Donald Trump’s campaign confirmed that the former president chartered a private jet once owned by Jeffrey Epstein over the weekend, but said it was an accident.
A campaign official told The Daily Beast on Monday afternoon that Trump and his staff had “no idea” that the Gulfstream G550 once belonged to one of the country’s most notorious sex traffickers. The official said the jet was provided to the campaign by a charter airline.
“The campaign team had absolutely no idea that the plane we rented was previously owned by Mr. Epstein,” the official said, adding that Trump’s advisers only learned of the jet’s shady past when reporters contacted them on Monday.
Trump’s camp said he made only one flight on the jet – a relatively short, 363-mile hop from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Aspen, Colorado, where he was attending campaign fundraisers. He flew back to Florida on a separate charter plane Saturday night because his private plane, Trump Force One, was still undergoing repairs in Montana.
Jeffrey Epstein stands in front of his private jet Gulfstream G550.
US Department of Justice
The official said Trump’s campaign had instructed Private Jet Services Group – the charter company that provided the plane – not to use Epstein’s old plane again on Trump’s next call. The Trump official said the company, which was used by the former president “many times,” apologized and assured the campaign it would not happen again.
Rumors of the flight spread quickly over the weekend, apparently starting on X and Reddit after the 16-year-old jet was photographed by a local photojournalist and aircraft spotter on the ground in Aspen.
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. It turned out the jet, which seats up to 16, was the same private plane Epstein bought in 2013 and regularly flew between Palm Beach, Manhattan, Paris and the U.S. Virgin Islands, redacted records showed.
The plane is not the same as Epstein’s infamous “Lolita Express,” a Boeing 727 that he allegedly used to transport underage girls across the country and the Caribbean. Flight logs previously listed Trump as a passenger on that plane.
It was the Gulfstream G550 that Epstein flew on shortly before he was arrested at an airport in Teterboro, New Jersey, on July 6, 2019 – his last day of freedom. He had just returned to the United States from a trip to Paris and was found dead in a New York jail just over a month later.
The Gulfstream G550 was offered for sale a year later with an asking price of $16.9 million. Palm Beach Post was reported at the time. A Trump campaign official said the plane had since changed hands twice, with the tail number also being changed.
The official added that Saturday’s jet’s livery, which read “Trump 2024” on the left side, was painted by the plane’s current owner when he learned his jet would be used by Trump.
“After the owner discovered that his plane was chartered for the campaign, he made the decision to place the decals on the plane himself,” the official said, noting that the font used was different from that used by the Trump campaign.
