Exiled by the elite after his conviction for having sexually solicited a teenage girl and failing to rehabilitate his image as a sexual predator, Jeffrey Epstein, embittered, thought in 2011 that his old friend Donald Trump had spiraled out of control.
“I want you to realize that this dog that didn’t bark is Trump,” Epstein wrote to his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell in April, noting that Trump had “spent hours at my house” with Virginia Giuffre, one of the most high-profile women to expose abuses by the financier, who died by suicide in April.
The correspondence, obtained from Epstein’s estate by the House Oversight Committee, was included among more than 20,000 documents released this week that focus more on the history of the men’s relationships. Dozens of cached emails show Epstein’s obsession with Trump as he descends into scandal and his Palm Beach neighbor ascends to the presidency.
Epstein was at a low point when he sent the missive to Maxwell after serving a prison sentence in Florida for soliciting a 16-year-old. Two months earlier, a Manhattan judge had rejected an attempt to downgrade his sex offender status, even though the well-connected wealth manager had then-prosecutor Cyrus Vance, Jr. on his side.
Giuffre had publicly spoken out about her allegations that Epstein trafficked her to powerful men for sexual purposes, sharing with the Daily Mail a now-infamous photo of her with friend Prince Andrew and Maxwell as apparent evidence.
Epstein’s 2011 email to Maxwell expressed surprise that Trump, who was then hosting “The Apprentice” and launching his presidential bid, had “never been mentioned.”
“I thought about it…” Maxwell replied.
Democrats released Epstein’s 2011 message to Maxwell Wednesday morning among a series of emails that appeared to suggest the president knew about the depraved lifestyle of the financier and his young victims.
Claiming that their colleagues across the aisle were engaged in a cherry-picking mission, House Republicans then released thousands of Epstein’s digital files online, revealing Giuffre’s identity in the 2011 message, which Democrats had previously redacted. Many came to the president’s defense, arguing that it proved nothing. Giuffre, they noted, had denied that Trump had mistreated her or that she had seen him mistreat others in the years before his death.
The president has long denied abuse and said he stopped speaking to Epstein — whom he considered a friend since the 1980s — in the early 2000s because of a real estate dispute.
On Friday, following a flurry of news reports about these emails, Trump took to his social media site Truth Social to denounce what he calls the “EPSTEIN hoax.” He asked the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationships with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JP Morgan, Chase, and numerous other people and institutions, to determine what was going on between them and him.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi said Jay Clayton, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, will lead the investigation.
Dirt on Trump
The mass of Epstein emails released this week, massive in volume and spanning from 2011 to 2019, include 1,625 references to Trump, although there was no direct communication between the two men.
It is clear throughout that – whether he did it or not – Epstein maintained that he had dirt on Trump.
In a message sent before a presidential debate in December 2015, Epstein asked his quasi-consultant, Trump biographer Michael Wolff, with whom he spoke regularly, how Trump might best respond to a possible question about their relationship.
“I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he didn’t get on the plane or at home, then that gives you valuable political and PR currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive profit for you, or, if it really looks like he might win, you could save him, generating debt,” Wolff responded.
“Of course, it’s possible that when asked, he will say that Jeffrey is a great guy, that he got a brutal deal, and that he is a victim of political correctness, which must be banned in a Trump regime.”
Wolff suggested it might be time to pull the trigger less than two weeks before Trump wins the presidency in 2016, following the release of “Filthy Rich,” a book about Epstein’s perversions.
“There is an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in a way that could garner you great sympathy and help put an end to him. Interested?” Wolff wrote on October 29. The statement did not say whether Epstein responded.
The batch of emails released this week, made searchable online by Courier Newsroom, is separate from the federal government’s investigative files — the so-called “Epstein files” — which are expected to be voted on for release by the House of Representatives next week.
These treasures shed light on Epstein’s state of mind in the years before his death and how he closely followed the president’s comings and goings, his policy decisions and his own series of scandals. In countless typo-laden emails, the Brooklyn-born financier presented himself as an expert on the POTUS in his conversations with reporters and various confidants, spoke with members of Trump’s inner circle and sought to shape American politics.
In June 2018, he asked former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland to convey a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin about his willingness to give his opinion on Trump.
His correspondence with Wolff is in the archives, and Epstein also frequently spoke about Trump with former New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr., joking about sending him a photo of Trump with bikini-clad girls in his kitchen in December 2015.
Epstein communicated regularly with the often foul-mouthed former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, to whom he told Trump was “borderline crazy,” emails show.
He also spoke often with Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who in August 2018 told the financier that they needed to discuss a “crazy jihad against you” and that “someone important has your sights on.”
After Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to violating then-President Trump’s campaign finance laws in connection with Stormy Daniels’ now-infamous hush money scheme in 2018, Epstein alluded to his insider’s view in correspondence with Kathy Ruemmler, a former Goldman Sachs executive and Obama aide, with whom the cache shows he spoke frequently.
“See, I know how dirty Donald is,” the financier joked. “I guess the non-lawyer, business people at the New York Times have no idea what it means to have your fixer-upper returned.”
“The real villain”
In December of that year, the Miami Herald published the most comprehensive account to date of allegations that Epstein serially exploited vulnerable teenage girls. The article explained how Epstein effectively got off with a slap on the wrist in his 2008 plea deal owed to former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, whom Trump chose as Labor secretary.
Epstein strategized with Wolff, who believed that “directly debunking” these claims was not the right move.
“This goes against virtue itself,” Wolff wrote. “What I’d like to do is analyze everything, create a structure to think about it all. Certainly not a piecemeal answer. Figure out where we want to be and where we can reasonably get to and work backwards.”
Epstein responded: “I think about what Trump would do. »
“The allegations are ridiculous and self-serving, the media is working with the other side’s lawyers, it’s all about Donald Trump,” Wolff responded.
“…it’s all about Donald Trump, the real bad guy,” Epstein said.
Less than two months later, Epstein explicitly implicated Trump, mentioning Mar-a-Lago to Wolff in a partially redacted email on January 31, 2019, and writing, “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member…of course he knew about the girls when he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
Epstein was apparently still focused on the president the following June, when an email describing some of Trump’s potentially questionable financial dealings landed in his inbox. Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, sent “interesting conclusions” from the financial information, or what Kahn called “outweighs 100 pages of nonsense.”
Within eight weeks, Epstein was dead. Authorities said he killed himself in his lower Manhattan jail cell, a month after his arrest on serious sex trafficking charges.
Maxwell, his longtime accomplice, was indicted a year later for contributing to abuse for at least a decade in the 1990s and convicted in a trial in December 2021. This summer, she was transferred to a comfortable prison in Bryan, Texas, after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, for a highly unusual meeting.
Transcripts of the meeting showed that Epstein’s longtime right-hand woman revealed little new information, but notably praised the president, to whom she now reportedly plans to seek clemency.
