One of President Donald Trump’s repeated claims regarding convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his relationship to Mar-a-Lago looks to be contradicted, thanks to an email from the initial release of files related to Epstein by the Department of Justice dating back to 2009.
The email was written by Epstein’s attorney at the time, Jack Goldberger, and detailed a telephone conference between Trump, his lawyer Alan Gerten and Brad Edwards who presumably represented the victims of Epstein. In the summary by Goldberger, Gerten was asked if Epstein was ever thrown out of Mar-a-Lago.
Gerten responded, “No he was not a member. May have been his guest. Never asked to leave.” A manager at the Florida estate confirmed to Edwards that Epstein was “never asked to leave Mar-a-Lago.” Edwards received further confirmation from a manager that Epstein “never asked to leave Mar-a-Lago.”
The email, as reported on by the Daily Beast, also shares Trump’s own responses to questioning about Epstein. When asked about flying on Epstein’s plane, Trump replied: “I’ve been on a lot of planes. May have been on his plane. No young girls on plane.”
The email along with other artifacts from the files contradicts Trump’s public claims that he had nothing to do with Epstein, including photographs of the two socializing frequently from the 1980s to the 2000s, as well as flight logs showing Trump’s presence on the late financier’s private plane.
Representative Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) displayed the email on the floor of the House of Representatives on Wednesday (March 17), and read its contents into the record, calling out Trump for “false statements over the past quarter century about Jeffrey Epstein” and blasting Attorney General Pam Bondi and the DOJ for their redaction of the email.
“The reason why this matters is because we don’t have half of the Epstein files,” Goldman said, detailing that the DOJ stated that there were 6 million files identified for potential release, but that they’ve only shared 3.5 million of them. “If the attorney general is covering up this information that she then reveals to Congress, what else is she covering up about Donald Trump’s involvement in the Epstein files?”
