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.
More than five dozen items belonging to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis are one step closer to returning home.
Wild boars have been declared "a pest in all circumstances" by the Alberta government effective Dec. 1, meaning new restrictions have been placed on keeping them in captivity and hunting them in the wild.
Health Canada has issued a public advisory after a convenience store in Toronto sold fake erectile dysfunction drugs to customers.
More details are now available about how a farmer's field in south London will be transformed to shelter up to 60 homeless people starting in January.
Ontario’s police watchdog is investigating after an officer involved shooting at Danforth Go station early Saturday morning, said Toronto police.
Thousands are without power across Newfoundland this morning due to severe weather conditions, including high winds and cold temperatures.
The federal government says roughly half of the workers expected to be laid off at Algoma Steel will be eligible to be rehired by the end of next year.
Almost a year and a half after pieces of the Mont-Blanc were discovered during dredging in Halifax harbour, plans are taking shape for what to do with some of the wreckage from the famed ship involved in the Halifax Explosion.
Ontario’s police watchdog is investigating after an officer involved shooting at Danforth Go station early Saturday morning, said Toronto police.
Montreal officials will hold a ceremony to mark the 36th anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre today.
The City of Regina's proposal to build a roadway through the McKell Wascana Conservation Park should be discarded, local conservationists say.
A holiday event that began in 2020 during the pandemic with three floats on pickup trucks has now become one of Kelowna’s big winter events, drawing thousands to the city’s downtown core.
WARNING: This story details allegations of child abuse.