00:00A series of emails released this week showed Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced
00:12financier and convicted sex offender, claimed he could provide the Kremlin with
00:17valuable insight into then-President Donald Trump ahead of his controversial
00:22summit with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. The correspondence, made public by
00:29congressional investigators on Wednesday, exposes a tangled web of contacts bridging
00:34Epstein, international diplomats and the White House. Epstein reached out to Thorbjorn Jagland,
00:40then Secretary-General of the Council of Europe, suggesting he could convey a message to Putin
00:45on how to handle Trump. In a June 2018 email, Epstein elaborated on his perspective of Trump,
00:52who was in his first term as President, telling Jagland that understanding Trump
00:57is not complex. He added that Trump must be seen to get something.
01:03Epstein further referenced the late Batali Cherkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations,
01:09noting Cherkin understood Trump after our conversations and suggesting that Jagland
01:14relay similar guidance to Putin through Sergei Lavrov, Russia's veteran foreign minister.
01:20Jagland replied that he would meet Lavrov's assistant on Monday to relay the message.
01:25The email exchange is part of a larger cache of over 20,000 messages, initially released
01:32by House Democrats and later shared in full by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee.
01:38White House Press Secretary Caroline Livet dismissed the implications of the emails at a briefing on
01:43Wednesday. These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing
01:49wrong. And what President Trump has always said is that he was from Palm Beach and so was Jeffrey Epstein.
01:55Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey
02:01Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep. And this email you refer to with the name of a victim that was
02:07unredacted now and has since been reported on in this room, so I will go ahead and say it, Virginia Guffrey.
02:13And it was CBS's own reporting Ouija that recently wrote that Ms. Guffrey maintained, and God rest her
02:20soul, that she maintained that there was nothing inappropriate she ever witnessed, that President
02:25Trump was always extremely professional and friendly to her. And so I think it's a question worth asking
02:30the Democrat Party, and you should all go ask them after this briefing, of why they chose to redact that
02:35name of a victim who has already publicly made statements about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein
02:40and is unfortunately no longer with us. The emails also shed light on the highly scrutinized
02:46Helsinki summit in July 2018, where Trump appeared to contradict US intelligence agencies and downplayed
02:54allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Larry Summers, former US Treasury Secretary,
03:02emailed Epstein the same day, questioning whether the Russians have stuff on Trump and calling the summit
03:08appalling, even by his standards. Epstein, meanwhile, described Trump's approach to the meeting as
03:15predictable and suggested the President likely believed it went super well. The documents also
03:23reveal a stark rift between Trump and Epstein over time. While Trump referred to Epstein as a terrific guy
03:30in a 2002 interview, he distanced himself by 2019, claiming the two had fallen out a long time ago.
03:40Leave It said on Wednesday that Trump had kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club
03:45decades ago for being a creep to his female employees. Further correspondence shows Epstein reaching out to
03:53author Michael Wolff in 2019, asserting that Trump knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine Maxwell to stop.
04:02Epstein added,
04:03Trump said he asked me to resign. Never a member ever.
04:08Epstein died in prison later that year, while Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with
04:14him. The release of these emails connecting the President, Epstein and Russian officials reignites
04:22questions about the unusual intersections of power, influence and scandal surrounding Trump's first term.
04:30Even as the White House maintains that nothing untoward occurred, the details paint a provocative
04:35portrait of a President whose approach to Russia and his associations remain a subject of intense scrutiny.
04:44of the
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