WASHINGTON — House Democrats probing the late financier Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday released three emails they say indicate President Donald Trump knew about Epstein’s abuse of underage girls as early as 2011.
The messages were among roughly 23,000 pages of documents provided to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform by Epstein’s estate, according to committee Democrats.
In a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein wrote that Trump “spent hours at my house” with a victim whose name is redacted in the document. In that same note, Epstein referred to Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked.”
A 2015 exchange between Epstein and journalist Michael Wolff shows Wolff telling Epstein he had heard CNN planned to ask Trump about his ties to the financier. The two discuss how to “craft an answer” for Trump; Wolff wrote, “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable (public relations) and political currency.”
In a January 2019 email to Wolff, Epstein referenced a redacted victim as having been at Trump’s Florida estate and Mar-a-Lago, writing, “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
The White House has maintained Trump had a falling out with Epstein and expelled him from Mar-a-Lago after allegations that Epstein recruited young women who worked at the club’s spa. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, during a briefing Wednesday, said the released emails “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong,” noting both men lived in Palm Beach and saying Epstein “was a pedophile and he was a creep.”
House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia said the emails “raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the President.” He urged the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files to the public and said the committee will keep pressing for answers and justice for victims.
Within hours of Democrats’ release, committee Republican leaders posted links to an “additional 20,000 pages of documents” from Epstein’s estate stored on Google Drive and Dropbox.
The committee’s bipartisan inquiry intensified after the FBI issued a July memo saying the Justice Department would not release further material from the government’s sex-trafficking investigation into Epstein. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019, an apparent suicide, while awaiting federal trial.
The FBI’s decision not to release more documents prompted wide calls for disclosure, including from some conservative media figures and Trump supporters. Trump campaigned on freeing the so-called “Epstein files.” A bipartisan effort in the House to force a floor vote to release the files gained traction after Speaker Mike Johnson swore in Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva and said the vote would be held next week. Grijalva provided the final signature on a discharge petition initiated by Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., calling for a vote to release all Epstein investigation files.
Massie and Khanna previously held a Capitol Hill press conference in early September that featured several women who described abuse by Epstein and Maxwell.
Since the FBI memo, scrutiny on Trump’s past ties to Epstein has increased. Trump sued The Wall Street Journal over a report about a 50th birthday card he allegedly gave to Epstein that included a suggestive doodle and a message. The Journal also reported that then-Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi had briefed Trump in May that his name appeared in Epstein case files; the context of that reference was not made clear. Trump has denied the reports.
This article was originally published by Louisiana Illuminator. It has been updated to note that the vote on the discharge petition is scheduled for next week now that Representative Grijalva has been sworn in and signed the petition.
