Call Me Crazy, but I for One Still Want to Know if the President Committed Depraved Sex Crimes

Sign up for the Slatest^[1] to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

Down in Washington, the students are back in school, the leaves are changing colors, and Congress is deciding^[2] whether to look into why the president’s name is reportedly mentioned multiple times^[3] in materials related to the investigation of an infamous sexual abuser of teenage girls.

In my opinion: Yes, that is a question that the United States legislature should be trying to answer. I do not care if it is a trending topic on search engines^[4]; I don’t care if it might be more tactically savvy^[5] for Democrats to talk about other issues. I simply believe that it is in the public’s interest to know, for example, what the president was talking about when he wrote a birthday note^[6] to the notorious sex criminal that stated, according to the Wall Street Journal, that they shared “certain things in common.” (Donald Trump has said this letter is “fake^[7]” and is suing the Journal^[8] over it.)

What did the president, Trump, mean when he told reporters this summer that the late Jeffrey Epstein “stole^[9]” a 16-year-old spa attendant named Virginia Giuffre^[10] from his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida in order to employ her as a masseuse? (Giuffre would later become one of Epstein’s most prominent public accusers^[11], stating that he went on to molest her and pressure her into having sex with his acquaintances for years.) If Trump ended his friendship with Epstein over this and other incidents in which the financier pursued young Mar-a-Lago employees, as the president currently claims^[12], why was Epstein still listed as a member of the club until well after^[13] his 2006 indictment for soliciting prostitution? (In 2019 Epstein was charged in a much more sweeping federal indictment.) Why did a so-called “raw” video released by the Department of Justice, which purported to prove that Epstein died in his prison cell as the result of suicide, turn out to actually have been edited^[14]? What do the records of Epstein’s financial transactions^[15] reveal?

The president’s defensiveness^[17] about these questions makes you wonder if there is something incriminating about him in the so-called federal “files” of documents related to the case, especially given his alleged history of walking in on underage girls^[18] while they were changing clothes in a dressing room, the jury finding^[19] that he sexually assaulted a woman in a New York City department store in 1996, the allegations by at least a dozen other women^[20] that he groped or otherwise forced himself on them sexually, and his own crude statement during a 2005 Access Hollywood taping about how much he enjoyed touching women without their consent^[21]. (Trump has denied committing sexual assault.)

As the American Prospect lays out in the story linked above^[22], the current choice before members of the House of Representatives is whether to sign on to 1) a so-called “discharge petition” authored by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna that would compel the chamber to vote on the public release of the DOJ’s Epstein files, including the unredacted names of any government officials mentioned within them, or 2) a resolution of support for the Republican-led House Oversight Committee’s much more limited pursuit of Epstein materials^[23]. On Tuesday, that committee made a show of releasing a group of documents that, according to the Washington Post, “appears to mostly contain information that was already in the public domain.”

Polls show there is some public pressure^[28] on Republican legislators from their own voters to conduct a more transparent inquiry into the matter. But it is also on principle important to investigate why the president reportedly shut down the planned release of Epstein-related documents immediately after being told that his name appeared in them^[29]. In a democratic society, the people have a right to know whether the president committed crimes; in a society of laws, it should not be permissible for the president to suppress information relevant to that question. Rich and powerful people should not be able to keep secrets about their connections to the systematic molestation^[30] of dozens of women from foreign countries and broken homes simply because they are rich and powerful.

Is it certain that the president’s political standing would suffer were it to turn out that he was, in fact, implicated in this investigation? No. Is that “depressing”? Sure. Is it proof that “nothing matters”? Maybe, but there is only one way to find out.^[31]

Sign up for Slate’s evening newsletter.