The newly released files also include notes and transcripts of interviews that federal investigators conducted with Mr. Epstein’s victims, some of whom describe interactions with Mr. Trump.
For instance,
handwritten notes from one interview in September 2019 — about a month after Mr. Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail — say that a victim, whose name has been redacted, recalled being transported in a dark green car to Mar-a-Lago to meet Mr. Trump.
“This is a good one, huh?” the victim recalls Mr. Epstein saying to Mr. Trump. The notes do not suggest misconduct by Mr. Trump.
In another file, Juan Alessi, who worked for Mr. Epstein,
is reported to have told investigators that Mr. Trump — along with other well-known individuals — had visited Mr. Epstein’s home.
Some of the new files are duplicates of emails and other records that the Justice Department or the House Oversight Committee released late last year. Those files show that, long after Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein’s relationship ended, Mr. Epstein
remained intensely focused on his former friend, which included looking for ways to leverage Mr. Trump’s political rise for his own purposes.
Some newly released files add to the sense that Mr. Epstein was keeping close tabs on the president. In 2018, for example, Mr. Epstein’s accountant
emailed him a link to a Reuters article about congressional investigations into Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank, which for years was
the president’s primary lender. At the time of the email, Deutsche Bank was also Mr. Epstein’s main bank.
In 2002, a woman named Melania wrote
a warm email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr. Epstein’s longtime associate who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of participating in his sex-trafficking operation. It is not clear if the sender of the email is the future first lady, Melania Knavs, who married Mr. Trump about three years later.
The email was sent shortly after New York magazine published a profile of Mr. Epstein that included a photo of him with Ms. Maxwell. The article included a now-famous quote from Mr. Trump in which he called Mr. Epstein a “terrific guy” and said that “he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”