General Discussion

I actually think it wasn't Trump himself who made that claim, but whoever did, IIRC they quickly backed away from it, realizing that it pretty much implicated Trump as having known what Epstein was up to, and didn't report it.

The falling out was because Trump snaked a Florida property that Epstein wanted at auction in 2002, a listing Epstein had asked his buddy Trump to look at with him, and give him his opinion on it shortly before. Which is the very same property Trump sold to a Russian oligarch 6 years later in 2008 (at the nadir of the housing market!) for more than DOUBLE what he'd bought it for in 2002 (when property values were relatively high, though not as high as the heights around 2005-the bust).

In fact, Epstein told Michael Wolff in a 2015 interview that he believed at the time (and still) that Trump got the cash to buy it at auction from the Russians, because Trump was WAY underwater at the time, business failing right and left. IOW, Epstein knew Trump was laundering oligarch money. Donald Jr. back that idea up in 2008 in fact when he admitted at some conservative seminar (iirc) that a lot of the money they had coming in was from Russia.