House Democrats released three new emails from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Wednesday, the day the longest government shutdown in U.S. history was nearing its end. In one of them, Epstein writes that Trump “spent hours” at the financier’s home with one of the victims, whose name is redacted to protect their privacy. The recipient of that message, dated 2011, is financier Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in a minimum-security prison as an accomplice to the crimes of her close friend. Epstein writes in that email about the future president: “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked yet is Trump.”

In another message, Epstein, who died in 2019 in a maximum-security cell while awaiting trial on charges of abusing hundreds of minors, implies that the then-president of the United States, a real estate mogul and reality TV star, was aware of his conduct. “He knew about the girls.” The material comes from files obtained by Congress through a court order from Epstein’s estate.

Trump has always denied any knowledge of Epstein's crimes, and it has never been proven that he participated in them or was an accomplice. The US president maintained a 15-year friendship with the millionaire pedophile, which lasted until around 2004, when they stopped seeing each other. This was before Epstein's first trial for child abuse in 2006. It was also long before Epstein died in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial for sex trafficking, and before Trump became president of the United States for the first time in 2017.

The shadow of Epstein's crimes has haunted Trump since the pedophile financier's death. The memory of that old friendship resurfaced in the early months of his second presidency, causing his biggest crisis with his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, some of whose most prominent members have been speculating about the case for years—a horrific web of sexual abuse with hundreds of victims. A group of these victims recently went to Congress to demand justice.

In early July, a joint statement from the FBI and the Department of Justice announced that US authorities did not plan to release any new documents about the pedophile, contrary to what they had been promising in the preceding months. Nor did they plan to release the Epstein list, which allegedly includes the names of wealthy and famous friends who participated in the millionaire's child sex trafficking ring.

Conspiracy theorists suspect that a secret exists and is being kept hidden to protect them. That joint statement also confirmed what the coroner had already concluded: that Epstein committed suicide in his cell, despite the murder theories circulating around his death, fueled by the strange circumstances, given that the prisoner spent more hours than expected without supervision.

“These latest emails 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 (D-California) said in a press release Tuesday. Garcia is a member of the House Oversight Committee, which received the materials from the convicted sex offender.

The House of Representatives has been in recess since before the start of the government shutdown, which began on October 1, and is about to end, more than 43 days later, making it the longest in U.S. history. The House is scheduled to vote this Wednesday to reopen funding for government spending, as the Senate did on Monday. The end of the shutdown will also result in the House of Representatives returning to session and the swearing-in of Representative Adelita Grijalva.

Grijalva was elected in a special election to fill a vacancy in the state of Arizona. Mike Johnson, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, has refused to allow her to take office, even though he had the power to do so. According to Johnson, this was to avoid depriving Grijalva of a ceremony with full honors, given that the government was shut down. Almost no one in Washington is unaware of the real reason: when the papers reach Congress, the Democrats, who are in the minority, will have, along with a handful of Republicans, enough votes to release the Epstein papers, and then it will be clear how many times and in what context Trump's name appears in those documents.