Bill Clinton reportedly sent Jeffrey Epstein note for birthday album
apparently isn't the only president that sent a birthday letter to
Jeffrey Epstein
. 'The biggest name in the album' was Bill Clinton, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The ex-president's letter appeared alongside nearly 50 others, including other prominent celebrities and executives.
Last week, the Journal reported that Mr Trump had authored a 'bawdy' letter to Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 after he was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges. The letter was included in an album Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell compiled on the occasion of his 50th birthday in 2003. Mr Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters and the newspaper's publisher, Dow Jones, for libel and slander over the reporting.
In Thursday's article, the Wall Street Journal provided additional details on the album, including names of some of the nearly 50 people who wrote to Epstein. They reportedly include billionaire investor Leon Black, fashion designer Vera Wang, billionaire media owner Mortimer Zuckerman, billionaire former Victoria's Secret owner Les Wexner, attorney Alan Dershowitz, model scout Jean-Luc Brunel and billionaire former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.
It also includes the British ambassador to the United States and Labour Party politician Peter Mandelson in a section titled 'friends'. Epstein's former co-workers, Alan 'Ace' Greenberg and James 'Jimmy' Cayne, who he worked with at the investment firm Bear Stearns in the 1970s, also sent letters.
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The New York Times confirmed the Wall Street Journal's reporting on Thursday evening.
'The professionally bound birthday book had multiple volumes and included a table of contents,' the Journal reported.
According to the newspaper, Mr Clinton's note to Epstein read: 'It's reassuring isn't it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends.'
A Clinton spokesperson declined to comment to the Journal, instead referring the paper to a previous statement from the ex-president, saying he had cut ties with Epstein more than a decade before his arrest and was not aware of Epstein's crimes.
Mr Trump's letter to Epstein was far from the only note that was sexual in nature, according to documents the Journal reviewed.
It describes a poem signed by Mr Black that read 'Blonde, Red or Brunette, spread out geographically / With this net of fish, Jeff's now 'The Old Man and The Sea'', and a note from Mr Wexner that included 'a line drawing of what appeared to be a woman's breasts'. Spokespersons for Mr Black and Mr Wexner declined the Journal's request for comment.
A letter from Ms Wang suggested Epstein star on The Bachelor. Ms Wang did not respond to the Journal's requests for comment.
And a note from Mr Myhrvold promised photographs from a recent trip to Africa: 'They seemed more appropriate than anything I could put in words.' The images included 'a monkey screaming, lions and zebras mating, and a zebra with its penis visible', the Journal reported.
A spokesperson for Mr Myhrvold told the Journal the former Microsoft executive did not recall the submission, only knew Epstein as a donor to scientific research, and that he 'regularly shares photos of and writes about animal behaviour'.
The letter from Mr Mandelson 'included photos of whiskey and a tropical island', the Journal reported. Mr Mandelson referred to Epstein as 'my best pal' in the note. A spokesperson for Mr Mandelson declined to comment to the Journal.
As for the relationship between Mr Trump and Epstein, the Times found that at least once before, Mr Trump had written Epstein an admiring note.
'To Jeff — You are the greatest!' reads an inscription in a copy of Mr Trump's book Trump: the Art of the Comeback, which belonged to Epstein.
The message, reviewed by the Times, is signed 'Donald' and dated 'Oct 97' – the month the book came out.
