Flight logs show Trump's longstanding ties to Epstein

But Kay Files' extensive reporting now shows the two shared a close social circle for nearly two decades, from private jet flights to high-profile parties, and that's only part of the story. Photos, flight logs, and court records

help reveal how long their personal history really was. Kay Files, Andrew Kaczynski is here with all of that, and it is some extensive research and reporting that you all did. You've chronicled this relationship between Trump and Epstein from the 80s to what,

mid 2000s is obviously when their contact probably cut off. What's the most striking thing that you find that kind of contradicts this, Donald Trump is no fan of

Jeffrey Epstein?

Yeah, so what we found, it really actually paints a portrait starting, as you said, in the 1980s up to the mid 2000s. It paints this portrait of a long enduring friendship. I think there were several associates who have called them best friends. Epstein himself said that he was Donald Trump's

closest friend for 10 years. And we looked through these hundreds of hours or hundreds of hours of video, hundreds of photos. We went through documents from court files, exhibits from lawsuits. So we really chronicled this whole relationship

through time. And one thing that I found really interesting was these flight logs from Epstein's private jet, which were part of that investigation into Ghislaine Maxwell. And they really tell you a story

of how close these guys are. Look at just a few of them. This is in 1993, for instance. This is the same year that we found as well that Jeffrey Epstein attended Donald Trump's wedding to Marla Maples. Trump flew on that plane four times with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell between Palm Beach,

where Mar-a-Lago is and where Epstein also owns a home. Let's fast forward then to 1994. Trump flew from Palm Beach to Washington, D.C DC with his then wife, Marla Maples, his daughter Tiffany, and a nanny before they returned to New Jersey that day. In August 1995, just he and Eric were on board with Epstein and Maxwell again.

They flew from Palm Beach to Tittleboro in New Jersey. And then in 1997, January, 1997, Trump flew with the pair from Palm Beach to Newark, New Jersey. All of these trips, eight in total, were documented in logs that I had mentioned were from that trial.

You also took a look at what Donald Trump himself has said about Jeffrey Epstein. What did you find?

Yeah, that's right. And one of the things that's always been so striking is that quote that he said in 2002 that we found in that New York Magazine article where he said he was a terrific guy, like beautiful woman just like him.

And then that quote where he says he likes many of them on the younger side, that was from an article entitled Jeffrey Epstein, International Money Man of Mystery in New York Magazine. Now, just two years later,

we were going through Donald Trump's book, and he had one called How to Get Rich. And then we wrote in his book that somebody named Mysterious Jeffrey had called him, and you could see it right there. That's the passage from his book. He says Jeffrey calls him.

But there was actually a lot of activity between these two in 2004. One of the things that was seized from Jeffrey Epstein's home during that initial investigation to him in the mid 2000s were message pads. And on those message pads, there were two, if you look here, two messages from Donald Trump in November of 2004. This is around the time the two of them actually were competing

to buy a property in West Palm Beach. Trump ultimately won out. He beat Epstein, and this is allegedly part of what made their relationship deteriorate.

Donald Trump's talked about that as well. Your review also, I mean, you looked also through tons of photos and tons of video of Trump and Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell together from Mar-a-Lago to Here in Manhattan walk us through kind of some of those moments that you found. Yeah Kate and these images

They really speak for themselves in November 1992 There's an image that a lot of people have seen and it's of Trump and Epstein and they're dancing there You can see with models. I think it actually you can see Ghislaine Maxwell's in the background if you look She was there just a second ago. Just a year later Trump we had found or previously Trump was at Epstein was at Trump's wedding in 1993. That's the photo there on the left. 1997 you can see in

that photo on the right that's them at a Victoria's Secret Angels event and then in 1999 this that I found in in archives, it was Trump and Epstein, and they're actually chatting at a Victoria's Secret fashion show. In 1997, he was also photographed with Maxwell at a fashion show. These guys attended a lot of fashion shows together,

it looks like. And then in February of 2000, there was an event in Mar-a-Lago that featured not only Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell, but also Prince Andrew was also at this event.

