The Epstein files are back in the news with fresh speculation about how deep President Donald Trump's involvement goes.

Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, November 17, 2025.

A new trove of 20,000 pages released last week has everyone talking about how much Trump knew and when did he know it.

Cue the coming House vote on releasing the full batch of documents that's been supposedly sitting on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi's desk since she

took office. What is this latest batch of Epstein documents revealed? And what are the chances

that we'll see even more before the year is out? For more on that, I'm now joined by USA Today

White House correspondent, Bart Jansen. Bart, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me.

Last Wednesday, we saw a new batch of Epstein documents, including both emails and texts, released by the House Oversight Committee. Let's start with Trump. What do we learn here?

Democrats highlighted several emails in particular where he's mentioned repeatedly.

One of those emails from April of

2011 says that he spent hours in Epstein's house with one of Epstein's victims. Another email

in January of 2019 said that Trump knew about the girls, Epstein told an author that he was exchanging emails with.

And so in both of those cases, Democrats wanted to highlight that Trump apparently was well-known to Epstein, and so was part of his circle.

But Trump has denied knowing about any of Epstein's wrongdoing.

The White House says these emails prove nothing and that, in fact, the victim mentioned in that

email has said that Trump did not have sex with the girls that Epstein is accused of abusing.

We also learned that Epstein appeared eager to help one of America's biggest enemies, the Russians.

What was the thrust of that email?

We saw in an email from June of 2018, about a month before Trump had a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, that Epstein

was offering basically to a European middleman to invite Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign

minister, to learn more about Trump.

Epstein was saying, hey, I can tell you about Trump what you need to know as you go into this summit. We don't know whether from these emails, whether Epstein actually got through to Lavrov or what information he provided.

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