In Washington, students returned to school, the papers changed color, and Congress debated whether to investigate why the president’s name was allegedly repeated in documents related to the investigation of a notorious teenage sex offender.
In my opinion: yes, this is a question the U.S. House should attempt to answer. I don’t care if it’s a trending topic on search engines; I don’t care if Democrats would be better off addressing other issues. I simply think it’s in the public interest to know, for example, what the president was talking about when he wrote a birthday letter to the notorious sex offender, in which he mentioned, according to the Wall Street Journal, that they had “something in common.” (Donald Trump called the letter “false” and is suing the newspaper.)
What did President Trump mean when he told reporters this summer that the late Jeffrey Epstein had “poached” 16-year-old spa worker Virginia Giuffre from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida to hire her as a masseuse? (Giuffre would later become one of Epstein’s most high-profile public accusers, claiming he continued to harass her and pressure her to have sex with his acquaintances for years.)
If Trump’s friendship with Epstein ended because of this and other incidents in which the financier harassed young female Mar-a-Lago employees, as the president now claims, why did Epstein remain a member of the club even after his 2006 indictment for soliciting prostitution? (In 2019, Epstein was indicted as part of a broader federal indictment.) Why does the so-called “raw video” released by the Justice Department, which purported to prove that Epstein committed suicide in his jail cell, actually appear to have been edited? What do Epstein’s financial transaction records reveal?
The president’s defense of these issues makes us wonder whether there is anything incriminating about him in the so-called federal “files” of documents related to the case, especially given his alleged history of groping underage girls while they were changing in a dressing room, the grand jury’s finding that he sexually assaulted a woman in a New York City department store in 1996.
accusations by at least a dozen other women that he groped or otherwise sexually coerced them, and his crude remark during a 2005 Access Hollywood taping about how he liked to touch women without their consent. (Trump has denied any sexual assault.) As the American Prospect explains in the attached article, members of the House of Representatives currently have the choice between approving 1) an “exemption petition” authored by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep.
Ro Khanna, which would require the House to vote on releasing the Justice Department’s Epstein files, including the names of all unredacted government officials; or 2) a resolution supporting the more limited efforts of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee to obtain the Epstein documents. On Tuesday, that committee purported to release a trove of documents that, according to the Washington Post, “appear to contain mostly previously publicly available information.”
Polls show that voters are putting popular pressure on Republican lawmakers to conduct a more transparent investigation into this matter. But it is also important, in principle, to investigate why the president would have blocked the planned release of documents relating to Epstein immediately after learning that his name appeared in them.
In a democratic society, the people have a right to know whether the president committed crimes; in a society governed by the rule of law, the president should not be allowed to withhold information about this matter. The rich and powerful should not be allowed to conceal their connections to the systematic harassment of numerous foreign women and broken families simply because they are rich and powerful.