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The dog didn’t bark. Until it did.
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New emails released Wednesday by House Democrats from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate include the convicted sexual predator alleging that former friend Donald Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of the victims, and that Trump “knew about the girls.”
The bombshell correspondence provides new fodder for those skeptical of Trump’s years of denial that he knew nothing about Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. The emails, released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, come at a moment of tremendous peril for Republicans on the verge of reopening the government and, in turn, triggering a procedural trap that might force the Department of Justice to release more of what it has on Epstein.
“Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein wrote in 2019 before he committed suicide in federal prison later that year while awaiting trial for sex trafficking charges.
In another email, dated in 2011, Epstein marvelled to Maxwell that no one had connected Trump to the notorious sex trafficking complex that would drag high-profile celebrities and even the King of England’s brother through the muck. “i want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote. Maxwell’s reply? “I have been thinking about that…”
Now most of Washington is thinking about it, too. And the timing could not have been any worse for Republicans—or better for Democrats, who are in the midst of their own internal row over the decision by a handful of Senate colleagues to help Republicans end the government shutdown. The Epstein disclosures, led by Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the ranking Democrat on House Oversight, are obviously going to bump the intra-party fight for Democrats out of the spotlight and refocus talks on Trump’s connections to Epstein and his tawdry business of underaged girls, sex, private islands, and star-studded jets.
Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida on state prostitution charges in 2008 in order to avoid federal charges. All three emails released to Congress from Epstein’s estate are dated after that plea deal, which required him to pay restitution to three dozen victims. In other words, Epstein sent these emails after his brush with the law and understood the sensitivity of his one-time friendship with Trump. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting federal charges related to a sex-trafficking ring.
Maxwell, meanwhile, became the focus of the feds’ investigations after Epstein’s death. The former socialite was convicted in 2021 on sex-trafficking charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role. More recently, though, she has become a cause célèbre and the subject of plenty of speculation that she was covering for Trump. In August, she was moved from a Florida prison to a minimum-security facility in Texas. House Democrats say she is seeking a commutation and Trump has not ruled out a pardon.
Read more: Here’s What Trump Said About Epstein During the 2024 Campaign
On Wednesday, after the emails ricocheted around Washington, the White House sought to cast the latest disclosures as political trickery. “The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to TIME, which claims the unnamed “victim” referenced in two of the new Epstein emails is Virginia Giuffre, who died earlier this year. “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre. These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”
In Washington, any Epstein news prompts most Republicans to try and change the subject. House Republicans have been largely in line with Trump, who has consistently denied any knowledge of the enterprise by which Maxwell, according to her conviction, enticed young women including minors to join a sex trafficking operation. House Republicans have gone so far as to deny seating a newly elected Democrat to her office for weeks because, once in power, she would tip the scale and force a vote on the House floor about Epstein.
But with the House back in session for the first time in seven weeks and poised to re-open the government, shut down for six of those weeks, there was no more avoiding the crisis afoot. House Republicans need to approve a Senate-passed spending bill that restores thousands of dismissed federal workers to their jobs, blocks future layoffs for now, and funds food aid to tens of millions of poor Americans. Even before these three Epstein emails came to light on Wednesday, various GOP lawmakers had been grumbling, mostly in private, about feeling like they’d been misled by Trump on the Epstein saga.
Still, the dual tracks at the Capitol—one focused on Epstein and another on ending the shutdown—seemed heading toward collision. House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would seat Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona in the 4 p.m. hour on Wednesday, ahead of a vote to fund the government. Grijalva, who is due to replace her late father, has vowed to be the 218th signature on a petition that overrides Johnson’s control of the floor schedule. A vote on calling for the release of whatever the federal government has on Epstein would put every Republican lawmaker in the House on the record on the politically explosive issue.
The cost of reopening the government may be House Republicans setting in motion an accounting on who is willing to walk the plank for Trump and who will heed the right-wing base’s sincere belief that there is a high-power cabal of pedophiles who have dodged responsibility for a child sex trafficking machine. After all, conspiracy theories for years have powered a corner of the GOP obsessed with such stories; one man even stormed a D.C. pizza parlor in search of a child sex ring and fired a rifle at a locked storage closet.
This is an hour most mainstream Republicans had hoped would never manifest. But a story that was once largely tabloid fodder has now moved to the Oval Office. No one in the GOP welcomes this mid-season twist.
—With reporting from Callum Sutherland
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