New York: Donald Trump told Palm Beach police in 2006 that “everyone” knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of minors, and called Epstein’s close friend Ghislaine Maxwell “evil”, according to investigation records made public in the so-called Epstein files.
The revelations stem from a report that documents a 2019 FBI interview with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, who recounted his recollection of a conversation with Trump in 2006 when charges against Epstein became public.
“Donald Trump told [Reiter] that he threw Epstein out of his club,” the report says. “Trump called the [Palm Beach police] to tell him, ‘Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this’.”
It goes on to say that Trump told police that people in New York “knew Epstein was disgusting”. Trump said Maxwell was Epstein’s operative, and that “she is evil and to focus on her”.
Trump told Reiter that he was once around Epstein “when teenagers were present”, and “got the hell out of there”, the report says. Trump was “one of the very first people to call when people found out that they [the police] were investigating Epstein”.
The FBI interview record appears among millions of pages released by the US Department of Justice. It was unearthed and first published by Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown, whose 2018 investigation into Epstein – before he was arrested on sex-trafficking charges – broke open the case.
The record of Trump’s remarks is significant because it appears to corroborate his claim to have cut ties with Epstein before his criminal charges were made public, and that he threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club.
However, it jars with some of Trump’s other claims, chiefly that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. Last year, he said he threw Epstein out of the Mar-a-Lago because he was “stealing” female staff from the resort – namely Virginia Giuffre, the Epstein survivor who died by suicide in Australia last year.
Meanwhile, Trump’s commerce secretary, billionaire businessman Howard Lutnick, was forced to admit that he visited Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, in December 2012 – despite previously claiming he severed contact with Epstein in 2005 after a creepy encounter.
“I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across to a family vacation. My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies,” Lutnick told a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday (Washington time).
“We had lunch on the island, that is true. For an hour, then we left with all of my children, with my nannies and my wife, all together. To suggest there was anything untoward about that in 2012 – I don’t recall why we did it.”
Lutnick and Epstein became next-door neighbours in New York in 2005. But Lutnick told the hearing that after an initial neighbourly introduction at Epstein’s home – the one he previously said was creepy – he could only recall meeting Epstein two more times: an hour-long meeting in 2011 and the island lunch in 2012.
“I did not have any relationship with him. I barely had anything to do with that person,” Lutnick said.
Lutnick is the former chairman and chief executive of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. He is not accused of any wrongdoing in relation to sexual activity, but critics, including Republican congressman Thomas Massie, have called on him to resign for misrepresenting the extent of his contact with Epstein.
Ro Khanna, a Democrat who helped lead the congressional push to release the Epstein files, implied there was a higher level of accountability in Europe than the US.
“If in Norway, the princess no longer has the support to be Queen, and if in the UK King Charles is now calling for a criminal investigation into his own brother, then surely in the United States of America, Howard Lutnick must resign!” he said on X.
The latest revelations come as the Justice Department removed some redactions from the Epstein files under pressure from members of Congress after they viewed the unredacted files in person.
That included the name of lingerie billionaire Les Wexner, the former chief executive of Victoria’s Secret and Epstein’s major long-term client, who is listed as a possible “co-conspirator” on an FBI memo dated five days after Epstein’s death in jail in 2019.
Among the other people identified as possible co-conspirators in that memo are the late French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, Epstein’s house manager Lesley Groff and Maxwell – as well as four other people whose names remain redacted.
Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse girls, and is serving a 20-year jail sentence. Her lawyer this week made an explicit appeal to Trump to clear his name in exchange for clemency.
Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.