By Jim Geraghty
Friday, July 18, 2025
The Wall Street Journal, attempting to give
readers a clearer picture of the past relationship between President Donald
Trump and the disgraced sex-trafficking financier, Jeffrey Epstein:
It was Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th
birthday, and Ghislaine Maxwell was preparing a special gift to mark the
occasion. She turned to Epstein’s family and friends. One of them was Donald
Trump.
Maxwell collected letters from
Trump and dozens of Epstein’s other associates for a 2003 birthday album,
according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Pages from the leather-bound album
— assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006 — are among the documents
examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell
years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It’s unclear if any
of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review. . . .
The letter bearing Trump’s name,
which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It
contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked
woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs
denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly
“Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.
The letter concludes: “Happy
Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
In an interview with the Journal on
Tuesday evening, Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture. “This
is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” he
said.
“I never wrote a picture in my
life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not
my words.”
(I am certain this is the first time the phrase
“mimicking pubic hair” has appeared in the Morning Jolt.)
Trump announced on Truth Social that he intended
to sue the Wall Street Journal.
It was not hard to find MAGA talking heads who insisted that the letter must be
fake. Vice President JD Vance, who had been rather quiet about this story over
the past weeks, weighed in on X: “Forgive my language but this story is
complete and utter bull****. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it. Where
is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before
publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”
Whether or not you believe the wording on the letter
sounds like Trump, Epstein’s 50th birthday was January 20, 2003 — well within
the period was when Trump and Epstein were friends, and Trump had no qualms
about telling anyone about what good friends they were.
New York magazine, October
28, 2002:
Epstein likes to tell people that
he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose
nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a
different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,”
Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said
that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the
younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much
as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Boy, that . . .
certainly sounds like an allusion to Epstein’s involvement with underage women
that led to the billionaire getting charged with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with
a minor.
Also note that Roger Stone, in his 2015 book, The
Clintons’ War on Women, quotes Trump as saying, “The one time I visited
[Epstein’s] Palm Beach home, the swimming pool was full of beautiful young
girls. ‘How nice,’ I thought, ‘he let the neighborhood kids use his pool.’” So
clearly Trump noticed that women who appeared to be under 18 were
frequently hanging around with Epstein.
By Epstein’s 50th birthday, he and Trump had been friends
for more than a decade. In 1990, Epstein purchased a mansion located at 358 El Brillo Way in Palm Beach, Fla.,
two miles north of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, which Trump had purchased in
1985. Within two years, the two men were partying together:
It was supposed to be an exclusive
party at Mar-a-Lago, Donald J. Trump’s members-only club in Palm Beach, Fla.
But other than the two dozen or so women flown in to provide the entertainment,
the only guests were Mr. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
The year was 1992 and the event was
a “calendar girl” competition, something that George Houraney, a Florida-based
businessman who ran American Dream Enterprise, had organized at Mr. Trump’s
request.
“I arranged to have some
contestants fly in,” Mr. Houraney recalled in an interview on Monday. “At the
very first party, I said, ‘Who’s coming tonight? I have 28 girls coming.’ It
was him and Epstein. . . .”
“I said, ‘Look, Donald, I know Jeff
really well, I can’t have him going after younger girls,’” Mr. Houraney
remembers. “He said, ‘Look I’m putting my name on this. I wouldn’t put my name
on it and have a scandal.’”
Mr. Houraney said he “pretty much
had to ban Jeff from my events — Trump didn’t care about that.”
NBC News found footage from
November 1992 of Trump and Epstein partying at the Mar-a-Lago estate. As the Washington Post reported, “Photographs and
videos show Epstein and Trump posing together at the mansion in 1992, 1997 and
2000. The two were also pictured together, with model Ingrid Seynhaeve, in 1997
at a Victoria’s Secret party in New York City.”
Trump and Epstein’s relationship is sometimes described
as “traveling in the same circles.” In this case, the phrase “in the same
circles,” means “Trump traveling on Epstein’s private jets”:
Decades before he became president,
Trump flew four times in 1993, once in 1994 and once in 1995, in addition to a
flight in 1997 that had been documented in portions of the flight log
previously released. The flights were all between Palm Beach and New York City
airports, with the June 1994 flight stopping at Ronald Reagan Washington
National Airport between Palm Beach and New York.
By July 2019, Trump was president and telling reporters in the Oval Office that he was not a fan of
Epstein:
I knew him like everybody in Palm
Beach knew him. People in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach.
