Epstein tried to set up meeting with Kremlin to offer insight into Trump, newly released emails show

Jeffrey Epstein claimed he could give the Kremlin valuable insight into Donald Trump ahead of a controversial summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, newly-released emails show.

The paedophile financier messaged Thorbjorn Jagland, the secretary general of the Council of Europe at the time, suggesting he could pass on a message to Putin about how to handle Trump.

In the June 2018 email exchange, shared among hundreds of emails released Wednesday by congressional investigators, Epstein discussed how to understand Trump, who was then in his first term as president.

He indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, “understood Trump after our conversations,” and advised that Jagland could “suggest to putin, that lavrov, can get insight on talking to me [sic]” as Churkin “used to” before his death in 2017, Politico reports.

“Lavrov” appears to refer to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s veteran foreign minister.

Epstein told Jagland, a former prime minister of Norway, that understanding Trump “is not complex.” Trump “must be seen to get something,” he said. Jagland responded that he would meet Lavrov’s assistant on Monday and relay the message.

open image in gallery

More than 20,000 emails were released by lawmakers on Wednesday, initially by House Democrats, before Republicans on the House Oversight Committee shared a full cache of correspondence between Epstein and his friends and associates.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing on Wednesday that the broader set of emails “prove absolutely nothing other than President Trump did nothing wrong.”

At the Helsinki summit in July 2018, Trump contradicted US intelligence and appeared to defend Russia over allegations of interference in the 2016 election.

Larry Summers, a former US Treasury secretary, emailed Epstein that day to ask whether “the Russians have stuff on Trump,” the newly-released documents show. He said “today was appalling even by his standards”.

Epstein said Trump’s approach to the summit was “predictable” and assessed that Trump probably thought “it went super well.”

Correspondence shows the rift between Trump and Epstein. Trump in 2002 described Epstein as a “terrific guy” he had known for 15 years. But in 2019, the president said that he had fallen out with Epstein “a long time ago.” Leavitt said Wednesday that Trump had kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club “decades ago” for being a “creep to his female employees.”

In 2019, Epstein also emailed author Michael Wolff, who has written books about Trump, to claim that the US president “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine [Maxwell] to stop”. Epstein added that “trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.”

open image in gallery

Jeffrey Epstein died in prison that year. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.

Leavitt said that the emails were “selectively leaked” by House Democrats to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.”

House Republicans released a wider corpus to counter what they said was a Democratic effort to “cherry-pick” documents.