Mark Epstein has addressed a now-viral email that he sent his brother Jeffrey about Donald Trump.
Newly released emails showed Mark telling his brother in 2018 to ask former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon if Russian President Vladimir Putin has “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.”
Internet users quickly speculated that “Bubba,” a nickname Bill Clinton has been known by, was referring to the former president.
But Mark told the Daily Beast Sunday that he had not been referring to Clinton in his email to Epstein, a convicted child sex offender who died while awaiting trial in 2019.
“They were simply part of a humorous private exchange between two brothers and were never meant for public release or to be interpreted as serious remarks,” Mark wrote in a statement sent to the Daily Beast. “For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former President Bill Clinton.”
The 71-year-old artist-turned-property developer said, “Any attempt to conflate that reference with President Clinton, or to read sweeping implications into them, misrepresents both the purpose and the tone of the original correspondence.”
He declined to answer further questions about the reference and the identity of “Bubba.”
His spokesperson, Ali Clark, told The Advocate that Bubba is “a private individual who is not a public figure.”
In the back-and-forth between Epstein and Mark, which was made public by Congress as part of a 26,000-page cache of documents obtained from the pedophile’s estate, Mark wrote, “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?”
“And I thought I had tsuris,” Epstein responded, using the Yiddish word for trouble.
“You and your boy Donnie can make a remake of the movie Get Hard,” Mark emailed back.
The new batch of emails have reopened the Epstein files controversy for Trump and suggest that he may have known more about Epstein’s conduct than he has acknowledged.
In one email, written to author Michael Wolff in 2019, Epstein stated that Trump “knew about the girls.” In another email, he offered to show reporter Landon Thomas Jr. photos “of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen.”
Epstein also labeled Trump, who was his friend from the 1980s until their falling out in the mid-2000s, as “dirty” and a “maniac.”
Trump has responded to the fallout from the new documents by ordering Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate Epstein’s links to Clinton and other perceived enemies—while keeping his own name off the target list.
When reached for comment on the “Bubba” reference and the emails, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast, “Those emails prove literally nothing. Democrats and the mainstream media are desperately trying to use this hoax as a distraction to talk about anything other than the President’s many wins, including the Democrats getting utterly defeated by President Trump in the shutdown fight. We won’t be distracted, and the entire Administration will continue fulfilling the promises the President was elected on, including cutting the Biden-era price hikes.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Clinton for comment.
