Tag Archives: Jeffrey Epstein

Alternet: Trump’s reckoning may be right around the corner — here’s why

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Trump’s possible connection to convicted sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein — who allegedly died by suicide in prison — may be the one thing that undermines his base of support and causes his Republican loyalists in Congress to turn on him. This makes it politically explosive.

With Congress now returning from August recess and the media and Congress looking into “Epsteingate,” the issue will either grow or disappear in the next few weeks.

Roughly half of the country now believes that Trump was involved in crimes committed by Epstein, according to recent polls. And more than two-thirds believes that the Trump administration is hiding information about Epstein.

Before the 2024 presidential election, both Trump and JD Vance called for the release of files related to Epstein. On February 21, Attorney General Pam Bondi, in an appearance on Fox News, said the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”

But the Trump regime still hasn’t released any trove of “Epstein files.” In fact, on July 7, the Justice Department released a memo saying it had found “no incriminating ‘client list’” for Epstein, directly contradicting Bondi.

Then came publication by The Wall Street Journal of what it said was a risqué birthday note Trump wrote to celebrate Epstein’s 50th birthday, prompting Trump to claim that “the supposed letter they printed by President Trump to Epstein was a FAKE. These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures.” The next day, Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against Journal over its coverage of his relationship with Epstein, including the birthday note that Trump says he didn’t write.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s co-defendant who was convicted of sex trafficking minors and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Late Friday, the Justice Department released transcripts of that interview in which Maxwell praises Trump, claims she never saw Trump engage in improper or illegal acts during his long friendship with Epstein, and that there’s no hidden list of powerful clients.

Maxwell’s credibility is questionable. She has a big incentive to tell Trump and his lackeys exactly what they want to hear because she has been trying to overturn or reduce her sentence. Right after her interview she was transferred to a minimum-security prison, a highly unusual move for a convicted sex offender.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee has received the first tranche of the Justice Department’s documents in response to its subpoena for all Epstein-related files. Democrats on the Committee claim that fewer 3 percent of the documents are new.

“Epsteingate” has all the hallmarks of a cover-up. Will it bring Trump down? Here are three likely scenarios:

1. Epsteingate keeps growing until it reveals a “smoking gun” that brings Trump down. Assume Trump continues to try to deflect attention from his connection with Epstein by, for example, occupying several American cities and threatening war with Venezuela. Yet the more he tries, the more evidence of his involvement with Epstein mounts. Eventually, a “smoking gun” emerges that forces even Trump loyalists in the House and Senate to vote to impeach and convict him.

2. Nothing comes of it, although it continues to percolate. Periodically, a damaging headline emerges, as more evidence comes out about Trump’s close connections to Epstein. But Trump and his lackeys continue to deflect attention from the stories. His loyalists in Congress refuse to probe any deeper into the issue. He distracts the media with so many controversial neofascist maneuvers that the stories never become a full-blown threat to Trump.

3. The whole Epstein story is a distraction from Trump’s neofascist moves. In reality, the Epstein story is a continuing distraction from what Trump is really doing — his takeover of the nation’s public and private sectors and his alliance with Putin to carve up the world. Every time a new story emerges about the connection between Trump and Epstein, the Trump regime takes more initiatives that violate the laws and the Constitution, but they do so not to distract from his Epstein connection but to take advantage of the public’s obsession with Epstein to bury the regime’s horrific moves.

Trump’s reckoning may be right around the corner — here’s why

https://www.alternet.org/trump-epstein-reckoning-2673924289

MSNBC: ‘Victims and MAGA base feel betrayed’: Committee to question official who oversaw Epstein plea deal

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‘Victims and MAGA base feel betrayed’: Committee to question official who oversaw Epstein plea deal
The House Oversight Committee announced Monday that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta will appear voluntarily before the panel next month as part of its investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/victims-and-maga-base-feel-betrayed-committee-to-question-official-who-oversaw-epstein-plea-deal/vi-AA1LfDVG

USA Today: Elise Stefanik booed off podium at local event

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The Republican congresswoman went to a small New York town to honor the death of a local politician. She wasn’t exactly welcomed.

Elise Stefanik isn’t usually the one in the hot seat.

