Days before Friday’s deadline for the release of materials from the government’s Epstein files, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, in an interview published in Vanity Fair, said that President Donald Trump “is in the file” but that “he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
The comments were made during a series of 11 candid interviews the magazine conducted with Wiles over several months, and were published three days before the Friday deadline established by the Epstein Files Transparency Act for the release of the government’s remaining files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019.
Trump, who had a friendship with Epstein until they had a falling out around 2004, has said that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in 15 years at the time of Epstein’s 2019 arrest.
Along with other high-profile individuals who were associated with Epstein, Trump’s name was mentioned nine times across the hundreds of Epstein file pages that were made public earlier this year, including his being listed in Epstein’s “contact book.”
Trump’s name has also appeared in documents produced by Epstein’s estate and released by lawmakers, along with photos of Trump and other prominent individuals.
Wiles, one of Trump’s most trusted advisers, told Vanity Fair that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane … he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever — I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”
Wiles also disputed claims Trump has made, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous island numerous times.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles listens to President Donald Trump speak with reporters, after he disembarked Air Force One on his return from Dover, Delaware, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, December 17, 2025.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
“There is no evidence” those visits happened, Wiles told the magazine, saying that “Trump was wrong” about there being evidence in the files incriminating the former president. Clinton himself has denied wrongdoing.
Wiles, in the Vanity Fair interview, dismissed the idea that the Epstein saga could hurt Trump politically.
“The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time — because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles told the magazine. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”
Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, in which Epstein was accused of trafficking and sexually abusing young women and girls on his private island estate and elsewhere. And he has insisted that the narrative about him and the Epstein files is a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats.
“Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office following Epstein’s 2019 arrest. “I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years … I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you. I was not a fan of his.”
After initially promising to make the government’s Epstein files public, the Justice Department and FBI announced in July they would not release further records from the Epstein investigation, prompting blowback from many of Trump’s MAGA supporters.
The FBI and DOJ said they found no evidence that Epstein had kept a “client list” of celebrities and politicians, even though Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February that an Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now,” then a week later released binders marked “Epstein Files: Phase 1” that contained little new information. Bondi responded by accusing the FBI’s New York office of withholding information about the Epstein investigation, and demanded that the office “hand over all records in its possession relating to Epstein.”
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles told Vanity Fair regarding Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
Regarding Trump supporters like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who repeatedly called for the release of the Epstein files prior to joining the administration, Wiles told Vanity Fair, “For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”
In a social media post after the Vanity Fair piece came out, Wiles did not dispute her quotes but pushed back on the story’s context.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” Wiles wrote on X. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
Asked if he had full confidence in Wiles, Trump fully backed his chief of staff, telling the New York Post, “Oh, she’s fantastic.”
