WATCH LIVE: White House holds briefing as newly released Epstein emails point to Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wrote in a 2011 email that Donald Trump “spent hours” at Epstein’s home with a sex trafficking victim, and said in a separate letter years later that Trump “knew about the girls,” according to correspondence released Wednesday.

White House Press Secretary Carolyn Leavitt is scheduled to hold a press conference at 1 p.m. ET. Watch in the player above.

The emails released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee add to questions about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and about any knowledge he may have of what prosecutors have described as Epstein’s years-long efforts to exploit underage girls. The Republican president has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes and said he ended their relationship years ago.

The letters are part of a trove of 23,000 documents that Epstein’s estate submitted to the oversight committee. The release resurfaces a story that cast a pall over Trump’s presidency over the summer when the FBI and Justice Department suddenly announced they would not release additional documents investigators had spent weeks examining, disappointing conspiracy theorists and online sleuths who expected to see new discoveries.

In an April 2, 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s girlfriend now imprisoned for conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking, Epstein wrote: “I want you to realize that that dog that didn’t bark is Trump. (Name redacted) spent hours at my house with him, and was not mentioned once. Chief of Police. Etc. I’m 75% there.”
Maxwell replied the same day: “I’ve been thinking about that.”

The name of the person who was said to have spent time with Trump was redacted from the email, but House Democrats identified the person as a “victim.”

In a separate 2019 email to journalist Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump, Epstein wrote of Trump: “Of course he knew about the girls when he told Ghislaine to stop.”

White House spokeswoman Carolyn Leavitt accused Democrats of “selectively leaking emails” in order to “create a false narrative to discredit President Trump.”

She said in a statement that the unnamed person referred to in the emails is Virginia Giuffre, who accused Britain’s Prince Andrew and other influential men of sexually exploiting her when she was a teenager, and who died by suicide in April. Andrew rejected Giuffre’s claims and said he did not remember meeting her.

Giuffre “has repeatedly said that President Trump was never involved in any wrongdoing and ‘could not have been friendlier to her’ in their limited interactions,” Leavitt said in a statement.

“The fact remains that President Trump fired Jeffrey Epstein from his club decades ago because he was intimidating his female employees, including Giuffre,” the statement read. He added: “These stories are nothing more than bad faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense correctly sees this as a hoax and a clear distraction from opening up government again.”

Giuffre came forward publicly after the initial investigation ended with an 18-month prison sentence for Epstein in Florida, who struck a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by instead pleading guilty to relatively minor state charges of solicitation of prostitution. He was released in 2009.

In subsequent lawsuits, Giuffre said she was a teenage spa hostess at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., club when Maxwell approached her in 2000.

Epstein committed suicide in a New York prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges.

Lawyers for Maxwell, a British socialite, have argued that she should never have been tried or convicted for her role in luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She is serving a 20-year sentence, although she was transferred from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a low-security prison camp in Texas after Deputy District Attorney Todd Blanche interviewed her in July.