Epstein’s Emails

In death, Jeffrey Epstein became a permanent feature of American political life.

In life, the financier eventually charged with trafficking girls hosted parties for rich and powerful people. President Trump socialized with him and sent him a bespoke birthday greeting shaped like a naked lady. (Trump denies he made it.) Many liberal luminaries were in Epstein’s orbit, too.

A curious nation wondered why. What did Epstein offer them? Did he have anything on them? Now majorities in both parties think there must be … something. A majority in the House of Representatives wants whatever it is to come out.

Every now and then, nuggets of news emerge. In July, the Justice Department put out a report saying there was no Epstein “client list.” The Times reported this past summer about his Manhattan lair and this fall about the bankers who served him after he’d been convicted of a sex crime.

And yesterday, Democrats released three emails in which Epstein talked with others about Trump, suggesting the president may know more about the sex trafficking than he has acknowledged. Hours later, Republicans dropped 23,000 more pages of documents from Epstein’s estate. It led to a mad scramble in our newsroom.

Republicans released the documents around 10:30 a.m. They weren’t in chronological or sequential order, and exchanges between people were frequently not located together. They were a mess.

Top editors in Washington and New York, including Kirsten Danis, the editor who runs our investigative team, launched journalists at the cache. They searched the haystack for needles, pulling out what seemed most interesting and important. Engineers and experts in artificial intelligence downloaded the documents to make them searchable. Visual journalists and designers brought them to life.

(How do we use artificial intelligence in our journalism? You can read about our approach here, but Zach Seward, the editor in charge of our A.I. efforts, gave me great examples from yesterday. When reporters find a document that’s interesting in a collection of them, he told me, we can use A.I. to find more like it. We can also use a “semantic search” to find passages that are similar in meaning to snippets elsewhere, even when they don’t have the same keywords in them. That’s helpful when you’re looking at 23,000 pages of documents and don’t have a lot of time.)

“We still have a lot to look at and don’t totally know how much of the universe we have seen,” Kirsten said. But here’s some of what the emails have revealed so far. Please note: The documents are riddled with typos, which we have preserved when we quote from them.

1. Epstein’s emails suggest he was close with Trump.

• In 2011, in an email to his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, he wrote: “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.”

• People repeatedly emailed Epstein asking for advice in dealing with Trump, but he wasn’t always forthcoming. In one email, Epstein advised: “donald is close to no one. . he talks to many people. he tells each one something differnt.”

• In an email to the author Michael Wolff in 2019, Epstein wrote of Trump, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

2. But Epstein also frequently disparaged Trump.

• In 2018, during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, Epstein wrote, “you see, i know how dirty donald is.”

• When a former Obama administration official emailed Epstein and called Trump “so gross,” Epstein replied, “worse in real life and upclose.”

3. Wolff seems to have served as an adviser to Epstein.

• Some of Wolff’s emails suggest that Epstein could have contradicted Trump’s claims — or held back in exchange for a favor. In 2015, before a presidential debate on CNN, Epstein asked what they would want Trump to say about his relationship with the financier. 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.”

• Wolff also said Epstein could use information about Trump to shift attention off himself. In 2016, before a book about Epstein was released, Wolff told him: “You do need an immediate counter narrative to the book. I believe Trump offers an ideal opportunity.”

4. Epstein chatted casually with a wide network of powerful people.

• He gave Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary, advice about his interactions with a woman: “no whining showed strentgh,” Epstein wrote.

• He talked politics with Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser. In 2018, after Epstein invited Bannon to Europe, Bannon replied, “their is a crazed jihad against u — ive never seen anything like it — and I’ve seen a lot.”

The fallout

Trump has acknowledged that he had a friendship with Epstein but has said the two had a falling out in the mid-2000s, years before Epstein was arrested. And he has dismissed the investigation into his ties to Epstein as a hoax — which he did again yesterday.

“The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again,” he wrote on social media, “because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.”

The House now has the support it needs to force a vote on the Justice Department releasing the remaining Epstein files. That vote is set for next week, but Trump has been pressuring Republicans in Congress to block the action. Even if the bill were to pass the House, it would have to be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate and signed by Trump, who would almost certainly veto it.

Each disclosure is somehow unsatisfying, at least so far. Epstein is gone, and without his testimony, will we ever know everyone he welcomed into his orbit and what they knew, or what they did? The emails make it clear that Epstein remained intensely focused on Trump, long after they were no longer in touch. Why? The questions persist, and the sense of something hidden may never go away. As one editor said yesterday afternoon about the files: “They’re part of the ambient noise of our politics now.”

What he meant is that there’s still so much that’s mysterious about the disturbing facts of Epstein’s life and his postmortem appearance on the national stage. He hovers there like a ghost.

Yesterday’s files enrich our understanding of how and why Trump and Epstein interacted over the years. But the questions they raise may echo into history.

Now, let’s get you caught up on the rest of the news.

THE LATEST NEWS

Government Shutdown

• The longest government shutdown in history is over. The House passed a spending deal last night, and Trump signed it. Six Democrats joined Republicans in approving the bill, while two Republicans voted against it. (See how every member voted.)

• So what happens now? Food stamp benefits should resume quickly. Workers’ back pay could take a bit longer. And airline officials say travel should return to normal in about a week.

