President Trump said Monday that he didn’t like photos of former President Bill Clinton being released in the first tranche of the Justice Department’s file on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
He called it a “terrible thing.”
“I don’t like the pictures of Bill Clinton being shown. I don’t like the pictures of other people being shown. I think it’s a terrible thing,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I think Bill Clinton’s a big boy. He can handle it.”
The Justice Department began releasing the Epstein files on Friday to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law signed by Mr. Trump mandating the declassification and publication of nearly all federal records related to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who was accused of running an underage sex trafficking network.
The first large batch of files included photographs of Mr. Clinton reclining without a shirt in a hot tub with an unidentified woman beside him, another photo showed him with his arm wrapped around a young lady on Epstein’s private jet, and in another, he was swimming in a pool with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Epstein to abuse underage women.
Other photos show Mr. Clinton touring a 1940s war room in London; at dinner with Epstein, Maxwell and Mick Jagger, with Mr. Jagger cozying up to a woman whose face is blacked out; with Epstein in the Southeast Asian nation of Brunei.
Mr. Clinton has not been accused of wrongdoing connected to Epstein.
Mr. Trump is also in photos with Epstein, with whom he had a social relationship in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Trump and Epstein had a falling out in the early 2000s before Epstein was charged with sex crimes.
Mr. Trump said it was unfair that people “who innocently met Jeffrey Epstein years ago” are going to have their reputations sullied as a result of the Epstein document release.
“Pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein, but they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party, and you ruined a reputation of somebody,” Mr. Trump said. “So a lot of people are very angry that this continues.”
A Clinton spokesperson said the former president has nothing to hide.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” spokesperson Angel Ureña wrote on social media.
