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Coverage of the Epstein-Trump emails revealed a familiar divide

For months, even years, there have been questions about President Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted and now dead sex offender.

On Wednesday, through a series of emails made public, we saw the most concrete evidence yet of the ties between Epstein and Trump.

A 2011 email from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell, his partner who was later convicted of sex trafficking, claimed that Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Epstein’s victims, and that it “has never once been mentioned” by police. Epstein called Trump a “dog that hasn’t barked.”

In a 2019 email to author Michael Wolff, Epstein wrote Trump “knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

The emails were among three released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

The Associated Press’ Michael R. Sisak and Eric Tucker wrote, “The disclosures seemed designed to raise new questions about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and about what knowledge he may have had regarding what prosecutors call a yearslong effort by Epstein to exploit underage girls. The Republican businessman-turned-politician has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said he ended their relationship years ago.”

Trump responded on Truth Social, saying, “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. Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap. The Democrats cost our Country $1.5 Trillion Dollars with their recent antics of viciously closing our Country, while at the same time putting many at risk — and they should pay a fair price. There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

He later wrote another post saying Democrats were trying to distract the country from the government shutdown.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters, “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including (victim Virginia) Giuffre. These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”

Within hours of Democrats releasing the emails, House Republicans released 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate, which they had withheld for months.

In an email to himself in 2019, Epstein wrote, “Trump knew of it. and came to my house many times during that period. He never got a massage.”

The Washington Post’s Isaac Arnsdorf and Matthew Choi wrote, “That account, included in a tranche of documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee, conflicts with Trump’s denial of ever knowing about Epstein’s solicitation of underage prostitution before Epstein’s 2008 plea deal. Trump has said that he knew Epstein socially in Palm Beach, Florida, and that they had a falling-out in the mid-2000s, which Trump has attributed to a real estate deal and Epstein’s hiring employees away from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club.”

So what about the coverage?

On Wednesday afternoon, around 2 p.m. Eastern, the headline on the lead story on The Washington Post’s website was “Newly released Epstein email claims that Trump ‘spent hours’ with victim.”

The New York Times had “Epstein Alleged in Emails That Trump Knew of His Conduct.” The Wall Street Journal had “Democrats Release New Epstein Emails Referring to Trump.” NBC News went with “Jeffrey Epstein wrote Trump 'knew about the girls,' referencing Mar-a-Lago, in newly released emails.”

CBS News had “Epstein said Trump ‘knew about the girls’ in 2019 email, House Democrats say.” ABC News wrote, “House Democrats release new Epstein emails referencing Trump.” CNN and MSNBC led with the Epstein-Trump story.

And Fox News’ website? After having nothing for several hours, the headline on a secondary story was “White House hits Democrats for ‘bad-faith’ Epstein leak as pressure mounts on DOJ.”

Details of the Epstein story also went unmentioned on Fox News’ airwaves.

A little after noon Eastern on Wednesday, Media Matters’ Matt Gertz wrote:

The president’s propaganda network had not addressed the story on its airwaves through noon ET, even as CNN and MSNBC gave it substantial coverage (a Fox correspondent referenced “new developments today from the House Oversight Committee” on Epstein without detailing what those developments entailed). According to a Media Matters review, as of noon ET, CNN and MSNBC had covered the story for 53 and 56 minutes, respectively. By comparison, Fox's coverage amounted to 6 seconds (the above-mentioned vague reference to “new developments”).

Gertz noted that while CNN and MSNBC were heavily covering the Epstein story, Fox News was doing stories on in-fighting among Democrats, Trump’s 50-year mortgage plan, and “Trump admin goes all-in on affordability.”

