Miranda Devine: What was Bill Clinton doing on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island?

Bill Clinton may have some explaining to do now that a witness has placed him ar Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious Caribbean retreat, writes Miranda Devine.

A bombshell story vanished without a trace in the US last week. Naturally, it was about the Clintons.

Turns out former US President Bill Clinton visited Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, after all — according to one of his most trusted former aides.

For anyone keeping track of Epstein’s criminal exploits before he conveniently hanged himself in a Manhattan jail last August, allegedly, while awaiting prosecution on sex trafficking charges, Clinton was firmly in the frame as a frequent flyer on the sexual predator’s private jet, aka the “Lolita Express”.

Clinton’s name appears at least 26 times as a passenger between 2001 and 2003 in flight logs obtained by Fox News.

Former US President Bill Clinton and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But while Clinton, 74, admits to indulging in a few private flights on the Boeing 727, and there are photos of him aboard, he always has denied it conveyed him to Epstein’s private ­Caribbean island, Little St James, also known as “Orgy Island”.

As recently as July, a Clinton spokesperson issued a statement denying allegations from Epstein’s one-time “sex slave”, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who now lives in Australia, that she once saw Clinton on the ­island with “two young girls” from New York. She also told a court that sexual orgies were a feature of life on the island.

Clinton has maintained he only took four trips on the Clinton Foundation donor’s jet and knew “nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to”, according to a 2019 statement from The Clinton Foundation.

But last week, in an interview with Vanity Fair, one-time Clinton “body man” turned “counsellor” Doug Band, who worked for the former president for nearly two decades, spilled the beans on his former boss.

Little St. James Island, in the U. S. Virgin Islands, a property owned by Jeffrey Epstein, which was known as Orgy Island. Picture: Gianfranco Gaglione/AP

Epstein accuser Virginia Roberts-Giuffre.

Band, 48, corroborates Giuffre's recollection, and claims Clinton flew on the convicted sex offender’s jet to the island in January 2003.

“Confessions of a Clintonworld Exile,” chronicles the spectacular falling out between Band and the Clintons in 2015 that was triggered when Bill and his only daughter Chelsea wanted a bigger slice of the Clinton Foundation booty Band was profiting from with a lucrative global consulting business.

Band quickly went from Bill’s “surrogate son” to persona non grata and, five years later, now that the Clinton power is waning, has ­decided to unload on his former ­mentor.

His claims are all the more plausible because of photos which surfaced earlier this year of Clinton receiving a neck massage in an airport chair from one of Epstein’s air hostesses, then-22-year-old Chauntae Davies, who went on to accuse Epstein of rape.

Clinton also was photographed at the door of the jet with Epstein pal Ghislaine Maxwell, who currently is in jail on charges of grooming underage girls.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at a party in 2005.

Maxwell also attended Chelsea’s wedding in 2010.

“Ghislaine had access to yachts and nice homes,” Band told Vanity Fair. “Chelsea needed that.”

Band claims he grew leery of Epstein’s unsavoury reputation for underage sex and banned him and Maxwell from attending Clinton events from 2011 but he knew “Chelsea and her father would be very angry” about his intervention in the friendship.

The Clintons deny Band’s claims, issuing a statement to the magazine maligning him as a self-serving leech who cashed in on “his boss’s Rolodex” during Bill’s post-presidential life.

“He put the [Clinton] Foundation at risk by leveraging a world-class philanthropy for his own financial gain.”

But there’s no doubting Band and Bill once were close enough to share a lot of secrets.

“There were years that Clinton spent more time with Band than with any other person — including Hillary and Chelsea,” says the magazine.

These days, Band says he wants nothing to do with the family that made him so “fabulously wealthy” he lives in a $20 million town house in Manhattan that once belonged to David Rockefeller.

Doug Band says Chelsea Clinton did not like him.

He describes Clintonworld as being “like a cult.”

The magazine quotes Band allies saying he was pushed out of Bill’s orbit because Chelsea, now 40, was jealous of his “favourite-son” status.

“Chelsea hated Doug because he was like a son to her father,” a friend said. “Band took offence that Chelsea treated him at times like hired help”.

The final straw, says Band, came in June 2011, when Chelsea allegedly demanded equity in his consultancy business, saying the $2.5 million cut he’d offered to her dad wasn’t enough.

“I thought she was kidding or deeply sick,” Band told the magazine.

Chelsea, eight years younger than Band, accused him of planting a gossip page story about her marital problems. He described her in emails as a “spoiled brat kid”.

Bill Clinton allegedly went to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island. Artwork: Terry Pontikos

Later that year, Band told Bill that if he “wanted to have girlfriends, he should divorce Hillary and move on with his life”.

Ouch.

Reportedly that was the end of a beautiful friendship.

Strangely enough, there has been less reporting of multiple claims of Clinton’s visit to Little St James and his Epstein links than there have been attempts to smear President Donald Trump for his past association with the pervert billionaire.

Video footage from 1992 repeatedly is played showing Trump, then a New York real estate developer, partying with Epstein in Florida.

In 2002, Trump notoriously told a magazine Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”.

Footage shows Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein partying with cheerleaders in 1992.

But two years later Trump fell out with Epstein over a Florida property deal and banned Epstein from his Mar-a-lago Club because of allegations he had sexually assaulted a girl there, according to a lawsuit filed by one of Epsteins’ victims.

As much as the media likes to play up Trump’s Epstein links, and downplay Clinton’s, the evidence keeps pointing in the opposite direction.

Miranda Devine is in New York for 18 months to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph