House oversight committee releases image of entire Epstein birthday album, with letter attributed to Trump
The Republican-led House oversight committee has released digital images of the entire birthday album presented to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003, making them available for download. The images include a sexually suggestive drawing and letter bearing the name of Donald Trump.
In a statement, the Republican chair of the committee, congressman James Comer of Kentucky, also scolded House Democrats for “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information received from the Epstein Estate today”.
Democrats on the committee posted an image of the letter attributed to Trump on social media, and of another letter that refers to the current president.
🚨🚨HERE IT IS: We got Trump’s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein that the President said doesn’t exist.
Trump talks about a “wonderful secret” the two of them shared. What is he hiding? Release the files! pic.twitter.com/k2Mq8Hu3LY
— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) September 8, 2025
The second letter released by the Democrats was from Joel Pashcow, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, who made a crude joke about a woman the Wall Street Journal reports “Epstein and Trump each courted in the 1990s, according to court testimony and people familiar with the matter.”
NEW PAGE FROM EPSTEIN’S BIRTHDAY BOOK: Epstein and a longtime Mar-a-Lago member joking about selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Donald Trump for $22,500. pic.twitter.com/iEMNSRX7X8
— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) September 8, 2025
Pashcow’s birthday letter included a photo of Epstein holding a giant, mock novelty check for $22,500, made to look like a payment from Trump to Epstein. The photo was captioned: “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [woman’s name] to Donald Trump for $22,500. Showed early ‘people skills’ too. Even though I handled the deal I didn’t get any of the money for the girl!”
The woman’s name was redacted in the image of the book provided to the House by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
As Leland Nally reported for Mother Jones in 2020, Pashcow’s name and phone number was in a leaked copy of what was said to be Epstein’s personal contact book that was posted online.
Key events
Closing summary
This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day. We will return on Tuesday, but in the meantime, here are the latest developments:
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House Democrats and the Wall Street Journal published an image of the 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, bearing the name of Donald Trump.
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The Republican-led House oversight committee later released the entire birthday album, which was reportedly compiled for Epstein by his former girlfriend, and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
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The White House press office claimed that Trump’s signature, using examples from 2024, is different from the signature on the 2003 letter, but signatures change with age, and other examples from the period, published by the Wall Street Journal, seem to match the signature on the letter to Epstein.
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Mary Trump, the president’s niece and fierce critic of her uncle, wrote: “That’s definitely his signature. Just saying.”
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JD Vance, the vice-president who had previously suggested that the letter might not exist, dismissed the new evidence and accused Democrats of smearing Trump.
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Another letter in the birthday album mentioned Trump. It was from Joel Pashcow, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, who made a crude joke about brokering the sale of a woman by Epstein to Trump for $22,500.
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The US supreme court overruled a lower court to allow federal immigration agents to proceed with raids in southern California targeting people for possible deportation based on their race or the language they speak.
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The supreme court also allowed Trump to fire a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission, blocking a lower court ruling to reinstate Rebecca Slaughter while the case plays out.
While there is no evidence yet of the promised Apocalypse Now style assault on Chicago by the president’s “Department of War”, a Fox News reporter announced on Monday that “the surge has begun”.
In a segment that was promoted on social media by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the Fox correspondent, Griff Jenkins, reported that while he was embedded with immigration officers, “we arrested” one man suspected of being an undocumented immigrant.
A Florida state appeals court judge who was nominated by Donald Trump to serve as a federal judge after the jurist ruled in favor of allowing Trump’s defamation lawsuit against the Pulitzer prize board to move forward was confirmed along party lines by the US Senate on Monday.
The Republican-led Senate voted 50-43 to confirm the Florida state judge, Ed Artau, to a seat on the US district court for the southern district of Florida.
Moments before the vote, the Democratic minority leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, denounced the nomination on the Senate floor, saying:
Mr Artau’s nomination is a textbook example of quid pro quo if there ever was one.
Listen to this: while Mr Artau was actively lobbying the White House for a federal judgeship in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election last year, while he was begging Donald Trump for a nomination to the bench, while he was meeting with Republican senators to angle for their recommendation, he was at the same time part of a panel of Florida state judges hearing Donald Trump’s defamation case against the Pulitzer Prize Board earlier this February.
Did Mr Artau do the right thing and recuse himself from the case? Of course not.
