Bannon has '16 hours' of Epstein interviews — with some about Trump — locked in vault: report
The Justice Department released another batch of documents on Monday from the investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. According to one reporter, this release had many more mentions of President Donald Trump than previous releases.
The White House has yet to respond to the latest batch and researchers continue to sift through them. However, a key email document includes details about Epstein's alleged suicide.
About two weeks before Epstein's death, a memo detailed his psychological state.
“We have supporting memorandums from the responding officers who indicated they observed inmate Epstein with a makeshift noose around his neck,” one email said.
The Washington Post revealed late Monday that documents show prison officials planned to move Epstein to a cell with Cesar Sayoc, a supporter of Trump's, who was sentenced in 2019 to 20 years in prison after he mailed explosive devices to Democratic officials and media personalities.
One internal Justice Department email from Jan. 2020 from a U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York mentioned flight records as part of the DOJ's case against Ghislaine Maxwell.
“For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” the email says.
Between 1993 and 1996 Trump was a passenger on eight flights on the so-called "Lolita Express," the name used to describe Epstein's plane. There were four plane trips in which Trump was also with Maxwell.
The memo found Trump in the logs, "Including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case."
Those flights also included possible witnesses for Maxwell's trial. In one flight, Trump was with Epstein and a 20-year-old woman.
“We’ve just finished reviewing the full records (more than 100 pages of very small script) and didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road,” the prosecutor wrote.
The hope was to obtain a subpoena for Mar-a-Lago for employment records that could be used in the Maxwell trial. Maxwell was accused of recruiting young women from Trump's country club to work for Epstein.
“I have not been able to locate anyone who recalls [redacted] working at Mar-a-Lago in 2000,” the federal prosecutor wrote.
CNN's crime and justice reporter, Katelyn Polantz, reported Tuesday morning that the first batch may not have had a lot of Trump information, but that the second trove certainly does.
"It's quite clear that Donald Trump is all over these documents," she began before citing the same memo referenced by the Post.
"In this one, there is already one very illuminating email sent during the presidency of Donald Trump," she said about the memo.
"It's a pretty revelatory document," said Polantz. "And Kate, this is just one page right now. This is just one page. There are many, many more documents," they're sifting through.
"But Donald Trump is in the latest batch of the Epstein files," Polantz.
Being mentioned in the Epstein files does not equate to any wrongdoing, and Trump has denied that he did anything illegal.