Republicans on the House Oversight Committee released tens of thousands of Epstein-related documents Wednesday afternoon, just hours after Democrats made public a handful of emails from deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his partner, convicted child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, that mentioned President Donald Trump by name.
According to The New York Times, the GOP’s release — totaling roughly 23,000 pages from Epstein’s estate — came after months of delays and followed Democrats’ publication of emails “suggesting that President Trump knew more about Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking than he has previously acknowledged.”
The documents were obtained by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer, through a subpoena in August. They were published online about two hours after House Democrats released an email from Mr. Epstein in which he wrote that Mr. Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims.
It was not immediately clear if the release would include other disclosures; The Times is reviewing the documents and will provide updates. But the emails from Mr. Epstein to friends and associates were laced with unflattering, at times mocking, references to Mr. Trump — including a description of Mr. Trump’s financial disclosures by an Epstein associate in 2019 as “100 pages of nonsense.”
A year before that, Mr. Epstein described Mr. Trump as “borderline insane” in an email exchange with Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Harvard University president.
The U.S. House went into an early summer recess — a move many observers see as driven by Speaker Mike Johnson’s effort to avoid a floor vote on bipartisan legislation that would compel the DOJ and FBI to release even more documents tied to the Epstein investigation. The break was timed amid rising pressure from both Republicans and Democrats for more transparency, including oversight involving Maxwell.
Whether the Republicans’ document dump proves to be an effective defense against criticism that they have dragged their feet on releasing all government records tied to Epstein and Maxwell remains unclear.