Did he inform anyone about this potential conflict of interest? Of course not.
Instead, Mr Artau stayed on the case and – surprise, surprise – ruled in favor of Donald Trump.
That is no coincidence. That is no accident. That is Donald Trump rigging our courts with his loyalists.
Some Trump critics suggest drawing for Epstein looks less like a woman than a girl
After House Democrats released an image of a 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein bearing Donald Trump’s name, several Trump critics suggested that the drawing that frames the text looks less like what the Wall Street Journal called “the outline of a naked woman” than the outline of a girl.
Faine Greenwood, a researcher who studies the use of drones in conflict, wrote on Bluesky: “this is actually worse than i imagined it was going to be because this does not look like a drawing of an adult woman, it looks like a drawing of a young girl”.
“This does not look like the body of a grown woman,” the TikTok influencer Suzanne Lambert said. “This looks like the body of a young girl.”
“Just look at it,” Julia Davis an expert on Russia media wrote. “Was he drawing a girl or a woman?”
The distinction matters, given that Epstein was later accused of abusing hundreds of girls during the decade before his 50th birthday, and that Trump had suggested in a 2002 interview with New York magazine that he was aware that the financier was attracted to young women.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told the magazine, three years before a 14-year-old girl’s parents told Palm Beach police Epstein had paid their daughter for a massage.
“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” the future president added. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
House oversight committee releases image of entire Epstein birthday album, with letter attributed to Trump
The Republican-led House oversight committee has released digital images of the entire birthday album presented to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003, making them available for download. The images include a sexually suggestive drawing and letter bearing the name of Donald Trump.
In a statement, the Republican chair of the committee, congressman James Comer of Kentucky, also scolded House Democrats for “cherry-picking documents and politicizing information received from the Epstein Estate today”.
Democrats on the committee posted an image of the letter attributed to Trump on social media, and of another letter that refers to the current president.
🚨🚨HERE IT IS: We got Trump’s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein that the President said doesn’t exist.
Trump talks about a “wonderful secret” the two of them shared. What is he hiding? Release the files! pic.twitter.com/k2Mq8Hu3LY
— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) September 8, 2025
The second letter released by the Democrats was from Joel Pashcow, a member of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, who made a crude joke about a woman the Wall Street Journal reports “Epstein and Trump each courted in the 1990s, according to court testimony and people familiar with the matter.”
NEW PAGE FROM EPSTEIN’S BIRTHDAY BOOK: Epstein and a longtime Mar-a-Lago member joking about selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Donald Trump for $22,500. pic.twitter.com/iEMNSRX7X8
— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) September 8, 2025
Pashcow’s birthday letter included a photo of Epstein holding a giant, mock novelty check for $22,500, made to look like a payment from Trump to Epstein. The photo was captioned: “Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! Sells ‘fully depreciated’ [woman’s name] to Donald Trump for $22,500. Showed early ‘people skills’ too. Even though I handled the deal I didn’t get any of the money for the girl!”
The woman’s name was redacted in the image of the book provided to the House by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
As Leland Nally reported for Mother Jones in 2020, Pashcow’s name and phone number was in a leaked copy of what was said to be Epstein’s personal contact book that was posted online.
Vance, who previously asked to see the Epstein letter, now calls it ‘BS’
The vice-president, JD Vance, who is one of the administration’s most dedicated social media posters, has weighed in on X to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy after they released an image of a sexually suggestive 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, with what looks like Donald Trump’s signature.
“The Democrats don’t care about Epstein. They don’t even care about his victims,” Vance wrote. “That’s why they were silent about it for years. The only thing they care about is concocting another fake scandal like Russiagate to smear President Trump with lies. No one is falling for this BS.”
In July, when the existence of the letter was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Vance had demanded to see the letter and suggested that it was suspicious that the paper had not shown the White House a copy.
“Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bullshit. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it. Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it?” Vance wrote at the time.
In reference to the text of the letter, which begins with an imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein, Vance asked: “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”
While the literary device and the formal language used in the dialogue does not sound at all like the way that Trump speaks in public, it is an open secret that he has worked with ghostwriters throughout his career, so it is certainly possible that the letter was commissioned by Trump, but composed by someone else.
In 2000, for instance, when Trump flirted with the possibility of running for the presidential nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform party, Trump published a book of his policy ideas that was actually written by Dave Shiflett, a journalist.
