WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump, who once said admiringly that sex-trafficking child rapist Jeffrey Epstein liked women “on the younger side,” may need new explanations for his ties with his late friend, now that his old ones have been debunked as lies.

Ever since Epstein’s conviction on a Florida prostitution charge in 2008, Trump has been claiming that he knew nothing about his close friend’s relationships with underage girls — claims that were directly refuted in emails made public Wednesday from Epstein himself to his associate and fellow sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and journalist Michael Wolff.

“These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that Trump did nothing wrong,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday. “This is truly a manufactured hoax by the Democrat Party.”

In the emails released by House Oversight Committee Democrats with victims’ names redacted, which the committee obtained by subpoenaing Epstein’s estate, Epstein and Maxwell expressed concern in 2011 that Trump, who was then talking about running for president in 2012, had not yet mentioned them.

“i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote. “[VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there”

Maxwell answered back: “I’ve been thinking about that...”

In a 2019 email to Wolff, Epstein wrote: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

A person holds open pages of the book "Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice" by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein's main accusers.

NIKLAS HALLE'N/AFP via Getty Images

Leavitt said the victim in the email to Maxwell was Virginia Giuffre, who later said Trump had not done anything untoward with her. Giuffre was recruited by Maxwell at age 16 and died by suicide earlier this year.

Neither Leavitt nor others in her office would answer whether Epstein’s specific, 14-year-old assertion ― that Trump had spent “hours” at Epstein’s home with one of the victims ― was correct.

On Tuesday, Leavitt’s colleague Abigail Jackson blamed Democrats and HuffPost for not doing more to help Epstein’s victims. “Democrats and the media — including the Huffington Post — knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents,” she said.

In fact, Trump’s White House and Justice Department have worked aggressively to prevent any further release of information about Epstein, who was found dead in his jail cell following his second arrest in 2019, or Maxwell, who was transferred to a minimum security “Club Fed” type of prison following her meeting with top DOJ official Todd Blanche. Blanche, prior to taking that job after Trump’s return to the White House, worked as one of Trump’s defense lawyers in his various criminal cases.

White House officials referred detailed questions about Maxwell’s transfer to the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas, to the DOJ and its Bureau of Prisons.

The department has never, over a period of months, responded to HuffPost queries on that topic. The Bureau of Prisons would not answer specific questions but did point to a bureau manual — a manual that suggests Maxwell’s transfer to Bryan violated the bureau’s own rules because of the nature of her crimes and the remaining length of her 20-year sentence following her conviction in 2021.

Minimum-security prisons like Bryan are designed for white-collar criminals who are within months of their release dates and have programs to help transition back into society, including arrangements for working unsupervised in the local community for hours at a time. Maxwell has a release date 12 years away. Despite this, according to a letter written to Trump by Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, she has been afforded extraordinary treatment at Bryan, including special meals delivered to her and access to a puppy to play with.

Trump, prior to Epstein’s first arrest, had little but praise for him.

“I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out pardoning Maxwell — he says he is allowed to do so — while also providing false and misleading explanations about the events that led to his break with Epstein.

This summer, Trump began claiming that he ended his friendship with Epstein after he learned that Epstein was hiring away staff from Trump’s Palm Beach country club Mar-a-Lago to join what turned out to be Epstein’s underage sex ring.

“He did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again,’” he told reporters during a golf vacation to Scotland. “He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata.”

That hiring away of staff began no later than 2000, however, which was when Giuffre was recruited by Maxwell in the Mar-a-Lago parking lot. It was a full seven years before Trump finally ended Epstein’s Mar-a-Lago membership.

When HuffPost asked him why it took seven years to break with Epstein, Trump said: “I don’t understand your question.”