On the menu today: I know a bunch of you would like to never read the words “Jeffrey Epstein” ever again. Alas, developments continue to put the controversy front and center in Washington. The president kept insisting that he never sent a note with a doodle to Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s 50th birthday and even sued the Wall Street Journal over its reporting about the note. Vice President JD Vance insisted the report was “complete and utter bull****. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it,” and demanded, “Where is this letter?” And yet, Epstein’s estate just turned over a note fitting the Journal’s description to the House Oversight Committee. The White House continues to insist it is a fake. Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson said he misspoke when he said President Trump had been an undercover FBI informant on Epstein.
The Birthday Note from Hell
As our James Lynch reports, “A congressional panel released Monday evening the first batch of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, which included a letter allegedly sent to the sex offender by President Donald Trump. The letter formed the basis of an [July] report in the Wall Street Journal which prompted a defamation lawsuit from the president.”
In late August, the House Oversight Committee — chaired by Kentucky Republican James Comer — issued a subpoena for unredacted documents and communications in its possession to further the committee’s investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking and the federal government’s knowledge of it. A committee aide told National Review that the Epstein estate complied and provided the documents to the committee. The documents can be accessed online in their entirety.
Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted the “Trump doodle” document was a hoax:
The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire “Birthday Card” story is false. As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it. President Trump’s legal team will continue to aggressively pursue litigation. Furthermore, the “reporter” who wrote this hatchet job reached out for comment at the EXACT same minute he published his story giving us no time to respond. This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!
Now . . . who does the White House believe perpetuated this hoax they’re alleging? You can call it “fake news,” but clearly there was a document with this note and doodle in the possession of the Epstein estate, and that is now turned over to an investigative committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Wall Street Journal didn’t make it up out of whole cloth in the original report.
The book of notes and letters was assembled by Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003. You know, the same Maxwell who the U.S. Department of Justice just transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Fla., a low-security facility, to Federal Prison Camp Bryan, in Bryan, Texas, which houses only women. The same Maxwell who testified for two days to the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and offered no new evidence of any crimes.
Is the White House contending that Epstein forged a letter from Trump to himself? Or that someone managing the Epstein estate created a fake letter sometime in the past 22 years, just to make Trump look bad?
Or is the White House contending that the House Oversight Committee created the fake letter?
By the way, this collection of letters sounds like Caligula’s scrapbook:
Many of the contributions are disturbing. In one letter, a person who signed only “Nick,” recounted an evening in London that left Mr. Epstein “howling with laughter.” That night, the contributor said, an “old man smiling sweetly” pulled down a woman’s panties and put his hand on her privates, only to find another man’s hand already there. Another letter alludes to when Mr. Epstein, in the mid-1970s, first “discovered the Maxwell teen-age daughter.”
Another poem ends noting that somehow at age 50, Mr. Epstein “has avoided the penitentiary.”
By his 55th birthday, Mr. Epstein would plead guilty in Florida to a state charge of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl after securing a non-prosecution agreement from federal prosecutors. He would then spend nearly two years in jail and have to register as a sex offender.
But none of that stopped Mr. Epstein from beginning something of a second act in 2010, and the rich and famous continued to socialize with him — some almost right up until his arrest in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges.
The first sign that many of Epstein’s friends had a clue that he was involved in sex with underage women is that apparently so many of them kept joking that he was involved in sex with underage women. Recall Trump’s infamous quote to New York magazine, October 28, 2002:
Epstein likes to tell people that he’s a loner, a man who’s never touched alcohol or drugs, and one whose nightlife is far from energetic. And yet if you talk to Donald Trump, a different Epstein emerges. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump booms from a speakerphone. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
As noted at the beginning of this controversy, whether or not you believe the wording on the letter sounds like Trump, Epstein’s 50th birthday was January 20, 2003 — that date falls well within the period when Trump and Epstein were friends, and Trump had no qualms about telling anyone about what good friends they were.
There’s also a Bill Clinton letter in there, praising Epstein’s “childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference, and the [illegible] of friends.”
Does the White House believe that the Clinton letter is a hoax, too? Or is the argument that all the other letters are genuine, but that the Donald Trump letter is a hoax, mixed in with the authentic ones?
A Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.”
The fact that Trump sent a weirdly affectionate note to Epstein years ago does not offer proof that Trump ever did anything illegal with the sex trafficker. But Trump’s howls of outrage and vehement, emphatic denials don’t really help him any, either.
As least twice on the campaign trail in 2024, Trump was asked about releasing any information the federal government had about Epstein. Trump’s answers were, “Yeah, I would,” and “I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”
So it’s difficult to begrudge Americans who have believed in a cover-up to believe that they were going to get a full accounting of Epstein’s crimes, including exposing any man who had sex with underage girls at Epstein’s parties or at his private island or the plane nicknamed “The Lolita Express,” and so on.
And it’s even harder to begrudge Americans for reacting with skepticism after the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation announced in July that there’s no evidence Epstein kept a client list, or blackmailed anyone, nor is there any evidence that Epstein’s death was anything but a suicide. That was a dramatic reversal from past comments from the likes of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino.
(By the way, for those who doubt a suicide, read through Rich’s lengthy, detailed, and comprehensive look at the circumstances around Epstein’s death. Rich weighs all the evidence and concludes, “The mystery about Epstein’s death is a classic case where the answer is either ‘conspiracy’ or ‘incompetence.’ The overwhelming weight of internally consistent and highly credible evidence is that it was incompetence.”)
Since returning to office, President Trump has managed to step on a rake just about every time he spoke about Epstein. He insisted that Epstein was “somebody that nobody cares about” and that those who were continuing to talk about Epstein were “selfish people.” Trump also contended that prominent Democrats were creating fake Epstein files to frame him:
Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.
If you want people to stop talking about Epstein, the president of the United States making a long angry tirade about Epstein online is probably not going to do the trick. And if you don’t want people to believe that there is some document that ties Trump to Epstein in some deeply embarrassing or scandalous way, it is probably not helpful to preemptively insist that the “files” were created by political enemies.
Nor is it helpful for Trump to insist, as he did Friday, “The confused and badly failing Democrat Party did nothing about Jeffrey Epstein while he was alive except befriend him, socialize with him, travel to his Island, and take his money! They knew everything there was to know about Epstein, but now, years after his death, they, out of nowhere, are seeming to show such love and heartfelt concern for his victims.”
A lot of people can throw stones at various elites for “befriending” Epstein and “socializing” with him, but Donald Trump is not one of those people!
In other news, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson has walked back his surprising claim that Trump had been an “FBI informant” in the Epstein case.
On September 4, addressing reporters about Trump’s repeated reference to the “Epstein hoax,” Johnson said, “He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down. The president knows and has great sympathy for the women who have suffered these unspeakable harms.”
Monday, Johnson said, “I don’t know if I used the right word. I said ‘FBI informant.’ I’m not sure — I wasn’t there. This isn’t my lane. I’m just repeating what is common knowledge and has been out in the public for a long time: President Trump was never a hindrance to the Epstein investigation. He was trying to assist in that.”
ADDENDUM: Over in that other place I write for, a look at whether Senate Democrats will attempt to force a government shutdown in October. If you’re the beleaguered Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, maybe you prefer Democrats’ frustration with you for appearing to lose a fight over Democrats’ anger at you for appearing to avoid a fight. How many paychecks are federal workers willing to forfeit in order for Schumer to look better in the eyes of progressives? Usually, my attitude in these looming fights is that the country either will not have a shutdown and there will be a short-term, kick-the-can-down-the-road deal, or there will be a very short one. But this time feels different, as though both sides seem convinced they would personally benefit from having the fight.