Jeffrey Epstein was offered a sweetheart plea deal by federal prosecutors in return for incriminating information that would lead to President Trump’s impeachment, according to the late pedophile’s cellmate.
Ex-Westchester cop and convicted killer Nicholas Tartaglione, Epstein’s bunkmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan weeks before his death in August 2019, said the disgraced financier dished on the dirt-digging expedition after a confab with the feds.
“He said, ‘When you were a cop, what do you know about proffers and cooperating?’ I said, ‘Jeff, it’s pretty simple, the prosecutors, you know, they caught a fish — you. They’re not gonna let that fish off the hook unless you give them a bigger fish,’” recalled Tartaglione in a phone call with Jessica Reed Kraus, a California-based self-described journalist who recorded the conversation and later posted it to her Substack.
“He said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s what they said,’” the quadruple murderer recalled. “He said, ‘They told me they’d let me plead out something small, and I’ll do just a couple of years in a camp, if I can give them something on Trump to get him impeached.’
“He says, but the government told me I don’t have to prove what I say about Trump, as long as Trump’s people can’t disprove it,” Tartaglione said — adding that Epstein considered “making stuff up” to save his skin. Tartaglione never said what Epstein ultimately planned to do.
Tartaglione, 57, was convicted in 2023 of murdering four people, including a man he tortured and strangled over stolen drug money. The one-time Briarcliff Manor cop was sentenced last year to four consecutive life sentences.
Tartaglione was Epstein’s cellmate when the moneyman was discovered with bruises on his neck on July 23, 2019. Epstein told his lawyers that Tartaglione “roughed him up,” which the cellmate denied.
Epstein was removed from Tartaglione’s cell and put on suicide watch. He killed himself three weeks later on Aug. 10 — though questions over the possibility of foul play remain. While he was supposed to be placed with a new cellmate, Epstein was alone, according to a report from the Department of Justice Inspector General.
Epstein at the time was facing a raft of charges from federal prosecutors, including sex trafficking of minors and sexual exploitation and abuse.
According to Tartaglione, Epstein said he knew Trump only socially and the two were not friendly. In fact, he said Trump once threw him out of a party at Mar-a-Lago for being flirtatious with young women.
“I said, ‘Well, do you know Trump?’” Tartaglione claimed in the phone call. “He says, ‘Well, you know, I know him. I met him, but we don’t like each other.’ I laughed. I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Trump threw me out of a party at his place in Florida.’
“I said, ‘Why he throw you out? He said, ‘Oh he got mad, I was talking to some girl.’
“By now I got wind of what he was in there for,” Tartaglione told the interview. “And I said, ‘How old was the girl, Jeff?’ And he says, ‘Oh about 18, 19.’
“So, I was a cop. I said, ‘Jeff, that means probably 14, 15.’ And he says, ‘Well he threw me out. I haven’t talked to him since.’”
It is not clear when the party was.
Tartaglione said Epstein admitted, “I don’t know anything” about Trump.
Tartaglione added that Epstein was additionally considering turning because he wanted to save his “girlfriend” — a likely reference to Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years for sex trafficking in 2022.
Before his death, Epstein said that he had so much dirt on Trump and Hillary Clinton that he could have had the 2016 election cancelled, his brother Mark Epstein told The Post last year.
Kraus, who posted her conversation with Tartaglione, additionally reported on her substack that the ex-cop was choked and stabbed by other inmates in October. A spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons declined to comment on the matter.
Kraus, 45, told The Post she was first introduced to the killer two years ago — and believes he was “wrongly convicted.”
“We were introduced by a friend in common almost two years ago. Nick knows I record him. He believes I can help him prove his conviction is unjust,” Kraus said.
Tartaglione’s attorneys declined to comment. Reps for Manhattan federal prosecutors declined to comment on Tartaglione’s allegations.
Legal experts told The Post that the purported fed offer to Epstein sounded plausible.
“Anything is possible when it comes to high-profile cases like this. They are career makers,” said Alan Dershowitz, a close confidante of Trump who represented him during his first impeachment trial.
“It could have originated at some point lower than the US attorney or one of the middle ranking officials at the Southern District of New York or the FBI. They are always looking to make cases.”
Added defense lawyer Jason Goldman: “Federal prosecutors in particular are known to conduct these types of proffer sessions. Defendants facing extreme sentences are pressured to name names and conform to the government’s version of the ‘truth,’ even where there may be resistance.”
“The threat to prosecute Maxwell is extremely plausible – the fact that she wasn’t simply arrested alongside Epstein but rather only later on, after his unwillingness to implicate Trump and after his apparent suicide, speaks volumes about the government’s tactics.”
