Trump and His Lawless Liars Smear Clinton

Joe Conason
Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:49:27 -0800
Opinion

When the legal deadline arrived for the Justice Department to release all its files on the late sexual predator and shady financier Jeffrey Epstein, the country awaited new and significant information about his crimes. Instead, we saw a blizzard of blacked-out documents — and a strenuous campaign to smear former President Bill Clinton.

The "evidence" Attorney General Pam Bondi chose to distribute only served to underline the basic and exculpatory facts regarding Clinton. Releasing a set of old photographs of Clinton in various scenes with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, altered and stripped of any pertinent information about dates and locations, Bondi exposed her own rather obvious scheme to protect President Donald Trump.

The attorney general and Trump's other flunkies may well be aware that several of those photographs were published years ago, in full context. But they're playing three-card monte games with the public. Like every other actual fact about Clinton's connections with Epstein, they confirm the former president's previous statements — and explode Trump's slanders and libels on those topics.
Updated: Mon Dec 22, 2025

When the legal deadline arrived for the Justice Department to release all its files on the late sexual predator and shady financier Jeffrey Epstein, the country awaited new and significant information about his crimes. Instead, we saw a blizzard of blacked-out documents — and a strenuous campaign to smear former President Bill Clinton.

The "evidence" Attorney General Pam Bondi chose to distribute only served to underline the basic and exculpatory facts regarding Clinton. Releasing a set of old photographs of Clinton in various scenes with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, altered and stripped of any pertinent information about dates and locations, Bondi exposed her own rather obvious scheme to protect President Donald Trump.

The attorney general and Trump's other flunkies may well be aware that several of those photographs were published years ago, in full context. But they're playing three-card monte games with the public. Like every other actual fact about Clinton's connections with Epstein, they confirm the former president's previous statements — and explode Trump's slanders and libels on those topics.

In 2002 and 2003, years before Clinton knew or could have known about the shadowy financier's abuse of underage girls, he flew more than two dozen trips on aircraft owned by Epstein. (Many similar donations of jet time have been made by wealthy individuals, including Google mogul Sergey Brin and others.) The sole purpose of those trips was to advance the Clinton Foundation's efforts to curtail the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Some of the trips included Epstein, his enabling paramour Maxwell and an entourage of Clinton Foundation staff, Secret Service agents and other foundation donors. The destinations included multiple stops in Africa, as well as Russia, China, Norway, the United Kingdom and Singapore.

It is worth mentioning here that independent experts credit the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative with saving well upward of 11 million lives since its founding. Much of that was achieved in cooperation with the President's Emergency Program for AIDS Relief, founded by then-President George W. Bush with Clinton's help, which Trump and Elon Musk have sought to destroy. The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS estimates that a permanent discontinuation of PEPFAR-supported programs could result in an additional 6.6 million new HIV infections and 4.2 million AIDS-related deaths globally between 2025 and 2029.

Now the selective drip of Epstein files material is not just than an act of bad faith but an avoidance of releasing the full files as required under the law. Let's consider a few of the photos they released. By redacting the faces of people next to Clinton, they sought to tie him to Epstein's victims, including underage girls.

One such picture shows Clinton with a blonde woman perched on the armrest of an airplane seat, her face blacked out. From previous coverage in tabloids, we know that she is Chauntae Davies, who served as a flight attendant on Epstein's plane during one of Clinton's Africa trips. While she later lodged accusations of abuse against her former employer, Davies has only described Clinton as a "perfect gentleman."

Other misleading images showed Clinton with the late performer Michael Jackson and singer Diana Ross, with small children whose faces are blacked out. A White House press aide implied that the redactions meant those kids were victims of sex crimes, when in fact they were offspring of Jackson and Ross. Those photographs are available from Getty Images — with accurate captions — as the DOJ could easily have learned.

Providing accurate information to the public was not Bondi's purpose here. An abject and lawless official, she was serving up and endorsing her master's mendacious narrative about Clinton, regurgitated by Trump in person and on social media countless times over the past decade.

Trump has claimed, for example, that Clinton repeatedly visited Epstein's private Caribbean island, where many young women were reportedly violated. Trump's false accusations are belied not only by flight manifests and Secret Service records but by Epstein's emails, Maxwell's statement to the deputy attorney general, and Trump's own chief of staff Susie Wiles in her recent Vanity Fair interviews.

Having directed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to investigate Clinton's ties with Epstein yet again, Trump should brace himself to hear that he has been lying for years. But he already knows that.

On social media, Clinton spokesman Angel Urena succinctly expressed what is really at stake for Trump in this distraction ploy. The former president, he said, wants Trump to order Bondi to release any remaining files, photos or grand jury minutes pertaining to Clinton, because he has nothing to hide.

"Refusal to do so," he continued, "will confirm the widespread suspicion the Department of Justice's actions to date are not about transparency but insinuation — using selective releases to imply wrongdoing about individuals who have already been repeatedly cleared by the very same Department of Justice, over many years, under Presidents and Attorneys General of both parties."

There can only be one purpose behind that misdirection — to protect Trump, the man known as "Epstein's best friend," from the reckoning he has sought to forestall for years.