Jeffrey Epstein died more than six years ago, and yet, he continues to haunt President Donald Trump from beyond the grave.

House Oversight Committee Democrats disclosed on Wednesday that some of the convicted sex offender’s emails in their possession in which the disgraced financier writes that Trump “knew about the girls.”

The revelations come hot on the heels of the news that Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, is expected to seek a commutation from the president for her 20-year federal prison sentence. 

At the same time, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) swore in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) on Wednesday, almost two months after she won her special election. Moments after her swearing in, she became the decisive 218th signature needed to force a full House vote on a measure requiring the Justice Department to release all of its files regarding the federal investigation into Epstein.

For Republican strategist Evan Siegfried, “enough” of Trump’s base cares about Epstein, “because his crimes represent a larger problem that the base recognizes: that ruling elites have taken advantage of everyday people while protecting one another.” 

“No situation more embodies this than the Epstein scandal,” Siegfried told the Washington Examiner. “People want to know who the establishment is protecting, and they deserve full transparency.”

“The discharge petition and new emails are a step forward, but it is all part of a slow-moving process, which will absolutely frustrate several people who just want it all out in plain sight,” Siegfried added. “The best thing that can be done from both a moral and political standpoint is to rip the Band-Aid off, man up, and release the full files with only the victims protected. You’ll avoid the drip, drip, drip and surrounding questions about why it is taking so long — which can itself fuel further conspiracies, speculation, and political problems.”

Trump defended himself from the criticism in a social post on Wednesday, accusing Democrats of supporting “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.” 

“Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap,” Trump wrote on social media. “There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

The White House also responded on Wednesday, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt criticizing Democrats for their “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media [for] a fake narrative to smear” Trump. 

In addition to Epstein’s 2019 email to author Michael Wolff, in which he indicated Trump “knew about the girls,” House Democrats circulated another note from 2011. In the note, Epstein told Maxwell, “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is trump” and that redacted-but-since-identified Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein and Maxwell who committed suicide in April, allegedly “spent hours at my house with” Trump.

To that end, Leavitt emphasized that Giuffre, whose memoir Nobody’s Girl was posthumously published last month and prompted King Charles III to strip his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of his titles and residence at Royal Lodge, has “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,” Leavitt told the Washington Examiner, referring to Trump’s private club in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, near where Epstein lived.

A White House official also undermined the credibility of Wolff, the author behind the 2018 book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, contending his work has historically been “riddled with mistakes and inaccuracies.”

During her press briefing on Wednesday, Leavitt reiterated that Trump has been transparent regarding Epstein, pointing to how the Justice Department has “turned over tens of thousands of documents to the American people” concerning Epstein.

“The Department of Justice also moved to unseal grand jury testimony, which we know, unfortunately, a judge declined those requests,” she told reporters. “[Democrats are] talking about it all of a sudden because President Trump is in the Oval Office, but when Joe Biden was sitting in there, the Democrats never brought this up. This wasn’t an issue that they cared about because they actually don’t care about the victims in these cases. They care about trying to score political points against President Trump.”

Regardless, in response to the House vote regarding the Epstein files, provoked by a bipartisan discharge petition led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA), the White House held a meeting with Bondi, Blanche, Patel, and Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO). 

A separate report emerged on Wednesday that Trump had telephoned Boebert regarding Epstein on Tuesday. 

Leavitt bristled at a question regarding the meeting during her briefing, arguing that it demonstrated Trump’s commitment to transparency, as his administration is “willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns.” 

“That’s a defining factor of transparency, having discussions, having discussions with members of Congress about various issues,” she said. “I’m not going to detail conversations that took place in the Situation Room in the press briefing room.”

Regardless, Boebert, along with Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) remained with Massie as the four Republicans on the petition. Boebert later confirmed the meeting did take place, thanking White House officials for meeting with her.

The House vote is anticipated to be scheduled for early December, but it is unlikely to pass the Senate.

The political furor around Epstein is, in part, a problem of Trump’s own making, perpetuated by the likes of the president’s own Cabinet members, namely FBI Director Kash Patel, who, along with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, called for greater transparency regarding Epstein in their past lives as MAGA-world podcasters.

The issue of transparency regarding Epstein was exacerbated in July when the Justice Department and FBI reported there was no evidence that Epstein had a client list or that he was murdered when he died by apparent suicide while in federal custody in 2019. That followed comments from Attorney General Pam Bondi,_ who told Fox News in February that Epstein’s client list was “on her desk” to be reviewed. Bondi told reporters in July she was speaking about the so-called Epstein files.

Bongino reportedly considered resigning over the Justice Department and FBI’s Epstein findings after Bondi, also in February, underscored how she was making the Epstein files public when many of those documents were already in the public domain.

In the hope of countering criticism of an alleged cover-up, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney, interviewed Maxwell in her prison in Florida days before she was transferred to a nicer facility in Texas, where she is now serving time after being found guilty of five sex trafficking-related charges in 2021.

Against that backdrop, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal for $10 billion in July for its reporting regarding the president’s contribution to a birthday book compiled by Maxwell for Epstein’s 50th birthday.