Jeffrey Epstein’s email to his companion and fixer reads like the kind of communication that would normally light up a conspiracy thread.
“I want you to realize,” the financier and convicted sex offender began the short email to Ghislaine Maxwell, “that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.”
It’s a juicy, sinuous phrase, one borrowed from a Sherlock Holmes story and used to make a hazy accusation that raises more questions than it answers.
“[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. Police chief. etc.,” Epstein went on in the 2011 message, part of a tranche of thousands of pages released Wednesday by members of the House Oversight Committee. “im 75 % there.”
What about Epstein did Trump know, and why wasn’t he barking? Why would he be mentioned? What police chief? And 75% of the way to where?
In a reply that provided little clarity but with ellipses that suggested something more, Maxwell — who’s serving a 20-year prison sentence for grooming girls for Epstein’s operation — wrote back, “I have been thinking about that …”
The long-running scandal over President Donald Trump’s ties to Epstein — who killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on charges that he sexually abused young girls — has refused to go away, thanks in large part to far-right conspiracy theorists. Their fervor for Trump is matched only by their relentless demands for a full accounting of which “deep state” operators were part of Epstein’s cabal.
To be sure, there are a lot of questions on MAGA’s fringes about these newly released emails, which come from a larger set of some 23,000 documents that lawmakers obtained from the Epstein estate.
But this time, instead of firing up conspiracists, the unearthed communications met with a reaction on the right that was swift and uncharacteristically dismissive: Nothing to see here.
“You can’t be outraged by the Epstein saga and simultaneously not be outraged by the fact that we have Muslims serving in Congress,” far-right activist and Trump whisperer Laura Loomer deflected in a post on X.
“It just shows there’s nothing there,” radio host Alex Jones said on his show, launching into a defense of Trump’s innocence. Jones claimed to have “every angle” covered and said it was clear to him that Trump knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes.
The emails, Jones said, would eventually prove not only that but a different conspiracy involving various figures Jones has targeted before. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his attempt to block a $1.5 billion defamation judgment against him over his false claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax — lies that paved the way for dozens of right-wing conspiracy-minded media figures now flourishing in the Trump era.
“Trump was the first to expose Epstein. That’s why they came after him,” Jones concluded.
Rep. Robert Garcia, the Oversight Committee’s ranking member, said the newly released correspondence raises “glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president.”
Trump has said that he was once friends with Epstein but denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking. In July, Trump said he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago decades earlier because he “stole people that worked for me,” including victim Virginia Giuffre, whom White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged was the person mentioned as spending time with Trump in the newly released email from Epstein.
In another email released Wednesday, sent in 2019 to author Michael Wolff, Epstein said more plainly about Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
Jack Posobiec, a onetime “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist and current host of a show on the Real America’s Voice network, said he believed the emails showed Epstein was trying to use Trump to protect himself. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory — itself constructed out of leaked emails, which were hacked from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and published by WikiLeaks — falsely alleged that Democrats and elites were trafficking and abusing children through a popular Washington, D.C., pizza shop.
But Epstein’s emails were old news, Posobiec said: “Once again, ultimately, it’s just Epstein trying to pull Trump in and implicate him in his own crimes.”
Posobiec was one of a group of influencers brought to the White House by Attorney General Pam Bondi in February and photographed with binders of already public Epstein documents. The stunt, which came to be known in right-wing media circles as “Bindergate,” sparked sharp criticism of both the Trump administration and the influencers.
Other Bindergate influencers also shrugged off the emails published Wednesday as cherry-picking. (It wasn’t clear whether these emails were part of a fuller exchange. MSNBC has not independently verified the allegations made in them.)
Mike Cernovich, a binder recipient and former men’s rights activist turned self-described journalist, asserted Trump’s innocence and called for the release of the complete Epstein files, blaming “billionaires and donors” for blocking it. (The administration has consistently opposed the release of the files.) “Trump is being led to slaughter,” Cernovich posted. That Epstein disclosures are just another plot by the deep state to take down Trump has long been the narrative of Trump’s former top campaign aide, Steve Bannon, who has warned that Epstein could be the thing that splinters the base and costs Republicans the next election. Bannon didn’t mention the emails on his show, either. Former Trump adviser Roger Stone, whom Bannon outed as the “access point” to WikiLeaks, delighted in the revelation that communications between Bannon and Epstein were among the trove of documents released Wednesday. “Fascinating! Over 1700 mentions of Steve Bannon in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails released today including many emails between Steve and his pedophile friend Jeffrey!” Stone posted on X. Bannon did not immediately return a message on Thursday from MSNBC seeking a response to Stone’s jab. It’s not the first time in recent months that newly unearthed writings have suggested Trump and Epstein shared closer ties than the president has acknowledged. In July, The Wall Street Journal reported on a 2003 birthday card from Trump to Epstein. The card contained a cryptic message wrapped in an illustration of a naked woman, drawn in bold black marker, about having “certain things in common,” which offered in closing, “may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump denies authoring the note and has sued the Journal over the story. That story elicited similar yawns from the same MAGA crowd, with influencers and media figures saying the card didn’t sound like Trump. That approach seemed to be catching on again this time: Fox News hadn’t mentioned the emails story at all as of midday Wednesday, hours after their release, according to Media Matters. Host Sean Hannity later sloughed off a question from a fellow Fox personality about whether he planned to cover the story, saying the emails showed nothing more than a grudge against Trump by Epstein. Within hours of their release, Trump had declared the new disclosures a “hoax,” blaming Democrats for trying to draw attention away from what he said was their failure with the government shutdown. MAGA conspiracists agreed on blaming Democrats — even if they weren’t ready to leave it at that. “These drip-drip Democrat disclosures are nothing but distractions to once again smear a good man’s name,” posted Rogan O’Handley, known by the handle DC Draino. “Release the entire Epstein files and let’s start putting the *real* criminals behind bars.”
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York. Recommended
