The message to his brother, released by House Democrats, alleges the president “spent hours” at the financier’s Palm Beach home, implying awareness of the situation.
WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Wednesday released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of his victims, among other messages suggesting the convicted sex offender believed the president knew more about his abuses than he has acknowledged.
Trump has emphatically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. He has said that he and Epstein, the disgraced financier who committed suicide in a federal prison in 2019, were once friends but grew distant.
But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said the emails, which they selected from thousands of pages of documents received by their panel, raised new questions about the relationship between the two men. In one of the messages, Epstein bluntly claimed that Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom, investigators later found, were underage. In another, Epstein reflected on how to handle media questions about their relationship as Trump became a national political figure.
The messages are certain to inflame the debate on Capitol Hill over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files and the decision by senior officials to reverse a promise to release them fully. That issue, which has divided Republicans and alienated some of Trump’s right-wing supporters, had taken a backseat as the government shutdown dragged on.
But the House is scheduled to return on Wednesday to pass legislation to end the government shutdown, and attention is likely to return to the Epstein matter.
“These latest emails and correspondence raise obvious questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a statement.
The three separate email exchanges released Wednesday date from after Epstein’s 2008 plea deal in Florida on state charges of soliciting prostitution, in which federal prosecutors agreed not to file charges. They occurred years after Trump and Epstein had a supposed falling out in the early 2000s. One was addressed to Epstein’s longtime confidante, Ghislaine Maxwell, while two were with author Michael Wolff.
In an April 2011 email, Epstein told Maxwell, who was later convicted on charges related to facilitating his crimes: “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.” He added that an unidentified victim “spent hours at my house with him, and he has never mentioned it.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Maxwell replied.
In a January 2019 email, Epstein wrote to Wolff about Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls, since he asked Ghislaine to stop.” House Democrats, citing an anonymous whistleblower, said this week that Maxwell is preparing to formally ask Trump to commute her federal prison sentence.
The emails were provided to the Oversight Committee along with a larger batch of documents from Epstein’s estate that the panel requested as part of its investigation into the financier and Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex trafficking charges.
Committee staff redacted the names of victims and any identifying information from the emails. Because the full set of documents has not been released, it was unclear if the emails had been extracted from longer conversations that might have provided fuller context.
Trump has condemned the continued questions about his handling of the case as a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. He has called Epstein “disgusting” and insisted he never participated in any wrongdoing with him or Maxwell.
Both Trump and Epstein divided their time between New York and Palm Beach, Florida, and were friends in the 1990s and early 2000s. Their relationship appeared to fade around 2004, though Trump and his associates have offered different versions as to why. According to one version, they had a falling out after trying to outbid each other for a Palm Beach property.
Last summer, Trump said that Epstein had “hired” employees from the Mar-a-Lago spa, his private club and residence in Palm Beach, and that he believed one of the women was Virginia Giuffre, who has said Maxwell recruited her into Epstein’s sex-exploitation network while she was working at Mar-a-Lago as a teenager.
At the time Epstein emailed Maxwell in 2011 calling Trump the “dog that hadn’t barked,” the mogul was a reality television star and a New York tabloid celebrity, years away from becoming president.
Around the same time, according to documents previously released by the Oversight Committee, Epstein was emailing staff about negative press coverage he had recently received regarding the abuse that took place inside his Florida home.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration released the transcript of a courthouse interview with Maxwell, who acknowledged that Trump and Epstein had a social relationship but denied any connection between Trump and the trafficking network.
Epstein’s 2019 email, in which he claims Trump “knew about the girls” and asked Maxwell to “stop,” was sent to Wolff, who had recently written a tell-all book about the president.
Epstein was months away from the arrest and federal charges that would send him to prison, but he was the center of significant attention after The Miami Herald published a series of articles that brought new attention to the secret deal he had signed in 2008.
In his email, Epstein mentioned a victim of his sex trafficking operation. He also mentioned Mar-a-Lago, and then denied that Trump had ever asked him to resign from the club. “I was never a member,” Epstein wrote.
Wolff was also involved in a third email exchange, which began on December 15, 2015, the night of a Republican presidential primary debate. Wolff emailed Epstein, warning him that CNN “planned to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in the post-debate scrum.”
Epstein replied: “If we could craft a response for him, what do you think it should be?”
Wolff advised inaction, suggesting Trump might try to deny a close relationship with Epstein. “I think you should let him hang himself,” he wrote of Trump. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or in the house, then that gives you valuable public relations and political currency” that could be used to “hang him” later or “save him, generating a debt.”
According to a transcript, Trump was never asked a question about the matter in that debate. It remained unclear if he was asked about it separately.
The release of the emails by Democrats came hours before House Speaker Mike Johnson was set to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, whom he has avoided appointing for nearly two months since she won the election.
She is expected to provide the final signature needed on a petition to force a House vote on a measure requiring the Trump administration to release all of its investigative material related to Epstein. The White House has firmly opposed the measure.
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