The cynical cherry-picking of the Epstein files

PUBLISHED: November 18, 2025 | www.baltimoresun.com

After the House Oversight Committee received 20,000 pages of files related to Jeffrey Epstein submitted by the Epstein estate, Democrats went on a tour of publicizing a handpicked set of documents from the files. Notably, nearly all of their selections reference one person only: President Donald Trump. One such set includes three email exchanges out of the trove of over 20,000 pages, which were used to cast Trump in a suspicious light.

For example, in one 2011 email from Epstein to his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, he referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and noted that a young woman, an alleged victim of Epstein, had “spent hours at my house with him,” yet “he has never once been mentioned.” In another email from 2019, Epstein outright claimed, “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” House Democrats predictably touted these snippets to show that there was some White House cover-up of the full Epstein files.

Yet, the context behind these emails was notably thin. Even media outlets observed that the full context of the emails in the exchanges is not clear from the portions that were released by the Democrats. And they also provided no additional documents. For example, they left out important details such as who the victim was and what prompted the comments — or how Trump actually behaved at all. But that didn’t stop Democrats and their left-wing cheerleaders from igniting sensational headlines about Trump’s apparently close relationship with Epstein.

Republicans in the Oversight Committee had to react swiftly, and so they did. Within hours of the selective leak, the Republican majority released the entirety of the Epstein estate documents to the public. They didn’t curate or filter the documents; they dumped everything online to allow the full truth to be examined by the public, rather than only the Democratic narrative. In fact, not only did the Republicans warn the public that the Democratic leak was “not grounded in the facts,” but they claimed that the Democrats deliberately ignored exculpatory information.

When one steps back from a Democrat’s narrow presentation of the documents, the actual evidence in the Epstein files does not at all implicate Donald Trump in any crimes or misconduct. First and foremost, in the voluminous records and prior legal cases, Trump is nowhere accused of participating in obscene sexual crimes. And tellingly, the victim that was referenced in the 2011 email, the one who allegedly spent hours with Trump at Epstein’s home, has herself never even accused Trump of any wrongdoing. That young woman was Virginia Giuffre, perhaps Epstein’s most famous accuser, who in the early 2000s was a teenage staffer at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club before being lured into Epstein’s ring. In fact, Giuffre has repeatedly stated that President Trump never did anything improper toward her, and according to her memoir, published posthumously in 2025, when Giuffre met Trump around the year 2000, she stated that “Trump couldn’t have been friendlier” to her. And even in interviews, she praised Trump’s demeanor and their limited interactions.

And of course, let’s not forget that years before Epstein’s 2019 arrest, Donald Trump banned Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. And multiple accounts, including from Epstein’s accusers and Trump himself, confirmed that Trump expelled Epstein from his Palm Beach property in 2007 after Epstein allegedly harassed an underage girl at the club.

In fact, the newly released files even include Trump’s July 2025 statement that Epstein was kicked out because he had “stolen” young female staffers from a Mar-a-Lago spa, including Giuffre, and that was part of his reason for barring Epstein from the club.

In July of this year, in an interview that the Justice Department conducted with Ghislaine Maxwell, she unequivocally stated that she never saw Donald Trump engage in inappropriate behavior. She said, “I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

And let’s not forget a crucial point of the Republican criticism of the Democrats’ cherry-picking of the Epstein files. The Epstein files implicate numerous powerful people across the political spectrum, yet Democrats oddly showed a laser focus on Trump’s name alone.

Yet, Democrats are continuing to publicize cherry-picked portions of the evidence, such as obscene, unverified emails that were sent during Trump’s presidency that make sensational claims about Trump performing fellatio on President Bill Clinton. The emails also show that Epstein had a clear disdain for Trump. He wanted to “take him down.” He said that Trump had “not one decent cell in his body.”

According to Democrats, it must follow, Epstein is a hero.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

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