MIAMI — Donald Trump’s campaign confirmed the former president chartered a private jet this weekend that once belonged to Jeffrey Epstein, but said he did so by accident.
A campaign official told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon that Trump and his staff had “no idea” the Gulfstream G550 was once owned by one of the country’s most infamous sex traffickers. The official said the jet was provided to the campaign by a charter flight company.
“The campaign had absolutely no idea the aircraft we rented was previously owned by Mr. Epstein,” the official said, adding that Trump’s advisers only learned of the jet’s shady past once journalists contacted them Monday.
Trump’s camp said he took only one flight on the jet—a relatively short, 363 mile hop from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Aspen, Colorado, where he was attending fundraisers on the campaign trail. He flew back to Florida on Saturday night in a separate chartered plane as his private aircraft, Trump Force One, was still undergoing repairs in Montana.
The official said Trump’s campaign instructed Private Jet Services Group—the charter jet company who provided the plane—to not pull out Epstein’s old aircraft again the next time Trump calls. The Trump official said the company, who’s been used by the former president “many times,” was apologetic and assured the campaign it wouldn’t happen again.
Rumors about the flight spread quickly over the weekend, seemingly starting on X and Reddit after the 16-year-old jet was photographed on the ground in Aspen by a local photojournalist and plane spotter.
Online sleuths noticed the jet looked familiar and dug into its past, using the Federal Aviation Administration’s public registry to look up its tail number, serial number, and history. That appeared to uncover that the jet, which seats up to 16 people, was the same private plane Epstein purchased in 2013 and regularly flew between Palm Beach, Manhattan, Paris, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, redacted records showed.
The aircraft is not the same as Epstein’s infamous “Lolita Express,” which was a Boeing 727 he allegedly used to shuttle underage girls around the country and Caribbean. Flight logs listed Trump as being a passenger on that plane previously.
It was the Gulfstream G550 that Epstein was flying on just before he was arrested at an airport in Teterboro, New Jersey, on July 6, 2019—his final day of freedom. He’d just returned stateside after a trip to Paris, and was found dead in a New York prison a little over a month later.
The Gulfstream G550 was put up for sale a year later with an asking price of $16.9 million, the Palm Beach Post reported at the time. A Trump campaign official said the plane has changed hands twice since then, which included its tail number number being changed.
That official added that the jet’s livery on Saturday, which had “Trump 2024” painted on its left side, was painted by the plane’s current owner once they heard that his jet was going to be used by Trump.
“Once the owner had found out that his plane was being chartered to the campaign, he made the decision to put the decals on the plane himself,” the official said, noting the font used is different than the Trump campaign’s.
By JOSH FIALLO/Daily Beast