I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him
for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan. I was not — yeah, a long time ago. I’d say maybe
15 years. I was not a fan of his. That I can tell you. I was not a fan of his.
So, I feel very badly for actually for Secretary Acosta because I’ve known him
as being somebody that works so hard and has done such a good job. I feel very badly
about that whole situation. But we’re going to be looking at that and looking
at it very closely.
“Secretary Acosta” refers to Alex Acosta, then the
Secretary of Labor.
In 2007, Acosta was Miami’s top federal prosecutor, and
Epstein was facing a 53-page federal indictment alleging sexual abuse of more
than 30 minor girls, some as young as 14. Yet Acosta agreed to allow Epstein to serve just 13 months in the county jail and
signed off on “a non-prosecution agreement” that “essentially shut down an
ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful
people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes.” In
2019, Vicky Ward of the Daily Beast reported:
“Is the Epstein case going to cause
a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had
explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting
on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s
attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his
pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it
alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought
that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor
Department had no comment when asked about this.)
For what it’s worth, Acosta has never repeated this
comment publicly, and thus there is no further indication of who purportedly
told Acosta that Epstein “belonged to intelligence” or when or where this
conversation took place. Those who put a lot of stock in this report apparently
dismiss the notion that Acosta made it up to explain away his own egregiously
bad decision.
When Trump said, “I don’t think I’ve spoken to [Epstein]
for 15 years,” that would be 2004, when Trump and Epstein reportedly ended their friendship over a dispute over who would
purchase an oceanfront mansion:
In 2004, they were suddenly rivals,
each angling to snag a choice Palm Beach property, an oceanfront manse called
Maison de l’Amitie — the House of Friendship — that was being sold out of
bankruptcy.
Before the auction, Epstein and
Trump each tried to work the ref; the trustee in the case, Joseph Luzinski,
recalls being lobbied by both camps.
“It was something like, Donald
saying, ‘You don’t want to do a deal with him, he doesn’t have the money,’
while Epstein was saying: ‘Donald is all talk. He doesn’t have the money,’”
Luzinski said. “They both really wanted it.”
Trump ultimately purchased the property for $41.35
million during an auction in a courtroom at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in West
Palm Beach, on November 15, 2004. The last known calls between Trump and Epstein were November 11 and
November 20, 2004.
Note that according to a probable cause affidavit, “From March 15,
2005, through February 2006, the Palm Beach Police Department conducted a
sexual battery investigation involving Jeffrey Epstein, Sarah Kellen and Haley
Robson. Sworn taped statements were taken from five victims and seventeen
witnesses concerning massages and unlawful sexual activity that took place at
the residence of Jeffrey Epstein.”
In other words, Trump’s friendship with Epstein ended
about four months before the Palm Beach Police Department started investigating
Epstein for sex crimes.
Whether or not Trump ever engaged in illegal sexual
activity with a minor around Epstein, there is little doubt that Trump finds
his years upon years of Bacchanalian debauchery with a notorious sex trafficker
to be extremely embarrassing — even for a man who can seem so shameless — and
wants to downplay it as much as possible. The most generous interpretation of
Trump’s actions in those years is that he noticed his friend, the single
hedonistic billionaire was always around girls who looked younger than 18, but
it never crossed his mind that something illegal could be going on.
This would explain why Trump had such a volcanic reaction
to a Journal article that just adds new details to what we already knew
— that at one point, Trump and Epstein were friends who partied together, and
that Trump knew Epstein had secrets. It’s impossible for the MAGA crowd to cast
Trump as the crusading hero of the Epstein story when he’s already, at best,
the oblivious, nonchalant bystander to all manner of sordid abuse.
Earlier this week, Alan Dershowitz, who was Epstein’s
lawyer, wrote on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal:
Epstein never created a “client
list.” The FBI interviewed alleged victims who named several “clients.” These
names have been redacted. They should be disclosed but the courts have ordered
them sealed. I know who they are. They don’t include any current officeholders.
We don’t know whether the accusations are true. The courts have also sealed
negative information about some of the accusers to protect them. Neither the
Justice Department nor private defense lawyers are free to disregard court
sealing orders. The media can and should petition the courts for the release of
all names and information so the public can draw its own conclusions.
Again, whether or not Epstein had “clients” or friends
who engaged in illegal sexual activity, no one has shown evidence that Epstein
kept a list of those clients, in paper or electronic form. Those who are
involved in criminal activity are not always sticklers for precise
record-keeping.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, California Governor Gavin Newsom apparently believes that his
state’s constitution is just a set of suggestions, to be disregarded the
moment they become politically inconvenient.
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