According to declassified FBI documents, former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter claims that Donald Trump called him in 2006 and stated that "everyone" knew about Jeffrey Epstein's behavior. These testimonies cast doubt on the current president's claims that he had no idea about the financier's criminal activities before his official arrest. This is reported by the BBC, writes UNN.
Details
The FBI report states that Trump was one of the first to contact the police when he learned about the investigation into Epstein for exploiting minors. According to Reiter, Trump approved of the law enforcement actions, noting: "Thank God you're stopping him, everyone knew he was doing it." In addition, he allegedly called Ghislaine Maxwell "evil" and the financier's "operative," urging the investigation to focus specifically on her.
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Reiter also said that Trump admitted to instances where he was near Epstein and teenagers, but then "got out of there." This information contradicts Trump's comments from 2019, when he assured that he "had no suspicion" about Epstein's crimes and had not communicated with him for many years.
White House reaction and Maxwell's defense position
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt did not confirm the call, but noted that the president's words about expelling Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because he was a "scumbag" remain unchanged. The administration's official position is that these testimonies only confirm Trump's negative attitude towards the financier from the very beginning.
The situation escalated after Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyer stated his client's readiness for a frank conversation in exchange for a pardon. Donald Trump currently rejects such a possibility. The published files initiated a new wave of questions about how much information about Epstein's network was known to the US elite long before the case was uncovered.