By Staff Reporter |
Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego has refused to delete an unverified theory about the relationship between child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and President Donald Trump.
Gallego claimed Trump and Epstein spent Thanksgiving together in 2017, citing an email exchange from Epstein. The Democratic Party deleted their post propagating this claim, which Gallego quoted in a post on X.
“The ‘Trump was secretly helping the cops take down Epstein’ theory kinda falls apart when you know he may have spent Thanksgiving with him. As President. After Epstein was already convicted,” said Gallego.
Over a decade before 2017 Thanksgiving, however, Trump had banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. Multiple sources have reported this timeline in years past to reporters and in a book published in 2020.
In 2008, Epstein was convicted of two state felony charges in Florida: soliciting prostitution, and soliciting prostitution with a minor. Epstein entered a plea deal of a 13-month jail sentence with work release and requirement to register as a sex offender.
Trump has repeatedly claimed to have had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes until the federal charges emerged in 2019. The president also claimed at the time that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in about 15 years.
It wasn’t until late 2018, a year after the Thanksgiving in question occurred, that investigative reporting from the Miami Herald publicized details of the 2008 plea deal. That following summer, federal prosecutors hit Epstein with the child sex trafficking charges that would ultimately conclude with his apparent suicide in prison a month later.
Unlike Gallego, the Democratic Party deleted their post on X in which they claimed Trump spent Thanksgiving with Epstein in 2017. Included in the post was a picture of an email exchange between Epstein and the founder of a major modeling agency, Faith Kates.
“Documents show Donald Trump spent Thanksgiving with Jeffrey Epstein in 2017,” said the Democrats in their deleted X post. “At the time, Trump was already president, and Epstein was already a convicted sex offender.”
Trump spent Thanksgiving at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach with family in 2017. A book published in 2020, “The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency,” included accounts from several Mar-a-Lago club members that Trump banned Epstein from the club years before the holiday, sometime before the 2008 pleading.
The Thanksgiving 2017 email was part of the 20,000-document dump from House Republicans on Wednesday, just hours before the House passed an agreement to end the government shutdown with six Democratic votes.
In another email from January 2019, approximately six months before federal prosecutors closed in and about two months after the investigative report dropped, Epstein claimed in an email to Michael Wolff, an author-journalist and longtime confidant of his, that Trump had knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking.
“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member [at Mar-a-Lago] ever,” said Epstein. “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
Ghislaine Maxwell was the British socialite convicted of child sex trafficking for Epstein in 2021.
Maxwell trafficked one of her victims, Virginia Giuffre, from her job as a teenage Mar-a-Lago spa attendant. Giuffre was 16 when she was trafficked.
Throughout her book “Nobody’s Girl,” public statements, and sworn testimonies, Giuffre has offered consistent, repeated defenses of Trump’s innocence and non-involvement with Epstein’s trafficking.
Giuffre’s statements also challenge the reliability of Epstein’s perspective and claims about Trump in his emails. In another email released within the 20,000 documents this week, Epstein claimed Trump and Giuffre “spent hours” together at his home. However, Giuffre said in her book that she only met Trump several times briefly in public places, such as Mar-a-Lago before she was trafficked and at a Halloween party.
Giuffre is unable to offer further clarity on these developments in the Epstein files, as she committed suicide in April. Her book was published posthumously in October.
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