House Democrats released three new emails from millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday, the day the government shutdown is expected to end.
In one of them, Epstein writes that Donald Trump “spent hours” at the financier’s home with one of his victims, whose name was blacked out to preserve her privacy. The recipient of that 2011 email is Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in a minimum-security prison as an accessory to her best friend’s crimes. In the email, Epstein writes of the future president: “I want you to realize that the dog that didn’t bark is Trump.” It adds that the then-real estate mogul’s encounter with the sex trafficking victim was “never mentioned.”
In a second message, Epstein – who died in 2019 in a maximum security cell awaiting trial, accused of abusing hundreds of underage teenagers – suggests that the man who would become president of the United States was aware of his behavior. “Of course he knew about the girls when he asked Ghislaine (sic) to stop,” Epstein wrote to journalist Michael Wolff, a critic of Trump during his first presidency and the recipient of the other two emails, which come from files that Congress obtained via court order from Epstein’s estate.
The third exchange, again with Wolff, took place in 2015, during the campaign that would have brought the real estate mogul and reality TV star to the White House. In it, the journalist warns that in a CNN Republican primary debate, he was expected to question the candidate about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein asks: “If we were able to give him an answer, what do you think it should be?” Inaction, Wolff suggests. “I think you should let him hang,” he replied. “If he says he wasn’t on the plane (referring to the private jets that Epstein used to fly minors to his private island) or at home, then that gives you 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 might win, you could bail him out, generating debt,” Wolff writes.
Trump has always denied knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and it has never been proven that he participated or was complicit in them. The US president maintained a 15-year relationship with the convicted sex offender, which lasted until around 2004, when they stopped seeing each other. This was before the first child abuse case in 2006, long before Epstein died in 2019 in a Manhattan cell while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and before Trump’s first term as US president in 2017.
The shadow of Epstein’s crimes has followed Trump since the financier’s death. The memory of that old friendship resurfaced in the first months of his second presidency, also causing him the biggest crisis among his MAGA followers, some of whose most prominent members have spent years speculating about the case – a frightening sexual abuse ring with hundreds of victims. A group of these victims recently went to Congress to demand justice.
Maxwell maneuvers to obtain pardon
It was also reported this week that Maxwell is maneuvering to get a pardon from Trump while she is in the prison where the Justice Department transferred her in the summer, where, according to a confidant who spoke to Congress, she is treated “more like she is a guest in a hotel.”
At the beginning of July, a joint statement from the FBI and the Department of Justice announced that the US authorities had no intention of releasing new documents on the pedophile, contrary to what they had promised in previous months. Nor would they publish the “Epstein list,” which supposedly includes the names of rich and famous friends who took part in the millionaire’s child sex trafficking ring.
Conspiracy theorists suspect that such a list exists and is being used to protect those involved. That same joint statement also confirmed what the medical examiner had already concluded: that Epstein died by suicide in his cell – despite the homicidal theories surrounding his death, fueled by its strange circumstances, as the inmate was left unattended longer than protocol allowed.
“These latest emails and correspondence raise clear questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-California) said in a press release Tuesday. Garcia serves on the House Oversight Committee, which received materials from Epstein’s estate.
The House of Representatives has been in recess since before the start of the government shutdown, which began on October 1 and is now coming to an end – more than 43 days later – making it the longest in US history. This Wednesday the lower house is expected to vote to reopen the flow of public spending, as the Senate did on Monday. The end of the lockdown will also mean the resumption of activities in the House of Representatives and the swearing-in of MP Adelita Grijalva.
Grijalva was elected in a special election to fill a vacancy for the state of Arizona. Mike Johnson, the Republican majority leader in the House, refused to allow her to take office, even though she could have done so. According to Johnson, this was to avoid depriving Grijalva of a ceremony with full honors, given that the government had fallen. Few in Washington are fooled by the real reason: Once he takes office in Congress, Democrats — who are in the minority — along with a handful of Republicans, will have enough signatures on a petition to release the Epstein documents, making clear how often and in what context Trump’s name appears in those documents.
Sign up to our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition
