The Epstein Scandal Is Snowballing

Politics

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November 13, 2025

And Republicans are running scared.

Representative Adelita Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, was sworn in by House Speaker Mike Johnson seven weeks after her election.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

After waiting 50 days to be sworn in as an Arizona Congress member, Representative Adelita Grijalva wasted no time playing nice with GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson. Asked by a reporter why there was such a long wait after her special election (to fill her late father Raul Grijalva’s seat), she smiled demurely, said, “It’s not my question”—and pointed to Johnson. “Look, I really like this lady,” Johnson cooed. Grijalva did not return the compliment. In brief remarks to her colleagues, she blasted the seven-week delay as an “abuse of power” by Johnson. “One individual should not be able to unilaterally obstruct the swearing-in of a duly elected member of Congress for political reasons.”

And when she stepped down from the podium, she made more trouble for the speaker by immediately becoming the last needed signatory to a discharge petition on a bill to release the Justice Department’s Epstein files. Now the bill could come before the House as early as next week. After a day rocked by the release of tens of thousands of Epstein e-mails, more than a few about Trump, even Republicans predicted it would pass the House, likely with plenty of GOP support. To be clear, the e-mails released Wednesday were acquired from Epstein’s estate after a GOP House Oversight subpoena, designed to block the release of the actual “files”—the voluminous records of the Justice Department’s investigation into Epstein that resulted in his indictment on sex trafficking charges.

What changed? After a summer of increasingly bad Epstein news, Johnson essentially shut down the House and refused to swear in Grijalva to keep the bill from passing. Now come the latest revelations. And Dems only released a handful of the e-mails they have, albeit some of the most incriminating. Committee Republicans replied by releasing tens of thousands later in the day. Nobody knows whether they did that thinking they would exonerate Trump, or whether they were too stupid to know how incriminating they were. They only contributed to the toxic fumes of scandal around Trump and his allies. (Epstein, you’ll recall, reportedly died by suicide while in jail on federal charges.)

You can find the whole bunch here.

The one “bombshell” in the e-mails came in the initial release by Democrats, including Epstein musing to collaborator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislane Maxwell, amid a new storm of controversy over his exploitation of underage girls, that “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump. [Redacted victim name] spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned.”

Trump is more accurately called “the shoe that hadn’t dropped”; “the dog that hasn’t barked” is a clumsier, less apt metaphor. Epstein was renowned for his intellect, financial savvy, and patronage of science and higher education; these e-mails, riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors, show him to be a pretty dim bulb. (All Epstein correspondence quoted here is verbatim.)

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The e-mails not only reveal Epstein’s long friendship with Trump, but that he continued to be obsessed with him long after their breakup that by most accounts came over a Palm Beach real estate deal (though Trump claims it was because Epstein “stole” young female employees from Mar-a-Lago). Obsessed by Trump, and not in a good way. He tells one correspondent, “you see, i know how dirty Donald is.” He told another, who called Trump “so gross,” that the president is “worse in real life and upclose.” In another thread, he told an unnamed correspondent: “I am the one able to take him down.”

In 2017, he e-mailed frequent correspondent Larry Summers, former Democratic treasury secretary and Harvard president, “Recall ive told you,, — i have met some very bad people ,, none as bad as trump. not one decent cell in his body.. so yes- dangerous.” (Summers asked for advice from Epstein about potentially cheating on his wife, for whom he sought a $1 million charitable donation, and commiserated on the scourge of cancel culture hitting creepy men. Like them.)

“Journalist” Michael Wolff, who was supposed to be writing a book about Epstein, turned out to be an unofficial adviser. He coached the sex offender on how to handle what he knew about Trump, just before his first election. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote. “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.”

After the release of the infamous Access Hollywood tape, Wolff e-mailed Epstein that he had an “opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him.” Later, Epstein e-mailed Wolff: “of course he knew about the girls.”

Wolff also helped the convicted sex offender to think about whether and how to respond to Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown’s exposé of the extensive investigation into his predation on underage girls locally, which was overtaken by US Attorney Alex Acosta and watered down into a single charge of soliciting a prostitute. In fact, Wolff and mega-MAGA guru Steve Bannon came together on a thread lamenting that Brown won the Sidney Hillman award—extremely prestigious among liberals but not widely known. “Look at the judges on this thing—the right-thinking establishment to a tee—or a Ta-nihisi [sic],” Wolff wrote, misspelling the name of renowned writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. “Fix always in,” Bannon replied. (Congrats, Hillman Foundation!)

But Wolff is not the only journalist who comes off badly. Former New York Times financial writer Landon Thomas Jr. was a frequent, friendly correspondent with Epstein, warning him when reporters were asking questions about him and bantering about his relationship with Trump. In 2015, Epstein asked if he’d like “photos of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas quickly wrote back “yes,” but the Times never wrote about it. Later Epstein wrote him: “Have them ask my houseman about Donald [Trump] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” He also told him that he “gave” Trump his 20-year-old girlfriend in 1993.

Thomas was quietly let go by the Times in 2019 when news broke of Epstein’s contribution to his favorite charity, but no one from the paper followed up on any of Thomas’s information (to be fair, he likely didn’t share it). Still, it’s hard not to remember that in 2015, the paper’s political reporters were busy publicizing its partnership with Bannon-funded right-wing author Peter Schweitzer on his mostly debunked “expose” of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s alleged financial misdeeds, “Clinton Cash.” The paper’s foul “but her e-mails” coverage of the Democratic candidate, through the final days of the 2016 election, should go down in history as rivaling scandals like its correspondent shilling for Josef Stalin in the 1930s, its scurrilous Whitewater coverage in the ’90s, and its touting of nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction” in the runup to the Iraq war in the early 2000s.

While Trump defenders insist that the new e-mails don’t “prove” Trump wrongdoing—besides multiple examples of Epstein claiming he was “dirty” and “knew about the girls”—they definitively prove the corrupt, chummy, sex-and-money chasing culture of elite American men. To see journalists and financiers and academics at best gossiping with Epstein and at worst providing him care and counsel is to see how the #MeToo movement never went far enough.

As MSNBC anchor and author Chris Hayes wrote on Bluesky: “Something absolutely perfect about Larry Summers riffing about the scourge of woke cancel culture being unfair to predatory men in a friendly e-mail to his pal JEFFREY EPSTEIN.”

Trump was still trying to block the release of the Epstein files even as four Republicans joined Democrats in backing the discharge petition to get a vote to the floor. Earlier, he’d tried (and failed) to get Colorado GOP Representative Lauren Boebert to remove her name at a meeting in the Situation Room, most famous for being the site where President Obama and his cabinet sat and watched the raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2011.“Only a bad, or very stupid Republican would fall for that trap,” he wrote on Truth Social Wednesday.

Next week, when the House votes, we’ll find out how many “bad, or very stupid” Republicans serve there. Predictions are that it will pass, despite Johnson’s opposition. Should the bill pass the Senate, which is not assured, it would put Trump in the position of having to veto it to block the files’ release. Given that he campaigned promising to unlock the vault on all things Epstein, it will be fun to watch MAGA react. Trump has seemed like Teflon until now, but this scandal is sticking.

Joan Walsh

Joan Walsh, a national affairs correspondent for The Nation, is a coproducer of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show and the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America. Her new book (with Nick Hanauer and Donald Cohen) is Corporate Bullsh*t: Exposing the Lies and Half-Truths That Protect Profit, Power and Wealth In America.