The Times also reviewed a previously undisclosed photo of Mr Trump and Epstein with the singer James Brown. It is not clear where the photo was taken. Brown frequently performed in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where Mr Trump owned the Taj Mahal casino. – Guardian
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RTÉ News
6 minutes ago
- RTÉ News
Hopes of EU-US trade deal ahead of August deadline
It was Ursula von der Leyen's late afternoon social media post that confirmed a deal is on. All the hard work has been done by trade negotiators. But US President Donald Trump likes to seal the deal himself with a high-level figure - that is why his own press office likes to call him "the closer". Of course it is not done till it is done. But there is no way Ms von der Leyen is getting on a plane tomorrow morning in hope: there is a deal to be sealed - though she will probably have to sweeten it a little in the end to get the closer to close. During the week he personally closed deals with the prime ministers of Indonesia and the Philippines (Ferdinand Marcos Junior) and with Japan's senior trade negotiator (Prime Minister Ishiba's LDP party had lost its parliamentary majority in elections last Sunday, and he is expected to resign). Taoiseach Micheál Martin is hopeful the deal can be signed - though he says it will be an outline deal, leaving much detail to be filled in later. But it should give some certainty to businesses to enable them to get on with planning. (The US President will meet UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to "flesh out" the outline deal he made with the British in May - the headline in that is a 10% tariff on British imports to the US). Mr Trump was certainly talking up prospects of an EU deal as he left the White House yesterday. "I would say that we have a 50:50 chance of making a deal with the EU, and it will be a deal where they have to buy down their tariffs, because they are right now at 30% and they'll have to buy them down maybe, or they could leave them the way they are," Mr Trump said. "But they want to make a deal very badly. I would have said we have a 25% chance with Japan. And they kept coming back, and we made a deal. "The biggest part of the Japan deal, and maybe we get this with the EU, maybe we don't, is that we have the right to go in and trade. We have the right - they've totally opened Japan to the US," he added. Note the phrase "buy down their tariffs". What is Europe offering the US that Mr Trump thinks is worth reducing the tariff rate from 30% to 15%? Big purchase agreement on energy expected Part of the deal is expected to be a big purchase agreement on energy. The day after the Presidential election last November, Ms von der Leyen offered to negotiate a massive gas contract with America, knowing that Mr Trump was coming gunning for the EU on trade. That deal, she said, could more or less close the annual trade gap between the EU and US. And besides a new gas supplier was needed, after Russia put itself beyond the pale by invading Ukraine. This will be Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), which is why the Irish Government has stamped on the accelerator of getting a long talked about LNG terminal built in Limerick. The gas plays into Mr Trump's campaign rhetoric of "drill baby drill" and energy dominance. But there will be many more elements, as even a deal to supply 450 million Europeans with gas will not be big enough. Mr Trump complains a lot about market access, particularly in relation to cars and food. In general the EU market is very open to US products and services. Look around your own home, shops, businesses - what American stuff do you not have? (genuine, made in USA stuff, not made in China with US marketing hype). Mr Trump is wrong about the car market being closed to US producers - Ford dominates the light commercial market on both sides of the Atlantic, while in left-hand drive mainland Europe, pretty much any American car is available to consumers - if they can afford the running costs. It is not the huge bulk of the vehicles that is the chief problem (though it is a problem): it is the huge cost of feeding the massive and inefficient engines they use. On food, there is a bigger problem, and it is the extra chemicals and hormones that go into the US food chain that are banned in Europe (a ban strongly supported by consumers). Mr Trump's own Health Secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr frequently mentions the thousand food ingredients that are banned in Europe but allowed in the US as a bad thing - for the US consumer and the health of the nation. His mission statement is MAHA - Make America Healthy Again, and he is trying to ban or force the discontinuance of these additives. Europe does have a quota for US beef - but only if it has been grown without artificial growth hormones. Chicken is washed in chlorine in the US, to kill off health threatening bacteria. The practice is banned in Europe, but the EU has a higher rate of food poisoning from chicken. In trade talks in 2012, Eurocrats said they had an alternative method that would satisfy both EU and US health norms, but those talks went nowhere. Critics of the US use of chlorine washing say it covers up lower animal welfare standards. None of this is likely to feature in talks in Scotland. But yesterday there was an unexpected development when Australia announced it would take imports of US beef. It has been quite a closed, protected market - but producers there also doubted the US could supply much beef to Australia anyway, as its own beef industry, they claimed, could not satisfy local demand for beef and needed to import. But Irish and French farmers will be