The Justice Department is desperately attempting to blunt the knife Donald Trump has wound up sticking in himself by insisting any salacious claims about the president contained in the Epstein Files are fake anyway.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the Justice Department posted on X Tuesday following Monday’s release of new material on the Epstein-Maxwell case.
“To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already,” it added.
It was not immediately clear what those specific claims are, how they could have been “weaponized” prior to their much-anticipated public release, or how that characterization would apply to any allegations that appeared credible.
The latest tranche of documents contains previously unknown details of Trump’s historically cozy relationship with the convicted sex trafficker, including at least eight flights the pair took together between 1993 and 1996. On one of those trips, they were accompanied by an unnamed 20-year-old woman.
They also feature mention of a 2021 federal subpoena sent to Mar-a-Lago amid the government’s probe of Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, reportedly along with tips to the FBI about Trump’s relationship with Epstein and parties hosted at the men’s properties in the early 2000s.
While the Justice Department may be at pains to muffle the explosiveness of those revelations, they represent only the latest developments in a chain of events set in motion by the president himself.
Trump maintained a decades-long friendship with Epstein and Maxwell until the mid-2000s. He has repeatedly fuelled conspiracy theories, popular among his support base, that the pair were members of an international pedophilic cabal, and that Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was orchestrated as cover for their envisioned accomplices’ crimes.
His campaign pledges of full transparency on the financier’s crimes backfired spectacularly earlier in July, when the DoJ announced that, contrary to those rumors, Epstein died by suicide and kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy co-conspirators.
Amid intense public outcry and renewed scrutiny of his historic friendship with the pedophile, Trump was forced in November to sign a bipartisan law mandating the release by Dec. 19 of all remaining documents on the case, allowing redactions only for the purpose of preventing Epstein’s victims from being identified.
Though that deadline fell on Friday, the DOJ has released only a heavily redacted fraction of the hundreds of thousands of documents amassed on the case since Epstein first came to the attention of law enforcement authorities back in 2005.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and Justice Department for comment on this story.
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