When it comes to attacking President Donald Trump, some stories are apparently just too good to check.
That appeared to be the case Tuesday when the Justice Department released yet more documents from the files of the late convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, including a letter supposedly written by Epstein to another notorious sex criminal that implicated Trump personally.
The only problem? According to a DOJ announcement mid-afternoon, the FBI had officially ruled the letter a fake.
By then, some major news organizations had already gone public with the “news” about Epstein’s purported 2019 letter to Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics doctor now serving decades in prison for sexually abusing female athletes.
In particular, they highlighted one of the letter’s most lurid sections, which claimed that “our president” (Trump was president in 2019) shared a “love of nubile young girls.”
The Wall Street Journal published a post on the social media platform X just before 1 p.m. that treated the letter as gospel.
One of the documents in the second batch of Epstein files is a handwritten letter mailed to fellow sex offender Larry Nassar. Prison officials logged it in 2019 after Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
It claimed President Trump shared “our love of young, nubile girls.”
Roughly 30,000… pic.twitter.com/6JscdZAtIu
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 23, 2025
A social media post from Forbes also published the quote before acknowledging “the Justice Department has disputed claims” about Trump.
Jeffrey Epstein, in a letter addressed to the convicted USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, wrote “our president” shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” while the Justice Department has disputed claims made against President Donald Trump.
Read more: https://t.co/b5UqtmffCq… pic.twitter.com/dPY0oy3MxP— Forbes (@Forbes) December 23, 2025
TMZ, the celebrity news site that occasionally makes forays into real news when it suits its target audience (like the relations of the Reiner family before Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife were killed, allegedly by son Nick), also treated the letter’s existence as an unquestioned fact.
There was no mention in the post of Justice Department misgivings.
Jeffrey Epstein wrote a letter to Larry Nassar before committing suicide, saying our President shares our love of “young, nubile girls.”
Details: https://t.co/Ku2LDzNyNx pic.twitter.com/YkOUzNw6t8
— TMZ (@TMZ) December 23, 2025
Yet by mid-afternoon Tuesday, the DOJ had published a post declaring in no uncertain terms that: “The FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”
The FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE. The fake letter was received by the jail, and flagged for the FBI at the time. The FBI made this conclusion based on the following facts:
-The writing does not appear to match Jeffrey…
— U.S. Department of Justice (@TheJusticeDept) December 23, 2025
The post listed reasons to conclude that the letter was not from Epstein at all, including that it was postmarked three days after Epstein’s notorious death in a federal prison cell in Manhattan.
It was postmarked in Virginia — not exactly close to Epstein’s last known — and very publicly documented — place of residence at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
The handwriting in the letter also did not match Epstein’s, according to the DOJ post.
Any one of these reasons would be enough to sink the story of the “Epstein letter,” but by the time they were out, reports were already flying.
To be fair, all three of the posts cited here contained links to coverage by the media outlets that did contain reservations, or reasons to at least doubt the veracity of the “Epstein letter,” but the percentage of readers who actually click on links versus simply reading posts has to be minuscule.
So the damage was out there, and the damage was done.
In one sense, of course, this is understandable. In the world of instant media, the old, venerable slogan of “get it first, but first get it right” that governed news coverage for decades (at least in theory) is as dead as yesterday’s newsprint.
Online news outlets with social media accounts care about getting it first. “Getting it right” is almost optional. When the governing ethos of generating news does not include ensuring facts are true before publication, fiascos are going to happen.
But there’s also no questioning the fact that it was Donald Trump at issue had something to do with the recklessness involved.
Bill Clinton is a former president whose involvement with Epstein has been copiously documented (and whose willingness to engage in questionable sexual activity — and lie about it — is a national joke). But it’s virtually impossible to imagine Forbes coming out with a post about Clinton sharing a “love of nubile young girls” with Epstein and Nassar.
If it had been Barack Hussein Obama, Americans would never have heard about it — from any establishment news outlet.
Coverage now should turn to the origin of the letter. Who was it that was well placed enough, and hated Donald Trump enough, to go to such pains to plant “incriminating” evidence as some kind of time capsule of malice to damage the 45th and now 47th president? (Maybe it was the same person who did the supposed Trump-Epstein “birthday” present.)
Don’t expect that to be happening, because the target here was Trump. And anytime it’s Trump — a man who’s been an object of loathing by the mainstream political press for more than a decade — it’s a different story.
If nothing else, the years have proven that when Trump is involved, clearly, there are some stories that are too good to check.
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