Everything you need to know about the Epstein scandal and why Trump can't escape it

Telegraph

15 hours ago

He's accepted a $400 million plane from Qatar as a gift, launched strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities and suffered dozens of defeats in court. But the biggest controversy of Donald Trump's presidency, so far, has turned out to be his decade-and-a-half relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr Trump's friendship with Epstein is well known, but it didn't prove a real issue until his administration declined to release any more of the documents it holds on the paedophile financier.
Now the US president is being questioned by reporters on his former friend at every opportunity, while the justice department is being consumed by the story and the infighting of senior figures looking to shift the blame.
It has even threatened to peel away Mr Trump's ever-loyal Maga base, when nothing else would.
At the same time, other figures have been sucked into the scandal, including Bill Clinton, the former president who rode on Epstein's private jet, and Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to the US who holidayed with him.
Here, The Telegraph rounds up everything you need to know about the Epstein scandal – and why Mr Trump can't escape it.
Maga
Prominent voices in Mr Trump's Maga movement have spent years playing into conspiracy theories that Epstein did not kill himself in 2019, and was silenced by 'clients' who feared he would expose their part in sex trafficking.
Kash Patel, director of the FBI, and Dan Bongino, his deputy, have appeared on several podcasts suggesting the paedophile was silenced by a 'deep state' of shadowy government figures.
And Pam Bondi, the attorney general, claimed in February she had Epstein's client list 'sitting on my desk right now to review'.
So when the justice department and FBI concluded this month that Epstein did not maintain a client list, killed himself in prison, and that there was no compelling reason to produce more documents, the Maga movement erupted.
'Pam Bondi fed a monster,' said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist who worked for the first Trump administration. 'And now there's a chance that the monster eats her.'
Mr Trump has been increasingly drawn into a row his law enforcement lieutenants have been unable to contain and is now under pressure from his own supporters to release the full Epstein files.
So far he has downplayed it as a 'hoax', urged the media to focus on figures like Mr Clinton and sought, unsuccessfully, to convince a court to release the grand jury transcripts from Epstein's 2019 case.
Nevertheless, prominent Maga voices are sounding the alarm.
Laura Loomer, the prominent Right-wing activist, has pushed back at the notion of an Epstein cover-up as a hoax and urged Mr Trump to appoint a special counsel to ensure complete transparency over the files, as has Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist.
Birthday letter
Though Mr Trump appears to have broken off his relationship with Epstein more than two decades ago, more details are still coming to light.
Notably, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr Trump, like Mr Clinton, had sent a birthday letter to the financier in 2003 when he turned 50, which was compiled into a leather-bound album by Ghislaine Maxwell.
In the letter, which featured a drawing of a nude woman in permanent marker with his signature, Mr Trump reportedly told his then-friend they had 'certain things in common', 'enigmas never age', and ended with the words: 'May every day be a wonderful secret'.
Mr Trump has fiercely denied writing or sending the letter, and has launched a defamation claim against the newspaper.
Subsequent reports have said dozens of people also provided well-wishes, poems and photographs to the album, among them Lord Mandelson, the British ambassador to the US.
The former cabinet minister, whom Epstein affectionately referred to as 'Petie', called the financier 'my best pal' in his birthday message, The Wall Street Journal reported.
He is also said to have included a picture of a tropical island. The pair had previously holidayed in St Barts in the Caribbean, with Lord Mandelson photographed trying on a leather belt while they shopped together.
A spokesman for the ambassador, who has previously said he regrets being introduced to Epstein by Maxwell, declined to comment.
Bill Clinton
Mr Trump is not the only US president who has been dragged into Epstein's orbit: Bill Clinton was also an associate of the financier.
'You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton,' Mr Trump told reporters on Friday before departing for a trip to his Scottish golf courses, as he was questioned, once again, about Epstein.
Mr Clinton spent nine days in Africa with the paedophile in 2002, a couple of years after he left office. They made the trip on Epstein's 'Lolita Express', accompanied by Maxwell and other figures.
The following year, The Wall Street Journal reported the Democrat sent a message to Epstein on his 50th birthday in which he praised the paedophile's 'childlike curiosity'. A spokesman for Mr Clinton declined to comment to the newspaper.
Mr Clinton has consistently denied any knowledge of the 'terrible crimes' committed by Epstein.
'I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,' he wrote in his 2024 memoir, Citizen: My Life after the White House.
On Wednesday, a House of Representatives committee voted to subpoena both Mr Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state. Should they testify, it will continue to keep the Epstein story in the headlines.
Democrats
The Democrats were shattered by their election defeats in November and the return of Mr Trump. Since January, their poll ratings have fallen further, with the party descending into factional fights and casting in vain for something to cut through with the electorate.
With the Epstein files, they smell blood.
Prominent Democrats are doing their best to make Mr Trump squirm over his association with the paedophile, and Ro Khanna and Robert Garcia, two congressmen, have approached the Epstein estate executors about getting hold of the alleged birthday album.
Mr Khanna also led an attempt with Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman and regular thorn in Mr Trump's side, to schedule a vote to compel the administration to release the Epstein files.
That attempt faltered when Mike Johnson, the House of Representatives speaker, refused to schedule a vote, and Congress broke early for the summer recess.
Not all of it is congressional manoeuvres, either.
The party's governing body, the Democratic National Committee, has launched a series of attack ads on Right-wing YouTube channels urging Republican voters to hound their representatives over the documents.
'Call your representative. Demand they release the Epstein files,' one advert demands, over a clip of Mr Trump dancing with Epstein in the 1990s.
Mid-terms
Republicans in Congress are wary of a mauling in the mid-terms next year over the president's refusal to produce the Epstein files.
One congressional aide told The Telegraph their boss was coming under extreme pressure from voters, saying: 'When you don't release information and do this cover up, you essentially fuel conspiracy theories and misinformation.'
Mr Johnson appears to have tried to have it both ways, treading a fine line between the voters he will need to maintain control of the House – and keep hold of his speaker's gavel – and Mr Trump.
Perhaps the president's closest ally in Congress, he appeared to turn on him recently when he demanded the release of 'everything' the government was holding on Epstein.
At the same time, he cut short the congressional session, thus avoiding a vote on releasing the documents, which would have forced representatives to choose between potentially angering their constituents or the president.
Mr Johnson, who was accused of 'running away… to cover up for paedophiles' by Democrats, has denied the Epstein vote influenced his decision.
Ghislaine Maxwell
Epstein may have killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, but Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year prison sentence for procuring young girls for her former boyfriend, is still around.
Mr Trump is likely to have met her in the late 1980s while moving in the same gilded circles of the New York elite, when she was acting as a social emissary for her father, Robert Maxwell, the late publishing titan and fraudster.
During the 1990s and early 2000s, the pair were regularly photographed together, attending the same dinner parties and functions. On at least one occasion, the pair flew together on the 'Lolita Express', Epstein's private jet.
'Donald liked Epstein but he was crazy about Maxwell, a very charming lady,' Steven Hoffenberg, a former business associate of Epstein, told The Washington Post before his death in 2022.
With the Trump administration under immense public scrutiny, Maxwell was questioned by Todd Blanche, deputy attorney general, on Thursday and Friday.
She did not invoke her Fifth Amendment defence to avoid answering questions, her lawyer said, and her brother told The New York Post that she was assembling new evidence to present to the Trump administration.
Critics have suggested Mr Trump is dangling a sentence reduction or pardon, he has not ruled one out, if Maxwell can shift the spotlight away from him and onto his political opponents.