(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Nearly 200 pages of documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s 2006 criminal investigation were unsealed this week, giving readers new details about how a Florida grand jury tanked its investigation into the multimillionaire sex trafficker.
The newly unsealed docs also led to misinformation being recycled about Epstein’s connections to former President Donald Trump. Upon the release, pro-Biden accounts began recycling debunked allegations from 2016 that Trump raped a 13-year-old girl named “Katie Johnson” who was trafficked by Epstein.
Not only is that allegation nearly a decade old—as opposed to being released this week—it was debunked by April 2020 in the then-new release, Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales; Spies, Lies & Blackmail.
https://t.co/jZuN3bHvQe pic.twitter.com/Pai1pD6td4
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) July 3, 2024
Indeed, Melissa Cronin, one of the authors of Dead Men Tell No Tale, investigated the Katie Johnson story and said she couldn’t find any traces of the mystery plaintiff.
“Cronin turned onto a dusty side street. She had beaten every other reporter there. But she didn’t find Johnson. Instead, the lawsuit’s address was a boarded up, abandoned home. Neighbors called it a ‘crack house,’ and said it had most recently been occupied by squatters,” Cronin reported in her book.
Cronin further stated that she canvassed the nearby town, and no one had heard of Katie Johnson. The phone number linked to Katie Johnson in court documents was unconnected, too, she reportd.
“It was clear the lawsuit was some kind of red herring. Speculation ran wild: Had the Clintons planted this to smear Trump and torpedo his campaign? Had Trump planted this in a canny bit of reverse psychology?” Cronin wrote.
“The truth was even stranger. The man behind the Katie Johnson lawsuit was a former Jerry Springer producer who called himself ‘Al Taylor,’ a.k.a. notorious gossip peddler Norm Lublow,” she added.
Lublow’s wingman was a conservative anti-abortion donor, Steve Baer, who also happened to be a ‘Never Trumper.’ Taylor claimed to have met Johnson and heard her story at a party several years before.”
Along with the recycled phony lawsuit, this week’s Epstein document dump also saw the recycling of allegations that Trump called Epstein twice in 2005.
While records do reflect Trump’s calls to Epstein, even the Washington Post didn’t treat those messages as smoking-gun evidence against the Trump. The Post admitted in 2019 that Trump was in a bidding war with Epstein for a property in South Florida around the time he left those messages.
BREAKING: Donald Trump Left Two Messages for Jeffrey Epstein in New Unsealed Docs
Is this True? No… it’s Fake and ghey…
• Late last night two screenshots flooded social media of Donald Trumps name in a call log, next to others making “massage appointments”
• LIE # 1
First… pic.twitter.com/SbgUI2J3mI— MJTruthUltra (@MJTruthUltra) July 2, 2024
“It is unclear whether Trump and Epstein were in contact after the house sale. That month, Trump left two messages for Epstein at his home in Palm Beach,” the Post reported in 2019.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
