Trump says America should move on from Epstein - it may not be that easy

Over the past two months, the US Department of Justice has released millions of documents related to its sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Now, the president wants the nation to move on - but will it?

Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche has said the government's review of the Epstein files - which was mandated by a law passed by Congress in November - is over, and there are no grounds for new prosecutions.

"There's a lot of correspondence. There's a lot of emails. There's a lot of photographs," Blanche said on Sunday. "But that doesn't allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody."

While the justice department's review may be over, on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives is pushing ahead with its own Epstein inquiry. Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are scheduled to testify later in February after Republicans threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress.

Members of Congress and Epstein's victims, meanwhile, are continuing to call for further disclosures – pointing to documents they say exist but weren't included in the released files.

It is yet another sign of just how difficult to shake this story has become for those, like President Donald Trump, who are clearly keen to move on.

For the moment, however, the president has emerged from the storm with no apparent lasting damage.

That is not true for some of the other rich and powerful figures whose ties to Epstein were more prominently detailed in the files, and who had continued contact with him long after he became a convicted sex offender in 2008.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, Lord Peter Mandelson, the former UK ambassador to the US, and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, for instance, have all faced professional and personal consequences for their connections to Epstein.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and tech multi-billionaire Elon Musk, among others, have had to explain emails and mentions of their name in the released documents.

The president, at the White House on Tuesday, said he thought it was "really time for the country to get on to something else".

"Nothing came out about me," Trump, who has consistently denied wrongdoing in relation to Epstein, said.

That, however, is not exactly accurate.

The president's name appeared more than 6,000 times in the documents. He was frequently mentioned by Epstein and his associates. The two men, both residents of New York City and West Palm Beach, had by all accounts a friendly relationship for much of the 1990s until, according to Trump, they fell out in the early 2000s.

One of those Trump mentions, in an email released in December, drew particular scrutiny.

"I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is Trump," Epstein wrote in the 2011 email to convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. "[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned".

In the latest batch of files, the justice department also released a list of unverified FBI tips, including some from 2016 when Trump was in the midst of his first presidential campaign. The list includes numerous allegations of sexual abuse made against Trump, Epstein and other high-profile figures.

The FBI tips, many of which were made without supporting evidence, temporarily disappeared from the justice department's document website on Saturday. That only served to fuel a feeling in some quarters that the department was working to protect the president.

"Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election," the justice department said of those particular files.

"The claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponised against President Trump already."

There have been a handful of new photographs of Trump, but none were any more revealing than images and videos that have long been in the public domain.

And Trump, who famously refrains from using email, has no documented trail of direct communication with Epstein. None of the new information substantively undercuts the president's assertion that his friendship with Epstein ended around 2004.

The closest thing to a political bombshell – a bawdy, suggestive note Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for inclusion in a 2002 birthday book – was released by the Epstein estate, not the government.

Trump has vehemently denied its authenticity.

Democrats have alleged the lack of damning evidence against Trump may mean the justice department withheld incriminating documents.

"You say all the documents are released," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote in a statement. "Does that include all of the co-conspirator memos, the corporate protection memos, the original Palm Beach Police Department reports, etc.?"

"Has every document that mentions the word Trump been released?"

One of Epstein's victims, Lisa Phillips, told the BBC that she and her fellow survivors were not satisfied by the justice department's actions on Epstein.

"The [department] has violated all three of our requirements," she said.

"Number one, many documents still haven't been disclosed. Number two, the date set for release has long passed. And number three, the DOJ released the names of many of the survivors, and that's not OK. We feel they're playing some games with us, but we're not going to stop fighting."

Anger and frustration among Trump's supporters over the administration's apparent reluctance to release all of its Epstein files – perhaps the most potent threat to the president's political standing – appears to have diminished with this wave of newly produced documents, however.

While some critics, like former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, continue to condemn the president, much of his Make America Great Again base appears to have moved on from the Epstein news – their attention divided between ongoing unrest in Minneapolis and the FBI's inquiry into allegations of voting fraud in the 2020 presidential election, among other headline stories.

That does not mean, however, that this story is over.

Democrats, citing legal requirements, are demanding access to unredacted versions of many of the released documents. And the Clinton testimony could create serious political fireworks.

New revelations independent of the justice department's actions could also rekindle the public's interest.

But perhaps more significantly, Democrats in Congress have promised to issue similar subpoenas for Trump and other Republicans to testify if they take control of the House of Representatives in November's midterm national elections.

The president may insist that it is time for the nation to move on, but years after Epstein's death, this saga has shown that it still has a life of its own.

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