Donald Trump made two Freudian slips on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal on Monday – admitting that he had been invited to Epstein’s infamous Pedo Island, and that their falling out wasn’t over Epstein being “a creep.”
“For years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein, because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help,” Trump told reporters across the pond in Scotland, where he’s been trying to hide out from the Epstein controversy, while also blatantly cheating at golf.
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“He stole people that worked for me,” said Trump, who went on to claim that he told the billionaire financier, who Trump has consistently claimed he barely knew, “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.
The “place” that Trump claims to have thrown Epstein out of would be Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate.
Trump did well not to mention Mar-a-Lago by name.
The best-known Epstein underage sex-trafficking victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, was working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 1999 when she met Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend, who offered the then-16-year-old a job as a traveling masseuse, and groomed the teen to provide sexual services for Epstein.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence after being convicted in 2021 on five counts of sex trafficking of girls as young as middle-school age.
Trump, it should be noted, is actively considering a pardon for Maxwell, who federal investigators think helped Epstein victimize more than 1,000 underage girls and young women over the course of the couple’s nearly 30-year relationship.
“Well, I’m allowed to give her a pardon, but nobody’s approached me with it. Nobody’s asked me about it,” Trump told reporters today. “It’s in the news about that, that aspect of it, but right now, it would be inappropriate to talk about it.”
This is all news again, 20 years after Palm Beach Police began investigating Epstein, back in 2005, 17 years after Alex Acosta, a U.S. Attorney in the George W. Bush administration, who later served in Trump’s first Cabinet as the Labor Secretary, gave Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2008, and six years after Epstein’s mysterious death in 2019, because Trump has directed the Justice Department to quash the promised release of its files on the Epstein investigation.
We know that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name is in the Epstein files, and that Bondi directed the FBI to flag mentions of Trump’s name in the files.
Trump, predictably, is playing the coverup game, and not well.
The first rule of telling lies and getting away with it is, get the story straight.
Trump flubbed that one on Monday by mixing up the stories on why he and Epstein supposedly fell out, with added demerits for admitting that he had been invited to Epstein’s private island, and turned it down.
“I never had the privilege of going to his island,” Trump said, curiously – seriously, he would have considered it a “privilege” to visit Pedo Island?
“A lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island,” Trump said.
For those keeping score at home, the story as of today is, Trump:
- barely knew Jeffrey Epstein.
- got an invite from Epstein to his Pedo Island and turned it down.
- stopped talking to Epstein because Epstein hired some of Trump’s employees, not because, as he’d said before, he thought Epstein was a creep.
- is considering a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, though it would be inappropriate to say more about that.
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Chris Graham
