Donald Trump eyes loophole in Epstein Files Transparency Act

Washington, D.C., was the venue for two contrasting spectacles on November 18—the antagonist in the first on the Capitol Hill was the protagonist in the second at the Oval Office.

In the first spectacle, the House of Representatives voted 427-1 to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Senate followed suit the next day.

Despite desperate efforts by antagonist Donald Trump and his coterie to block the massive tranche of unclassified records, documents, communication and investigative materials related to the late convicted financier-paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the scandal blew up in the president’s face.

On November 12, Democrats in the House Oversight Committee dropped a bombshell by making public emails sent by Epstein to his girlfriend-socialite pimp Ghislaine Maxwell, attorneys, controversial author Michael Wolff, journalists and former treasury secretary Larry Summers 15 years ago that mentioned Trump multiple times in demeaning ways. The emails were obtained by subpoenaing the Epstein estate.

The Committee released  20,000 more pages  of records received from Epstein’s estate, showing that Trump’s association with the sex trafficking kingpin was deeper than reported.

The massive blowback from the “Democratic hoax”—as Trump dubbed it—and the danger of increasing number of House Republicans defying him and joining Democrats in signing a discharge petition which forced the vote jolted the president into surrender.

On November 16, Trump asked House Republicans to vote for releasing the files. A day later, Trump told reporters that he would sign the law if passed by the Senate. On November 19, he signed the Bill.

In the second spectacle, protagonist Trump, unperturbed by the Epstein hurricane, was on a personal mission of accumulating more wealth while hosting a dinner for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as the House voted.

MBS visited the White House seven years after ordering dissident Jamal Khashoggi’s murder—per a February 2021 Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) report—at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018.

Trump also defended MBS, going against the ODNI report, saying that the Crown Prince “knew nothing” about the murder.

Trump, Epstein and the X Files

Trump and Epstein bonded for almost two decades, starting in the ’80s, over money, women, power and status. The neighbours partied hard at Mar-a-Lago, dined at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and attended Victoria’s Secret events. Trump flew on Epstein’s Lolita Express seven times between 1993 and 1997, especially between Palm Beach and NYC.

However, the two playboys turned adversaries in 2004 over a Palm Beach property called Maison de l’Amitie with Trump outbidding Epstein.

By late 2007, Trump barred Epstein from visiting Mar-a-Lago. In June 2008, the pervert was arrested after pleading guilty to soliciting sex from minor girls. After he was arrested for the second and final time in July 2019, Trump said at the Oval Office, “I was not a fan of his that I can tell you.”

Therefore, Trump’s name in the Epstein files, released in five batches in January 2024 upon a court order and the department of justice (DoJ) in one batch in February this year, wasn’t a shocker.

Though Trump was never charged with any crimes related to Epstein’s monstrous sex racket, their connection ran much deeper than reported—even before the November 12 explosive document trove.

There are three angles in the Trump-Epstein connection—sex, lies and a suspected suicide.

Nothing more exposes the apparent cover-up of these three aspects than US attorney general Pam Bondi’s July  memo , which stated that a joint DoJ-FBI review of the trove of documents and audio/video files “revealed no incriminating ‘client list’.

First, the sex.

In his book Ticking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes, former 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen recounts Maxwell telling him before the 2016 election that Epstein had videotapes of both Trump and Bill Clinton in compromising positions with women.

Few days before the 2016 election, a woman mentioned as “Katie Johnson” and “Jane Doe” in court filings dropped her third suit  accusing  Trump of raping her during an orgy at Epstein’s Manhattan home in 1994 when she was 13. She also cancelled a press conference at the last minute with her attorney Lisa Bloom saying “Johnson” received death threats.

One of the exhibits unsealed on January 8, 2024, contains explosive emails Epstein’s victim Sarah Ransome sent to then-New York Post journalist Maureen Callahan in October 2016. Ransome alleged that Trump had sex with “many girls”, including her friend, at Epstein’s mansion. Strangely, Ransome wrote to Callahan in her final email that she wanted to “retract everything I have said to you and walk away from this”.

On October 31, 2024, five days before the presidential election, Wolff, who has written four books on Trump, dropped a bombshell.

Wolff, whose 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was a New York Times number-one bestseller, claimed in his podcast  Fire & Fury  that Epstein showed him photos of Trump with “topless young women” in his lap in 2017 while he was researching for the book.

