When colleagues brought up former President Bill Clinton’s involvement, Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino helped put the latest reporting on Jeffery Epstein into context on Thursday morning. He reminded them that while Epstein has a large network of associates, being among them doesn’t necessarily mean that there is anything “sordid” about knowing him via Mediaite.
In a case involving Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s partner, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for her role in the sex trafficking scheme, 900 pages of court documents were unsealed on Wednesday. Bill Hemmer of America’s Newsroom asked Gasparino if there were any new revelations in these documents.
Gasparino replied that there was “nothing” new, nothing that wasn’t already known, revealed in these new documents.
“This is a story about who Jeffrey Epstein knew,” he said, describing how the disgraced financier “knew so many people in power” in Wall Street, academia, and politics that it was hard to “do justice to his Rolodex,” which also included celebrities as well as billionaires who were at the top of major financial companies like JP Morgan.
“This doesn’t mean they were in a sordid relationship,” Gasparino emphasized. “This means they were in a business relationship with a guy who was a high net worth broker.”
“I’m not excusing his crimes,” he said, but “a lot of these people had no idea,” and that perception was easy to maintain after Epstein’s initial jail sentence was so short, just a year, so there was a “rationalization” that “he made a mistake” and “he might have slept with somebody” he didn’t know was underage, not that he was “that type of guy.”
“That’s really the mystery,” said Gasparino. “Why did he only get a year the first time?”
“Also, President Clinton is named,” said Hemmer’s co-anchor Dana Perino. “There is this one line that says, that at one point Epstein says ‘Clinton likes them young.’ Is that new? It’s sort of been out there? Also is that something significant that we should be aware of?”
“That Clinton likes them young?” Gasparino replied. “What does that mean? Here’s something really interesting, if you go back in time — and I did a lot of research on this, Donald Trump was quoted as saying that — you know, Donald Trump and Epstein were friends at one point. In Palm Beach. And Trump was commenting about Epstein, I’m paraphrasing.”
Perino called for the producers to play a video clip of Trump talking about Epstein, in which the ex-president said that he had a “falling out with [Epstein] a long time ago” and was “not a fan of his.” After it played Gasparino said “that’s not the quote” and he was thinking of a different clip. Trump also kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-lago, banning him, prior to his death.
