Republican House Speaker
Mike Johnson stated in a CNN interview last week that the House Oversight Committee’s probe into the Epstein files made requests for the records’ release
a “moot point.” Wolff and Johnson’s remarks were made a few days and
hours before minority Democrats on the Oversight Committee published the emails
that included Wolff, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Epstein.
This week, the biographer
made an appearance on the Daily Beast podcast in an episode titled “Epstein
Files are About to Spill Into Open,” which aired around twelve hours
before the emails.
In one of the emails
Epstein sent Wolff, dated January 2019, the late sex offender apparently wrote:
“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever…of course he knew
about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
Later, in an email dated
December 15, 2015, Wolff seemed to counsel Epstein on how to deal with Trump as
he prepared for the 2016 presidential election.
“What will happen,
theoretically, is that the House will vote to subpoena the Epstein files…”
he explained.
“So they are going to
subpoena something, but they don’t know what they are subpoenaing and then it
will be they’ll have to figure out exactly what that is.”
He continued that the
documents related to the Epstein case are dispersed across U.S. government departments.
“It will be sort of up to Congress to kind of…define what they’re looking
for,”
he said.
Johnson stated that calls
for the release of the remaining papers were “a moot point” because
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee had already revealed a
“treasure trove” of records during an appearance on CNN’s The Lead
with Jake Tapper on Monday.
Epstein replied:
“If we
were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”
“I think you should let him
hang himself,”
Wolff replied to Epstein, according to the email.
“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,”
Wolff apparently continued.
“Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great
guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which
is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
The dispute has been
rekindled by the most recent document release.
Wolff informed the
disgraced financier via email on December 15, 2015, the night of a Republican
presidential primary debate, that CNN was “planning to ask Trump tonight
about his relationship with you – either on air or in scrum afterwards.”
Other emails discovered in
the most recent release included one from April 2011 in which Epstein told
Maxwell that Trump had “spent hours” with a redacted victim.
The late Virginia Guiffre
was the victim, according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who
also accused the Democrats of running a “smear” campaign.
Leavitt went on to say that
Democrats utilized the “selectively leaked emails” to “create a
fake narrative.”
How are House Democrats framing Wolff Epstein emails?
House Egalitarians are framing the Wolff- Epstein emails as
raising serious questions about former President Donald Trump’s knowledge of
and relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, including allegations that Trump”
knew about the girls” involved in Epstein’s coitus trafficking
operation.
Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House
Oversight Committee, stated that the emails” raise striking questions
about what differently the White House is hiding and the nature of the
relationship between Epstein and the President.”
At the same time, Egalitarians stress the significance of
continuing examinations into how Epstein’s networks operated and who may have
been complicit or apprehensive. The framing suggests a narrative of ongoing
concealment by Trump’s abettors varied with Egalitarians’ efforts to reveal the
full variety.
