How many flights by Donald Trump appear in Epstein flight logs released by the DOJ?
Executive summary
The Department of Justice documents released in late December 2025 include a prosecutor’s email stating that Donald Trump appears as a passenger on Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet eight times in flight records dating from the 1990s [1] [2]. Reporting from multiple outlets confirms that count while noting limitations in the underlying material and that a name on a log is not itself evidence of criminal conduct [2] [3].
1. What the DOJ material actually says: an eight‑flight tally
An internal DOJ email dated January 7, 2020, and published in the Epstein tranche, explicitly tells colleagues that “Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported,” specifying that the flight records show Trump as a passenger on eight flights in the 1993–1996 period [1] [2]. Major news organizations—Reuters, The New York Times, PBS and others—have repeated that eight‑flight figure based on that prosecutor note and the flight logs included among the released exhibits [2] [4] [3].
2. What the logs show about those trips and the surrounding context
The released material includes individual flight entries and related prosecutor comments that give partial detail: one 1993 entry lists only Epstein and Trump as passengers, another August 13, 1995, entry lists Donald Trump along with his son Eric on a PBI-to‑TEB flight, and other entries include women whose names were redacted or who were described as potential witnesses in the Maxwell case [3] [5] [2]. Reporting also notes that several of the flights overlapped with periods prosecutors were considering in the Maxwell prosecution—hence the heightened internal attention—while the DOJ has emphasized that listing a name on a flight log is not evidence of criminality [5] [1] [6].
3. Why discrepancies and confusion have persisted
Different outlets earlier referenced seven flights or reported previously known trips disclosed in Maxwell’s trial exhibits, which seeded conflicting public tallies; the January 2020 email and subsequent DOJ release clarified that the newly processed flight records contained more entries than investigators initially realized, bringing the count to eight in the 1990s [7] [1]. The flight logs themselves are a mix of typed and handwritten pages, some hard to read, and the DOJ’s massive, phased release involved redactions and later corrections—factors that make independent verification from the raw PDFs difficult for outside reporters [5] [8].
4. Competing claims and official cautions
While conservative and liberal outlets have emphasized different takeaways—some focusing on the quantity of trips, others on isolated, sensational allegations in the files that the DOJ later flagged as uncorroborated or potentially false—the department warned that some documents contained “untrue and sensationalist claims” submitted during the 2020 election cycle and stressed that the material requires cautious interpretation [9] [6]. Fox News published the DOJ line that none of the records “implicate President Trump” in criminal conduct, even as the agency released the files for transparency and legal compliance [6].
5. Bottom line and limits of the public record
The straight answer supported by the DOJ email and corroborating reporting is that Trump’s name appears on eight Epstein flight entries in the flight records released by the Department of Justice for the 1993–1996 period [1] [2]. That numerical answer is firm in the documents made public, but the released files are redacted, sometimes handwritten and partially incomplete, and the presence of a name on a log does not itself establish wrongdoing—limitations the DOJ and multiple outlets explicitly note [5] [1] [3].