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On Wednesday, more than twenty thousand pages of documents from Epstein’s files were released—not from the much-anticipated Justice Department 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 could yet emerge. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald writer who has pursued the Epstein story longer and more doggedly than anyone, reported that Trump’s name appears thousands of times in these documents. Within hours, there were reports about Epstein’s correspondence with Steve Bannon, Larry Summers, and Michael Wolff. One Epstein e-mail suggested, but offered no proof, that Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage. Another missive from Epstein implied, mysteriously, that he had spent the first Thanksgiving of Trump’s Presidency in Palm Beach, in close proximity to him, years after the two had supposedly broken off all contact. Several other e-mails also hinted at ongoing ties.
In a twist that took me by surprise but I suppose shouldn’t have, the e-mails also revealed that Epstein corresponded with a wide network of international contacts about Trump in the years before he died, including attempting to pass along a message to Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, in advance of Trump’s 2018 Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin. It was, in effect, an invitation to get the scoop on the American President, relayed via Thorbjørn Jagland, a former Prime Minister of Norway who was then serving as head of the Council of Europe. “I think you might suggest to putin that lavrov can get insight on talking to me,” Epstein wrote. In the same e-mail exchange, he said that he had previously talked with Russia’s late Ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, about Trump. “Churkin was great,” Epstein wrote. “He understood trump after our conversations. it is not complex. he must be seen to get something its that simple.” I was not the only one stunned by this. In response to Politico’s reporting, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, wrote, “All of the times I’ve wondered what Putin had on Trump, and now we find out Jeffrey Epstein was talking to Putin’s ambassador about Trump.”
The e-mails—unverified, typo-ridden assertions from a man who is not around to testify about them—do not constitute specific proof of anything, it should be underscored, just fodder for endless new rounds of questions now that politicians in Trump’s own party have chosen to release them. Who knows what else is lurking in there?
At the White House, the attempts at damage control thus far have only fuelled the story. Trump, who now labels this the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to distinguish it from all the other alleged hoaxes to which his various tormentors over the years have previously subjected him, certainly did not dispel concerns by summoning a Republican congresswoman, Lauren Boebert, to the White House Situation Room in the unsuccessful effort to dissuade her from signing on to the discharge petition. The Situation Room is where Presidents are supposed to discuss urgent national-security matters, not Jeffrey Epstein’s e-mails. Yikes. Smoke, meet fire.
At a briefing on Wednesday dominated by questions about the e-mails, meanwhile, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, noted that they “prove absolutely nothing.” She then added, in Trump’s defense, that “Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep.” But in 2019, when Trump was asked by a reporter at a White House press conference if he had “any suspicions” that Epstein “was molesting . . . underage women,” the President replied, “No, I had no idea. I had no idea. I haven’t spoken to him in many, many years.” The question naturally arises: If he had no suspicions about Epstein’s behavior with girls then how could he have kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago for being a pedophile?
By Thursday, Leavitt was complaining that the latest Epstein flareup was all “another Democrat + Mainstream Media hoax, fueled by fake outrage, to distract from the President’s wins.” The distraction lament is one I’ve heard many times over the years from embattled press secretaries. But it seems to me that it’s the Trump White House as much as Trump’s enemies who might want to distract from the news these days. At least, that’s usually how it works for unpopular Presidents whose poll numbers are sinking to record lows amid persistent inflation, at a time when his party is losing elections by big margins and fighting among itself over whether one of its leading propagandists should have given respectful airtime to a notorious white supremacist. But this is Trump, so who knows? ♦
