Trump was told he is in Epstein files, Wall Street Journal reports
The disclosure about Trump's appearance in the Justice Department's records on the case threatened to deepen a political crisis that has engulfed his administration for weeks. Some Trump supporters for years have fanned conspiracy theories about Epstein's clients and the circumstances of his 2019 death in prison.
The White House sent mixed signals following the story. It released an initial statement characterizing it as "fake news," but a White House official later said the administration was not denying that Trump's name appears in some files, noting that Trump was already included in a tranche of materials Bondi assembled in February for conservative influencers.
Trump, who was friendly with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s, appears multiple times on flight logs for Epstein's private plane in the 1990s. Trump and several members of his family also appear in an Epstein contact book, alongside hundreds of others.
Much of that material had been publicly released in the criminal case against Epstein's former associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison after her conviction for child sex trafficking and other crimes.
During her trial, Epstein's longtime pilot testified that Trump flew on Epstein's private plane multiple times. Trump has denied being on the plane.
The Journal's report could not be immediately verified.
Trump has faced intense backlash from his own supporters after his administration said it would not release the files, reversing a campaign promise.
The Justice Department said in a memo earlier this month that there was no basis to continue probing the Epstein case, sparking anger among some prominent Trump supporters who demanded more information about wealthy and powerful people who had interacted with Epstein.
Trump has not been accused of wrongdoing related to Epstein and has said their friendship ended before Epstein's legal troubles first began two decades ago.
Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a statement that did not directly address the Journal's report.
"Nothing in the files warranted further investigation or prosecution, and we have filed a motion in court to unseal the underlying grand jury transcripts," the officials said. "As part of our routine briefing, we made the President aware of the findings."
Many named appeared
The newspaper reported that Bondi and her deputy told Trump at a White House meeting that his name, as well as those of "many other high-profile figures," appeared in the files.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, to which he had pleaded not guilty. In a separate case, Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a prostitution charge in Florida and received a 13-month sentence in what is now widely regarded as too lenient a deal with prosecutors.
Under political pressure last week, Trump directed the Justice Department to seek the release of sealed grand jury transcripts related to Epstein.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi (center) during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on July 8 |
Doug Mills / The New York Times
On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg denied one of those requests, finding that it did not fall into any of the exceptions to rules requiring grand jury material be kept secret.
That motion stemmed from federal investigations into Epstein in 2005 and 2007, according to court documents; the department has also requested the unsealing of transcripts in Manhattan federal court related to later indictments brought against Epstein and Maxwell.
Last week, the Journal reported that Trump had sent Epstein a bawdy birthday note in 2003 that ended, "Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret."
The authenticity of the alleged letter could not be confirmed. Trump has sued the Journal and its owners, including billionaire Rupert Murdoch, asserting that the birthday note was fake.
MAGA pushback
Trump and his advisers have long engaged in conspiracy theories, including about Epstein, that have resonated with Trump's political base. The Make America Great Again movement's broad refusal to accept his administration's argument that those theories are now unfounded is unusual for a politician who is accustomed to enjoying relatively unchallenged loyalty from his supporters.
Epstein hung himself in prison, according to the New York City chief medical examiner. But his connections with wealthy and powerful individuals prompted speculation that his death was not a suicide. The Justice Department said in its memo this month that it had concluded Epstein died by his own hand.
In a sign of how the issue has bedeviled Trump and his fellow Republicans, U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday abruptly said he would send lawmakers home for the summer a day early to avoid a floor fight over a vote on the Epstein files.
His decision temporarily stymied a push by Democrats and some Republicans for a vote on a bipartisan resolution that would require the Justice Department to release all Epstein-related documents.
Trump, stung and frustrated by the continued focus on the Epstein story, has sought to divert attention to other topics, including unfounded accusations that former President Barack Obama undermined Trump's successful 2016 presidential campaign. Obama's office denounced the allegations as "ridiculous."
More than two-thirds of Americans believe the Trump administration is hiding information about Epstein's clients, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last week.
