WASHINGTON—After enduring months of attacks from Democrats, President Donald Trump’s White House is going on the offensive against Democrats who are mentioned or implicated in the Epstein files.
The president announced last week that he supports the release of any remaining files that the Department of Justice has on Jeffrey Epstein, the sex offender who died in a Manhattan jail cell from apparent suicide in August 2019. On Wednesday afternoon, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that her Justice Department will “follow the law,” which passed the Senate on Wednesday, and release the files within the next 30 days “while protecting victims.”
She also said last week that the Justice Department was beginning a new investigation into the possible ties between high-profile Democrats and Epstein, after the president pushed her to do so in a Truth Social post. The Epstein Files Transparency Act is now headed to the president’s desk. It is not immediately clear when the president will sign it.
Critics, particularly prominent Democrats, had argued for months that the president was afraid to release the files because they contained something compromising. And while the recent release of documents from Epstein’s estate did mention Trump a number of times, the files actually incriminated people like Stacey Plaskett, the congressional delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands, who was shown to have been texting Epstein during a hearing on the February 2019 testimony of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen. She said Wednesday that she was just seeking information.
The White House, which has argued for weeks that Democrats were using Epstein and his victims to distract from the government, is now switching into attack mode and planning on going on offense. The president’s position on the Epstein files has not changed, a senior White House official told The Daily Wire, arguing that Trump has always wanted transparency and called for it over and over again on the campaign trail.
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Their thinking, and their messaging, is this: Democrats need to answer for their longstanding ties to Epstein before the country can move on from this. The White House views Democrats as the ones who have shifted on Epstein — and, they say, Democrats only began to take an interest in the topic once they realized they could score political points. The White House views this as a big mistake, but one that can play out in their favor.
“Trump has nothing to hide,” a senior White House official told The Daily Wire, “but the Democrats clearly do.”
“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party,” the president said on Sunday, and the White House is intent on pushing this message out.
Former President Joe Biden and his administration would have used anything they had against Trump long ago, people close to the administration maintain. The recently released emails not only don’t include anything that implicates the president, they also indicate that Epstein wanted to hurt or blackmail his former friend, and they show Epstein communicating with top Democrats.
“It’s so clear that all of his ties were to Democrats,” Donald Trump Jr. said of Epstein in a text message to The Daily Wire. “He funded them, he befriended them. Even after he was a convicted pedophile, famous journalists and businesspeople were visiting his home and dining with him willingly. He’s live texting a sitting congresswoman, as a convicted pedophile, during a testimony against Trump.”
“Everyone knows he was thrown out of Mar-a-Lago for being creepy 30 years ago,” the president’s son added. “No one knew just how creepy he was at the time, but he hated Trump because my father beat him in a real estate deal, and that’s where it ends. Does anyone honestly believe that if he had information he could use to take down Trump, that he wouldn’t have wielded that to gain favor with the Democrats and eliminate someone he hated for years? It’s literally implausible.”
Democrats made a big fuss about the files while holding up the government shutdown. They released a trove of Epstein documents as the shutdown was drawing to an end — selective leaks to liberal media, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, intended to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.”
Trump has consistently called the Democrat push to release the files a “hoax.” A White House official who spoke with The Daily Wire argued that he was never opposed to actually releasing the files, but instead opposed to Republicans falling into a Democrat trap of not focusing on issues Americans care about, such as the shutdown, the economy, affordability, and more.
Now the shutdown is over, and Democrats face a White House equipped with fresh information about their communications with the notorious sex offender himself.
“There are definitely major figures on the left who are going to regret trying to make a spectacle out of this for political gain,” shared a person familiar with the administration’s thinking on the files.
A few figures who may be unhappy with House Democrats as they find themselves under fire: Plaskett, former President Bill Clinton, ex-Harvard president Larry Summers, journalist Katie Couric, billionaire Democrat megadonor and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and writer Michael Wolff, all of whom the White House mentioned in a recent messaging email decrying Democrat affiliation with Epstein.
“Why aren’t Democrats talking about the fact that Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-U.S. Virgin Islands) solicited (and was given) $30,000 from Epstein for the DCCC after he was already a convicted sex offender?” the White House messaging asks. “Or the fact that Plaskett herself accepted maxed-out donations from Epstein for her own campaign? Or the fact that the wife of the former Democrat governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands told Epstein ‘we would have a friend in Stacey’ if he made said donations? Or the fact that Plaskett was literally texting Epstein during a committee hearing?”
Clinton’s 26 flights on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” are certainly up for scrutiny, as is the fact that one of Epstein’s victims says she saw Clinton on Epstein’s Little St. James island with two young women. While Clinton’s spokesman says that the former president never visited the island, his former deputy assistant Doug Band says that Clinton did indeed go in 2003.
The White House messaging points out that Summers, who also served as Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, had a “long relationship” with Epstein, even acting as Summers’s “wingman.” It also notes that Couric attended a 2010 dinner at Epstein’s home, two years after he had been convicted as a sex offender.
The Wall Street Journal reported in May that Reid Hoffman not only visited Epstein’s “Little St. James” but was scheduled to stay at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan in 2014. The Democratic National Committee never returned Epstein’s $32,000 in donations.
And Wolff, an anti-Trump magazine writer who wrote a biography of Epstein, urged Epstein to blackmail the president, writing: “You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
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