Visits: 2
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that “I have no idea” if former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were somehow involved in the death of Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier who died last weekend after an apparent jailhouse suicide.
Trump also told reporters that he wants a “full probe” of the death of Epstein, an accused child sex trafficker, on Saturday, which conspiracy theorists have suggested — without any evidence at all — was the fault of the Clintons.
Both Bill Clinton and Trump himself are former friends of Epstein.
Trump on Saturday retweeted one of the conspiracy promoters, who had written that Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead. I see #TrumpBodyCount trending but we know who did this! … #EpsteinSuicide #ClintonBodyCount #ClintonCrimeFamily.”
“He is a very highly respected conservative pundit,” Trump said of Terrence Williams, whose tweet he retweeted to the president’s 63 million followers on Twitter.
“He’s a big Trump fan. And that was a retweet. That wasn’t from me. That was from him. But he’s a man with half a million followers, a lot of followers,” Trump said.
Epstein’s death in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, which sources have said was the result of him hanging himself, is currently under investigation by both the FBI and the inspector general’s office of the Justice Department.
At the time of his death, Epstein was being held without bond on federal child sex trafficking charges.
He was found semiconscious in his cell at the jail in late July with marks on his neck in what authorities believed at the time may have been a suicide attempt. Epstein was taken off suicide watch less than week later.
Trump flew on Epstein’s private plane at least once in the 1990s, and Clinton is known to have flown on Epstein’s plane multiple times.
Portrait of American financier Jeffrey Epstein (left) and real estate developer Donald Trump as they pose together at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, 1997.
Davidoff Studios Photography | Archive Photos | Getty Images
Asked Tuesday if he actually believed the Clintons had anything to do with Epstein’s demise, Trump answered: “I have no idea.”
“I know he [Bill Clinton] was on his plane 27 times,” Trump said.
He also called Clinton “a very good friend of Epstein’s.”
A spokesman for Clinton had no immediate comment when contacted by CNBC.
However, the spokesman, Angel Urena, tweeted a video of Trump’s comments about Clinton and Epstein, and wrote: “Might be hard to hear over Air Force One, but that’s the sound of the President of the United States’ credibility blowing in the wind.”
Trump said Monday that if Clinton visited Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Island, that would not be “very good.”
“That was not a good place, as I understand it, and I was never there,” Trump said. “You have to ask, did Bill Clinton go to the island?”
“That’s the question. If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”
Clinton’s spokesman said last month that the former president had not spoken to Epstein “in well over a decade,” and had never been to Epstein’s island, known as Little St. James.
But one of Epstein’s accusers, Virginia Giuffre, said in a deposition in a civil lawsuit that Epstein once hosted a dinner for Clinton on Little St. James.
FBI agents raided Little St. James, on Monday as part of their investigation into Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking ring.
Agents seized several computers at Epstein’s residence on the island, which is known to locals as “Pedophile Island.”