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Topics: Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, US News, Politics, Crime
Rhianna Benson
Topics: Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, US News, Politics, Crime
Following the release of what the Department of Justice claims are the 'final' round of Epstein files, one politician accused Donald Trump's name of appearing more times than Jesus' features in the Bible.
The allegation was made recently by Democratic Rep, Jared Moskowitz of Florida during a congressional hearing about the handling of federal files related to the crimes of the late sex offender.
A similar comparison was also made by senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, following his review of parts of the un-redacted documents that feature the US President, claiming the 79-year-old is mentioned 'over a million times'.
The staggering claim has since spread like wildfire across social media - though, many spectators have questioned whether it's actually a fact, or a piece of rhetoric being used by Trump's opponents to emphasise just how frequently he is referenced in the files.
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What we do know, is that Donald Trump's name comes up a lot in the 3.5 million files dropped on 31 January, following the November passing of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
This release - which Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche insists is the last of many - consists of 3,000,000 documents, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos, an alarming number of which featured explicitly or briefly mentioned A-listers, including the Republican front-man himself.
The exact amount of mentions Trump receives across all of the staggered release remains unknown.
Sky News reports that a search for the right-wing leader in the files returns 5,176 results, with over 38,000 varied mentions of his name. The New York Times, meanwhile, claims to have identified a surplus of 5,300 references to Trump in the publicly released files that reference, including mentions of his Mar-a-Lago, Florida property, and his wife, Melania Trump (as cited by ABC).
The father-of-five also appears alongside Epstein - who took his own life whilst awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019 - in a handful of photos contained within the files.
Despite Trump previously admitting to having been associates with the paedophile in the late 90s and early 00s, with the pair having run largely in the same celebrity circles, he maintains that he and Epstein fell out long before the latter's 2008 conviction against a minor.
The BBC reports that a vast proportion of references to Trump in the federal files appear to be unverified and without evidence.
"Some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election," the Justice Department also previously said. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false, and if they have a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponised against President Trump already."
In another denouncement earlier this month, Trump told attendees to a White House press conference: "I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. And, in fact, if you look at the DOJ, they announced, you know, they released three million pages.
"It’s like this is all they’re supposed to be doing. And, frankly, the DOJ, I think should just say, 'We have other things to do.'"
Back to the original postulation, however.
Despite the amount of times Trump's name appears in the filings, it would seem that the Biblical comparison made or alluded to by Moskowitz et al was simply intended to serve dramatic effect purposes.
Unless someone digs out their copy of the New Testament and manually reads it over, or whacks every page into a scanner and computer searches the term 'Jesus', then goes through every single Epstein-related email, flight log, image or document that mentions or features Trump - including the tens of thousands that the Justice Department had already redacted, it remains an unverified statistic.
On the former, there are also different terms to describe Jesus contained within the Bible - words like 'Almighty', 'Lord, 'Saviour' and 'Shepherd'.
This reality is further complicated when you consider that, in theological terms, Jesus is considered by many Christians to be one in the same as God.
So, again, we'd struggle to put an exact figure on this, and then compare it to Trump and his Epstein file appearances.