Image source, Craig Hudson/Getty
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- author, Drafting
- Author title, BBC World News
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New documents released by US House Democrats appear to show that President Donald Trump was mentioned several times by deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in emails he exchanged with his partner Ghislaine Maxwell and with writer Michael Wolff, the author of several books about the president.
Democratic representatives released an alleged 2011 email from Epstein in which he indicated to Maxwell that Trump “spent hours” at his home with someone Democrats described as a victim of sexual exploitation and whose name was redacted in the post to maintain his privacy.
In the same email, Epstein reportedly referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked yet.”
Democrats also released another alleged Epstein email from 2019, in which he told Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls,” an apparent reference to young women he had sexually exploited.
According to the brief, the sitting president would have asked Maxwell to stop providing youth to Epstein himself, who committed suicide in 2019 in a maximum-security prison in New York while awaiting trial.
Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence in the United States for sex trafficking.
In a third email from 2015, Wolf warns that CNN was planning to ask Trump — then a candidate in the 2016 GOP presidential primary — about his relationship with Epstein, who in return asked the writer: “If we were to prepare an answer, what do you think it should be?”
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolfe replies. “If he said he wasn’t home or wasn’t on the plane (referring to the private plane on which Epstein smuggled minors), that would give you an advantage,” the journalist writes.
White House press secretary Carolyn Leavitt on Wednesday responded to the release of the documents by saying that “Democrats selectively leaked emails to liberal media outlets to create a false narrative to discredit President Trump.”
“The anonymous victim mentioned in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said that President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing of any kind and ‘could not have been friendlier to her’ in their few interactions,” Leavitt said.
“These stories are nothing more than malicious attempts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense clearly sees this deception and the clear distraction it represents to derail the reopening of the government,” the White House press secretary said.
The resumption of US House of Representatives sessions on Wednesday was scheduled to focus on voting to end the federal government shutdown that has been ongoing for more than a month.
But with the release of Epstein’s emails, Democrats set the tone and put the issue at the top of the agenda.
*With information from Nomia Iqbal.
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