Jeffrey Epstein’s brother says the ‘Bubba’ in viral email is not Bill Clinton • FRANCE 24 English

It’s good to truth or fake. Donald Trump inevitably is part of our next feature. Emerald Maxwell joins us over by the bit. Good evening to you, Emerald. Great to see you as always. An old photograph of the current US President Donald J. Trump and the former President Bill Clinton has gone viral alongside one of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails that has attracted scrutiny on social media. Explain what this is all about. Well, Mark, we can see the photo being shared on Reddit and Tik Tok amongst others. Here it is on Tik Tok. Um, and it claims to show Donald Trump groping then President Bill Clinton. It’s gone viral after the US House Oversight Committee released a trove of Jeff Jeffrey Epstein’s emails last week, including emails pertaining to Trump. And this photo is being shared alongside those rumors. So, let’s look at one claim at a time. The photo is in fact a real photo of the two uh and we can see it here on Reuters and also on Wikipdia. And we know from from the Wikipdia that it was taken in 2000 at the US Open by photographer William Vaster. He was the White House photographer at the time. So fact checkers at Snopes got in touch with him about the photo and he told them that he didn’t see any inappropriate contacts. Trump was simply signaling to others in the room to gather for a group photo that included him, his guests, and Clinton. What you’re seeing in the still photo is just an outtake between uh handshakes and gestures. And indeed, other photos from that day show the two shaking hands uh or standing with other people um as well as with uh uh Trump’s wife Melania and apparently sharing a joke. So these photos were released in 2016 when Trump was running against Hillary Clinton in a very acrimonious race for the White House, but the batch of photos show an earlier time around 2000 when Trump and Bill Clinton were friendly. So in short, it is a real photo, but no, Trump is not groping Clinton in it. Mark. Okay, glad we clarified that. It’s worth pointing out too that Trump Republican today, of course, once upon a time gave money to Democrats. Emerald, why is this photo viral now? Well, it’s because the internet has also jumped on an email between Jeffrey Epstein and his brother Mark from 2018. And we can see here that this photo is being shared in light of that email. As we see in this Reddit post, the email in question is authentic. We can see here it’s got a House oversight label. Um, and it was part of those that was released um, along with thousands of Epstein’s other emails in a Google Drive folder uh, last week by the House Oversight Committee, which is the uh, United States’s House of Representatives Investigative Committee. So, in the email exchange, we’re just going to have a look at it between Mark and Jeffrey Epstein. Mark tells Jeffrey uh to ask Bannon, and I quote, “If Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” The Bannon referred to appears to be former uh White House strategist Steve Bannon, who was fired from his post about eight months before the email exchange in question. Meanwhile, social media users are speculating that Bubba is Bill Clinton because it’s an old nickname for him as we can see in these uh news articles from the time, these Washington Post and Time art articles from the 1990s. But according to the advocate magazine, Mark Epstein issued a statement addressing the rumors and he said that uh the emails were simply part of a humorous ex private exchange between two brothers and were never meant for public release or to be interpreted as serious remarks. For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to Bubba in this correspondence is not in any way a reference to former President Bill Clinton. Trump has not commented on the email in question, but he has slammed the Democrats for using the emails as a hoax and a distraction. Um, but rumors are persistent, of course, and all the online speculation about the ties between Trump and Clinton and Epstein are doing the president no good. Uh, we will see, of course, as the House of Representatives has now approved the publication of the unclassified documents detailing the investigation into Epste. We’ll see what happens next there,

An old photo of current US president Donald Trump and former US president Bill Clinton has gone viral, alongside one of Jeffrey Epstein’s released emails that has attracted scrutiny. The photo is not as compromising as social media users would have it – but many have been left questioning who the “Bubba” is that Trump is allegedly “blowing” in the email.

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