California Gov. Gavin Newsom exposed Donald Trump’s attempt to distance himself from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
While addressing reporters Monday in the Oval Office, Trump, 79, insisted that his about-face on releasing the Epstein files was due to some of his political opponents having more to hide than he did.
“I believe that…some of the people that we mentioned are being looked at very seriously for their relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. But they were with him all the time. I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all,” he claimed. “What I just don’t want Epstein to do is detract from the great success of the Republican Party.”
https://t.co/tfetsC7paL pic.twitter.com/qpIMWDBaVP
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 17, 2025
Minutes after that clip was posted online, Newsom, 58, responded with a screenshot from video of Trump and Epstein together at a Mar-a-Lago party in 1992. The NBC News footage from that November shows the two men laughing during a party.
When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson repeated an earlier statement: “Why isn’t the Daily Beast concerned with their own employee – Michael Wolff – closely corresponding with Jeffrey Epstein?”
Trump, of course, has been photographed with Epstein on several other occasions, like in February 1997 and February 2000 at Mar-a-Lago and at two Victoria’s Secret events in New York in April 1997.
Some of those images have since been used to needle Trump, for instance by projecting him and Epstein on the castle the president stayed in during his visit to the U.K. in September.
Epstein’s own words are now being used similarly. The dead sex offender’s Jan. 2019 email claiming that Trump “knew about the girls” has been put up on a billboard in Times Square.
The anti-Trump group Home of the Brave paid for the billboard to be put up for two weeks. A spokesperson said Trump and his enablers “are working overtime to overlook the fact that he’s in the Epstein files, was friends with Epstein for decades, and has spent his first year in office trying to make this story go away.”
Epstein said in an interview before he died that he was once Trump’s “closest friend.” The two had a falling-out around the mid-2000s.
A statue of the pair holding hands has periodically popped up around Washington, D.C. in recent months. The U.S. Park Police, however, removed one such installation in the wee hours.
On Sunday night, Trump told House Republicans to vote to release the Epstein files this week in a 9:15 p.m. Truth Social post.
“As I said on Friday night aboard Air Force One to the Fake News Media, House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat “Shutdown.”,” he wrote.
The post Newsom Jumps at Chance to Attack Trump’s Latest Epstein Claim appeared first on The Daily Beast.
