Jeffrey Epstein: Trump 'Spent Hours At My House' With Victim
Congressional investigators released emails from the late sex trafficker discussing how to leverage his relationship with the future president.
The case of Jeffrey Epstein just won't go away, much to President Donald Trump's chagrin. "For years, it's Epstein, over and over again," Trump complained in a July 2025 social media rant, calling the deceased pedophile "a guy who never dies." And indeed, the more information comes out through congressional investigations and journalistic leaks, the worse it looks for Trump.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released three emails from Epstein's inbox discussing Trump. In 2011, Epstein wrote to his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, that a victim "spent hours at my house with" Trump. (White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt named the victim as the late Virginia Giuffre in a statement denouncing the email release.) In 2019, Epstein wrote to journalist Michael Wolff that Trump "asked me to resign," apparently from Trump's club, Mar-a-Lago. "[O]f course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop," Epstein added.
Maxwell told administration lawyers in an August 2025 jailhouse interview that she "never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way" and that Trump "was a gentleman in all respects." She plans to apply for Trump to commute her sentence.
The third email is a back-and-forth conversation between Epstein and Wolff from 2015, discussing then-candidate Trump's upcoming interview with CNN. Wolff told Epstein that Trump was going to be asked about their relationship, and Epstein asked Wolff to "craft an answer" for Trump. Wolff suggested that letting Trump deny their relationship in public would give Epstein leverage.
"If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency," Wolff wrote. "You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt." CNN didn't end up asking Trump the question, according to The New York Times.
The emails don't implicate Trump directly in any sexual abuse, and the 2019 message about Maxwell actually backs up Trump's claim that he kicked Epstein out of his club for poaching employees. But the emails do suggest that Trump knew a lot more about Epstein than he let on—and that he has something to hide about their relationship.
In September 2025, the House Oversight Committee released a sexually suggestive letter from Trump to Epstein talking about their "wonderful secret." It was part of a 2003 birthday book full of letters to Epstein, including a note from former President Bill Clinton, a close Epstein associate.
And it isn't just American politicians who are facing questions about their relationship with Epstein. In August 2025, Reason reported on a trove of leaked emails between Epstein and his business partner, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
The emails revealed that Epstein had been in contact with Britain's former Prince Andrew much longer than acknowledged—the prince was stripped of his titles last month over the scandal—and that Epstein and Barak had been trying to get into the surveillance business in America, Russia, and Israel together.
Building on those email leaks and the House Oversight Committee documents, Drop Site News revealed last month that Barak used Epstein's business ties for secret diplomatic talks with Russia about the future of Syria, as well as other international ventures. On Tuesday, Drop Site News reported that Barak's chief of staff had stayed at Epstein's apartment for weeks at a time.
Epstein was arrested for sexually exploiting minors in 2006 and given a plea deal that allowed him to spend only a year in jail. After victim lawsuits and press coverage started to mount, authorities reopened the sex trafficking case against Epstein in 2019. He died in custody a month later. At the time, it looked like the case would die with him; Epstein's name was transformed into a conspiracy theorist punchline.
But during the 2024 campaign, Trump offhandedly agreed to open up the government's files on Epstein, a campaign promise he would come to regret. In February 2025, the department announced that it was releasing "The Epstein Files: Phase 1," only to publish a set of already public documents. Shortly after, the Department of Justice informed Trump that his name appeared several times in Epstein's case file, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Department of Justice then declared that there was actually nothing more to see in July 2025. "You got a lot of people that could be mentioned in those files that don't deserve to be," Trump told reporters in August 2025, insisting that he is "in support of keeping it totally open" anyways.
Democrats had been reluctant to push too hard on Trump's relationship with Epstein during the 2016 and 2020 elections, perhaps because some of them also had ties to Epstein. In fact, two Democratic candidates in 2020 attacked Trump for entertaining "conspiracy theories" about Epstein.
After Trump made it clear that he didn't want the files opened, however, Democrats seized on the Epstein case. The House Oversight Committee demanded documents from the Department of Justice and Epstein's estate, including the birthday book, whose existence was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Meanwhile, Reps. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) have been pushing—against the will of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.)—for a full release of the Department of Justice files on Epstein. Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D–Ariz.) says that she will sign Massie and Khanna's discharge petition after being sworn in on Wednesday afternoon, forcing a vote next month.
Johnson has tried to use the House Oversight Committee investigation to preempt Massie and Khanna's proposal. "The bipartisan House oversight committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought, and much more," Johnson told reporters last month.
