Trump breaks silence on Epstein files – to defend Bill Clinton

Washington: Donald Trump defended former US president Bill Clinton and bemoaned the destruction of people’s reputations for associating with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in his first substantive remarks about the so-called Epstein files following their partial release on the weekend.

Clinton, a former Democratic president known to have been friends with Epstein in the early 2000s, featured heavily in photographs made public by the Department of Justice after it was forced to release all documents relating to its investigation into Epstein’s abuse of girls.

“I like Bill Clinton. We’ve always gotten along … I hate to see photos come out of him, but this is what the Democrats – mostly Democrats and a couple of bad Republicans – are asking for,” Trump said on Tuesday (AEDT).

“[There are] photos of me too, everybody was friendly with this guy [Epstein]. Either friendly or not friendly. But he was around, he was all over Palm Beach and other places … I don’t like the pictures of Bill Clinton being shown. I think it’s a terrible thing.”

In a digressive, eight-minute answer to a question about Epstein, Trump lamented that the saga was intended to distract from his administration’s achievements – including his announcement on Tuesday about a new “Trump-class” warship to be made for the US Navy.

He also bemoaned the damage any association with Epstein could do to someone’s reputation.

“Bill Clinton’s a big boy, he can handle it. But you probably have pictures being exposed of other people that innocently met Jeffrey Epstein years ago, many years ago,” he said.

“A lot of people are very angry that 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 ruin a reputation of somebody.”

Shortly after the release of the files, Clinton’s spokesman Angel Ureña said his boss had been associated with Epstein before he was convicted of sex offences.

Trump on Tuesday also singled out Clinton-era treasury secretary Larry Summers, who resigned from the board of Open AI and took leave from his teaching position at Harvard University after his emails with Epstein were exposed in recent disclosures by US Congress.

“The problem is a lot of Democrats have been caught up in the web,” the president said.

It was an about-face by Trump, who last month ordered the Justice Department and FBI to investigate Epstein’s links to prominent Democrats, including Clinton and Summers.

Trump, who was also friends with Epstein before a falling out in the mid-2000s, did not feature prominently in the seven bundles of documents released so far, prompting Democrats to accuse the Trump administration of a cover-up and to flag contempt proceedings against Attorney-General Pam Bondi.

The president broke his silence on the Epstein files at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, where he announced that the US Navy would build a new “Trump-class” warship as part of a White House push to modernise the service’s surface fleet and restore domestic shipbuilding.

A poster displayed at the event featured an artist’s rendering of a sleek warship dubbed the USS Defiant, cutting through choppy waters with a laser beam shooting from its deck and smoke billowing from a target in the background.

Next to the ship was a picture of Trump raising his fist in the air in a near copy of the defiant pose he struck minutes after surviving an assassination attempt in 2024. Another poster shows a rendering of the vessel sailing by the Statue of Liberty.

“We’re desperately in need of ships,” Trump said. “Some of them have gotten old and tired and obsolete, and we’re going to go the exact opposite direction.”

The navy is also pursuing a new frigate based off the Legend-class cutter as it looks to shore up a surface combatant fleet that is one-third the size of what the service needs.

The new ships are part of Trump’s “Golden Fleet” bid to revive US shipbuilding and address shortfalls in smaller ships exposed by recent military operations around the world.

Overhauling shipping has been one of the top defence-related priorities, and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said contractors need to accelerate development of new weapons systems or lose government contracts.

Trump had already linked himself to another new weapons system, the F-47 stealth, a nod to his place as the 47th president. He’s also put his name on the newly anointed Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.

The state of US shipbuilding is vastly behind China’s production rate and the Trump administration is prioritising investing in its shipbuilding industry to narrow the output gap.

With Bloomberg

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