The Washington Post: Epstein wrote that Trump knew of sexual abuse but didn’t participate

Jeffrey Epstein wrote that Donald Trump knew about the sexual abuse of underage girls but never participated, according to thousands of pages of documents released overnight by the House Oversight Committee.

“Trump knew of it. and came to my house many times during that period,” Epstein said in an email to himself on Febuary 1, 2019, six months before he was arrested on sex trafficking charges and killed himself in jail. “He never got a massage.”

That account, included in a tranche of documents released Wednesday (US TI by the House Oversight Committee, conflicts with Trump’s denial of ever knowing about Epstein’s solicitation of underage prostitution before Epstein’s 2008 plea deal.

Mr Trump has said he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Florida, and that they had a falling-out in the mid-2000s, that Trump has attributed to a real estate deal and Epstein hiring employees away from Mr Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

“I had no idea,” Mr Trump told reporters in July 2019. “I haven’t spoken to him in many, many years.”

On Wednesday, Mr Trump accused the Democrats of resurfacing the scandal to distract from the pending end of a 43-day government shutdown, which disrupted air travel and food stamp distribution while winning the opposition party few concessions.

“The Democrats are using the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax to try and deflect from their massive failures, in particular, their most recent one — THE SHUTDOWN!” he wrote on social media.

But the scandal that has made headlines for at least six years and threatened to engulf Mr Trump’s second term earlier this year showed no sign of letting up.

A House motion to force the Trump Administration to release investigative files from Epstein’s case received the crucial 218th signature on Wednesday afternoon, after the swearing-in of Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva), who succeeded her late father in a special election on September 23.

Democrats alleged a coordinated cover-up to keep the Epstein files secret and highlighted an email exchange between Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell discussing Mr Trump in 2011 as “the dog that hasn’t barked” because investigators hadn’t mentioned him. Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking in 2021.

“Of course (Trump) knew about the girls,” Epstein said in another email, from January 2019, to author Michael Wolff. Wolff did not respond to requests for comment.

The email goes on to say Mr Trump asked Maxwell “to stop” but doesn’t specify what he was referring to.

Mr Trump banned Epstein from his properties in 2007 in response to his indictment, Mr Trump’s company lawyer told The Washington Post in 2019.

“President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a paedophile and he was a creep,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday.

Epstein’s basis in the emails for Mr Trump’s knowledge of the sex trafficking focuses on a victim whose name is redacted. People familiar with the documents identified the victim as Virginia Giuffre, a teenage spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago whom Maxwell recruited in 2000.

Giuffre died by suicide in rural Western Australia earlier this year, at 41.

“VICTIM spent hours at my house with him,” Epstein said of Mr Trump in the 2011 email.

In a memoir published posthumously last month, Giuffre recalled meeting Mr Trump once, saying he “couldn’t have been friendlier.” She wrote that Maxwell noticed her at the resort and approached her, saying she knew a wealthy man who was looking for a massage therapist.

“People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone,” Mr Trump told reporters in July. Asked about Giuffre, he said, “Yeah, he stole her.”

Mr Trump’s claim not to know about Epstein’s conduct was previously undercut by his purported contribution to a book of personal notes for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

The note alleged to be from Mr Trump was a sexually suggestive letter with a sketch of a young woman’s body.

Mr Trump denied the existence of the letter when the Wall Street Journal reported it in July, and he sued the Journal’s parent company, Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and the two Journal reporters who wrote the article for defamation. The suit is ongoing.

House Oversight Democrats released a document matching the Journal’s description of the letter and the sketch in September.

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Mr Trump said of Epstein in a 2002 magazine profile. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Epstein appeared to agree with the account of their friendship faltering over a competition for a Palm Beach estate being sold out of bankruptcy in 2004, recounting the episode in his 2019 email to himself.

Mr Trump ultimately purchased the property and would go on to sell it for more than double.

Wednesday’s documents, made up of thousands of pages of emails, text messages and other documents from Epstein’s estate, came from an unredacted tranche the committee received last week from a subpoena issued in August.

Committee Democrats released three selected emails earlier in the day.

The Oversight Committee has also subpoenaed the Justice Department for documents related to its investigation against Epstein and conducted interviews with people believed to be familiar with investigations into the financier.

Transcripts of a number of those interviews, including with Alexander Acosta, the former US labor secretary who served as the top Federal prosecutor in South Florida when Epstein received a widely criticised plea deal, and former US attorney general William P Barr have been released as well.

Kentucky Republican representative Thomas Massie, who has led the effort to force a vote on the Epstein files, said the White House appeared to be “scrambling” Wednesday to stop the vote from happening, but he declined to say exactly what they were doing.

“I’m little bit troubled that we’re trying to undo a shutdown here, and the most important thing at the White House was trying to stop a vote on releasing the Epstein files,” he told The Post.

He said the petition to force a vote would now move forward no matter what and that it’s a “done deal.”