President Donald Trump is mentioned in Jeffrey Epstein’s emails over 1,000 times — the most cited person in the tranche released this week by the House Oversight Committee.
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Despite all the questions the emails have raised about his relationship with Epstein, Trump on Friday continued to fan the flames of the scandal. On his social media platform “Truth Social,” Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to investigate some of the influential figures named in the emails.
“I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him,” Trump wrote.
But no one is named more in the Epstein emails than Trump himself, revealing that years after his friendship with Epstein had waned, Trump remained front and center in Epstein’s emails as a figure whom he could use as currency in his conversations with journalists, world leaders, academics and wealthy men.
As Congress debates whether to force the release of DOJ’s files, the Miami Herald has reviewed many of the documents that are part of a trove of communications held by Epstein’s estate. In recent months, Epstein’s calendars have also been released by Democrats on the Oversight Committee and, like his emails, they reveal Epstein’s continued association with influential people in the years after he pleaded guilty in Florida to sex charges involving a minor.
The messages about Trump were among more than 20,000 documents released by the committee Wednesday. They were obtained from Epstein’s estate pursuant to a subpoena — and are separate from “the Epstein files” that members of Congress are trying to pry out of the Department of Justice and the FBI.
The Herald searched the most recent trove for documents containing Epstein’s e-mail address and variations on Trump’s name, isolating unique pages to avoid counting duplicate files twice. Other names were also searched, including former presidents Clinton, Obama and Biden. No one was mentioned more than Trump.
Emails show that the late financier and convicted sex offender tried to cast himself as a Trump expert and led his friends, girlfriends and political acquaintances to believe he had the inside track on Trump — for everything from who was being nominated to his cabinet to where the president was spending Thanksgiving.
More than once, Epstein suggests that he has compromising information on Trump, both before and after his first term as president.
The emails span a decade, from about 2009 to Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. Part of that period includes December 2018 — right as Epstein was once again under scrutiny. On Nov. 28, 2018, the Miami Herald published an investigation, Perversion of Justice, which examined how Epstein received an unusual federal immunity deal even though the FBI had evidence that he had raped and sexually abused dozens of girls in his Palm Beach mansion. The series went viral and led to public outrage and demands in Congress to reopen the investigation.
Several emails, written just days after the Herald’s series, suggest that the financier was weighing what to do in response to the renewed scrutiny of his case.
An unknown writer, whose name is redacted from the email, tries to console Epstein on Dec. 3, 2018, saying “It will all blow over! They’re really just trying to take down Trump and doing whatever they can to do that…!”
Epstein replies: “yes. thx. it’s wild. because i am the one able to take him down.”
None of the documents directly implicate Trump in Epstein’s sex crimes and Trump has adamantly denied he was involved in any wrongdoing. Still, Epstein, in an email two months later, makes it clear that Trump knew about “the girls.”
Writing to author Michael Wolff, he says: “trump said he asked me to resign. never a member ever. of course he knew about the girls he asked ghislaine to stop…”
The exchange seems to reference Trump’s statement that he had kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, where Maxwell had been recruiting girls for massages.
The messages also reveal that Epstein tried to leverage his association with Trump with world leaders.
In one message, Epstein suggests that Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov should use him to get “insight” on Trump before their first meeting in Helsinki in 2018.
“I think you might suggest to putin that lavrov can get insight on (Trump) talking to me,” Epstein wrote to former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland in a June 2018 email in advance of Trump’s meeting with Putin.
The emails also show Epstein’s preoccupation with Trump’s money and power, as he tallies how much of Trump’s worth is what Epstein’s accountant described as “nonsense” — and how much of Trump’s empire is the result of smoke and mirrors.
Trump “represents his ‘income’ as the GROSS receipts of his clubs,” means a nothing at all ZERO. no income as we no it,” Epstein wrote in January 2019 to Kathryn Ruemmler, former president Barack Obama’s White House counsel with whom Epstein shared many emails. “He lists his ‘assets,’ and their VALUE — but not the corresponding loans, against it. so no net number, hence meaningless.”
The emails don’t show any messages between Trump and Epstein — or between Epstein and Trump’s White House staff or cabinet members.
It’s unclear if this is because most of his contact with Trump was prior to 2009, or because Trump didn’t use email to communicate with Epstein — or because Epstein was making it all up.
Trump has said in the past that he doesn’t like to use email.
“I’m not an email person myself. I don’t believe in it,” he said in his first term as president. “I think it can be hacked, for one thing. When I send an email, I mean, if I send one, I send one almost never. I’m just not a believer in email. A lot of people have taught me that, including Hillary (Clinton). But, honestly, it could be maybe attacked. Who knows.”
The president is famous for working the phone, often dialing directly from his cell phone instead of going through the White House switchboard. During his presidency, he has been criticized for using a personal, less secure iPhone for communications.
Epstein doesn’t say in his communications that he has spoken directly with Trump. In fact, they reflect how much he keeps details about the president to himself, walking a fine line between boasting of his inside knowledge and distancing himself from a man whom he considered to be of lesser intelligence.
“i have met some very bad people, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body,” Epstein wrote to Lawrence H. Summers, former President Obama’s treasury secretary and president emeritus of Harvard University.
The massive file release also contained many bizarre details — like when Epstein sent Trump a truck filled with $10,000 in baby food as payment for a bet concerning Trump’s former wife Marla Maples and her pregnancy.
In one interesting message to Maxwell, Epstein describes Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked,” adding that one of the sex trafficking victims “spent hours at my house with him… he has never once been mentioned.” But the victim, whose name is redacted from the email, is the late Virginia Giuffre — who before her death wrote that she had no knowledge of Trump being involved in Epstein’s crimes.
Despite this and other notable blank spots — the president is unlikely to put the scandal behind him anytime soon. The White House continues to characterize the Epstein controversy as a Democratic “hoax.”
The new email dump, which came as Democrats were divided over ending the longest government shutdown in history, was described by White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt as nothing more than a political “smear.”
But the emails are being scrutinized by the public and by influencers on social media, many of whom — both on the left and the right — are inaccurately decoding them. The emails are addressed to a variety of people and sometimes only Epstein’s side of the conversation is shown. None of them are in chronological order, making them hard to read and decipher.
“If anything they raise a lot more new questions than they answer,” acknowledged Matthew Dallek, a political science professor at George Washington University. “They just whet people’s appetite for more.”
Trump has stoked some of the public’s scrutiny with reports that he lobbied Republican representatives Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert to take their signatures off a petition that would force a vote in the House on a bill requiring the Justice Department to release all its Epstein files.
The lawmakers — who were critical to the petition’s success — declined to be swayed.
The petition successfully garnered the necessary 218 signatures. And the House will vote on it next week, Speaker Mike Johnson said. While it is expected to pass the House, it faces long odds in the Senate. Then it must clear one final obstacle before it becomes law: Trump would have to sign it — or veto it.
sStaff writers Claire Healy, Ben Weider and Shirsho Dasgupta contributed to this story.
©2025 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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