“They were with Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach house sitting around the pool with these young girls and the young girls are topless. And in some of the pictures, they’re sitting in his lap,” Wolff, who recorded 100 hours of conversation with the sex offender, said.

Epstein had about six pictures, Wolff claimed, taken in the “late ’90s” at his Palm Beach mansion and stored in his safe seized during the FBI raids in July 2019.

The pictures, part of “hundreds of photos of girls and young women”, were never made public.

The DoJ’s attempt to not make the voluminous material in the Epstein case public smacks of a cover-up.

According to the memo, an “exhaustive review of investigative holdings relating to” Epstein was conducted jointly with the FBI.

More than “300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence” were found after the FBI conducted digital searches of its databases, hard drives and network drives and “physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets and other areas where responsive material may have been stored”.

“The files relating to Epstein include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography,” the memo reads.

The memo contended that there “was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions”.

However, it’s been widely alleged that Epstein  blackmailed  several of his clients and friends after ‘videorecording’ their sexcapades and also threatening to leak their affairs, including that of Microsoft cofounder  Bill Gates .

According to Florida attorney Spencer Kuvin, who represented three of Epstein’s victims, videotapes taken from multiple surveillance cameras inside Epstein’s homes were never released.

“There are thousands of hours of videotapes taken from inside the homes of Jeffrey Epstein that have, I have no doubt, video of people on them. People that have never been named before. Never identified before. Let’s see the tapes.”

If Trump had sex with underage girls or raped them, as alleged by Espetin’s two victims, there is a high possibility that Epstein recorded them—and hence, the cover-up.

According to Epstein’s brother Mark, the rapist had shocking information on Trump and the Clintons that could have disrupted the 2016 presidential election.

“If I said what I know about both candidates, they’d have to cancel the election,” Epstein told  his brother in 2016 .

The emails released by Democrats on November 12 show that Trump “spent hours” with Epstein’s main accuser, the late Virginia Giuffre, at the paedophile’s house.

“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (REDACTED) spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there,” Epstein wrote in an email to Maxwell dated April 2, 2011.

The redacted name was of Giuffre, recruited by Maxwell as a 16-year-old masseuse from Trump’s Palm Beach-situated Mar-a-Lago, raped by Epstein several times and passed on “like a platter of fruit” to other men. Giuffre apparently committed suicide in Neergabby, Australia, on April 25, days after posting that she had “four days to live”.

Giuffre’s posthumous memoir Nobody’s Girl neither alleges any wrongdoing by Trump nor claims that she was with Trump at Epstein’s home.

However,  Giuffre often changed her accounts  regarding Trump in the past. In March 2011, a month before the email, she claimed to the Mail on Sunday of having met Trump during her time with Epstein only to withdraw the claim in a sworn deposition years later.

In a December 8, 2015, email, Epstein offered “photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen” to then-NYT reporter Landon Thomas Jr.

In a January 31, 2019, email, Epstein told Wolff that “of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked [Maxwell] to stop [recruiting girls from his resort].”

In another email dated August 23, 2018, and part of the 20,000 documents, Epstein writes: “I know how dirty donald is.”

Mark believes that his brother had dirt on Trump. “He didn’t tell me what he knew, but Jeffrey definitely had dirt on Trump,” he told NewsNation on November 17.

Second, Trump’s lies.

There are conflicting accounts of the end of Trump’s association with Epstein.

The two had a fallout over the Palm Beach property in 2004. Asked about his relationship with Epstein in his first term in 2019, Trump said, “I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years.” This confirms that the duo cut ties around 2004.

However, Trump barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because of his lasciviousness in October 2007, meaning that despite the soured ties, he allowed the sex offender into the resort for three more years.

However,  the pair were in touch till 2017 —if the Epstein brothers are to be believed.

Epstein claimed to have been at Trump Tower five days after Trump’s 2016 win.

Epstein and former Microsoft executive Linda Stone discussed Trump’s chances against Hillary in 2016. In two mails sent on September 25, Stone asks Epstein, “Will you have a cabinet position? do you think he can win?”

A day later, Epstein replies: “too far to tell, we will know much more come Oct 15.”

On November 13, Stone emails asking Epstein: “You still in Paris?” He replies: “trump tower.”

