'Did Trump just confess?' Expert floored by president's explosive Epstein remark

National security analyst Marcy Wheeler has been among those following President Donald Trump's ongoing scandal involving a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, who recruited girls under 18 for sex. On Tuesday, she posed a serious question.

"Did Trump Just Confess He Learned about Virginia Giuffre before Jeffrey Epstein Recruited Someone Else at Mar-a-Lago?"

That was the title of her latest post, in which Wheeler pointed to Trump's comments aboard Air Force One on Tuesday, where he revealed there was more than one young woman poached from Mar-a-Lago to work for Epstein. Trump raged they were his girls "taken out of the spa. Hired. By him [Epstein]. In other words, gone."

Wheeler noted, "To be sure, it would pathological to describe the recruitment of sex trafficking victims as simply hiring someone’s help away from them. But it is the case that Giuffre, at least, went from [an employee] at Mar-a-Lago (where her father was a more trusted employee) to years of financial payment from Epstein."

The idea that Trump categorized what the girls were doing for Epstein as "employment" is what Wheeler called "the kind of fiction Trump engages in all the time.

He's treating "the financially-lubricated sex trafficking of women as mere [employment]," Wheeler wrote.

She also took issue with the timeline, noting that the first employee Epstein "stole" from Trump was Virginia Giuffre in 2000. She was just 16 at the time and working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago. Then, Trump told him not to take his people, but he did it again, and Epstein was removed from Mar-a-Lago in 2007.

In 2002, Trump interviewed with New York Magazine, where he talked about Epstein liking girls, particularly young ones.

In 2003, for Epstein's 50th birthday, Trump sent the drawing of a woman with his name scribbled over her pubic region, the Wall Street Journal recently reported.

Wheeler said that if Trump learned what happened to Giuffre and told Epstein not to recruit his sex slaves from Mar-a-Lago, "it would mean he was aware of what happened to Giuffre, aware years before law enforcement first started investigating Epstein. It would mean he learned Epstein was trafficking girls, which that New York Magazine quote sure seems to reflect, and rather than do something to make Epstein stop, Trump just told him not to do it at Mar-a-Lago."

She added that the newly revealed info would "also mean that whatever records the FBI has on their investigation into Prince Andrew — an investigation that led the Prince to stop traveling internationally — would reflect personally on Donald Trump. Not because of what Trump did, but because of what he didn’t do."

Read the full column here.