Since that book was published just three years before the Epstein birthday letter, the Guardian contacted Shiflett to ask if it might have been written for Trump by someone else.
“My understanding is that Trump neither writes nor reads his books,” Shiflett wrote back. “Several years back a Washington Post reporter told me he had asked Trump about his books and he had said he never read them.”
‘That’s definitely his signature,’ Trump’s niece says of birthday letter to Epstein
Mary Trump, the president’s niece who is a fierce critic of her uncle, has weighed in on the image of the signed birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, bearing Donald Trump’s name.
“That’s definitely his signature,” the president’s estranged niece wrote on X. “Just saying.”
Another former member of Trump’s inner circle who has turned critic, George Conway, pointed to a Wall Street Journal visual analysis, which compared the signature “Donald” on the sexually suggestive wishes to Epstein on his 50th birthday in 2003 to that on two letters signed by Trump in the same period.
One of those letters was to thank Conway, in 2006. The other was Trump’s remarkably warm letter of congratulations, in 2000, to Hillary Clinton on her victory in the race to represent New York in the senate that year.
The effusive letter to Clinton congratulated her on a “well-deserved victory” and had the words “great going!” written by hand and underlined twice in black marker next to the signature.
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The Journal’s analysis of the letter also points to other reasons to doubt Trump’s denial when first confronted by the letter. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women”, Trump told the newspaper. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
As the Journal shows, however, Trump did line drawings in a similar style, in a similar black marker, at about that time. He also used the word “enigma”, which is central to the letter, in two of his books; and has frequently used the phrase “a wonderful thing”, which also appears in the note, in public remarks.
Lauren Gambino
Several speakers at the immigrants rights news conference in Westlake quoted from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.
“I dissent. We all dissent,” the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, said.
Bass called the ruling “enraging” and said she had already directed the city to strengthen protocols prohibiting resources from assisting with federal immigration enforcement.
“We will not and we will not participate in these cruel, inhumane tactics,” Bass said.
She warned that undermining the personal liberties of Angelenos would impact all Americans.
“The rule of law used to mean something not just to us, but to the supreme court, but now, with the stroke of a pen, the supreme court has undermined the rights of millions,” she said.
She added: “And how ironic is it that this same supreme court that ruled colleges cannot use race in the admissions process has now ruled that law enforcement can use race to conduct raids and detain people.”
Another speaker, representing the ACLU, also quoted a part Sotomayor’s dissent that stated the situation in stark terms: “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”
ACLU press conference on Supreme Court decision to stay TRO in LA, allowing immigration agents to resume raids based on race.
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job” pic.twitter.com/bFTnAmCCSu
— Sergio Olmos (@MrOlmos) September 8, 2025
Lauren Gambino
Outside a Home Depot in a heavily Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles, immigrant-rights advocates, joined by the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, warned that the supreme court had “effectively legalized racial profiling”.
Cars honked in support as they passed signs that said “Keep Ice out of LA” and one that read simply: “Fuck Trump.”
“We are infuriated because the impacts will continue to show in our community,” Flor Melendez, the executive director of CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center and a plaintiff in the case. “We will continue to feel the pressure, because we could not depend on our legal system.”
She said 81 car washes across the region have been raided since Trump’s crackdown began earlier this summer, some multiple times. At least 247 car wash workers were detained, she added.
“The supreme court of the United States decided not to see this evil that has been visited on our people, not to hear the cries of all who have been victims and witnesses of these actions, and not to use the voice of the court to protect individual rights under the Constitution,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (Chirla), which was one of the organizational plaintiffs in this case.
“Do the conservative justices not have eyes to see the video evidence, or are they not able to read our multiple collected declarations that we have provided,” Salas added. “Our evidence demonstrated that these are not calm and consensual engagements with individuals who voluntarily offer information about their immigration status.”
White House claims image of Epstein birthday note ‘proves’ Trump did not draw or sign it
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insists that a photograph of a sexually suggestive 2003 birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, bearing Donald Trump’s name and signature, released by House Democrats and published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, is evidence that the president has been framed.
“The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire ‘Birthday Card’ story is false”, Leavitt wrote on X. “As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it.”
The president’s spokesperson added that his legal team “will continue to aggressively pursue litigation”, against the Journal, which first reported the existence of the note and drawing.
