David Enrich

What happened next is that the Republicans on the House Oversight Committee released, by our best count, more than 20,000 pages of emails from Jeffrey Epstein's Gmail account.

We're frankly, I would say we're maybe a third or a quarter of the way through going through all these emails.

So I do not know what the totality of it is going to show.

But so far, the main takeaway is that it's really clear that for years after Trump severed his ties with Epstein,

Epstein was still really focused on Trump.

And it seemed like for at least two reasons.

One is that he was trying to hurt Donald Trump.

He was disparaging his businesses.

He was disparaging Trump's character.

But secondly, especially in later years, Epstein appeared to think that he had some potential leverage over Trump at a time when the federal government, which was run by Donald Trump, was criminally investigating Epstein.

And so we see emails where Epstein is calling Trump a dope and demented.

But we also see emails where he is urging his lawyer or his financial advisor to dig into Trump's finances.

Well, I don't think anyone should ever put much stock into what Jeffrey Epstein says or writes.

He is a complete liar with a really clear pattern of manipulating people for his own gain and exaggerating his connections to powerful people.

That said, we have, through our reporting and other news organizations reporting, we've clearly established over and over again that Trump and Epstein were quite close for a period of time.

But to me, the takeaway of these emails is not so much what they reveal about Epstein's relationship with Trump as much as they reveal that Epstein, who is always an opportunist and always looking for an edge over people, was doing that here with Trump.

He could sense, I think, that the walls were closing in on him and that his life, his freedom were on the line.

And he was desperate to find any edge, any advantage he could grab.

And one of those edges was Trump.

It was this long ago relationship, but it's still, in Epstein's eyes, had value to him as he tried to evade the criminal justice system.