Donald Trump has spent the last year insisting he was never on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight. Not once, not ever. He even claimed that anyone insisting otherwise was fabricating evidence with artificial intelligence to sabotage him politically. But the Department of Justice just released documents that prove otherwise.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice released a new batch of Epstein-related documents consisting of roughly 30,000 pages. This included internal communications from federal prosecutors reviewing flight logs tied to Epstein’s private jet. Buried inside those records is a detail Trump has been aggressively denying for more than a year. His name apparently appears repeatedly in Epstein’s flight history.
According to the documents, Trump is listed as a passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996. Prosecutors also noted that the number may not be exhaustive because some records remain incomplete. On one 1993 flight, Epstein, Trump, and then–20-year-old victim are listed as the only passengers. Other flights include Marla Maples, Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump as his co-passengers.
This directly contradicts Trump’s January 9, 2024, Truth Social post, in which he declared:
“I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island… This is A.I., and it is very dangerous for our Country!”
But the document exposing his lie isn’t AI, it’s his own Justice Department’s official, unclassified files. The email appears to have been sent by the Assistant U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York on January 7, 2020. The Attorney wrote that newly reviewed flight records show Trump traveled on Epstein’s jet “many more times than previously reported.” This includes multiple flights where Ghislaine Maxwell was present.
Trump’s flight lie has now put his every claim of innocence under scrutiny
The email explicitly warns colleagues that this information could become relevant in Maxwell-related proceedings. They wrote, “We didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road.” Yet, the only person surprised by the revelation is probably Trump, because he probably thought he’d never be exposed. But his lie has run headfirst into records produced by his own Department of Justice, under court order.
The DoJ has also released 118 pages of Epstein’s flight logs, covering the period from 1991 to early 2003. This matters because Trump outright denied being on the plane. It’s a categorical denial. Trump’s defenders will now rush to add qualifiers that being on the flight doesn’t prove wrongdoing. We’ll probably see tweets arguing that the flights didn’t go to Epstein’s island, or that others flew too. And even if we believe all of that to be true, none of it addresses the lie.
For months, Trump framed the Epstein revelations as a smear campaign so absurd it required imaginary technology to exist. Now the documents have proved that the flights were real, and the only fiction in this story was Trump’s denial. This leaves us with the obvious question: What else did Trump lie about?
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