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, then secretary general of the Council of Europe, suggesting he could pass on a message to Putin about how to handle Trump.
In the June 2018 email exchange, shared among hundreds released on Wednesday by congressional investigators, Epstein discussed how to understand Trump, who was then in his first term as president.
He indicated that Vitaly Churkin, Russiaâs ambassador to the UN, âunderstood Trump after our conversationsâ, and advised that Jagland could âsuggest to putin, that lavrov, can get insight on talking to me [sic]â as Vitaly Churkin âused toâ, before his death in 2017, POLITICO reports.
âLavrovâ appears to refer to Sergei Lavrov, Russiaâs veteran foreign minister.
Epstein had told Jagland, a former Norwegian prime minister, that understanding Trump âis not complexâ. Trump âmust be seen to get somethingâ, he said. Jagland responded that he would meet Lavrovâs assistant on Monday and relay.
More than 20,000 emails were released by lawmakers on Wednesday, initially from House Democrats, before Republicans on the House Oversight Committee shared a full cache of Epsteinâs correspondence with friends and associates.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing on Wednesday that the broader set of emails âprove absolutely nothing other than President Trump did nothing wrongâ.
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, former US Treasury secretary, emailed Jeffrey Epstein that day to ask whether âthe Russians have stuff on Trumpâ, the newly released documents show. He said âtoday was appalling even by his standardsâ.
Epstein said Trumpâs approach to the summit was âpredictableâ and assessed that Trump probably thought âit went super wellâ.
Correspondence shows the rift between Trump and Epstein. Trump in 2002 described Epstein as a âterrific guyâ he had known for 15 years. But in 2019, the president said that he had fallen out with Epstein âa long time agoâ. Leavitt said on Wednesday that Trump had kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club âdecades agoâ for being a âcreep to his female employeesâ.
In 2019, Epstein also emailed author Michael Wolff, who has written books about Trump, to claim that the US president âknew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine [Maxwell] to stopâ.
âtrump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever,â Epstein added.
Jeffrey Epstein died in prison that year. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
Leavitt said that the emails were âselectively leakedâ by House Democrats to âcreate a fake narrative to smear President Trumpâ.
House Republicans released a wider corpus to counter what they said was a Democrat effort to âcherry-pickâ documents.
