Image of Trump’s birthday note along with full Epstein album released
House Democrats on Monday released an image of a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that appears to bear the signature of Donald Trump, the very same note the president had denied writing after reports of its existence were published earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.
The letter, which was turned over by lawyers for disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in response to a subpoena from the House oversight committee, was included in a set of notes sent to the convicted sex offender for his 50th birthday.
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The image showed a letter that, in effect, comported with a description in the Journal’s report from July. Inside the sketch of a woman’s torso, the note depicts an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein, with what appeared to be Trump’s signature below.
“The oversight committee has secured the infamous ‘Birthday Book’ that contains a note from President Trump that he has said does not exist,” Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the panel, said in a statement. “It’s time for the president to tell us the truth about what he knew and release all the Epstein files.”
The White House did not immediately comment on the letter, but officials sought to discredit the note. Deputy chief of staff for communications, Taylor Budowich, suggested in an X post carrying a different version of Trump’s signature that the letter or the signature had been falsified.
“Time for News Corp to open that chequebook, it’s not his signature. DEFAMATION!” Budowich wrote, referencing the defamation suit that Trump filed against News Corp, the parent company of the Journal, over its original story.
But even though Trump more recently has signed both his first and last name together, for years, he used only his first name in signatures, stylised with a line extending from the last letter, and Trump’s signature on a letter from 1995 closely resembled the one found on the note to Epstein.
Trump denies the allegations
Trump has separately denied drawing the figure or writing the note to Epstein. “The supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE,” he said in July.
The letter from the so-called birthday book was turned over to the House oversight committee in response to a subpoena issued by its Republican chairperson, James Comer, and a 25 July letter from Democrats Sylvia Garcia and Ro Khanna urging Epstein’s estate to produce the materials.
The committee later also released the entirety of the birthday book, whose scanned pages showed was titled “The First Fifty Years” and was split into 10 sections, including a prologue written by Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The leather-bound volume contained dozens of letters and images that were of a sexually explicit nature, ranging from drawings by “girlfriends” of Epstein receiving massages next to a pool, to photos of lions and zebras engaged in sex.
Other contributors included Bill Clinton, the billionaire Leon Black, Harvard law school professor and onetime Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz, the now British ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson and Les Wexner, among others.
