‘He knew about the girls’: New Epstein emails allege Trump was aware of conduct

New York: Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein told his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell that Donald Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of his victims, and told a journalist that Trump “knew about the girls”, according to new documents released by Democrats in the US Congress.

The US president, who was friends with Epstein in the 1990s but says the pair fell out in the 2000s, has always emphatically denied knowledge of Epstein and Maxwell’s sex-trafficking operations.

The White House said the new emails were selectively chosen to smear the president, while Trump said the Democrats were using the Epstein “hoax” to deflect attention from their own failures.

The three emails released on Wednesday morning, US time, were selected by Democrats from a tranche supplied by Epstein’s estate to the House oversight committee under subpoena. All three are from the period after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution and soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008 under a plea deal.

In the first email, from April 2011, Epstein told Maxwell: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [REDACTED] spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there.”

Maxwell wrote back: “I have been thinking about that.”

The version of the email released by the Democrats redacted the person’s name, but Republicans on the committee later said it was Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters with a number of his rich and powerful friends.

Giuffre, who had accused influential men of sexually exploiting her as a teenager and who died by suicide in Western Australia this year, had long insisted that Trump was not among those who had victimised her.

She said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s misconduct with underage girls. And in her recently released memoir, Giuffre described meeting Trump only once, when she worked as a spa attendant at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and did not accuse him of wrongdoing.

The second email, from December 2015, involves author and journalist Michael Wolff informing Epstein that CNN might be planning to ask Trump about his ties with the disgraced financier during a television interview. Trump was, at that time, seeking the Republican nomination for president.

Epstein replies: “if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”

Wolff then suggests that Epstein should “let him [Trump] hang himself”. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency,” Wolff says. “You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”

The third email, from 2019 – months before Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges – again involves correspondence from Epstein to Wolff.

“trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.. of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein wrote.

The redacted email also made reference to Mar-a-Lago and an Epstein victim, whom the Republicans also later identified as Giuffre.

The new documents are certain to prompt renewed interest in the fallout from the Epstein saga, which raged in Washington earlier this year as Democrats – and a slew of Republicans – demanded the Trump administration release more files from the FBI investigation into Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking ring.

Epstein was never convicted on those charges, but his long-time associate and former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors.

In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the emails were selectively released by the Democrats “to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump”.

She said Giuffre had “repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions”.

At news briefing, when asked directly whether the substantive claims in the emails were true, Leavitt said the emails proved nothing except that Trump did nothing wrong.

“What President Trump has always said was that he was from Palm Beach and so was Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a paedophile and he was a creep.”

Leavitt said the Trump administration had turned over tens of thousands of documents related to the Epstein investigation, and no other administration had been as transparent.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the Democrats were “trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again” to deflect from their handling of the 43-day US government shutdown, which ended on Thursday (AEDT) after lawmakers were summoned back to Washington to vote on a deal.

Trump warned that only a “very bad or stupid Republican” would fall into the Democrats’ trap. “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!” he wrote.

It was not clear whether the emails selectively released by the Democrats were part of longer email chains, and the lack of context makes it harder to ascertain their significance. But the Democrats said the documents struck a blow against “the White House’s Epstein cover-up”.

“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover,” said Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee.

“These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president.”

Hours after the Democrats released the new Epstein emails, Republicans on the same committee released a trove of some 20,000 pages of emails, photographs and other documents received from the Epstein estate.

Among others, they included email exchanges between Epstein and new age author Deepak Chopra, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, investor and former Bill Gates adviser Boris Nikolic and former New York Times journalist Landon Thomas Jr, who left the paper in 2019 after reportedly seeking a charitable donation from Epstein, who was a source and friend.

Democrats on the House oversight committee have selectively released several documents from thousands collected from the Epstein estate.

They included pages from the so-called “birthday book” made for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. One of those pages was a written note, purportedly signed by Trump, that appeared inside the outline of a woman’s body.

Trump has denied writing the note or drawing the picture. He is also suing News Corp and The Wall Street Journal, which first revealed the note, over its reporting.

Giuffre accused Britain’s then-Prince Andrew and other powerful men of sexually exploiting her as a teenager. Andrew, who was recently stripped of his titles and evicted from his royal residence by King Charles III after weeks of pressure to act over his relationship with Epstein, has rejected Giuffre’s allegations and said he didn’t recall meeting her.

With AP

Support is available from the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service at 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) or the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.