A newly released tranche of records from the Department of Justice included a significant internal email from a federal prosecutor stating that President Donald Trump flew on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's private jet “many more times than previously has been reported.”
According to Reuters, in an email dated January 7, 2020, the public prosecutor wrote that flight records demonstrated Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet eight times during the 1990s.
Meanwhile, on these four flights, Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell was also aboard.
Trump said in a social media post in 2024 that he “ was never on Epstein’s plane, or at his stupid island.”
The prosecutor’s email did not state that Trump was being indicted or that he had committed any crime.
On one flight described in the newly released records, the only three passengers were Epstein, Trump and a 20-year-old woman whose name was redacted. In separate instances, there were also women who were identified as possible witnesses in the Maxwell case.
In this connection, the Department of Justice posted a statement on X saying, "Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election…”
The latest release of Epstein files includes around 30,000 pages of documents with many redactions and a large number of video clips, including some claiming to have been inside a federal detention center.
The government has further unveiled various reports of phone calls to an FBI tip line that reference Trump, but it did not identify the callers or indicate whether investigators followed up on the tips or found them to be credible.
In an attempt to comply with the new Epstein Files Transparency Act, The Trump administration released a large repository of documents last weekend.
However, the heavily redacted files have sparked bipartisan backlash and ensured that the controversy will remain a central issue heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
The Trump administration downplayed the significance of the Epstein files, and told reporters that the material was “just used to deflect against tremendous success.”
Additionally, the new transparency law passed by Congress, mandated the disclosure of all Epstein files regardless of Trump’s efforts to keep them sealed for a long period of time.
