Justice Department will examine Democrats' ties to Epstein

Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated Friday that she has appointed a federal prosecutor to examine the relationships between deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and several prominent Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, who were identified by President Donald Trump in a social media post earlier in the day.

Trump wrote on Truth Social that he wants Bondi and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton, former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers, and LinkedIn founder and prominent Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. He also called for them to investigate the banking company JPMorgan Chase “and many other people and institutions.” Trump suggested that those connections deserve more scrutiny than his own relationship to the disgraced financier.

The president did not specify what aspects of their relationships should be investigated, but all have connections to Epstein that have been publicly reported. Several were mentioned in a tranche of documents related to Epstein that was released on Wednesday by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Hours later, Bondi said on social media that Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, would be leading the investigation. She called him “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country.” The district Clayton leads indicted Epstein in 2019.

“As with all matters,” Bondi added, “the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump vowed to declassify Justice Department files related to Epstein, and questions about the administration’s transparency regarding the case have hovered over much of Trump’s second presidential term. Democrats - and some Republicans - have alleged that there has been a coordinated cover-up to keep a majority of the Epstein files secret.

Earlier this week, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee highlighted a 2019 email in which Epstein wrote that Trump knew about Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls - which Trump has denied - but never participated. The email was among thousands of pages of documents released by the committee.

Earlier Friday, Trump said in a social media post that Democrats should not waste their time trying to connect him to Epstein, writing that “Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again.” The president, who was mentioned by Epstein and his associates in several instances in the files released this week, also argued that the Democrats’ ongoing pursuit of information about Epstein’s connections was an effort “to try and deflect” from the lengthy government shutdown that ended on Wednesday.

The individuals and entities mentioned by Trump in his social media post on Friday have all been linked to Epstein.

Clinton flew on Epstein’s private jet, and Epstein donated to the Clinton Foundation. The former president has said that he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes. A representative for Clinton did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

The documents released this week show two years’ worth of communication between Epstein and Summers, including conversations about ranked-choice voting and talking through Summers’s apparent romantic problems. Summers has said he deeply regrets his associations with Epstein. He did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

Hoffman publicly apologized in 2019 for having solicited funding from Epstein for a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calling Epstein’s behavior “abhorrent, horrific, and disgusting.” A representative for Hoffman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

In 2023, a judge approved a $290 million settlement by JPMorgan Chase to women who said Epstein abused them. Epstein was a client of the bank from 1998 to 2013, which kept him on after his 2006 arrest on prostitution charges.

Trish Wexler, corporate communications for JPMorgan Chase, said in a statement that the bank regrets “any association we had with the man, but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”

“The government had damning information about his crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks,” Wexler said. “… We ended our relationship with him years before his arrest on sex trafficking charges.”

Trump has said that he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Florida, and that they had a falling-out in the mid-2000s, which Trump has attributed to a real estate deal and Epstein’s hiring employees away from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

Among the thousands of documents released by Congress this week was the account by Epstein that Trump knew about the sexual abuse of underage girls but never participated.

“Trump knew of it. and came to my house many times during that period,” Epstein wrote in an email to himself on Feb. 1, 2019, several months before he was arrested on sex trafficking charges and died in jail. “He never got a massage.”

That account conflicts with Trump’s denial of ever knowing about Epstein’s solicitation of underage girls for prostitution before Epstein’s 2008 plea deal.