Elon Musk mocks Trump over Epstein files — ‘Where is the client list?'
The tech billionaire alleged during the pair's explosive falling-out in May that Trump was named on the so-called Epstein client list.
He later deleted the allegation, but on Wednesday night he criticised the president for suggesting the furore over the files was a 'hoax' perpetrated by his political rivals.
'Wow, amazing that Epstein 'killed himself' and Ghislaine [Maxwell, Epstein's longtime girlfriend convicted of sex trafficking] is in federal prison for a hoax,' he wrote. In more than a dozen posts in an hour to his 222 million X followers, he noted that 'not even one' of Epstein's alleged clients had been prosecuted and said 'so many powerful people want that list suppressed'.
Musk resumed in the early hours of Thursday morning by responding to a number of posts questioning the decision to keep part of the evidence secret. 'Yeah, where is it?' he asked of the client list.
In response to a photo of one of the binders the White House released to conservative influencers earlier this year, entitled 'The Epstein Files: Phase 1', Musk wrote: 'Where is Phase 2?'
He also appeared, in a public exchange with his Grok chatbot, to endorse allegations that Trump flew on Epstein's private plane, nicknamed the Lolita Express.
He asked it for details about Epstein's plane logs and to summarise 'who went to Epstein's island and when?' This was a reference to the financier's private resort in the US Virgin Islands, an alleged base for sex trafficking underage girls.
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'Why was the plane called the Lolita Express? How old was Lolita in Nabokov's book?' he added. 'Research throughly [sic] to find the complete lists of who else was on the plane during Trump's 7 flights?'
Epstein was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's estate in Florida, in the 1990s before the pair fell out in the mid-2000s. Trump once described him as a 'terrific guy'.
Epstein died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019 while awaiting trial.
In recent days, Trump has struggled to contain the fallout over his administration's decision not to publish all files about his case.
Pam Bondi, the attorney-general, released a memo last week that rebuked the two core allegations among Maga loyalists — that Epstein was murdered and that he kept a 'client list' to blackmail celebrities. However, she refused to publish all the documents from the case.
It was later claimed that a video released by the justice department, purporting to show no one entering or leaving Epstein's cell at the time of his death, had been doctored.
Trump has stood by Bondi and described the controversy as the Democrats' 'new SCAM', but has also encouraged her to release all 'credible' evidence.
In a further development sure to alarm conspiracy theorists, the prosecutor who worked on the criminal cases against Epstein and Maxwell was fired from her job in the Manhattan US attorney's office on Wednesday.
Maurene Comey, 36, is the daughter of James Comey, the former director of the FBI and one of the people Trump has blamed for spreading the 'hoax' along with Barack Obama and Joe Biden.
Democrats are looking to exploit the divisions in the Maga movement over Trump's refusal to release the files by forcing a vote in Congress. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, himself called this week for 'transparency' and the release of 'everything' in the files.
Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, has teamed up with Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, to introduce a bill calling for the files' release that has attracted several Republican co-sponsors, including the Maga firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.
'People voted for Trump in part because they were so disgusted in the system — they thought that Washington protected the elite, protects the powerful, protects the wealthy. Epstein is a symbol of that,' Khanna told Politico.
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