According to Mark,  Trump, stunned by his win, called Epstein . “In 2016, Jeff had a conversation with Trump after the election. Trump called Jeff asking “Can you believe this?’” Mark told CNN on November 19.

Another email shows that ‘President’ Trump’s association with Epstein continued till 2017—unless the rapist was lying.

In an email thread dated November 23, 2017, Faith Kates, the founder of NEXT Model Management, asks Epstein about his Thanksgiving plans. “eva,” he replies referring to his former girlfriend Eva Andersson-Dubin.

“Who else is down there?” she asks. Epstein replies: “David fizel. hanson. trump.”

Third, Epstein’s suspicious suicide.

Mark always believed his brother was murdered.

Per the DoJ memo, the FBI concluded that Epstein “committed suicide in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in New York City on August 10, 2019”.

Was Epstein eliminated because of his Black Book, which contained 1,749 entries of 1,510 people, including around 40 members of royalty and European nobility and 12 high-ranking politicians and diplomats?

Discovered by famous investigative journalist Nick Bryant in 2012, the  Black Book  was first published by _Gawke_r, a non-mainstream media website/blog, in 2015.

“If Epstein talks, there’s gonna be a lot of powerful people who could go down,”  Bryant told  Vanity Fair in July 2019. He wondered why Epstein’s house manager “circled” the names of Trump in the booklet.

Within a month of his bail rejection, while prosecutors were building their case, Epstein was found ‘hanging’ from the lower bunker of his cell with his buttocks 1-1.5 inches above the ground. Within a week, a medical examiner termed Epstein’s death a suicide with then-US attorney general Bill Barr calling the situation a “perfect storm of screw-ups”.

In its  128-page report , the DoJ blamed “long-standing operational challenges” for his death. Contrary to instructions, Epstein was left alone without a cellmate and taken off suicide watch despite his highly doubtable earlier attempt to ‘kill himself’. He was found on his cell floor with neck injuries on July 23. Later, he told his lawyers that his cellmate, former Westchester County cop Nicholas Tartaglione—found guilty of murdering four people in April 2023—tried to kill him.

In an interview with journalist Declan Hill on the Crime Waves podcast in December 2023, Mark seriously doubted the suicide angle.

Why would Epstein commit suicide if his appeal against the bail rejection was to be heard a few days later? He spent most of August 9 (Friday) with his legal team.

“Jeff was looking forward to defending himself against the charges,” Mark said. In fact, during the last meeting with his lawyers on Friday, Epstein was in “ great spirits ”, a source told the New York Post.

Epstein called someone around 7.40 pm on August 9. Manhattan’s Metropolitan Correctional Centre said that it was his mother—but she had died in 2004!

Mark claimed to know the person, who was “equally surprised to know Jeff killed himself”. The New York City pathologist said that it looked more like a homicide with the original certificate stating that the cause of death is “pending”. A few days later, however, the chief pathologist, who wasn’t present during the actual autopsy, termed it suicide.

Online pics of other suicide victims show the noose high up on the chin and behind the ears. But the mark on Epstein’s neck was “at the centre of his neck and straight back as if he was strangled with a rope”.

Mark hired famous forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who was present during the four-hour autopsy. He saw something unusual. “There were fractures of the left, the right thyroid cartilage and the left hyoid bone. I have never seen three fractures like this in a suicidal hanging,” he told CBS News 60 Minutes.

According to Mark, the fractures resembled injuries caused by a karate chop. “I found out from Special Forces people that it is how they kill people. In this particular case, as if someone gave him a karate chop and garrotted him.”

Several other questions remain unanswered. It was a crime scene and the body shouldn’t have been touched until the coroner showed up.

Epstein’s picture showed him in a hospital gown on a gurney, not the prison dress. “Who decided to dress a dead body in a hospital gown?” Mark asked.

Why were the PCR and the 911 reports never found? Why were there no pics of Epstein’s body inside the cell? Why did the camera that could have captured Epstein’s cell door and the doors of other inmates on his tier malfunction on the night of August 9 and 10? Why did the two guards on duty on the second tier fall asleep?

Attorney Sigrid McCawley, who represented Giuffre, said, “The fact that Epstein took his own life within 24 hours of the unsealing of detailed and devastating documents and exhibits in Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, which informed the public of the scope, scale and sophistication of the international sex trafficking operation Epstein conducted, is no coincidence.”

