Democrats released more emails from deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday. They are said to come from his estate and have not previously been published. In one of his messages, Epstein wrote that Donald Trump, Epstein’s former friend, “knew about the girls.” This passage could refer to Epstein’s victims – some of whom were minors; he had systematically sexually abused her for years.
Trump has so far denied knowing anything about Epstein’s actions, and so far there is no evidence to the contrary. However, the two New Yorkers have been friends for years. Trump is also said to have written a contribution to Epstein’s birthday book, in which he is said to wish Epstein “every day to keep a sweet secret.” The post was surrounded by images that resembled naked women, and the signature on the woman’s crotch was similar to Trump’s. He denied being the author of the post.
Epstein’s properties are currently under review by a House committee. The email excerpts now published are said to date from 2011, 2015 and 2019.
The White House talks about defamation
The email about the “girls” was said to be addressed to journalist Michael Wolff. Epstein wrote to her in 2019: “Trump said he asked me to stop, and I was never a member. Of course Trump knew about the girls because he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
On the one hand, this may be a defense of Trump, who said after Epstein’s first conviction in 2008 that he had thrown him out of his golf club at Mar-a-Lago. Epstein said in an email that he was never a member of the club. On the other hand, it is about Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who repeatedly victimized the former investor for years and was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2021 for sex trafficking of minors. Epstein’s sentence could be interpreted to mean that Trump not only knew that Maxwell was doing this, but also that he knew that Epstein was abusing girls and young women.
The White House responded to the email’s publication later in the afternoon. Democratic Party spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the Democratic Party “selectively shared emails with liberal media to create a false narrative and defame President Trump.”
In another email to Maxwell published on Wednesday, Epstein wrote in 2011, referring to his first conviction, that it was surprising that the only person who had not spoken out at that time was Donald Trump. It continued: “(Name redacted) spent hours with him at my house.”
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee responded to the Democratic Party Platform wanting to keep it secret because he “has said publicly that he has never seen any wrongdoing by President Trump.”
In Giuffre’s memoir, published posthumously after her suicide, the woman made no accusations against Trump. According to Giuffre, she was poached by Maxwell from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in 2000 as a teenager and then sexually abused as Epstein’s masseuse. Maxwell said in an interview with Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche that she had never seen Trump “in an inappropriate environment.” He was always a gentleman.
The third published correspondence is from 2015 and is again between Epstein and Michael Wolff. The journalist apparently gave Epstein advice on how best to handle knowledge about the then-presidential candidate.
Shortly after the emails were released by Democrats, Republicans in the House of Representatives released 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate after months of delays.
Conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death
In recent months, both Democrats and Republicans have repeatedly published excerpts from the Epstein investigation files. However, all the material is not publicly available, making it difficult to classify individual documents into the entire corpus.
Epstein’s extramarital affairs have preoccupied the American public for years. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and found hanged in his cell in August 2019. Shortly thereafter, speculation arose about whether Epstein was the victim of a conspiracy and was silenced. It circulated primarily in right-wing circles, where it was assumed that top Democratic Party officials were involved in Epstein’s actions.
During the election campaign, Donald Trump promised to publish investigative files, but this has not been realized to date. This caused discontent among his supporters, and Trump repeatedly tried to end the affair with statements. Democrats in the House of Representatives are working to publish the report, but so far they lack the allies on the Republican side to actually do so. The new email snippets were released Wednesday, just before a House hearing in which a new Democratic Party member could be sworn in. According to US media, he was then able to add his missing signature to a petition that the Democratic Party wanted to force a vote on disclosing the archive.
