The name of US President Donald Trump is mentioned multiple times in the Jeffrey Epstein files, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing unnamed senior administration officials.
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) made the discovery earlier this year while reviewing what Attorney General Pam Bondi described as a “truckload” of documents related to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender. Back in May, Bondi and her deputy notified Trump during a “routine briefing,” telling him that he and “hundreds” of other “high-profile figures” were mentioned, the WSJ has claimed.
DOJ officials also notified the US president they did not plan to release any more documents related to Epstein, given that the material contained child porn and personal information about the victims. In response, Trump reportedly told the officials he would defer to the DOJ decision to withhold the outstanding files from the public.
The decision was announced in early July, when the DOJ released a memo stating that the long-rumored “client list” of Epstein’s pedophile island never existed, no evidence was uncovered to merit a probe into uncharged third parties, and no further documents related to the affair would be released.
The new WSJ piece contradicts statements made by the US president last week, when Trump said that Bondi had not told him his name was in Epstein’s files. The US administration has strongly denied the latest allegations.
“This is another fake news story, just like the previous story by The Wall Street Journal,” White House communications director Steven Cheung has said.
Last week, the Journal claimed it had obtained a lewd letter allegedly sent by Trump to Epstein for his 50th birthday. The alleged letter was reportedly part of a leather-bound album compiled by Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in 2003 and included a crude drawing of a nude woman.
“A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly Donald below her waist, mimicking pubic hair,” the report described the drawing. The WSJ did not elaborate on how it obtained the material it claimed to be a previously unreleased DOJ file.
Trump denied the report, insisting that he “never wrote a picture in my life,” and accused the WSJ and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, of deliberately spreading “defamatory lies.” The US president sued for libel Murdoch, the WSJ parent company, News Corp., the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., and the two reporters, denouncing the “once great” paper as a “disgusting and filthy rag.”
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