— Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) Statement to reportersJuly 9
Florida Circuit Judge Luis Delgado last week unsealed nearly 200 pages of grand jury testimony in a 2006 Florida case involving notorious financier Jeffrey Epstein, who allegedly raped a teenage girl. In 2019, a prison guard found Epstein dead in his cell at a federal prison in New York after he was indicted in federal court on charges of sex trafficking minors. Investigators said Epstein committed suicide by hanging.
According to the documents, prosecutors heard testimony that Epstein assaulted teenage girls before he struck a plea deal with Epstein in 2008 that was concealed from the victims and granted him lenient work release. “The details that will be made known to reasonable people will be outrageous,” Judge Delgado wrote in his order. “The testimony heard by the grand jury concerns conduct that ranges from grossly unacceptable to rape, and all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, abhorrent, and criminal.”
However, Donald Trump’s name does not appear anywhere in the minutes.
Still, Democrats, perhaps trying to deflect attention from Biden’s troubles, continue to suggest on social media that there are disturbing connections between the former president and convicted sex offenders. Some social media posts falsely claim that Trump was named in the draft indictment unsealed last week; only his 2006 grand jury testimony has been made public.
Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter whose passionate reporting forced a reopening of the Epstein case, has tried bravely to point out the fallacies about X, but the misinformation continues to spread. “I’ve come to the conclusion that the American people aren’t going to pay for the truth,” she lamented. “They’re more willing to believe lies that are available for free on the Internet.”
(Trump may have fueled this speculation by being vague about whether he would release all of the Epstein-related documents in a recent Fox News interview. “I don’t want to have it impact people’s lives if there’s fake stuff in there,” he said.)
When we asked Liu’s office for evidence to back up his speculation, they provided us with a number of old Washington Post articles examining Trump’s ties to Epstein. But contrary to what Liu said, none of them indicate that Trump did anything inappropriate. Let’s take a look at what the public records say.
“Photo with Epstein”
Trump has acknowledged that he and Epstein were in the same Palm Beach social circles decades ago, but their relationship appears to have ended around the time Epstein’s legal troubles began.
Photos of Trump and Epstein abound: In 2019, NBC News released a video of Trump hanging out with Epstein at a party with NFL cheerleaders in 1992. In one scene, Trump appears to tell Epstein, pointing at someone, “She’s hot!”
In a 2002 profile of Epstein, Trump said: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. He’s a wonderful guy, a lot of fun to be around. He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and I’ve been told many of them are young women. I have no doubt Jeffrey enjoys a social life.”
But as The Washington Post reported, their relationship soured after the two fought over the acquisition of a luxury Palm Beach oceanfront mansion called Maison de l’Amity in 2004. Trump won the deal at auction, and the two have not been in contact since, according to phone records (the ones Liu referenced). Two weeks after the auction, Palm Beach police received a tip that young women had been seen coming and going from Epstein’s home, leading to a grand jury investigation.
“Multiple plane trips with Epstein”
Many celebrities, including former President Bill Clinton, flew on Epstein’s jet. Trump flew with Epstein at least seven times in the 1990s, according to flight logs released as evidence in the trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping sexually abuse girls. Liu claims that young girls were on board, but there is no evidence to support this claim. The ages of the passengers are not recorded.
Trump flew between Palm Beach and New York City airports in June 1994. Marla and Tiffany are listed as other passengers on the flight, presumably a reference to Trump’s then-wife, Marla Maples, and their daughter, who was less than a year old.
“It’s very worrying.”
Trump was mentioned briefly in a roughly 1,000-page document released in January in a separate case involving a defamation lawsuit against Maxwell by alleged victim Virginia Giuffre. (Liu’s staff sent him a story about the document.)
But these were minor mentions.
In Giuffre’s 2016 deposition, which was made public, she was asked about Trump, and she said she was recruited by Maxwell when she was 17 and working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago.
“I don’t believe Donald Trump was involved in anything,” she said. “That would be another assumption. I have never seen or witnessed Donald Trump engaging in any of those activities. But was he at Jeffrey Epstein’s house?”
She said anyone who visited Epstein’s home would have seen numerous photographs of nude women hanging on the walls. “These were lewd acts of young girls, girl on girl acts, that would be considered child pornography,” Giuffre testified. “If you walked into Jeffrey Epstein’s house, if you were inside, if you knew him after that, you knew what was going on there.”
Meanwhile, Joanna Sjoberg, an alleged victim of Epstein, has said Epstein’s planes made unscheduled landings in Atlantic City between 2001 and 2006. There was no indication the planes saw Trump, and Sjoberg said she never gave Trump a massage.
The documents also included emails from accusers who had made and later retracted allegations against Trump. (Separately, two women, under pseudonyms Katie Johnson and Jane Doe, accused Trump of raping them at Epstein’s home when they were 13, but those allegations were dismissed or retracted years ago.)
“Ted is a total corrupt loser who continues to paint himself as a buffoon, his brain rotting with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and instead of getting the proper treatment he desperately needs, he has become the laughing stock of all his colleagues, who secretly joke about his glaring shortcomings,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Chang said in a statement.
Liu’s office declined to comment beyond providing a link to the article.
Pinocchio Test
As we have documented, 17 women have alleged that Trump engaged in sexual misconduct — a Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed one of the women on our list — but no credible allegations have emerged linking Trump to Epstein’s crimes.
Liu is a member of Congress and should not have to rely on questionable social media posts to stay informed, especially when he makes statements like this one. Trump is not listed in the latest documents on Epstein and was barely mentioned in the previous ones. Rest assured, if Trump had been featured prominently, it would have been big news.
Lieu won four Pinocchios.
The four Pinocchios
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