After dodging reporters’ questions about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein for two days last week, Donald Trump broke cover on Friday to address the latest bombshell revelations in the scandal that has plagued his second presidency.
Trump’s name appears hundreds of times in the latest cache of emails sent by the late paedophile financier. Demanding a new investigation by the justice department into Epstein’s links to America’s ruling elite, the president targeted only the prominent Democrats named in the files.
Within hours, attorney general Pam Bondi had named a chief prosecutor to lead the investigation into former president Bill Clinton, former Treasury secretary Larry Summers and venture capitalist and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. Only months after declaring it dead when it emerged that Trump was named in the files, Bondi vowed to “pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people”.
Trump’s bid to deflect attention from himself followed a bruising week that underscored the desperation inside the White House to quash the speculation around his ties to America’s most notorious sex offender. A mass rebellion brewing among Republican members before a House vote on the Epstein files last week has highlighted Trump’s faltering grip on his party and Maga base.
Emails released by Democrats on the House oversight committee revealed Epstein claiming the president “spent hours at my house” with one of his victims. In another message, Epstein said Trump “knew about the girls,” implying that the president’s knowledge of his crimes ran deeper than he has let on.
“I want you to realise that that dog that hasn't barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote in a 2011 message to his former partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year jail term for her role in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.
The revelations came as a congressional petition to force a House vote on releasing the Epstein files reached the required 218 signatures to force a ballot last week, despite a last-ditch effort by Trump to strongarm Republican rebels into line. Colorado congresswoman Lauren Boebert, one of four GOP members to support the bill, was summoned to a meeting in the White House Situation Room where Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel urged her to remove her name from the petition. Boebert refused. Even after a call from Trump, she would not buckle.
With a House vote now unavoidable, more than 100 Republicans are expected to break with Trump and support the bill as they prepare to face voters at next year’s midterm elections. With the White House unable to shake the Epstein scandal, GOP members appear to be focusing on their own survival as the party begins to contemplate life after Trump.
The latest Epstein revelations come on the heels of dismal election results for Republicans this month amid a backlash from voters at Trump’s failure to tackle the cost of living crisis that he was elected to fix. Running on a platform of affordability, Democrats swept key races from coast to coast, even making inroads in deep red states.
‘Trump will protect you… if you vote to cover up for paedophiles’
Thomas Massie, Republican congressman from Kentucky
Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-sponsored the Epstein bill with California Democrat Ro Khanna, warned colleagues that their vote this week will remain “on their record for the rest of their political career,” long after Trump leaves office. Heaping the pressure on wavering Republicans ahead of the vote, Massie and Khanna will hold a press conference with Epstein victims outside the Capitol on Tuesday.
Massie, a persistent GOP rebel, now faces a Trump-backed primary challenge for his seat next year. The message from the White House, he told reporters on Capitol Hill last week, was that “Trump will protect you… if you vote to cover up for paedophiles.”
Trump has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, conceding that he was friends with Epstein before a falling out in the early 2000s. But the frantic effort to block the full release of the files, and Trump’s furious response to last week’s revelations, has revived speculation about what secrets remain hidden in the unredacted documents held by the justice department.
However, the new investigation announced on Friday could give the justice department a pretext to refuse to release any more documents. It may argue that publication could prejudice an ongoing investigation.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday, Trump continued to deflect from his relationship with Epstein. “You’ve got to find out what did he know with respect to Bill Clinton, with respect to the head of Harvard [Summers],” he said, adding that he and Epstein “had a very bad relationship for many years”.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the “selectively released emails” published by Democrats were a bid to “smear” the president. Hoping to distract from the initial release by Democrats, House Republicans dumped more than 20,000 documents online, revealing Epstein’s web of high-level connections in politics, media, business and foreign affairs. But the emails also raised awkward questions for Trump, including Epstein’s offer of information on him to the Russian government before his summit with Putin in 2018. In other messages obsessing over his former friend, Epstein described Trump as “demented”, “borderline insane” and claimed he had photos of the president “with girls in bikinis in my kitchen”.
‘They keep stepping on rakes. The handling of the Epstein issue has only brought more attention to it’
Republican strategist close to the administration
The chaos has only deepened frustration among the conspiracy-hungry wing of Trump’s own Maga movement, which has believed for years that the Epstein files would expose a cabal of Democratic paedophiles at the heart of America’s ruling elite. Trump whipped up that appetite during the 2024 election campaign, vowing to declassify the files, only to backtrack when it emerged that his name featured prominently, to the fury of many supporters.
“They keep stepping on rakes,” lamented one Republican strategist close to the administration. “The handling of the Epstein issue has only brought more attention to it.”
Some Republicans fear that the new investigation into Clinton and other Democrats only ensures that the Epstein scandal will dog the party into the midterm campaign, however.
“We don’t know how far this scandal still has to run,” the GOP strategist said. “The focus should be on affordability, crime, the issues that voters have told us they care about. We don’t have time to waste.”
Stung by recent election defeats, White House officials have vowed to refocus on the economy, but have struggled to get Trump back on message. Invited to address voters’ concerns in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham last week, the president dismissed affordability as “a con job by the Democrats”.
“I think polls are fake,” Trump insisted. “We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”
“Don’t forget, Maga was my idea,” he added. “I know what Maga wants better than anybody else.”
Photograph by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images