Donald Trump told aides this summer that he could not understand his supporters’ obsession with Jeffrey Epstein and complained that the public does not understand that Palm Beach in the 1990s was a very different time, according to a report.
The president made the remark after attendees at a Turning Point USA event in Tampa, Florida, in mid-July expressed dissatisfaction with his administration’s handling of the late pedophile’s case, The Wall Street Journal reports in its latest dispatch on an issue that has dogged Trump since July.
The president has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, who died in a New York City jail cell in August 2019, but has been under intense pressure to explain his past friendship with the deceased financier and release all Justice Department files on the sex trafficker’s activities.
Trump is currently suing the WSJ for $10 billion in damages for reporting that he sent Epstein a “bawdy” signed doodle for his 50th birthday in 2003, denying its existence, only for the financier’s estate to produce an item closely resembling the newspaper’s description of the note in compliance with a House Oversight Committee subpoena earlier this month. He has said the signature it bears is not his own.
The WSJ’s lawyers have since hit back by arguing that its story is true, calling the lawsuit “an affront to the First Amendment” and an attempt to “silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public.”
In its latest update, the paper reports that Trump privately told his aides he feared some of his personal friends might be mentioned in the Epstein files and that his enemies might have doctored them to wound him, hence his reluctance to publish them.
White House officials are quoted in the piece admitting they underestimated how “sticky” the issue would prove and the strength of public feeling about Epstein’s crimes, and that they were wrong to assume the matter would blow over.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Independent: “This is a lazy rewrite of a dead story. Democrats and the media knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”
Trump’s relationship with Florida’s exclusive Palm Beach are goes back to the 1980s, when, like many New Yorkers, he descended on the Sunshine State during the winter. He began by renting penthouses in the prestigious Breakers resort before purchasing Mar-a-Lago.
In 1990, Epstein too purchased a property near Mar-a-Lago, which many believe is how the pair became acquainted.
Infamously, a video shot by an NBC News crew showed the two partying with NFL cheerleaders in the club in 1992. At one point in the clip, Trump tells Epstein: “Look at her, back there... She’s hot.”
According to flight logs released in 2021, Trump flew on Epstein’s planes seven times between 1993 and 1997.
In 2007, Epstein’s membership at Mar-a-Lago was revoked, with the president recently claiming that the two men had fallen out prior to that over the financier poaching employees from Trump’s club to join his staff – long before the allegations against him first surfaced.
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