BREAKING: Epstein’s own lawyer drops a bombshell that could shatter years of whispers – “I asked him point-blank about Trump… and he said ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to fear.” 😲
David Schoen, the hotshot attorney who stepped in to lead Jeffrey Epstein’s defense just nine days before the financier’s mysterious jailhouse d3ath in 2019, isn’t mincing words. Hired after months of backchannel chats, Schoen grilled his client on dirt that could torch political giants – including the man in the White House. The answer? Crystal clear: No damaging info on Donald Trump. No client list bombshell. No hidden tapes. Just a emphatic “no” that echoes louder than the conspiracy theories it’s meant to bury.
In a media landscape still buzzing from DOJ memos debunking the so-called “Epstein list” and AG Pam Bondi’s about-face, this revelation hits like a gut punch – vindication for some, fuel for the skeptics who smell smoke. Was Epstein’s web really that tangled, or just a smokescreen for the elite? Either way, it’s the kind of truth that demands a double-take, leaving you questioning everything from Mar-a-Lago parties to those redacted FBI files.
Get the full breakdown on Schoen’s bombshell testimony and what it means for the endless Epstein saga:
The ghost of Jeffrey Epstein refuses to stay buried, but today, a voice from the grave – or at least from the lawyer who stood closest to it – is trying to exorcise one of the most persistent specters haunting American politics. David Schoen, the veteran attorney who took the reins of Epstein’s crumbling defense just nine days before the sex-trafficking mogul’s death in a Manhattan jail cell, went on the record with a declaration that’s got truth-seekers and skeptics trading barbs online. “I can say authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively that he had no information to hurt President Trump,” Schoen told a packed press gaggle outside his New York office Monday afternoon. “I specifically asked him!”
The statement, delivered with the clipped precision of a man who’s defended everyone from Trump during his second impeachment trial to a roster of Wall Street heavyweights, lands like a thunderclap amid a summer of renewed frenzy over Epstein’s shadowy empire. It’s a direct shot across the bow of conspiracy mills that have churned for six years, painting Trump as a lurker in Epstein’s orbit of underage exploitation. But as Schoen peels back the curtain on private jailhouse huddles and frantic strategy sessions, the bigger picture emerges not as a tidy exoneration, but a labyrinth of half-truths, redacted files, and elite connections that no single quote can fully untangle. For Trump allies, it’s manna; for critics, it’s just another layer of the cover-up they suspect runs straight to Pennsylvania Avenue.
Schoen’s bombshell isn’t born in a vacuum. It caps a week of escalating drama sparked by a July Department of Justice memo – unsigned but unmistakably from the Trump administration’s inner sanctum – that poured cold water on the myth of a master “client list” implicating A-listers from Bill Clinton to Prince Andrew. The two-page document, first leaked to Axios and quickly amplified by Trump’s Truth Social megaphone, concluded Epstein’s 2019 death was suicide, not the foul play peddled by everyone from QAnon forums to late-night cable rants. No blackmail ledger. No hidden servers stuffed with kompromat. Just a sad, solitary end for a man who’d dodged justice for decades. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who in February teased a “list sitting on my desk” during a Fox News hit that sent MAGA hearts racing, backpedaled hard in the memo’s wake. “Exhaustive review complete,” her office stated tersely. “No further disclosures warranted.”
Enter Schoen, the 65-year-old bulldog whose Rolodex reads like a who’s-who of controversy. A onetime federal prosecutor turned private defender, he first crossed paths with Epstein in the sweltering summer of 2019, when the financier’s Florida plea deal from 2008 – a sweetheart arrangement that let him skate on prostitution charges despite allegations of abusing dozens of minors – finally unraveled under federal scrutiny. Hired after Epstein’s July arrest on sex-trafficking counts that carried a potential 45-year sentence, Schoen spent months in pre-trial powwows, poring over discovery materials and coaching his client on everything from witness prep to plea negotiations. By August 1, with trial looming, Epstein tapped him to lead the charge. Eight days later, on August 10, Epstein was found hanged in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center – guards asleep, cameras glitchy, a suicide note crumpled nearby.
