Fox News host Sean Hannity has claimed President Donald Trump never flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane, despite Trump’s name appearing in the aircraft’s flight logs numerous times.
The conservative anchor was interviewing the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Kentucky Republican Rep. James Comer, on Hannity Tuesday evening after former president Bill Clinton and ex-secretary of state Hillary Clinton refused to appear before his panel to discuss their past interactions with the late pedophile.
Comer has signaled that he could push for contempt of Congress charges against the Clintons if they do not comply with his subpoena.
“I’m seeing pictures of Bill Clinton all over the place with young women in a hot tub, mystery women, women sitting on his lap in Jeffrey Epstein’s plane, swimming in a pool with a woman that looks pretty naked to me, Ghislaine Maxwell, and somebody else,” Hannity told Comer, in reference to some of the material published by the Department of Justice so far in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
“I think he has some explaining to do, considering so many people wanted Donald Trump to answer, no?”
“You’re exactly right,” Comer answered. “The American people are interested in this. They want to know the truth. We’re trying to provide the truth on the Oversight Committee.
“This subpoena wasn’t just issued by me. It was voted on unanimously by the Oversight Committee. Every Democrat in that committee voted for this subpoena.”
Unlike the Clintons, Comer has not subpoenaed Trump to appear before his inquiry, despite the latter being pictured with Epstein at Palm Beach social events prior to the falling out that brought an end to their friendship, which appears to have occurred around 2003.
“Donald Trump never flew on the plane, from what I understand, either,” Hannity then said to Comer, as their conversation continued.
But flight logs kept by pilot David Rodgers and released by prosecutors during the trial of Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and accomplice, in late 2021 name Trump as flying on the jet with his second wife Marla Maples and his children Eric Trump and Tiffany Trump on several occasions in 1993 and 1994.
More recently, among the files newly-released by the DOJ was an internal email sent by an unnamed assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York dating from January 2020, who wrote to colleagues reporting that records obtained from Epstein’s jet revealed Trump had flown in it “many more times than previously has been reported.”
There were at least eight such flights between 1993 and 1996 with Trump as a passenger, according to the message, with Maxwell present on at least four of the journeys.
That development appeared to contradict a claim Trump made on Truth Social in January 2024, while campaigning for the presidency, when he flatly declared: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.”
An individual’s name appearing in the logs or the files does not imply wrongdoing and Trump has not been accused of any crime in relation to Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York City jail cell in August 2019.
However, the president has faced persistent questions about their past relationship amid ongoing pressure to release the government’s files, which has caused a schism among his MAGA supporters.
The DOJ has so far – by its own estimate – published only around 1 percent of its investigative materials on Epstein on its website in two tranches, advising a federal judge earlier this month that it still has more than 2 million documents to review before they can be uploaded.
The 30-day deadline set by the act for full disclosure passed on December 19 last year.
