President Donald Trump’s name appears in the Epstein files more than a million times, according to a top Democrat who reviewed the Justice Department’s unredacted version of the documents.
Congressman Jamie Raskin, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, made the jaw-dropping revelation after examining some of the Epstein files that the department blacked out when it released its latest tranche of documents earlier this month.
“I mean, there’s tons of redacted stuff,” Raskin told Axios in an interview.
“And [Trump’s] name, I think I put his name, and it appears more than a million times. So it’s all over the place.”
The latest trove of more than 3.5 million files was released by the Justice Department earlier this month, marking what Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said would be “an end” to the DOJ’s review of the documents.
But this was only about half of the six million documents the department reviewed, prompting renewed fears of a cover-up.
Trump, who has consistently claimed the files were a “hoax,” initially featured about 5,300 times in the heavily redacted trove.
But Raskin’s revelation suggests there are many references the public is not aware of, despite the laws that Trump signed last year demanding maximum transparency.
In a letter sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, survivors told her: “We must be clear: this release does not provide closure. It feels instead like a deliberate attempt to intimidate survivors, punish those who came forward, and reinforce the same culture of secrecy that allowed Epstein’s crimes to continue for decades.”
One file that Raskin reviewed on Monday undercut Trump’s longstanding claim that he cut ties with Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-2000s.
Last year, the president also asserted that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago years ago after the sex offender “stole” staff from his spa.
But an unredacted email Raskin claims he saw involved a conversation between Epstein’s lawyers and lawyers for Trump which suggested otherwise.
“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.”
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.
The president has also consistently claimed that he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes.
However, another newly unearthed document suggests that he called Palm Beach’s police chief Michael Reiter in July 2006 – just as Epstein’s first criminal sex charge became public – to inform him that Epstein’s activities were well known.
According to the document, Trump also referred to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell as the sex offender’s “operative,” telling Reiter that “she is evil and to focus on her.”
Asked about the inconsistencies on Tuesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was unable to say whether or not the call actually took place.
However, she told reporters: “What the president has always remained consistent in is that he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club at Mar-a-Lago because frankly Jeffrey Epstein was a creep.”
“And unlike many other people who are named in these files, the president cut off his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and was honest and transparent about that for years and years,” she said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on Raskin’s claim about the president’s presence in the files. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Bondi is also expected to be grilled about the issue when she appears before the House Judiciary Committee later this week.
Trump, meanwhile, is keen for Americans to move on, telling reporters last week: “I think it’s really time for the country to get on to something else.”
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