The most consequential aspect of the spat between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is likely to be the Tesla boss’s angry tweet which claimed that Donald Trump was “in the Epstein files” and that this was “the reason they have not been made public”.
The conspiracists who helped elect Trump twice (three times, if you swallow their nonsense) are obsessed with what might be in files seized by the FBI from disgraced financier and convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein shortly before he killed himself while in jail facing sex trafficking charges. Believing that evidence may exist that implicates high-profile Democrats and left wing celebrities, they were excited last month when Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi claimed the FBI were poring over “tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn”.
Yet the president’s pick as FBI director, Kash Patel, now says he has no evidence like that. He has yet to mention, however, whether the files contain photographs shown by Epstein to journalist and author Michael Wolff while he was researching a trilogy of books about Trump.
Last year Wolff claimed that the pictures, taken in the late 1990s, were in Epstein’s safe and showed Trump in Epstein’s Palm Beach house surrounded by young women. “And the young girls are topless, and in some of the pictures, they’re sitting on his lap. And then there’s one I especially remember where there’s a telltale stain on the front of Trump’s pants, and the girls are pointing at him and laughing,” Wolff said.
“And I would say it was likely that they would have been there when the FBI, Trump’s FBI at that point, not to put too fine a point on it, raided Epstein’s house and took the contents of the safe in 2019.”
