Jeffrey Epstein, who took his own life in 2019 while imprisoned on charges of being a sex trafficker and a pedophile, continues to haunt the Republican Party and its leader, President Donald Trump.
Republicans released about 20,000 pages of Epstein documents on Wednesday, shortly after Democrats published a handful of emails Epstein once sent to confidantes and acquaintances suggesting that Trump knew more about Epstein’s predations than he had acknowledged. The disgraced financier also seemed to allege in the documents that Trump kept company for hours with one of Epstein’s victims.
The White House dismissed the trove as nothing more than “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.” The reality is that it was conspiracy-minded Republicans who set the Epstein firestorm in motion last summer, outraged that Trump’s Justice Department ended an investigation into Epstein’s suicide and clientele.
Trump, who hasn’t been accused of any crimes in connection with Epstein, once made political hay stoking conspiracy theories about Epstein’s relationships with elites. He knitted that tale into a broader narrative about institutional malfeasance smothering average Americans, and it may not have occurred to him that some of the traps he set would eventually snap back.
It should have crossed Trump’s mind, of course. After all, he and Epstein were pals. Trump once bragged to me that their friendship was stronger than mere business after showing me a prized Palm Beach property that he had outbid Epstein to secure. For his part, Epstein considered himself deeply familiar with Trump, as the documents showed.
He described Trump as a “dirty” business operator, adept at maintaining a public image at odds with who he was in “real life and up close.” The Trump that Epstein described was insecure, shallow and ignorant. He was also ruthless and unstable. “Treating trump like a mafia don ignores the fact that he has great dangerous power,” Epstein advised in one 2018 email. “Gambino was never the commander in chief. there was little gambino could do as the walls closed in. not so with this maniac.” Trump, Epstein allowed, was “borderline insane. and corroborated by some that are close.”
Epstein also fashioned himself a foreign policy savant. He advised one European diplomat in the run-up to Trump’s disastrous Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin in 2018 that Russia’s leadership could gain insights from him about Trump’s thinking. “It is not complex. he must be seen to get something its that simple,” he noted in an email.
The wrinkle here, as they say in the trade, is that Epstein was an unreliable narrator. He made his fortune and forged a formidable social network by offering financial advice and strategic acumen alongside gossip — and, in some cases, sex — to the rich and powerful. He had every incentive at every turn to inflate his expertise and to claim unusual proximity to the celebrated. When being an insider is more important to your well-being than professional aptitude, spinning yarns comes with the territory.
That’s why it’s also important for Congress and the law enforcement community to undertake a full vetting of Epstein’s intersection with the president, and to release as much information as they can. An accurate accounting of the Trump-Epstein relationship shouldn’t be dependent on unreliable narrators and conspiracy theorists. Trump’s own constituents and some members of his party have been clamoring for that.
The Trump who emerges from this recent round of Epstein emails is consistent with the Trump that I and other writers have encountered over the years. But what’s most significant about the Epstein episode transcends questions about Trump’s character alone. What remains to be discovered and delineated is whether he secured sexual liaisons through Epstein, or whether the same president who has been busily enriching himself from the Oval Office also once made use of some of Epstein’s murkier financial services.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, has thus far kept a lid on a deeper exploration of Trump and Epstein’s ties. The Justice Department, presided over by Trump loyalists, is sitting on its hands. So an information vacuum has emerged, and it’s populated with conjecture.
Some of that theorizing is built upon statements from Epstein enablers like Ghislaine Maxwell, now imprisoned and desperate to extricate herself (while being the beneficiary of a curious White House desire to make sure she’s relatively well looked after). The cast of unreliable narrators also includes social media sensationalists and propagandists such as Tucker Carlson, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, Michael Flynn and Jack Posobiec.
Trump himself reigns supreme over this entire group as the Unreliable-Narrator-in-Chief. To that end, the White House has opted for misdirection. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said during a briefing that the fresh Epstein email disclosures “prove absolutely nothing other than President Trump did nothing wrong.”
There may be some alternate universe in which that claim is accurate, but in the current reality confronting the Trump administration, the email disclosure has resurrected speculation that Trump and Epstein’s intimacy may have harbored a very dark side.
Republicans and Democrats would be wise to keep pushing for greater and continued disclosure in all matters Epstein, as some of them, including Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, are already trying to do. The legislators successfully corralled enough signatures to go over the heads of Johnson and other House leaders and force a floor vote requiring the Justice Department to release all of its Epstein files. Johnson said on Wednesday evening that the vote will take place next week.
Transparency and accountability are useful counterweights when conspiracies take flight, even if you already have tens of thousands of Epstein missives in hand.
This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
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