The Republican congresswoman from New York has built her no-holds-barred political brand around grilling college presidents during congressional hearings.

But it was her turn to face intense public scrutiny on Aug. 18, when she was met with a wave of loud boos from the crowd during an event to honor a late local politician in the town of Plattsburgh. The jeering, which went viral, was so bad that she gave up on speaking and passed the microphone back to others on stage.

“Shame!” protesters shouted, along with “Unseal the Epstein files!”

“It is a disgusting disgrace that this is what the far left does,” she later told a local news outlet.

It’s the latest instance of a GOP lawmaker encountering unhappy consituents in recent months. Anger over the economic impact of tariffs, the president’s new tax and spending law and cuts to the federal workforce has prompted a series of acrimonious town halls across the country.

The Democratic National Committee siezed on the moment, writing in a post on X: “That’s what happens when you sell out your constituents to Donald Trump.”

The moment comes at a changing political time for Stefanik as she eyes a run for governor of New York state. President Donald Trump pulled her nomination to be ambassador to the United Nations earlier this year.

It sucks to be a Republican these days!

Elise Stefanik booed off podium at local event
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-New York, was rankled by protesters who shouted her down at an event in the town of Plattsburgh.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/19/elise-stefanik-gets-booed-off-stage/85722064007

Daily Beast: Trump, 79, Tells Smithsonian to Stop Saying ‘How Bad Slavery Was’

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The president is annoyed that America’s history museums say “nothing about the future.”

President Donald Trump says the war on woke is not dead yet.

POTUS posted a bizarre screed on Tuesday about museums in Washington, claiming the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL” and is fixated on the shortcomings of yesteryear, like documenting the horrors of slavery.

“The Museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE,’” he wrote on Truth Social. “Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

Trump, 79, has vowed to rid museums of the “woke” he claims infests them. In doing so, he has pushed the more vital issues of today—like brokering a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, or releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files, a pair of campaign promises—to the back burner.

“I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities, where tremendous progress has been made,” Trump said. “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE. We have the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and we want people to talk about it, including in our Museums.”

It is unclear if Trump intends to bully museums into displaying current matters—like how the U.S. is supposedly the “hottest” country in the world—instead of exhibiting, preserving, and interpreting objects of historical or scientific significance.

Trump did not elaborate on how he intends for museums to display “the future.”

The president’s complaints did not go unnoticed by lawmakers. California congresswoman and Congressional Black Caucus Whip Sydney Kamlager-Dove retweeted Trump’s message with her own, which stated: “Slavery WAS bad, Donald. It’s absurd that this even needs to be said.”

“We don’t whitewash history,” she continued, “we learn from it.” Before adding: “You keep trying to rewrite the past—@TheBlackCaucus won’t let you get away with it.”

Slavery WAS bad, Donald. It’s absurd that this even needs to be said.

We don’t whitewash history; we learn from it.

You keep trying to rewrite the past— @TheBlackCaucus won’t let you get away with it. https://t.co/CoVc7LqY5b— Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (@RepKamlagerDove) August 19, 2025

The president’s threat to unleash lawyers on American museums is akin to how he went after U.S. universities, like Harvard, which refused to bend to his demands and axe programs he deems problematic, like diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Harvard, as a result of its defiance, has been cut off from federal funding. Trump will likely try to do the same to D.C.’s popular Smithsonian museums if changes are not made—though it is unclear what, exactly, the president is upset about.

Trump announced last week that the Smithsonian Institution, which is funded by the federal government, was being put under review to make sure its exhibitions are in line with MAGA’s view of American history.

The White House’s pressure on the Smithsonian is already being felt. It ordered the institution to erase references to Trump’s first-term impeachments in the exhibit “A Glorious Burden” last month.

The National Museum of American History briefly removed Trump from its impeachment exhibit, but told USA Today it did so to improve its appearance, not because the administration ordered it to. The paper reports that references to the impeachments have since been returned to the exhibit.

Trump Tells Smithsonian to Stop Saying ‘How Bad Slavery Was’
The president is annoyed that America’s history museums say “nothing about the future.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-79-tells-smithsonian-to-stop-saying-how-bad-slavery-was

HuffPost: This Republican Governor Has Declined To Send National Guard Troops To D.C.

