More than twenty thousand pages of documents from Epstein's dossier were released Wednesday—not from the Justice Department's long-awaited treasure trove, but from a separate collection subpoenaed by Congress from Epstein's estate—and reading through them, it soon became clear how many new lines of inquiry might still emerge. Julie K. Brown, Miami Herald A writer who has followed Epstein's story longer and harder than anyone else said Trump's name appears thousands of times in the documents. Within hours, reports emerged of Epstein's correspondence with Steve Bannon, Larry Summers and Michael Wolff. One Epstein email suggested, but did not provide evidence, that Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom investigators later found were minors. Another message from Epstein cryptically said he spent the first Thanksgiving of Trump's presidency in Palm Beach, in his immediate area, years after the two allegedly cut off all contact. Several other emails also hinted at ongoing ties.
In a twist that caught me off guard, but I guess I shouldn't have: the emails also showed that Epstein had been corresponding with a wide network of international contacts about Trump in the years before his death. including trying to convey a message to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov ahead of Trump's 2018 Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin. In essence, it was an invitation to obtain information about the American president, transmitted through Thorbjørn Jagland, the former Prime Minister of Norway, who then served as head of the Council of Europe. “I think you could suggest to Putin that Lavrov could get information by talking to me,” Epstein wrote. In the same email, he said he had previously spoken about Trump with the late Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin. “Churkin was great,” Epstein wrote. “He understood Trump after our conversations. It's not difficult. You have to see him to get something, it's that simple.” I wasn't the only one who was taken aback by this. In response to Politician reportingSheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator from Rhode Island, wrote: “I kept wondering what Putin had on Trump, and now we find out that Jeffrey Epstein talked to Putin's ambassador about Trump.”
The emails – unverified, misspelled statements from someone who is not around to testify on them – do not constitute concrete evidence of anything, it should be emphasized, but simply provide fodder for endless new questions now that politicians in Trump's own party have decided to release them. Who knows what else is hiding there?
The White House's efforts to do damage control have only made the story worse. Trump, who is now calling it the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax” to distinguish it from all the other alleged hoaxes he has been subjected to by his various tormentors over the years, has certainly not allayed concerns. call Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert came to the White House situation room in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade her from signing the dismissal petition. The Situation Room is where presidents should discuss pressing national security issues, not Jeffrey Epstein's emails. Yes. Smoke, meet fire.
Meanwhile, at a briefing on Wednesday that was dominated by questions about the emails, White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt said they “prove absolutely nothing.” She then added in Trump's defense that “Jeffrey Epstein was a member of Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and a scumbag.” But in 2019, when a reporter at a White House news conference asked Trump if he had “any suspicion” that Epstein had “molested… minor women,” the president responded: “No, I had no idea. I had no idea. I haven’t spoken to him for many, many years.” The question naturally arises: if he had no suspicions about Epstein's behavior with girls, how could he kick him out of Mar-a-Lago for being a pedophile?
By Thursday, Leavitt was complaining that Epstein's latest outburst was “yet another hoax by Democrats and the mainstream media, fueled by fake outrage to distract from the president's victories.” Complaints of distraction are ones I've heard many times over the years from embattled press secretaries. But it seems to me that it is the Trump White House, as well as Trump's enemies, who may want to take attention away from the news these days. At least that's what usually happens with unpopular presidents whose approval ratings fall to record lows amid ongoing inflation while his party loses elections by a landslide and fights among themselves over whether one of its leading propagandists should have respectfully given airtime to a notorious white supremacist. But this is Trump, so who knows? ♦
