Key takeaways

• Democrats released an email in which Jeffrey Epstein said Donald Trump had spent hours with one of his victims at his house.
• However, the victim in question was Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who has said repeatedly that Trump was not involved in Epstein’s abuse of her.
• Understanding the timeline of Trump and Epstein’s relationship — they were close from the 1990s until about 2004, when they fell out over a property dispute — is important to assessing new revelations.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sent the political world into a frenzy by releasing two damning-looking emails Jeffrey Epstein had sent about Donald Trump.

The committee’s Republicans then followed up by releasing thousands more Epstein emails and documents, containing embarrassing revelations about various other public figures. But the GOP and the White House also pushed back, arguing that the revelations about Trump were less than met the eye.

All of this is just an appetizer for the push for public disclosure of the “Epstein files” held by the Justice Department. A months-long effort to get a majority of the House to sign a petition that would force a vote on the matter finally won its 218th signature Wednesday. A House vote on the Epstein files is now expected in December, and if it passes, the matter will advance to the Senate.

President Trump seems highly worried about this possibility. This week, he tried to strong-arm some Republican House members into dropping their signatures from the petition, including by having officials summon Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to the Situation Room.

We don’t know what, if anything, Trump is trying to prevent from getting out through the DOJ’s Epstein files. But as we await their potential release, it’s worth taking a closer look at the newly-released Epstein emails about Trump, to assess what they actually show. Doing this requires some decoding.

“That dog that hasn’t barked is trump”

The email that got the most attention is from Epstein to his companion and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Dated April 2, 2011, it says (typos included):

I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. virignia spent hours at my house with him ,, he has........

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