Good morning. Donald Trump’s shutdown victory barely lasted a day before a fresh batch of Jeffery Epstein e-mails dropped – more on that below, along with the spike in beef prices and Pierre Poilievre’s leadership style. But first:

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• Canada imposes sanctions on the Russians behind the drone and cyber attacks on Ukraine
• When Tigray became a ‘wild west’ of illegal gold mining, Canadian firms staked a claim

Yesterday was meant to be triumphant for the Republican Party. The House of Representatives voted to finally reopen the federal government, ending the longest shutdown in U.S. history after eight Senate Democrats broke ranks to agree on a deal. It should’ve been a vindication of U.S. President Donald Trump’s strong-arm tactics. Instead, the entire narrative flipped to Jeffrey Epstein.

Several e-mails from the sex offender, released yesterday morning by House Democrats, suggest that Trump knew about Epstein’s abuse. In 2011, he wrote that Trump and one of Epstein’s victims “spent hours at my house” together. In 2019, six months before dying by suicide in jail, Epstein contended that Trump “knew about the girls.” Both e-mails were sent to his confidant and co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex trafficking of minors.

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee quickly dumped 23,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate, obtained through a subpoena issued this summer. They identified the unnamed victim as the late Virginia Giuffre, who was recruited by Maxwell from Mar-a-Lago, where she worked as a teenager. Giuffre repeatedly said she didn’t believe Trump took part in Epstein’s crimes.

At her afternoon White House briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed any uproar over the documents. “These e-mails prove absolutely nothing, other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong,” she said. The President was inclined to agree. “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,” Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.”

The MAGA walkback

The challenge is that, for years, Trump and his allies fanned the flames of Epstein conspiracy theories. Before they joined the U.S. government, FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, former podcaster Dan Bongino, spoke darkly of cover-ups and a client list filled with the names of Democratic elites. Trump promised on the campaign trail to release the Epstein files once he returned to the Oval Office. Attorney-General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February that the client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Then everyone abruptly changed their tune. Bondi’s Justice Department said the client list never existed. Patel and Bongino said they no longer doubted Epstein killed himself. Trump said his MAGA base should drop the matter altogether. “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” he posted in July, lamenting their continued interest. He told his “PAST supporters” their obsession with the files risked undermining his “PERFECT Administration” – “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”

The vote approaches

With the House back in session yesterday afternoon, Speaker Mike Johnson swore in Representative Adelita Grijalva, ending a seven-week standoff that had kept the Arizona Democrat from taking her seat. (Johnson said he couldn’t seat her while the House was in recess, though he managed it for two Florida Republicans who won special elections earlier this year.) Grijalva brought two of Epstein’s victims with her for the occasion. She immediately added her signature – the final one needed – to a petition to force a vote on the full release of the Justice Department’s Epstein files.

That vote probably won’t take place before December – the petition needs to “ripen,” in congressional parlance, for seven legislative days, and the House is about to break for American Thanksgiving. It’s also just the first step: The measure to release the files would then have to pass the Senate (iffy) before being signed into law by the President (improbable). But Republicans will be forced to go on the record about this very sordid business. And for all his Truth Social tirades, Trump won’t get a break from the Epstein fixation any time soon.

The price of beef is at a record high, Canada’s supply of cows is at a record low, and U.S. President Donald Trump is accusing meat packers of collusion. Read more here about the family businesses caught in the cattle crosshairs.

At home: Despite the recent lo