Details of Donald Trump’s flights on board Jeffrey Epstein’s plane were included in newly released files on Tuesday, including one trip with an unnamed 20-year-old woman.
The documents, which were temporarily unpublished around 8 p.m. before being re-released toward midnight, contain previously unknown details of the president’s relationship with the late financier and pedophile, per The Washington Post.
Also featured is an email from the Southern District of New York, with the recipient’s name redacted, indicating, “Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case.”
The records appear to indicate that on one flight, “the only three passengers” were Epstein, Trump, and an unnamed 20-year-old woman, and that on two others, two of the passengers “were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case.”
The documents also include a 2021 federal subpoena sent to Mar-a-Lago amid the government’s investigation and subsequent prosecution of Epstein’s co-conspirator, the former socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s now serving a 20-year sentence on sex trafficking charges.
WaPo further reports that the new documents include “several tips that were collected by the FBI about Trump’s involvement with Epstein and parties at their properties in the early 2000s.” It is unclear at this stage whether those tips were corroborated or subject to further investigation.
Epstein died in 2019 while in police custody awaiting trial on charges stemming from perhaps the most notorious sex trafficking conspiracy in modern history.
Trump, who maintained what has been described as an exceptionally close relationship with Epstein until the mid-2000s, has repeatedly fueled conspiracy theories, popular among the MAGA base, that Epstein and Maxwell were members of an international pedophilic cabal.
Campaign promises of full transparency on the financier’s crimes backfired in July when the Justice Department quietly announced that, contrary to far-right speculation, Epstein’s death was a suicide and he kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy accomplices.
That determination ignited a firestorm at the heart of the MAGA administration, with Trump facing intense scrutiny in the months since over the extent of his relationship with Epstein, and what he may have known of the financier’s sex trafficking operations.
Following a concerted, bipartisan push through the House and Senate, the president signed a law in November mandating the release by Dec. 19 of all remaining documents on the case, subject to redactions solely for the purpose of protecting the identities of Epstein’s victims.
That deadline passed on Friday. As of Tuesday, the DOJ has released only a tiny fraction of the estimated hundreds of thousands of files held on the investigation and prosecution of Epstein and Maxwell, prompting fears the department may be buying time to redact embarrassing or potentially incriminating details of their friendship with Trump.
Trump, for one, appears genuinely perplexed at continued public interest in one of the most earth-shattering political scandals since the 1972 Watergate affair. “They’re asking me questions about Epstein,” he lashed out at reporters Monday. “I thought that was finished.”
Over the past several months, the president has repeatedly deflected scrutiny of his ties to Epstein by drawing attention to the disgraced financier’s relationship with other high-profile figures. Among them is President Bill Clinton who, Trump has claimed without evidence, traveled no fewer than “28 times” aboard Epstein’s private jet.
While Clinton has indeed featured prominently in the files released by the Justice Department thus far, those documents have since done little to dampen the intense public focus on Trump himself, who now appears to have undergone a wholesale reversal of his previously aggressive stance toward his Democratic predecessor.
“I don’t like the pictures of Bill Clinton being shown. I don’t like the pictures of other people being shown. I think it’s a terrible thing,” he told reporters Monday. “Bill Clinton’s a big boy. He can handle it, but you probably have pictures being exposed of other people that innocently met Jeffrey Epstein years ago. Many years ago. And they’re, you know, highly respected bankers and lawyers and others.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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