Content warning: This story contains mentions of child sexual assault and suicide.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released a trove of documents and emails from the estate of serial child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein. The emails included indications that President Donald Trump had knowledge of Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.
“That dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (Redacted victim’s name) spent hours at my house with him,” Epstein wrote in a message to longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011.
“I have been thinking about that,” Maxwell responded.
Officials redacted the names of victims for their privacy, though Republicans say the victim mentioned in the email is Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre came forward with accusations against Epstein and sued Prince Andrew, now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, in 2021.
Reports estimated Mountbatten-Windsor settled with Giuffre out of court for upwards of $16 million.
Unsealed court documents from 2019 allege Epstein first groomed Giuffre when she worked as a teenager at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida. To cover for Trump, Republicans have pointed to a quote in her posthumous memoir in which she states the president “couldn’t have been friendlier.”
In April, after years of advocacy on behalf of Epstein’s victims, Giuffre died by suicide.
Documentation of Trump’s direct patronage of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking scheme has not been revealed, but we now have confirmation that Epstein felt he had information that could destroy him.
“its wild…because i am the one able to take (Trump) down,” Epstein texted an unidentified acquaintance.
The nature of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, from Epstein’s perspective, directly contradicts what Maxwell said in an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche earlier this year.
After admiring Trump’s political successes and calling him a “gentleman,” she echoed Trump’s repeated claims that the two men didn’t have a friendship beyond the elite social circles they shared. “I certainly never witnessed him in (Epstein’s) house,” Maxwell said.
But Trump knew Epstein well enough: “of course (Trump) knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” Epstein wrote to journalist Michael Wolff in 2019.
This week, a whistleblower told House Democrats that Maxwell is formally seeking a commutation of her 20-year federal child sex trafficking sentence from Trump.
The release of these documents comes before a highly anticipated House vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, co-authored by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). It aims to force the release of all files relevant to the Epstein case.
Many House Republicans — including those close to Trump — made promises to voters about releasing the files during campaigns last year. Likewise, prominent MAGA influencers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have called for their release, signaling a split among the MAGA faithful on the issue of, well, protecting pedophiles.
One of four Republican detractors on the bipartisan discharge petition, which forced a vote on the Epstein files bill, was Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), a far-right congresswoman whose worship at the altar of MAGA has known no bounds. CNN reported that Trump officials summoned her to the White House Situation Room on Wednesday.
The Situation Room is a space usually reserved for national emergencies and covert military operations. Its purpose is secrecy. The Trump administration understands that the prospect of releasing the Epstein files poses a significant risk to national security. Our leader is compromised.
Trump is an iconoclast of our democratic institutions. He makes a game of it. Always the outsider, Trump may soon be revealed as beyond even the kind of society that shuns the sexual abuse of children and views their protection as transcendent of politics.
When we stand on our principles, we bring down the monsters that prey on innocence, and we root out those who support them. This much is as rudimentary in law as it is in society.
If we fail to expose Epstein’s most elite accomplices, we have surrendered more than our democracy and institutions under attack: We have forfeited our integrity and reneged on our commitment to a free society where our children have the right to grow up without fear of exploitation. We will become a wholly different nation and redefine our purpose as human beings for the worse.
We owe it to Giuffre and all of Epstein’s victims to investigate these crimes and hold those responsible to account — even, and especially if, they involve figures like Trump. To forsake justice at this juncture would be incompatible with a society that professes to uphold any standard of decency.
I pray our president is not directly implicated in the forthcoming Epstein files. But if he is, it will be our duty — no matter how you gauge your support of his agenda — to banish him from respectable society as we would anyone who victimizes our children.
Societal standards are our safeguards. The complicated ones determine our politics; others are plain and simple. This one, my friends, is obvious.
Trump was never fit to lead our republic. But the true nature of his associations with Epstein may show that he was never worthy of being a part of it. In that case, fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let justice be done though the heavens fall.
Aidan Klineman is a Medill junior and author of “Off-Campus: White House.” He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
