- Trump was informed in May that his name appeared in Jeffrey Epstein case files by Pam Bondi
- Trump denies wrongdoing and has sued WSJ over claims of a 2003 lewd letter to Epstein
- White House labelled WSJ reports as fake news and said Trump cut ties with Epstein years ago
With a new report claiming that US President Donald Trump knew his name was present in case files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, the White House on Wednesday pulled out all the stops to redirect public attention from uproar over its handling of the case and promoted claims that Barack Obama headed a "treasonous conspiracy" against the Republican.
For years, Trump has benefited from conspiracy theories surrounding the Epstein case, which fueled the conservative MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement and targeted his political enemies. When Trump returned to the White House for a second term this January, he promised to release Epstein case files. But on July 7, US Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had nothing to release. This made several Trump supporters furious, and since then, Trump has been attempting to control the scandal.
Trump's Association With Epstein
The matter became even more complicated for the Republican after The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) last week reported that Trump had written a lewd birthday letter to Epstein in 2003. The President denies the claim and has sued the publication.
However, on Wednesday, WSJ dropped a new story, stating that Bondi had informed Trump in May that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files. It wasn't clear in what context the billionaire Republican's name appeared in the files, as like many high-powered people in 1990s New York, Trump was associated with the late sex offender, who was known to cultivate celebrities to burnish his business.
Though the new report adds little to previous knowledge about Trump's ties with Epstein, the White House rushed to label it "fake".
"The White House is not surprised by this - Trump's name was present in the binders that Bondi produced and handed out," a White House official told CNN.
They stated that a significant amount of materials related to the case, already released by the Justice Department, had included Trump's name, and there is no evidence to suggest that the President was involved in any wrongdoing.
White House communications director Steven Cheung called the WSJ report "fake news" and said Trump had long ago broken with Epstein and "kicked him out of his club for being a creep."
"This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media, just like the Obama Russiagate scandal, which President Trump was right about," he told CNN.
Distraction Tactics
The Trump team also used the "Obama Russiagate scandal" to distract people's attention from the intensifying speculation over Trump's handling of the case against the late sex offender and reputed pedophile pimp.
Trump's intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard, told a White House press briefing there had been a "years-long coup" by Obama. The extraordinary narrative essentially rehashed Trump's longstanding argument that investigations into Russia's multi-layered attempts to disrupt the 2016 election, where he beat Hillary Clinton, were a "hoax" against him.
Gabbard touted newly declassified intelligence that she said provided "irrefutable evidence" that Obama had ordered intelligence assessments to be manipulated to accuse Russia of election interference to help Trump. The Justice Department also announced the formation of a "Strike Force" to examine the allegations with "utmost seriousness."
But Gabbard's findings run up against four separate criminal, counterintelligence and watchdog probes between 2019 and 2023 -- each of them concluding that Russia did interfere and did, in various ways, help Trump.
Who Was Jeffrey Epstein
Epstein was a financier and friend to numerous high-profile people -- for years, including Trump -- who was convicted of sex crimes and then imprisoned pending trial for allegedly trafficking underage girls.
His 2019 prison cell death -- ruled a suicide -- supercharged a conspiracy theory long promoted by many of Trump's supporters that Epstein had run an international pedophile ring and that elites wanted to make sure he never revealed their secrets.
