Epstein email says Trump ‘knew about the girls’ as White House calls its release a Democratic smear

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three emails referring to Trump, including one written by Epstein in 2011 in which he told his close friend Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump “spent hours” at Epstein’s home with a sex trafficking victim.

The disclosures appear intended to raise new questions about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and about knowledge he may have of what prosecutors call a years-long effort by Epstein to exploit underage girls. The Republican businessman-turned-politician has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and said he ended their relationship years ago.

The version of the 2011 email released by Democrats redacted the victim’s name, but Republicans on the committee later said it was Virginia Giuffre who accused Epstein of arranging sexual encounters for her with several of his wealthy and powerful friends. Epstein committed suicide in a New York prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges.

The emails released Wednesday are part of a trove of 23,000 documents that Epstein’s estate submitted to the oversight committee.

Giuffre said Trump “could not have been friendlier.”

Giuffre, who died earlier this year, has long insisted that Trump was not among the men who sacrificed her.

In her court testimony, she said under oath that she did not believe Trump was aware of Epstein’s misconduct with underage girls. In her recently released memoir, she described meeting Trump only once, when she was working as a spa hostess at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and did not accuse him of any wrongdoing.

Giuffre wrote that she met Trump through her father, who also worked at the club. She described Trump as friendly, and said he offered to help her get a job babysitting her parents at the club.

Trump “could not have been more cordial,” Giuffre wrote.

Other members of Epstein’s staff also said in sworn depositions that although Trump stopped by Epstein’s home, they did not see him engaging in any inappropriate behavior.

Republicans say the emails were released to discredit Trump

White House spokeswoman Carolyn Leavitt said Democrats “selectively leaked the emails” in order to “create a false narrative to discredit President Trump.”

Trump, on his “Social Truth” platform, said Democrats “are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein hoax again because they will do absolutely anything to distract from how bad they did” regarding the government shutdown “and a lot of other topics.”

“There should be no bias toward Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should focus solely on opening up our country, and repairing the enormous damage Democrats have done!” Trump wrote.

In July, Trump said he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because his former friend was “taking people who work for me,” including Giuffre. The women were “taken out of the spa, rented out — in other words, gone,” he said.

“I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you to take our people,'” Trump told reporters. When asked if Giuffre was one of the employees who was stolen by Epstein, the president demurred but then said that Epstein “stole her.”

Shortly after Democrats released emails related to Trump, Republicans on the committee responded by releasing what they said were an additional 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate. Among them: copies of pages from a book by James Patterson about the former financier.

The emails revive questions about Trump’s relationship with Epstein

The release resurfaces a story that cast a pall over Trump’s presidency over the summer when the FBI and Justice Department suddenly announced they would not release additional documents investigators had spent weeks examining, disappointing conspiracy theorists and online sleuths who expected to see new discoveries.

In one 2019 email to journalist Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump, Epstein wrote of Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls when he told Ghislaine to stop.”

In an April 2, 2011 email to Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend now imprisoned for conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking, Epstein wrote: “I want you to realize that that dog that didn’t bark is Trump. (Name redacted) spent hours at my house with him, and was not mentioned once. Chief of Police. Etc. I’m 75% there.”

Maxwell replied the same day: “I’ve been thinking about that.”

The name of the person who was said to have spent time with Trump was redacted from the email, but House Democrats identified the person as a “victim.”

Levitt said the unnamed person referred to in the emails was Giuffre, who accused Britain’s then-Prince Andrew and other powerful men of sexually exploiting her when she was a teenager and died by suicide in April. Andrew, who was recently stripped of his titles and evicted from his royal residence by King Charles III after weeks of pressure to act on his relationship with Epstein, rejected Giuffre’s claims and said he did not remember meeting her.

Giuffre “has repeatedly said that President Trump was never involved in any wrongdoing and ‘could not have been friendlier to her’ in their limited interactions,” Leavitt said in a statement.

“The fact remains that President Trump fired Jeffrey Epstein from his club decades ago because he was intimidating his female employees, including Giuffre,” the statement read. He added: “These stories are nothing more than bad faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense correctly sees this as a hoax and a clear distraction from opening up government again.”

Messages seeking comment were left with Wolfe, Maxwell’s attorney David Marcus and representatives of Giuffre’s family.

Maxwell interview with the Department of Justice

Maxwell, who was interviewed by the Justice Department’s No. 2 in July, has repeatedly denied witnessing any inappropriate sexual interactions involving Trump.

“I actually never saw the president in any kind of massage,” Maxwell told Deputy District Attorney Todd Blanche, according to a transcript of the interview. “I never saw the President anywhere inappropriate in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anyone. In the times I was with him, he was an all-around gentleman.”

Giuffre came forward publicly after the initial investigation ended with an 18-month prison sentence for Epstein in Florida, who struck a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by instead pleading guilty to relatively minor state charges of solicitation of prostitution. He was released in 2009.

In subsequent lawsuits, Giuffre said she was a teenage spa hostess at Mar-a-Lago when Maxwell contacted her in 2000.

Lawyers for Maxwell, a British socialite, have argued that she should never have been tried or convicted for her role in luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She is serving a 20-year prison sentence, although she is transferred from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a low-security prison camp in Texas after meeting Blanche.

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Sisak reported from New York.

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