While publicly calling for a third-party candidate to challenge Donald Trump during his first presidency, an influential public relations strategist says she “courted” Jeffrey Epstein in the hopes of extracting compromising information about the president to stop him from running again.
Juleanna Glover, a prominent figure in the conservative Never Trump movement, exchanged several dozen emails with Epstein, arranged for two in-person meetings and held at least three phone calls with the late sex offender over 15 months, according to a recent Politico analysis of the so-called Epstein files released by the Department of Justice.
Glover — who previously advised John McCain’s presidential campaign and served in George W. Bush’s administration — wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post on Wednesday that she had hoped to connect Epstein with a prominent journalist who could publish “revealing” information about the president.
She said she came “excruciatingly close” and “almost got it done” before Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on trafficking charges in 2019.
Days after his death, The New York Times published “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People” by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James B. Stewart, who wrote that “many prominent men and at least a few women must be breathing sighs of relief that whatever Mr. Epstein knew, he has taken it with him.”
Trump — whose name has appeared thousands of times in the files — socialized with Epstein throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Epstein once described himself as the president’s “closest friend.”
The president has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing, and one’s appearance in the Epstein files does not suggest otherwise.
Trump has repeatedly denied any allegations of misconduct and insists he cut ties with Epstein years before the wealthy pedophile was under investigation.
He has characterized efforts to release files connected to Epstein probes as a “hoax” perpetuated by Democratic officials to distract from his agenda, and Trump has sued The Wall Street Journal over the publication of an alleged letter to Epstein, a story he labelled “false, malicious and defamatory.”
“Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein, no matter how much Trump-deranged individuals living in fantasyland want to pretend otherwise,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Independent.
“And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him,” she added.
The messages provide a further glimpse of Epstein’s expansive contacts list as members of Congress continue to investigate the sex offender’s alleged connections to a broader network of powerful figures.
Glover, who was a PR consultant for Elon Musk at the time, has denied trying to rehabilitate Epstein’s image.
According to messages in the Justice Department’s Epstein files, the author Michael Wolff had repeatedly suggested Epstein meet with Glover while Musk battled a Securities and Exchange Commission probe and rumors of drug use as he tried to take Tesla private.
She agreed to meet Epstein in 2017, she said, “to see if he would talk to a reporter about whatever he knew about Trump,” Glover wrote.
Glover met him a second time, in 2018, “not because I wanted Epstein’s help or advice, but because I wanted him to have faith in my strategic recommendations,” she said.
In August 2018, Epstein and Glover exchanged several emails and calls about Musk, who was looking for wealthy investors to buy out shareholders, according to documents in the Epstein files.
“If you are advising re: sovereign wealth funds looking to help a prominent company go private, let me know if I can help w any approp additional information,” she wrote to Epstein on August 12 2018.
Epstein sent her several potential candidates for Tesla’s board, including Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Barack Obama’s former White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, among others.
He also offered to “help shape your story” and gave Glover advice on how Musk should talk on the record to reporters about Tesla, emails show.
“Will try,” Glover replied.
The Independent has requested comment from Musk’s Tesla.
That same month, Glover floated some “radical combinations” of “third party thinkers” to challenge Trump, including former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, former Republican Governors Larry Hogan of Maryland and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, and Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates, among others, emails show.
Throughout their interactions, Glover continued to suggest that Epstein meet with Stewart, the journalist from The New York Times.
In a statement to Politico, Stewart said he was not aware at the time of any relationship between Glover and Epstein and didn’t know about anything Epstein might have told her.
“As I would with any potential source, I reached out to Epstein because I’d heard he was recruiting board members for Tesla at the behest of Musk,” he said.
“Epstein wanted to meet in person, so I went to his townhouse. (I subsequently wrote about that encounter.) I don’t recall using anything Epstein had to say in any story about Musk. He certainly didn’t ‘shape’ any story I was involved in,” he said.
In his column from 2019, Stewart wrote that Epstein tried to enlist him to write his biography. He declined.
“I almost got Epstein to tell his story to a formidable reporter, one not likely to let Epstein slither away from revealing what he knew about ‘powerful people,’” Glover wrote in The Washington Post.
“My efforts, episodic but serious, over the course of more than a year, foreshadowed what has become a national obsession: What did Jeffrey Epstein know about Donald Trump?” she wrote.
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