For the last several months, Democrats have been trying furiously to tie Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein. Aside from the fact that this media campaign is obviously not organic, it’s utterly bizarre and disingenuous. Democrats simply don’t care about ties to Epstein, and never have. They only care that these allegations can be used to possibly harm Trump.
For instance, the evidence tying Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein is far stronger than that involving Donald Trump, and Clinton spoke in primetime at the Democratic National Convention last year and is hardly persona non grata. Similarly, LinkedIn’s billionaire founder Reid Hoffman is a Democrat megadonor who was actively involved in funding the lawfare efforts against Trump and other deeply unethical efforts to help Democrats — including overt attempts to deploy Russian disinformation tactics in Senate races.
Hoffman has been to Epstein’s island and had close ties to Epstein, years after his terrible behavior was public knowledge. No one in the party felt the need to distance himself from Hoffman, and to the contrary, Hoffman was a huge funder of Biden’s reelection effort. (And Epstein aside, it’s worth noting Democrats enabled child sex trafficking on an industrial scale when Biden deliberately opened the border and ignored virtually every plea to do something about it.)
But on Wednesday, The New York Times has set off a frenzy on the left with a story headlined “Epstein Alleged in Emails That Trump Knew of His Conduct.” The emails in question were given to The New York Times by House Democrats and come from documents related to Epstein’s 2008 plea deal. Far and away, the most incriminating email is this:
In one email from April 2011, Mr. Epstein told Ms. Maxwell, who was later convicted on charges 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.”
Huh. “Unnamed victim,” you say? Later in the story we get these revealing details from the Times:
The committee’s staff redacted victims’ names and any identifying information from the emails. Because the full set of documents has not been released, it was not clear whether the emails had been excerpted from larger conversations that might have provided fuller context. …
[The Republicans also identified the victim] whose name was redacted in the emails [as Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April.] Ms. Giuffre had said that Ms. Maxwell recruited her into Mr. Epstein’s sex ring while she was working at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, as a teenager.
In a 2016 deposition for a civil case, Ms. Giuffre was asked if she believed Mr. Trump had witnessed the sexual abuse of minors in Mr. 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,” Ms. Giuffre added. “I’ve heard he has been, but I haven’t seen him myself so I don’t know.”
The House Oversight committee confirms that Giuffre’s name was not originally redacted in the documents. So the same woman Epstein said implicates Trump is on record saying Trump never did anything untoward and, further, she said she did not know if Trump was ever in Epstein’s house, even though Epstein alleges she was in the house with him. In fact, Giuffre also testified under oath in her suit against Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell that she never saw Trump outside of Mar-a-Lago, where she had worked, and she was never with him in Epstein’s house.
While we don’t know what Trump knew, if anything, about his former friend’s criminal conduct, it’s fairly well-established that Trump and Epstein had a big falling out years before Epstein started facing legal consequences and his predatory behavior became public. It’s also been reported that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for making moves on a teenage girl who was the daughter of a club member.
For a more detailed analysis of Giuffre’s testimony and the other problems with Epstein’s emails, I highly recommend Techno Fog’s substack, which concludes:
Here’s a different slant: this is not a Trump scandal but a Democrat scandal.
Virginia Giuffre was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. She cleared Trump of all wrongdoing under penalty of perjury. And in April 2025 she committed suicide. Giuffre is no longer here to defend her statements — but Democrats, through Epstein, are saying she lied under oath.
Democrats are essentially asking you to give Epstein credibility he does not deserve. After he was publicly outed for his behavior, who knows what Epstein’s motives might have been to smear Trump? He’s clearly thinking about ways to protect himself in these emails, and not entirely reliable.
All of these obvious issues should make these emails a nonstory, especially given the sources and their demonstrable willingness to obscure exculpatory information for Trump.
Another basic fact that must be addressed is that the supposedly incriminating emails in this story have been knocking around for many years, and the “dog that hasn’t barked” email is 14 years old. We’re supposed to believe that after all the illegal leaks against Trump, his tax returns being leaked, and the massive coordination across all levels of government during his first term to lie about his involvement in Russia collusion and feed the press damaging stories, that they’re just now discovering damning emails tying him to Jeffrey Epstein?
That the Biden information had full access to the Epstein files for the previous four years, and despite raiding Trump’s home, launching abusive criminal investigations against anyone in his orbit, and coordinating lawfare efforts against him across multiple jurisdictions — they just didn’t bother combing through all the Epstein files and releasing all the damning information Democrats suddenly assure us is being hidden now that Trump is president again?
In this case, it’s much more likely that Democrats in Congress squinted at the Epstein docs long enough that they realized that if they selectively released certain emails and blacked out a key name, they could probably get away with saying they were trying to protect one of Epstein’s victims, instead of hiding exonerating information for Trump.
The New York Times didn’t fully fall for it, but it’s scandalous enough that they ran the story with the headline they did. The cable news outlets and social media influencers pushing the story are basically ignoring the information discrediting the story, and that’s good enough. They’ve run this playbook many times, and it doesn’t matter if the story is discredited in the end. By the time it all becomes clear, Trump will have been dragged through the mud, people will talk about the “scandal” for months, and that might be good enough to discredit Trump and drag down his approval. For Democrats, it must be nice to have a grossly unethical and partisan media amplify obvious smear campaigns.
Anyway, at this point, rather than let any more dishonest stories drip out like this, Congress and/or Trump should call Democrats’ bluff and just release all the Epstein files. Let people decide for themselves who is implicated and who is not, even if it has the unfortunate effect of outing people who had perfectly normal and inconsequential interactions with Epstein. Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems pretty obvious to me Trump has little to fear if he hasn’t been implicated thus far, and the best Democrats can do is deliberately mislead the public the way this story does.
