We kind of kicked this around in previous threads but journalist Julie K. Brown had the right answer yesterday: the criminal case against Maxwell was open during the Biden administration. She wasn't convicted until late 2021, and then she appealed. It's never a good idea to open your evidence files when a criminal case is ongoing.

I'm super swamped, but I wanted to point out that this is certainly wrong. The government has to open up their evidence files when a criminal case is ongoing - the defendant has a right to examine all that stuff. And as we talked about during those previous threads, almost all of this stuff became public after she was convicted and her first appeals were denied, and the civil cases were wound up:

poynter.org - The judge in the ghislaine maxwell trial did not seal all evidence and proof

These new emails aren't even from the case files - they're from the Epstein estate that were subpoenaed recently. That's the GOP's biggest "own goal" on L'Affaire Epstein: in order to provide some political cover for Trump not releasing the entirety of the government's file, they convened their own investigative panel, which then discovered a lot more stuff that made Trump look worse, like the birthday book and the recently disclosed emails.

Still seems unlikely there's anything especially damning for anyone (other than Epstein and Maxwell) in the actual "Epstein files" that Trump's base rabidly wants released, and which he can't release without disappointing them immensely.