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Their content is cryptic and raises more questions than answers.
Yet the tranche of emails on the Jeffrey Epstein affair released by Democrats in the House of Representatives show enough contradictions between their references to Donald Trump and the US president’s own previous utterances on the subject to fan a fresh wave of speculation and guesswork.
An email sent by Epstein in April 2011 to Ghislaine Maxwell captures the intriguingly ambiguous tone.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein writes.
Maxwell writes back: “I’ve been thinking about that.”
“Victim [name redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.” The White House has since identified the victim as Virginia Giuffre.
Another Epstein email in January 2019 to the writer Michael Wolff – author of several books on Trump’s presidency – is more direct, yet tantalizingly incomplete.
Once again mentioning a victim’s redacted name, it makes an unexplained reference to “Mara Lago” [sic], Trump’s Florida home and club, before going on to say, “Trump says he asked me to resign, never a member ever.”
That comment may refer to reports that Trump once banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago – according to some reports, for allegedly trying to seduce the teenage daughter of another member.
Trump told reporters during his first presidency in July 2019 that he had banned Epstein but did not explain the reasons. “I did have a falling out a long time ago,” he said. “The reason doesn’t make any difference, frankly.”
He has repeated the assertion several times while trying to dissociate himself from a man he once praised lavishly.
Last summer, he said he had expelled Epstein for luring spa attendants away from Mar-a-Lago. Other accounts have suggested that the two men fell out after getting into a competitive bidding war over the same property in Palm Beach in 2004.
In the email to Wolff, Epstein adds: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
While what Maxwell was asked to stop is unexplained, the assertion that Trump “knew about the girls” could raise doubts about the truthfulness of the president’s previous statements.
Asked in the same 2019 encounter with journalists if he had “any suspicions that [Epstein] was molesting … underaged women”, Trump responded: “No, I had no idea. I had no idea. I haven’t spoken to him in many, many years.”
That comment – while Epstein was in federal custody awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges – sits uneasily with what Trump told New York magazine in 2002.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” he said. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
An email exchange released Wednesday between Epstein and Wolff in December 2015 – when Trump was running for the Republicans’ presidential nomination – alludes to damage that the pair’s past ties could cause Trump.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” writes Wolff. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or in the house, then that gives you a valuable PR or political currency.
“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.
“Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
Since Epstein’s death and as revelations of his underage sex trafficking have proliferated, Trump has, on the contrary, tried to wash his hands of his once close friend – while emphasizing Epstein’s close ties to Bill Clinton.
“I know [Clinton] was on his plane 27 times, and he said he was on the plane four times … And then the question you have to ask is: Did Bill Clinton go to the island?, Trump said in 2019 referring to an island owned by Epstein.
“Because Epstein had an island that was not a good place, as I understand it. And I was never there. So you have to ask: Did Bill Clinton go to the island? If you find that out, you’re going to know a lot.”
According to Rolling Stone, an unsealed document disclosed that Clinton and Trump flew on Epstein’s plane.
Trump in recent years has gone out his way to express disdain for Epstein.
“I was not a fan of Jeffrey Epstein … I threw him out of a club. I didn’t want anything to do with him. That was many, many years ago. It shows you one thing: that I have good taste. OK? Now, other people, they went all over with him. They went to his island. They went all over the place.”
He has also indulged conspiracy theories circulating among his Maga supporters that Epstein’s death in a Manhattan prison cell may not have been suicide.
Asked by the rightwing broadcaster Tucker Carlson in 2023 if Epstein may have been murdered, he said: “I don’t know … it’s possible. I mean, I don’t really believe – I think he probably committed suicide.
“But there are those people, there are many people – I think you’re one of them, right? But a lot of people think that he was killed.”
Amid the clamor to release the files, Trump was ambiguous – fanning unease that the latest email releases is unlikely to quell.
Asked by Fox News during the 2024 presidential election campaign if he would release the Epstein files – along with the John F Kennedy and the September 11 attack files – he equivocated.
“I guess I would. I think that less so because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world,” he said. “I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others.”
With segments of his base angered by the reneging on that vague promise, he has hit out at journalists and his opponents.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” he told a reporter who asked Pam Bondi, the attorney general, about the files at a cabinet meeting in July.
“I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas [where deadly floods had happened.] It just seems like a desecration.”
He has also called the files a hoax and a creation of his political opponents, including Barack Obama.
“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands,” he posted on his Truth Social platform. “Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?”
