The Trump Department of Justice sought to cover up a potentially damaging email suggesting that the President lied when he claimed he had cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-2000s.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, made the revelation after reviewing some of the Epstein files that the department blacked out when it released its latest tranche of documents earlier this month.
According to Raskin, one redacted file included an email Epstein forwarded to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, involving a conversation between Epstein’s lawyers and lawyers for Trump.
“Epstein’s lawyers synopsized and quoted Trump as saying that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago — but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago and he had never been asked to leave,” Raskin told reporters on Monday.
“And that was redacted for some …inscrutable reason.”
The unredacted version of the file raises renewed questions about the president’s links to Epstein, and whether or not the Justice Department is deliberately trying to hide information it is meant to disclose under the Epstein Transparency Act.
Trump was serving his first term as president when Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy.
Asked about their relationship at the time, he told reporters that Epstein was “a fixture of Palm Beach” in Florida, and “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.”
But in terms of when they last spoke, Trump added: “I had a falling out with him a long time ago, I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan.”
This suggests the pair cut ties around 2004, a few years before Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 for soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from a minor as part of a sweetheart plea deal.
Last year, the president also asserted that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-lago after the sex offender “stole” staff from his spa. One particular staff member, he admitted, was Virginia Giuffre, who Maxwell recruited as a sex slave for Epstein when she was still a minor.
Asked if he thought the latest email had been redacted to avoid embarrassing the president, Raskin replied: “I don’t know why that was redacted. It was puzzling to me… There was certainly nothing in our federal law that would require redaction in that case.”
The file was among more than 3.5 million documents the department released two weeks ago from the 6 million it had collected relating to Epstein’s crimes and networks.
But the release of those documents last month sparked an immediate public backlash, after some victims discovered they had been identified in the files, while the names of suspected co-conspirators were kept hidden.
In one email from 2014, for example, a sender whose name is redacted tells Epstein: “Thank you for a fun night… Your littlest girl was a little naughty.”
In another email exchange from 2009, Epstein writes a brief email to a redacted recipient that asks, “where are you? are you ok I loved the torture video.”
And in one particular interview conducted by the FBI in September 2021, a woman told the FBI how Ghislaine Maxwell effectively tried to pimp her out to Trump and his party pals, making it clear that she was “available” for them.
But the names of the men involved in the victim’s testimony, other than the president’s, were hidden by the Justice Department.
“There’s no way you can run a billion dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell,” Raskin said.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial, while Maxwell is currently serving a 20 year prison sentence for her role as his accomplice.
Trump had known the pair for years, but has repeatedly insisted he never knew about their crimes, nor has he ever been charged with wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
He has, however, appeared thousands of times in the files, from uncorroborated abuse allegations to references in Epstein’s very own emails.
Last week, the president declared that he had been exonerated by the latest tranche of files, and that it was time to move on.
“I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else,” he told reporters in the Oval Office last week.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House and the Justice Department for comment.
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