Epstein case: Trump orders investigation into Bill Clinton

The head of the US Department of Justice said he will open an investigation into ties between the sex offender and the former president. Measure is announced after the revelation of emails involving Trump in a sex scandal.

US President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to his political adversaries, including former President Bill Clinton. The announcement comes days after the revelation of emails involving Trump himself in the New York financier’s pedophilia scandal.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said this Friday (14/11) – in a post on the X network, in response to a demand from Trump – that she appointed Manhattan federal prosecutor Jay Clayton to lead the investigation, ending a busy week in which Republicans in Congress revealed almost 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate and House Democrats seized emails that mentioned Trump.

“As with all matters, the department will address this with urgency and integrity to provide answers to the American people,” Bondi published, without providing specific information.

Trump, who was friends with Epstein for years, did not explain what alleged crimes he wanted the Justice Department to investigate. None of the men he named in a social media post demanding the investigation had been accused of sexual misconduct by any of Epstein’s victims.

Hours before Bondi’s announcement, Trump had posted on his Truth Social platform that he would ask her, the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Clinton and others, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman.

“Farsa de Epstein”

Trump, calling the matter “the Epstein hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans,” said the investigation should also include financial giant JPMorgan Chase, which provided banking services to Epstein, and “many other people and institutions.”

“This is yet another Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, with all arrows pointing toward the Democrats,” the Republican president wrote, referring to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in Trump’s 2016 election victory over Bill Clinton’s wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Asked Friday whether he should order such investigations, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One: “I’m the chief of police of the country. I have permission to do this.”

In a July memo on the Epstein investigation, the FBI said: “We have not uncovered evidence that could support an investigation against unindicted third parties.”

Attention diversion

The president’s demand for an investigation — and Bondi’s quick acquiescence — is the latest example of the erosion of the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House since Trump took office.

It is also an extraordinary attempt to divert attention. For decades, Trump himself has been the target of scrutiny for his closeness to Epstein — although, like the people he now wants investigated, he has not been accused of sexual misconduct by Epstein’s victims. None of Trump’s proposed targets have been charged with sexual crimes.

A spokeswoman for JPMorgan Chase, Patricia Wexler, said the company regretted its association with Epstein, “but did not help him commit his heinous acts.”

“The government had damning information about his crimes and did not share it with us or other banks,” she said. The company previously agreed to pay millions of dollars to Epstein’s victims, who sued the bank alleging it ignored warning signs about criminal activity.

Trip on Epstein’s jet

Clinton admitted to traveling on Epstein’s private jet but said through a spokesman that she had no knowledge of the late financier’s crimes. He was also never accused of misconduct by Epstein’s known victims.

Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, Angel Ureña, posted on Friday: “These emails prove that Bill Clinton did nothing and knew nothing. The rest is noise to distract from election defeats, disastrous shutdowns and who knows what else.”

Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida in 2008 to soliciting a minor for prostitution, but was spared a long prison sentence when the U.S. attorney in Florida agreed not to prosecute him over allegations that he had paid many other children for sex acts.

After serving about a year in prison and an outside work program, Epstein resumed his social and professional life until federal prosecutors in New York reopened the case in 2019. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The official conclusion on the cause of death was suicide.

Summers and Hoffman had nothing to do with either case, but both were friends of Epstein and exchanged emails with him. Those messages were among the documents released this week, along with other correspondence Epstein had with friends and associates in the years before his death.

Nothing in the messages suggested any wrongdoing on the part of the men, other than their association with someone who had been accused of sexual crimes against children. Summers, who served on Clinton’s cabinet and is a former president of Harvard University, previously said in a statement that he has “great regrets in my life” and that “my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error in judgment.”

On social media Friday night, Hoffman called on Trump to release all of Epstein’s files, saying they will show that “calls for baseless investigations against me are nothing more than political persecution and defamation.” He added: “I was never a client of Epstein and never had any involvement with him other than fundraising for MIT.”

Originally published by DW on 11/15/2025