The relationship between President Donald Trump and disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has been in the spotlight this week after three emails from Epstein’s estate were released by Democratic lawmakers in the House Oversight Committee late Tuesday night — and thousands more were released by Republicans hours later.
From the thousands of emails from Epstein’s estate, the information “contained no real smoking gun,” Axios noted.
Republicans on the committee accused their counterparts of selectively picking emails to paint the president in a bad light. “Democrats whine about ‘releasing the files,’ but they only cherry-pick when they have them to generate clickbait,” the lawmakers posted on X. “You deserve the full truth.”
Trump gives reaction to email release online
Since the release of the emails, Trump has not responded to press questions about them. But he did break his silence on Truth Social, claiming the Democrats’ initial release of the emails is “to deflect from all of their bad policies and losses, especially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where their party is in total disarray, and has no idea what to do.”
“The Democrats are doing everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again, despite the DOJ releasing 50,000 pages of documents,” he said on Friday morning. In a separate post, he added, “I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him. This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats. Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island.’ Stay tuned!!!”
But news outlets like CNN have argued that Trump’s initial outspoken stance on releasing the Epstein files during his presidential campaign last year, combined with the fact that almost a year into his presidency, his administration has refused to release all the files, raises suspicions.
“Why is Trump acting like a person desperately trying to hide something?” CNN’s Erin Burnett said on her show Thursday.
And many Americans feel skeptical, too. A Pew Research Survey from August found that 70% of Americans disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files. Specifically, among GOP voters, 44% approve, while 53% disapprove. Over half (63%) of Americans said they don’t trust what the White House is sharing about the files.
Axios noted that Trump’s actions are perhaps because the emails “shed new light on the relationship between the two men, with gossipy, unflattering descriptions of Trump by Epstein.”
Congressional petition
On Wednesday, the congressional petition to vote on releasing the Epstein files in full received the votes needed, and House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would bring the bill to a vote next week. When asked whether he thought Republicans would come out and vote for the release, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who filed the petition in September, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, “There’s going to be a deluge of Republicans.”
“The longer this goes on, the more support we gain,” Massie said. “And I think the Speaker recognized that, and that’s why, after months of trying to stop us, he’s decided to accelerate the vote, because he knows we’re going to get votes, and that’s going to carry momentum into the Senate.”
Why weren’t Epstein files released by Biden?
When asked by the press earlier this week why he doesn’t push his fellow Republican lawmakers to vote to release all the files for the American public to see, Johnson said the draft of the discharge petition did not adequately protect victims.
“There are as many as 1,000 women, by some estimates, of people who have been victimized because of the sex trafficking and Epstein and all these horrendous, heinous crimes, and we can’t have them subjected (to) any further harm,” he said. “But the discharge petition is not only reckless, it is also a totally moot point.”
He continued, “Here’s two questions you should ask every Democrat in the House and Senate. Why didn’t you bring this up during the four years of the Biden administration, when the Biden DOJ had all these records the entire time, nobody ever said a word about it. They didn’t care. Now it’s the biggest thing in the world. Didn’t matter at all when Joe Biden had the files.”
Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie Brown, who is an expert on the Jeffrey Epstein case, posted on X that the emails released “are separate from the criminal case files held by the DOJ and the FBI that Trump and Bondi promised to release after the election,” and that “Maxwell’s criminal case was still OPEN during the Biden administration. She wasn’t convicted until late 2021, and then she appealed her conviction. Generally, it’s not a good idea to open your evidence files when a criminal case is ongoing. We also don’t know whether the FBI was *still* investigating other possible suspects who helped Epstein or participated in his crimes. If you are still targeting suspects, you don’t want them to know you are zeroing in on them.”