Donald Trump wants the Justice Department to launch an investigation into a variety of prominent figures mentioned in the Epstein materials — but not himself.
Donald Trump hasn’t just spent months insisting that he did not know about and had no involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, the president has also desperately tried to make the scandal go away, condemning the controversy as a “scam” and a “hoax” concocted by his political enemies.
Those efforts took a dramatic step backward on Wednesday morning, as Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a package of emails, obtained by the Epstein estate, in which the convicted sex offender wrote, among other things, that Trump had “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with one of Epstein’s victims. In a separate message, Epstein said the future president “knew about the girls.”
The revelations dovetailed with Republicans on the same committee releasing a tranche of 20,000 documents it received from the Epstein estate in response to a congressional subpoena. An MSNBC report noted that some of the additional email correspondence between Epstein and his associates was “unflattering” to Trump. A related report in The New York Times summarized, in reference to the documents: “Mr. Epstein insulted Mr. Trump and hinted that he had damaging information on him.
