‘I wasn’t friendly with Epstein’ – Trump
US President Donald Trump has denied being friends with Jeffrey Epstein, accusing the late convicted sex offender of plotting against him.
Last week, the US Department of Justice released the final batch of over 3 million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, legislation signed by Trump in November, compelling the agency to publish data tied to federal criminal investigations into the disgraced financier.
The US president’s name is mentioned in the files on at least 3,000 occasions. The documents also show that Epstein, who died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, had communication with multiple high-profile US figures, including former President Bill Clinton and billionaires Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday that “not only wasn’t I friendly with Jeffrey Epstein but, based upon information that has just been released by the Department of Justice, Epstein and a SLEAZEBAG lying ‘author’ named Michael Wolff, conspired in order to damage me and/or my Presidency.”
“Unlike so many people that like to ‘talk’ trash, I never went to the infested Epstein island but, almost all of these Crooked Democrats, and their Donors, did,” he insisted.
Trump already promised on Saturday that he would sue Wolff, a US journalist behind the 2018 unauthorized autobiography ‘Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House’.
Wolff said in an Instagram message on Sunday that he wasn’t sure what had caused Trump’s anger, but acknowledged that he had encouraged Epstein to “go public with what he knew about Trump.”
The journalist featured in many of the Epstein files published by the DOJ last November. In an email from February 2016, Wolff suggested that the disgraced financier could become the “bullet” to end Trump’s first presidential campaign.
The DOJ prefaced its latest release with a statement, saying the emails revealed no suggestion from Epstein that Trump “had done anything criminal or had any inappropriate contact with any of his victims.” According to the agency, the emails instead show the convicted sex offender frequently disparaging the president, calling him “stupid” and questioning his mental fitness.
