Demonstrators hold signs asking for the release of the Epstein files.Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun via AP
Sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims and “knew about the girls,” in e-mails released as U.S. lawmakers turned up the pressure on the White House to make public the full investigation of the late financier.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday published three e-mail exchanges in which Mr. Epstein suggested Mr. Trump was aware of Mr. Epstein’s crimes.
The e-mails came from more than 20,000 pages’ worth of documents that Mr. Epstein’s estate turned over to the committee in response to a subpoena.
Mr. Trump’s Republicans countered by releasing all of the documents in an apparent bid to pre-empt a slow drip of revelations from the opposition party. In those documents, Mr. Epstein wrote that he had photos of Mr. Trump and “girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” described him as “dirty” and speculated that he had “early dementia.”
The document dump came the same day that the House of Representatives took a key procedural step toward compelling the Department of Justice to release all of its files on Mr. Epstein, while Mr. Trump and his subordinates ramped up pressure on Republican lawmakers in a bid to prevent it.
The President has repeatedly denied that he knew anything of Mr. Epstein’s activities when the pair were friends in New York and Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Epstein died by suicide in jail in 2019 while awaiting a second trial for trafficking underage girls.
“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover,” Robert Garcia, the committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement.
The White House reiterated Mr. Trump’s denials.
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“These e-mails prove absolutely nothing, other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong,” spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said at a press briefing. “Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep.”
Ms. Leavitt said the Epstein victim referenced in the e-mail, whose name is redacted, was Virginia Giuffre. She pointed to a 2016 deposition in which Ms. Giuffre, who had also worked at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s Florida club and estate, said that she “never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate” in Mr. Epstein’s criminal acts.
One of the e-mails was sent by Mr. Epstein on April 2, 2011, to Ghislaine Maxwell, his then-associate who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in his crimes.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Mr. Epstein wrote, adding that one of his victims “spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”
Ms. Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that …”
The context of the pair’s discussion is unclear. Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a single state-level charge in Florida of procuring an underage girl for prostitution and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, a plea deal later widely criticized as overly generous.
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In 2011, Ms. Giuffre went public with her story. In July, 2019, Mr. Epstein was charged federally in Manhattan and found dead in his jail cell the following month.
Another e-mail is dated Jan. 31, 2019, from Mr. Epstein to author Michael Wolff. In it, Mr. Epstein addresses Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had Mr. Epstein banned from Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Epstein writes that he was “never a member ever” and “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
Mr. Wolff, who used Mr. Epstein as a source for a series of books on Mr. Trump, repeatedly gave Mr. Epstein advice on how to improve his public image, including by encouraging him to be an “anti-Trump voice.” On one occasion in December, 2015, Mr. Wolff advised Mr. Epstein to use the growing public knowledge of his past association with Mr. Trump to either “hang” the then-presidential candidate or “save” him to incur a “debt” if he won the election.
In an Aug. 23, 2018, exchange with Kathryn Ruemmler, a White House counsel under former president Barack Obama, Mr. Epstein discussed Mr. Trump’s payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. “You see, I know how dirty Donald is,” he wrote.
On Dec. 8, 2015, he offered to send Landon Thomas Jr., then a finance reporter at The New York Times, “photos of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen.” When Mr. Thomas replied “Yes!!!,” Mr. Epstein named two, Lauren Petrella, a beauty-pageant contestant whom a lawsuit once identified as an alleged target of sexual harassment by Mr. Trump in 1993, and Celina Midelfart, whom Mr. Epstein wrote was an ex-girlfriend he subsequently “gave” to Mr. Trump.
In a January, 2019, exchange with Mr. Thomas, Mr. Epstein speculated that Mr. Trump’s “goofy” statement in response to Mr. Wolff’s first book about him was caused by “early dementia?”
The White House is accusing Democrats of selectively leaking emails from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein to 'create a fake narrative' to smear U.S. President Donald Trump.
The Associated Press
Mr. Epstein also kept up an extensive correspondence with Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard University and treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. In one December, 2018, e-mail, Mr. Epstein told Mr. Summers that Mr. Trump was “borderline insane.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were friends from the 1980s until the 2000s before having a falling out. In an interview with Mr. Wolff in 2017, Mr. Epstein claimed to have been Mr. Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years.”
Getting all of the government’s files on Mr. Epstein to see which of his wealthy and famous friends took part in his crimes has long been a cause célèbre for right-wing media personalities. But Mr. Trump has tried to shut down the possibility in recent months.
Republican Speaker Mike Johnson refused to hold a House vote on compelling the government to release the files and then kept the chamber adjourned for nearly eight weeks, preventing lawmakers from forcing one.
On Wednesday, however, he had to reconvene legislators to vote on a deal to end the government shutdown. This also meant swearing in Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who won a special election in September. She became the final signature needed on a discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files.
“Justice cannot wait another day,” Ms. Grijalva said on the House floor as two of Mr. Epstein’s victims, Elizabeth Stein and Jessica Michaels, watched from the public gallery.
Epstein's former associate Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the financier's crimes.John Minchillo/The Associated Press
The Trump administration, meanwhile, made a last-ditch effort to persuade the handful of Republicans who have signed the discharge petition to withdraw their support for it.
On Truth Social, Mr. Trump referred to the matter as “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” and said that “only a very bad, or stupid, Republican” would support compelling the release of the files.
Attorney-General Pam Bondi, her deputy, Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel summoned Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican congresswoman who signed the petition, to the White House Situation Room. The meeting was reported by CNN and The New York Times and later confirmed by Ms. Leavitt.
There was no immediate indication that she or any of the other three Republicans who have signed the petition would change their minds.
By Wednesday evening, Mr. Johnson said he would schedule a vote on the motion next week.
Even if the vote succeeds in the House, it is unlikely to pass the Senate. But it will compel Republican lawmakers to go on the record as either supporting or opposing releasing the files.
Democratic U.S. Representative Adelita Grijalva in her first day in office on Wednesday signed the discharge petition to start the process for a House vote on directing the Justice Department to release files related to deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Reuters