00:00Newly released emails written by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein are sending shockwaves through Washington this morning,
00:09including mentions of President Trump and a bitter political fight over whether the public should see all the Epstein files.
00:16More than 20,000 emails sent by Epstein between 2011 and 2019 were made public by House lawmakers on Wednesday.
00:24In one 2011 message to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein claimed that then-businessman Donald Trump, quote,
00:30spent hours at my house with a young woman who would later accuse Epstein of sex trafficking, calling Trump that dog that hasn't barked.
00:39In another email, Epstein wrote to author Michael Wolff that Trump, of course, knew about the girls and asked Maxwell to stop.
00:47And in a separate 2015 exchange, Wolff warned Epstein that if Trump denied ever visiting him, quote,
00:54I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the House, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency, end quote.
01:04Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released those emails first, saying they raised new questions about what Trump knew and when.
01:11Republicans responded hours later with a 20,000-page dump of Epstein documents from the estate, accusing Democrats of, quote,
01:20cherry-picking to embarrass the president. Here's how the White House hit back on Wednesday.
01:25These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.
01:31And what President Trump has always said is that he was from Palm Beach and so was Jeffrey Epstein.
01:36Jeffrey Epstein was a member at Mar-a-Lago until President Trump kicked him out because Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile and he was a creep.
01:44And this email you refer to with the name of a victim that was unredacted now and has since been reported on in this room,
01:52so I will go ahead and say it, Virginia Guffrey.
01:55And it was CBS's own reporting Ouija that recently wrote that Ms. Guffrey maintained, and God rest her soul,
02:01that she maintained that there was nothing inappropriate she ever witnessed, that President Trump was always extremely professional and friendly to her.
02:09The White House is calling the emails a hoax, arguing Trump hadn't had contact with Epstein in decades,
02:15and Democrats are trying to change the subject away from the government shutdown.
02:20Republicans note the woman Epstein referred to in that 2011 email, as you just heard there from Caroline Leavitt,
02:26is Virginia Guffrey, one of Epstein's best-known survivors, who died by suicide in April and who never accused Trump of wrongdoing.
02:35The emails span from 2011, as Epstein rebuilt his social circle, to 2019, months before he died in federal custody.
02:43They include correspondence with Wolf, who later wrote a book about Donald Trump.
02:47Those documents surfaced on the same day the House returned from a seven-week shutdown recess,
02:54and its newest member, Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva, was swept into the center of the Epstein fight.
03:00Moments after being sworn in, Grijalva signed the discharge petition to force a vote
03:05on releasing all government files related to Jeffrey Epstein, giving the effort its crucial 218th signature.
03:12With my signing, we move one step closer to the truth, the truth that they will try to deny,
03:19but that survivors deserve their day of justice, and the American people demand it.
03:26Her signature means the House must now hold a vote on a bipartisan bill sponsored by Republican Thomas Massey
03:32and Democrat Ro Khanna, requiring the Justice Department to release all Epstein files
03:38with the victims' names redacted. All 214 Democrats and four Republicans have signed on.
03:44House Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed late Wednesday he will bring the bill to the floor next week,
03:49earlier than expected. The vote will force members of both parties to go on the record
03:54about making the full Epstein files public, an issue that has drawn support from Trump allies
03:59and Democrats alike. As for Grijalva, her swearing in ended a seven-week delay that Democrats say
04:05was designed to keep her from signing that petition.
04:08It has been 50 days since the people of Arizona's 7th Congressional District elected me to represent them.
04:17This is an abuse of power. One individual should not be able to unilaterally obstruct the swearing-in
04:27of a duly elected member of Congress for political reasons.
04:30Johnson insists the delay was procedural, not political, as well as delayed by the shutdown.
04:37The Speaker says he followed House custom and that Grijalva didn't miss a vote.
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