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Over the next 27 years, this deregulation removed 177,048 apartments from the rent-stabilized rolls, 69% of them in Manhattan. High-rent deregulation came to an end with the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, approved by a state legislature that Mamdani had not yet joined (he was elected to the state Assembly in 2020) and signed into law by none other than the governor at the time, Andrew Cuomo, who after losing to Mamdani in the Democratic mayoral primary announced that he would run as an independent in the general election. The bill's passage (and especially Cuomo's decision to sign it) came as a shock to real estate investors who had been piling into rent-stabilized buildings in hopes of cashing in as more apartments were deregulated — Bloomberg's Patrick Clark and Prashant Gopal did a great job last year of depicting the market turmoil that has resulted. The deregulation of the previous three decades, meanwhile, left the city's rent-stabilized housing stock bifurcated between a bunch of buildings concentrated in Manhattan south of Harlem ("Core Manhattan' in Rent Guidelines Board parlance) where most of the apartments are market rate and the 50% of rent-stabilized buildings citywide where 100% of the apartments are regulated. Which brings us back to the dilemma faced by the Rent Guidelines Board. Over the years, the board has tried to keep rent increases in line with increases in operating costs, which generally rise with inflation. Rent was frozen in 2015 and 2016 because costs weren't rising — the nonshelter consumer price index for the New York area actually fell both years. But the increases approved by the Rent Guidelines Board in 2021 and 2022 fell far short of inflation and the increases since then have only more or less kept up. Rents on market-rate apartments in the city have risen faster than inflation since just before the pandemic, in part because the 2019 rent law cut off what had been a steady stream of newly unregulated apartments coming on the market each year. As a result, rent-stabilized buildings in Core Manhattan — most of which, remember, are majority market rate — experienced a whopping 23.1% gain in net operating income in 2023. In the Bronx, where 75% of rent-stabilized buildings have only rent-stabilized units, net operating income rose just 0.8%, a decline in inflation-adjusted terms. On average, even the 100% rent-stabilized buildings in the Bronx still turned a monthly operating profit of $325 a unit, but 476 buildings there, 12.7% of the total, reported negative net operating income in 2023. These financial struggles are accompanied by increasing signs of physical decay, with the average number of maintenance deficiencies in pre-1974 rent-stabilized buildings up 45% since 2017, according to the Housing and Vacancy Survey. This is not just a tale of greedy landlords: Representatives of two large affordable-housing nonprofits, the Community Preservation Corporation and Enterprise Community Partners, told the Rent Guidelines Board that the New York City buildings they're involved with are increasingly struggling to keep up. Nearly 60% of the 160 buildings in Enterprise Community Partners' New York City Low-Income Housing Tax Credit portfolio were "cash-flow negative' in 2023, senior director Tania Garrido said, up from 20% in 2019. One big reason these buildings are struggling is that, while insurance costs are up for real estate owners nationwide, for less-than-clear reasons they rose a shocking 103% from 2019 to 2023 for owners of affordable housing in New York City. Another is that the share of tenants paying their rent on time fell in 2020 and 2021 and hasn't fully recovered. The COVID-19 pandemic hit working-class New Yorkers especially hard, with employment in construction, retail, leisure and hospitality in the city is still below pre-pandemic levels. Raising rents doesn't seem like the optimal solution to a problem caused in part by people not being able to afford the rent. But it's the only arrow the Rent Guidelines Board has in its quiver. The city and state have more arrows. In his campaign literature, Mamdani stresses reforming New York's property tax system, which taxes apartment buildings much more heavily than single-family homes but also gives inexplicably large tax breaks to some high-end condominiums and coops. He wants to "put our public dollars to work' building 200,000 new rent-stabilized apartments over the next decade, offering a set of wonky suggestions for how to fund this and has some interesting ideas for pooling rental assistance funds currently distributed as vouchers to tenants (or not distributed; utilization rates are quite low) to support struggling affordable buildings directly. None of these is as catchy or easy to deliver as freezing the rent. It's understandable why Mamdani chose this as a campaign pledge, and probably inevitable that the Rent Guidelines Board will deliver at least one 0% annual rent increase if he is elected. Whether he succeeds in making housing more affordable in New York City, though, will depend on what else he does. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts.
