House releases Epstein emails referencing Trump

What happened

House Democrats Wednesday released a small batch of emails that appear to suggest President Donald Trump knew more about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage women than he has acknowledged. “Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff in a January 2019 email, six months before the convicted pedophile died by suicide in a Brooklyn prison cell.

In a 2011 email to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked,” adding that trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre “spent hours at my house with him” and “he has never once been mentioned” by investigators. House Republicans accused the Democrats of cherry-picking documents, then released about 20,000 more Epstein emails subpoenaed from his estate.

Who said what

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Epstein emails were a “distraction” from the government reopening and “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.” Trump has repeatedly asserted he did not know about Epstein’s conduct, The Washington Post said, but that claim was “previously undercut” by statements he made when they were still friends and by a “sexually suggestive letter with a sketch of a woman’s body” that he allegedly contributed to a book for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

“Some of the biggest ‘Epstein files’ fire-breathers” from Trump’s MAGA coalition “were silent yesterday,” Axios said, as their “conspiracy-laden search for answers against the deep state has turned (for some) into a defensive posture to protect Trump.” But Epstein’s “typo-strewn emails and other messages” are “unlikely to quell the furor around the Trump-Epstein relationship,” The New York Times said. A “core part” of Trump’s base believes the “mother lode of documents, audio files and video” on Epstein is still in the hands of the FBI and Justice Department.

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What next?

After being sworn in Wednesday, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) provided the final signature needed to force a vote in the House intended to compel the Justice Department to release its separate trove of Epstein-related documents. Trump had tried to fend off the bipartisan petition, saying on social media that “only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall” for the Democrats’ “Epstein Hoax” trap. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday night that he would schedule the vote for next week.