Epstein affair | Donald Trump calls to “move on”

(Washington) Donald Trump judged on Tuesday that the time had come for the United States to turn the page after the publication of a mass of documents from the file of sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, which continues to impact personalities around the world.

“I think it’s time for the country to maybe move on to something else, like health care or something that people care about,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

When announcing the publication of these documents on January 30, the US Department of Justice claimed to have respected the obligation imposed by Congress on the Trump administration to be fully transparent on this politically explosive file.

In total, nearly 3.5 million pages of this sprawling dossier have been released by the government since December under the constraint of a law passed by Congress, according to the department.

Around a hundred victims denounced the way in which the documents were published, without precaution for their private lives. But a hearing scheduled for Wednesday on the subject before a federal judge in New York was canceled until further notice at the request of their lawyers, who reported “constructive discussions with the Department of Justice” to remedy the situation.

Epstein’s plane

The latest avalanche of documents has set off a chain reaction, discrediting many figures around the world, including former British ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson.

London police opened an investigation on Tuesday into Mr. Mandelson, suspected of having transmitted sensitive financial information to Jeffrey Epstein when he was a minister in Gordon Brown’s Labor government, from 2008 to 2010.

Cornered, the ex-minister had already resolved on Tuesday to leave the House of Lords on Wednesday, where he had not sat since last year.

During his campaign for the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump said he wanted to publish the entire Epstein file. But his visible reluctance to keep this commitment has earned him accusations of lack of transparency, even concealment, even among his MAGA base.

Earlier Tuesday, a Republican-dominated parliamentary committee announced that it would hear former Democratic President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, separately at the end of February on past ties between Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.

Refusing to appear for several months, the couple made an about-face Monday evening, shortly before a vote in the House of Representatives on a procedure to obstruct Congress against them. Prosecution would then have been recommended to the Department of Justice, and they would have faced up to a year in prison.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, for their part, denounce purely political motivations on the part of the Republicans, in particular in order to divert attention from the past proximity between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, when the two men moved in the New York jet set in the 1990s.

Bill Clinton, who traveled several times aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet and was photographed numerous times in his company, claimed in 2019, the year of the financier’s death in prison, that he had not spoken to him for more than a decade.

The former Democratic president has also always denied having any knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Donald Trump admits to having dated him at the time, nevertheless claiming to have broken up with him before he was concerned by the courts.

But contrary to his assurances that he would “never have taken Epstein’s plane”, his name appears eight times on the plane’s passenger list between 1993 and 1996, according to an email from an investigator dating from 2020.