White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles called out one of President Donald Trump’s repeated claims about the Jeffrey Epstein case.
As Trump faced escalating scrutiny over his relationship with the convicted sex offender over the summer, the president instead pointed fingers at other Epstein associates, including former President Bill Clinton.
Trump argued the focus should instead be on the former president, but Wiles said Trump did not have evidence to back his own claims about Clinton’s relationship with Epstein.
“You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton, who went to the island 28 times,” Trump told reporters over the summer. “I never went to the island.”
The president repeated his accusation in a Truth Social post last month when he called on the attorney general to investigate Clinton and others for their relationships with Epstein.
“Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island,’” Trump wrote on November 14.
But Wiles told Vanity Fair in a wide-ranging feature that Trump did not have proof to back his Clinton claim.
“There is no evidence,” she told the magazine about Clinton’s alleged visits to the private island.
She also indicated there wasn’t anything incriminating about Clinton in the files.
“The president was wrong about that,” she said.
Wiles told Vanity Fair that she read the Epstein files, and she said Trump is in the files. But she claimed, “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
She also acknowledged that Trump was on Epstein’s plane. Both he and Clinton have shown up on the manifest, but not for trips to the disgraced financier’s private island.
The comments from Wiles were released less than a week after Democrats dropped tens of thousands of photos from the Epstein estate that included images of both Trump and Clinton.
It comes as Republicans this week are demanding that the former president, as well as Hillary Clinton, appear for depositions with the House Oversight Committee behind closed doors as part of their investigation, but the Clintons have pushed back.
They have offered to give sworn statements to the committee as others who had been subpoenaed have done, but Republican Party Chairman James Comer has threatened to begin contempt proceedings if they do not appear in person.
While Republicans on the committee have pushed to speak with the Clintons about Epstein, Trump has not been asked to go before the committee to discuss his own relationship with the convicted sex offender.
However, Wiles indicated Trump may have to be deposed separately about Epstein at some point.
The president sued The Wall Street Journal after it reported on a lewd letter that it appeared Trump gave to Epstein for his 50th birthday. Trump denies he wrote the letter and filed a $20 billion defamation lawsuit.
Wiles insisted that the letter, which included a doodle of a naked woman’s torso, did not come from Trump, but she said they would get some answers with discovery after suing.
Asked if Trump would sit for a deposition as part of the process, Wiles responded: “I mean, if he had to.”
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