The name of former President Donald Trump has surfaced in a recent document release, which includes references to flight records associated with Jeffrey Epstein’s private aircraft.
Authorities have not charged Trump with any criminal activity linked to Epstein.
These documents, made public on Tuesday night (AEDT), follow an earlier release of partially redacted files last Friday. The previous batch contained never-seen-before photographs of former President Bill Clinton with Epstein and a 1996 criminal complaint description against the late convicted sex offender.
One of the newly disclosed documents is an email dated January 8, 2020, from an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. It reveals that flight records indicate Trump “traveled on Epstein’s private jet significantly more often than previously reported or known to us.”
According to the document, Trump was listed as a passenger on “at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, including at least four flights where Ghislaine Maxwell was also present.”
On one 1993 flight, Trump and Epstein were the only two listed passengers. On another occasion, the flight’s only passengers were Epstein, Trump, and a then-20-year-old individual.
“On two other flights, two of the passengers, respectively, were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case,” the assistant US attorney said in the email, which was sent during Trump’s first term.
The assistant US attorney added: “We’ve just finished reviewing the full records (more than 100 pages of very small script) and didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road.”
Trump and Epstein have a long history together, and authorities have not accused Trump of criminal wrongdoing related to Epstein. The vast scope of the documents related to Epstein cite many individuals and being named does not in itself show criminal wrongdoing.
Trump has long tried to distance himself from Epstein. Trump has called him a “creep”, insisted he was “not a fan”, and said that before Epstein’s death, they hadn’t spoken in years. Yet a comprehensive CNN review of court records, photographs, interviews, and other public documents paints a portrait of an enduring relationship until the mid-2000s, when Trump says he broke it off. Trump now repeatedly downplays his past friendship with Epstein, even as new material continues to surface.
Material in Epstein files will ‘continue being reviewed and redacted’
The Department of Justice has previously said it would continue reviewing and redacting materials from the thousands of files related to the late sex trafficker Epstein.
“Photos and other materials will continue being reviewed and redacted consistent with the law in an abundance of caution as we receive additional information,” the DOJ wrote in a post on X on Saturday.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the Justice Department to redact content that could potentially identify victims who were sexually abused.
But the DOJ has faced scrutiny for the level of redactions in the first batch of documents released on Friday.
The department acknowledged that day that the “size and scope” of the redaction process it undertook made the result “vulnerable to machine error” and “instances of human error”.
Representative Thomas Massie, the Republican lawmaker who led the effort to force a vote on the legislation to release the files, told CNN on Sunday that the DOJ was not complying with the law Congress passed last month.
“Not only are they trying to create an exemption that doesn’t exist in our law, they are expressly ignoring the requirement to provide those materials,” Massie said.
Epstein survivor mortified her name went unredacted
An Epstein survivor who has only ever chosen to identify herself anonymously as “Jane Doe” was startled to learn that her name appeared multiple times in the Justice Department’s initial release on Friday of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.
She told CNN in an exclusive interview yesterday that her attempts to get the DOJ to redact her name from the publicly available documents had been unsuccessful so far.
Jane Doe said she both witnessed and experienced Epstein’s abuse in 2009 and reported her experience to the FBI the same year. That time frame is particularly significant, because it was after Epstein pleaded guilty to two state prostitution charges in Florida in the aftermath of receiving a non-prosecution deal with federal prosecutors.
Epstein would serve just 13 months in prison, though for much of his jail sentence Epstein was allowed to be out on a work-release program â a period of time when his abuse continued, survivors have said.
CNN verified that Jane Doe’s name appears many times in the Epstein files released so far by the DOJ.
CNN is choosing to only describe Jane Doe’s experience with and allegations against Epstein in broad and agreed-upon terms to protect her identity. She said that since Friday, she has received unsolicited phone calls.
CNN reached out to the DOJ for comment on Jane Doe’s unredacted inclusion in the files.
