WASHINGTON, Dec 23 (Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Division launched a brand new trove of paperwork on Tuesday from its investigation into the late financier and convicted intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein, together with an e mail from a prosecutor indicating President Trump had traveled aboard his personal jet “many extra occasions than beforehand has been reported”.
The most recent launch contains round 30,000 pages of paperwork, with many redactions, and dozens of video clips, together with a number of purporting to be shot inside a federal detention heart. Epstein was discovered useless in 2019 in a New York jail. His dying was dominated a suicide.
Personal jet
In a type of emails, dated January 7, 2020, an unidentified prosecutor in New York wrote that flight information confirmed Trump had flown on Epstein’s personal jet eight occasions through the Nineties, which was greater than investigators then had been conscious of. Amongst these had been “at the very least 4 flights” on which Ghislaine Maxwell was additionally aboard. Maxwell is serving a 20-year jail sentence for serving to Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage women.
On one flight, the one three passengers had been Epstein, Trump and a 20-year-old girl whose title was redacted. “On two different flights, two of the passengers, respectively, had been girls who can be potential witnesses in a Maxwell case,” the doc acknowledged.
The White Home didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the e-mail concerning Trump’s alleged flights with Epstein within the Nineties.
‘Unfounded and false’
In one other e mail, an unidentified particular person wrote in 2021 that they’d lately been wanting via knowledge the federal government obtained from Steve Bannon’s cellphone and located an “picture of Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell”. The federal government redacted the photograph.
The Division of Justice posted an announcement on X saying: “A few of these paperwork comprise unfaithful and sensationalist claims made towards President Trump that had been submitted to the FBI proper earlier than the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they’d a shred of credibility, they actually would have been weaponized towards President Trump already.
“However, out of our dedication to the legislation and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these paperwork with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims.”
Transparency legislation
The most recent materials comes a number of days after the Trump administration printed a big cache of Epstein recordsdata in an try to adjust to a brand new legislation forcing disclosure on the politically fraught matter.
Nevertheless, the releases on Friday and Saturday contained intensive redactions, angering some Republicans and doing little to defuse a scandal threatening the get together forward of 2026 midterm elections.
On Monday, Trump downplayed the significance of the Epstein recordsdata. Talking to reporters, he mentioned the fabric was “simply used to deflect towards great success” by him and his fellow Republicans.
The brand new transparency legislation, overwhelmingly handed by Congress final month, mandated the disclosure of all Epstein recordsdata, regardless of Trump’s months-long effort to maintain them sealed.
(Reporting by Brad Heath and Bhargav Acharya; Writing by Richard Cowan and Mark Bendeich, Modifying by Alex Richardson)