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Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott has declined to send the state’s National Guard to Washington, D.C., noting that he didn’t believe it to be a proper use of these troops. 

“In the absence of an immediate emergency or disaster that local and regional first responders are unable to handle, the governor just does not support utilizing the guard for this purpose, and does not view the enforcement of domestic law as a proper use of the National Guard,” Scott’s chief of staff Jason Gibbs told Vermont Public on Friday. 

Scott is the rare Republican leader who’s refused to bow to the Trump administration’s requests as the president has deployed National Guard and federal law enforcement to address what he’s described as a spiraling crime crisis in the capital. In reality, data shows that violent crime rates in the district have declined in 2024 and 2025, and Trump’s efforts have been criticized by Democrats as a “stunt” designed to distract from other controversies his administration is grappling with, like the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Scott’s decision followed a Pentagon request for a “few dozen” of the state’s troops, according to Gibbs, and comes as six Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana, have authorized the deployment of their National Guard to D.C. in the last week. 

All told, Trump has already deployed 800 National Guard troops to the city, and the states’ contributions could put that number upwards of 1,700. 

It’s not evident why more troops have been requested from different states and what function they will serve upon their arrival in D.C. 

A spokesperson for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told the Associated Press that the state’s National Guard would “assist with monument security, community safety patrols, protecting federal facilities, and traffic control.” Some troops “may be armed,” a Guard representative said Sunday.

“In this case, because it is being hyperpoliticized, the governor doesn’t feel like — and I believe the vast majority of Vermonters don’t feel like — it would be an acceptable and appropriate use of the National Guard,” Gibbs added in his comments to Vermont Public. 

A Scott spokesperson and a White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to provide additional comment. 

Gibbs noted that Scott would have viewed the situation differently if D.C. leaders had called for federal aid, which was not the case this time around. On Friday, the D.C. attorney general sued the Trump administration for its federal takeover of the leadership of the district’s police force. 

“This doesn’t make sense. The numbers on the ground and the district don’t support 1,000 people from other states coming to Washington, D.C.,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Monday. 

This also isn’t the first time that Scott has pushed back on the Trump administration’s attempts to use the state’s National Guard. Previously, Scott rejected a Defense Department request to utilize Vermont’s National Guard to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at detention facilities. 

This Republican Governor Has Declined To Send National Guard Troops To D.C.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/this-republican-governor-has-declined-to-send-national-guard-troops-to-d-c/ar-AA1KLFeF

Alternet: Trump’s worst crimes and destructions haven’t even happened yet | Opinion

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The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”

He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.

Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.

If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.

Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”

His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.

The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.

Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.

There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.

If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.

Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.

With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.

Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.

Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”

Trump’s worst crimes and destructions haven’t even happened yet | Opinion

https://www.alternet.org/trump-s-worst-crimes-and-destructions-haven-t-even-happened-yet

The Atlantic: The President’s Police State

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Trump is delivering the authoritarian government his party once warned about.

For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny. An FBI search of Mar-a-Lago? The weaponization of law enforcement.

Now that a president is actually sending federal troops and officers out into the streets of the nation’s cities, however, the right is in lockstep behind him. This morning, Donald Trump announced that he was declaring a crime emergency, temporarily seizing control of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying the D.C. National Guard to the nation’s capital.

“This is liberation day in D.C.,” Trump said. Nothing says liberation like deploying hundreds of uniformed soldiers against the wishes of the local elected government. District residents have made clear that they would prefer greater autonomy, including congressional representation, and they have three times voted overwhelmingly against Trump. His response is not just to flex power but to treat the District of Columbia as the president’s personal fiefdom.

Trump’s move is based on out-of-date statistics. It places two officials without municipal policing experience in positions of power over federalization and the MPD, and seems unlikely to significantly affect crime rates. What the White House hopes it might achieve, Politicoreports, is “a quick, visually friendly PR win.” Trump needs that after more than a month of trying and failing to change the subject from his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein.

