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Photo: Clinton Presidential Library

Last week, Congress released more than 2,300 emails Jeffrey Epstein sent and received between 2008 and 2019. The most substantial revelation, as highlighted by Democrats in the first leak, was that the late sex offender once said of Donald Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls.”

But a 2018 email Mark Epstein sent to his brother, Jeffrey, may ultimately have the most impact. The one-sentence question about someone named “Bubba” has gone viral, spawning a new conspiracy theory and forcing us to ponder appalling questions we never thought we would.

Specifically, did Donald Trump have sexual relations with that former president, Bill Clinton?

The evidence for this theory, such as it is, is this one March 2018 email exchange. Mark checks in with Jeffrey, asking, “How are you doing?” Jeffrey says he’s with Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief of staff. Then Mark says, “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?”

To many, this was obviously a joke. In March 2018, questions about whether the Russians had footage of Trump engaging in taboo sex acts were very much part of the national conversation. Days before the email was sent, The New Yorker published a story that began:

Of all the allegations about Donald Trump contained in the ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s infamous “dossier,” the most notorious remains a secondhand report that Trump consorted with prostitutes in 2013 while staying in the Presidential suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, in Moscow, and that, at his request, the prostitutes urinated on a bed in which President Barack Obama and his wife had previously slept.

“Bubba” is a well-known nickname for Clinton. The former president was impeached over an affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky. His defense partly rested on his claim that receiving oral sex does not count as “sexual relations.” Thus, Mark Epstein was conflating two presidential sex scandals to humorous effect.

But some people weren’t alive in 1998, and it shows.

By Friday, posts asking “Who is Bubba?” were going viral and search terms like “photo of Trump and Clinton” were exploding. A lot of the engagement with this tale of star-crossed presidential romance was clearly just about the LOLs; multiple Trump-Clinton montages set to Chappell Roan songs were posted to TikTok, and there was even a Bubba reference on Saturday Night Live.

However, some online posters seemed to think the email had actually exposed a shocking new angle in the longtime feud between Trump and the Clintons. A video of Trump grabbing Clinton’s crotch was suddenly all over the internet (the image of Trump and Clinton golfing together in 2020 is real, but the handsy video it spawned is AI-generated). In an interview with The Advocate, U.S. representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, called the “Bubba” message a “very, very interesting email” and suggested we simply can’t tell “what that’s in reference to” without more context.

“There’s a massive cover-up at the White House and the DOJ right now over the files,” he said. “Those are the documents that we need for us to fill in the blanks and actually put this together.”

But while Jeffrey Epstein is dead (and has absolutely no credibility), conveniently that is not true of the person who actually sent the emails. On Sunday, Mark Epstein released a statement to the Daily Beast, Newsweek, and other outlets saying he was just joking.

“Recently, emails from 2018 between my brother and me were made public. They were simply part of a humorous private exchange between two brothers and were never meant for public release or to be interpreted as serious remarks,” Mark said.

Okay, case closed! But the statement continued, “For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former President Bill Clinton.”

And then Ali Clark, a spokesperson for Mark, told The Advocate in an email that Bubba is “a private individual who is not a public figure.”

So who is this other Bubba? Do we really have to go down a rabbit hole on Ghislaine Maxwell’s horse? And how does the line “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?” make sense if it isn’t a reference to the Lewinsky scandal?

We may never have the answers to these questions. But Mark Epstein’s broader point is clear: He was definitely not suggesting Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were involved in a torrid romance.

The White House has not addressed the Bubba email specifically. (When People asked for comment, it replied with a statement broadly dismissing the Epstein emails as a “hoax” and a “distraction.”) However, these two TikTok videos posted on Friday do seem to say, “For the record, the president is madly in love with his wife, a woman who is not Bill Clinton.”

“Take My Breath Away” is actually kind of a gay song choice, but maybe Trump is reclaiming it as an extremely heterosexual presidential anthem, just like “Y.M.C.A.”

Trump Did Not Have Sexual Relations With ‘Bubba,’ Bill Clinton

Trump Did Not Have Sexual Relations With ‘Bubba,’ Bill Clinton