US Justice Department Informed Donald Trump His Name Is In Epstein Files: Report
Donald Trump was reportedly briefed in May that his name appeared several times in Jeffrey Epstein case files, though officials said he wasn't the focus.
US President Donald Trump, in May this year, was informed that his name appeared multiple times in the files of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The information to Trump was passed on by Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, during a meeting at the White House, who told the President that many other high-profile figures were also named, according to the report.
The conversation, which also included Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, was characterised by two White House officials as a 'routine briefing" that covered the scope of the Justice Department's findings, as per CNN.
Trump's name appearing in the files, they said, was not the sole focus of the discussions.
The WSJ report further claimed Trump was also told that senior Justice Department officials didn't plan to release any more Epstein documents, because the material contained child pornography and victims' personal information.
Trump said at the meeting he would defer to the Justice Department's decision not to release any further files, the report claimed.
Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, responded to the report by calling on Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to the Associated Press.
'We need to bring Bondi and Patel into the Judiciary Committee to testify about this now," Schiff said in a video posted on X.
Over the years, thousands of pages of records have been released through lawsuits, Epstein's criminal dockets, public disclosures and Freedom of Information Act requests.
They include a 2016 deposition in which an accuser recounted she spent several hours with Epstein at Trump's Atlantic City casino, but didn't say if she met Trump and did not accuse him of any wrongdoing.
Trump has also said he once thought Epstein was a 'terrific guy" but they later had a falling-out.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung on Wednesday said the reports were 'nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media."
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