It was hard to miss the letter Donald Trump reportedly sent disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein for his 50th birthday — complete with a sketched outline of a naked woman — after the House Oversight Committee Democrats published a copy of the 2003 note to X on Monday afternoon.
The Democrats’ X account posted the document — in which Trump seemed to wish “may every day be a wonderful secret” to Epstein — and accrued 5.2 million views by early Monday evening. The White House and its MAGA allies were simultaneously posting to deny the veracity of the letter across multiple social media platforms. Even the pop culture social media account PopCrave picked it up, accruing hundreds of millions of views.
But the Republican lawmakers gathered on Capitol Hill, just hours later, claimed they were not among those millions of viewers.
“I’ve got to activate my Wall Street Journal subscription, I guess,” Rep. Tom Barrett told NOTUS, “because I haven’t seen it.”
By the time Barrett spoke to NOTUS, the letter had been plastered onto The Journal’s homepage — which doesn’t require a subscription to access. And even if Barrett did need to re-up his subscription to reach the document, The New York Times and The Washington Post had also been carrying an image of the letter on their landing pages for much of the day.
Reps. Tom Tiffany, Paul Gosar and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan all said they hadn’t seen the note. Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Monday evening: “I haven’t seen that.”
Rep. Ronny Jackson, Trump’s former physician, also said he hadn’t “seen” the letter. Jackson explained to NOTUS that, “I just saw in the news he didn’t have anything to do with it.” But, apparently, not from any news source that also carried a photo of the letter itself.
Republican lawmakers pleading ignorance to the latest Trump news cycle is hardly a new defense. During his first administration, when the Capitol Hill press corps would question members about the president’s tweets on a near daily basis, they often tried to dodge by using the haven’t seen it excuse.
Still, the latest round of Republican denials is notable, as the MAGA base is aggressively demanding transparency on all things related to Epstein. While Republicans have repeatedly fallen in line behind the president’s most controversial policies, the Epstein matter has riled their constituents across the country. And yet, Monday proved most are still inclined to avoid any comment that the administration might consider hostile.
Even the lawmakers who have been pressing aggressively for transparency on any documents concerning Epstein said on Monday evening that they weren’t up to speed. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace — two of the four Republicans who signed onto a petition to force the Department of Justice to release more Epstein documents — both said they hadn’t seen the note.
“I know that we had received a bunch of things from what we had subpoenaed, but I haven’t had a chance to look at them,” Greene said.
Mace was even more concise.
“I haven’t seen it,” she told reporters.
Exacerbated by the repeated dodges from Republican lawmakers, members of the Capitol Hill press corps printed out copies of the notes and presented it to the members of Congress they were questioning.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Rep. Rich McCormick told NOTUS, adding: “I’m sure it’s an unconfirmed rumor right now.”
When a NOTUS reporter showed McCormick the letter on her phone for the congressman to review, he responded, “Oh yeah, I saw that.”
“It’s BS,” McCormick continued, saying that Trump’s signature could have been forged. “That’s not something — I’ve never seen Trump do anything like that in his life. So it doesn’t fall in character. It has to pass the sniff test.”
Epstein’s estate turned over the birthday book, alongside a bundle of other documents in compliance with an August subpoena from the Oversight panel. The Wall Street Journal first reported in July on the existence of a “bawdy” collection of birthday notes to Epstein from 2003, but did not publish an image of the alleged document.
Short of physical evidence, Republicans leapt at the opportunity to defend the president at the time. Rep. Tim Burchett, for example, called the story “#Bogus” on X.
When reporters asked Burchett on Monday evening about the note, he said, “That’s the first I’ve heard about it.” When reporters showed Burchett a physical copy of the letter, he responded, “Anybody can do a signature.”
“We’ve seen autopen has been used quite a bit with the Biden administration,” he continued. “I’ve never known Trump to be much of an artist, either. So I kind of draw that into question.”
Democrats, unsurprisingly, were happy to keep talking about the letter.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz told reporters on his way into votes Monday evening that Trump is a “decent doodler.” Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters he is pleased that his panel has access to the information from Epstein’s estate.
“I think it’s good,” Garcia told reporters. “At the end of the day, they wouldn’t be releasing anything. We were pressuring them to do it. And so I’m glad they’re moving forward.”
Rep. James Comer, Oversight’s chair, accused his Democratic colleagues of “cherry-picking” documents and “politicizing information.”
With most Republicans roundly denying they have seen the letter, it is unclear whether its publication will force the Trump administration to release more documents.
As of Monday evening, no new Republicans had signed onto Rep. Thomas Massie’s discharge petition to force a House vote that would compel the DOJ to release its complete, unfiltered cache of Epstein-related documents. The effort has appeared stalled since the Oversight panel last week released 33,000 pages of DOJ Epstein documents.
Not one of the over a dozen Republicans NOTUS spoke to Monday seemed to be taking the letter seriously. Even Massie wasn’t buying that the letter from Epstein’s estate would change the conversation.
“It doesn’t prove anything,” Massie told reporters. “Having a birthday card from Trump doesn’t help the survivors and the victims. It doesn’t name an additional new person who could be indicted. I think it’s just a distraction.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in there that implicates Trump,” he added
Rep. Eric Burlison, who has not ruled out eventually signing Massie’s petition, told reporters Monday that he was hearing about the letter for the first time.
“That’s new for me,” Burlison said. “I’ve not seen that.”
But that didn’t stop Burlison from offering a defense of the president.
“Look, a lot of us — because we’re in elected office — we’re around thousands of people a week, and sometimes you have people that will ask, ‘Can you write a letter on my behalf or make a recommendation?’ And for the most part, you say ‘yes,’ right?”
“If that is true, and he did sign that letter,” Burlison continued, “I don’t know that there’s anything there.”