FBI Report Of 2006 Call Ratting Out Epstein Muddles Trump’s Previous Explanations

An FBI report detailing a phone call by Donald Trump to the Palm Beach Police chief in 2006 implicating his child sex trafficking friends Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell has muddled the president’s varying explanations of when and why he broke off contact with them.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed that the document, released by the Justice Department in response to a new law requiring disclosure of the federal government’s investigations of the now-dead financier, vindicates Trump.

“Look, it was a phone call that may or may not have happened in 2006…. What I’m telling you is that what President Trump has always said is that he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club because Jeffrey Epstein was a creep and that remains true,” she said during a press briefing.

“And this call, if it did happen, corroborates exactly what President Trump has said from the beginning.”

In fact, the FBI report first discovered among the millions of released documents by The Miami Herald, adds yet another conflicting data point to Trump’s various explanations through the years of why he ended his long history of socialising with Epstein.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told then-Palm Beach Police chief Michael Reiter, according to a 2018 FBI interview of Reiter.

Reiter, who has since retired, also told investigators Trump was among the first to call him in 2006 after news of the investigation into Epstein spread through Palm Beach, where Trump and Epstein were neighbours.

He added that Trump told him to focus on Maxwell, calling her Epstein’s “operative” and “evil.”

Epstein was originally arrested in 2008, three years after Palm Beach Police received a complaint he had molested a young girl he had hired to give him a massage.

That arrest was the result of an agreement, crafted by a US attorney who would go on to serve in Trump’s cabinet, that let him plead guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in return for immunity on far more serious sex trafficking charges being considered by South Florida federal prosecutors.

After the Herald ran articles about that sweetheart deal in 2018, federal prosecutors in New York opened their own probe, and indicted and arrested Epstein in the summer of 2019. During the second investigation, agents interviewed Reiter.

At that time, Trump, by then the sitting president, claimed he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing by Epstein. “No, I had no idea. I had no idea,” he said then.

He began offering a new story last year after public pressure mounted for him to release the investigative files on Epstein, as he had promised he would do during his campaign to regain the White House. During the spring and summer, he rolled out the explanation that he had cut ties and thrown Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago country club after he learned that Epstein had been poaching young female staff members.

“He did something that was inappropriate. 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,’” Trump told reporters during a visit to one of his golf courses in Scotland last year. “He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata.”

That story, though, did not mesh with already known dates. The poaching of his staff started no later than 2000, which was when Virginia Guiffre, then 16 years old, was recruited by Maxwell for Epstein. Yet Epstein remained a member at Mar-a-Lago until 2007.

When HuffPost asked Trump why it took him seven years to act, Trump claimed he did not understand the question.

And two years after Epstein began recruiting Trump’s “help” away from him, Trump was still lavishly praising the man with whom he repeatedly attended parties that featured very young women.

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

On Monday, US Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said some unredacted emails he was able to review at a Justice Department office indicated Epstein was still going to Mar-a-Lago in 2009 and had never been told to stay away ― information Trump’s DOJ had blacked out from public view.

Epstein died by apparent suicide in 2019 a month after he was arrested on child sex trafficking charges. Maxwell was arrested the following year, convicted at trial in late 2021, and in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

She was moved to a minimum-security “Club Fed” type prison camp last summer after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously had been one of Trump’s numerous criminal defense lawyers.

Trump, despite numerous opportunities, has refused to rule out a pardon for Maxwell. On Tuesday, Leavitt again did not close the door on that happening. “I haven’t spoken with him recently. Last time we did speak about it, he said it’s not something he’s considering or thinking about,” she said.