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In one email from April 2011, Epstein told Maxwell (who was later convicted on charges and is now serving a 20-year sentence related to facilitating his crimes): “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.” He added that an unnamed victim “spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”
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Wolff was also involved in an email exchange, which began on Dec. 15, 2015, the night of a debate in the Republican presidential primary. Wolff emailed Epstein and warned him that CNN was “planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.”
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Epstein wrote back, “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”
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Wolff advised inaction, suggesting that Trump might try to deny a close association with Epstein. “I think you should let him hang himself,” he wrote of Trump. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable P.R. and political currency” that could be used to “hang him” later or “save him, generating a debt.”
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In an email from January 2019, Epstein wrote to Wolff about Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
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The committee’s staff redacted victim names and any identifying information from the emails. Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of politicizing the investigation. They also identified the victim whose name was redacted in the emails as Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April.
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Giuffre had said that Maxwell recruited her into Epstein’s sex ring while she was working at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, as a teenager.
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In a 2016 deposition for a civil case, Giuffre was asked if she believed Trump had witnessed the sexual abuse of minors in Epstein’s home. “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said. “I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein,” she added. “I’ve heard he has been, but I haven’t seen him myself, so I don’t know.”
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Meanwhile, Trump has condemned continued questions about his administration’s handling of the case as a “hoax” perpetrated by Democrats. He has called Mr. Epstein a “creep” and has insisted he never engaged in any wrongdoing with him or Maxwell.
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During the time they were friends, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Trump and Epstein split their time between New York and Palm Beach, Florida. Their relationship appeared to fizzle out around 2004. Last summer, Trump asserted Epstein had “hired” away spa attendants from at Mar-a-Lago. He also said he kicked Epstein out of his club and believed one of the women was Giuffre.
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House Democrats, citing an unnamed whistle-blower, said this week that Maxwell was preparing to formally ask Trump to commute her federal prison sentence.
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The Democrats’ release of the emails came hours before Speaker Mike Johnson was scheduled to swear in newly elected democratic representative from Arizona, Adelita Grijalva. She is expected to provide the final signature necessary to force a House vote on a measure demanding the Trump administration release all its investigative material pertaining to Epstein.
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