But what this PR stunt could also do is create precedent for Trump to send armed forces out into American streets whenever he declares a spurious state of emergency. Some of Trump’s supporters don’t seem to mind that fact: “Trump has the opportunity to do a Bukele-style crackdown on DC crime,” Christopher Rufo, the influential conservative personality, posted on X, referring to Nayib Bukele, the Trump ally who is president of El Salvador. “Question is whether he has the will, and whether the public the stomach. Big test: Can he reduce crime faster than the Left advances a counternarrative about ‘authoritarianism’? If yes, he wins. Speed matters.”

Rufo seems to view everything in terms of a political battle to be won via narratives; the term authoritarianism appears to mean nothing to him, and maybe it never meant anything to others on the right who assailed Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Democratic governors. It does have a real meaning, though, and Bukele is its poster boy. Despite the constitution having banned it, he ran for a second term in office; his party then changed the constitution to allow “indefinite” reelection. Lawmakers in his party also brazenly removed supreme-court justices, and his government has forced journalists into exile and locked up tens of thousands of people without due process. This is apparently the America that Chris Rufo wants.

To justify the crackdown, Trump has cited an alleged carjacking attempt that police records say injured the former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. But MPD has already arrested two Maryland 15-year-olds for unarmed carjacking. That’s good news. Carjacking is a serious crime and should be punished. But Trump has used the incident to claim that violent crime is skyrocketing in Washington. This is, put simply, nonsense. During a press conference today, Trump cited murder statistics from 2023, and said that carjackings had “more than tripled” over the past five years. He didn’t use more recent numbers because they show that these crimes are down significantly in Washington. Murder dropped 32 percent from 2023 to 2024, robberies 39 percent, and armed carjackings 53 percent. This is in line with a broad national reduction in crime. MPD’s preliminary data indicate that violent crime is down another 26 percent so far this year compared with the same timeframe in 2024, though as the crime-statistics analyst Jeff Asher writes, this drop is probably overstated.

Trump’s descriptions of Washington as a lawless hellscape bear little resemblance to what most residents experience. Not only is D.C. not “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World,” as Trump claims, but his prescription seems unlikely to help. He said he is appointing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to help lead the federalization effort and MPD, but neither has any experience with municipal policing. They have not said what they will do differently. If the administration deploys its forces to high-profile areas such as the National Mall, they won’t have much impact on violent crime, because that’s not where it happens; if they go to less central areas with higher crime rates, they won’t get the PR boost they seek, because tourists and news cameras aren’t there.

Throughout his two presidencies, Trump has treated the military as a prop for making statements about which issues he cares about—and which he doesn’t. He deployed the D.C. National Guard during protests after the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. Earlier this summer, he federalized the California National Guard and sent Marines to Los Angeles to assist with immigration enforcement, but they were sent home when it became clear that they had nothing to do there. Yet according to testimony before the January 6 panel, Trump did not deploy the D.C. National Guard when an armed mob was sacking the U.S. Capitol in 2021 to try to help Trump hold on to power.

Good policing is important because citizens deserve the right to live in safety. Recent drops in crime in Washington are good news because the district’s residents should be able to feel safe. But Trump’s militarization of the city, his seizure of local police, and his lies about crime in Washington do the opposite: They are a way to make people feel unsafe, and either quiet residents’ dissent or make them support new presidential power grabs. Many of Trump’s defenders are angry when he’s called an authoritarian, but not when he acts as one.

The President’s Police State
Trump is delivering the authoritarian government his party once warned about.

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/08/trump-national-guard-dc/683839

MovieMaker: South Park Keeps Up Kristi Noem Mockery With Pet Store Massacre Sequence

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South Park kept up its mockery of Kristi Noem by sharing an unaired sequence in which the Homeland Security Secretary visits a pet store and opens fire on the animals.

The sequence is a riff on Noem telling the story in her memoir, No Going Back, of the time she shot and killed an “untrainable” dog named Cricket because he was misbehaving and killing a local family’s chickens.

“I hated that dog,” she wrote, adding that killing Cricket “was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done.” She uses her killing of the dog as a metaphor for her willingness to perform unpleasant tasks.

Her current job includes overseeing ICE raids, which earned her derision in last week’s episode of South Park, in which a cartoon version of Noem was shown shooting and killing dogs in in an instruction video for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mocking her dramatic appearance makeover before she joined the Trump Administration, South Park also showed the former South Dakota governor in heavy makeup. At one point her face melts from apparently deflated Botox.

