First, three emails were made public by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Then, more than 20,000 unfiltered documents were released by their Republican rivals on that committee. This Wednesday, the millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein once again took center stage in Washington news with a glimpse into his murky world through the documents that Congress has been obtaining in waves from his family since August.
One of the three emails that kicked off the day was addressed to her friend and fixer Ghislaine Maxwell, an accomplice in a sex trafficking ring with hundreds of underage victims, for which she is serving a 20-year prison sentence. The other two were addressed to journalist Michael Wolff.
In the 2011 email to Maxwell, Epstein mentions a victim whose name is redacted, saying, “She spent several hours with [President Donald] Trump at my house.” He also writes, “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked yet is Trump,” referring to the fact that the then real estate mogul “had not once mentioned” his meeting with that victim.
The White House later confirmed that the woman was Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide earlier this year, a month after surviving being hit by a bus in Australia, where she lived. She had previously stated that she never saw Trump participate in her attacker's crimes.
In one of the emails to Wolff, from January 2019, Epstein—who died in August of that year in a maximum-security cell while awaiting trial—implies that the then-president of the United States was aware of his conduct. “Of course he knew about the girls, given that he told Ghislaine to stop.” The other exchange with Wolff is earlier, from 2015, during the first campaign that took the real estate mogul and reality TV star to the White House. In it, Epstein suggests to the journalist that he use what he knows about Trump to blackmail him.
Trump and his allies accused the Democrats of selectively choosing certain emails to damage the president. In response to his rivals' move, Republican James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, decided to release all the documents that came into his possession last week, which he linked to in a tweet. That link leads to an impractical document repository that is frankly difficult to trace.
As the hours passed, the distillation of that information began to bear fruit, thanks to a patient review and the filtering work of the American media.
Confidences with an Obama advisor
Trump is mentioned repeatedly in those more than 20,000 documents, although there are no email exchanges between him and Epstein. The two were friends for 15 years and ended their relationship around 2004.
On one occasion, Epstein refers to the then-president as someone “on the verge of madness.” On another, he says he is “as crazy as a goat” after learning, at the beginning of his first term, that he had ordered a travel ban to the United States for citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries.
Perhaps the most revealing email, however, is the one the financier sent in 2018 to Kathryn Ruemmler, who was a White House advisor during Barack Obama's presidency:"I know how dirty Donald is," he wrote about the potential scandals that could come to light regarding Trump, after Michael Cohen, a former confidant, pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to the financing of the presidential campaign that Hillary Clinton lost.
As part of a cooperation agreement with the prosecution, Cohen implicated Trump in a 2016 bribery scheme involving payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged extramarital affair, which Trump denies. In 2023, the then-Republican candidate was convicted on 34 felony counts in that case.
The material released this Wednesday also offers new details about the relationships with figures close to the financier, familiar faces in his web of abuse and influence, as well as the appearance of less common names in that world, such as the national-populist ideologue Steve Bannon, whom Epstein advised on establishing a foothold in Europe, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and a close ally of the current Vice President, J. D. Vance. Thiel received an invitation to visit the pedophile millionaire's private island, the place where he committed dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his abuses. Thiel told Politico that he never accepted the offer.
The intrigues of journalist Wolff
Journalist Michael Wolff wrote to the millionaire pedophile shortly before Trump's electoral victory in 2016, in what appears to be an offer to damage him in the final stretch of the campaign."This week you have the opportunity to talk about Trump in a way that could win you a lot of sympathy and contribute to his downfall. Are you interested?" Wolff asks. This is not the only document in which the two fantasize about bringing down the then-candidate with supposedly compromising information, which, however, is nowhere to be found in the new documents.
These revelations do not reflect well on the journalist, who at times comes across as an image consultant for Epstein. Author of several books about Trump (and another about the financier), Wolff posted a video on Instagram this Wednesday in which he says: “I’ve been trying to talk about this story for a long time. [Epstein and the US president] maintained a close relationship for more than a decade. Perhaps we are close to irrefutable proof.”
In those emails there is also other evidence that Epstein closely followed the developments of his old friend, such as when an associate passes him information about Trump's finances or in another email he shows interest in the confirmation process of Alex Acosta as Secretary of Labor.
When he was a federal prosecutor in South Florida (between 2005 and 2009), Acosta agreed to bury the first trial against Epstein with a lenient plea deal that allowed the defendant, who spent only 13 months in jail, to plead guilty to two state crimes. He also granted him immunity from prosecution under federal law for sex trafficking of minors because, Acosta later said, he considered it unlikely that prosecutors would succeed in a hypothetical trial. That agreement, which allowed Epstein to continue abusing minors for another decade, is what prevented Acosta from joining Trump's cabinet.
Advice about women to Larry Summers
If the publication of the documents has served any purpose, it is to confirm the close relationship between Epstein and Lawrence Summers, a prominent economist who worked in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and later became president of Harvard University.
It was already known that Summers had had a relationship with the financier (a relationship she later publicly regretted), but not that she had continued to maintain such frequent contact with him between 2017 and 2019, years after Epstein's first (mild) conviction for a prostitution-related crime and also after the Miami Herald revived the case against him with a series of investigative reports.
The publication of those reports led to Epstein's second prosecution, when federal prosecutors in New York accused him in 2019, amid the Me Too movement, of sex trafficking for events that occurred between 2002 and 2005 in Miami and New York.
In these exchanges, there is much talk about Summers' relationship with a London woman about whom Epstein gives him advice. They also discuss Trump. In a 2017 email, the economist says he has been to Saudi Arabia and returns with the impression that officials there think"Donald is an increasingly dangerous clown in foreign policy." In other messages, they plan a donation from Epstein to a project connected to Harvard and to the economist's wife, Elisa F. New.
From those dozens of emails exchanged between the two, it is not possible to conclude that Summers knew anything about Epstein's crimes.
Former Prince Andrew: “Say it has NOTHING to do with me”
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's relationship with Maxwell and Epstein and the accusations of Virginia Giuffre, a victim of the pedophile, caused a gradual fall from grace for the then Duke of York that led to the decision by his brother, King Charles III, to strip him of his title of prince last month.
Among the more than 20,000 documents is a 2011 message in which the then-prince responds to an email forwarded to him by Maxwell through Epstein. It concerns the British newspaper Mail on Sunday, which has just asked the financier for a rebuttal to the sexual abuse allegations its reporters are about to publish. Prince Andrew replies: “Hello! What is all this? I know nothing! Please tell me. This has NOTHING to do with me. I can’t stand it anymore.”
On March 6, 2011, the Mail on Sunday published an article with a photograph of Prince Andrew and Giuffre, the victim who recently committed suicide. The Duke of York maintains that he never committed any crime. In Giuffre's recently published posthumous memoirs, she describes the three times she was forced into sexual slavery by the prince, whom she describes as a man"very aware of his privileges," who was convinced that he "had a birthright" to have sex with her.