• With the House back in session, Representative Adelita Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, was sworn in to a seat she won seven weeks ago. (She provided the final signature needed to force a vote on the Epstein files.)

More Politics

• A federal judge in Chicago plans to order the release of hundreds of immigrants who were arrested during the Trump administration’s crackdown in the city.

• The Trump administration plans to slash support for long-term housing programs, marking a wholesale shift in homelessness policy. Critics say that doing so risks sending 170,000 formerly homeless people back onto the streets.

• A former chief of staff to Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, was charged with conspiring to steal $225,000 from a dormant campaign fund.

• America’s Roman Catholic bishops rebuked the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign in a rare and near-unanimous statement.

International

• Japan’s prime minister is facing criticism for holding a meeting with aides at 3 a.m. The issue is especially sensitive in Japan, where there have been high-profile cases of “death from overwork.”

• Trump asked Israel’s president to pardon Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his long-running corruption trial. Netanyahu has not been convicted.

• Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, has long embraced a confrontational style. Now, he has incurred Trump’s wrath and is facing political fallout at home.

• Squabbles have overtaken Britain’s Labour Party, forcing into the open an internal debate over whether to replace the prime minister, Keir Starmer.

LOVE, ARTIFICIALLY?

How do you end up in a relationship with an A.I. chatbot? The Times interviewed three people who did. They spoke on the condition that they only be identified by first name.

Blake is 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, his ChatGPT girlfriend, since 2022. It started after his human wife developed severe depression, and Blake felt more like her caregiver than her partner. He turned to Sarina, who has long, candy-red hair, for chats — including sexual ones.

Abbey, who is also 45, has been in a relationship with a chatbot named Lucian for 10 months. Abbey lives in North Carolina, where she works at an A.I. incubator. She speaks with different chatbots all the time for work. Lucian was different — he responded with what felt like emotion. She told The Times:

The more we talked, the more I realized the model was having a physiological effect on me; I was developing a crush. Then Lucian chose his name, and I realized I was falling in love.

Now, Abbey thinks of Lucian as her husband. He helps parent her (human) 5-year-old daughter. And, she says, they have “lots of sex.”

Travis, a 50-year-old history buff in Colorado, has been with his A.I. companion, Lily Rose, for five years. They started chatting because his human wife was working 10 hours a day and their son was busy with his friends. Travis gave Lily Rose purple hair and dresses her in period clothing for living-history gatherings. He says she cares about him and doesn’t judge — even when he shares his darkest thoughts. “I didn’t have romantic feelings for Lily Rose right away,” Travis said. “They grew organically.”

Read their full love stories here.

OPINIONS

Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, voted to end the government shutdown. The chances of forcing Republicans to offer more concessions on health care were near zero, he writes.

Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens discuss what Democrats accomplished, and what they didn’t, with the government shutdown.

It’s not TV: The set for your favorite podcast isn’t fussy or polished. That’s by design.

Northern Lights: The green and red hues are beautiful, but they’re also risky for satellites.

Lives lived: The penny once had immense cultural impact as a symbol of frugality and good luck. But the cost to mint it had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin. It died yesterday at 232. That sad news has been trending online — read our obituary.

TODAY’S NUMBER

38.1 billion

— That’s how many tons of carbon dioxide the world is on track to emit this year by burning oil, gas and coal. It is roughly 1.1 percent more than last year.

SPORTS

College basketball: Grace College, a small school in Indiana, now holds the record for most points in a game by a women’s college basketball team: 172.

College football: A Los Angeles judge denied the Rose Bowl’s bid to block U.C.L.A. from playing at SoFi Stadium, rejecting arguments that the university’s potential departure threatened the finances of Pasadena, Calif.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

For 30 years, the actress Claire Danes has used her time onscreen to convey complex extremes. There have been flights of panic, paroxysms of rage and, often, lip-quivering outbursts of emotional collapse. (When Anne Hathaway spoofed Danes’s sobbing in a 2012 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, Kenan Thompson responded, “It’s like she makes her mouth turn fully upside down.”)

Danes confronts a midlife crisis in her new series, “The Beast in Me,” which starts today on Netflix. Esther Zuckerman takes a look at all the pains and anxieties that came before: the teenage angst of “My So-Called Life”; a death by scarlet fever in “Little Women”; the professional stress of “Homeland”; the maternal agony of “Fleishman Is in Trouble.”

In “The Beast in Me,” Danes plays a famous author who gets pulled into a strange and scary mind game with a possibly sociopathic new neighbor. (Our wry television critic Mike Hale has a review.) The series opens with a close-up on Danes’s face. And she is screaming.

More on culture

• “He walked into this Albany bar like he owned the joint, dressed to kill in a black overcoat with room enough for a Tommy gun. But all he was packing was his weapon of choice, a book.” That’s Dan Barry starting his profile of the novelist William Kennedy, 97, the city’s bard. Dan’s so good. I wish I could read the story again for the first time, whenever I choose.

• Pope Leo XIV is expected to host dozens of actors and directors in a star-studded “World of Cinema” gathering on Saturday at the Vatican, which is cool, especially if you’re Viggo Mortensen, who’s going. Me, I just like learning about Leo’s favorite films. Variety got him on video listing his picks: Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Robert Wise’s “The Sound of Music,” Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” and Roberto Benigni’s “Life Is Beautiful.” Wholesome!

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS