Shortly after the regulation enforcement investigation into Jeffrey Epstein turned public in the mid-2000s, Donald Trump referred to as the Palm Beach, Florida, Police Department to specific gratitude, in line with a newly launched doc.
“Thank goodness you’re stopping him,” Trump stated, in line with the doc. “Everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
The document — a written file of an FBI interview {that a} former Palm Beach County police chief told the Miami Herald he gave in 2019 — is more likely to gas extra questions about when and what particularly Trump knew about Epstein and his crimes. President Trump and the White House have stated repeatedly that Trump broke ties with Epstein in the early 2000s, believing Epstein to be a “creep.”
The Miami Herald reported the interview memorialized in the doc was with Michael Reiter, whose identify is redacted. He was the Palm Beach police chief on the time of the decision, which seems to have occurred round 2006, in line with the Herald. According to the FBI doc, Trump told him on the decision that folks in New York knew Epstein was disgusting. And he stated Epstein confederate Ghislaine Maxwell was “Epstein’s operative,” including of her, “she is evil and to focus on her.”
Trump additionally stated he was round Epstein as soon as when youngsters had been current and “got the hell out of there,” the doc says. Trump was one of many “very first people” to name the Palm Beach Police Department when folks discovered they had been investigating Epstein, in line with the doc, which was amongst thousands and thousands launched by the Justice Department underneath a brand new regulation handed by Congress.
The White House referred a request for remark to the Justice Department. A Justice Department official stated, “We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the President contacted law enforcement 20 years ago.” NCS has reached out to Reiter for remark.
The question of what Trump knew about Epstein and his crimes has clouded the president’s second time period amid renewed curiosity in the story and the discharge of thousands and thousands of pages of paperwork associated to the late convicted intercourse offender. Trump has stated the 2 males had been associates in the Nineteen Nineties, and socialized in the identical circles in Palm Beach, earlier than having a falling out in the early 2000s that resulted in Trump kicking Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago membership.
Trump has stated the falling-out was motivated by Epstein’s makes an attempt to steal his workers however has denied having any data of his crimes.
“The concept of people taking people that worked for me is bad,” Trump told reporters in July. “People were taken out of the spa, hired by him, in other words, gone.”
“When I heard about it, I told him, we don’t want you taking our people – whether it was spa or not spa. I don’t want him taking people, and he was fine and then not too long after that he did it again and I said ‘outta here,’” Trump stated.
Trump stated he believed one of the people taken was Virginia Giuffre, one of the crucial distinguished Epstein survivors who later died by suicide. But Trump later that week told reporters he didn’t actually know why the ladies had been poached from his membership.
Trump’s description of Maxwell as “evil” in the doc contrasts with how he reacted to her arrest in 2020. He stated on the time “I just wish her well.” Maxwell is serving a prolonged jail sentence for intercourse trafficking.
While Maxwell pleaded the fifth throughout her newest deposition to the House Oversight Committee, her legal professional stated that she can be prepared to “speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump.” In a prior interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell stated she “absolutely never” heard Epstein or anybody say Trump had performed something inappropriate.
Trump told NCS in July that he hasn’t thought about giving a pardon or commutation to Maxwell, though he didn’t rule it out.
“It’s something I haven’t thought about,” he stated. “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”