Trump says America should move on from Epstein – it may not be that easy

Over the past two months, the US Department of Justice has released millions of documents related to its sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Now, the president wants the nation to move on – but will it?

Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the government’s review of the Epstein files – which was mandated by a law passed by Congress in November – is over, and there are no grounds for new prosecutions.

“There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs,” Blanche said on Sunday. “But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”

While the justice department’s review may be over, on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives is pushing ahead with its own Epstein inquiry. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are scheduled to testify later in February after Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress.

Members of Congress and Epstein’s victims, meanwhile, are continuing to call for further disclosures – pointing to documents they say exist but weren’t included in the released files.

It is yet another sign of just how difficult to shake this story has become for those, like President Donald Trump, who are clearly keen to move on.

For the moment, however, the president has emerged from the storm with no apparent lasting damage.

That is not true for some of the other rich and powerful figures whose ties to Epstein were more prominently detailed in the files, and who had continued contact with him long after he became a convicted sex offender in 2008.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, Lord Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for instance, have all faced professional and personal consequences for their connections to Epstein.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and tech multi-billionaire Elon Musk, among others, have had to explain emails and mentions of their name in the released documents.

The president, at the White House on Tuesday, said he thought it was “really time for the country to get on to something else”.

“Nothing came out about me,” Trump, who has consistently denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, said.

That, however, is not exactly accurate.

The president’s name appeared more than 6,000 times in the documents. He was frequently mentioned by Epstein and his associates. The two men, both residents of New York City and West Palm Beach, had by all accounts a friendly relationship for much of the 1990s until, according to Trump, they fell out in the early 2000s.

One of those Trump mentions, in an email released in December, drew particular scrutiny.

“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote in the 2011 email to convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. “[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned”.

In the latest batch of files, the justice department also released a list of unverified FBI tips, including some from 2016 when Trump was in the midst of his first presidential campaign. The list includes numerous allegations of sexual abuse made against Trump, Epstein and other high-profile figures.

The FBI tips, many of which were made without supporting evidence, temporarily disappeared from the justice department’s document website on Saturday. That only served to fuel a feeling in some quarters that the department was working to protect the president.

“Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the justice department said of those particular files.

“The claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponised against President Trump already.”

There have been a handful of new photographs of Trump, but none were any more revealing than images and videos that have long been in the public domain.

And Trump, who famously refrains from using email, has no documented trail of direct communication with Epstein. None of the new information substantively undercuts the president’s assertion that his friendship with Epstein ended around 2004.

The closest thing to a political bombshell – a bawdy, suggestive note Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for inclusion in a 2002 birthday book – was released by the Epstein estate, not the government.

Trump has vehemently denied its authenticity.

BBC