WATCH: White House holds briefing as newly released Epstein emails reference Trump

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jeffrey Epstein wrote in a 2019 email to a journalist that Donald Trump “knew about the girls,” according to documents made public Wednesday, but what he knew — and whether it pertained to the sex offender’s crimes — is unclear. The White House quickly accused Democrats of selectively leaking the emails to smear the president.

Watch White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s news briefing in the video player above.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three emails referencing Trump, including one Epstein wrote in 2011 in which he told confidant Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump had “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with a sex trafficking victim.

READ MORE: Read Jeffrey Epstein’s newly released emails about Trump

The disclosures seemed designed to raise new questions about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and about what knowledge he may have had regarding what prosecutors call a yearslong effort by Epstein to exploit underage girls. The Republican businessman-turned-politician has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said he ended their relationship years ago.

The version of the 2011 email released by the Democrats redacted the name of the victim, but Republicans on the committee later said it was Virginia Giuffre, who accused Epstein of arranging for her to have sexual encounters with a number of his rich and powerful friends. Epstein took his own life in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges.

The emails made public Wednesday are part of a batch of 23,000 documents provided by Epstein’s estate to the Oversight Committee.

Giuffre said Trump ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’

Giuffre, who died earlier this year, had long insisted that Trump was not among the men who had victimized her.

In a court deposition, she said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s misconduct with underage girls. And in her recently released memoir, she described meeting Trump only once, when she worked as a spa attendant at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida, and did not accuse him of wrongdoing.

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Giuffre wrote that she was introduced to Trump by her father, who also worked at the club. She described Trump as friendly and said he offered to help her get babysitting jobs with parents at the club.

Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier,” Giuffre wrote.

Other members of Epstein’s household staff also said in sworn depositions that, while Trump did stop by Epstein’s house, they didn’t see him engage in any inappropriate conduct.

Republicans says emails released to tarnish Trump

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said Democrats “selectively leaked emails” to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.”

Trump, writing on his Truth Social platform, said 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 government shutdown “and so many other subjects.”

“There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!” Trump wrote.

In July, Trump said he had banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because his one-time friend was “taking people who worked for me,” including Giuffre. The women, he said, were “taken out of the spa, hired by him — in other words, gone.”

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“I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people,’” Trump told reporters. Asked if Giuffre was one of the employees poached by Epstein, the president demurred but then said Epstein “stole her.”

Shortly after Democrats released the Trump-related emails, committee Republicans countered by disclosing what they said was an additional 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate. Among them: copies of pages from a James Patterson book about the ex-financier.

Emails revive questions about Trump’s relationship with Epstein

The release resurfaces a storyline that had shadowed Trump’s presidency during the summer when the FBI and the Justice Department abruptly announced that they would not be releasing additional documents that investigators had spent weeks examining, disappointing conspiracy theorists and online sleuths who had expected to see new revelations.

In one 2019 email to journalist Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump, Epstein wrote of Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

In an April 2, 2011, email to Maxwell, a former Epstein girlfriend now imprisoned for conspiring to engage in sex trafficking, Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. (Redacted name) spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”

Maxwell replied the same day: “I have been thinking about that.”

The name of the person said to have spent time with Trump was blacked out of the email, but House Democrats identified the person as a “victim.”

Leavitt said that the unnamed person referenced in the emails is Giuffre, who had accused Britain’s then-Prince Andrew and other influential men of sexually exploiting her as a teenager and who died by suicide in April. Andrew, who recently was stripped of his titles and evicted from his royal residence by King Charles III after weeks of pressure to act over his relationship with Epstein, has rejected Giuffre’s allegations and said he didn’t recall meeting her.

Leavitt said in a statement that Giuffre had “repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions.”

“The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre,” the statement said. “These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”

Messages seeking comment were left with Wolff, Maxwell attorney David Markus and representatives for Giuffre’s family.

Maxwell’s interview with the Justice Department

Maxwell, interviewed in July by the Justice Department’s second-in-command, repeatedly denied witnessing any sexually inappropriate interactions involving Trump.

“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, according to a transcript of the interview. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Giuffre came forward publicly after an initial investigation ended in an 18-month Florida jail term for Epstein, who made a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by pleading guilty instead to relatively minor state-level charges of soliciting prostitution. He was released in 2009.

In subsequent lawsuits, Giuffre said she was a teenage spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was approached in 2000 by Maxwell.

Lawyers for Maxwell, a British socialite, have argued that she never should have been tried or convicted for her role in luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She is serving a 20-year prison term, though she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas after the Blanche interview.

Sisak reported from New York.