\n<\/p>\n
This morning, House Democrats released emails from the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that claim, among other things, that Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein\u2019s home with one of his victims. Later in the day, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if this was true\u2014that Trump had spent hours at Epstein\u2019s place with a sex-trafficking victim.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese emails,\u201d she replied, \u201cprove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
That is not a no.<\/p>\n
Of all of Trump\u2019s scandals, his relationship with Epstein\u2014if you ignore the stomach-churning human toll involved\u2014may be the richest source of black comedy. Some of Trump\u2019s most devoted worshippers chose the very issue of Epstein\u2019s misdeeds and supposed cabal of elite backers as the fantasy onto which they projected a valiant role for their hero. Trump was meant to courageously release all of the available evidence for public scrutiny. Instead, this scandal has turned out to implicate him personally. (This is a risk inherent in building a personality cult around one of the worst human beings in the United States\u2014almost any moral violation you pick will, statistically, have a high likelihood of appearing somewhere on his r\u00e9sum\u00e9.)<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s defense in the matter has been that the Epstein files are a hoax, concocted to smear him by \u201cObama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration.\u201d But he has also decided to let the matter drop because this conspiracy involving the CIA, the FBI, and two presidents to falsely connect him to a criminal millionaire who died suspiciously is simply too boring for anybody to care about. \u201cI don\u2019t understand it, why they would be so interested. He\u2019s dead for a long time,\u201d Trump said of Epstein in July.<\/p>\n
The latest revelations have prompted Trump and his allies to update their defense. Their response makes as much sense as what came before.<\/p>\n
The first round of rebuttals centered on the allegedly suspicious timing of the email release, so soon after some Democrats decided to help end the shutdown\u2014a move that has earned some derision from their base. \u201cThe libs are almost finished destroying the American government for no discernible reason so naturally they\u2019re shifting focus to a dead pedophile,\u201d the conservative strategist Josh Holmes said on X. \u201cPAY NO ATTENTION TO THE DEMOCRATS CAVING,\u201d Erick Erickson chimed in sarcastically.<\/p>\n
It is not wrong to say that the timing of the release is related to the shutdown, in the sense that when the House returns to session, members who support releasing the Epstein files will have a majority. Democrats are clearly trying to pressure the handful of supportive House Republicans to maintain their support. Trump is lobbying them to abandon the petition, both privately and on his social-media channel.<\/p>\n
But the revelations are a bit too damning to be dismissed as a news-cycle gambit, so the White House took a different tack a few hours later. It released a statement noting that the unnamed victim in the Epstein email who \u201cspent hours\u201d with Trump at Epstein\u2019s house was Virginia Giuffre, who \u201crepeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rapid Response 47, an official White House X account, fired off a message noting that in her new posthumous memoir about surviving Epstein\u2019s abuse, Giuffre says that Trump was friendly and that he offered to help her find babysitting work. The account later added, \u201cDemocrats redacted the victim\u2019s name because the victim said Trump \u2018couldn\u2019t have been friendlier,\u2019 was a \u2018gentleman,\u2019 and that she didn\u2019t witness any wrongdoing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The encounter was perfectly innocent\u2014just several hours of Trump brainstorming ideas for babysitting clients, a familiar act of generosity from a man known for his passion for mentoring young people. (Giuffre cannot be subpoenaed, because she killed herself in April.)<\/p>\n
The White House\u2019s response raises several questions. First, the conversation Giuffre recalled having with Trump took place at Mar-a-Lago. The email in question described an encounter at Epstein\u2019s home, where the interaction may have included more than babysitting tips. Further, contextualizing this email by noting which girl it involved is a strange way to respond to a \u201cfake\u201d document<\/p>\n
Epstein\u2019s emails also imply that Trump was aware of his sex-trafficking scheme. \u201cOf course he knew about the girls,\u201d Epstein wrote in an email. If I met a teenager who I knew to be a likely victim of a sex-trafficking ring, I\u2019d like to think that I\u2019d try to help them contact law enforcement or get away. Also, if I discovered that a close friend was running a sex-trafficking ring, maybe I\u2019d reconsider our friendship, rather than engaging in long, pleasant chats with his victims.<\/p>\n
The White House\u2019s responses fit a pattern of suspicious behavior from the president on this matter. Trump has said of Epstein\u2019s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, \u201cI wish her well\u201d\u2014a strange thing to say about a convicted felon who systematically abused young girls. His administration has granted her a cushy upgrade for her stint in prison, including a transfer to a minimum-security camp and puppy visits. This has the appearance of a quid pro quo. Asked today if Trump is going to pardon Maxwell, Leavitt replied, \u201cIt\u2019s not something he\u2019s talking about or even thinking about at this moment in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this moment in time doesn\u2019t exactly slam the door on that possibility.<\/p>\n
Are the Epstein files suddenly real? Or are some of them real (and vindicating) and some of them fake (and incriminating)? All we know is that Trump wants us to stop talking about the subject. That\u2019s usually what you want when the subject includes evidence that you have behaved in a manner beyond reproach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This morning, House Democrats released emails from the notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that claim, among other things, that Donald Trump spent hours at Epstein\u2019s home with one of his victims. Later in the day, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt if this was true\u2014that Trump had spent hours at Epstein\u2019s place<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":33246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3703,3093,455,4623],"class_list":{"0":"post-33245","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-epstein","9":"tag-files","10":"tag-real","11":"tag-wait"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/33246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}