The public disclosure of more than 20,000 pages of newly released documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has reignited a long-running scandal over his relationship with the rich and powerful.
Democratic politicians released three emails obtained from Epstein’s estate, saying they showed Donald Trump may have known more about Epstein’s crimes than he has publicly acknowledged.
The president’s team struck back, saying those files were cherrypicked, and Republican representatives followed up by releasing a much bigger cache of files.
Here are the key revelations so far:
Epstein said Trump knew about ‘about the girls’
Democratic members of the House oversight committee said the emails they released “raise serious questions about Donald Trump and his knowledge of Epstein’s horrific crimes”.
In one of the emails, dated January 2019 and sent to columnist Michael Wolff, Epstein said of Trump: “Of course, he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
Trump has previously suggested that Epstein “stole” young female staffers whom he hired away from the president’s Mar-a-Lago country club.
Epstein’s former friend and aide, Ghislaine Maxwell, is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, including procuring girls to be sexually abused.
Epstein saw Trump as a ‘dog that hasn’t barked’
In another 2011 email, Epstein alleged to Maxwell that Trump had spent hours with one of his victims but had not spoken about it.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” said Epstein. In her reply, Maxwell says: “I have been thinking about that.”
The victim was later identified by the White House as Virginia Giuffre, who killed herself in April, aged 41. The email did not suggest why Trump spent time with Giuffre.
A “dog that hasn’t barked” is a phrase sometimes used to suggest the absence of something is more significant than its presence, although its meaning is not entirely clear in this case.
Trump responded to the files on his Truth Social platform, accusing Democrats of “trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again” to deflect from the government shutdown, in which political divisions left the federal government in disarray for weeks.
Epstein despised Trump
Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 aged 66, had a sour opinion of Trump in the years before his death.
“I have met some very bad people,” Epstein wrote in a 2017 email. “None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.”
In other messages, Epstein described Trump as a “maniac” showing signs of “early dementia”.
Prince Andrew kept ties with Epstein longer than previously thought
The emails have cast further doubt on Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s account of when he cut ties with the child sex abuser, as well as his denials about meeting his accuser, Giuffre.
In March 2011, four months after he later claimed to have ended his relationship with Epstein, the former prince wrote to him and Maxwell, saying, “I can’t take any more of this,” in response to allegations put to him by the Mail on Sunday.
Another email from Epstein in 2011 appears to corroborate the veracity of a photograph of the then-Prince Andrew holding Giuffre by the waist in 2001 when she was 17. In the email, Epstein said: “Yes, she was on my plane and yes, she had her photo taken with Andrew, as many of my employees have.”
Mountbatten-Windsor, who denies any wrongdoing, suggested in a 2019 BBC Newsnight interview that the photograph may have been doctored and that he had “absolutely no memory” of it being taken.
In her posthumous memoir, Giuffre alleged she was forced to have sex with the former prince three times.
Emails put Trump biographer Michael Wolff in the spotlight
A New York author, Michael Wolff, has written four books chronicling Trump’s political career, including his 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which drew pushback from the administration.
Wolff has known Epstein for years, and the financier was a source for his books on Trump. The writer has previously said he has dozens of hours’ worth of interview tapes of Epstein talking about Trump.
Of the three emails released by the Democrats on Wednesday, two included exchanges with Wolff, including the one where Epstein says Trump “knew about the girls”, putting the high-profile writer in the spotlight.
One email, sent by Wolff to Epstein in December 2015, said that Trump might “hang himself” in an upcoming CNN interview on what relationship the then presidential candidate had previously maintained with Epstein.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff says. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you …”
He added: “Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