South Park shared the new pet shop end-credit sequence on X, explaining that it didn’t air on Comedy Central, but does appear on Paramount+.

Noem responded to last week’s episode of South Park on conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s podcast: “It’s so lazy to just constantly make fun of women for how they look. … If they wanted to criticize my job, go ahead and do that. But clearly they can’t — they just pick something petty like that.”

Noem became the head of the DHS in January, and has been accused of staging reality show-type events to draw headlines.

South Park Keeps Up Kristi Noem Mockery With Pet Store Massacre Sequence
South Park kept up its mockery of Kristi Noem by sharing an unaired sequence in which the Homeland Security Secretary visits a pet store and opens fire on the
South Park Keeps Up Kristi Noem Mockery With Pet Store Massacre Sequence

Independent: Trump team weighs releasing Ghislaine Maxwell’s interview with DOJ officials over Epstein case: report

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It was not previously known that such a recording existed, but a final decision in whether to release it or not has yet to be made

The Trump administration is considering publicly releasing an audio recording of an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and senior officials from the Department of Justice about Jeffrey Epstein, according to a new report.

It was not previously known that such a recording existed, and officials are currently discussing whether or not to release a transcript of the discussion between the British socialite and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Maxwell, 63, was the disgraced financier’s ex-girlfriend, and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after her 2021 conviction for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple girls. Her attorneys have taken an appeal of her conviction to the Supreme Court.

The interview between the socialite and the DOJ came following ongoing pressure on the administration to be more transparent over the Epstein case, following a July 6 memo which stated that convicted pedophile died by suicide in 2019 and there was no evidence to support the existence of a so-called “client list.” Such claims caused uproar among the MAGA faithful.

Sources told CNN that the audio recording was currently being transcribed and digitized, but that some parts that may reveal sensitive information – like the names of victims – would need to be redacted.

The outlet reported that as of Tuesday morning, a final decision on whether to release the recording and the transcript, had not been made.

CNN also reported that, per its sources, some within the administration were concerned that making details from the interview public would bring the Epstein controversy back into the public spotlight, when many officials close to the president believe the story has largely died down.

When asked for comment by The Independent, the administration denied that any such decisions were being made about the transcript, and that Trump had already addressed the issue.

In a statement, Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director, said: “This is nothing more than CNN trying desperately to create news out of old news. He already addressed this issue in an interview with Newsmax, a real news outlet that routinely gets better ratings than CNN.”

Discussions about the recordings and transcript come after the DoJ admitted that the grand jury transcripts in Maxwell’s criminal case, contain mostly publicly available information.

Trump previously asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to make public “any and all pertinent” grand jury transcripts in both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, in order to stymie the ongoing furore.

A judge overseeing Maxwell’s case asked the government to provide more information to the court. The department provided a version of the transcripts that identifies which information is not publicly available. However, Bondi admitted in a Monday filing that “much” of the information in the transcripts was already made publicly available.

Trump weighs releasing Ghislaine Maxwell’s Epstein interview with DOJ: report
It was not previously known that such a recording existed, but a final decision in whether to release it or not has yet to be made

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/ghislaine-maxwell-doj-interview-epstein-b2802282.html

Raw Story: Trump said to be getting ‘what he deserves’ as judge he ‘detests’ assigned to Epstein case

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A judge hated by Donald Trump was just assigned a major case seeking to get the Trump administration to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein, according to analysts.

Commentator Brian Tyler Cohen published a video over the weekend featuring former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner. The video, called “Trump gets what he DESERVES in court over Epstein,” the two media analysts discuss Trump drawing Judge Chutkan in the Epstein case brought under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

In an article called “Judge Detested by Trump Will Oversee Epstein Files Case,” The New Republic recently pointed out Chutkan’s history of upsetting Trump when she presided over his criminal trial in D.C.

Kirschner said he is “sure” that the Trump lawyers are “less than thrilled” that she’s the judge.

Trump said to be getting ‘what he deserves’ as judge he ‘detests’ assigned to Epstein case

https://www.rawstory.com/trump-what-he-deserves-chutkan