Michael Gold

So if you ask them, they'll tell you that they got these particular documents a few days ago.

It took them time to go through and redact information and decide that these needed to come out today.

That's the stated reason.

But I think there's also political dynamics at play, as there often are here on Capitol Hill.

Today is the day that the House is voting to end the government shutdown.

And House Democrats are really unhappy with the deal that the Senate made.

They think it makes them look weak, that they didn't get what they wanted.

And the release of these e-mails

intentionally or not, has changed and shifted the conversation on Capitol Hill so that the Epstein saga has become the focus again.

But it's very clear that Republicans, President Trump and the White House all want to be talking about the fact that Republicans ended the shutdown without Democrats having to make major concessions.

And instead, a significant amount of their time today has been spent talking about Jeffrey Epstein and his relationship with President Trump.

So earlier this morning, House Republicans and the White House argued the Democrats were cherry picking documents and selectively choosing documents from this trove in order to present a specific narrative.

And so they released 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate to make the point that there's way more in the files than just these three emails.

Throughout their investigation, House Republicans have been making the case that their Epstein investigation is not just about Trump, but about a host of political elites and powerful figures, including President Clinton, who they've repeatedly focused on.

That's right.

And I think it was always going to be hard to change the focus away from Epstein's relationship with the president.

Because if you remember how we got here in the first place, is that the Justice Department, after promising to release these files and insisting that they would release these files, decided not to.

And so there were always questions about Trump's relationship with Epstein.

and what might have been in the files.

But there was a sense in which today was always going to be about Epstein in some way anyway.