If President Donald Trump sought to use Friday’s Epstein file dump to deflect attention from his own relationship with the late sex offender, as critics allege, he may have succeeded. Since the release, the public gaze has been fixed not on Trump but on one of his great ideological foes — Bill Clinton.
The former president features in many of the photographs related to Jeffrey Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, that were released by the justice department on Friday under a law signed by Trump last month.
Trump, who himself enjoyed a well-publicised friendship with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s, had long sought to keep the documents sealed. But his team has since appeared to recognise the political benefit of using them to tarnish the reputation of a prominent Democrat.
Over the weekend Trump’s supporters in the media and blogosphere quickly took up that guilt by association line, singling out pictures of Clinton that appeared to underscore his closeness to Epstein.
“Tubba Bubba” ran the front-page of the New York Post, above a picture of Clinton relaxing in a hot tub next to a woman, her face blacked out. “Bill has some explaining to do,” the standfirst read.
“It’s pretty rich how the Democrats falsely accused President Trump of being a pedophile, only for the Trump DOJ to release Epstein files that show Bill Clinton skinny dipping with a pedophile in the pedo’s pool,” the rightwing influencer Laura Loomer wrote on X.
“Maybe now the media will stop obsessing over these files.”
The White House press team, meanwhile, hammered the point home.
“We did see something,” Abigail Jackson, a Trump spokeswoman, wrote on X, above the photograph of Clinton in a hot tub. “Just not what you wanted.”
The former president’s aides said the images were a diversionary tactic aimed at shifting attention from Trump’s own ties to Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while under indictment on federal charges of sex trafficking minors.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” said Angel Ureña, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff.
“This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever.”
The data dump highlighted how the Epstein case has become a weapon in America’s escalating ideological war, with the left using the files to discredit Trump while the right deploys them to attack his adversaries.
They also underscore the claims of Democrats and others that Trump is using the DoJ to pursue his political opponents, a charge which the current president has himself repeatedly levelled at the Biden administration.
Todd Blanche, the president’s personal defence attorney, was installed as deputy attorney-general in March and since then the DoJ has pursued criminal charges against some of Trump’s most high-profile enemies — chief among them former FBI director James Comey.
Last month, Trump ordered the department to investigate any ties between Epstein and prominent Democrats, including Clinton. Attorney-general Pam Bondi then directed Jay Clayton, the US attorney in Manhattan, to undertake the review.
In their response to the release of the Epstein files on Friday, Democrats passed over the many images of Clinton, focusing instead on how heavily redacted the records were. Several documents of 100 pages or more were entirely blacked out.
There was also anger that the justice department failed to release the full cache. Under a law passed by Congress and signed by Trump last month, Bondi had been required to release all unclassified records, communications and investigative materials related to Epstein within 30 days — yet only a fraction were made public by the deadline.
Adam Schiff, Democratic senator from California, said on X that the attorney-general should be summoned before the upper chamber’s Judiciary Committee and explain “this wilful violation of the law”.
“The Trump justice department has had months to keep their promise to release all of the Epstein files,” he said. “Epstein’s survivors and the American people need answers now.”
In a troubling sign for the White House, some on the right reacted to the file dump with similar scepticism. Kyle Seraphin, a rightwing podcaster and former FBI agent, reposted a tweet by Bondi praising Trump for leading the “most transparent administration in American history”, saying: “One gets the feeling that this is tongue-in-cheek at this point . . . ”
Clinton was not the only public figure featured in the documents released on Friday. Other photographs showed Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson, Richard Branson, Queen Elizabeth II’s second son Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the veteran newsman Walter Cronkite.
But Clinton features perhaps most prominently. He is shown aboard a plane with his hand on Michael Jackson’s shoulder, with Diana Ross looking on; with Mick Jagger and an unidentified woman, her face redacted; with the Hollywood actor Kevin Spacey; and in a swimming pool with Ghislaine Maxwell. There is also an image of Clinton on an aeroplane with his arm around a woman — her face blacked out — wearing a white camisole.
The pictures, which were displayed prominently on conservative news websites, including Fox News, do not necessarily imply wrongdoing. But Trump supporters seized on them as evidence of Democratic hypocrisy.
“This Epstein File drop is absolutely damning for Bill Clinton. He’s littered all throughout it,” said Benny Johnson, a conservative commentator, on X.
Ureña, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, responded that there were two groups of people in the whole Epstein saga — those who “knew nothing and cut [him] off before his crimes came to light” and those who “continued relationships with him after”.
Clinton, he insisted, was in the first group.
“No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that,” he went on. “Everyone, especially Maga, expects answers, not scapegoats.”
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