wary of any agricultural sweeteners in this deal. Defence is another element in the trade balance between the EU and US. The EU defence commissioner Andrius Kubilius spent a few days in the US, setting out some big numbers that have sprung out of another "Trump Win" - getting European NATO to raise its defence spending to 5% of GDP. This consists of 3.5% of GDP going on "real" defence spending, and 1.5% going on enabling infrastructure, such as roads, bridges, railways, communications satellites and other things that can be called "military mobility". About 40% of the EU's defence equipment spending goes on US made products. In cash terms that figure has risen sharply in the past three years as the EU supplies weapons systems and "consumables" to Ukraine. With the big increase in European NATO spending, and the EU's own €150 billion defence loans scheme (applications close on Tuesday), there is an awful lot of money sloshing around, and inevitably a big chunk of it is going to go to American industries, particularly in the highest end of high tech defence. According to Mr Kubilius, EU states are going to spend around €2.2 trillion on defence equipment over the next seven years of the EU "Financial Framework" budget cycle. If America gets 40% of that, then it could be looking at the thick end of a trillion bucks. It is hard to see more concessions here, especially as the French and some others have argued that if the Europeans are going to spend these kinds of colossal sums, they should spend as much as possible on developing home industries, not acting as employment support for the Americans. Trump planning regime of pharmaceutical tariffs As for pharmaceuticals, that seems likely to be left out of this outline deal, at least for the moment. Mr Trump is planning a special regime of pharmaceutical tariffs - medicines have not been tariffed by tradition - in order to force the relocation of manufacturing for the US market back to the US. That is a more complex business, as "patent cliff" effects come into play, as well as investment decisions. It seems the US plans on this one are not yet ready for rollout. That will be the big one hanging over the Irish after tomorrow's outline deal (if it is done), because of what we might call the 'Reverse-Leprechaun' economic effects of a sudden disappearance of a large lump of GDP, and with it associated corporation tax returns. Ireland's trade in goods surplus with the US is about $80 billion, according to the Americans - it vies with Germany for the biggest trade surplus of any EU state, a position it has been driven to almost entirely by the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland, which is mostly US owned. According to US trade statistics, Ireland has the fourth or fifth biggest trade surplus of any country doing business with the US: only Vietnam, Mexico and China have bigger surpluses. And China's trade surplus is only three times bigger than Ireland's. So the Emerald Isle does stick out on the charts - worldwide as well as European. And most of that is because of the strange world of pharmaceutical manufacturing, internal pricing and tax regime arbitrage that US pharma companies are so good at. On landing in Scotland, Mr Trump was asked what areas are outstanding to be negotiated with the EU. He said about twenty areas, but said he was not going to list them off. It felt like a deflection, not an answer. Trump says US-EU agreement would be 'biggest of them all' The uncertainty of the past six months has been paralysing for many investment decisions on both sides of the Atlantic. And that is important, because as Mr Trump said yesterday evening, getting an agreement with the EU would be "the biggest of them all". Because the EU-US trade in goods, services and investment is by far the biggest and most important in the world. The US President has decided to charge an entry fee to the US market. He believes - correctly - that the market is so valuable to outsiders that they will pay more to do business here. The art of this particular deal is finding out the realistic limits of bearable pain. For Japan it was 15% - down from the 25% they were told to expect. Once that news broke on Tuesday night, it was the tipping point for the EU, which had been hoping for a 10% tariff, but had been told 15% would be more like it. It is pretty much what the EU has been charged for the past three months - a 10% general baseline tariff on top of the 4.8% pre-existing average tariff rate on EU goods coming into the US. The impacts of that have yet to play out. And if the 'closer' and his visitor from Brussels cannot close the deal tomorrow? The US is set to impose a 30% tariff rate on the EU on 1 August. But according to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, talks on a final deal would continue, and the rate could still come down. But the 30% would act as a spur to the talks. The EU also made moves to show it was reaching the end of the rope as far as talks with the US are concerned. On Thursday, member state governments approved a retaliatory package on $70 billion of US exports, on top of an earlier $23 billion of tariffs on US steel and aluminium products. A third package of levies on US services exports has also been floated in the Brussels ether. The EU tariffs on $90 billion of US imports will go into effect on 7 August - if there is no deal this weekend. Mr Trump is one of those people who always has to feel he has gotten one over whoever he is doing a deal with; the sort who always tries to chip a little extra in the end. Ms von der Leyen ought to be prepared to give a little sweetener. Will it be in some aspect of trade or taxation, or will it be old fashioned cash?. Last Tuesday, Mr