President Donald Trump appeared to shush a reporter who attempted to ask him a follow-up question about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein during a gaggle aboard Air Force One on Friday evening.
Speaking to reporters while flying to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, Trump was asked about his relationship with Epstein, specifically Epstein’s claim that the president “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop,” referring to Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who recruited victims as part of the financier’s sex trafficking operation.
The president responded by deflecting and drawing attention to other powerful men in Epstein’s network, including former President Bill Clinton and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
“I know nothing about that,” Trump said of Epstein’s claim that Trump knew about Epstein’s victims. “They would’ve announced that a long time ago. It’s really, what did he mean when he spent all the time with Bill Clinton, with the president of Harvard, who you know, that is Summers, Larry Summers, whatever his name is, and all of the other people that he spent time with.”
“Jeffrey Epstein and I had a very bad relationship for many years, but he also saw a strength because I was president,” he continued. ”So he dictated a couple of memos to himself. Give me a break. You’ve got to find out what did he know with respect to Bill Clinton, with respect to the head of Harvard, with the respect of all of those people that he knew, including JPMorgan Chase.”
When the reporter attempted to ask a follow-up question, asking the president, “Sir, if there’s nothing incriminating in the files,” he cut her off, shouting, “Quiet! Quiet!” before taking a question from another reporter.
Epstein and Trump were friends for over a decade before falling out some time in the 2000s. The 20,000 pages of email correspondence belonging to Epstein that were released by the House Oversight Committee this week contain numerous emails about Trump, including ones in which the disgraced financier calls him a “maniac” and suggested Trump was displaying early signs of dementia.
The president has been dodging and deflecting questions about his ties to Epstein for months, including when he refused to take questions after officially ending the government shutdown, with the live feed being cut off immediately after a reporter can be heard asking about Epstein.
The president also declined to take questions after signing an executive order relating to the “Fostering the Future” program championed by the first lady on Thursday, ignoring journalists’ shouted questions and departing immediately after posing for photos with guests.
The House is expected to vote on whether or not it will demand that the DOJ release all documents associated with the Epstein case on Tuesday, with several Republicans including Rep. Thomas Massie, who introduced the petition, expected to vote in favor.
The post Trump, 79, Shushes Reporter for Asking About Epstein appeared first on The Daily Beast.
