Newly released emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s personal account have added fresh detail to the late financier’s long-scrutinised links with Donald Trump, including an offer to supply a reporter with what he described as photographs of Trump with “girls in bikinis” in Epstein’s kitchen.
The messages, part of roughly 20,000 pages of material made public by the US House Oversight Committee this week, show Epstein corresponding in December 2015 with Landon Thomas Jr, then a financial journalist at the New York Times. Thomas had first profiled Epstein more than a decade earlier, in a 2002 magazine article that quoted Trump calling Epstein a “terrific guy” who liked “beautiful women… on the younger side”.
According to the newly disclosed exchange, Thomas contacted Epstein in the early stages of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, noting that the old quote had prompted renewed interest in the relationship between the two men. “Now everyone coming to me thinking I have juicy info on you and Trump,” Thomas wrote, adding, “That story will never die.” Over the next two hours Epstein replied in a string of emails urging Thomas to scrutinise Trump’s finances, before shifting tone and dangling the prospect of compromising images.
“would you like photos of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” Epstein wrote, in a message whose spelling and punctuation mirrored his other informal emails. Thomas replied, “Yes!!!” Epstein then specified, “Hawaiian Tropic girl Lauren Petrella,” apparently referring to a model associated with the swimsuit brand.
Thomas has since told the New York Times that he never received such images, and the newspaper has said it is unclear whether they ever existed. The committee’s release does not include any photographs matching Epstein’s description, and there is no independent verification that the pictures were taken or retained. The email nonetheless appears to show Epstein suggesting he could “out” Trump with privately held material depicting the future president at his home alongside young women.
In another email from the same chain, Epstein suggested that reporters should “ask my houseman about donad [sic] 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.” The anecdote, framed as a story for journalists to pursue, portrays Trump as transfixed by women at Epstein’s estate, but again is not corroborated by other evidence in the released files.
The email cache also contains a separate message in which Epstein linked Trump to another woman he had dated. In that note, sent in 2015 and now published by several outlets, Epstein attached an article about Norwegian cosmetics heiress Celina Midelfart and described her as “my 20-year-old girlfriend in 93, that after two years i gave to donald.” Midelfart, who would have been 20 in 1993, has previously been reported to have dated both men. The email does not provide further detail and, like the bikini-photo offer, has not been independently substantiated.
The disclosures form part of a broader document trove drawn from Epstein’s Yahoo email account and other records, released by the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee after Democrats on the panel earlier published three Trump-related emails from Epstein. Those earlier messages included a 2011 note to Ghislaine Maxwell in which Epstein wrote that an unnamed victim “spent hours at my house with him,” referring to Trump, and a separate 2019 exchange with author Michael Wolff in which Epstein discussed how Trump might be questioned about their relationship.
In the 2011 email to Maxwell, Epstein wrote: “i want you to realise that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump…[VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him…he has never once been mentioned.” The victim’s name is redacted in the public version of the documents. According to the White House, which responded after the leak, the person referred to is Virginia Giuffre, who has long alleged she was trafficked by Epstein as a teenager but has repeatedly said Trump was not involved in wrongdoing. In a statement, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Giuffre had described Trump as having “couldn’t have been friendlier” during their limited interactions.
Another email, sent to Wolff in 2019, has Epstein stating, “Of course, he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop,” in apparent reference to Trump. Wolff has previously claimed that Epstein told him he once showed Trump photographs of topless young women, an assertion the novelist reiterated in comments reported alongside the email release. The documents do not include such images.
The White House has sharply rejected the significance of the emails, portraying them as a politically motivated attempt to damage the president amid an ongoing government shutdown and mounting pressure over domestic policy. Leavitt said Democrats had “selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,” calling the episode a “hoax” and a “distraction” from efforts to reopen the government.
Trump himself has responded on his social media platform, describing the revived focus on Epstein as the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” and accusing political opponents of trying to “deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” During a press conference at the White House, he twice declined to answer shouted questions about the emails, with reporters noting that the official livestream feed was cut shortly after the subject was raised.
