According to Trump, in addition to Epstein’s ties to Clinton, the Ministry of Justice should also investigate his ties to former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, the founder of the LinkedIn platform and major Democratic financial donor Reid Hoffman, and the JPMorgan bank, reports Reuters.
The president made the announcement on Friday after a congressional commission released thousands more documents from the Epstein case, which greatly revived the attention paid by the American public to Trump’s ties to the late financier. Epstein faced charges of illegal sex trafficking and criminal conspiracy. In 2019, he committed suicide in prison.
Although Clinton was indeed in contact with Epstein at the beginning of the millennium, the requested investigation of the former president gives the impression that Trump is mainly trying to divert public attention from himself.
Trump himself contributed to this assessment of the situation by posting on social networks. “Epstein was a Democrat and he’s a Democrat problem, not a Republican! Everyone knows about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have to run the country!” wrote the current American head of state.
Clinton, Summers, and Hoffman did not comment on Trump’s request for an investigation. “We regret any connection we had with this man, but we did not help him commit his heinous acts. We ended our relationship with him years before his arrest on sex trafficking charges,” JPMorgan said in a statement.
Valuable client
The ties of all the mentioned actors to Epstein are publicly known, but they all deny that they knew about his crimes or even participated in them. However, the case continues to be a burning problem for everyone.
Clinton flew on Epstein’s private plane several times, and all of these flights took place before the financier’s first conviction in 2008. He was sentenced to 13 months at the time for procuring a girl under the age of 18 for the purpose of prostitution.
Hoffman and Summers were also demonstrably associated with Epstein, and all three men now say they regret their relationship with the financier. No credible evidence has yet been provided for the claim that they might be involved in his trade with minors for sex.
In 2023, JPMorgan paid some of Epstein’s victims a total of $290 million to settle allegations that it actually condoned his sex trafficking. She did not admit any doubt as part of the settlement. Even before that, however, it became clear that the bank’s management really ignored the internal warning, because it considered Epstein a valuable client.
The whole case continues to be the most unpleasant for Trump. He had been friends with Epstein since the nineties. Now he insists that he ended his relationship with Epstein even before his first conviction and was unaware of his crimes. The documentation from the case that has been published so far, however, rather strengthens public doubts about the veracity of his claims.
For example, e-mails were published this week in which Epstein states that he “handed over” his own partner to Trump in the 1990s when he no longer wanted her, and that he has photos of Trump with girls in bikinis.
The whole case is even more unpleasant for Trump, because he used it in his election campaign, when he promised his voters to publish the complete documentation on Epstein’s case, including the list of his clients. Justice Minister Pam Bondiová said shortly after taking office that she already has this list on her desk for review. A few months later, however, her ministry and the FBI announced that the list of Epstein’s clients does not exist.
A significant part of Trump’s electoral base did not accept this announcement. Although 90 percent of Republicans in an October survey by the Ipsos agency said that they approve of Trump’s performance so far after returning to office, as far as his approach to the Epstein case is concerned, only 40 percent of Republican respondents approved of it.
