Can’t wait to hear how Donald Trump tries to spin a 2011 email exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in which Epstein wrote that Trump, years before anybody cared about him as a politician, had “spent hours at my house” with a victim of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring, and complained that Trump “had never once been mentioned” in connection with Epstein’s child-sex crimes.
“I have been thinking about that…” was the response from Maxwell, currently serving out a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of sex trafficking related to the Epstein case, in a minimum-security Club Fed, where she was moved by Trump’s personal lawyer earlier this year as part of the effort to reward her for not talking.
The emails were among several Epstein emails released by House Democrats on Wednesday, as the House is set to return to work for the first time since mid-September, to take up the funding bill to reopen the government.
House Speaker Mike Johnson had kept the House on a rolling vacation to keep Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat who won a special election to fill an open seat in Arizona way back on Sept. 23, from being able to sign on to a discharge petition getting a measure to force the release of the Epstein files to the House floor.
No doubt the release of these Epstein emails, overseen by Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is timed to add to the public pressure.
That this whole Epstein files matter is still a talking point six years after Epstein’s mysterious death in a Manhattan jail cell is a massive self-own on the part of Trump and his stooges.
It was Trump himself who made the dormant Epstein case a talking point during his 2024 presidential campaign, pledging to release the Justice Department’s files on Epstein if elected.
And then he had his attorney general, Pam Bondi, fan the flames, with Bondi bragging for weeks that the files were “on her desk,” ahead of inviting MAGA influencers to her office and handing out binders of information that turned out to be full of nothingburgers.
Keep in mind that what we’re getting today from House Democrats is three email exchanges – barely even the tip of the expected iceberg.
The Epstein Estate, according to a press release from the Oversight Dems, released a total of 23,000 documents that the Oversight Committee is currently reviewing.
“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover. These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” said Garcia, D-Calif. “The Department of Justice must fully release the Epstein files to the public immediately. The Oversight Committee will continue pushing for answers and will not stop until we get justice for the victims.”
‘The dog that hasn’t barked’
The most explosive of the emails released today is the set that I referenced in the lede to this story.
Epstein refers to Trump in an email to Maxwell as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and complains that Trump “has never once been mentioned.”
Background here: the email from Epstein dates to 2011. By this point, Epstein had already been convicted, in 2008, on a state charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below age 18 and been sentenced to 18 months in prison; he would ultimately be released after 13 months, which he served in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Jail with work release 12 hours a day, six days a week that allowed him to work at the office of his foundation with deputies who were required to wear suits and staff a front desk for his welcomed guests, which, if you’ve got to serve time in jail, isn’t a bad way to do it.
By 2011, aside from having had to register as a Level 3 sex offender, and facing a legal requirement to personally check in with the New York Police Department every 90 days that was never enforced, Epstein’s life was back to normal – he was meeting with the likes of Bill Gates, ostensibly to discuss philanthropic efforts, as Epstein was plotting to try to rehabilitate his reputation with the launch of a PR campaign touting his donations to cancer and other scientific research.
Trump, meanwhile, in 2011, was still a private businessman with multiple bankruptcies and a reality-TV show that on the tail end of its long descent into irrelevance, having dropped out of Nielsen’s Top 100 by its 2010 season finale.
Epstein appears to be wondering aloud here in this email why he had to go to jail on the child-sex stuff, and Trump, who was right there in the thick of things with him, had “never once been mentioned.”
Maxwell’s response – “I have been thinking about that” – is telling.
Could be that her getting kid-gloves treatment from the Trump DOJ, which has her serving her prison time along the lines of how Epstein had to serve his jail time, in as cushy a situation as possible, is a function of her still “thinking about” how Trump never had to face the music for whatever he knew was going on here.
The first response from the Trump side to this comes from a post to Twitter by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee, which names Virginia Giuffre as the redacted victim who Epstein said Trump had “spent hours with.”
“Why did Democrats cover up the name when the Estate didn’t redact it in the redacted documents provided to the committee? It’s because this victim, Virginia Giuffre, publicly said that she never witnessed wrongdoing by President Trump. Democrats are trying to create a fake narrative to slander President Trump. Shame on them,” the Twitter post from the MAGAs on Oversight reads.
Odd defense here. The email from Epstein relates that Trump had “spent hours with” Giuffre, implying that Trump would have, at the least, known about the sex-trafficking ring.
At the least, again, Epstein’s complaint here is, this millionaire buddy of mine knew what was going on, and somehow never got questioned in relation to it.
At the least, for the umpteenth time, this email would seem to make it clear that there’s more to look into here.
‘Let him hang himself’
The next set of emails is between Epstein and Trump biographer Michael Wolff.
The first, from 2015, was an exchange initiated by Wolff, who wrote to Epstein about an upcoming CNN interview with Trump that Wolff said he had heard may involve a question about Trump’s relationship with Epstein.
For context: this is December 2015; Trump had already launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
Epstein asked Wolff directly: “if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”
Flagging here: Epstein writes, “we.”
Wolff’s answer:
“I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
We don’t get Epstein’s response to this advice, which is to have Epstein leverage what he knows about Trump for the purpose of “political currency” and “generating a debt.”
‘Of course he knew about the girls’
The final email released today is a standalone, from Epstein to Wolff, dated Jan. 31, 2019, five months before Epstein was arrested by the Trump DOJ on federal sex-trafficking charges dating back to 2002.
In the email, Epstein tells Wolff that Trump asked him to resign as a Mar-a-Lago club member, and says he was “never a member ever.”
And then:
“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop”
This feels like a teaser from the House Dems, who are clearly indicating that they have seen and have access to more.
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Chris Graham
