‘I know how dirty Donald is’: Key takeaways from the 20,000-plus Epstein documents released by Republicans

First came three emails made public by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. Then, more than 20,000 unfiltered documents released by their Republican rivals on that same committee. On Wednesday, the millionaire and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein once again took center stage in Washington, as a new glimpse opened into his murky world through the papers that Congress has been receiving in waves from his family since August.

One of the three emails that kicked off the day was addressed to his friend Ghislaine Maxwell — an accomplice in a sex trafficking network with hundreds of underage victims, for which she is serving a 20-year prison sentence. The other two were sent to journalist Michael Wolff.

In the email to Maxwell, dated 2011, Epstein mentions a victim whose name appears redacted, saying: “[Victim] spent hours at my house with him.” He also writes: “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” referring to the fact that the then–real estate mogul “never once” mentioned his meeting with that victim.

The White House later said the woman in question was Virginia Giuffre, who took her own life this year, a month after surviving being hit by a bus in Australia, where she lived. In the past, she had said she had never seen Trump take part in her abuser’s crimes.

In one of the emails to Wolff, from January 2019, Epstein — who died in August of that year in a high-security cell while awaiting trial — implied that Trump was aware of his behavior: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” The other exchange with Wolff, from 2015, dates back to the first campaign that took the real estate tycoon and reality TV star to the White House. In it, Epstein suggests that the journalist use what he knows about Trump to blackmail him.

Trump and his allies accused the Democrats of selectively choosing certain emails to damage the president. In response, Republican James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, decided to release all the documents that came into his possession last week, linking them in a message on X. That link leads to an unwieldy repository of files that is extremely difficult to navigate.

As the hours went by, the distilled content of that information began to yield results, thanks to patient review and careful filtering by U.S. media outlets.

Conversations with an Obama adviser

Trump’s name appears repeatedly throughout the more than 20,000 documents, though there are no email exchanges between him and Epstein. The two were friends for about 15 years before ending their relationship around 2004.

On one occasion, Epstein refers to the then-president as “borderline insane.” In another, he writes that Trump had “fucking crazy” after learning, early in his first term, that he had ordered a travel ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries.

Perhaps the most revealing email is one Epstein sent in 2018 to Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel during Barack Obama’s presidency. “I know how dirty Donald is,” he wrote, referring to possible scandals that could emerge about Trump after Michael Cohen — his former lawyer — pleaded guilty to federal crimes related to the financing of the presidential campaign Trump won against Hillary Clinton.

As part of a plea deal, Cohen implicated Trump in a 2016 hush-money scheme involving payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an alleged extramarital affair, which Trump denies. In 2023, the then–Republican candidate was convicted on 34 felony counts in connection with that case.

The material released on Wednesday also provides new details about Epstein’s network of associates — both familiar figures from his web of abuse and influence and others less commonly linked to him. Among them are the nationalist ideologue Steve Bannon, whom Epstein advised on expanding his operations into Europe, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and close ally of current Vice President J. D. Vance. Thiel received an invitation to visit the millionaire pedophile’s private island — the site of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of his abuses. Thiel told Politico he never accepted the offer.

Journalist Michael Wolff’s involvement

Journalist Michael Wolff wrote to the millionaire pedophile shortly before Trump’s electoral victory in the 2016 elections, in what appears to be an offer to harm him during the final stretch of the campaign. “There’s an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him. Interested?” Wolff wrote. It is not the only document in which the two fantasize about bringing down the then-candidate with allegedly compromising information, though no sign of it appears in the newly released documents.

These revelations do not cast the journalist in a very favorable light; at times, he comes across almost as Epstein’s image consultant. Wolff, the author of several books about Trump (and another about the financier), posted a video on Instagram on Wednesday in which he said: “I have been trying to talk about this story for a very long time now [...] These two men, Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump, had the closet relationships for more than a decade,” he said. “Perhaps we’re getting close to the smoking gun.”

The released emails also contain further evidence that Epstein kept a close eye on his old friend’s affairs — for example, when an associate passed him information about Trump’s finances, or in another message, when he showed interest in the confirmation process of Alex Acosta as Secretary of Labor.

When Acosta was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida (between 2005 and 2009), he agreed to bury the first prosecution against Epstein through a lenient plea deal that allowed the defendant — who served only 13 months behind bars — to plead guilty to two state-level offenses. Acosta also granted him immunity from federal prosecution for sex trafficking of minors because, he later said, he believed it was unlikely that federal prosecutors would succeed in a potential trial. That agreement, which enabled Epstein to continue abusing minors for another decade, was ultimately what prevented Acosta from joining Trump’s Cabinet.

Giving Lawrence Summers advice about women

If the release of the documents has served any purpose, it has been to confirm the close rapport between Epstein and Lawrence Summers, the prominent economist who served in the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and later became president of Harvard University.

It was already known that Summers had a relationship with the financier — one he later publicly regretted — but not that he had continued to maintain such frequent contact with him between 2017 and 2019, years after Epstein’s first (lenient) conviction for an offense related to prostitution and also after The Miami Herald revived the case with a series of investigative reports.

The publication of those reports triggered Epstein’s second prosecution, when federal prosecutors in New York charged him in 2019 — amid the rise of the #MeToo movement — with sex trafficking for crimes committed between 2002 and 2005 in Miami and New York.

In those exchanges, there is much discussion of Summers’s relationship with a woman in London, about whom Epstein offers him personal advice. Trump also comes up in their correspondence. In one 2017 email, the economist writes that he has been in Saudi Arabia and came back with the impression that officials there considered Trump “a clown, increasingly dangerous on foreign policy.” In other messages, the two discuss a possible Epstein donation to a project connected to Harvard and to the economist’s wife, Elisa F. New.

From the dozens of emails exchanged between them, there is no indication that Summers was aware of Epstein’s criminal activities.

Prince Andrew: “Say it has NOTHING to do with me”

Prince Andrew’s ties to Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein — along with accusations from Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre — led to his downfall, which culminated last month when his brother, King Charles III, decided to strip him of his title as prince.

Among the more than 20,000 documents is an email from 2011 in which the then prince replies to a message Maxwell had forwarded to him through Epstein. It concerns the Mail on Sunday, the British newspaper that had just asked the financier for a comment on sexual abuse allegations that its reporters were preparing to publish. Andrew replies: “Hey there! What’s all this? I don’t know anything about this! You must SAY so please. This has NOTHING to do with me. I can’t take any more of this.”

On March 6, 2011, the Mail on Sunday published an article featuring a photograph of Prince Andrew with Giuffre, the victim who recently took her own life. The Duke of York maintains that he never committed any crime. In Giuffre’s newly published posthumous memoir, she describes the three occasions on which she was forced to act as the prince’s sexual slave. “He was friendly enough, but still entitled — as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright,” she wrote.

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