President Donald Trump on Wednesday seemed furious over the release of a trove of new documents obtained from the estate of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The emails cast doubt on Trump’s account of his long-documented friendship with Epstein, creating a new headache for his administration and prompting the president to fire off an angry message to members of both parties.
“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.”
The issue, though, is unlikely to go away as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) announced the lower chamber could vote on a bill related to releasing the full Epstein files as early as next week after a “discharge petition” to force the vote got the last signature required from newly sworn-in Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) despite a campaign by the president and his allies to block it.
Meanwhile, Trump signed a bill to fund the government through much of January, after the legislation cleared the House of Representatives, marking an end to the longest shutdown in U.S. history, and paving the way for federal workers to get paid and millions of Americans to receive full food aid benefits.