According to Mediaite’s Tom Durante, the bombshell email exchange between Epstein and Maxwell — the one where Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (Victim) spent hours at my house with him” — was released at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Durante wrote, “Over at Fox News, the first mention of the story didn’t come until 11:07 a.m. ET, when Washington correspondent Mark Meredith reported that ‘we expect more of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy to make its way back up here to Capitol Hill. (Adelita Grijalva is) expected to sign on to a discharge position, which would force in a few weeks a vote whether or not the get the Department of Justice to release all of its files on Jeffrey Epstein. It’s a story that will continue to bubble here on Capitol hill, including some new developments today from the House Oversight Committee.”

As Durante noted, “Meredith never mentioned what the ‘new developments’ were, nor was he pressed to reveal them by ‘The Faulkner Focus' anchor Harris Faulkner.”

Another check of Fox News’ website at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday showed there was one story about the Epstein emails, and you had to scroll down the homepage to get to it. Stories played much more prominently on the site included one about comedian Rob Schneider, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman caught on a hot mic saying something nasty to Gov. Josh Shapiro, the daughter of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones commenting about Super Bowl halftime performer Bad Bunny, Trump pardoning Rudy Giuliani and many more.

In his Axios newsletter, Mike Allen wrote, “Some of the MAGA activists who banged the drum for years about the ‘Epstein files’ have gone quiet, after Democrats released a trove of new Epstein emails that included mentions of President Trump, Axios' Tal Axelrod reports. The right's Epstein fixation started as a conspiratorial quest to find ammunition against Democrats and the "deep state." But some conservatives are now shifting toward a defensive posture, aiming to shield Trump from Democrats and the media.”

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The Wolff connection

Another prominent name that showed up among the Epstein emails released on Wednesday was author Michael Wolff. The New York Times’ Erik Wemple wrote that Wolff “has spent his long career building his profile as an insider with gossip on New York luminaries that sometimes draws scrutiny from his peers.”

The scrutiny intensified Wednesday when the emails revealed he once provided advice to Epstein on how to deal with Trump.

In a December 2015 email, Wolff wrote to Epstein about Trump, “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”

At that time, Trump was running for president for the first time.

In an October 2016 email — sent less than a month before the 2016 election — Wolff wrote that there was an “opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him.”

Wemple wrote, “Mr. Wolff has written several books on Mr. Trump and published his shorter fare in Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine and other outlets. The often eyebrow-raising details in his reporting have long drawn criticism for his reporting tactics.”

Wolff released a video on social media Wednesday night, saying “perhaps we’re getting close to the smoking gun” connecting Epstein and Trump. He did not, however, talk about the apparent ethical misconduct of offering advice to Epstein.

All apologies

The BBC is planning to make a formal apology to President Donald Trump in hopes of getting him to drop his lawsuit against the British public broadcaster, according to Michael Savage, the media editor at The Guardian.

Over the last weekend, two top leaders at BBC News resigned, in part because of the way Trump’s Jan. 6, 2021, speech was edited for a documentary that aired on the BBC a week before the 2024 presidential election. The documentary showed Trump’s speech on the day many of his supporters attacked the Capitol, but the speech was edited to show him saying, “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol … and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”

There was about a 50-minute gap between the first half of that quote and the second half.

On Monday, a day after BBC director-general Tim Davie and BBC News CEO Deborah Turness announced they were stepping down, Trump threatened to sue the BBC for $1 billion unless they retracted the story, apologized and agreed to pay him an unspecified amount of money. The letter from a Trump representative threatening to sue the BBC said the BBC has until Friday to respond.

Savage reported Wednesday that the BBC is prepared to formally apologize. “However,” Savage wrote, “figures at the corporation are also minded to be robust in defending its journalism in the face of allegations from Trump that it made ‘false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements’ about him.”

Savage added, “People familiar with the discussions over how to respond also said the apology meant it could push back at any wider criticisms of its journalism of the US in relation to the coverage of Trump. A US congressional committee found that Trump failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol. Should Trump pursue legal action, the BBC leadership faces an invidious choice over a public battle with the US president or making a payment that will be seen as politically toxic, given it is publicly funded through the licence fee.”

