Trump flew on Epstein jet eight times in the '90s, according to prosecutor email

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump flew on convicted offender Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously has been reported,” according to an email from a New York prosecutor that forms part of a new batch of documents about Epstein released Tuesday by the U.S. Justice Department.

In an email dated January 7, 2020, the unidentified prosecutor wrote that flight records showed Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet eight times during the 1990s. Among those were at least four flights on which Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell was also aboard. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping late financier Epstein abuse underage girls.

In a social media post in 2024, Trump said he “was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.” There was no allegation in the prosecutor’s email that Trump had committed any crime. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the email.

On one flight described in the newly released records, the only three passengers were Epstein, Trump, and a 20-year-old woman whose name was redacted. “On two other flights, two of the passengers, respectively, were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case,” the document stated.

Trump knew Epstein socially in the 1990s and early 2000s. Trump has said their association ended in the mid-2000s and that he was never aware of the financier’s sexual abuse. Epstein was convicted in Florida in 2008 of procuring a person under the age of 18 for prostitution. The Justice Department charged him with sex trafficking in 2019.

The Department of Justice posted a statement on X saying: “Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.

“Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims,” it said.

The latest release of Epstein files includes around 30,000 pages of documents, with many redactions, and dozens of video clips, including several purporting to be shot inside a federal detention center. Epstein was found dead in 2019 in a New York jail. His death was ruled a suicide.

In another email, an unidentified person wrote in 2021 that they had recently been looking through data the government obtained from former Trump aide Steve Bannon’s cellphone and found an “image of Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell.” The government redacted parts of the message indicating who sent and received it.

Another file in the government’s release included a grainy photo of Trump seated next to Maxwell. It matches an image of the two at a New York fashion show in 2000.

The disclosures included a scattering of other records that reference Trump, though they give little indication that the government considered them to be credible.

Among them was an image of a card purporting to be from Epstein to Larry Nassar, a former gymnastics doctor who was convicted of sexually abusing girls under his care. A handwritten message in the card referenced Trump without using his name.

The Justice Department later labeled the card a “fake” and said it will continue to release Epstein file documents as required by law.

The government also disclosed several reports of phone calls to an FBI tip line that reference Trump, though they did not identify the people who made the calls or give an indication of whether investigators followed up on the calls or found them to be credible.

One caller claimed that he had driven a limousine for Trump in 1995 and overheard him making a phone call in the back in which he addressed someone as “Jeffrey” and at one point mentioned abusing a girl.

The government on Tuesday also released a video that purports to show Epstein kneeling inside his jail cell, but a Reuters examination found it appears to be a computer-generated clip that first surfaced on social media in 2020, a year after his death. It was submitted to the Justice Department by a person who said it purported to show Epstein’s death, according to an email also released on Tuesday.

TRANSPARENCY LAW

The Trump administration last week published a large cache of Epstein files in an attempt to comply with a new law forcing disclosure on the politically fraught topic.

However, the releases on Friday and Saturday contained extensive redactions, angering some Republicans and doing little to defuse a scandal threatening the party ahead of 2026 midterm elections.

On Monday, Trump downplayed the importance of the Epstein files. Speaking to reporters, he said the material was “just used to deflect against tremendous success” by him and his fellow Republicans.

The new transparency law, overwhelmingly passed by Congress last month, mandated the disclosure of all Epstein files, despite Trump’s months-long effort to keep them sealed.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie, who helped spearhead the law requiring the files’ release, responded late on Monday to Trump’s comments expressing dislike for the release of Epstein documents. The Kentucky Republican wrote on X: “Trump is blaming me for a bill he eventually signed, while defending his banker friends, Bill Clinton, and ‘innocent’ visitors to rape island. Meanwhile (Attorney General Pam Bondi is working fervently to redact, omit, and delete Epstein files she is legally required to release under our bill.”