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President Donald Trump can’t seem to escape Jeffrey Epstein. All summer, the Trump administration tried to brush back questions, including from allies, around its handling of the late financier’s case. The issue quieted down for over the past few weeks, with the government shut down and Congress preoccupied. But it reemerged Wednesday, just as the shutdown is set to end. The latest twist comes at an inopportune time for Trump, with the president already in the midst of criticism from longtime supporters over his economic rhetoric and policy proposals in the wake of Republican candidates being routed in last week’s off-year elections. Trump’s name is featured multiple times in a trove of 20,000-plus documents related to Epstein released by Republicans on the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “[Y]ou see, I know how dirty donald is,” Epstein wrote about Trump’s business practices in a 2018 email to Kathy Ruemmler, the former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, when longtime Trump confidant Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges. “My guess is that non lawyers ny biz people have no idea. What it means to have your fixer flip.” Epstein killed himself in a New York prison in August 2019, after being charged with sex-trafficking minors. He refused to answer whether he had “ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18” in a March 2010 deposition cited in the files released Wednesday — a deposition in which he declined to answer a series of questions based on various Constitutional rights. The documents were obtained by the committee from Epstein’s estate as part of its ongoing investigation into the federal government’s handling of his crimes. Trump denies any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein and has never been charged with any crimes involving minors. The Justice Department has declined, under public pressure from Trump’s base and lawmakers in both parties, to make public its full trove of Epstein-related files. That has been a sore point within Trump’s MAGA movement, which has called for more information on Epstein. Many in the movement believe that Epstein’s wealth and proximity to power — including prominent figures in both parties — allowed him to prey on young girls. Now, Trump faces criticism from Democrats and some Republican allies for not pushing all of the government’s Epstein files into the public domain. “The left and right agree — the Epstein class must go,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who has been working with a bipartisan group to force the House to vote on requiring the Justice Department to release its Epstein files. In August, a senior White House official predicted that the public would never be satisfied with any level of transparency — and that this issue won’t go away anytime soon. “There are always going to be more questions,” the official said. On Wednesday morning, House Democrats released three of the Epstein emails related to Trump. Republicans on Capitol Hill then pushed out the larger batch of documents, in which Trump appears frequently. A GOP congressional aide working on the committee’s investigation said Republicans had “always” planned to release the documents but when Democrats “selectively leaked” certain emails, they decided to release the full batch immediately. “They keep asking for transparency, that’s what we’re doing,” the aide said. Jack Posobiec, a MAGA influencer who has pushed for more Epstein files from the Justice Department, criticized Democrats for not releasing all the emails initially, suggesting they were “selectively edited.” The White House also pointed to the first release of Democratic emails, playing down the Epstein imbroglio as a partisan attack. Trump did the same thing in a Truth Social post. “The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” Trump wrote, referring to the government shutdown that could end as early as Wednesday night. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap,” he wrote. “There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!” It should have come as no surprise to Trump that the Epstein case would resurface this week. With the swearing-in of Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, D-Ariz., Wednesday afternoon, a bipartisan group of lawmakers cleared the threshold of 218 signatures on a “discharge petition” that would force House GOP leaders to hold a vote on whether to require the Justice Department to release all of its files on Epstein. The mostly Democratic group includes MAGA-friendly Republicans such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., and Lauren Boebert, R-Colo. “Today, we had a historic achievement of 218 votes to secure the release of the Epstein files,” Khanna said, adding that “justice will come soon.” For the most part, leading Trump supporters in the online universe held their fire on the new Epstein documents on Wednesday — or argued that he is not completely to blame for the lack of transparency from his administration that is roiling some in his base. “Every OG MAGA person called for the Epstein files,” Trump ally Mike Cernovich wrote on X, using “OG” to refer to “original gangster” — or longtime — MAGA Republicans. “The billionaires and donors are the ones blocking it. Trump’s failures here are falsely implicating him. Lunacy.” The emails released by Democrats Wednesday morning included one in which Epstein wrote to the author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls” and had asked Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell “to stop.” Trump told reporters earlier this year that Epstein had been poaching workers from his Mar-a-Lago club. “He took people that worked for me. And I told him, ‘Don’t do it anymore.’ And he did it,” Trump said in July. In a separate 2011 email to Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for conspiring with Epstein to abuse underage girls, Epstein alleged that Trump had spent significant time with him and a person the committee Democrats identified as an Epstein victim. “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote, according to the emails Democrats released, which redacted the name of the girl. “[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. Police chief. etc. im 75 % there.” NBC News reached out to a lawyer for Maxwell, but did not receive a reply. Danielle Bensky, an Epstein accuser who was 17 and an aspiring ballerina when she met the late financier, told NBC News that the emails represent progress for victims. “I think the release of the latest emails is another step forward for the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein who have been fighting for years to get the truth out,” Bensky said. “We have been banging on the transparency drum for so long. I know that there are politics involved, but we should all be on the side of releasing all of the Epstein files once and for all.”
