Donald Trump has at last got the Clintons where he wanted – in the dock, giving testimony about Jeffrey Epstein to Congress. Trump first mooted the idea on Fox News, as long ago as 2015, that former US president Bill Clinton was nefariously involved with the late paedophile financier.
“Nice guy,” Trump said about Clinton on Fox News. “Got a lot of problems coming up in my opinion with the famous island with Jeffrey Epstein – a lot of problems.” Trump was running for president then, and Epstein was very much alive and at large.
As Clinton insisted to the House Oversight Committee, he never set foot on Epstein’s Caribbean hideaway. That he enjoyed other links to Epstein is not in doubt. But back then, Trump was playing to the Republicans’ obsession with an alleged link between the Clintons and underage sex.
The Grand Old Party (GOP) is still in thrall to conspiracy theories about this. Giving evidence to the House Oversight Committee on Thursday, Hillary Clinton was quizzed about “Pizzagate” – the preposterous smear from 2016 about a paedophile sex ring run by Democrats in the basement of a Washington restaurant.
Now, I think we can safely say the US President wishes he had never brought up the subject of Epstein. The flame of scandal is licking at his own heels, while Congress drags in the political warhorses of a bygone era and ignores that Trump fella who is referenced 38,000 times in the Epstein files.
Somehow, among the three million documents, 2000 videos and 180,000 images released by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) in January, several important pages are missing in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. These happen to contain details of the most serious allegations against the President. Coincidence or cover-up?
The allegation is that Trump sexually abused a 13-year-old girl in South Carolina in the mid-1980s. There is no evidence he did any such thing. The allegations appear to have been dismissed and the complainant was deemed ineligible for compensation from the Epstein survivors’ fund.
Some documents were released by the DoJ, including an FBI summary of the woman’s claims to have been assaulted by Jeffrey Epstein and Trump, and notes from her first FBI interview. However, documents from three subsequent FBI interviews with her appear to have been withheld.
According to the New York Times, which examined the serial numbers of the Epstein files, up to 50 pages of the alleged victim’s testimony appear to be missing. They did not show up in the unredacted pages shown privately to members of the House Oversight committee.
A DoJ spokeswoman has since said that any “improperly tagged” documents will be published “consistent with the law”. We have yet to see if this happens. But it shows that while Trump keeps trying to put a lid on the Epstein scandal, the scandal has by no means finished with him.
On the face of it, the allegations against Trump are far-fetched. The accuser first filed a suit in California in the run-up to the 2016 election but backed out of a widely-publicised press conference with celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom, citing fear of retribution.
The alleged victim has never put forward her claims publicly (the same is true for many other Epstein survivors), and has been accused of being an unreliable witness with a history of drug abuse and drunk driving. But the testimony of the late Virginia Giuffre, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s accuser, was also rubbished before being partially vindicated.
In any event, the point about the Epstein Files Transparency Act is that all documents were supposed to be released, whether fair or not to the individuals named in them, including the President.
This has made the insistence on the Clintons giving evidence to Congress look like a tacky act of political retribution. Hillary Clinton claimed never to have even met Epstein, yet once again was obliged to answer for her husband’s behaviour.
James Comer, the Republican committee chairman, had the nerve to say: “We showed her that picture with Bill Clinton in the hot tub and she acted like she had no curiosity, was not concerned who was in the hot tub with him.”
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Of course not, because the picture had nothing to do with her and was nothing she had to answer for. In contrast, Melania Trump appears in photographs hanging out with Trump and Epstein, yet she has not been called to give evidence. Comer made it plain that Trump would not be grilled either.
Double standards are nothing new in politics. But it was Trump who lit the fire on Epstein, urging Maga supporters to find the “truth” when he thought it would hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign and help him become president.
To his own surprise, the gambit worked. Looking back, it was astonishing how paedophilia was a core Maga and QAnon obsession, which paved the way for Trump’s victory in 2016. That obsession could yet be his downfall, corroding the bond of trust with his supporters.
Sarah Baxter is director of the Marie Colvin Center for International Reporting
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