In a conversation with reporters, Trump talked about Epstein. "And by the way, I never went to the island. And Bill Clinton went there supposedly, uhh, 28 times," he says. "I never went to the island, but Larry Summers, I hear, went there. He was the head of Harvard. And many other people that are very big people. Nobody ever talks about them," Trump goes on.

"I never had the privilege of going to his island," he then says.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he ended his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein because the disgraced financier “stole” young women working at his Mar-a-Lago spa too many times — including a 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre.

Speaking aboard Air Force One while returning from his five-day combination golf holiday and tariff summit in Scotland, Trump was asked about comments he’d made over the weekend suggesting that he’d banned the pedophile power-player from his Palm Beach club for hiring away employees.

He confirmed that Epstein “took people that work for me” and did so again despite being admonished not to poach Mar-a-Lago workers by Trump.

“He took people that work for me, and I told him, don’t do it any more. And he did it. I said, stay the hell out of here,” he said.

Pressed further on whether the workers poached by Epstein included Giuffre, then a Mar-a-Lago pool locker-room attendant whose groundskeeper dad got her a job there, Trump confirmed she was among the poachings.

[...]

Giuffre met Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, she told the BBC, and she offered her an interview to train as a massage therapist. Giuffre was ultimately recruited and groomed by Maxwell and raped by Epstein on numerous occasions after being ostensibly hired as a “masseuse” by the pedophile.

The president’s new claim about the reasons why he ended a years-long friendship with Epstein contradicts previous statements made by him over the years concerning why he cut off contact with the notorious sex offender, who was arrested in March 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges and died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial.