Not only was Trump intimately close to Jeffrey Epstein, but there is a wealth of reporting tying the billionaire pedophile to intelligence circles. Trump is once again protecting the elites he claimed he would fight on the campaign trail.

The Trump administration’s shameless flip-flop on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files is one of the laziest, most brazen cover-ups in American history.

Donald Trump and his team spent the 2024 campaign promising to release what the government had on Epstein and the criminal network around him and claimed right up until this past week that they had the files and were ready to set them loose. Then they did a complete 180.

Attorney general Pam Bondi once claimed that a “truckload of evidence arrived,” that she had Epstein’s client list “sitting on my desk right now, to review,” and that “everything’s going to come out to the public.” Bondi now says she was never referring to a client list and that all the Epstein material is simply unreleasable child porn. FBI director Kash Patel previously charged the government was withholding the files “because of who’s on that list,” and he was “not going to withhold information from the American public, ever”; now the official position of both Patel’s FBI and the Department of Justice headed by Bondi is that there is “no incriminating ‘client list’” and that they will make “no further disclosure” — all in the name of “combatting child exploitation,” no less.

To be clear, there is likely no actual “client list.” What there is — as Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who broke the Epstein story, has repeatedly said — is a trove of heavily redacted and unreleased files that the FBI and DOJ have been sitting on for years, which could give us an idea of who Epstein consorted with while still protecting the identities of victims. Yet the Trump team has conveniently steered attention away from this to a phantom client list and Epstein’s pornographic content, while insisting nothing, not even these files, are going to see the light of day.

Trump himself seems unusually agitated by the subject of Epstein these days. Earlier this week, when a reporter asked him about his flip-flop and Epstein’s possible intelligence ties, Trump uncharacteristically erupted in anger at the question:

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. . . . Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste time on it? . . . I mean, I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success, and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration.

Mind you this is less than a year after Trump told podcaster Lex Fridman it was “very interesting” that Epstein’s associates had still not been made publicly known and that he would “be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

So why does Trump suddenly seem to have such a problem with it?

Epstein’s “Closest Friend”

One explanation is that, other than former president Bill Clinton, Trump was probably the most high-profile, long-standing, and intimate friend of Epstein’s among the political elite — his “closest friend,” in the billionaire pedophile’s own words.

Trump’s name, as well as more than a dozen contact numbers, is listed in both of Epstein’s “little black books” of personal contacts (and cryptically circled in one), he flew at least eight times on Epstein’s skin-crawlingly named “Lolita Express,” according to its flight logs. Just last year, author Michael Wolff — who wrote one of the most well-known insider tell-alls about Trump’s first term — revealed that he had roughly a hundred hours’ worth of interview recordings of Epstein talking about “his long standing, deep relationship with Donald Trump.”

The two dated the same woman, Norwegian socialite Celina Midelfart, and Epstein bragged that he was the one who introduced Trump to First Lady Melania, whose best friend appears in the billionaire pedophile’s address book. A now-infamous video shows the two men partying and ogling women together at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago in 1992, the same year that twenty-eight young women were reportedly flown to the Palm Beach resort at Trump’s request for a private beauty contest, for which the billionaire duo were the sole audience members.

The connections get even seedier. One of Epstein’s accusers testified he introduced her to Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was just fourteen. Another accuser said she was “recruited” for Epstein’s abuse while she was a locker room attendant at Trump’s resort. An unnamed woman backed by two witnesses sued Trump in 2016, claiming she was raped by both Trump and Epstein at some of the late pedophile’s parties when she was just thirteen (the lawsuit was dropped when the plaintiff started receiving a hailstorm of threats, at the same time that one of Trump’s allies pressured her attorney to drop her as a client).

Given all this, it’s not surprising that former Trump ally Elon Musk — another billionaire who has his own connections to Epstein — claimed, shortly after their falling out, that Trump himself was “in the Epstein files.” Given all of these connections, it would be more surprising if he wasn’t.

Links to Intelligence

Another reason might be Epstein’s alleged links to intelligence.

There’s the fact that Trump’s former labor secretary Alexander Acosta reportedly admitted he had given Epstein the scandalous “sweetheart deal,” which allowed him to resume his sex trafficking operation after a relatively brief slap on the wrist, because he had been “told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.” Vicky Ward, the same journalist who broke that story, was later told by four sources that Epstein had worked as an arms dealer in the 1980s, work that led him into the employ of the Israeli government and several others.

There’s the fact that, when authorities raided Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, they found, alongside diamonds and $70,000 of cash, an expired Austrian passport with his photo, a fake name, and his residency listed as Saudi Arabia, which was used to enter four countries in that same decade. There’s the fact that Ari Ben-Menashe, a former spy for Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, unequivocally told reporters on the record that Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence running “honeytrap” operations — meaning sexual blackmail of powerful people using young girls.

There’s the fact that the father-in-law of Epstein’s chief benefactor Les Wexner — the billionaire former owner of the Victoria’s Secret company that Epstein sometimes used to lure victims, and who bizarrely gave Epstein total control over of his personal finances — was Yehuda Koppel, an Israeli military veteran with ties to Israeli intelligence. Credited with helping found Israel through his role as a commander of the atrocity-checkered Haganah militia, Koppel later became a director of Israel’s state-owned airline El Al, which at various times went on to serve as a front for Mossad. Koppel and his wife flew to France on Epstein’s jet on September 3,1997, according to the flight logs.

There’s the fact of Epstein’s early association with the late media magnate Robert Maxwell, who has been serially alleged to work for Mossad. That was including by famed Israeli spy Rafi Eitan, who told journalist Gordon Thomas he had used Maxwell to sell rigged terrorist-tracking software to foreign governments that allowed Israel to siphon the data they collected, which Thomas swore to in an affidavit. Ben-Menashe separately charged that Maxwell had introduced Epstein to Israeli intelligence and “wanted us to accept him as part of our group.”

There’s also the fact that Epstein’s professional career had been kickstarted by Donald Barr, a former officer with the agency that later became the CIA, who inexplicably hired the unqualified then-college dropout to teach at the elite private school where he was headmaster. (Barr’s son later, as Trump’s attorney general, declared Epstein’s death a suicide before an investigation was even concluded, decades after he had shielded the perpetrators of the Iran-Contra scandal, another shadowy fiasco that heavily involved Israeli intelligence.)

Another Betrayal

But where the Trump administration may have most annihilated its own credibility is with its maximalist denial that there was “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

This is a laughable claim. Just two years ago, Bill Gates’s own spokeswoman admitted that Epstein had “tried unsuccessfully to leverage” his knowledge of the Microsoft founder’s affair with a woman “to threaten Mr. Gates.” Epstein had secret rooms full of surveillance equipment in his various homes, and law enforcement found a cache of hard drives and of binders full of CDs containing lewd photographs labeled with names, some of which went mysteriously missing four days later. He idly boasted to a reporter about the illegal things he had seen high-profile Silicon Valley figures doing. His coconspirator admitted to award-winning CBS News producer Ira Rosen that Epstein had tapes of both Trump and Clinton.

Whether Trump put the kibosh on the Epstein release to protect himself, the intelligence figures he had close ties to, the elite circles he’s spent his entire life in, or all of the above, it amounts to the same thing, one that’s part and parcel of Trump’s entire second term: after running a populist campaign claiming to fight the corrupt establishment on behalf of the working American, Trump has entered office and done everything possible to protect and enrich that same establishment and his fellow elites.

https://jacobin.com/2025/07/jeffrey-epstein-files-trump-elites