Trump spent 75 minutes talking in person with Japan's trade envoy Ryosei Akazawa, screwing an extra $150 billion out of the Japanese for an investment fund that the US government will direct. It helped to "buy" them a tariff cut, according to US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who claimed credit for the idea of the "tariff buy down". Market access will affect trade deal with Japan, says Lutnick Mr Lutnick said in an interview for Bloomberg that market access was always going to be a big issue in any trade deal with Japan. He did not see the Japanese opening their market to the extent the US wanted, so looked for another way. His solution was a fund of $400 billion, which the Japanese would put at the disposal of the US. Mr Trump, the 'closer', bumped that up to $550 billion before he said "deal" and shook hands. So what is this $550 billion for? It is not an investment by Japanese companies, according to Mr Lutnick. He told Bloomberg on Wednesday the Japanese will be bankers, supplying the money to pay for American projects. The Japanese cut will be 10% of the profits: "The Japanese are going to give America the ability to choose the projects, decide the projects and execute the projects. Suppose we want to build a generic antibiotics plant - America doesn't make antibiotics anymore - the Japanese will finance the project and we will give it to an operator, and the profits will be split 90% to the United States, and ten percent to the Japanese," he said. "So the Japanese have basically brought down their tariff rate due to this commitment that 'we will back what you Mr President want to build in America that are key to national security concerns, we will back that'," he added. He said the money can be equity, loans or loan guarantees. "They are the banker, not the operator - this is not a Japanese company like Toyota coming in and building a factory - this is America saying we want generic pharmaceuticals, microchips etc". Mr Lutnick - who claims to talk to Mr Trump daily at 1am by phone - said he came up with the idea in January to get the equivalent of market access for the US and a tariff rate at which the Japanese car makers - who account for the vast bulk of Japan's trade surplus with the US, can live with. "15% is right on the line where they can still build cars in Japan - huge amounts here as well - but $550 billion bought that," he said. "For the Europeans it is 25%, for South Korea it is 25% - the Japanese have bought 15% by giving Donald Trump the means to invest. We'll see what happens in the EU and South Korea talks, but let's be clear: Donald Trump has put pressure on them," he added. Peter Navarro, a senior trade advisor in the Trump administration and ideologue of a hard line on foreigners, especially China, said of the $550 billion : "its a blank cheque to invest in America: it's going to used to cure our supply chain vulnerabilities - this is really important: we've seen in the pandemic we were exposed on pharmaceuticals, we have a chip problem with too many of the chips made offshore: we've seen Chinese export restrictions on gallium, rare earth magnets, critical minerals. "Howard Lutnick is going to be the symphony orchestra guy on this - we are going to figure out every vulnerability we have in our economy with the help of the Japanese," he added. Medical devises may be excluded from tariffs The EU is of course the home of the car, specifically Germany where the internal combustion engine was invented. A deal on cars is huge for Germany as well. So is a deal on spirits - especially for the Irish whiskey industry and French and Italian liquor makers. Medical devices are another really important area for Ireland that may be excluded altogether from tariffs, according to some of the chatter reported late last week. For the Irish Government, which has become so dependent on corporation tax revenues - far more than is the case in most countries - the potential hit to revenues from Mr Trump's tariffs are what causes it sleepless nights. But it is not just tariffs that are making life more difficult for Irish and European exporters to the US. The dollar has weakened against the Euro since Mr Trump took power, making foreign imports more expensive for Americans to buy. The tariff comes on top of that. On leaving the White House yesterday, Mr Trump extolled the virtues of a weaker dollar. "The weak dollar makes you a hell of a lot more money. So when we have a strong dollar, one thing happens, it sounds good, but you don't do any tourism. "You can't sell factories, you can't sell trucks, you can't sell anything. It is good for inflation, that's about it. And we have no inflation. We've wiped out inflation. So when I see it (the dollar) down there, I don't lose sleep over it, put it that way," he added. As for other countries, Mr Trump said "We have the outlines of a deal with China" (Mr Bessent is meeting his opposite number in Stockholm on Monday and Tuesday for more trade talks). But he did not hold out much hope for Canada, the US' number three trade partner: "We haven't really had a lot of luck with Canada. I think Canada could be one where they'll just pay tariffs, not really a negotiation." Next Friday is the closing deadline for this round of tariff related deals, as far as the US President is concerned. He plans to send letters out to close to 200 countries over the next week "I'm not looking to hurt countries", he said yesterday morning. "I could - I could do that too, but I'm not looking to do that. But when that letter goes out, that's a deal. "Now, we sent one to Japan, we sent one to the EU, and they came back and negotiated a deal. I think the EU has got a pretty good chance of making a deal," he added.
