President Donald Trump’s previously long-standing relationship with New York financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has been brought under sharp scrutiny following the president’s spectacular fallout with Elon Musk.
During the once-tight pair’s highly public bust-up on Thursday, Musk alleged on X that the reason the Epstein files have not been released as promised is because Trump is in them, describing it as “the really big bomb.”
In the first direct response to the allegation, Trump shared a post to Truth Social on Friday to reiterate his claim that there is nothing salacious about him in Epstein’s law enforcement records.
“I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that [Epstein] had no information to hurt President Trump. I specifically asked him!” wrote attorney David Schoen, who was hired to lead Epstein’s defense shortly before his death in 2019. Trump shared the message to his followers on Truth Social.
The White House has already responded to Musk’s incendiary statement, describing the outburst as “an unfortunate episode for Elon” and attributing the sudden vitriol to a clash over the policies contained within Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill.”
The Trump administration has previously said that records relating to Epstein, including flight logs and other information, would be declassified, but that has yet to happen.
Trump had a long, documented relationship with Epstein through the late 1980s to the early 2000s and appears in numerous photographs alongside him and his convicted partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. In a 2002 interview, Trump even praised Epstein as a “terrific guy.”
In 2017, Epstein described himself to author Michael Wolff as Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years,” although the pair appear to have had a falling out in the early 2000s. “He’s a horrible human being,” Epstein later said of the president in the same interview.
When asked in 2024 if he would release a number of classified records relating to 9/11, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Epstein, Trump quickly agreed, before hedging over the Epstein files.
“I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would,” Trump said in a Fox News interview, this section of which was cut from the broadcast.
Off the back of Musk’s outburst, Democrats are now calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to clarify the accusation and provide a timeline in which to declassify and release all records relating to Epstein.
Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
