Donald Trump hasn’t just spent months insisting that he did not know about and had no involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, the president has also desperately tried to make the scandal go away, condemning the controversy as a “scam” and a “hoax” concocted by his political enemies.
Those efforts took a dramatic step backward on Wednesday morning, as Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a package of emails, obtained by the Epstein estate, in which the convicted sex offender wrote, among other things, that Trump had “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with one of Epstein’s victims. In a separate message, Epstein said the future president “knew about the girls.”
The revelations dovetailed with Republicans on the same committee releasing a tranche of 20,000 documents it received from the Epstein estate in response to a congressional subpoena. An MSNBC report noted that some of the additional email correspondence between Epstein and his associates was “unflattering” to Trump. A related report in The New York Times summarized, in reference to the documents: “Mr. Epstein insulted Mr. Trump and hinted that he had damaging information on him.”
In the immediate aftermath of the reports, the usually talkative president had very little to say about the reporting (which includes allegations that have not been substantiated by MSNBC). The Republican published a handful of missives to his social media platform on the matter, but most focused on his appeals to GOP lawmakers to follow his lead on the scandal.
On Friday morning, however, Trump broke new ground, with an online item that read in its entirety:
Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him. This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats. Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island.’ Stay tuned!!!
There’s no point in trying to summarize in a single blog post every error of fact and judgment in the president’s 116-word rant — the Russia scandal, for example, still isn’t a scam — but the bottom line comprises three key elements.
The first is that Trump wants federal law enforcement to initiate an investigation into a variety of prominent figures mentioned in the Epstein materials — but not himself. That’s a tough position to take seriously.
The second is that the president wants the public to see the underlying controversy as a hoax, except for the parts related to people he doesn’t like. How does Trump reconcile the obvious contraction? By ignoring it. Finally, it’s worth emphasizing that the president continues to act as if he has decision-making authority at the Justice Department and the FBI. There is no modern precedent for a White House publicly declaring which of the president’s political foes deserve to be targeted with federal investigations, but in 2025 it has become an alarmingly common occurrence. In late September, Trump used his platform to direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after three of his perceived political enemies. In October, he did it again, adding additional names to his enemies list. On Friday morning, he barked related orders. White House critics have spent much of the year accusing Trump of effectively seizing control over federal law enforcement and calling the shots at the Justice Department. The political world confronts additional evidence that bolsters those arguments all the time.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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