“The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” – Corinthians 3:6
In W. Somerset Maugham’s much-adapted 1927 play “The Letter,” a spurned woman kills her rejecting lover, then passes the crime off as an attempted rape and self-defense. Her story seems plausible but for one thing – an incriminating letter inviting her lover to her home while her husband is away, a letter that’s in the hands of the lover’s mistress.
No one writes letters anymore, we’re told, but they do write lots and lots of emails, which they apparently never delete. Will the thousands of emails released from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate ultimately prove to be politically lethal?
So far, there is nothing to suggest that President Donald J. Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Bill Gates or Larry Summers – some of the names that pop up in the Epstein narrative -- slept with girls supplied by the late sex trafficker, who was also apparently a power broker, blackmailer, money launderer and influence peddler. But the three emails released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/house-democrats-release-new-epstein-emails-referencing-trump/story?id=127435983 – 2011,’15 and ’19 discussions of the aftermath of Epstein’s onetime friendship with Trump – paint a compelling portrait of the sins of commission and those of omission.
They suggest that once Trump realized that Epstein and his girlfriend/associate Ghislaine Maxwell were using Mar a Lago as a kind of pouching ground for underage females they could prostitute, he confronted Maxwell and told her to knock it off. (This would align with Trump’s comments that Epstein was a “creep” who was stealing employees like the late Virginia Giuffre.)
But Trump didn’t go to the police, which he was not required to do by law. Instead, in the words of a 2011 email exchange between Epstein and Maxwell, he became the “dog that hasn’t barked.”
Indeed, by then, seven years after their friendship reportedly ended, the two men had become for each other like the past in a Somerset Maugham novel, always lurking in the shadows. Enter journalist/agent provocateur Michael Wolff in the 2015 and ’19 emails with Epstein to suggest how Epstein could leverage his past relationship with Trump either to kill his presidential candidacy or, if he won, to ingratiate himself.
Notice that in all this, there is not a shred of compassion for Epstein’s victims. It’s all about the players’ power – how to keep it, how to obtain more. There may be plenty here that is not illegal. But there is plenty more that is unethical and immoral.
Now the Trump Administration is planning to investigate Democrats who associated with Epstein as the House prepares to vote on releasing the Epstein files. But like the antiheroine of Maugham’s play, we none of us can undo the past.
The email may not killeth. But it certainly revealeth.