Kamal Ghorui
An unredacted 2009 email tied to Jeffrey Epstein is raising fresh questions about Donald Trump’s long-standing claim that he expelled Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club. Speaking on the House floor, New York Representative Dan Goldman said he had reviewed the full version of the email—originally released in heavily redacted form by the Justice Department—and argued it suggests Epstein was “never asked to leave” the club, according to the Daily Beast.In the unredacted 2009 email from Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney, Jack Goldberger appeared to summarise a “20 minute phone conference” with Trump, Trump’s attorney Alan Garten, and a person named “Brad,” presumably Brad Edwards, who represented Epstein’s victims. Goldberger wrote that the conference was conducted “in lieu of a depo.”Responding to whether Epstein was ever expelled from Mar-a-Lago, Garten allegedly replied, “No he was not a member. May have been his guest. Never asked to leave.”Goldberger’s email noted that the person referred to as “Brad” talked to a manager at Mar-a-Lago, who confirmed that “JE never asked to leave Mar a Lago.”According to the email, Trump was asked to respond to Epstein’s brother Mark’s claim that Trump flew on the convicted sex offender’s plane, the “Lolita Express.”“I’ve been on a lot of planes. May have been on his plane. No young girls on plane,” the future president allegedly said.Asked if he was ever at Epstein’s house, Trump said, “I may have been there with my wife.”“Any young girls there?” he was apparently asked.“No may have been children of guests but that’s it,” he allegedly replied.The email appeared to contradict Trump’s repeated claim that he expelled Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, a story the White House leaned on as details of the president’s close friendship with Epstein surfaced.Trump, who appeared thousands of times in the Epstein files, said that he was not “friendly” with Epstein and was “never” on his plane.The story referenced photographs and videos showing Trump and Epstein together in New York and Florida, and said they socialised beginning in the 1980s until sometime in the 2000s. It also cited flight logs that named the president.The story also referenced Trump and Melania with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 12, 2000, and Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in New York City, on April 9, 1997.The 79-year-old president told reporters last July that he cut ties with Epstein after the pedophile “stole” female workers from his exclusive Florida members club. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt often pushed back against scrutiny of Trump’s relationship with Epstein by proclaiming, “President Trump did nothing wrong and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”Goldberger’s email raised doubts about those assertions, and the story said that according to Mar-a-Lago membership documents seen by the authors of The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency, Epstein was a member of the club until October 2007, more than a year after he was indicted for soliciting prostitution.In his speech on the House floor, Goldman accused Trump of making “false statements over the past quarter century about Jeffrey Epstein” and criticised Attorney General Pam Bondi for her department’s redactions to the email.“The reason why this matters is because we don’t have half of the Epstein files,” he said, adding that the DOJ identified 6 million Epstein files for potential release but disclosed about 3.5 million.“If the attorney general is covering up this information that she then reveals to Congress, what else is she covering up about Donald Trump’s involvement in the Epstein files?” he asked.
