Trump says Epstein poached young women from Mar-a-Lago. That raises new questions about what he knew.
The most recent instance has to do with precisely why the two men had a falling out about two decades ago.
Trump acknowledged on Tuesday that the employees who he said Monday that Epstein poached from him, triggering their breakup, were young women who worked in the spa at his Mar-a-Lago club.
'The answer is yes, they were,' he told reporters on Air Force One while traveling back from Scotland.
The answer doesn't just call into question Trump's honesty about his relationship with Epstein, but also his potential knowledge of the accused sex trafficker's misconduct. (Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.)
A day earlier, the president said they'd fallen out because Epstein 'stole people that worked for me' – including after he had warned Epstein not to do it again. But Trump had made no mention of the employees being young women.
And the White House last week had said Trump barred Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club 'for being a creep.' (Trump on Tuesday said the two reasons were 'sort of a little bit of the same thing.')
But back in 2019, reporting traced their fallout to another factor entirely: the two powerful real estate men competing for the same Palm Beach property.
It's clear that this is something of a sensitive subject. After Epstein's arrest in 2019, Trump declined to go into detail about their falling out, telling reporters, 'The reason doesn't make any difference, frankly.'
But it surely does now. So where does the truth lie?
Trump was the most forthcoming so far on Tuesday.
Epstein hired away Mar-a-Lago spa employees more than once, Trump said, even after being warned against it, prompting him to cut ties with Epstein and throw him out of the club.
'I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa,'' Trump told reporters. 'And then not too long after that he did it again and I said, 'outta here.''
He also acknowledged that one of those employees may have been Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent accusers, who died by suicide earlier this year.
'I think she worked at the spa,' Trump said. 'I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her.'
With these answers, there's clear overlap between Trump's account Monday and what the White House said last week.
'I wouldn't talk [to him] because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help,' Trump said of Epstein on Monday, adding: 'He stole people that worked for me. I said, 'Don't ever do that again.' He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non-grata. I threw him out, and that was it.' And last week, the White House communications director said: 'The fact is that the president kicked [Epstein] out of his club for being a creep.'
Both of those accounts differ from the falling out that's portrayed in a 2019 Washington Post report about the two men competing for a bankrupted oceanfront property called Maison de l'Amitié – a process that included plenty of hardnosed tactics. (The first Trump White House at the time did not comment on or deny that story.)
When asked by CNN on Tuesday to reconcile these accounts, the White House said, 'Nothing more to add to POTUS' comments.'
There are still plenty of unanswered questions.
Trump casting Epstein as merely having stolen employees – even young women from the spa – would be a pretty shocking way to characterize recruiting someone into a sex-trafficking ring.
The whole thing certainly adds to questions about what Trump knew and when about Epstein's activities.
Those questions had already been relevant for a host of reasons.
There's the infamous 2002 Trump comment about how Epstein 'likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' There's the Florida businessman who has said he expressed discomfort to Trump about putting on a 'calendar girl' event with Epstein.
'I said, 'Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can't have him going after younger girls,' he recalled telling Trump, according to The New York Times.
And then there's longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone's 2016 book, in which he quoted Trump citing how Epstein's 'swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls.'
'How nice, I thought,' Trump said, according to Stone, 'he let the neighborhood kids use his pool.'
And then there's another reported scene at Mar-a-Lago. A 2020 book by reporters for the Miami Herald and Wall Street Journal reported that Trump actually severed ties with Epstein after he hit on a Mar-a-Lago member's teenage daughter.
'The way this person described it, such an act could irreparably harm the Trump brand, leaving Donald no choice but to remove Epstein,' one of the book's authors said.
What's particularly striking here is the timeline. In former Trump aide Sam Nunberg's telling to the Washington Post in 2019, Trump's excommunication of Epstein from his club for recruiting a young woman for massages came years before Epstein's sex-trafficking investigation became public knowledge. That would mean years before 2005.
But that — and Trump's own comments Tuesday – suggest the president might have known something unsavory was going on before a lot of other people did. Giuffre, after all, was a teenaged employee during the relevant period.
The president doesn't seem to want to talk about that. But as with so many of his other answers on Epstein, that only leads to more questions.
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