The mushrooming political scandal over the Jeffrey Epstein file is following President Donald Trump around like an ominous storm cloud on a rainy day, dark, heavy and impossible to outrun.
One of the latest bombshell developments in the ongoing drama? Trump now says his friendship with Epstein ended in 2004 because the disgraced financier and sex trafficker “stole” young women from the spa at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
In Scotland, Trump first said he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for stealing Trump’s employees.
“He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He did it again. And I threw him out of the place, persona non grata. I threw him out, and that was it,” Trump said.
Then, on Air Force One, later as he was returning to the White House, he surprisingly revealed that he knew the employees Epstein was poaching were young women.
Here’s how the shocking comments unfolded.
A reporter asked, “Mr. President, Epstein has a certain reputation, obviously. I’m just curious, were some of the workers that were taken from you, were some of them young women?”
“Some of them?” Trump replied.
“Were some of them young women?” the reporter pressed.
“Well, I don’t want to say, but everyone knows the people that were taken, and it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad, but that story’s been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes, they were,” the president answered.
He was then asked, “Mr. President, did one of those stolen, you know, persons include Virginia Giuffre?”
“I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And, by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know, none whatsoever,” Trump continued.
Guiffre was just 16 when Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell lured her away from Trump’s spa at Mar-a-Lago. She died by suicide in April, years after filing civil and criminal lawsuits against Epstein and Maxwell and accusing Prince Andrew of sexual abuse.
That’s different from a previous White House statement on why Trump and Epstein’s friendship ended.
“The fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep,” it said.
CNN’s Erin Burnett is also contesting Trump’s version of events, namely the timeline.
During Tuesday night’s episode of “Erin Burnett Outfront”, the news anchor questioned the timing of Trump’s supposed departure from Epstein.
“You’ve studied this case so closely,” she said to her guest Barry Levin, author of “The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. “I just laid out something you were talking about as you were sitting down here, that if hiring away the then 16- or 17-year- old Virginia Giuffre from the Mar-a-Lago spa was the reason for the falling out, the timeline doesn’t add up because that was 2000, and Trump made those comments about Epstein to “New York Magazine” in 2002.”
“It is even more skewed, Erin,” Levin began. “I mean, we know that a year after the “New York Magazine” comment about Jeffrey being a terrific guy, that he took part in that birthday book that “The Wall Street Journal” pointed out.
And research shows from investigative reporting from “The Miami Herald”, that Jeffrey Epstein was actually still on the Mar-a-Lago membership logs up to 2007. Okay? So Trump was still getting money from Jeffrey Epstein up until 2007. He was still — Jeffrey Epstein’s — was still paying for his membership at Mar-a-Lago, according to “The Miami Herald”. And that, of course, is a year after Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest in Florida in 2006.”
Erin briefly interrupted to add, “So if he kicked him out for being a creep … That would have even been a year after that would have been established through a legal suit.”
Social media went wild over the revelations, with thousands of comments on Trump’s admission.
“He’s cooked,” BoobeeYAGA wrote on X.
Another user posted,” So Trump didn’t need to travel to Epstein island because he had his own operation going on. Makes sense.”
And the hits keep coming.
“Dang, he already played his ‘Obama is guilty of treason’ card. How is he going to distract from this one? That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. I’m not suggesting he’s finally stuck. There will be another distraction,” Tom Haflinger predicted.
One added in response to CNN’s clip, “The man lies about everything and his base believed everything that came out of his mouth but this is where they are drawing the line. They aren’t putting up with not knowing who was involved and trump knows it. DOJ should be ashamed.” Another thanked Levine for “bringing the receipts.”
The Bulwark characterized Trump’s admission this way. “The thing that Donald Trump thinks is inappropriate that Jeffery Epstein did is that he stole the help?…Truly, mindbogglingly heinous stuff from the President of the United States today.”
And Jeff Rasley perhaps said it best, “Not because he was sex trafficking or a pedophile, Trump broke with Epstein because he ‘stole people that worked for me.’”
But Trump has never admitted he knew Epstein and Maxwell were sex trafficking young girls. He has denied knowing about Epstein’s criminal enterprises.
The Epstein scandal swirling around Trump has continued to intensify after the Justice Department earlier this month closed the case on Epstein. The move came after Trump and many in his inner circle spent years stoking conspiracy theories around Epstein’s death in jail, allegedly by suicide in 2019, and about his reputed “client list.”
Trump’s supporters went wild after the announcement, attacking Trump and his administration for what they saw as a betrayal and the backtracking on the campaign promise to release the files.
The controversy has only continued to worsen for Trump and has shown no signs of going away despite the President’s repeated attempts at distraction.
