Trump's Shifting Explanations Are Prolonging The Epstein Scandal He Wants To End

Trump's answers about why he stopped being friends with Epstein while traveling to the United Kingdom are providing more questions than answers.Donald Trump wishes he knew how to quit Jeffrey Epstein.The president has repeatedly professed a desire to move on from questions about whether he’s included in Department of Justice files outlining the investigation of Epstein’s sex trafficking charges. Yet Trump has provided seemingly conflicting information about his relationship with Epstein — helping sustain a scandal that has hounded him more than any other, even though his friendship with Epstein ended more than two decades ago and Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell six years ago.The White House has long insisted Trump and Epstein’s friendship ended after the president kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago at some point for being a “creep,” although previous reports suggested their friendship ended years earlier, when Trump outbid Epstein for a piece of property in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump, when speaking with reporters who traveled with him to the United Kingdom on Monday and Tuesday, gave yet another explanation for their break.“He stole people that worked for me,” Trump told reporters on Monday during a meeting with prime minister Keir Starmer. “I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ And he did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out and that was it.”On Tuesday, aboard Air Force One, Trump suggested it was possible Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died of suicide last year, was among the employees Epstein “stole.” In 2000, Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell recruited Giuffre to be Epstein’s masseuse while Giuffre was working at Mar-a-Lago, leading to years of abuse.“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump said. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her.” He added: “She had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”Every new comment Trump makes about Epstein leads to another series of stories illustrated by the many photos of the president with his former friend. The text often contains Trump’s creepy praise, from 2002, for the deceased sexual predator: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The stories might also note Trump repeatedly flew on Epstein’s jet, though they usually don’t mention that Trump and Epstein have both been represented by Alan Dershowitz or that Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who first left Epstein off the hook, wound up as a Cabinet official in Trump’s first term. It’s not news that Trump and Epstein were friends. It wasn’t even news back in 2015 when Trump first launched his political career. But Epstein’s death in Trump’s first term created a new layer of conspiracy theories that laid the groundwork for what’s happening now. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, said in February she had Epstein’s mythical “client list” sitting on her desk, building hype for the unmasking of exactly the sort of elite sex cabal prophesied by the leading lights of QAnon. The Justice Department’s subsequent statement this month that there’s actually no client list, no blackmail scheme, nobody else to charge with crimes and that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” was a shocking reversal even by Trump standards. Trump's answers about why he stopped being friends with Epstein while traveling to the United Kingdom are providing more questions than answers.Trump’s handling of the Epstein investigation is now among his least popular actions in public surveys, even if members of both parties are sceptical that it will significantly change how Americans feel about Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday found 61% of Americans disapproved of his handling of the Epstein files.The same poll also found a plurality of Americans now believe Trump was somehow involved in Epstein’s crimes: 46% believe he was, while just 32% believe he wasn’t. Another 23% aren’t sure either way. (Trump’s name being in the files, which likely encompass troves of court records and private data seized by the FBI, would not by itself indicate wrongdoing.) Trump has previously talked about Epstein’s pursuit of Mar-a-Lago staff leading to their falling out, but in a way that emphasized Epstein’s actual bad behavior rather than merely complaining about losing employees.In 2007, amid the fallout over Epstein’s first arrest, the New York Post reported that Mar-a-Lago had banned Epstein from the club, though the story didn’t say when the ban was imposed.“He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” a person identified as “a source” told the Post that year. The story added that Epstein himself denied he was banned and said he had been “recently invited to an event there.”Sam Nunberg, a former Trump aide, told The Washington Post in 2019, after Epstein had been arrested on federal charges, that he had quizzed the president about his relationship with Epstein back in 2014, when Trump was considering a White House bid.“Trump told Nunberg that Epstein had recruited a young woman who worked at Mar-a-Lago to give him massages,” the Post reported. “Nunberg said Trump told him he issued the edict against Epstein years before the police investigation became public.” The story said the last known communication between the two men were voicemails Trump left Epstein shortly after outbidding him for an oceanfront property in November 2004, roughly four years after the time Victoria Giuffre said she’d been recruited as Epstein’s masseuse.The White House did not immediately respond to a question about whether it could offer a more precise timeline of the president’s split with his former friend. Republicans in Congress are not helping Trump bury the story. A handful of House Republicans have backed efforts to get at the Epstein files through legislative maneuvers and subpoenas. While House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) started the chamber’s summer recess one day early last week to dodge some of the drama, he is seemingly unable to quash the surprising push led by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) to force a vote on legislation freeing the files. And three Republicans on the House Oversight Committee — Reps. Brian Jack (Ga.), Scott Perry (Pa.) and Nancy Mace (S.C.) — joined the committee’s Democrats last week in moving to subpoena the Justice Department for the documents. And even as some Democrats worry the story is a distraction from more politically effective attacks on the Republican Party’s unpopular domestic policy legislation, party leaders are doing their best to keep the story in the news: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday called for the FBI to conduct a counterintelligence threat assessment to see if a foreign government could blackmail Trump with the contents of the Epstein files.“Whatever is in the Epstein files is clearly concerning enough that Donald Trump is running scared,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. “If that is in fact the case, our adversaries could certainly be interested in trying to use this information to hurt America and Americans.”Related...The Internet Is Losing It Over A Video Of Trump Being Drowned Out By Bagpipes In ScotlandTrump Implies Epstein Poached Virginia Giuffre From Mar-A-Lago SpaTrump Wants Murdoch Swiftly Deposed Over Epstein Story Because Of Age And Health

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