The White House on Tuesday forcefully rejected suggestions that President Donald Trump authored a sexually suggestive birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein or signed a $22,500 novelty check to the disgraced financier, insisting both documents were forgeries but stopping short of declaring them outright fabrications.
“The President did not write this letter. He didn’t sign this letter,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters during a briefing in which she said the Trump Administration would be open to a handwriting expert reviewing the signature on the 2003 letter and the President’s handwriting at the time.
When pressed repeatedly on whether the documents were fake, Leavitt pushed back: “I did not say the documents are a hoax. I said the entire narrative surrounding Jeffrey Epstein right now that is absorbing many of the liberal cable channels is a hoax. It is a distraction.”
The newly public materials released Monday night by the Republican-led House Oversight Committee included a 238-page birthday album for Epstein and a redacted photo showing him holding an oversized check apparently signed by “DJTRUMP.” The caption below the photo, which is partially redacted, reads: “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500.”
Hours before the Republicans posted the records, the Committee’s Democrats released the letter in the birthday book signed by Trump. The records were provided by lawyers for Epstein’s estate in response to a subpoena demanding financial records, contact books, and correspondence.
For Trump, the disclosures are a reminder of a friendship he has long sought to minimize. Once close in Palm Beach social circles, Trump and Epstein were seen together frequently in the 1980s and 1990s before a falling-out in the early 2000s. Trump has said he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago for poaching spa employees, including Virginia Giuffre, later one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers.
The committee’s release of Epstein estate materials has fractured Congress. Democrats seized on the birthday letter, which depicts the outline of a naked woman’s body framing a typed note from “Donald,” as evidence that Trump has not been forthright about the extent of his ties to Epstein. The letter concludes with the phrase: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret” along with what appears to be Trump’s squiggly signature.
Trump has repeatedly denied writing the letter and sued The Wall Street Journal, which was first to report on the letter, for defamation.
Republicans have mostly downplayed the revelations. Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer of Kentucky accused Democrats of “cherry-picking” from the files. Rep. Thomas Massie, a libertarian Republican leading a bipartisan push to compel the Justice Department to release all Epstein records, dismissed the birthday book as irrelevant: “It doesn’t prove anything. Having a birthday card from Trump doesn’t help the survivors and the victims,” he told reporters Monday.
Asked if Trump planned to meet with Epstein’s victims, Leavitt told reporters: “I don’t have any meetings for you to read out on that.”
She added that Democrats were “pretending to care about victims of crime” while ignoring broader issues of child exploitation. “They are desperately trying to concoct a hoax to smear the President of the United States,” she said.
That message is in line with Trump’s own framing of the matter. In July, he called the story a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated by the Democrats and some stupid Republicans, and foolish Republicans fall into the net.”
Soon after the birthday letter became public on Monday, Taylor Budowich, a White House’s communications aide, circulated examples of Trump’s signature to argue the handwriting in the birthday letter is inconsistent.