And these images were initially published in the Palm Beach Post in the year 2000. So there's a lot of public appearances, and it definitely undercuts Trump's claim that he was not a fan and they were sort of just distant acquaintances.

So what is the president saying about this?

So we reached out to the White House. We asked them about all of this, and it's on CNN.com. If you read the timeline, it's very extensive. They didn't respond to any of the detailed questions that we sent. But Stephen Chung, who is the communications director for the White House, sent along a statement and said, quote,

the fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep. So it's going to be interesting to see, because he says they weren't close. He says he was not a fan, but we continue to just see more and more revelations come out.

Yeah, and we've heard that similar statement from Stephen Chung many times about questions that linger. It's great to see you. Great reporting, as always. Thanks, Andrew. A key figure in the Epstein case, who later worked for President Trump, could soon be called to testify under oath. Alex Acosta was the prosecutor who infamously

gave Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal in 2008, a deal that allowed Epstein to serve minimal time in prison and a deal that shut down the federal investigation into his alleged sex-trafficking ring. Acosta then went on to serve as Trump's first-term labor secretary.

For reasons unknown, Acosta, the man who would know everything about the Epstein case, was left off the House Oversight Committee's list of subpoenaed witnesses. But tonight, a Republican on that committee,

Congresswoman Ana Paulina Luna, is telling the Palm Beach Post that calling Acosta to testify is not, quote, off the table. She also says at any time he can be called to testify. I'm going to speak to the top Democrat on that committee in a moment about plans to subpoena

Acosta, because even though dozens of victims had come forward at that point, Acosta, as I mentioned, let Epstein off easy, allowed him to plead guilty to just two prostitution-related charges. Epstein served only 13 months in a county jail and allowed and

was allowed to leave the jail nearly every day for 12 hours. The Department of Justice review later found that Acosta exercised poor judgment in the case, although he continued to

defend his actions years after the case was closed.

There was value to getting a guilty plea. You can always look at a play after the fact and say, should it have been the safe play or should you have gone for the big score?

This comes as President Trump is, many think, trying to change the subject from Epstein, as he threatens a full-on federal takeover of Washington DC. But it's Trump's own party who won't let Epstein go.

The American people are sick and tired of this government holding on to all these secrets. They're sick and tired of being lied to by the intelligence community and by a deep state. I hope that we don't have to wait 6070 years to find out what what really happened when it came to Jeffrey Epstein.

Kristen Holmes is out front at the White House for us tonight. Kristen, just as President Trump was trying to shift attention to DC, his takeover as of the Police Department,

there are members of his own party are making Epstein front and center again. They are, Kate. And just to be clear, I mean, President Trump, the White House, they don't want to be talking about this. And you talk about how he's been shifting the narrative. Of course, we've seen this happen time and time again as they've tried to get away from this story. But they were just starting to see some success in that. I mean, they'd been over a month of them being on the defensive when it came to the Epstein story. And I was actually told that they were

starting to circulate some of our polling that we put on air of how the searches for the Epstein case had dropped down. And they were sending that amongst themselves to try and show that there was no reason to insert this into the narrative again, to bring up the Epstein files in any kind of conversations about the transcripts between Blanche and Maxwell, something of course we had been reporting on that they were considering.

And now you have Republicans themselves coming out and saying, why don't we know more, talking about subpoenaing Alex Acosta. And even the vice president himself over the weekend in an interview bringing up Epstein again. I mean, most of the people who responded to that interview responded with release the Epstein files.

So they're having a hard time actually getting away from the story. But I can tell you, they want nothing to do with this. And the hope is that, of course, with this DC takeover, with the federalization, with the fact that they are so focused on that, and then moving into the Putin-Trump summit at the end of the week, that they can try again to move away from the story.

We'll see how successful they are.

Try, try again, I guess. Try, try again, I guess. Kristen, thanks so much for the reporting tonight.