Emails reveal Epstein sought Kremlin meeting to offer ‘insight’ on Trump

Late US financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein attempted to set up a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister to offer “insight” into US President Donald Trump in the run-up to his first summit with Vladimir Putin in 2018, newly released emails have shown.

According to correspondence published on Wednesday and reported by POLITICO, Epstein wrote to then-European Council Secretary General Thorbjørn Jagland on 24 June 2018 suggesting he could brief Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on the US president.

“I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me”, Epstein said in the email, sent around three weeks before Trump met with the Russian leader in Helsinki. Jagland responded that he was meeting with Lavrov’s assistant the following day and would pass on Epstein’s message, though it is unclear whether anything came of the proposal.

In the email exchange, Epstein also indicated that he had discussed Trump with Vitaly Churkin, who served as Russia's permanent representative to the UN until his death in 2017. “Churkin was great. He understood Trump after our conversations”, Epstein wrote, adding that the US president “must be seen to get something” in diplomatic negotiations.

Immediately after the controversial Helsinki summit, for which the US president was criticised for dismissing claims of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers contacted Epstein to ask whether “the Russians have stuff on Trump” as the meeting was “appalling even by his standards”.

“My email is full with similar comments. Wow”, Epstein replied. “I’m sure his view is that it went super well. He thinks he has charmed his adversary. Admittedly he has no idea of the symbolism. He has no idea of most things”, he continued, calling Trump’s behaviour in the summit “predictable”.

The email exchange was part of over 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate released by US lawmakers on Wednesday that shed light on the extent of the disgraced financier’s political connections — and in which Epstein appears to suggest Trump may have had some knowledge of his wrongdoing.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Democrats from the House Oversight Committee, who published three of the email exchanges before Republicans responded with a much larger batch, of selectively leaking emails “to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump”. Trump himself labelled the emails a “hoax”.

Trump’s ties to Moscow have long been a source of public debate, with the US president’s efforts to establish his businesses in Russia reportedly dating back to the 1980s. In 2016, the US intelligence community concluded that Russia had interfered in that year’s presidential election to boost Trump’s campaign.