Trump is named 1,500 times in the Epstein document dump. Here's why that number doesn't matter
CBC
Donald Trump's name appears at least 1,500 times in documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein made public Wednesday by Republicans in the U.S. Congress, according to an AI-assisted search of the material by CBC News.
The vast majority of the mentions, however, appear to reveal nothing new or substantive connecting Epstein — the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 — to the man who is now U.S. president.
Republicans on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released what they described as 20,000 pages of documents received from the Epstein estate.
The documents include copies of emails Epstein sent and received, as well as deposition transcripts, book excerpts and news clippings.
CBC News analyzed the files using the Google application Pinpoint, a tool that converts image files into searchable documents.
While the analysis shows Trump is mentioned more than 1,500 times, a significant proportion of the references are in news reports from 2016 onward, covering Trump's first campaign for the presidency and his first term in the White House.
For instance, Trump's name appears dozens of times in a lengthy catalogue of social media posts about the 2016 Brexit referendum results.
Trump's name also appears throughout another document in the release: the 100-page public financial disclosure report the newly inaugurated president filed to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics in 2017. It was attached to an April 2018 email exchange between Epstein and author Michael Wolff.
One of the strangest items in the document dump is a 20-second video of a dog vigorously chewing the head of what appears to be a Trump stuffed toy, while a Hillary Clinton stuffed toy sits nearby apparently untouched.
It was not immediately clear why the video was in the tranche of files from the Epstein estate, although the documents included a range of email attachments.
Earlier on Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three emails out of the 20,000-plus pages that they claimed "raise serious questions about Donald Trump and his knowledge of Epstein's horrific crimes."
One was a January 2019 email to Wolff in which Epstein claimed Trump "knew about the girls."
The email does not say what exactly Trump knew. Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the leak of emails selective and an attempt "to create a fake narrative to smear" the president.
Other emails released by the Republicans suggest that Epstein tried in 2018 to pitch himself to the Kremlin as a source of insight on Trump.
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