RTÉ News
36 minutes ago
- RTÉ News
Israel bypasses UN already struggling for relevance
The relationship between Israel and the United Nations has always been strained. But the war in Gaza has pushed it to breaking point. Now as pressure grows on UN agencies in Gaza, so do fears over the permanent bypassing of the United Nations. Will that deal a blow to the multilateral system, at a time when the UN is already reeling from severe financial crisis, not to mention questions over its very relevance? "Israel's sidelining of UN agencies in Gaza – particularly in the delivery of aid – offers a chilling glimpse of what a world without a functioning United Nations might look like: starving people being shot while queueing for food and malnourished medical staff too weak to treat civilians," Christine Ryan, director of the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity Project at New York's Columbia University, told RTÉ News. For nearly eight decades, the United Nations has been engaged on the issue of Israel and Palestine. After all, it was a UN resolution in 1948 to partition the former British mandate into Jewish and Arab states, that sparked the first Arab-Israeli war. The Security Council, the UN's highest decision-making body, still regularly meets, as it did this week, to discuss the conflict in the Middle East including what is still called "the Palestinian Question". At that meeting, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations confirmed that the head of the UN's humanitarian agency (OCHA) in Gaza and the West Bank would be ejected at the end of this month and the visas of other international staff restricted. "We will no longer allow anti-Israel activity under the guise of humanitarianism," Israel's Ambassador Danny Danon told the Security Council. This appears to be part of a pattern. Last year, Israel accused UNRWA – the UN's Palestinian Refugee agency that has housed, fed and educated Palestinians for the past 70 plus years – of complicity with Hamas and banned it from operating on Israeli soil or having any contact with Israeli officials. The UN's peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon – UNIFIL – similarly faces deep opposition from Israel's government. The test for the blue-helmets force will come at the end of next month when the UN Security Council is due to renew its mandate. It remains to be seen whether all five permanent members of the body – including Israel's staunchest ally the United States – will vote in favour. In New York, the United States continues to shield Israel from UN action and scrutiny. The acting US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea told the Security Council that accusations of genocide against Israel made by other council members were "politically motivated and categorically false". "They are part of a deliberate, cynical propaganda campaign as Hamas attempts to win symbolic victories to compensate for total defeat in war," she said. Earlier this month, in an unprecedented move, the Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned the UN's special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, accusing the independent expert of spewing "antisemitism" and "open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West". That seemed to have a chilling affect. Just a week later, all three members of a UN Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate alleged violations of international law in Israel and Palestine suddenly quit. Their resignations were applauded by the Israeli mission to the UN. And then, there is the deliberate bypassing of UN aid mechanisms in favour of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – a US and Israel-backed venture widely condemned by other member states over mass killings of starving Palestinians near aid distribution sites Israel said the GHF was necessary to prevent aid being hijacked by Hamas. UN officials maintain there is no evidence of widespread diversion. But UN-distributed aid has been limited to a trickle, as famine conditions set in. "I think it's important to underscore that the UN and UNRWA in particular, is the only organisation that can deliver services at scale in Gaza," said Ciarán Donnelly, senior vice president of crisis response at International Rescue Committee. "Everything that we do as humanitarian NGOs is incredibly important but ultimately is a