President Donald Trump made the claim that the Justice Department’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were “made up” by former President Barack Obama, ex-FBI director James Comey and the Biden administration.
Trump is continuing to deal with the backlash from many of his supporters over the Justice Department and FBI’s memo last week disclosing that there was no evidence of an Epstein “client list” that incriminated powerful people amid his perpetration of child sexual abuse against hundreds of victims.
Trump was asked during a press gaggle Tuesday in front of the White House whether U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Trump that he was cited in the Epstein documents. He responded: “No, no.” Trump said Bondi provided “us just a very quick briefing” in terms of “the credibility of the different things that they’ve seen.”
Trump continued, “And I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden [administration]. And we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, with all of the different things that we had to go through.”
As Trump has in recent days, he defended Bondi’s decision to not release any of the Epstein files. “The attorney general has handled that very well,” the president told reporters. “She has really done a very good job. And I think that when you look at it, you’ll understand that. I would like to see [transparency] also. But I think the attorney general — the credibility is very important. And you want credible evidence for something like that.”
According to the two-page memo about the Epstein case released July 7 by the DOJ and FBI (available at this link), officials discovered “a significant amount of material, including more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence.”
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Bondi said in a Feb. 21 interview with Fox News that an alleged list of Epstein’s sex-trafficking clients was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” Last week, the attorney general told reporters that she was referring to the documentation of the Epstein case more generally.
Earlier Tuesday, actor Kevin Spacey called for the release of the Epstein files, coming more than a year after his name appeared alongside other major Hollywood stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Cate Blanchett in Epstein’s unsealed court documents. None of the stars mentioned in the court documents were accused of facilitating Epstein’s sex trafficking ring in any capacity.
“Release the Epstein files. All of them,” Spacey wrote on X. “For those of us with nothing to fear, the truth can’t come soon enough. I hate to make this about me — but the media already has.”
In an interview that aired on Fox News in June 2024, Trump was asked by “Fox & Friends Weekend” co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy whether he would declassify the government’s Epstein files if reelected president. “Yeah, I would,” Trump said in the version that aired. However, the “Fox & Friends” segment edited out the rest of his answer, in which he suggested there was “phony stuff” in the Epstein documentation, as reported by Semafor: “I guess I would [release the Epstein files]. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—” At that point Campos-Duffy asked whether releasing the Epstein files would “help restore trust,” to which Trump answered, “Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”
Epstein and Trump were “friends for years who saw each other frequently at high-society parties in Florida and New York,” according to the New York Times. In a 2002 interview with New York magazine, Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” and said, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The Times reported that “There is little public record of the two men interacting” after a 2004 battle in a Florida real estate deal.
The DOJ and FBI’s July 7 memo said that an “exhaustive review” of Epstein documents found “no credible evidence” that Epstein “blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Epstein died in 2019 in what authorities said was a suicide while he was being held in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The DOJ-FBI memo released last week reiterated findings that Epstein died by suicide: “After a thorough investigation, FBI investigators concluded that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City on August 10, 2019.”
“Through this review, we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials and will not permit the release of child pornography,” the DOJ-FBI memo said. “One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims. Perpetuating unfounded theories about Epstein serves neither of those ends.”
From Variety US