And the Republicans are running in fear.
Representative Adelita Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, was sworn in by House Speaker Mike Johnson seven weeks after her election.
(Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
After waiting 50 days to be sworn in as a member of Arizona Congress, Representative Adelita Grijalva wasted no time playing nice with GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson. Asked by a reporter why she had to wait so long after her special election (to fill her late father Raul Grijalva's seat), she smiled coyly, said, “That's not my question,” and pointed to Johnson. “Look, I really like this lady,” Johnson cooed. Grijalva did not return the compliment. In a brief address to her colleagues, she called the seven-week delay an “abuse of power” by Johnson. “One person should not be able to unilaterally prevent a duly elected member of Congress from being sworn in for political reasons.”
And when she left the podium, she caused even more problems for the Speaker by immediately becoming the last necessary signatory to the dismissal petition on the bill to release the Justice Department's Epstein files. The bill could now be introduced in the House of Representatives as early as next week. After a day rocked by the release of tens of thousands of Epstein emails, many of them related to Trump, even Republicans predicted it would pass the House, likely with significant GOP support. To be clear, the emails released Wednesday were obtained from Epstein's estate following a subpoena from House GOP officials designed to block the release of the actual “files” – voluminous reports of the Justice Department's investigation into Epstein, which led to his indictment on sex trafficking charges.
What has changed? After a summer of increasingly bad news about Epstein, Johnson essentially shut down the House of Representatives and refused to swear in Grijalva to prevent the bill from passing. Now about the latest discoveries. And Dems have only released a few of the emails they have, albeit some of the most incriminating ones. Committee Republicans responded by releasing tens of thousands of people later that day. No one knows if they did this thinking they would exonerate Trump, or if they were too stupid to realize how incriminating they were. They only contributed to the toxic fumes of scandal surrounding Trump and his allies. (As you may recall, Epstein committed suicide while in prison on federal charges.)
You can find the whole bunch Here.
The only bombshell in the emails came in the Democrats' initial release, including when Epstein mused in a conversation with co-author and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell amid a new storm of controversy over his exploitation of underage girls: “I want you to understand that the dog that didn't bark was Trump. [Redacted victim name] spent hours with him in my house, he was never mentioned.”
Trump would be more accurately described as “the shoe that didn’t fall”; “The dog that didn't bark” is a clumsier and less successful metaphor. Epstein was known for his intellect, financial savvy, and patronage of science and higher education; these emails, riddled with spelling and grammatical errors, show that he's a pretty dim bulb. (All Epstein correspondence quoted here is verbatim.)
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The emails not only show Epstein's long friendship with Trump, but also that he remained obsessed with him long after their breakup, which most sources say was the result of a Palm Beach real estate deal (though Trump claims it was because Epstein “stole” young female employees from Mar-a-Lago). Obsessed with Trump, and not in a good way. He tells one correspondent: “See, I know how dirty Donald is.” To another who called Trump “so rude,” he said the president is “even worse in real life and up close.” In another thread, he told an unnamed correspondent: “I am the one who has the power to destroy him.”
In 2017 he emailed frequent correspondent Larry Summers.Former Democratic Treasury Secretary and Harvard President: “Remember what I told you: I've met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body… so yeah, dangerous.” (Summers asked Epstein for advice about potentially cheating on his wife, for whom he was asking for a $1 million charitable donation, and sympathized with the scourge of cancel culture afflicting creepy men. Like them.)
“Journalist” Michael Wolff, who was supposed to write a book about Epstein, turned out to be an unofficial adviser. He taught a sex offender how to handle what he knew about Trump right before his first election. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolf wrote. “If he says he wasn't on the plane or at home, then that gives you valuable PR and political currency. You can frame him in a way that potentially benefits you in a positive way, or if it really looks like he might win, you can bail him out by creating debt.”
After the release of the infamous Access to Hollywood On the recording, Wolf emailed Epstein that he had “an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in a way that will generate a lot of sympathy from you and help finish him off.” Epstein later emailed Wolf: “Of course he knew about the girls.”
Wolf also helped a convicted sex offender think about whether and how to respond to Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown's exposé of an extensive investigation into his assaults on underage girls locally, which was overturned by U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta and reduced to a single charge of soliciting a prostitute. In fact, Wolf and MAGA mega-guru Steve Bannon converged on a branch of sorrow that Brown received the Sidney Hillman Prize, extremely prestigious among liberals but little known. “Look at the judges in this thing – absolutely a right-thinking establishment – or Ta-nihisi. [sic]”,” Wolf wrote, misspelling the name of famous writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Always improve,” Bannon responded. (Congrats, Hillman Foundation!)
But Wolf isn't the only journalist with poor results. Former New York Times Financial writer Landon Thomas Jr. was a frequent and friendly correspondent for Epstein, warning him when reporters asked questions about him and poking fun at his relationship with Trump. In 2015, Epstein asked if he wanted “pictures of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas quickly said yes, but Time I never wrote about this. Epstein later wrote to him: “Let them ask my landlord about Donald [Trump] almost walked through the door, leaving a nose print on the glass while the young women were swimming in the pool, and he was so focused that he walked right through the door.” He also told him that he “gave” Trump his 20-year-old girlfriend in 1993.
Thomas was quietly released Time in 2019, when news broke about Epstein's contributions to his favorite charity, but no one from the newspaper followed up on any of Thomas's information (to be fair, he probably didn't share it). It's hard not to remember, however, that in 2015 the newspaper's political observers were busy covering its partnership with Bannon-funded right-wing author Peter Schweitzer on his virtually debunked “exposure” of Bill and Hillary Clinton's alleged financial misdeeds “Clinton Cash.” The newspaper's sleazy coverage of the Democratic candidate in the final days of the 2016 election “but her emails” should go down in history as rival scandals such as its correspondent's shilling of Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, its salacious reporting on Whitewater in the '90s, and its promotion of non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” in the run-up to the Iraq War early in the war. 2000s.
While Trump's defenders insist that the new emails do not “prove” Trump's wrongdoing (other than numerous examples of Epstein claiming he was “dirty” and “knew about girls”), they do definitively prove the corrupt, friendly, sex-and-money-chasing culture of elite American men. To see journalists, financiers and academics at best gossiping with Epstein and at worst providing him with care and advice is to see that the #MeToo movement has never gone far enough.
As MSNBC host and author Chris Hayes wrote on Bluesky: “There’s something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers discussing how woke cancel culture is unfair to male predators in a friendly email to his buddy JEFFREY EPSTEIN.”
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Trump still tried to block the release of Epstein's files, although four Republicans joined Democrats in backing the dismissal petition to get a vote on the floor. He previously tried (and failed) to get Colorado GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert to remove her name from a meeting in the Situation Room, best known as the place where President Obama and his Cabinet sat and watched the raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011. “Only a bad or very stupid Republican would fall into this trap,” he wrote in Truth Social Wednesday.
Next week, when the House of Representatives votes, we will find out how many “bad or very stupid” Republicans there are. It is predicted to be passed despite Johnson's opposition. If the bill passes the Senate, which is uncertain, Trump would have to veto it to block the release of the files. Considering he campaigned on a promise to open the vault to anything Epstein-related, it will be interesting to watch the MAGA reaction. Trump still seemed like Teflon, but the scandal stuck.
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