Suddenly, one of the officials in the Situation Room raised the subject of a disturbing but uncorroborated accusation against Trump that had come to light in unsealed filings from a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell, which had been settled two years later. The secondhand accusation, alleging a specific type of sexual abuse, was the perfect example of something that would show up on the public website and put the spotlight on Trump, whether it was true or not.

Giuffre, who had met Epstein when she was a teenage spa attendant at Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla., became one of the sex offender’s most outspoken victims. Giuffre stated in late 2016 that, to her knowledge, Trump had done nothing improper. She died by suicide in April 2025, three months after Trump returned to power. The old Giuffre case file included emails sent to a journalist by another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome, who later sued Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein had also settled that case.

In the emails, Ransome claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransome also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransome wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. “They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,” she wrote.

The Trump administration is launching a "massive leak hunt" to find out who spilled details on a panicked conversation inside the White House.

A new book by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan has the Trump White House scrambling to find out who leaked details about the Trump administration's "freakout" over the release of the Epstein files, according to reporting by CNN. The New York Times published an excerpt of the book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," on Wednesday.

The book's excerpt describes a meeting that Trump didn't attend or know about in the Situation Room. Included in the meeting were his senior aides, Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, last year to plan how to contain the fallout.

Others present included then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, according to reporting by The Daily Beast. According to an excerpt of Haberman and Swan's book, Vance "appeared panicked" about how the Epstein files would divide the president's base.

CNN cited a person who "detected" the search for the leaker to confirm that the White House is now hunting them down.