With the latest Jeffrey Epstein revelations, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. There’s so much interesting and scandalous stuff in the tranche of more than 20,000 emails released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week that you can find yourself thinking: “Wait, why does this all matter again?”

Most obviously, it’s about the disgraceful personal conduct of the president himself. There’s no doubt that Donald Trump and his most fanatical supporters will find some tortured way to lie to themselves about this latest damning evidence of his Epstein ties, just like they did with the weird and creepy letter he wrote Epstein for his fiftieth birthday, or with his administration’s Orwellian about-face on releasing what they had on the notorious sex offender.

But for anyone still tethered to reality, Epstein’s statements that Trump “knew about the girls” or asking a New York Times reporter if he wanted “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen” will be further confirmation of what has been a matter of public record for decades: that Trump and Epstein were very close friends for years, and that Trump was, at minimum, fully aware of what the billionaire pedophile was up to.