Trump Called Epstein Right After Winning 2016 Election Jeffrey Epstein’s brother shed more light on how close Donald Trump was to the sex trafficker.
Donald Trump was reportedly still in contact with Jeffrey Epstein as he ascended to public office.
Trump has claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted in 2009 for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But he rang his old “pal” in 2016, shortly after he won the presidential election, according to one of the sex trafficker’s closest confidants.
“After the election—you know I used to speak to Jeffrey regularly—and one of the calls we spoke, Jeffrey told me that Trump, it was after the election that Trump called him,” Epstein’s brother Mark told CNN Wednesday.
“And it was sort of like, can you believe this? Because nobody believed Trump was going to win. Trump was very surprised himself that he won, so Jeffrey said he called him like, ‘Can you believe this?’” Epstein continued, specifying that Trump had called his brother and not the other way around.
Trump and Epstein were friends for decades before their relationship reportedly dissolved over a real estate dispute in Palm Beach, Florida. Prior to his death, the child rapist described himself as one of Trump’s “ closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together on several occasions and were caught partying with underage girls in New Jersey casinos. Epstein was invited to attend Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and in 2002, Trump told New York magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy.”
“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,” Trump told the magazine at the time.
But the pair weren’t always simpatico, especially in the years leading up to Epstein’s death. In the same interview with CNN, Mark Epstein recalled a documented conversation between his brother and former Trump White House strategist Steve Bannon, in which the New York financier said he “stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”
“That’s a direct quote from Jeffrey,” Epstein told the network.
Bannon assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life. As part of that, Bannon conducted a series of interviews with Epstein between 2018 and early 2019, totaling about 15 hours of unseen footage.
“Crook” wasn’t the only bad word that Epstein shared about his longtime friend. In a 2017 exchange with Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and president of Harvard University, Epstein said that Trump was “dangerous” and was one of the worst people he’d ever met. “Not one decent cell in his body,” Epstein wrote to Summers.
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