Emails released last week on the Epstein scandal dragged Trump’s relationship with Putin into the spotlight
The release of 20,000 documents relating to convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein has led to renewed speculation over the links between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
As Congress prepares to vote on the release of another tranche of Epstein files, experts say the documents indicate Russia may have obtained material to use to blackmail Trump.
The release by the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee last week included implications that the late financier sought to advise Russian politicians on how to understand Trump.
One email from June 2018, a month before the US President met Putin at a summit in Helsinki, indicated that Epstein had spoken about Trump with Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the UN, before the latter’s death in 2017.
“[Churkin] understood Trump after our conversations,” said the email from Epstein, sent to former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjorn Jagland.
“It is not complex. He must be seen to get something, it’s that simple.”
He added: “I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me,” apparently referring to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.
Another email from the release, sent in 2019, appeared to show Epstein telling a journalist that Trump “knew about the girls”, although it was unclear what this referred to.
In one vulgar email exchange from March 2018, Epstein’s brother Mark appears to tell the financier to ask Steve Bannon if Putin had “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba”.
“And i thought I had tsuris,” Epstein replies, using the Yiddish word for problems.
Epstein had information on Trump
Dr David Dunn, a professor in international politics at the University of Birmingham, told The i Paper: “We know what Epstein had things to say about Trump.
“We know that from the documents released in the last week Epstein thought that Trump was vulnerable and there is material out there that could be damaging to Trump.
“The interesting question that follows from that is did he share that view to the Russians, almost certainly, but did he share evidence to support that to the Russians, and as a consequence of that, do the Russians now have blackmail material on Trump?”
Despite Epstein and Trump’s one-time friendship, the US President said in July this year that he had fallen out with the financier after he “stole” young women who worked at his Mar-a-Lago beach club spa, including the late Virginia Giuffre.
Dunn said: “Part of it could have been about damaging Trump, who [Epstein] fell out with, but that isn’t actually what he was about.
“He saw the information that he had on Trump as being useful to him, to perhaps help Epstein himself avoid prosecution for his criminality.”
Dr Colin Alexander, a senior lecturer in political communications at Nottingham Trent University, described Epstein as an “enormous narcissist”, with no genuine friendships or allegiance to anybody.
He told The i Paper: “He would speak for or against any world leader as his will to power dictates. So, as much as we focus on the Trump aspect, because he is the incumbent President, I am pretty sure if we had the full release of the documents you would see him doing this against anybody.”
Trump’s behaviour with Putin ‘stokes speculation’
Dunn said how Trump and Putin have interacted in public could be indicative of the latter possessing blackmail, pointing at a private conversation the two had before the Alaska summit between the two nations in August.
“The fact that when they met in Alaska, they met for 15 minutes in Trump’s car without anybody else there. Was that the occasion that Putin was reminding him that the Russians have stuff on him?
“There is all this speculation, with no evidence for it, but the fact that Trump leaves himself open to that by having one-to-one conversations with Putin while no one else is there just stokes this speculation.”
The professor also noted Trump’s attitude to the war in Ukraine and Russia’s exemption from his reciprocal global tariffs as examples of his complex “multi-faceted” relationship with Putin.
“If you look at his tariff announcements on “Liberation Day” where the whole world was going to be tariffed on an equal basis, Russia got no tariffs… Russia seems to be in this special category, not as a pariah, but as a category where Trump will not go.
“Trump is almost being neutral in his language about the war, even blaming the Ukrainians on occasions rather than the aggressor Russia. All those things help to stoke the speculation that the Russians have something on him because if he’s not a Russian asset, he is certainly an asset to the Russians in the way he behaves.”
While there may be speculation on this, there is absolutely no evidence that Putin has anything on Trump.
Dunn also pointed to how Trump is portrayed in Russia as an example of the country’s attitude towards him, namely Russian state television broadcasting nude and blurred photos of Melania Trump in November last year, days after he won his second US election.
Dunn: “The confidence with which they act and talk about Trump; showing his latest wife nude and the way in which they consistently make fun of him on Russian TV, they act with a confidence that seems to suggest a sense of immunity in dealing with Trump.”
‘Everybody has got files on Trump’
Alexander emphasised that information derived from the Epstein files should be caveated in the context of “political point scoring”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Democrats last week of redacting the name of a sex trafficking victim in a set of released emails, who Epstein claimed Trump had “spent hours” with.
Leavitt claimed the victim was Giuffre, who had called Trump friendly without accusing him of any wrongdoing in her posthumous memoir.
Alexander postulated that the unreleased files could contain some reference to Trump’s sexual habits, but felt this would be irrelevant to Russia’s wider handling of the President.
“That could be a blackmail tool. But I think the Russian administration is a bit better than just dangling things like that in front of people. How effective is that if you’re engaged in trade negotiations around gas supply?
“I don’t think the Epstein files are the only source of information that Putin has on Trump.”
Putin is not known to have access to any more files than the documents available to the public.
Alexander said that it was standard protocol for intelligence agencies globally to psychologically profile world leaders in an effort to gain the upper hand, a practice that is no different in Moscow.
“Everybody had got files on Trump. If you were the foreign minister of a country and you didn’t have a file on Trump, you would probably be getting a P45 quite quickly.”
Dunn commended the intelligence operations of the Russians, and the use of “kompromat” – compromising material used to blackmail individuals and exert influence.
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He said: “They have a massive systemic intelligence effort that is incomparable to what other nations have and the belief that actually gathering material on people over the long term is a useful intelligence strategy to their wider geopolitics… The notion that the Russian embassy in Washington would seek to talk to people who knew Trump isn’t in itself surprising.
“Thereafter, the notion that they have gone to someone who is a convicted criminal and asked questions takes it to a new level, somebody who has fallen out with someone, who is known to use his relationship with people to his own advantage.”
Alexander added: “One thing we have learned about almost all people in the world is everyone’s got some sort of skeleton in their closet somewhere from some part of their lives.”
