Epstein emails say Trump ‘knew about the girls’

Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wrote in a 2011 email that US President Donald Trump had “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with a victim of sex trafficking and said in a separate message years later that Mr Trump “knew about the girls”, according to communications released on Wednesday.

The emails, made public by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, add to the questions about Mr Trump’s friendship with Epstein and about any knowledge he may have had in what prosecutors call a yearslong effort by Epstein to exploit underage girls.

The Republican president has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes and has said he ended their relationship years ago.

In one 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend now in prison for conspiring to engage in sex trafficking, Epstein wrote: “I want you to realise that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.”

He added that Mr Trump had “spent hours at my house” with a person whose name is blacked out of the emails but who House Democrats identified as a “victim”.

Epstein wrote that Mr Trump “has never once been mentioned”.

In a separate email to journalist Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about the president, Epstein wrote of Mr Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt accused the Democrats of having “selectively leaked emails” to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump”.

She said in a statement that the unnamed person referenced in the emails is Virginia Giuffre, who had accused Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and other influential men of sexually exploiting her as a teenager and who died by suicide in April.

Andrew has rejected Ms Giuffre’s allegations and said he did not recall meeting her.

Ms Leavitt said in a statement that Ms Giuffre had “repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions”.

“The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre,” the statement 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.”

Ms Giuffre came forward publicly after an initial investigation ended in an 18-month Florida jail term for Epstein, who made a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by pleading guilty instead to relatively minor state-level charges of soliciting prostitution. He was released in 2009.

In subsequent lawsuits, Giuffre said she was a teenage spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, club, when she was approached in 2000 by Maxwell.

Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges.

Lawyers for British former socialite Maxwell have argued that she never should have been tried or convicted for her role in luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein.

She is serving a 20-year prison term, though she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas after she was interviewed in July by US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.