By leaking a select few documents from the tranche of material they have on Jeffrey Epstein, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee aimed for Donald Trump.
In the end, they ended up hitting themselves over and over again — including their favorite media organ, The New York Times.
In the latest revelation to come out of the Epstein file dump, a former Times reporter who left the paper after his cozy relationship with the financier was revealed had apparently tipped Epstein off to an investigation into his activities.
The New York Post reported that a June 1, 2016 email from Landon Thomas Jr., then an investigative journalist with the Gray Lady, told Epstein that reporter and author John Connolly was asking questions about him.
“Keep getting calls from that guy doing a book on you — John Connolly. He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media. I told him you were a hell of a guy :),” Thomas said.
“He actually seemed to be a sensible guy/solid reporter — just from the few conversations I had with him. I think he is close to finishing up. Did you ever speak to him?”
He was a “sensible guy” and a “solid reporter,” which is probably why it was a mistake to speak to him. Connolly would share co-writing credits on James Patterson’s 2016 true crime story about the financier, “Filthy Rich: A Powerful Billionaire, the Sex Scandal that Undid Him, and All the Justice that Money Can Buy: The Shocking True Story of Jeffrey Epstein.”
“One oddity: he said he had been told that that quote from Trump about you in the original NY Mag story had been manufactured. ie, that I did not actually speak to Donald,” Thomas wrote to Epstein elsewhere in the email.
Thomas is probably best known for a New York Magazine article in 2002 in which Trump said “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” and that “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do and many of them are on the younger side.”
Granted, that hasn’t aged well, but little was known about just how young (i.e., very illegally) Epstein liked girls (not women) at the time. Trump and Epstein had a falling out just a few years later when Trump says he found out Epstein was a “creep,” and nothing in the correspondence seems to bear out anything else.
As for Connolly’s questions about whether the quote was true, Richards told Epstein it “is bull s*** of course. I am sure that is what Trump told him as they have been getting a lot of questions from reporters about you.”
We’ll get to Richards’ relationship with Epstein in a second, but let’s just go back and analyze the events of this week, in which the Democrats committed a self-own of Brobdingnagian proportions.
On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three cherry-picked emails of Epstein’s with Trump’s name in them, including one to procurer/lover Ghislaine Maxwell that said, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.”
That sounded ominous — except for the fact that Republicans contended the redacted name was Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein’s who is now deceased but has insisted Trump had no part in Epstein’s depredations.
As the BBC notes, the Republicans on the Oversight Committee released over 20,000 emails that showed precisely how this fit into the larger scheme of things. This also included an unredacted version of that smoking gun email which showed that the victim was indeed Giuffre — making it more of an exploding cigar than a smoking gun.
The Democrats have tried to spin this various ways, including an allegation that Epstein spent Thanksgiving of 2017 with Trump (debunked by media reports, now deleted) and an email in which Epstein denounces Trump… which we’re somehow supposed to interpret as a great thing for the Democrats, because the opinion of dead infamous pervert sex criminals is something Americans should heed?
Sure, whatever:
🚨 BREAKING: The Democrats deleted their post claiming that President Trump spent Thanksgiving with Epstein in 2017.
Probably because it’s an easily disprovable lie and the attempts to connect President Trump to Epstein’s crimes are a giant hoax. pic.twitter.com/dY5winZ4dJ
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 13, 2025
BREAKING: Newly released emails show Jeffrey Epstein thought Trump was one of the worst people he knew, with “not one decent cell in his body.”
He went on to describe Trump with one word:
“Dangerous.” pic.twitter.com/kMyRwkgk8i
— Democrats (@TheDemocrats) November 13, 2025
Meanwhile, we have Thomas — who, it’s worth noting, was forced to leave the paper in 2019 after he revealed to his editors he’d solicited a $30,000 donation from Epstein — warning Epstein again in September 2017 that Connolly was continuing to probe.
The reporter, Thomas said, “is digging around again — not clear if it’s [sic] another book/or expanded paperback version. Was asking me all sorts of questions about why you hired Ken Starr.”
Starr was the former independent counsel who investigated violations related to sexual misconduct when Bill Clinton was in the White House, eventually leading to Clinton’s impeachment.
“I told him I had no idea — I think he is doing some Trump-related digging too,” Thomas continued. “Anyway, for what it’s worth…”
Also, for what it’s worth, the Times made sure it emphasized it had nothing to do with Thomas and didn’t want to talk anymore.
“Landon Thomas Jr. has not worked at The Times since early 2019 after editors discovered his failure to abide by our ethical standards,” a spokeswoman told the Post.
Thomas could not be contacted.
At the end of the day, will the Epstein emails be more embarrassing to the left or to Trump?
However, the Post did note that the reporter’s “disclosure led brass at the Grey Lady to revisit Thomas’ past work, turning up a fawning profile of Epstein published in 2008, days before he began serving time as part of a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal on Florida child prostitution charges.” Nice going.
In other words, another attempt to try to make Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein happen, and what do we get? More Democrats ensnared. You almost wonder what liberal politician or institution is going to get hit next.
Keep up the good work, Dems. The character assassination of Trump can basically be scored thusly: Democrats 0, New York Times -1, Trump +1 million.
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