Jeffrey Epstein's handwritten notes reveal bid to leverage Trump links before death

Jeffrey Epstein, just before his death, tried to leverage dirt on US President Donald Trump to salvage his freedom from the Manhattan Metropolitan Centre, according to a New York Times report. Trump was then in his first term in the President's office. The New York Times obtained previously unreleased handwritten notes, which had broken sentences and phrases, including ideas for a federal prosecutor to investigate Trump, written by Epstein in his cell during the 35-day stint inside the New York prison in 2019.

“Trump is a total con artist,” he wrote, adding the phrases “smoke & mirrors” and “never had money.” He suggested that former Trump organisation CFO Allen Weisselberg "knows all" and suggested the President's “college transcripts” should be publicly released. “Not a stable genius,” he wrote. The circumstances of Epstein's death and his connection to a wider network of paedophiles have consumed Congress and the Trump administration. The newly published message obtained as part of a sprawling investigation into Epstein's final days does not raise any new allegations against the President.

However, the new reports underscore the sex traffickers' awareness of the political sensitivity surrounding their connections. Trump's name appears thousands of times in the millions of tranche released by the DOJ under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Epstein's attempt to provide potentially useful information in exchange for the possibility of clemency did not appear to have worked. The report suggests that he wasn't able to offer up anything that wasn't already known.

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Trump and Weisselberg were investigated for forgery. In 2022, the longtime Trump Organisation CFO pleaded guilty to running a 15-year scheme that evaded taxes on off-the-books compensation. He spent around 100 days inside Rikers Island in 2023. In 2024, he also pleaded guilty to two counts of felony perjury for lying under oath. Trump was also found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in a landmark New York criminal trial. But none of it relates to Epstein and his sex-trafficking network.

Though several unverified allegations mention Trump in the files related by Epstein, they do not put forward any verified allegations of criminal wrongdoing. In his notes, Epstein feared being known as the “billionaire paedophile in jail”; prison guards told his cellmate that “if he beat the s*** out of me, they wouldn’t file a report,” he wrote. He also wrote that he was “told to get Depends instead of being able to use the toilet.” It also shows desperation and contempt for his famous friends who publicly distanced themself from him and his crimes.