When he should have been ecstatic about managing to end the government shutdown without giving anything to the Democrats, the US President Donald Trumphas been caught up again by the ‘Epstein case’, a web from which he cannot escape in his second term.
This network of controversy that takes up all the oxygen of attention has put its own Administration under suspicion of lack of transparency and in conflict with politicians and bases of the MAGA movement. And it became more dense on Wednesday with the publication by the House Oversight Committee of more than 20,000 pages of emails and other documents from the financier and sexual predator, which range from at least 2011 until spring 2019, months before Epstein’s federal indictment, which he took his life that summer in a New York cell as he awaited trial.
These are six keys of that material and what its content reveals.
The material published on Wednesday was obtained from the Epstein heirs and for court decision James Comer, the Republican head of the House Oversight Committee. It is different from the so-called “Epstein files,” documents in the hands of the FBI and the Department of Justice that Trump promised to make public during the campaign but which so far have not seen the light of day.
This failure to keep his word has provoked anger and indignation on the part of Republicans and Trump’s bases. It has also promoted a bipartisan legislative proposal claiming the declassification of all the material that we are going to vote next week in the Lower House.
For now, Comer’s publication of the other material on Wednesday responds to a clear effort on the part of the president’s allies to try to help you recover the story of transparency. And it arrived only a few hours after the democrats The committee published three emails from Epstein that suggested Trump knew much more about his plot to exploit young women and minors than he has confessed.
Those more than 20,000 pages They do not include any direct messages between Trump and Epsteinaccording to the analysis carried out by the American media. According to that study There is also no information that directly incriminates the current president in criminal activities. of the investor.
What there is are several documents that state in question claims made by Trump about their relationship o about what I knew of their actions and crimes. The president has maintained that both were friends in the 80s and 90s of the 20th century, coinciding in social circles in New York and Palm Beach but also that he broke off relations with him around 2004, some years before Epstein was charged in Florida and jailed for prostitution of minors (In that case he was sentenced to 13 months in prison under lenient conditions and obtained a generous judicial agreement from a prosecutor who later served as Trump’s Secretary of Labor in his first presidency and was forced to resign when an investigation by the ‘Miami Herald’ reopened attention to the case).
Trump has maintained that he broke up with the investor once he began recruiting young people at Mar-a-Lago for his sexual exploitation plot, including Virginia Giuffre, the woman who accused Epstein of abuse, his partner Ghislaine Maxwell and who until recently was Prince Andrew of England.
In a message from 2019, months before being indicted for the second time and already facing federal charges, Epstein wrote that ““Trump knew about it.” and? He went to her house “many times that period.” He also wrote, in any case, that Trump “They never gave him a massage.”
In some of the messages, Epstein appears convinced that had information that could harm Trump. For example, in one of December 2018, when the president had already been in office for almost two years, he wrote: “I am the one who is capable of sinking it.”
He allegedly handled information about properties and businesses of the former businessman and in 2012, according to an email he sent to one of his lawyers, he asked someone to delve into Trump’s finances, including a Mar-a-Lago mortgage and loan that he had requested for the value of 30 million of dollars.
In 2015, when Trump was still only a candidate, the financier offered a journalist who then worked for ‘The New York Times’ potentially compromising images. “Do you want pictures of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen?” he specifically wrote. The reporter, who no longer works for the New York newspaper, has told the newspaper that Epstein never gave him those photos but he did tell him about a time when Trump was so “concentrated” on girls who were in the pool that crashed into a door and left “the mark of the nose on the glass.”
They may have been friends, but Epstein’s view of Trump, at least as revealed in documented conversations, was not very positive. In a message that crossed 2017 with Kathryn Ruemmler, a lawyer who was advisor to Barack Obama and now it is Goldman Sachs chief legal officerEpstein wrote: “I know how dirty Donald is.”
When Ruemmler in a message described Trump as “so disgustingEpstein replied that it was “worse in real life and up close”.
The negative portrait also appears in several messages that he exchanged with Larry Summersthe former advisor to Obama and Bill Clinton who was also president of Harvard and who now denies his friendship with the pedophile. In 2018, for example, Epstein wrote that Trump was “bordering on madness.” To Summers he also said: “Your world doesn’t understand how stupid it really is. He will blame everyone around him for bad results.”
In other documents released Wednesday, Epstein is quoted as saying that Trump is “a demented”, ensure that your finances are “tI hear a thyme” or what he had said “all lies” when talking about Stormy Daniels, the adult entertainment star he paid before the 2016 election through his lawyer Michael Cohen to keep quiet about an extramarital affair.
The revealed material confirms the great network of relationships that Epstein had not only with Trump but with all kinds of rich and powerful charactersincluding Trump allies like Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, or Steve Bannonto whom Epstein gave advice in his campaign to land in Europe.
The financier also had repeated contacts with journalistswho often came to him for opinions on Trump or the world of finance or in search of contacts.
The messages published on Wednesday reveal their very close relationship specifically with the author Michael Wolff, who offered advice to Epstein to try to counteract negative information about him and spoke often with him about Trump, whom he has interviewed on several occasions for his books.
Who sinks more than Trump with each publication of new material about Epstein is Andrew Mountbatten-Windsorwho was until recently the prince Andrew of England. The latest documents, for example, pone doubts his version of when he cut ties with Epstein and also his repeated claim that he did not know Giuffre, la woman who accused him of having been forced to have sex with him three times when she was a teenager.
For example, an email that Andrés exchanges with Maxwell and Epstein has been published in which he says: “I can’t take this anymore“, in reference to an investigation that the ‘Mail on Sunday’ was carrying out. Although Andrés in the past He has said that he had broken off his relationship with them in 2010that email is dated March 2011.
Andrés also suggested in 2019 that the famous Photo in which he is seen with Giuffre and Maxwell could have been falsified and that he did not remember that they had taken it. A 2011 email from Epstein, however, contradicts him. “Yes, he was on my plane and yes, they took a photo of him with Andrés,” said about Giuffre, although he also wrote that taking photographs with the then member of the British royal house was common among his employees and defined the accuser (who committed suicide in April) as “a liar”.
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