Former President Bill Clinton flew multiple times on airplanes belonging to the late Jeffrey Epstein. But there is no evidence that Clinton visited the convicted sex offender’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands “28 times,” as President Donald Trump has claimed.
In a 2019 statement posted on social media, a spokesman for Clinton acknowledged that he traveled on Epstein’s planes during several international trips in 2002 and 2003, when he was no longer president. However, the statement said that Clinton never went to the Caribbean island that was Epstein’s primary residence.
But in recent interviews, Trump – who has been under public pressure to release files related to Epstein’s crimes – invoked Clinton’s connection to Epstein as Trump responded to questions from reporters about his own past friendship with the disgraced financier who was arrested on charges of sex trafficking of minors in July 2019 and died in prison a month later. The Justice Department concluded Epstein committed suicide. The federal indictment alleged that Epstein “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money,” between 2002 and 2005, the Justice Department said at the time. Epstein’s island was alleged to have acted as a hub for the sex trafficking of young women and underaged girls.
“And by the way, I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there, supposedly, 28 times,” Trump said when answering questions about Epstein while in Scotland on July 28.
Days earlier, during a July 25 press gaggle outside the White House, Trump made the same claim about Clinton when a reporter asked Trump if he was considering pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking conspiracy charges and transporting minors to engage in sex acts with Epstein. Maxwell was recently interviewed by Justice Department officials, and she has offered to testify about Epstein before Congress in exchange for an immunity deal or clemency from the president.
“Well, I don’t want to talk about that,” Trump said to the reporter who asked. “You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton, who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.”
We asked the White House for the source of Trump’s recent claim about Clinton, but we have not received an answer.
Trump may be incorrectly referring to the number of times that Clinton traveled on Epstein’s planes. In August 2019, Trump’s claim was that Clinton “was on his plane 27 times” — not that he had been to the island that often.
As we wrote in an article at that time, Clinton was on an Epstein plane 26 times during six trips between Feb. 9, 2002, and Nov. 4, 2003. That’s according to flight logs that were unsealed as part of a lawsuit brought by one of Epstein’s accusers. There were 26 flights because some of the six trips included multiple stops. Clinton traveled to places such as London, Hong Kong, Oslo, Beijing and several African countries.
But in that same article, we said: “There is no evidence that Clinton visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean. None of the flight logs list Clinton as a passenger on a Virgin Islands-bound plane.”
Business Insider later reported in July 2020 that Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, who died by suicide this year, wrote in an unpublished memoir, which was unsealed as part of a lawsuit against Maxwell, that she saw Clinton on the island. Also, one of Clinton’s former aides, Doug Band, told Vanity Fair for a December 2020 story that Clinton once visited the island in January 2003.
But in a July 2019 statement, Clinton’s office, while acknowledging his multiple trips on Epstein’s planes, said that Clinton “has never been to Little St. James Island.” The statement said that Clinton “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has been recently charged in New York.”
We’d note that Trump also was a guest on Epstein’s planes, taking at least seven flights with him during the 1990s, according to flight logs released during Maxwell’s trial. But as with Clinton, those logs do not indicate that Trump ever flew to Epstein’s private island.
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