Over the past two months, the US Department of Justice has released millions of documents related to its sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Now, the president wants the nation to move on – but will it?
Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the government’s review of the Epstein files – which was mandated by a law passed by Congress in November – is over, and there are no grounds for new prosecutions.
“There’s a lot of correspondence. There’s a lot of emails. There’s a lot of photographs,” Blanche said on Sunday. “But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”
While the justice department’s review may be over, on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives is pushing ahead with its own Epstein inquiry. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are scheduled to testify later in February after Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress.
Members of Congress and Epstein’s victims, meanwhile, are continuing to call for further disclosures – pointing to documents they say exist but weren’t included in the released files.
It is yet another sign of just how difficult to shake this story has become for those, like President Donald Trump, who are clearly keen to move on.
For the moment, however, the president has emerged from the storm with no apparent lasting damage.
That is not true for some of the other rich and powerful figures whose ties to Epstein were more prominently detailed in the files, and who had continued contact with him long after he became a convicted sex offender in 2008.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, Lord Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for instance, have all faced professional and personal consequences for their connections to Epstein.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates and tech multi-billionaire Elon Musk, among others, have had to explain emails and mentions of their name in the released documents.
The president, at the White House on Tuesday, said he thought it was “really time for the country to get on to something else”.
“Nothing came out about me,” Trump, who has consistently denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, said.
That, however, is not exactly accurate.
The president’s name appeared more than 6,000 times in the documents. He was frequently mentioned by Epstein and his associates. The two men, both residents of New York City and West Palm Beach, had by all accounts a friendly relationship for much of the 1990s until, according to Trump, they fell out in the early 2000s.
One of those Trump mentions, in an email released in December, drew particular scrutiny.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote in the 2011 email to convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. “[Victim] spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned”.
Source:Fiilafmonline/BBC
