3 Sep, 2024 20:34
Epstein client list ‘will be’ made public – Trump
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has suggested that the “black book” with deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s client list would be made public should he be elected president.
Epstein worked as a financier and socialized with the rich and famous for years, introducing them to dozens of young women – some of whom were underage at the time – and flying them to his private island in the Caribbean on the jet dubbed the ‘Lolita Express’.
“I never went to his island, fortunately. But a lot of people did,” Trump said in an interview with the Lex Fridman podcast, published on Tuesday.
“It’s very interesting, isn’t it? Probably will be, by the way,” Trump told Fridman, after the host said it was “very strange” that the list of people who traveled to Little St. James has never been made public.
Trump compared the Epstein disclosures to declassifying the last remaining documents related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and said he would “certainly take a look at it” and would “be inclined to” release the client list.
Trump has previously said that as president (2017-2021) he tried to release the Kennedy files, only for the US intelligence community to persuade him at the last moment that this would somehow be damaging. He has since made a promise to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to declassify the documents about his uncle’s assassination, after the former Democrat endorsed him last month.
Revelations that Epstein lured young women – many below the legal age of consent – and pimped them out to powerful and prominent acquaintances were instrumental in the financier’s arrest in 2019.
FBI searches of his New York residence and Caribbean island reportedly came up with videos potentially containing compromising material on his “guests.” That evidence remained under lock and key even after Epstein died in his Manhattan cell in August 2019, officially due to suicide.
Epstein’s sometime girlfriend and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested in 2020. She wound up convicted of child sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years behind bars. While the public found out some of the names of the trafficked teens, the names of people they were trafficked to have remained a secret.
