President Trump tried to shift the conversation away from his ties to Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, urging the public and the media to focus on prominent Democrats linked to the deceased sex offender.
“They should focus on the fact that Larry Summers from Harvard, that Bill Clinton, who you know very well, and lots of other friends, really close friends of [Epstein], should be spoken about. … And they should speak about them because they don’t speak about them, they talk about me. I had nothing to do with the guy,” Mr. Trump told reporters while departing the White House for his trip to Scotland.
“But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers and some of his friends,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he never visited Epstein’s infamous island, where wealthy individuals were alleged to have had sex with underage girls.
Mr. Summers was president of Harvard and held high-profile positions in Democratic administrations, including treasury secretary under Mr. Clinton and director of the National Economic Council in the Obama White House.
A bunch of Epstein documents released in 2023, including his emails and schedules, showed that big names continued to meet with Epstein long after he was registered as a convicted sex offender. The papers show no evidence that Mr. Summers engaged in wrongdoing.
The documents revealed that Mr. Summers met with Epstein more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2016, even after Harvard began rejecting the financier’s donations because of his 2008 guilty plea to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.
At the time, Mr. Summers said he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his conviction” and that the meetings were to solicit money for his wife’s nonprofit.
Mr. Summers’ wife, Eliza New, who also worked at Harvard as a literature professor, had launched a venture that creates videos about poetry. In 2016, a nonprofit linked to Epstein donated $110,000 to Ms. New’s endeavor.
Flight logs from Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” show that Mr. Summers flew on it at least four times, including once in 1998 when he was deputy treasury secretary and at least three times while president of Harvard.
Mr. Clinton’s ties to Epstein have been well documented, as the two were photographed together.
The former president was named in court documents released last year as part of a case against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend, who has been jailed for helping him abuse girls.
There is no implication that Mr. Clinton engaged in wrongdoing.
According to the documents, a woman who claimed that Prince Andrew groped her while underage also alleged that Epstein once told her that Mr. Clinton “likes them young,” referring to girls.
The files also include testimony from Ms. Maxwell that Mr. Clinton traveled on Mr. Epstein’s private jet, but she didn’t know how many times.
In a statement in 2019, Mr. Clinton said the trips on Epstein’s plane were for humanitarian trips to Africa in the early 2000s, a time when he praised Epstein as a philanthropist. He later cut ties with him.
Mr. Clinton has insisted he knew nothing about Epstein’s crimes and that his Secret Service detail was with him on every leg of those trips.
