t, gerrymandering, and emocratic areas to vote.
) two Senate seats, thanks to e victory was enough to save Senator John McCain’s deci- ope for 2020. I was especially in South Florida over a GOP of good work as president of rt campaign.
as Vegas to see former Senate 1o was battling cancer but still to fight on as long as he had lid two long sessions with the out Hillary. It was both exhila- out her and painful because I nd the problems as well as the Hillary was streamed on Hulu g her life and work. But it hurt ney wished America had seen She was there all the time, but view of them is blocked by
a film on the late King Hussein esperately ill with cancer, came lenge the Palestinians to make also weighed in, diplomatically, ying in a press conference that with nine U.S. presidents and as much for peace as I had, and ish the job. With his life ebbing him. Soon I would be marching 1. He was a brave, good man, and d by his son Abdullah, who along Palestinian by birth, have contin- peace and fairness in the Middle in CGI, and have been uncom- Hillary and me.
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Throughout 2018 and 2019, the Miami Herald had been pub- lishing stories about the financier Jeffrey Epstein, who in 2008 had been convicted and jailed in Florida for sex crimes. In part because of that rigorous journalism, Epstein was arrested again in 2019 for those and other crimes, this time by federal authori- ties in New York. The Herald stories and his rearrest raised questions about several well-known people’s connection to him, including me. They deserved answers and I gave them. In 2002 and 2003, he invited me to fly on his airplane to support the work of the foundation, and in return for flying me, my staff, and my Secret Service detail who always accompanied me, Epstein asked only that I take an hour or two on each trip to discuss politics and economics. He had just donated $10 million to Har- vard for brain research and he asked a lot of questions. That was the extent of our conversations. My only other interactions with Epstein were two brief meetings, one at my office in Harlem and another at his house in New York.
I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing. He hurt a lot of people, but I knew nothing about it and by the time he was first arrested in 2005, I had stopped contact with him. I’ve never visited his island. When it was suggested that I traveled there without my round- the-clock Secret Service detail, which would explain why there’s never been a record of me being there, in 2016 the Service took the extraordinary step of saying I had never waived protection and they had never been there. Another person reportedly said she’d seen me on the island, but that I didn’t do anything wrong. However, in early 2024, unsealed depositions showed that she’d only heard I was there but didn’t actually see me. Then there was one of my former staffers who fed the story to Vanity Fair. He knew it wasn’t true when he said it.
The bottom line is, even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward. I wish I had never met him.
In May, I went to the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, to address a symposium on the presidency. I worked
11/2024
