Opinion: Latest Trump revelations demand disclosure

Who would have thought that electing a serially bankrupt, convicted felon who has been found liable for sexual abuse and bragged about grabbing women by their private parts would lead to the moment when emails from a convicted sex offender reveal that Donald Trump might be a little more closely associated with a sex trafficking victim than he has let on.

The White House complains that the newly released emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate are another example of the Democrats “playing politics.” If so, they should do more of it and any Republicans with a conscience should play along.

In fact, just after the U.S. House of Representatives convenes to reopen the government, it should pass the legislation asking the Trump administration to release all of its Epstein files. The time for being coy is over.

These newly released emails are only a partial dump of more than 20,000 pages and include email exchanges between Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker who committed suicide in prison, his convicted and imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and the Trump biographer Michael Wolff. One of the emails to Maxwell says, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” adding that an unnamed victim “spent hours at my house with (Trump), he has never once been mentioned,” according to The New York Times.

In another email Epstein wrote to Wolff: “Of course (Trump) knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

If these two emails can be believed, they raise more than a few questions. Among them: Was Trump meeting with a victim before or after she was abused? What did he do when spending “hours” with the young victim? And if he knew about the abuse, did he tell anybody or did he keep it as a secret among the boys?

Here, Donald Trump doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt given his own abuse of the women he was responsible for — the teen girls he claimed to oogle in their dressing room at one of his pageants, the wives he cheated on and the women he has been held responsible by a court to the tune of five million dollars for sexually abusing.

A handful of House Republicans have turned on Trump — backing a discharge petition to force a vote calling on the administration to release all the Epstein files — and a growing number of his supporters online and elsewhere are clamoring for their release. The new revelations could expand this Republican divide even as a newly sworn in Congresswoman provides the final signature.

The defense offered by Trump’s spokeswoman, that the release of these emails are “bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again,” shouldn’t wash this time.

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt sounds like one of Bill Clinton’s paid stooges trying to explain how questions about cigars, stained dresses and White House oral sex are just a distraction from the booming economy. Ultimately, character matters no matter how many times we elect men unfamiliar with it.

The Trump administration was once all in favor of releasing these files — believing that they would embarrass Democrats more than Republicans — but now that Trump is in the crosshairs, they’ve flip-flopped. The latest revelations reveal that the issue isn’t going away until they flop back and do the right thing.

I don’t pretend to know what is in those files, but they should be opened to let the chips fall where they may.

David Mastio is a national columnist for The Kansas City Star and McClatchy.