FACT CHECK: Did Google Remove Photos of Bill Clinton with Jeffrey Epstein from Search Results? – Snopes.com

In July 2019, registered sex offender and hedge fund manager Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on charges relating to the sex trafficking of minors. In addition to the severity of the alleged crimes, Epstein’s arrest made headlines due to his connections to well-known public figures and politicians, including President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.

The news of Epstein’s arrest sent political partisans into overdrive as they attempted to show that politicians on their side were less involved with Epstein than politicians on the other side. So when images of President Trump with Epstein were published by news outlets and circulated on social media, his defenders were upset not to see similar images of Bill Clinton with Epstein being given equal prominence. This led to a rumor that Google was “scrubbing,” “removing,” or “deindexing” images of Clinton and Epstein together from search results as part of a cover-up to protect the Clintons.

Twitter users Paul Sperry, Jack Murphy, and BNL News all claimed, without evidence, that images of Epstein and Clinton together had been removed from Google’s search results, and their tweets were collectively shared thousands of times over:

These claims are without merit. These tweets provided no evidence that images of Clinton with Epstein could be found on Google prior to the latter’s arrest in July 2019, nor any proof that Google had removed these alleged images from their search results in the aftermath of Epstein’s incarceration. In fact, they provided no evidence that photographs of Clinton with Epstein even existed at all.

Twitter user Robert Barnes inflated this rumor by claiming that while Google wouldn’t show photographs of Epstein and Clinton together, such images were findable using other search engines, such as DuckDuckGo:

This simply wasn’t the case.

We searched for images of Clinton together with Epstein on Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yandex. The results for all five of these search engines were similar, with none of them turning up a genuine photograph of Epstein together with Clinton:

Google:

Yahoo:

Bing:

DuckDuckGo:

Yandex:

Photographs of Epstein with Clinton were not scrubbed from Google’s search results, because images of Clinton with Epstein don’t seem to exist. Or if they do, they haven’t ever been widely disseminated online.

We also checked right-leaning websites such as Breitbart, the National Review, and the Daily Caller to see if they had published any pictures of this pair together, but yet again we came up empty-handed. In fact, the only image of Clinton with Epstein we managed to find was a manipulated image based on a photograph that originally showed Donald Trump with Epstein:

Of course, the lack of pictures doesn’t mean that Bill Clinton didn’t have a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The former president reportedly took several trips on Epstein’s private jet, and in 1995 Clinton and Epstein were both on the guest list for a “small dinner party” hosted by Revlon mogul Ron Perelman to raise funds for the Democratic National Convention:

We reached out to Google for comment and will update this article if more information becomes available.