Topline
Jeffrey Epstein claimed President Donald Trump knew about his abuse of women and spent time at Epstein’s house with at least one victim, according to new emails released by House Democrats on Wednesday, raising new speculation about the nature of the president’s relationship with the late financier and whether he had knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking scheme.
Now-President Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, on February 12, 2000.
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Key Facts
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three email exchanges Wednesday provided by Epstein’s estate in which the financier, who died in 2019, appeared to discuss his relationship with Trump and suggest the now-president was aware of Epstein’s alleged sexual abuse of women, many of whom were underage.
Epstein wrote to associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011 that an unnamed victim of his “spent hours at my house” with Trump.
In another email exchange from 2019 with writer Michael Wolff, who has said he interviewed Epstein prior to his death, the financier wrote of Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
A third email exchange from 2015 shows Epstein and Wolff discussing Trump, then a presidential candidate, being potentially asked during a debate about his relationship with the financier, with Wolff suggesting to Epstein that Trump had been on Epstein’s private plane and in the financier’s home.
The exchanges suggest Trump had knowledge of Epstein’s relationships with women, though they do not explicitly say the president was at all directly involved with abusing women or participated in Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme himself.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed in a statement that House Democrats “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,” also claiming the unnamed victim Epstein referenced was the late Virginia Giuffre, who has said she met Trump at Mar-a-Lago but never accused the president of wrongdoing.
Chief Critic
“The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre,” Leavitt said Wednesday, calling the emails “nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”