National Review Online
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Where there’s smoke . . . there’s sometimes just smoke.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new
emails the other day from Jeffrey Epstein that caused an instant frenzy in
Washington, although they are more of what one would expect given what we know
so far: They are embarrassing regarding President Trump’s relationship with
Epstein, but contain no smoking gun regarding any misconduct.
In one email to his former girlfriend and procurer
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein claims that Trump spent hours at Epstein’s home with
a victim, whose name Democrats conveniently redacted. The only reason to strike
her name, Virginia Giuffre, was that people might go back and see what she said
about Trump. In a deposition, she said she never saw Trump and Epstein together
and never saw him at Epstein’s home, and denied that he ever flirted with her.
(A tragic case, clearly abused within Epstein’s orbit, Giuffre committed
suicide last year.) She might not have been telling the truth — Giuffre was not
a reliable witness — but certainly there’s no reason to accept the word of
Epstein, a sociopathic liar, over hers.
One way to read the email is that Epstein was floating
the idea that it was Trump who blew the whistle on him to the police, rather
than suggesting Trump partook in his abuses.
In another email, to the journalist Michael Wolff,
Epstein said that Trump “knew about the girls,” a phrase that has gotten much
play in the media, but the disgraced financier added, “as he asked ghislaine to
stop,” a reference to Ghislaine Maxwell. This is cryptic, but a very plausible
interpretation is that it’s confirmation of Trump’s story that Epstein was
recruiting girls from Mar-a-Lago, and the future presidential candidate told
him to stop.
In a strange email to himself, then forwarded to Michael
Wolff, Epstein says that girls, in exchange for payments, came to his house to
give him massages that included a sex act. He says, again, that Trump spent
time at his house, but that he never got a massage.
At the very least, none of this is a smoking gun, yet
Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) is saying, “Clearly, Donald Trump was at the
center of a child sex ring.”
To be sure, Trump isn’t taking any of this well, lashing
out on Truth Social and especially targeting Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene (R., Ga.), who has broken with him over the Epstein files and several
other issues, many of them much more publicly consequential. “Marjorie
‘Traitor’ Green is a disgrace to our GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY!” wrote the
president.
For his critics, this constitutes Trump “acting guilty.”
It’s more like Trump acting like Trump. When has he not gone into overdrive to
try to suppress or redefine an unwelcome narrative? It’s not like him to
concede that he might have done something untoward and express regret over it,
in order to make a more credible case that he isn’t guilty of some alleged
greater offense.
Many prominent people, including Trump, had warm
relationships with Epstein for years — a fact that does not reflect well on any
of them. There will surely be more embarrassing material in the Epstein files
that his enemies will exaggerate and distort for partisan purposes.
To his fury, it seems that the push to release all the
Epstein documents is an unstoppable train in the House. But this isn’t the way
to handle sensitive investigative documents or to treat innocent people who may
be mentioned in them. We favor maximal transparency, overseen by the relevant
judges in the various, ongoing Epstein-related cases, rather than a
willy-nilly, politicized push to violate every standard practice in the hopes
of nailing Trump or exposing some vast, elite criminal conspiracy.
The Epstein emails released last week occasioned a lot of
hysteria and slander, and there’s surely much more where that came from.
No comments:
Post a Comment