Democrats And The Selective Epstein Email Release: There’s No ‘There’ There

It is a brand-new day, and that means it’s time for more Epstein revelations.

The reason for the Epstein revelations is that there was a discharge petition put forward late last night in the House of Representatives. The petition was signed by several rogue Republicans — some of whom are very much oriented against the Trump administration — in order to shame President Trump by saying that there ought to be a widespread release of more documents.

Democrats had to chum the waters. They had to make everyone interested in Epstein again. So they decided to do this in their usual fashion, which is to selectively release three emails.

Republicans then responded by releasing 20,000 pages of documents.

The Democrats were attempting a shame tactic directed at President Trump that was going to demonstrate full-scale that he was in Jeffrey Epstein’s pocket, or that Jeffrey Epstein was blackmailing Donald Trump, or that Jeffrey Epstein had untoward material about Trump, which is why Trump has been reluctant to allow for the release of more materials.

The reason President Trump does not favor the release of more materials is, as he has noted, there are already tens of thousands of pages of materials out there, and courts have already barred the release of an enormous number of these materials on the basis of victim protection. The FBI is doing the same.

You can yell and scream about it as much as you want, but these discharge petitions, these attempts to pry more documents out, are likely to fail in court.

President Trump believes the whole process is an attempt, by implication, to humiliate him.

And it does seem like that based on what the Democrats did. They dropped three emails, which were less than edifying with regard to the broad conspiracy theories that have been put out there about Jeffrey Epstein.

As I’ve said a thousand times, there are true, open, honest questions to be asked about Jeffrey Epstein: How did he make all of his money? Where did all that money come from? Why was one media mogul paying him something like $158 million to do his taxes and look for tax breaks? Why was another mogul giving him access to a $70 million home in Manhattan?

These are very real questions that require very real answers. But instead, the entire realm has been filled with the most outlandish speculation. The case that you have heard — retailed in public by many prominent figures — is not the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was running a child sex trafficking ring on behalf of himself, in which he preyed on underage girls, but a broader conspiracy involving the idea that Jeffrey Epstein brought in a bunch of underage girls and a bunch of prominent people, and then blackmailed them after making tapes and taking pictures of them.

There is no evidence for this. In fact, Michael Tracey, who’s been all over this for years — a journalist with whom I frequently disagree — has done a very good job digging into the details, and there’s no evidence for that version of the story.

That still doesn’t answer the question as to where all the money was coming from. Was he blackmailing those guys? That could be. But as far as Donald Trump or Bill Clinton or any of the other wide variety of figures who have been mentioned in connection with this, unless you have evidence, it’s very difficult to make claims about them.

That has been blown into an even bigger conspiracy theory, that Jeffrey Epstein was a foreign agent acting on behalf of a foreign power, honey-trapping these guys in order to blackmail them to change policy.

The evidence of that just doesn’t exist. If it did, then Dan Bongino, Kash Patel, the president, and the vice president would have an obligation to tell you that.

But they’re telling you the opposite.

So where is the evidence? It’s a free country. You can speculate, but stop pretending the speculation is evidence.

That’s the backdrop of all of this.

Democrats are trying to underscore allegations that Donald Trump was being blackmailed by Jeffrey Epstein. But in the supposedly embarrassing emails involving Donald Trump, there’s no “there” there.

Email number one was an email from Jeffrey Epstein, apparently to his lawyer, saying, “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.” 

This is April 2, 2011, long before Donald Trump was even a gleam in the eye of American presidential politics in a serious way.

“I want you to realize that the dog that has embarked is Trump.” Redaction. And then it says, “‘Victim’ spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned, police chief, etc. I’m 75% there.”

There is one major problem with this particular revelation. What the Democrats did was to redact the name of the person, supposedly because it was to protect the victim. Who’s the victim? The victim here is apparently Virginia Giuffre.

Virginia Giuffre was a very unstable person. She passed away recently. She was considered such an unstable personality that prosecutors could not use her in the case against Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell. Not only that, but in a sworn deposition, Virginia Giuffre literally said that she was never mistreated by Donald Trump. But if you just read that email out of context, it would sound as though Virginia Giuffre was trafficked to Donald Trump.

But that’s not what the email says, and that’s not what the email means. And we have counter-evidence with regard to this particular person.

This is a very cynical move by Democrats to redact the name there and then put “victim.” Not because Virginia Giuffre wasn’t a victim of someone — he may very well have been victimized by Prince Andrew — but because we know who she is publicly. Also, she’s dead, so there’s no more victim protection.

There’s a deposition with Virginia Giuffre. She said, “Donald Trump was also a good friend of Jeffrey’s. He didn’t partake in sex with any of us but he flirted with me.”

ABC News noted:

Years later, while being questioned by lawyers for Maxwell (who Giuffre sued in 2015 for defamation) – Giuffre said the quote about Trump attributed to her was not accurate. She also said that she had met Trump when she worked at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, but said she did not recall ever seeing Trump at Epstein’s homes or seeing Trump and Epstein together in the same place. She also said Trump never flirted with her.

The basic idea that Giuffre was victimized by Trump is not true. Democrats put out the email cynically and then redacted the name of the victim to make it look like there was another victim who was not Virginia Giuffre victimized by President Trump.

Not true.

The second email is from Jeffrey Epstein to Michael Wolff, who was basically doing PR on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein. Michael Wolff is the author who is constantly writing extremely sleazy and half-accurate tomes about what’s going on in the Trump administration or the White House.

Wolff was doing defense for Jeffrey Epstein, which shows you what kind of human he is. Jeffrey Epstein apparently wrote to Michael Wolff of Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

If he asked Ghislaine to stop, I don’t understand why that’s bad for Trump. They released this email to make it sound like Trump knew about the girls. This email is dated January 2019. According to Trump, he threw Epstein out of his club because he knew that he was acting in nefarious ways.

Third email: from Michael Wolff. This is December 15, 2015.

Michael Wolff wrote, “I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in scrum afterward.”

Epstein wrote, “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”

Wolf wrote back, “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR political currency. 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. Of course, it is possible that when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in Trump regime”.

The proof here is that Michael Wolff, who is a purveyor of many untruths, said to Jeffrey Epstein that he should hold over Trump’s head the idea that maybe he had been on the plane or to the house.

I’m not sure what this is supposed to prove.

These are the only three emails the Democrats released. They released them in order to imply things about Trump without actually saying them.

This is one of the things that’s deeply annoying about our current politics: People are never asked to actually say the thing they appear to be saying.

Instead, they just imply, and then they back away, and then they imply some more, and then they back away.

If you want to say it, just say it. It’s a free country. You can say it.

And then we can all judge you by what you are actually claiming.