"Pay No Attention to That Pedophile Behind the Curtain!"
--Donald J. Trump
Here are some more key excerpts from recent (and not-so-recent) news articles about the ever-unfolding Jeffrey Epstein saga:
1) From Justin Baragona's 7-15-25 INDEPENDENT article entitled "Charlie Kirk Backtracks After Saying He’s 'Done Talking About Epstein,' Claims He Meant Just 'Yesterday'":
A day after proclaiming that he was “done talking about” Jeffrey Epstein and that he would “trust my friends in the government” amid the MAGA fallout over the Trump administration’s handling of the disgraced financier’s files, Charlie Kirk is now insisting that he merely meant “yesterday” and he would continue to discuss the issue [...].
With Kirk’s comments about moving on from Epstein drawing scrutiny and headlines, especially in light of his phone call with Trump, the right-wing activist took to his Tuesday show to maintain that he had never intended to drop the issue altogether.
Grumbling that he was responding to the “viral fake news” that he was done talking about the deceased sexual predator, Kirk complained about the amount of coverage his comments on Monday received before reading them back in full, claiming he was misconstrued.
“‘Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being.’ Nobody, not a single news outlet, said ‘for the time being.’ They did not include that second part of the sentence,” he groused. (For the record, most publications included that part of the quote – including The Independent.)
“Again, no one covered the second part of the statement,” Kirk continued. “No one covered it. This thing has, like, 10 million views on social media. And, unfortunately, too many people on our side fell for this garbage. And I get that it’s heightened — and, by the way, part of this is I'm gonna have some compassion. This is a very hot moment. Very hot.”
He also took issue with the amount of criticism he’s taken for saying that he's going to trust his “friends in the government,” noting that he’s “not trusting the government” but rather individual members of the administration that he knows his viewers admire.
“You guys are all fans of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel,” he said. “We are trusting that they heard you, they heard me, and they are working to fix this. Let me finish this. But let me say this again — I would love to see the DOJ move to unseal the grand jury testimony.”
After wondering if he “should I have said those five words in the sequence I said,” Kirk continued to bash the media’s coverage of his remarks before asserting that he merely meant he was taking a one-day break from Epstein-gate.
“When I said for the time being, I was talking yesterday,” he huffed. “I was telling the audience, guys, I got a whole deck of stories I gotta cover here. You see, they wanna cover MAGA in disarray, and there is so much going on right now.”
To read the entire article, click HERE.
2) From Farrah Tomazin's 9-4-25 YAHOO NEWS article entitled "DOJ Posts Embarrassing Apology Over Official Caught in Honeypot Trap":
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s department was forced into damage control after a top justice official was secretly recorded telling a date that the Epstein files would be manipulated to protect Republicans.
Joseph Schnitt, an Acting Deputy Chief in the Department of Justice, was caught divulging the information by a woman he met on the Hinge dating app, not realizing she was an undercover operative for the O’Keefe Media Group.
In a video posted online on Thursday, Schnitt is recorded telling the woman that the department would “redact every Republican or conservative person in those files, leave all the liberal, Democratic people in those files, and have a very slanted version of it come out.”
He also told his date that the decision to move Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a lower security prison went against Board of Prisons policy because she was a convicted sex offender, “which means they’re offering her something to keep her mouth shut.”
And he detailed the “internal conflict” between Bondi and FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, who famously clashed earlier this year over the Attorney General’s handling of the files.
“Second-in-command [Dan Bongino] at the FBI has been causing problems, because he’s like, ‘No, these [Epstein Files] have to be released… Bondi wants whatever Trump wants. Internally there’s a lot of conflict,” he said.To read the entire article, click HERE.
3) From William Vaillancourt's 9-5-25 DAILY BEAST article entitled "Mike Johnson Drops Bombshell About What Trump Really Knew About Epstein":
House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed President Donald Trump acted as an “FBI informant” on Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson was questioned Thursday by CNN reporter Manu Raju about how the president has been using the term “hoax” frequently in regard to Epstein. This, Johnson argued, was not about downplaying Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.
“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said.
“He has never said or suggested or implied—I’ve talked to him about this many times, many times. He is horrified. It’s been misrepresented,” Johnson said. ”He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
When asked to confirm the claim that Trump was an “FBI informant,” a spokesperson for Johnson sent the Daily Beast the following statement: “The Speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump—who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago—was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator.”
The White House has previously said Trump kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club after his 2006 sex trafficking indictment, though that took over a year to take effect, according to The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency.
Epstein had a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal in 2007. Former U.S. attorney Alex Acosta said that was because he had been told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta would later become Trump’s secretary of labor.
In July, Trump told reporters that he grew apart from Epstein after he learned he was hiring workers from Mar-a-Lago.