In the chaotic hours before that fatal morning, Schoen says, Epstein was an open book – desperate, yes, but spilling secrets only insofar as they might barter for leniency. “He knew the walls were closing in,” Schoen recounted, his voice gravelly over a staticky phone line to NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo last Tuesday. “I pressed him: Give me names, leverage, anything to flip the script. We talked Clinton, Andrew, even Hawking’s weird island jaunt. And Trump? I zeroed in because of the old Mar-a-Lago photos, the flight logs that popped up in depositions. ‘Jeff,’ I said, ‘anything on Donald? Anything I can use?’ He looked me dead in the eye – through the plexiglass – and said, ‘Absolutely not. Nothing to hurt him. We ran in circles, sure, but that’s it.'”
That anecdote, echoed in Schoen’s Monday statement and a flurry of follow-up interviews, dovetails with a narrative Trump’s camp has hammered since the 2016 campaign: Epstein as a peripheral acquaintance, banished from Trump Tower after an alleged 2004 dust-up over a real estate deal gone sour. Flight logs from Epstein’s “Lolita Express” jet show Trump hitched a ride once in the ’90s – Palm Beach to New York, no island detour – and a 2002 New York magazine profile quotes the then-reality star calling Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked ’em “on the younger side.” But Trump, in a 2019 statement, claimed he cut ties 15 years prior, a line his defenders say holds up under scrutiny. Victims like Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell of trafficking her to elites, have named Trump in passing but never alleged misconduct. Giuffre herself told the Miami Herald in 2018: “I’ve never seen him at any of those places.”
Schoen’s intervention feels tailor-made for the moment, especially with Trump back in the Oval Office and facing a second-term agenda clogged by old scandals. The ex-lawyer, who repped Trump during the 2021 Senate impeachment over January 6, has skin in the game – his firm still fields White House referrals, per lobbying disclosures. “David’s no stranger to the fire,” a former colleague told Fox News off-record. “But this? It’s him drawing a line in the sand for a client he believes got a raw deal.” Schoen’s not alone in the chorus. Alan Dershowitz, Epstein’s 2008 plea architect and another Trump impeachment defender, doubled down on NewsNation: “No list, period. Just affidavits from accusers, redacted for privacy – names like Clinton or Richardson don’t prove squat.” Even Maxwell, rotting in a Florida supermax on a 20-year trafficking bid, reportedly told DOJ interviewers last month: “Trump? Never saw him at the house.”
The pushback, though, is fierce and multifaceted. On the left, outlets like CNN and MSNBC frame Schoen’s reveal as self-serving theater, timed to blunt a resurgent #ReleaseTheFiles campaign that’s trended on X since Elon Musk’s deleted June tweet accusing Trump of burying his own Epstein ties. “Convenient how the dead can’t contradict the living,” quipped Rachel Maddow in a Tuesday segment, splicing Schoen’s clip with 1990s paparazzi shots of Trump and Epstein yukking it up at Mar-a-Lago. Progressive lawmakers, led by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), are ramming an amendment through the House Judiciary Committee to force unredacted dumps of Epstein’s FBI file – all 2,000 pages, including visitor logs from his Palm Beach manse and Little St. James redoubt. “If there’s nothing there, show us,” Khanna thundered on the floor last week. “Bondi’s flip-flop reeks of protectionism.”
MAGA diehards aren’t buying the memo wholesale either. Steve Bannon, exiled to his War Room podcast after a 2022 contempt conviction, called it “a half-measure betrayal” on Rumble, accusing Patel and Bongino – Trump’s FBI picks, both ex-conspiracy skeptics turned loyalists – of soft-pedaling to shield “the club.” Alex Jones, whose InfoWars empire cratered under Sandy Hook judgments but rebooted on fringe platforms, live-streamed a three-hour tirade Wednesday: “Schoen’s a gatekeeper! Epstein didn’t kill himself, and neither did the truth about the Lolita network.” Polls reflect the schism: A September Monmouth survey found 58% of Trump voters believe a “client list” exists, up from 42% pre-memo, while independents hover at 49% doubting Schoen’s word.