McAfee’s silly comments

A day after Trump appeared on Pat McAfee’s ESPN show, Awful Announcing's Sean Keeley had some thoughts in “As always, Pat McAfee wants it both ways.”

Keeley points out that when sports shows have presidents on their sets, it could be seen as sportswashing.

Keely writes, “Donald Trump presents a unique problem for the sports media world. You could argue that he is the most sports-friendly president we’ve ever had. You could also use that same line of logic to say that he uses that relationship to ‘sportswash’ his image, considering he is deeply unpopular at the moment. While he has the unbreakable support of some, he’s the last person others want to see or hear from when they turn on sports programming. In many ways, Trump epitomizes the reasoning behind the ‘stick to sports’ mantra. He is intensely disliked, polarizing, and divisive. The whole point of ‘stick to sports,’ we’ve been told, is to keep people like that out of our sports programming because that exists to be ‘an escape’ from politics and rhetoric.”

Keeley went on to point out that McAfee isn’t shy about criticizing others at ESPN for what they do and say, adding, “He often positions himself on the high road as the voice of the sports fan and the scourge of the ‘suits.’ One wonders how he would have reacted had Trump appeared on ‘First Take’ with Stephen A. Smith instead. Would he have talked about how much he appreciated seeing it happen, or would he take a shot at Smith for besmirching the sanctity of sports? What if that First Take discussion had been peppered with images that glorified Trump instead of the veterans he was supposedly there to support?”

Keeley made more valid points about McAfee, so take a moment to check them out.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, McAfee responded to those who criticized Trump’s appearance by saying, “In my eyes, he’s the leader of the military, and we were celebrating the hell out of Veterans Day. There are people that are certainly not the most happy that that happened. But what I would like to say, every veteran and military person that I talked to was very grateful and thankful that we spotlighted the heroes of America who walk amongst us, who are willing to sign a line and go for the United States of America as opposed to anything else. So if you’re against what happened yesterday, I would like to say, you hate the troops. And you should go ahead and swallow that and you can take that to where you want to go.”

That last part — the “you hate the troops” part — is astonishingly ridiculous, but not surprising coming from McAfee, who tends to have thin skin whenever even slightly questioned or criticized. And that’s odd considering the business he is in, his background as a football player, and the fact that he has the world by the tail.

What he fails to see is that people who had a problem with him having Trump on have a problem with Trump, not the troops.

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Media tidbits

• The Guardian’s Justin Baragona with “Bari Weiss wants to take down CBS News’ Standards and Practices unit for having ‘too much power’: sources.”
• ProPublica’s Rob Davis with “‘Riots Raging’: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops.”
• Fascinating story from The New York Times’ Ken Bensinger: “Who Pays When A.I. Is Wrong?”
• The New York Times’ Jin Yu Young with “3 Bob Ross Paintings Sell for $600,000 to Support Public Broadcasters.”
• This Saturday, the Poynter Institute will honor legendary journalist Jane Pauley at our Bowtie Ball in Tampa with the 2025 Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. In addition, Poynter will award its Distinguished Service to Journalism Award to individuals who have made significant contributions to the field. This year’s honorees are Dean Baquet and G.B. “Garry” Trudeau. Here’s Poynter’s Amaris Castillo with “Jane Pauley has spent her career mastering the art of reinvention.”
• My Poynter colleague, Kristen Hare, with “Why the New York Times is sticking around the South.”

Hot type

• The New York Times’ Alex Marshall (with visuals by OK McCausland) with “Sarah Jessica Parker’s Year of Judging the Booker Prize.”
• A few days old, but catching up on this excellent story about the 1980s pop hit from The Washington Post’s Geoff Edgers: “‘Take On Me’ has been stuck in our heads for 40 years.”
• Terrific column from Tampa Bay Times sports columnist John Romano: “Curious how Kai Trump got in an LPGA event? Well, that’s the point.”
• Finally today, a rather unique obit from The New York Times’ Victor Mather: “The Penny Dies at 232.”

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