Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein referred to Donald Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked” and told his former partner Ghislaine Maxwell that an alleged victim had “spent hours at my house” with Trump, according to email correspondence released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote in a typo-riddled message to Maxwell in April 2011. “[Victim] “I spent hours at my house with him… he’s never been mentioned.”
“I’ve been thinking about that…” Maxwell replied.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend Grisogono Sponsors The 2005 Wall Street Concert Series Benefiting Wall Street Rising, Featuring a Performance by Rod Stewart at Cipriani Wall Street on March 15, 2005 in New York City.
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That email exchange, which came just weeks after a British newspaper published a series of stories about Epstein, Maxwell and their powerful associates, was one of three released by Democrats from a batch of more than 23,000 documents the committee recently received from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena.
The names of the alleged victims and other personally identifying information were redacted from the messages.
The other newly released email exchanges are between Epstein and author Michael Wolff, who has written four books chronicling Trump’s presidency. Wolff has said he spoke at length with Epstein about Trump during his reporting for the books.
“I hear CNN plans to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you, either on air or in a subsequent scrum,” Wolff wrote to Epstein in December 2015, six months after Trump officially entered the race for the White House.
Michael Wolff attends Michael Wolff with Alec Baldwin on Donald Trump: All or Nothing on 92NY on March 14, 2025 in New York City.
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“If we had to craft a response for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein responded.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff responded the next day. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or the house, then that gives you a valuable political and PR advantage. You can hang him in a way that potentially creates a positive benefit for you, or, if he really looks like he could win, you can bail him out, generating a debt. Of course, it’s possible that, when asked, he’ll say that Jeffrey is a great guy and that he’s been treated unfairly and that he’s a victim of political correctness, which is prohibited in a Trump regime.”
The third message, exchanged between Epstein and Wolff while Trump was in his first presidential term in January 2019, appears to touch on whether Trump had banned Epstein from being a member of Mar-a-Lago years earlier.
“Trump said he asked me to resign, he was never a member,” Epstein wrote, “Of course he knew about the girls when he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
The full context of these email exchanges is unclear from the portions released by the Democratic committee. ABC News has contacted Wolff for comment.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In July, Trump published a lengthy social media post that partly blamed Democrats for creating a controversy over Epstein-related files, which he called a “scam” and “hoax.”
“His new SCAM is what we will always call the Jeffrey Epstein hoax, and my PREVIOUS supporters have swallowed this ‘d***’, hook, line and sinker,” he wrote at the time.
US House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) delivers a speech to reporters on November 10, 2025 at the Capitol in Washington, DC. The Senate reached a deal Sunday night to fund the government, aiming to end the longest shutdown in history.
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The release of the emails comes the same day that House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, will swear in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who won a special election last month.
Once sworn in, Grijalva is expected to provide the final signature on a discharge petition to force a vote on a House bill that would force the Justice Department to release all government investigative files on Epstein.
The earliest that vote could happen is the first week of December, after the Thanksgiving break.
“The Department of Justice must release Epstein’s files immediately,” said Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., the ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, which is conducting an investigation into the federal government’s handling of the Epstein investigations.
“The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we discover. These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” Garcia said.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., during a House Select Subcommittee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic in Washington, DC, U.S., Monday, June 3, 2024.
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The Trump administration has been dogged by controversy over Epstein’s files since the Justice Department, in an unsigned statement earlier this year, announced that the department would not make its files public, despite previous promises of transparency from members of the Trump administration.
The statement said the government had found no evidence of a “client list” or credible evidence that “Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”
The Oversight Committee issued a bipartisan subpoena to the Justice Department in August for all records related to Epstein and Maxwell.
So far, the Justice Department has produced only a small fraction of the documents and other evidence gathered by federal investigators over the course of multiple investigations into Epstein’s alleged international sex trafficking operation.
It is unclear whether emails the estate provided to the committee are also in the possession of the Justice Department.
After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, President Trump said he had not spoken to him in 15 years. Earlier this year, Trump claimed that he ended his association with Epstein in the early 2000s after discovering that Epstein and Maxwell were allegedly poaching Mar-a-Lago employees.
Epstein committed suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking girls and women.
Maxwell, who has consistently denied wrongdoing, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in Texas for child sex trafficking and other Epstein-related crimes.
