However harmful these revelations, we can be sure the President will shrug them off, attack his accuser and carry on as before
SEATTLE – It should tell us something if we could guess ahead of time how Donald Trump and his supporters would respond to the latest shocking details from the Jeffrey Epstein files.
A “smear job” job by Democrats, they’d say, or else they’d fall back on attacking “the fake news”. The 79-year-old President would probably threaten to sue anyone who mentioned it.
And so it was.
“Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said.
“These stories are nothing more than bad faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”
And, predictably, Trump, writing on his Truth Social platform, accused the Democrats of “using the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax to try and deflect from their massive failures, in particular, their most recent one — THE SHUTDOWN!”
To be fair, the material contained in the three emails released by Democrats in the House of Representatives is not hard proof of anything.
Trump has always denied any wrongdoing and said he’d take legal action against The Wall Street Journal after it published a message that he had allegedly sent to Epstein on his 50th birthday, words the President said were not his.
Nevertheless, emails such as one from Epstein to his long-time partner Ghislaine Maxwell, claiming that Trump “spent hours at my house” with one of the late sex offender’s victims underscore why the President was so determined to shut down the Epstein investigation earlier this year.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein writes, later adding that, “he has never once been mentioned”.
In what initially appeared to be a strange tactic, Leavitt said the victim in the email, whose identity had been redacted by Democrats, was none other than the late Virginia Giuffre, the young woman who claimed the former Prince Andrew had seduced her on three occasions, at least one of which she said took place when she was 17.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as he is now known after he was stripped of his prince title by King Charles, has vehemently denied all the claims.
In 2022, Mountbatten-Windsor paid a reported £12m in a civil settlement to Giuffre without making an admission of guilt or liability. She took her own life this year, aged 41.
But Leavitt referenced a 2016 deposition by Giuffre in which she said she did not see Trump “have sex with any of the girls, so I can’t say who he had sex with in his whole life or not, but I just know it wasn’t with me when I was with other girls”.
She added: “Donald Trump never flirted with me.”
Leavitt was revealing Giuffre’s identity in an effort to show that Trump did nothing wrong at this time, according to what the accuser herself has said.
In another email, Epstein appears to deny Trump’s claim he asked the financier to resign his membership at Mar-a-Lago golf club, writing: “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever. Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
What exactly he knew remains a question.
The emails may be more of a problem for Mountbatten-Windsor, since they include a confirmation by Epstein that the former prince was photographed with Giuffre – something Andrew says he does not remember.
They also include emails from someone named “The Duke” to Epstein saying, “Please make sure that every statement or legal letter states clearly that I am NOT involved and that I knew and know NOTHING about any of these allegations.
“I can’t take any more of this my end.”
“The Duke” also writes to Maxwell: “I don’t know anything about this! You must SAY so please. This has NOTHING to do with me.”
The sender’s name is redacted and it is not clear if Mountbatten-Windsor sent the email.
What happens next? One thing we can be sure of is that more material relating to Trump and Epstein is on its way.
Under reported pressure from Trump, the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson had placed the chamber in recess, in part to avoid a vote by the whole House on whether or not to demand that all the remaining materials on Epstein are made public.
With the House now back in session to approve a spending measure that would reopen the federal government, Johnson will be obliged to swear in Democratic Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva from Arizona. She would likely be the 218th – and tie-breaking – name added to a so-called discharge petition that would force a vote on the House floor about the Epstein materials.
A battle will continue to control the narrative in the coming hours and days. Trump will likely double down on his denials.
Democrats will use the new material as ways to attack him, a year ahead of the mid-terms, claiming he and the Republicans have been involved in a cover-up.
You might think this ought to harm America’s 47th President, and the party he leads.
Yet, this is an individual who has twice been impeached, been accused of a range of very serious crimes, found guilty of sexual assault, only to be re-elected and become the nation’s oldest ever head of state.
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Bear in mind also, Trump’s second term has seen him spearheading a series of far more extreme policies than in his first, and adopting an increasingly authoritarian grip on elements of the political fabric that have by tradition been independent, be it the courts, independent agencies and even the Federal Reserve.
It seems there is nothing he thinks he cannot do.
This will probably be another instance where, however harmful these new details might appear at first, he will shrug them off, attack his accuser and carry on as ever before.
