President Bill Clinton tried to celebrate World Typing Day… and Twitter users rained on his parade.
For the obscure holiday, Clinton’s presidential library tweeted a 1998 photo of the former president at a computer. The library asked Twitter users to guess the recipient of the first email ever sent by a sitting president.
The account deleted the tweet after a sea of replies saying “Epstein.”
Clinton has reentered the headlines this year. While the former president is not accused of any crimes, he was mentioned in court documents unsealed this month during a defamation suit against Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted co-conspirator of trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Clinton had been emailing John Glenn: an astronaut, a U.S. senator, and the recipient of the first email by a U.S. president.
“Dear John, Thanks for the message,” Clinton wrote in the historic email, according to the text published online. “Hillary and I had a great time at the launch. We are very proud of you and the entire crew, and a little jealous.”
However, some Twitter used this piece of trivia as an opportunity to take shots at Clinton’s checkered history with communications.
Some conservatives cracked jokes about the 2009-2013 scandal over Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state.
Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics referred to Vice President Al Gore and his dubious claim about inventing the internet.
One person said “Penthouse letters,” a reference to President Clinton’s sex scandals.
In a recently unsealed testimony, victim Joanna Sjoberg said under oath that Epstein had told her about Clinton’s affinity for young women. Sjoberg said the words “likes them young.”
However, a final round of legal documents was unsealed Tuesday in the same case, and this trove of documents was made up of testimony transcripts that were already largely public and dealt with allegations about misconduct by several rich and influential men whose names have been known for a decade or more.
The unsealed files included a 2016 deposition of Virginia Giuffre, a woman who said Epstein sexually abused her and arranged for her to have sexual encounters with men including Britain’s Prince Andrew starting when she was 17.
It also included a transcript of testimony by Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, who insisted that Giuffre was a liar. There was also a deposition from Epstein himself, who refused to answer questions citing his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself.
Those depositions had already been made public, though with some sentences or names blacked out.
Take a look —
Who did Bill Clinton first email? pic.twitter.com/FGbnaxGbmc
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) January 8, 2024
@billclinton @Sarah_Boxer @NASA I hope you thanked Al Gore for the internets!
— Tom Bevan (@TomBevanRCP) September 18, 2014
Overall, the documents released since last week have added few details to what was already known about Epstein’s crimes. They did not contain the explosive revelations or new identities of abusers that some had predicted.
Epstein, a millionaire money manager, surrounded himself with celebrities, leading academics and big names from the fashion and political worlds before he was arrested in Palm Beach, Florida, in 2006 and accused of paying underage girls for sex.
He served 13 months in a jail work release program. Outrage over his plea bargain, sparked by reporting in the Miami Herald, led federal prosecutors in New York to bring new sex trafficking charges against Epstein in 2019, before his death later that year.
Prosecutors also brought charges against Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year prison term for helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls.
Dozens of women say Epstein sexually abused them at his homes in New York, Florida, the Virgin Islands and New Mexico.
The documents released this month relate to a 2015 defamation lawsuit that Giuffre filed against Maxwell and was settled in 2017. Most of the court file has been public for years, but public interest in the documents soared after a judge ordered that some sealed sections be fully released.
Much of the lawsuit revolved around the truthfulness of Giuffre’s claims that Epstein had flown her around the world for sexual encounters with billionaires, politicians, royals and heads of state.
She initially kept the names of those men secret, but in a 2014 legal filing, she said her abusers included Prince Andrew, other royal figures whose names she didn’t know, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the head of a hotel chain, noted academics, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, French modeling scout Jean Luc Brunel, billionaire Glenn Dubin and law professor Alan Dershowitz, who had represented Epstein.
All of the men named by Giuffre denied her allegations.
Giuffre withdrew her claims about Dershowitz in 2022, saying she “may have made a mistake” in identifying him as an abuser. She said she “was very young at the time” and “it was a very stressful and traumatic environment.” Dershowitz campaigned to get documents related to Giuffre’s lawsuit unsealed, arguing that they would make his innocence more clear.
Giuffre settled a lawsuit against Prince Andrew in 2022.
Brunel, who was close to Epstein, killed himself in a Paris jail in 2022 while awaiting trial on charges that he raped underage girls.
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.