complement to the basic services of water, of shelter, of food distribution, as organised by the UN," he told RTÉ News. "So, if the UN isn't able to operate, then it simply makes our job exponentially harder in terms of trying to deliver the impact that we're focused on". UN experts fear the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation could set a precedent for aid distribution not just in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world. This week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he was "very disturbed by the undermining of the UN and the relief organisations," and called for the "primacy of the United Nations" to be restored. It's a tall order in the current climate, as the world's major powers sit across from each other at the UN Security Council in scornful disagreement. Diplomatic paralysis in the face of war in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere has raised serious questions about what the UN stands for. Meanwhile, the United States - hitherto global champion of the international rules-based order enshrined in UN multilateralism, since the end of the Second World War - abruptly ditched it in favour of Trump's "America First" foreign policy. The Trump administration pulled out of UN bodies including World Health Organisation, the Human Rights Council and UNESCO, slashed funding to agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Programme and dismissed the values championed by the UN, especially on things like gender and diversity, as "woke". "There's no question about the fact that the UN is being actively undermined," said Anjali Dayal, associate professor at New York's Fordham University, "and is, in a real way, facing an existential crisis". "But I would argue that that's largely financial at the moment," she said. The UN Secretary General António Guterres directed officials to cut the UN workforce by a fifth, while staff at UN agencies have already been laid off in their thousands. Although some UN insiders welcome the financial jolt which they hope may usher in much-needed and long-overdue reform. And it's not just Washington tightening the pursestrings. A pivot to defence spending has prompted Europe to claw back cash from multilateral institutions and international aid. "The UN might not survive the loss of this degree of funding," said Ms Dayal. Indeed, "very senior international officials" speculate that the UN may go the way of the League of Nations – the UN's ill-fated predecessor - according to Richard Gowan, UN Director of the International Crisis Group. But some experts – perhaps the more optimistic among them - believe the current crisis may reinvigorate global commitment to the United Nations. "If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have probably spoken about the UN being at a breaking point," said Ms Ryan. "But the horror wrought by this private aid organisation in place of UN agencies has made the relevance of the UN front of mind," she said. There was "no clearer warning to states, donors and civilians" on why the UN remains critical, she added. On Thursday, the French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would recognise Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in September – the first G7 country to do so. The fact he chose the UN - and not, say, the Elysée Palace - as the forum for this grand gesture is notable. The UN's annual jamboree will follow the conference on the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, co-chaire by France and Saudi Arabia, due to kick off this Monday. That confab was postponed in June after Israel and the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites. Israeli government officials have slammed the conference as a "reward for terror," while the United States issued a diplomatic cable to UN member states ahead of the June-scheduled dates, warning them not to attend. But countries appear to be undeterred. 40 government ministers are expected to turn up in New York next week to take part - a sign, perhaps, that the UN is still viewed as relevant in many capitals around the world. Asked how a UN conference had any hope of breathing life into a two-state solution that has failed for decades, is bitterly opposed by the Israeli government and while war continues to rage, a French diplomatic source said: "Sometimes from the darkness, the light can emerge."