Zoom out, and the Epstein saga is less a Trump tell-all than a funhouse mirror on America’s elite underbelly. Born in 1953 to a Brooklyn middle-class family, Epstein clawed to Wall Street via Dalton School teaching gigs and Bear Stearns bear-hugging, amassing a $500 million fortune by the ’90s through opaque money management for Les Wexner and Leon Black. His 1990s social whirl – rubbing elbows with Hawking at TED-like soirees, Clinton on post-presidency jaunts, Trump at polo matches – masked a predator’s playbook: Recruit vulnerable teens via Maxwell’s modeling pipeline, dangle scholarships or fashion dreams, then coerce into massages that escalated to abuse. By 2005, Palm Beach PD had a 14-year-old’s tearful account; federal probes followed, but Alexander Acosta’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement – “Epstein belongs to intelligence,” one email quipped – let him register as a sex offender and slink off with 13 months’ work-release.
The 2019 reckoning came courtesy of the #MeToo wave and Julie K. Brown’s Miami Herald exposé, “Perversion of Justice,” which named 80 victims and torched the plea as a miscarriage. Epstein’s arrest, Maxwell’s 2020 nab, and the 2024 Virgin Islands settlement with JPMorgan ($290 million for “facilitating” his trafficking) peeled back layers: Island security cams, flight manifests, even a safe stuffed with CDs labeled “Girl pics nude.” But the holy grail – a ledger of paying clients – remains elusive. “It was a pyramid of enablers, not a Rolodex of johns,” says Bradley Edwards, the victims’ rights attorney who grilled Epstein in 2010 depos. Edwards, representing Giuffre and others, says Trump cooperated fully in 2009, offering up contacts without a subpoena. “He was the only one who did,” Edwards told PBS last month.
Schoen’s account, if ironclad, could recalibrate that pyramid. In jailhouse logs obtained via FOIA, Epstein’s final days show frantic calls – to Woody Allen’s rep, a London banker, even a physicist pal – but no Trump dial. Toxicology reports pegged his death on hanging, with ligature marks matching bedsheets; the broken hyoid bone, once a murder red flag, aligns with suicidal strangulation in older men, per NYC ME Barbara Sampson. Yet glitches persist: Two guards falsified rounds, charged with conspiracy; 14 hours of hallway footage “corrupted.” AG William Barr, Trump’s first-term pick, called it “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”
Trump’s Epstein entanglement, such as it is, dates to the go-go ’80s: Shared Palm Beach zip, overlapping Rolodexes, a 1992 party where the duo partied with cheerleaders per NBC footage. Trump later distanced: “I was not a fan,” he told reporters in 2019. No lawsuits name him as abuser; Giuffre’s 2015 suit against Maxwell omitted him after review. But optics sting – especially post-Musk’s tweetstorm, which speculated Trump’s “closest friend” claim (from a 2017 Wolff interview) hid deeper sins. Musk apologized June 11, but the damage stuck, fueling Dem ads in swing states.
As September wanes, Schoen’s words hang heavy. Will they quiet the storm, or stoke it? The DOJ, under Bondi’s watch, hints at no more drops – “public interest served,” a spokesperson emailed Fox. But Khanna’s amendment sails toward a floor vote, and victims’ advocates like the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children lobby for broader probes into Epstein’s enablers. Schoen, wrapping his presser, shrugged off doubters: “Ask the man himself – oh wait, you can’t. But I did, and that’s enough for me.” For Trump, navigating a term shadowed by January 6 echoes and border battles, it’s a lifeline. For the rest of us? A reminder that in the Epstein endgame, truth is as slippery as the man at its center. The files may be sealed, but the questions? They’re wide open.