Leavitt also referred to the reporting that Trump contributed the signed drawing and note to a birthday album for the late sex offender as an effort “to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!”
Leavitt’s deputy, Taylor Budowich, chimed in on X with what he presented as definitive visual evidence that “it’s not his signature”, in the form of four images of Trump’s signature on cards inserted in copies of a book about the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year.
However, it appears that all four of those signatures were from 2024, more than two decades after the 2003 birthday note, and it is a documented fact that people’s handwriting and signatures commonly change as they age.
Andrew Feinberg, a White House correspondent for the Independent, posted two images of Trump’s signature from the years before 2003 on X, which appear closer to the one on the note to Epstein.
Newsom accuses supreme court of unleashing ‘racial terror in Los Angeles’
Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, has denounced the US supreme court ruling that permits federal immigration agents to demand proof of citizenship from anyone who appears to be of Latin American origin or is speaking a foreign language in Los Angeles, a city with a population that is 35% foreign-born and where 56% speak a language other than English at home, in a county that is nearly 50% Latino.
Newsom said, of the 6-3 ruling by the Republican-nominated majority:
Trump’s hand-picked supreme court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws – it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including US citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses. Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family – and every person is now a target – but we will continue fighting these abhorrent attacks on Californians.
Republican senators open investigation of ‘botched’ response to Palisades fire
Two Republican senators announced on Monday that they are opening a congressional investigation of “the preparation for and response to” the deadly Palisades fire in Los Angeles by state and local officials in California, who are Democrats.
The senators, Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said in a press release that the fire, which burned for 24 days in January and killed at least 12 people, “was more than just a horrific tragedy, it was an unacceptable failure of government to protect the lives and property of its citizens”.
In a separate news release last week, Scott accused California Democrats of having “botched” the response to the California wildfires.
However, the senate investigation appears to focus only on the fire in the affluent Palisades, where Scott was taken on a tour last month by a former reality TV star turned rightwing podcaster, Spencer Pratt, and not on the Eaton fire, which burned through Altadena, a less well-off suburb to the east.
As soon as the investigation was announced, Pratt, a conservative Palisades resident, folded it into a partisan attack on California Democrats in a social media video. “Why is it that only Republicans are interested in finding out why a California city burned to the ground?” Pratt asked.
The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, announced three weeks ago that the city had been asked by the justice department to wait until federal investigation is complete to release its “after action report” on the Palisades fire.
I’ve been speaking with Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, about the ruling from a federal appeals court today which upheld the defamation lawsuit by writer E Jean Carroll, and orders that Donald Trump still pay an $83m judgment.
Tobias said that the ruling is significant because it affirms substantial “punitive damages” – which comprise around $65m of the total award to Carrol. These “send a message” to the president, according to Tobias, to avoid further defamation.
While Tobias isn’t surprised by the ruling, characterizing Judge Lewis A Kaplan – who tried the case in the district court – as a “savvy, experienced jurist, who has resolved many high profile cases” – he fully expects the Trump administration to challenge the decision and attempt to appeal to the supreme court.
Per my last post, Robert Garcia, a representative who serves as the ranking member on the House oversight committee, said that Donald Trump is lying about the existence of his birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein.
In a video, posted to X, Garcia said that the president is “leading a White House cover-up”. The lawmaker from California added that committee members plan to review the documents that they received from the Epstein estate today.
House Democrats share Trump ‘birthday note’ to Jeffrey Epstein
Democrats on the House oversight committee have released a scanned copy of a “birthday note” that Donald Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein, that was eventually compiled into an album of messages to celebrate Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.
The sexually suggestive note to Epstein includes a conversation between Trump and the late sex offender, with a naked female silhouette drawn around it. The president’s signature is at the bottom of the note.
“Happy birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” the note reads.
🚨🚨HERE IT IS: We got Trump’s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein that the President said doesn’t exist.
Trump talks about a “wonderful secret” the two of them shared. What is he hiding? Release the files! pic.twitter.com/k2Mq8Hu3LY
— Oversight Dems (@OversightDems) September 8, 2025
The committee recently subpoenaed the Epstein estate for more documents as part of their investigation into the handling of the Epstein case. Trump has denied writing a letter for the birthday book, and even sued the Wall Street Journal for defamation when they first reported his contribution.