Irish Times
36 minutes ago
- Irish Times
Epstein saga has exposed cracks in Maga movement which could fatally undermine Donald Trump
The second Trump administration has featured many scandals: his shameless corruption, his pardoning of the January 6th insurrectionists, his pushing a Bill that strips millions from healthcare to give more money to those who need it the least, his backing for the Israeli genocide of Palestinians and Israel's other reckless wars in the Middle East. All these things seem more important than whether his justice department relents and releases its files on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Yet, this is the one scandal from which Trump can't seem to escape, and the one that might prove the most damaging for him politically. No one is more aware of this than Trump himself. It is a sign of his desperation to move on from the Epstein story that on Wednesday – at a bizarre press conference with the president of the Philippines looking on – he ranted about Barack Obama's supposed corruption. READ MORE He claimed that Obama was guilty of 'treason' and that he tried to 'lead a coup' with faked intelligence about Russian interference in the election. It was a transparent effort to change the story. The embattled Trump even admitted as much: 'It's time to go after people.' In the past, he has had a brilliant knack for deflecting negative attention from himself to others. During the 2016 campaign, it seemed like he was finished when the Access Hollywood tapes emerged which captured him bragging about groping women. But before the next presidential debate, he assembled a press conference of several women who claimed to be victims of sexual harassment by Bill Clinton . It worked then; it allowed enough voters to come to the cynical conclusion that all politicians are equally corrupt. The tactic is unlikely to work this time. Attacking Obama is something of a reflex for Trump, who rose to prominence promoting the 'birther' conspiracy theory that Obama was born outside the US. Trump's run for the presidency was, people close to him has said, partly a desire for vengeance against Obama after the then-president mercilessly mocked him at the fateful 2011 White House correspondents' dinner (Obama's quips included: 'No one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that's because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter–— like, did we fake the Moon landing'). But Obama is arguably the politician that the public would least expect to have anything to do with a sexual predator like Epstein. Bill Clinton was in fact friends with Epstein, but his presidency ended so long ago that attacking him just doesn't have much purchase any more. [ White House claims 'fake news' over reports Donald Trump named in Epstein files Opens in new window ] Donald Trump, Melania Knauss (later, Melania Trump), Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club in 2000. Photograph: Davidoff Studios/ Getty Images This time, Trump hasn't been able to shift the narrative. That is partly because, as Ciarán O'Connor wrote this week , once the flames of conspiracy theories have been fanned, they are difficult to extinguish. But it is also because it goes to the same open secret that was at the centre of the Access Hollywood scandal: Trump's serial pattern of sexual abuse makes the notion that he has something to hide more plausible. To paraphrase congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who would have thought that electing a sexual offender would have complicated the release of the Epstein files? In 2023, a civil court ruled that Trump had sexually abused E Jean Carroll. By one count, at least 18 women have accused Trump of sexual assault or sexual harassment. The controversy over the release of the Epstein files has also resurfaced, leading to renewed attention on Trump's once close relationship with him. Epstein's brother has suggested that Trump was once Jeffrey Epstein's 'best friend'. The Wall Street Journal published a card that it claimed Trump sent Epstein on his 50th birthday with a lewd drawing of a woman and a reference to a 'wonderful secret'. Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion over the report, which he vehemently denies. It's possible that there is nothing in the Epstein files that reveals damaging information about Trump. But that is now almost beside the point. The political significance of the Epstein controversy is that it has hurt Trump's standing among his own base, which was already upset about his breaking America First principles by joining Israel's war against Iran. Though Trump has been unpopular with many Americans for most of the last decade, his political strength has been the unshakeable support of his base, which has allowed him to dominate the Republican Party. [ Bill Clinton reportedly sent Jeffrey Epstein note for birthday album Opens in new window ] This time, Trump hasn't been able to shift the narrative. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/ Getty Images As he himself once boasted, 'I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose any voters.' But it is symptomatic of his hubris that he promoted the conspiracy theory about Epstein, someone who was once a close associate. Under pressure from a disaffected Maga base, a significant number of Republican legislators broke with Trump for the first time in this second term. Rather than face a vote on whether to release the Epstein files that he was certain to lose, House Speaker Mike Johnson simply declared that they would break for summer early, even though that meant abandoning parts of the Republican agenda. But significantly, three Republicans on the ten-member House Committee on Oversight joined Democrats to subpoena the justice department for its Epstein files. Republicans Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Brian Jack of Georgia sided with Democrats. Democrats certainly don't consider the Epstein case to be the most significant issue facing the US – but they smell a rare political opportunity to exploit cracks in the Maga movement. They recognise that Trump is in a lose-lose situation. It seems unlikely he will release any information too damaging about himself. Yet, if he refuses to release files or releases them but there's nothing significant in them, many – and not only conspiracy theorists – will wonder if key information is being withheld. It's certainly possible that the Epstein controversy will blow over. Come September, when the US legislature reconvenes, we may all be talking about something else: a national or world crisis, quite possibly one of Trump's own making. And yet the cracks it has revealed in MAGA are potentially disastrous for Trump's power, dampening enthusiasm for Republican candidates at the next election, and undermining his tight control of the Republican Party.
