Trump says he’s asking Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s ties to slew of high-profile figures
By Kristen Holmes, Adam Cancryn, Donald Judd, Annie Grayer, CNN
(CNN) — President Donald Trump said Friday he will ask Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to many other high-profile figures, in an extraordinary step that comes just days after Democrats released emails from the late Epstein that mention him.
Trump announced the directive in a Truth Social post that accused Democrats of trying to revive attention to his past ties with Epstein, contending they are “using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures.”
“I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,” Trump wrote.
Bondi later on Friday confirmed she would launch the investigation on Trump’s orders, assigning Jay Clayton, the top prosecutor in New York’s southern district, to lead the federal probe.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” she wrote in a post on X that included a screenshot of Trump’s request.
Earlier this year, after Bondi ordered the FBI to review Epstein files for release, Justice and FBI officials conducted another assessment and determined there were no additional prosecutions that could be brought based on the evidence at hand, according to law enforcement officials.
But Trump’s move on Friday represents the president’s most significant effort yet to discredit the push by Democrats and some Republicans to release all of the Epstein case files. And it serves as the latest example of the president’s belief that he can defuse the issue through sheer force of will, despite deepening fears among allies that his actions are only further amplifying it while damaging his own credibility.
“Why doesn’t he just release these? Just release them!” conservative podcast host Megyn Kelly said of the Epstein files during her show on Wednesday. “Now he’s in a position of being, like, singled out as the only one, allegedly, as opposed to one of a slew of names.”
In a lengthy thread on X, Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, blasted Trump’s directive and called on the administration to release all the Epstein files.
“The call for an investigation is an obvious ploy to avoid releasing the files. Simply release all the files, and expose the people who had both deep and ongoing relationships with Epstein,” he wrote, adding later, “I refuse to bend the knee to Donald Trump and his slanderous lies.”
A spokesman for Clinton said on X: “These emails prove Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise meant to distract from election losses, backfiring shutdowns, and who knows what else.”
CNN has reached out to Summers for comment about Trump’s demands for an investigation.
In a statement, JPMorgan Chase spokesperson Patricia Wexler said the bank “ended our relationship with (Epstein) years before his arrest on sex trafficking charges.”
“The government had damning information about his crimes and failed to share it with us or other banks,” Wexler said. “We regret any association we had with the man, but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”
Trump earlier this week tried and failed to convince Republicans to block a discharge petition in the US House forcing a vote on the release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files, with the White House even holding a Situation Room meeting with one key GOP lawmaker who had signed on ahead of it receiving its decisive 218th signature.
Officials during that meeting argued that the administration was not hiding anything, according to a senior White House official, including showing GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert some documents obtained by the House Oversight Committee that had not yet been released. Trump appeared to acknowledge Friday that was part of a bid by his administration to dissuade her from driving more conversation on Epstein.
“When you talk about the Epstein hoax, what happens is, you’re not talking about how well we’ve done,” Trump added while speaking aboard Air Force One. “That’s the whole purpose behind them. They want to waste people’s time and some of the dumber Republicans like that, but it’s mostly Democrats, by the way.”
But they could not change her mind.
Speaker Mike Johnson now plans to schedule a vote on releasing the Epstein files next week, in a strategic shift spurred by the realization that it could not be stopped. The vote is expected to attract significant support from rank-and-file GOP lawmakers.
But the newly announced criminal investigation could give the Justice Department a new justification to resist turning over files — or convince some lawmakers to back off. Generally, the department resists giving Congress files during an ongoing criminal investigation because any public release could jeopardize the integrity of the probe or any resulting criminal case.
“This will certainly give members of Congress a basis on which to vote against disclosing the Epstein files,” CNN legal analyst Elie Honig said. “If there’s an ongoing criminal investigation, that’s a perfectly good reason for Congress to back off or to vote no.”
The White House’s approach to the Epstein case and its subsequent fallout has perplexed even some administration officials and Trump allies, some of whom have been telling him and his advisers to change strategy for months.
In recent days, at least one ally on Capitol Hill directly told Trump that he was getting bad advice on his approach to the Epstein case by continuing to delay and downplay it, a source familiar with the matter told CNN.
“These people have no idea what advice the president is getting,” another senior White House official said.
Addressing the controversy Friday night, Trump told reporters he and Epstein had “a very bad relationship for years,” and sought to turn the focus to those he had demanded face investigation.
“Larry Summers, whatever his name is, and all of the other people that he spent time with, Jeffrey Epstein and I had a very bad relationship for many years. But he also saw strength, because I was president, so he dictated a couple of memos to himself. Give me a break. You’re gonna find out what did he know, with respect to Bill Clinton, with respect to the head of Harvard, with respect to all of those people that he knew, including JP Morgan Chase,” Trump said.
The first senior White House official pushed back on the idea that the White House had been caught flat footed, noting that the administration, while aware of the emails released earlier this week, intentionally did not want to insert Epstein back into the news cycle. Asked about the message to the president from that congressional ally, a White House spokesperson reiterated that the emails “prove literally nothing” and pivoted to attacking Democrats for trying to use the Epstein “hoax” to distract from the shutdown.
Multiple other sources told CNN that Trump himself has dictated the administration’s response to Epstein-related developments, specifically opposing any actions that risk pushing the storyline forward.
“Trump doesn’t want his people to get ahead of it. Everybody has been instructed to wait until information comes out and then respond that it is a hoax or doesn’t prove anything,” one of the sources said.
In the 24 hours after the House Oversight Committee’s Wednesday release of emails Epstein wrote that mentioned Trump by name, Trump had declined to take questions from the press. Trump did not receive or send any of the messages, which largely predate his time as president, and he has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.
But on Friday, Trump again vented his frustration over the state of affairs in a series of Truth Social posts, blasting Republicans backing the Epstein files release as “soft and foolish” and repeatedly branding the issue a “Hoax.” He then took questions from reporters while flying to Mar-a-Lago.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Trump wrote in one post.
He announced his demand for a Justice Department investigation into “many other people and institutions” in a subsequent Truth Social post.
In thousands of emails reviewed by CNN, Epstein corresponded with a wide group of powerful and influential people, including prominent Democrats.
Among his most frequent communications were with former Obama White House chief counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, who represented Epstein as his attorney, and Summers, the former Clinton Treasury secretary and Obama National Economic Council director. (Corresponding with Epstein would not be a crime, and there’s no evidence in the emails that any of them participated in Epstein’s wrongdoing.)
Clinton and Epstein had been friendly in the early 2000s, with the former president appearing on Epstein’s private jet logs at least 16 times between 2002 and 2003 for trips he said were related to Clinton Foundation work. Clinton would later write that his relationship with Epstein had ended by 2003 before he was aware of the financier’s crimes. Clinton has never been accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing related to Epstein.
JPMorgan paid $290 million in 2023 to settle a class action lawsuit filed by Epstein’s survivors that alleged it turned a blind eye to unusual cash transactions that they claimed enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking. JPMorgan also paid $75 million to settle with the US Virgin Islands. The bank did not admit or deny any wrongdoing in either settlement.
CNN’s Kara Scannell, Kit Maher, Evan Perez and Hannah Rabinowitz contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
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