Jeffrey Epstein sought to leverage his connection to Donald Trump in an apparent last-ditch request for leniency while in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, a 35-day stint inside a notorious New York prison that ended with his suicide in 2019.
Previously unreleased handwritten notes obtained by The New York Times reveal Epstein’s half-baked sentences and phrases scribbled on legal pads, including what appear to be ideas for federal prosecutors to investigate then-President Trump.
“Trump is a total con artist,” he wrote, adding the phrases “smoke & mirrors” and “never had money.”
He also suggested former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg “knows all” and suggested the president’s “college transcripts” should be publicly released. “Not a stable genius,” he wrote.
The circumstances surrounding Epstein’s death and his alleged connections to a wider network of powerful pedophiles have consumed Congress and the Trump administration, which is eager to move on from federal investigations into Epstein and the political blowback surrounding the release of millions of documents connected to his cases.
The newly published messages — obtained as part of a sprawling investigation from The Times that examines the wealthy and well-connected pedophile’s final days — do not appear to have raised any new allegations against the president.
Epstein’s attempts to provide potentially useful information to federal prosecutors in exchange for the possibility of clemency in his own case do not appear to have moved the needle in his favor.
His writings suggest he wasn’t able to offer up anything that wasn’t already known. Trump and Weisselberg were later subject to extensive investigations that resulted in bombshell fraud verdicts targeting the president’s real estate empire and his family wealth.
Weisselberg spent 100 days inside Rikers Island in 2023 after he was convicted on a range of tax crimes in a separate case stemming from a sweeping criminal investigation into Trump’s business. He returned to jail in 2024 after pleading guilty to perjury over testimony he gave during a blockbuster fraud case targeting the president’s business.
That same year, a judge determined Trump and his business partners illegally enriched themselves by defrauding banks and investors as part of a decade-long scheme to secure favorable financing terms for some of his brand-building properties.
The president’s name appears thousands of times within the millions of documents released by the Department of Justice as part of legislation that Trump had signed into law. Trump socialized with Epstein throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and Epstein who once described himself as the president’s “closest friend.”
Trump has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and one’s appearance in the Epstein files does not suggest otherwise. The president has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein and insists he cut ties with the pedophile years before he was under investigation.
Notes from Epstein’s final weeks inside New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center appear to show a desperate, unraveling decline, and his meetings with lawyers largely revolved around his contempt for his former friends who began publicly distancing himself from him, according to The Times.
“I can’t do this,” he told his lawyers, according to the newspaper.
In his notes, he feared being known as the “billionaire pedophile in jail”; prison guards told his cellmate that “if he beat the s*** out of me, they wouldn’t file a report,” he wrote.
He also wrote that he was “told to get Depends instead of being able to use the toilet.”
The Times investigation — which relies on court documents, previously released Epstein files and more than 50 new interviews with inmates, jail staff and others — raises critical and likely unanswerable questions about his thinking and pattern of behavior before he was found dead on August 10, 2019.
While the Justice Department is hoping to close the book on Epstein, bipartisan pressure to investigate people in his orbit — including the president — has only accelerated, with members of Congress issuing subpoenas for interviews with high-profile figures, former employees and administration officials.
The House Oversight Committee has also performed a series of interviews with survivors, whose testimony has led to criminal referrals to at least two people connected to Epstein.
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