Trump tells Justice to seek release of Epstein grand jury testimony
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President Donald Trump late Thursday told the Justice Department to seek the release of “all pertinent” grand jury testimony in the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein as he tried to tamp down growing political outcry over his administration’s handling of the case files.
It was not immediately clear to which records he was referring in his social media post. Federal grand jury testimony is by law confidential, and Trump said in the post that the release is “subject to court approval.” Records from a state grand jury that investigated Epstein in 2006 were released last year by a Florida judge.
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Trump’s announcement came minutes after he pledged to sue the Wall Street Journal over its Thursday evening report, which said that he contributed a drawing of a naked woman to Epstein’s 50th birthday album in 2003. The letter concluded with “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the Journal report.
“President Trump will be suing The Wall Street Journal, NewsCorp, and Mr. Murdoch, shortly,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Press has to learn to be truthful, and not rely on sources that probably don’t even exist.”
The Wall Street Journal declined to comment on Trump’s lawsuit threat.
The Trump administration earlier this month announced it would not release the files from the case against Epstein, who was federally charged in 2019 with sex trafficking minors. The court records released last year showed that Florida prosecutors in 2006 heard testimony that he had assaulted multiple teenage girls.
The choice not to release the files outraged parts of Trump’s base, which believes the government is shielding high-profile people involved in the criminal enterprise, and trusted the president to treat the case seriously in a broader fight against what they see as the corrupt elite.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said she would act Friday: “We are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts,” she wrote on X.
The grand jury testimony would constitute only a fraction of the evidence amassed by federal authorities – material broadly referred to by Bondi and others as the “Epstein files.” Bondi said earlier this year that she was going to review a list of Epstein’s clients. Her department later said there was “no incriminating ‘client list.'”
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The resulting political backlash has reverberated on Capitol Hill, with congressional Democrats delaying Trump’s efforts to slash $9 billion in federal spending to force votes on releasing the Epstein files. The votes would put their GOP counterparts in a delicate situation, caught between constituents demanding more transparency and a reluctant administration.
As the Wall Street Journal report circulated online Thursday evening, some prominent Trump allies who have been critical of the White House’s handling of the case in recent days rushed to defend the president.
“I’m calling bullshit on this Trump ‘birthday letter’ to Epstein,” Laura Loomer wrote on X. “It’s totally fake.”
Even Trump’s ally-turned-critic Elon Musk, who previously posted that Trump was listed in the Epstein files and continued calling for their release as late as Thursday night, downplayed the Journal report.
“It really doesn’t sound like something Trump would say,” Musk wrote of the account.
The Washington Post has not independently verified the letter described by the Journal.
Trump, for years, has sued news outlets over what he deems unfair coverage. Many of his suits have been dismissed, including claims against CNN, the New York Times and The Washington Post over columns and coverage that tied his 2016 campaign to Russian election interference. In his second term, Trump has had more success, reaching hefty out-of-court settlements with ABC and Paramount.
The Journal’s report said pages from the leather-bound birthday album were examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping him sexually abuse girls.
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
In a memo last week announcing that no further disclosures of Epstein materials “would be appropriate or warranted,” the Justice Department and the FBI said materials in the case were under court seal to protect victims. The sealed materials did not implicate any additional people in wrongdoing, the memo stated. “We found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials,” the report concluded.
Bondi stood by that assessment as recently as Tuesday, saying the memo “speaks for itself.”
The fight over the Epstein files has presented a challenge for Trump in part because he and some of his closest allies have spent years inflaming public suspicions about the case.
Epstein died before his case was adjudicated – leaving many in the public wondering if other powerful people in his orbit were guilty of similar crimes. His 2019 death while in federal custody was ruled a suicide.
Trump in recent years has given a platform to his supporters who have theorized, without evidence, that prominent Democrats were involved in Epstein’s crimes or culpable in his death. Those suspicions have landed on fertile ground, with a large share of the American public primed to mistrust government institutions.
Recent polling shows that a significant majority of Americans from both parties believe the government is withholding information about the case. The polling also shows, however, that not many voters have been following the issue closely, although search traffic shows attention has increased sharply in recent days.
For nearly two decades, starting in the 1980s, Trump and Epstein, both wealthy businessmen, partied together at their homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach, often surrounded by models, cheerleaders and beautiful women. In a New York magazine profile of Epstein in 2002, years before he was accused of criminal conduct, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years.
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“Terrific guy,” Trump said at the time. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Those words came back to haunt Trump during his first term in 2019, when Epstein was charged with sex trafficking, and then again this summer, as the case drew renewed attention.
“Anyone who has paid attention to Epstein-related matters could not be surprised by any information related to the closeness of their relationship,” said Jack Scarola, who represented several teenage girls who sued Epstein. “They clearly socialized with one another on a fairly regular basis.”
They had a falling-out several years before Epstein pleaded guilty in state court on a prostitution solicitation charge in 2008. Trump has said that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago but has never said when or why their relationship ruptured.
“The reason doesn’t make any difference, frankly,” he once said. In 2004, the two men competed against each other to land an oceanfront manse in Palm Beach that was being sold out of bankruptcy. A few months later, local police began investigating allegations that Epstein was sexually abusing minors.
“The island of Palm Beach is a very close-knit community of wealthy people that socialize at the same parties and in the same sphere of influence,” said Spencer Kuvin, who represented the 14-year-old girl who first alerted police to Epstein’s sexual abuse. “They socialized regularly for years and then they stopped.”
Kuvin called the Justice Department’s decision not to release any more information about the case “a whitewash.”
There were reams of videotape seized from Epstein’s homes by the FBI, he said, that have never been publicly explained.
“No one has never talked about what’s on that video or who is on that video and what it shows,” he said. “That evidence exists, and I assume someone at the FBI reviewed it to see if there were any crimes on it.”
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