Trump told Palm Beach police chief ‘everyone’ knew about Epstein, Maxwell was ‘evil’

President Trump, in a 2006 call, bashed Jeffrey Epstein and called Epstein’s procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, “evil,” the now-retired cop recounted to FBI agents in 2019, according to a document released by the Department of Justice.

Trump called the then-Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter “to tell him ‘thank goodness you’ [are] stopping [Epstein], everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter told the FBI in October 2019, according to the FBI document, known as a 302.

Reiter’s name is redacted from the 302. But the document identifies the interview subject as the person who had been Palm Beach’s police chief at the time of the department’s investigation of Epstein, who was Reiter.

Reiter told FBI agents that Trump revealed that Epstein’s associate, Maxwell, was Epstein’s “operative,” and that Trump said “she is evil and to focus on her,” according to the report. Trump told Reiter that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there,’” the report said. Trump also told Reiter that he threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club. That stands in sharp contrast to what Trump told reporters in July 2019 when he was asked if he had any knowledge that Epstein had molested girls. “No, I had no idea. I had no idea,” Trump said at the time. Reiter, who retired as chief in 2009, confirmed to the Miami Herald that he was interviewed by FBI agents in 2019. He said the conversation with Trump happened in July 2006.

An FBI official denied that Trump called Reiter. “We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the President contacted law enforcement 20 years ago,” the official said. The new information about Trump’s 2006 comments comes as Maxwell was summoned to appear by video Monday before the House Oversight Committee. Maxwell, 64, is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking related to her and Epstein’s sex abuse of minors. She invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to testify before the committee, although her lawyer noted that she is “prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump.” Trump has not said whether he would or would not pardon her. When asked about her arrest in July 2020, Trump said, “I just wish her well, frankly.” Maxwell’s attempts to appeal her conviction have been unsuccessful, but she has filed a legal petition arguing that her trial was unfair.

The circumstances behind Reiter’s 2019 FBI interview have also not been reported before. The FBI agents came to Palm Beach at the former police chief’s request to pick up two boxes of Epstein case files that were found in the home of Joe Recarey, the lead detective who handled the case. Recarey, 50, died of natural causes in May 2018, and his widow moved out of the area. Reiter notified the FBI after the boxes were turned over to him, the report said.

He told the FBI that one of the boxes contained an imaged copy of a laptop computer from Epstein’s kitchen counter that had phone messages on it that Reiter had not seen before, the FBI report said. The report did not say what else was in the boxes. The interview is four pages, mostly focusing on Reiter’s summary of the Palm Beach Police Department’s investigation into Epstein, which began in 2003, when the police received a report that young women were seen going in and out of Epstein’s waterfront mansion at 358 El Brillo Way on the island of Palm Beach. The police set up surveillance at Epstein’s house, but upon checking the identities of two of the women who were visiting, found them to be adults. The case was closed because police found no evidence of a crime at the time. Then in March 2005, Palm Beach police received a call from a woman reporting that her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been molested by Epstein. Upon interviewing the girl, she told them that other girls were being sexually assaulted as part of an organized scheme in which high school girls were being recruited to give Epstein massages that led to assault and, at times, even rape, according to Reiter’s account, which is also backed up by court files.

More surveillance was done on Epstein’s house,” Reiter told the FBI agents. “Some kids were observed, prepubescent with braces and backpacks coming from school…one employee said there were dozens of girls in one day. The [Palm Beach Police Department] then put together a case and brought it to the state’s attorney office.” Reiter explained that he was upset when the state attorney, Barry Krischer, rebuffed police efforts to arrest Epstein in 2006. After Krischer declined to prosecute, Reiter took the unusual step of writing a later asking Krischer to recuse himself from the case. When Krischer refused, Reiter then took the case to the FBI. The case was turned over to the Miami U.S. Attorney’s office in early 2007. Epstein hired a team of high-powered attorneys, and private investigators, whom Reiter said followed him and other police officers assigned to the case, and picked through their trash in order to find something they could use to discredit them.

Epstein lived less than a mile from Mar-a-Lago and, around 2000, Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, recruited 16-year-old Virginia Giuffre, who worked at Mar-a-Lago’s spa as an attendant. Giuffre, who died by suicide last year, has said that Maxwell approached her while she was working at the spa and offered her a job as a masseuse for a wealthy man. It was Maxwell who introduced her to Epstein.

Palm Beach police, however, said no victim they had interviewed indicated they were recruited or abused by Maxwell, who by 2006 had largely been absent from Epstein’s Palm Beach home.

Trump has said that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after learning he was trying to steal his employees. But the President has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein crimes. In 2002, in an interview with New York Magazine, Trump called Epstein a “terrific guy” and noted “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” In 2019, Epstein also wrote an email in which he said of Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls, as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” That email was contained in a cache of documents the House Oversight Committee obtained from Epstein’s estate pursuant to a subpoena in December. Reiter told the FBI agents that by 2007 he became troubled by the fact that the federal prosecutors still had not arrested Epstein, so he requested a meeting with then-Miami U.S. Attorney, Alex Acosta, to find out why. Acosta told him that the defense attorneys had frustrated prosecutors and that there was “a lot of interest from higher up.”

Reiter told the FBI he felt “there was a hurry to make this case go away.” Shortly after meeting with Acosta, he then found out on television that Epstein had been given federal immunity. Federal prosecutors gave Epstein federal immunity in 2007 in exchange for him pleading guilty in state court to two counts of solicitation, one involving a minor. He served 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail, most of it on work release that allowed him to leave the jail every day to go to his office in West Palm Beach. In 2018, the Miami Herald published an investigation into the case, “Perversion of Justice,” which detailed how Epstein and his lawyers were able to convince federal prosecutors to limit the scope of Epstein’s crimes – to just one case involving one 16-year-old girl. At the time, they had nearly 40 underage victims.

Reiter said he was devastated upon learning about the plea deal. “It was very disappointing that the system failed in this case,” Reiter told the FBI.