Topline
House Democrats released a tranche of emails Wednesday in which Jeffrey Epstein criticized Donald Trump and suggested the president knew about Epstein’s abuse of women, raising new speculation about Trump’s relationship with the late financier—though the White House has continued to decry the latest revelations as a smear campaign.
Now-President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 12, 2000.
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Key Facts
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released more than a dozen emails provided by Epstein’s estate in which the financier discussed the president—most notably suggesting in several email exchanges that Trump knew about Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse of women, many of whom were underage. (Read the emails here.)
House Republicans on the Oversight Committee also released a tranche of 20,000 files from the Epstein estate, accusing Democrats of “cherry-pick[ing]” the files they released “to generate clickbait.”
In the two most controversial exchanges, Epstein wrote to associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011 that an unnamed victim of his—who the White House and House Republicans have identified as Virginia Giuffre—“spent hours at my house” with Trump, and then told writer Michael Wolff in 2019, “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
The exchanges suggest Trump had knowledge of Epstein’s relationships with women but do not explicitly say the president was at all directly involved with abusing women or participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme himself, and Giuffre has said she met Trump at Mar-a-Lago but never accused the president of wrongdoing.
Epstein and Wolff also discussed Trump in 2015, with Wolff suggesting to Epstein that Trump had been on Epstein’s private plane and in the financier’s home, while other emails sent during Trump’s first presidency show Epstein repeatedly criticizing the president, calling him “dumb” and “gross.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a statement House Democrats “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.”
Chief Critic
“The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre,” Leavitt said Wednesday, calling the emails “nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’