The Trump administration has made numerous false and contradictory statements about Jeffrey Epstein — and Trump himself has attempted to dismiss the story as old news.
Marcetic highlights some of the critical information and falsehoods:
BRANKO MARCETIC, [email protected], @BMarchetich
Marcetic is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine, and is working on a piece on Epstein. He writes for other outlets as well, including Responsible Statecraft.
He said today: “Other than former president Bill Clinton, Trump was probably the most high-profile, long-standing, and intimate friend of Epstein’s among the political elite — his ‘closest friend,’ in the billionaire paedophile’s own words. Trump’s name, as well as more than a dozen contact numbers, is listed in both of Epstein’s ‘little black books’ of personal contacts (and cryptically circled in one), he flew at least eight times on Epstein’s skin-crawlingly named ‘Lolita Express’ according to itsflight logs, and just last year, author Michael Wolff — who wrote one of the most well-known insider tell-alls about Trump’s first term — revealed that he had roughly a hundred hours’ worth of interview recordings of Epstein talking about ‘his long standing, deep relationship with Donald Trump.’ …
“Given all this, it’s not surprising that former Trump ally Elon Musk — another billionaire who has his own connections to Epstein — claimed, shortly after their falling out, that Trump himself was ‘in the Epstein files.’ Given all of these connections, it would be more surprising if he wasn’t.
“Another reason might be Epstein’s alleged links to intelligence.
“There’s the fact that Trump’s former labor secretary Alexander Acosta reportedly admitted he had given Epstein the scandalous ‘sweetheart deal,’ which allowed him to resume his sex trafficking operation after a relatively brief slap on the wrist, because he had been ‘told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to leave it alone.’ Vicky Ward, the same journalist who broke that story, was later told by four sources that Epstein had worked as an arms dealer in the 1980s, work that led him into the employ of the Israeli government and several others.
“There’s the fact that, when authorities raided Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, they found, alongside diamonds and $70,000 of cash, an expired Austrian passport with his photo, a fake name, and his residency listed as Saudi Arabia, which had been used to enter four countries in that same decade. There’s the fact that Ari Ben-Menashe, a former spy for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, unequivocally told reporters on the record that Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence running ‘honeytrap’ operations — meaning, sexual blackmail of powerful people using young girls.
“There’s the fact that the father-in-law of Epstein’s chief benefactor Les Wexner — the billionaire former owner of the Victoria’s Secret company that Epstein sometimes used to lure victims, and who bizarrely gave him total control over of his personal finances — was Yehuda Koppel, an Israeli military veteran with ties to Israeli intelligence. Credited with helping found Israel through his role as a commander of the atrocity-checkered Haganah militia, Koppel later became a director of Israel’s state-owned airline El Al, which at various times went on to serve as a front for Israeli spy agency Mossad. Koppel and his wife flew to France on Epstein’s jet on September 3,1997 according to the flight logs. …
“But where the Trump administration may have most annihilated its credibility is with its maximalist denial that there was ‘no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.’
“This is a laughable claim. Just two years ago, Bill Gates’s own spokeswoman admitted that Epstein had ‘tried unsuccessfully to leverage’ his knowledge of the Microsoft founder’s affair with a woman ‘to threaten Mr. Gates.’ Epstein had secret rooms full of surveillance equipment in his various homes, and law enforcement found a cache of hard drives and of binders full of CDs containing lewd photographs labeled with names, some of which went mysteriously missing four days later. He idly boasted to a reporter about the illegal things he had seen high-profile Silicon Valley figures doing. His co-conspirator admitted to award-winning CBS News producer Ira Rosen that Epstein had tapes of both Trump and Clinton.”