President Trump knew about the late Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of girls, according to email exchanges between Epstein and Michael Wolff, the Amagansett author and journalist profiled in The Star last week.
Democrats in the House of Representatives released three emails on Wednesday in which Epstein, who allegedly died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019, wrote that Mr. Trump had spent hours at Epstein's residence with one of his victims, according to published reports. Other emails suggest that Epstein believed that Mr. Trump knew more about Epstein's conduct than he has admitted to.
The president has denied knowledge of, or involvement in, Epstein's trafficking and sexual abuse of girls.
"In one of the messages, Mr. Epstein flatly asserted that Mr. Trump 'knew about the girls,' many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage," according to a report published by The New York Times on Wednesday.
Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said the emails "raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president," according to The Times.
The House of Representatives reconvened on Wednesday to vote on legislation to end the government shutdown that had stretched into a seventh week. This cleared a path for the swearing-in of Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, which happened yesterday afternoon, seven weeks after her special-election victory in Arizona. Ms. Grijalva is expected to be the pivotal vote on a bipartisan petition to force a vote to direct the Justice Department to release "the Epstein files."
The email exchanges followed Epstein's 2008 plea deal on state charges of soliciting prostitution in Florida, according to The Times. Two were with Mr. Wolff, who has written four books about Mr. Trump, and the other addressed to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime confidante, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in abusing and trafficking minors with Epstein.
Ms. Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison and is reportedly enjoying "luxuries" there following a July meeting with the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who represented Mr. Trump in his 2024 hush-money trial and has represented him in other criminal investigations. Ms. Maxwell is reportedly seeking a commutation of her sentence from the president.
In a 2019 email to Mr. Wolff, Epstein claimed that Mr. Trump "knew about the girls" and mentioned a victim of his sex-trafficking activity as well as the president's Palm Beach, Fla., residence, according to The Times. The email exchanges with Mr. Wolff followed publication of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," Mr. Wolff's account of the first nine months of the first Trump administration. Months later, Epstein was arrested and jailed.
Mr. Wolff, who did not reply to an email seeking comment, claimed on his "Inside Trump's Head" podcast that Epstein once showed him about a dozen photographs depicting Mr. Trump with topless young women at Epstein's Palm Beach residence. The Daily beast quoted Mr. Wolff saying that the three photographs he remembered depicted "young" women, of undetermined age, "sitting in Trump's lap" by Epstein's swimming pool.
During a hearing last month, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island asked Attorney General Pam Bondi whether the F.B.I. had discovered any such photographs during a search of Epstein's properties. Ms. Bondi did not answer the question.
Mr. Wolff sued Melania Trump, the first lady, last month following the latter's threat to sue him for $1 billion "unless I retracted a set of statements I had made about her and her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein," he told The Star. "This was obviously just an effort . . . to keep me from writing about this story and reporting on this story. I obviously wasn't going to apologize. There was nothing really here to retract."
Mr. Wolff's lawsuit, he told The Star, "puts them in an awkward position because now I have subpoena power. I can call her, I can ask her things. I can delve into this relationship, which is obviously her relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, but also, more to the point, Donald Trump's relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. And obviously that's an issue of national significance."
