WASHINGTON — House Democrats on Wednesday released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Donald Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Epstein’s victims, among other messages that suggested that the convicted sex offender believed Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged.

Trump has emphatically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. He has said that he and Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019, were once friendly but had a falling out.

But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said the emails, which they selected from thousands of pages of documents received by their panel, raised new questions about the relationship between the two men. In one of the messages, Epstein flatly asserted that Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage. In another, Epstein pondered how to address questions from the news media about their relationship as Trump was becoming a national political figure.

“The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said.

The messages are certain to inflame the debate on Capitol Hill over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, and top officials’ decision to backtrack on a promise to fully release them. That issue, which has split Republicans and alienated some of Trump’s right-wing supporters, had faded to the background as the government shutdown dragged on.

But the House is set to return Wednesday to clear legislation to end the shutdown, and attention is likely to shift back to the Epstein matter.

“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,” Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a statement.

The three separate email exchanges released Wednesday were all from after Epstein’s 2008 plea deal in Florida on state charges of soliciting prostitution, in which federal prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges. They came years after Trump and Epstein had a reported falling out in the early 2000s. One was addressed to Epstein’s longtime confidant Ghislaine Maxwell, while two were with author Michael Wolff.

In one email from April 2011, Epstein told Maxwell, who was later convicted on charges related to facilitating his crimes, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.” He added that an unnamed victim “spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”

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

In an email from January 2019, Epstein wrote to Wolff of Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” House Democrats, citing an unnamed whistleblower, said this week that Maxwell was preparing to formally ask Trump to commute her federal prison sentence.

The emails were provided to the Oversight Committee along with a larger tranche of documents from Epstein’s estate that the panel requested as part of its investigation into Epstein and Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges.

The committee’s staff redacted victims’ names and any identifying information from the emails. Because the full set of documents has not been released, it was not clear whether the emails had been excerpted from larger conversations that might have provided fuller context.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of politicizing the investigation. “Democrats continue to carelessly cherry-pick documents to generate clickbait that is not grounded in the facts,” a committee spokesperson said. “The Epstein Estate has produced over 20,000 pages of documents on Thursday, yet Democrats are once again intentionally withholding records that name Democrat officials.”

The Republicans also identified the victim whose name was redacted in the emails as Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April. Giuffre had said that Maxwell recruited her into Epstein’s sex ring while she was working at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, as a teenager.

In a 2016 deposition for a civil case, Giuffre was asked if she believed Trump had witnessed the sexual abuse of minors in Epstein’s home. “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said.

“I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein,” Giuffre added. “I’ve heard he has been, but I haven’t seen him myself so I don’t know.”

Trump has condemned continued questions about his handling of the case as a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. He has called Epstein a “creep” and has insisted he never engaged in any wrongdoing with him or Maxwell.

Last summer, Trump said Epstein had “hired” away spa attendants at Mar-a-Lago. He said he had kicked Epstein out of his club, and that he believed one of the women was Giuffre.

At the time Epstein emailed Maxwell in 2011 calling Trump the “dog that didn’t bark,” Trump was a reality television star and New York tabloid celebrity who was years away from becoming president.

Around the same time, according to documents previously released by the Oversight Committee, Epstein was emailing staff members about negative press coverage he had recently received about the abuse that took place inside his home in Florida.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration released the transcript of a courthouse interview with Maxwell, who acknowledged that Trump and Epstein had once had a social relationship, but denied any connection between Trump and the sex-trafficking ring.

Epstein’s email from 2019, which claims Trump “knew about the girls” and asked Maxwell “to stop,” was sent to Wolff, who had recently written a tell-all book about the president.

Epstein was months away from the arrest and federal charges that would send him to prison, but he was the focus of significant attention after The Miami Herald had published a series of articles drawing renewed attention to the secret agreement he had signed in 2008.

In his email, Epstein mentioned a victim of his sex-trafficking operation. He also mentioned Mar-a-Lago, then disputed that Trump had ever asked him to resign from the club. “Never a member ever,” Epstein wrote.

Wolff was also involved in a third email exchange, which began on Dec. 15, 2015, the night of a debate in the Republican presidential primary. Wolff emailed Epstein and warned him that CNN was “planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.”

Epstein wrote back, “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”

Wolff advised inaction, suggesting that Trump might try to deny a close association with Epstein. “I think you should let him hang himself,” he wrote of Trump. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency” that could be used to “hang him” later or “save him, generating a debt.”

Trump never received a question about the matter in that debate, according to a transcript. It was unclear if he was asked about it separately.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michael Gold/Doug Mills
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