One of President Donald Trump's repeated defenses of his longtime friendship with deceased financier and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is that he kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago country club when it became clear he was "stealing" young girls in Trump's employ.
But resurfaced records paint a very different picture, reported The Daily Beast.
According to the footnotes of The Grifter's Club, a 2020 book about the goings on at Trump's flagship South Florida resort, "'The authors viewed a membership list showing that Epstein’s account had been closed.' The book reports that the 'membership log shows his account at the club was closed in October 2007.'"
Not only does that mean Epstein was a member of the club seven years after Trump said he "stole" Mar-a-Lago worker — and Epstein victim — Virginia Giuffre. It also means he was a member of the club a year after he was indicted on charges related to his sex trafficking operation.
Epstein would ultimately be given a controversial sweetheart deal — orchestrated by a federal prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who would later become Trump's Secretary of Labor in his first term — that let him plead guilty to a prostitution charge. Acosta resigned amid scrutiny over his role in 2019, right around the time when Epstein faced a new wave of charges.
Epstein was found dead of suicide in his Manhattan cell before he could be brought to trial, which has spawned ongoing conspiracy theories on both the left and right that he was killed to cover the involvement of other famous and powerful people in his trafficking operation.
It was that pressure from Trump's own supporters that caused his DOJ to re-examine the case, and ultimately come out with an admission they had no "client list" revealing such co-conspirators — even though Attorney General Pam Bondi, who herself passed on an opportunity to prosecute Epstein years earlier, had promised that list was "on her desk."