White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt heads to the press briefing room at 1 p.m. today. She should have a lot to talk about. Happy Tuesday.

The Letter Drops

by Andrew Egger

It’s a strange thing, psychologically speaking. When the Wall Street Journal reported this summer on Donald Trump’s leering “we have certain things in common” birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, it was painfully obvious that the White House response—it’s a forgery! A hoax! We’re suing everyone involved!—was a series of desperate lies and distractions. There was never any legitimate reason to doubt the letter’s authenticity.

Still, there’s knowing something is true intellectually, and then there’s knowing something is true beyond the shadow of a doubt. Yesterday, congressional Democrats released the full birthday book, compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell decades ago and handed over by Epstein’s estate. And there the letter sat, just as the Journal had described it, nestled grotesquely amid the “we’re so proud of you”s from his parents, the “you’ve made good, Jeff” letters from former Jewish-school teachers, and the ribald reminiscences of teenage exploits from lifelong friends.

“Happy Birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret,” it read, signed by Trump’s own hand.

Incredibly, it turns out that the card wasn’t even the book’s only alarming suggestion of Trump’s knowledge of or participation in Epstein’s sordid affairs. A letter from longtime Mar-a-Lago member Joel Pashcow showed a picture of Epstein standing behind a giant novelty check, supposedly from Trump. “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women!”, the letter reads. “Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [name redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500.” A joke, obviously—but a joke referencing what, exactly? The “fully depreciated” woman, the Journal reports, was then in her 20s.

This is exactly the sort of juice Epstein truthers have been convinced for years was still locked away in Justice Department filing cabinets. It is the whole reason for all these years of RELEASE THE FILES rabble-rousing. The biggest unanswered question about Epstein to date is how distinct he kept the two halves of his life: his elbow-rubbing with elites and his despicable sexual appetites.

Trump’s letter makes it unbelievably obvious that he at the very least knew about Epstein’s perversions, to say nothing of him claiming in the letter to share them. Pashcow’s letter suggests that everyone basically knew about it, and that Trump was himself part of the joke they told themselves about it.¹

The White House’s explanations for all this, even by their standards, have been pathetic—shockingly, hilariously lame. “As I have said all along,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X, “it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it.” Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich posted pictures of Trump’s signature today—which indeed looks a little different than it did in the early 2000s—as a supposed proof: “It’s not his signature. DEFAMATION!”

This despite the fact that Trump has been in public life for decades and has been signing every piece of paper within his reach for that entire span. The Journal compared the Epstein-letter signature with several other letters from Trump signed around that time. I mean, you be the judge:

What the White House is doing here isn’t persuasion or argumentation. It’s pure noise—an attempt to drown out a seemingly unspinnable story and get its people to change the channel to something else. As usual, JD Vance has the more puerile and purest form of the message: “The Democrats don’t care about Epstein. They don’t even care about his victims. That’s why they were silent about it for years. The only thing they care about is concocting another fake scandal like Russiagate to smear President Trump with lies. No one is falling for this BS.”

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of “alternative facts,” of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with shit—it all amounted