Donald Trump suggested that his name was possibly planted in documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, by Democrats.
Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May on the Justice Department’s review of the documents related to Epstein’s case and told him that his name appeared in the files.
At a press conference in Turnberry, Scotland on Monday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump was asked by a reporter, “you had said you had not been briefed that your name was in the Epstein files, doesn’t the AG have to tell you?”
The president responded by calling the Epstein documents a “hoax” and falsely claimed his name was planted in the files despite his years long close friendship with Epstein, who once claimed to be Trump’s “closest friend.”
“Well, I haven’t been overly interested in it. It’s a hoax that’s been built up way beyond proportion. I can say this: those files were run by the worst scum on Earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by Biden — and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen. The whole thing is a hoax,” Trump said.
“They ran the files—I was running against somebody that ran the files. If they had something, they would have released. Now they can easily put something in the files that’s a phony,” he continued, adding “they can put things in the file that are fake.”
Trump was also asked again about the possibility of pardoning Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and he refused to rule it out.
“Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it, nobody’s asked me about it,” Trump said. “It’s in the news about that—that aspect of it, but right now it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”
Maxwell is serving 20 years in prison after she was convicted in 2021 of recruiting and grooming multiple teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.
Trump’s former personal attorney and current deputy attorney general Todd Blanche has met with Maxwell privately as the Epstein scandal engulfed the White House. Critics have noted that Maxwell has everything to gain from helping Trump and that he could pardon her in exchange for testimony that’s favorable to him.