“When I heard about it, I told him, I said: ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people—whether it was spa or not spa—I don’t want you to take our people,’" Trump said. “And he was fine, and then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said: ‘Out of here!’”
Trump said nothing then about being an FBI informant.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
4) From Vicky Ward's 7-9-19 DAILY BEAST article entitled "Jeffrey Epstein’s Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight":
Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.) [...]
In 2007 and 2008, as the FBI prepared a 53-page indictment that would charge Epstein with sex crimes, Epstein’s powerful legal team played the influence card.
After the one meeting with then-U.S. Attorney Acosta, where presumably “intelligence” was mentioned, the indictment was shelved and, instead, Epstein signed a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, pleading guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of procurement of minors for prostitution, which earned him a cushy 13 months in county jail, from where he was allowed to leave to work at his office and go for walks.
The deal granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators.” Most significantly, federal prosecutors agreed to keep the deal secret from Epstein’s victims, which meant they would not know to challenge it in court. As it turned out, this actually broke the law, because victims have a right to know of such developments, under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
5) From Tom Winter's 9-6-25 NBC NEWS article entitled "DOJ Says Names of Two Associates Epstein Wired $100K and $250K Should Stay Secret":
The Justice Department on Friday asked a federal judge overseeing the case of deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to deny a request from NBC News to unseal the names of two associates who received large payments from him in 2018, court documents show. The Justice Department cited privacy concerns expressed by the two individuals as the reason for not making their names public.The first associate received a payment of $100,000 from Epstein and the second associate received a payment of $250,000, both in 2018, days after the Miami Herald began publishing a series of investigative stories where victims criticized a plea deal he received in Florida in 2008.
As part of the plea agreement, Epstein secured a statement from federal prosecutors in Florida that the two individuals would not be prosecuted.
The payments became public after Epstein was indicted and arrested in New York in 2019 and asked to be released on bail. Federal prosecutors in New York filed a memorandum on July 16, 2019, that argued Epstein should remain in jail to prevent him from tampering with witnesses.
They cited the payments he made to the two individuals, which began two days after the Miami Herald began publishing its stories on Epstein’s plea deal, also known as a nonprosecution agreement, or NPA.
Prosecutors wrote that on Nov. 30, 2018, Epstein “wired $100,000 from a trust account he controlled, to an individual named as [REDACTED] a potential co-conspirator — and for whom Epstein obtained protection in — the NPA.”
Prosecutors also wrote that “this individual was also named and featured prominently in the Herald series.”
Prosecutors added that “the same records show that just three days later, on or about December 3, 2018, the defendant wired $250,000 from the same trust account to [REDACTED], who was also named as a potential co-conspirator — and for whom Epstein also obtained protection in — the NPA.”
The prosecutors continued: “This individual is also one of the employees identified in the Indictment, which alleges that she and two other identified employees facilitated the defendant’s trafficking of minors by, among other things, contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with the defendant at his residences in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida.”
To read the entire article, click HERE.
6) From PBS News' 9-10-25 article entitled "See Epstein’s Full ‘Birthday Book,’ with Alleged Personal Messages from Trump, Clinton and Others":
A collection of personal notes penned for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday offers a portrait of the convicted child sex offender through crude drawings, images and messages filled with sexual content or innuendo.
The Epstein estate delivered an electronic copy of the book Monday to the House Oversight Committee, which posted a redacted version of the file in a Google Drive folder.
The bound volumes, titled “The First Fifty Years,” were compiled in 2003 by former Epstein girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell. A table of contents includes a list of alleged contributors, including former President Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, entrepreneur Leslie Wexner and President Donald Trump.
After The Wall Street Journal first reported on the book’s existence in July, Trump denied writing a sexually suggestive letter for the collection and filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper.
Democrats on the Oversight committee released an image of the alleged letter, which has “Donald J. Trump” typed above a scrawled signature at the bottom, on social media. Trump and members of his White House staff have said the signature on the note is not his. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the White House would welcome expert handwriting analysis and called the Epstein case generally “a hoax” meant to distract from the Trump administration’s accomplishments.
Maxwell began the collection with a handwritten note to Epstein. “The idea behind this book was simply to gather stories and old photographs to jog your memory about places[,] people and different events. Some of the letters will definitely achieve their intended goal — some well … you will have to read them to see for yourself.”
In one drawing, a male figure who is presumably Epstein is giving lollipops to a group of girls, labeled 1983. On the right side of the page, an older Epstein is shown being massaged by four nearly naked women, labeled 2003.On another page, a photo shows Epstein holding a large novelty check for $22,500 with a “DJTRUMP” signature. An accompanying note jokes that Epstein sold a “‘fully depreciated’ [woman] to Donald Trump for $22,500.” The New York Times reported the page was made by Joel Pashcow, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
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