Mark repeated his allegation with CNN.

“They didn’t do the investigation into the cause of his death. Bill Barr admitted that. How the guards didn’t do their job. How the cameras weren’t working,” he said. “The autopsy said it looked too much like a homicide.”

Now, British historian and author Andrew Lownie has corroborated Mark’s allegation.

According to Lownie, the FBI’s files on Epstein’s death show that  he was killed . “Internal FBI correspondence” shared with Lownie by a former FBI agent showed that a “fellow convict who was brought in to do this”, he told The Daily Beast Podcast. “It was treated as fact; not speculation.”

Considering the three angles—sex, lies and a suspected suicide—is the Trump administration hiding something?

“It’s just there’s things in there he [Trump] doesn’t want people to see. I mean, that… seems to be obvious,” Mark told CNN.

Besides, names of Trump’s rich friends and donors and former political bigwigs associated with him could be revealed, which the president doesn’t want.

DoJ can Still not Release all Files

Every time Trump’s name has been mentioned in previous releases of bits of Epstein files, the media has jumped the gun saying the damage could be his worst nightmare.

This time too, the media concluded that Trump could become a lame duck president.

But Trump has sustained the worst of maelstroms—two impeachments, the 2020 election loss and four indictments of which one resulted in a conviction—and bounced back with more unbridled rage and political vendetta and upended the law domestically and globally.

The law requires the DoJ to make public “in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to Jeffrey Epstein, including all investigations, prosecutions, or custodial matters” within 30 days.

Besides, flight logs or travel records, manifests, itineraries, pilot records and customs or immigration documentation for any aircraft, vessel or vehicle owned, operated or used by Jeffrey Epstein or any related entity should be made public.

However, there are ways the Trump administration can withhold damaging information and release only selective details.

First, Bondi, Trump’s troubleshooter in the Epstein scandal, hasn’t provided a specific date by which and what materials will be released except that the administration will “follow the law”.

“We have released 33,000, over 33,000, Epstein documents to the Hill and will continue to follow the law and to have maximum transparency,” she told reporters ahead of the House voting.

“We will continue to follow the law with maximum transparency while protecting victims. And again, we will continue to follow the law to investigate any leads.”

Second, Trump’s Truth Social post asking Republican lawmakers to vote to release the Epstein files had a rider.

“House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to,” Trump posted.

Obviously, Bondi will decide what the Committee is legally entitled to. She can withhold entire files and videos/photos or both and redact names without letting the Committee know.

Third, the law has a big loophole with several aspects that Bondi could use to withhold damaging information.

The law allows releasing only unclassified records and documents. Classified information related to “national defence or foreign policy” should be kept secret.

Any information about victims’ names, medical files and identifying information; child sex abuse material; and images of death, abuse or injury can be withheld or redacted.

The DoJ memo already mentioned that more than 10,000 “downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography” were found.

Trump’s another troubleshooter, FBI director Kash Patel, had testified before Congress that pornographic material discovered was part of the reason for not disclosing all records, files and documents.

Trump’s most powerful weapon in the loophole is that any records or information that “would jeopardise an active federal investigation or prosecution” can be withheld or redacted. Though the DoJ is required to outline its justification(s) for doing so within 15 days of its public release.

Trump, Bondi and Patel had already planned to use this aspect of the loophole.

The DoJ memo stated: “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”

On November 14, however, Trump suddenly asked the DoJ to probe Epstein’s ties to Bill Clinton, his treasury secretary Summers and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman—they all were in touch with Epstein.

Bondi, who shot herself in the foot by first pledging to release the Epstein files and then refused, can withhold important information citing the Trump-ordered investigation.

The possibility of the DoJ releasing information only about Democrats associated with Epstein and not anything on Trump or anyone connected to him is high.

Trump made it clear after asking the GOP to cote for the Bill that he intends to target Democrats.

“It is really a Democrat problem,” he said on November 17. “The Democrats were Epstein’s friends—all of them. And it is a hoax; the whole thing is a hoax.”

Trump will try his best not to let the Epstein saga destroy him. Perhaps, that’s why he was unperturbed while meeting MBS as the House voted.

(The writer is a freelance journalist with more than two decades of experience and comments primarily on foreign affairs. He tweets as @FightTheBigots. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)