Republicans on the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday released more than 20,000 additional documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate, vowing transparency and accusing Democrats of using selective leaks to attack President Donald J. Trump.
The release came only hours after Democratic members of the committee published several Epstein emails that mentioned Trump by name. Republicans denounced the move as a politically motivated attempt to “slander” the president, while asserting that their own larger release was intended to provide, in their words, “the full truth.”
Early Wednesday morning, Democrats had released three emails from Epstein that included a reference to Trump. In one message sent by Epstein to his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell, he 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.” Democrats redacted the name of the victim mentioned in the email, saying the reference was sensitive.
Republicans immediately criticized the redaction, revealing that the woman referenced was Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers. They noted that Giuffre herself has publicly stated that Trump never engaged in any wrongdoing. “This was an attempt to create a fake narrative,” Republicans charged in a statement accompanying the release, arguing that Democrats had sought to draw Trump into the scandal without evidence.
The White House joined in the criticism of the Democrats’ selective release. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt accused them of leaking information to “the liberal media” to “smear President Trump.” She added, “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything.”
The exchange marked the latest escalation in the long-running political battle over Epstein’s associations with powerful figures from both parties. Republicans argued that the Democrats’ narrow release of emails mentioning Trump, without broader context, was designed to generate headlines rather than uncover facts.
By contrast, the GOP’s broader document dump, containing tens of thousands of pages, was presented as an effort to ensure that “the American people have the full truth.” However, the full contents of the documents have yet to be analyzed, and it remains unclear whether they will change the public’s understanding of Epstein’s extensive network of political, financial, and social connections.
Republicans on the Oversight Committee framed their action as a corrective to what they characterized as partisan manipulation of evidence. “Democrats cherry-picked documents to advance a political narrative,” one committee member said privately. “We’re releasing everything so Americans can see for themselves.”
The back-and-forth reflects how Epstein’s legacy continues to reverberate through Washington nearly six years after his death, as both parties attempt to shape public perception of who in power may have been close to him—and who was not.
For Republicans, Wednesday’s release served as both a defense of Trump and a broader indictment of what they describe as the selective transparency of their Democratic counterparts. Whether the thousands of new documents will substantiate any claims or simply deepen the political divide remains to be seen.
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