Nov. 12, 2025, 9:43 p.m.
President Trump and congressional Republicans spent much of Wednesday in damage-control mode after newly released emails suggest Trump knew more about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of young women than he had previously acknowledged—and claim he spent time with one of the victims.
House Democrats released the emails only hours before Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva was sworn in—giving lawmakers the necessary 218th petition signer to force a floor vote on a measure requiring the Trump administration to release its trove of files on Epstein, who was a close friend of the future president before they had a falling-out. A vote on the discharge petition is expected as soon as next week.
Most Republicans are publicly downplaying the revelations, however, arguing that it’s a political ploy by Democrats to distract attention away from the government shutdown, which officially ended Wednesday night as the House passed a spending bill to reopen the government.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a set of emails Wednesday sent between the disgraced millionaire and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and journalist Michael Wolff going as far back as 2011. The emails are the latest revelation in the saga of Epstein, who committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex-trafficking charges. A number of questions and conspiracy theories have swirled around Epstein’s network of influence, with members of Trump’s base—along with Democrats—calling on the administration to release the complete set of files related to the sex-trafficking cases.
In a Truth Social Post after Democrats released the emails, the president pressured House Republicans to abandon the effort.
“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” Trump wrote. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.”
In an April 2011 email, Maxwell wrote to Epstein referring to Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked,” adding that a victim of Epstein’s had “spent hours” at Maxwell’s house with the future president.
Trump “said he asked me to resign, never a member ever,” a January 2019 email sent from Epstein to Wolff said, apparently detailing a plea from Trump for Epstein to leave Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club. Epstein added that “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
In a slate of emails in 2015, Wolff wrote Epstein that CNN was planning to ask Trump, then a presidential candidate, about his relationship with Epstein. In response, Epstein asked for advice on how Trump should answer.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff replied. “If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. 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.”
While the release of the emails has created a headache for the White House on a day officials were prepared to tout the end of the shutdown, Republicans were forced to pivot and spent their energy trying to undermine the credibility of the emails. They characterized it as a Democratic-led witch hunt to defame the president. Still, a number of Republicans said they plan on voting for the resolution once it hits the floor.
“Since 2015, [Democrats have] thrown everything in the world at them, so I don't think they have anything left to throw at President Trump,” Rep. Warren Davidson told National Journal. “This is just an ongoing Trump derangement syndrome.”
But the Ohio Republican said he plans to vote for the discharge petition when it hits the floor. And he called for Attorney General Pam Bondi to come before Congress to testify and explain the handling of the documents’ releases.
Following a Trump campaign pledge last year to release the files to appease conservative influencers and podcasters, House Oversight Committee Republicans released more than 33,000 documents in September, including records sent from the Justice Department back in August. However, many of these documents were already public—stoking ire from the MAGA base, and upping the pressure on the Trump administration to release new information.
Hours after Democrats released their own set of documents Wednesday, House Oversight Republicans released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from Epstein’s estate.
Rep. Thomas Massie, the Republican spearheading the discharge petition, told reporters that he expects the measure to receive more GOP votes than those that had signed onto it.
The files could lay the groundwork for House Democrats to launch a public investigation into the Trump administration if they take back the lower chamber during next year’s midterms—but it could be premature to start discussing impeachment proceedings, according to Rep. Dan Goldman, who served as the lead counsel in the first Trump impeachment.
“What we need to do is see all the documents. The DOJ is covering everything up,” Goldman said. “What we are learning—not from the DOJ, but from Jeffrey Epstein's estate—in these emails is exactly what you suspected, which is that Donald Trump is all over the Epstein files in the possession of the Department of Justice. He’s the president of the United States, who clearly was associated with one of the most notorious underage sex traffickers in history.”
In response to GOP claims that Democrats are releasing information selectively, Oversight ranking member Robert Garcia argued that minority members are publishing documents as they’re able to get through them.
“They've never called for anything to be released,” Garcia said. “The only reason we have any files or any emails today is because we have forced subpoenas, and we forced Republicans to actually get these subpoenas out the door. And if it was up to them, they wouldn't want anything done.”
Retiring Republican Rep. Don Bacon said the criticism the White House has received over the files was self-inflicted.
“The White House brought it on themselves to say they had all these client lists: ‘We got the binders. Oops, there’s nothing there,’” Bacon said. “And let the chips fall where they fall. [If] somebody had dinner with Epstein, say, ‘I had dinner.’”
A number of Republicans, including Bacon, threw cold water on the idea that anything new could be revealed from the release of the documents, asserting that any smoking gun would’ve been leaked years ago.
The swearing-in of Grijalva, who was elected in a September special election to succeed her late father, Rep.Raul Grijalva, allowed for the discharge petition to reach the required 218 votes to put the resolution on the floor for a vote. Grijalva also honored Epstein survivors, who were in the gallery of the House chamber as she was sworn in.
While the resolution faces a long shot in the Senate and is all but certain to be vetoed by the president, it would put House Republicans in an uncomfortable position and force them to go on the record on a thorny issue that embroils the president.
House Republicans, including Reps. Massie, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are adding to the pressure by joining forces with Democrats on the discharge petition. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said top administration officials briefed Boebert on the issue Wednesday, but that did not sway the Colorado Republican, who kept her name on the petition.
Massie said he remains optimistic that the president wouldn’t veto the measure, arguing that it would go against his original calls for transparency into the matter. But the Kentucky Republican—who has found himself in Trump’s crosshairs over the discharge petition—didn’t mince his words criticizing Trump’s efforts to lobby against the petition.
“At one level, I think he's afraid of embarrassing his friends and donors,” Massie said. “And at a higher level, I think everybody in the administration is worried about exposing our own intelligence agencies and those of foreign countries that were involved with Epstein.”
Massie also noted that while the Senate doesn’t have discharge-petition mechanisms, there are other procedural moves to force votes. Furthermore, a Democrat is likely to lead the measure in the upper chamber, he says.
“I think the best strategy for getting the Senate to bring it up is to have a really big vote in the House,” he said.
Mace released a statement on Wednesday saying the Epstein petition is “deeply personal” for her as a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, while also reiterating her support for the president.
"As a survivor I will defend every last attack on President Trump to the death, everywhere,” Mace wrote. “And all this fake news, well, it’s just noise. I will NEVER abandon other survivors.”
Over the course of Trump’s second term, several reports have trickled out that detail ties between Trump and Epstein, including the release of a risqué birthday card for Epstein signed by Trump, and a Wall Street Journal report on DOJ officials briefing the president and telling him that his name appeared several times in files related to Epstein.
