Democratic political operatives initiated a coordinated propaganda attack centered on releasing Jeffrey Epstein's emails and promoting a range of narratives targeting President Trump, including claims that he and Epstein shared a Thanksgiving dinner in 2017. The Trump team has since responded, with the Department of Justice and the FBI set to begin investigations into "Epstein's involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Reid Hoffman."

Let's begin here: The email dump occurred on the same day Trump signed legislation ending the record-long government shutdown, a shutdown driven by the Democratic Party's decision to hold government funding hostage, triggering nationwide travel disruptions and SNAP funding outages.

What's clear is that the Democratic Party staked heavily on the Jeffrey Epstein email narrative. Bloomberg data shows that headlines mentioning "Epstein" were minimal throughout the shutdown, but as soon as Trump signed the bill to reopen the government, putting Democrats in a very unfavorable position and creating terrible optics in the news cycle, their propaganda cannon was fired. 

Western Journal's C. Douglas Golden describes the Democratic Party's maneuvering to control the news cycle after the government shutdown's damaging optics, highlighting how they cherry-picked Epstein emails to redirect attention.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three of Epstein's emails, which mentioned President Donald Trump in some vague way.

They redacted the name of one of his victims, who is said to be Virginia Giuffre; now deceased, the woman at the center of the scandal involving the former Prince Andrew was formerly employed at Mar-a-Lago but had repeatedly avouched, during her life, that she never witnessed Trump at any events where misbehavior was going on.

Later on Wednesday, the GOP members of the Oversight Committee decided to call foul on the cherry-picking and released over 20,000 pages of documents that paint a fuller picture of what's long been known: Trump and Epstein knew each other and broke in the early 2000s. The unredacted documents also seem to confirm the redacted victim was Giuffre.

Democrats, of course, were not happy. But the party had a new theory: OK, maybe the person in the email consistently stated that Trump didn't do anything wrong, but what about the fact that Epstein said he spent Thanksgiving of 2017 with Trump?

In a post on X, they said that's exactly what the "[d]ocuments show," noting that, "At the time, Trump was already president, and Epstein was already a convicted sex offender."

. . .

And, as conservative operative Greg Price noted, it wasn't verified "because it's an easily disprovable lie and the attempts to connect President Trump to Epstein's crimes are a giant hoax."

. . .

The post has since been deleted, since the Democrats figured out the smoking gun turned out to be an exploding cigar. But the internet is forever, as is evidence of what Trump was doing on Thanksgiving in 2017:

One of the claims - now a deleted X post, the Democratic Party's official account stated, "NEW: Documents show Donald Trump spent Thanksgiving with Jeffrey Epstein in 2017. At the time, Trump was already president, and Epstein was already a convicted sex offender." 

Now deleted post. 

For very obvious reasons. 

What's clear is that the info war launched by Democrats was intended to paper over the terrible optics surrounding the government shutdown.

Trump has asked Bondi, DoJ, and FBI to investigate "investigate Jeffrey Epstein's involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him." 

"Fatty at LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman" 

"This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats," the president noted. 

It appears the Democratic Party's social media desk, likely staffed by inexperienced Gen-Z operatives, didn't bother to verify anything. However, competence was never the point; the objective was to plant a headline and let it do maximum damage before anyone could check the facts. That's the nature of information warfare. And now it looks like the Trump team is preparing to hit back.