- Democrats released an email in which Jeffrey Epstein said Donald Trump had spent hours with one of his victims at his house.
- However, the victim in question was Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has said repeatedly that Trump was not involved in Epstein’s abuse of her.
- Understanding the timeline of Trump and Epstein’s relationship — they were close from the 1990s until about 2004, when they fell out over a property dispute — is important to assessing new revelations.
On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent the political world into a frenzy by releasing two damning-looking emails Jeffrey Epstein had sent about Donald Trump.
The committee’s Republicans then followed up by releasing thousands more Epstein emails and documents, containing embarrassing revelations about various other public figures. But the GOP and the White House also pushed back, arguing that the revelations about Trump were less than met the eye.
All of this is just an appetizer for the push for public disclosure of the “Epstein files” held by the Justice Department. A months-long effort to get a majority of the House to sign a petition that would force a vote on the matter finally won its 218th signature Wednesday. A House vote on the Epstein files is now expected in December, and if it passes, the matter will advance to the Senate.
President Trump seems highly worried about this possibility. This week, he tried to strong-arm some Republican House members into dropping their signatures from the petition, including by having officials summon Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to the Situation Room.
We don’t know what, if anything, Trump is trying to prevent from getting out through the DOJ’s Epstein files. But as we await their potential release, it’s worth taking a closer look at the newly-released Epstein emails about Trump, to assess what they actually show. Doing this requires some decoding.
“That dog that hasn’t barked is trump”
The email that got the most attention is from Epstein to his companion and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Dated April 2, 2011, it says (typos included):
I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there
When House Democrats first released the email, they redacted the name Virginia and replaced it with “VICTIM.” And the release was taken on social media as a bombshell. It appeared to show, well, Epstein saying Trump had spent hours at his house with a victim. And what explanation could there be for that other than a sexual one?
Yet Republicans soon cried foul, revealing the redacted name was Virginia — a reference to Virginia Roberts Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent public accuser, who died earlier this year.
This changed the email’s meaning significantly because, in years of depositions, litigation, and a memoir published posthumously earlier this year, Giuffre was consistent that Trump was never a participant in Epstein’s sex crimes involving her. She accused Epstein of trafficking her to other prominent men — but said repeatedly that those men did not include Trump. Unless she was lying, this email then does not mean that Trump abused an Epstein victim.
So what could Epstein have meant in the email?
Some important context here is that, according to reporting by Epstein correspondent (and pal) Michael Wolff, Epstein had wondered whether Trump played some part in bringing about his legal woes due to a falling-out they’d had. The emails appear to nod to this idea.
The belief, floated by House Speaker Mike Johnson among others, that Trump helped bring Epstein down by informing the authorities, has been much mocked and lacks any corroboration. However, Wolff did claim that Epstein himself thought this might have been true, though Epstein purportedly believed Trump was motivated by personal pique over a property auction rather than a heroic desire to save abused women.
Trump and Epstein were close pals throughout much of the 1990s and early 2000s — a time when they were frequently photographed together at parties in New York and Florida. This time encompasses Trump’s infamous “birthday book” message to Epstein, and Trump’s similarly infamous quote to a reporter that Epstein was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
But in 2004, this friendship came to an end — reportedly because Trump and Epstein had a bidding war against each other over the same Florida mansion, and things got quite bitter.
Shortly after the auction’s conclusion, the Palm Beach police received a tip that young women had been seen at Epstein’s home, according to a later deposition by the department’s police chief.
The first major law enforcement investigation into Epstein didn’t kick off until the following year, in 2005, when a 14-year-old girl and her parents went to the Palm Beach police, accusing Epstein of molesting her during a massage. But — according to Wolff — Epstein had privately wondered whether it was Trump who was responsible for the initial tip.
Epstein resolved that initial investigation with what was later called a sweetheart plea deal, but his victims soon began suing him civilly. These lawsuits were at first filed from “Jane Does,” but in 2011, one of them — Virginia Roberts Giuffre — came forward to put her name to her accusations, becoming Epstein’s most prominent accuser.
Shortly after that, in 2011, Epstein sent that newly-released email to Maxwell, which I’ll quote again:
I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there
The email may be an expression of Epstein’s suspicion that Trump is behind his legal woes. He’s asking, why hasn’t Trump’s name been mentioned in the investigation and lawsuits? He’s saying Giuffre, his lead public accuser, had spent time with Trump, so perhaps he was behind her coming forward. And he’s perhaps alluding to how the “police chief” got his tip, perhaps saying he’s “75% there” toward thinking it was Trump.
“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop”
A second email that is being treated as damning was sent by Epstein to Wolff on January 31, 2019. It reads:
(REDACTED) worked at mara lago. . she was the one that accused prince andrew. . trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop
Epstein’s claim that “of course” Trump “knew about the girls” has gotten a great deal of attention, but it should also be noted that the sentence concludes “as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
This likely refers to the reports that Epstein and Maxwell were recruiting girls from the Mar-a-Lago spa to become his “masseuses” — Giuffre, for one, had worked there. Trump spoke about this earlier this year when he claimed Epstein had “taken” people from his spa, and said he intervened to stop that.
Indeed, as far as back as 2007, an anonymous source told Page Six, about Epstein: “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things…Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.” (The reader may decide whether that anonymous source sounds like John Barron.)
So on one hand, Epstein’s statement sounds damning: Trump knew about the girls! On the other hand, what Epstein then says is that Trump asked Maxwell “to stop” — presumably, to stop recruiting girls from Mar-a-Lago.
That email, then, also doesn’t really corroborate the idea that Trump was a participant in Epstein’s sex crimes — though in assessing its candor, we should keep in mind that Epstein is writing to a journalist, not a trusted associate like Maxwell.
It’s important to get the timeline straight
In the frenzy of interest over the newly-released Epstein emails, decontextualized tidbits have been rocketed across social media and been treated as damning. But there have also been a lot of misinterpretations and misreadings. If the DOJ’s Epstein files ever do get released, that will likely continue.
In my view, the most helpful thing to keep in mind when assessing the import of new information about the Trump/Epstein relationship, is that the relationship had two phases:
- From the 1990s to about 2004, Trump and Epstein were friends, frequently seen together, exchanging bawdy messages, etc.
- After 2004, they had a falling out, reportedly over that mansion auction; the reporting has been quite consistent that this was a bitter falling-out and their relationship did not continue after that.
Naturally, Trump’s defenders are preferring to focus on the second phase. Indeed, after this week’s release of tens of thousands of Epstein’s emails, many claimed there was surprisingly little about Trump. But those emails were from the 2010s.
It’s more likely that the things Trump’s most worried about in the Epstein files would be about the earlier period, when Trump and Epstein really were close — things like Trump’s birthday book message to Epstein: “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
