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It was a famous question Howard Baker asked as the Watergate scandal engulfed Richard Nixon.
“What did the president know and when did he know it?” the Tennessee senator proclaimed.
Much, as it turned out, and Nixon preferred to face impeachment and certain conviction.
Now, more than half a century later, the same question is being asked about another president.
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President Donald Trump appears to know much more about the Jeffrey Epstein case than he lets on. (José Luis Magaña/AP Photo)
It is important to say at the outset that the long-awaited Jeffrey Epstein files have not produced a shred of evidence that Donald Trump personally engaged in sexual misconduct.
But he knew much more than he lets on.
Thanks to relentless reporting by the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown, who has covered this story since Epstein’s 2008 sentencing deal, Trump knew exactly what was going on between the reprehensible pedophile and the underage girls.
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The scoop is based in part on a 2019 FBI interview with former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter.
In the summer of 2006, Reiter said, Trump called him and told him that everyone in Palm Beach and New York knew about Epstein’s sexual activities with minors.
He also said that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s facilitator and ex-girlfriend, who is now serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, was “evil” and that the focus should be on her.
“Thank God you’re stopping this, everyone knows he’s been doing this,” Reiter recalled Trump saying, referring to an investigation into Epstein that the boss had launched three years earlier.
What’s more, the boss says Trump told him that he “was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and that ‘he got out of there.'”
Trump reportedly sounded the alarm about Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell nearly two decades ago. (Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
During this period, a woman called authorities and said that Epstein had sexually abused her 14-year-old stepdaughter, as had other girls at the same high school, who were allegedly giving Epstein massages or being subjected to assault or rape, according to this account.
Reiter took the case to the state’s attorney, who declined to prosecute him, and then to the FBI.
In a 2019 email before he committed suicide in prison, Epstein wrote: “Of course he knew about the girls since he begged Ghislaine to stop.”
That same year, when asked by reporters if he knew about Epstein’s depraved pedophilia, the president said, “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.”
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The absurd deal: Prosecutors gave Epstein federal immunity in exchange for pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation, one of which involved a minor. He completed 13 months of service.
Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, working with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, yesterday named six people whose records were inexplicably redacted. That protected them from public disclosure.
“There were six rich and powerful men that the Department of Justice hid for no apparent reason,” Khanna said.
Khanna and Massie were allowed to review the raw files for two hours.
Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., were allowed to view raw files for two hours. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
Khanna named them in the House, where he has immunity:
“Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, CEO of Dubai Ports World and billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, who was labeled an accomplice by the FBI.
“Now my question is, why did Thomas Massie and I have to go to the Department of Justice to have the identities of these six men made public? And if we find six men they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are hiding in those 3 million files.”
That is indeed the question. Why were they protected from public exposure? How many more are there?
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Maxwell, summoned by Republican James Comer’s Oversight Committee, invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself and indicated she would continue to do so unless Trump granted her clemency.
Trump had dropped hints when he and Epstein were still friends. In a 2002 interview with New York magazine, Trump called him “a fantastic guy…he’s even said to like beautiful women as much as I do, and a lot of them are younger.”
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The Epstein files have been politically toxic for Trump since the start of his second term. And now the plot thickens.