The President has long acknowledged a past acquaintance with Epstein, a financier who moved in wealthy social circles in New York and Florida before his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges. In the 2002 profile that Thomas wrote for New York magazine, Trump said of Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Trump has more recently sought to distance himself, saying they fell out years before Epstein’s arrest and claiming he banned Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago resort for inappropriate conduct toward female employees.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial, in what authorities ruled a suicide. Maxwell was later convicted of sex trafficking and related offences and is serving a 20-year federal sentence. The new documents, drawn from Epstein’s communications between roughly 2011 and 2019, offer further insight into how he perceived Trump and other powerful figures during that period.
Several emails show Epstein criticising Trump’s behaviour and mental state in blunt terms. In exchanges with Thomas and others, he referred to Trump as “f****** crazy,” suggested the then-president might have “early dementia,” and described him as “evil beyond belief,” according to summaries published by outlets that reviewed the file. In a separate message to former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler in 2018, Epstein warned that treating Trump like a mafia boss ignored “the fact that he has great dangerous power,” comments that came as he predicted fresh scandals following the guilty plea of Trump’s long-time lawyer Michael Cohen.
The bikini-photo email stands out within the cache because it appears to show Epstein contemplating how his private archive, or the suggestion of one, could be used in the political context of Trump’s presidential bid. The exchange took place in December 2015, at a time when Trump’s unexpected rise in the Republican primary was drawing intense scrutiny of his personal history. Epstein’s message does not explicitly frame the photographs as leverage, but by offering them to a reporter who had just referenced public curiosity about the men’s relationship, he appeared to present himself as a potential source of damaging material.
There is no indication in the released documents that Thomas or his editors ever used the offer in a published story, and the Times has said the journalist’s conduct in this and other matters ultimately led to his departure from the paper in 2019 for failing to meet ethical standards. The House committee’s cache contains the text of the emails but not the attachments Epstein alluded to, and the existence of any compromising pictures of Trump at Epstein’s properties remains unproven.
The messages nonetheless add to a growing body of material suggesting Epstein viewed his proximity to Trump as both a liability and a possible asset. In one 2011 email cited by multiple outlets, Epstein told Maxwell that Trump was “the dog that hasn’t barked,” complaining that a victim who “spent hours at my house with him… has never once been mentioned” in press coverage. In later correspondence with Wolff, he discussed how a televised interview might force Trump to address their relationship, with Wolff replying that a denial could give Epstein “valuable PR and political currency” and that he should “let him hang himself.”
Democrats who first released a small sample of the Trump-related emails have argued that the material underscores the need for full transparency about Epstein’s contacts with powerful people and the government’s handling of the case. Republicans, who control the committee, responded by publishing the larger 20,000-page tranche that includes extensive correspondence with other figures in politics, finance and the media, from former Treasury secretary Larry Summers to technology investor Peter Thiel and Britain’s Prince Andrew.
For Trump, the latest disclosures revive a politically sensitive association that has repeatedly resurfaced since his first campaign. While the new emails do not provide photographic evidence of misconduct, they depict a former ally describing him as “dirty” and boasting of intimate knowledge of his behaviour around young women. They also reopen questions about whether the government will eventually release all records related to Epstein, something Trump’s critics say he promised but failed to deliver during his first term.
The White House has so far shown no sign of altering its stance. In statements and social-media posts, officials have insisted that the emails show nothing more than a convicted sex offender seeking attention and that the president is being targeted for partisan reasons. Trump’s aides have pointed again to Giuffre’s past comments clearing him of wrongdoing and to his claim that he barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago decades ago.
With the document dump still being examined by journalists, lawyers and campaign operatives, it is unclear whether further material will emerge that sheds additional light on the extent of Trump’s involvement in Epstein’s world. For now, the newly disclosed emails add another layer to a complex and often contested narrative: a powerful financier who boasted of his access to a future president, hinted at compromising photographs and private stories, and is no longer alive to explain exactly what he did – or did not – have in his files.