The Epstein Shutdown commentary by Heather Cox Richardson
It turns out Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA) and House Democrats were right to call it the “Epstein Shutdown” for the last several weeks on social media and in interviews. As Marc Elias of Democracy Docket put it today, while it was clear what the Democrats wanted from the shutdown—lower costs for healthcare insurance premiums, affordability, and for Trump to stop breaking the law—it was never clear what the Republicans wanted. They seemed simply to be doing as Trump demanded.
Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) kept House members from conducting any business at all. The House last voted on September 19, gathering in Washington, D.C., again only after the Senate on Monday passed a measure to reopen the government. The hiatus gave Johnson an excuse not to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), whose voters elected her on September 23. Grijalva had promised to be the 218th and final vote on a discharge petition that would force the House to vote on a measure that would require the Department of Justice to release files relating to the government investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Elias notes that he, like many of us, considered as plausible the idea that the government shutdown was a way to keep the Epstein files under wraps, but there were other plausible theories as well. Maybe Trump and his cronies wanted to gut the federal workforce. Maybe they wanted to undermine the Affordable Care Act. Maybe Trump simply wanted to run the country without the interference of Congress.
Today put the Epstein files firmly in the center of the story.
The House got down to business this morning after a 54-day break to work on the Senate measure to reopen the government. Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform immediately released three emails from a cache of more than 23,000 documents the committee received recently from the Epstein estate. The first email was one Epstein sent to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011. It referred to a story in which the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved a case by noting that a dog didn’t bark at a crime scene because it knew the perpetrator. The reference has come to mean an expected action or piece of evidence whose absence proves guilt.
Epstein wrote: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75% there.” Maxwell replied: “I have been thinking about that…”
The second email the Democrats released was from January 2019, from Epstein to Trump biographer Michael Wolff. In it, Epstein said of Trump: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop[.]”
In a third email thread from December 2015, after Trump had declared his candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, Wolff told Epstein that CNN would ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein asked what Wolff thought Trump should answer. Wolff wrote: “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house,… [y]ou 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.”
As legal analyst Asha Rangappa noted, this exchange suggests that Epstein would have leverage over Trump if Trump tried to say he had not been at Epstein’s house or on his plane, in other words, that Trump was there and Epstein had receipts.
After the Democrats released these three emails, Johnson called the release “[a]nother publicity stunt by the Democrats” and claimed: “They’re trying to mislead people.” Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) issued a statement accusing the Democrats of “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information.” The committee then released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the Epstein estate.
Those were hardly better. In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”
But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward. (continued on page 2 or here)