FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News on Wednesday that the federal government is in no “rush” to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein and the so-called Epstein Files.
https://www.newsweek.com/jeffrey-epstein-files-kash-patel-fbi-bondi-2078537
When Hillary Clinton was first lady, a furor erupted over reports that she had once made $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures. Even though it had happened a dozen years before her husband became president, it became a scandal that lasted weeks and forced the White House to initiate a review.
Thirty-one years later, after dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Jeff Bezos agreed to finance a promotional film about Melania Trump that will reportedly put $28 million directly in her pocket — 280 times the Clinton lucre and in this case from a person with a vested interest in policies set by her husband’s government. Scandal? Furor? Washington moved on while barely taking notice.
The Trumps are hardly the first presidential family to profit from their time in power, but they have done more to monetize the presidency than anyone who has ever occupied the White House. The scale and the scope of the presidential mercantilism has been breathtaking. The Trump family and its business partners have collected $320 million in fees from a new cryptocurrency, brokered overseas real estate deals worth billions of dollars and are opening an exclusive club in Washington called the Executive Branch charging $500,000 apiece to join, all in the past few months alone.
Just last week, Qatar handed over a luxury jet meant for Mr. Trump’s use not just in his official capacity but also for his presidential library after he leaves office. Experts have valued the plane, formally donated to the Air Force, at $200 million, more than all of the foreign gifts bestowed on all previous American presidents combined.
And Mr. Trump hosted an exclusive dinner at his Virginia club for 220 investors in the $TRUMP cryptocurrency that he started days before taking office in January. Access was openly sold based on how much money they chipped in — not to a campaign account but to a business that benefits Mr. Trump personally.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/us/politics/trump-money-plane-crypto.html
Circuit Judge James Ho issued a blistering concurrence Tuesday, taking aim at the Supreme Court and other courts’ “special treatment” for illegal immigrants in legal proceedings.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued an order to expedite the oral arguments of a challenge to the deportation of a group of Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act in Texas. The order came after the Supreme Court vacated the appellate court’s previous ruling, saying it lacked jurisdiction, and denied a bid by the migrants’ lawyers to temporarily stop President Donald Trump’s administration from deporting the group of foreign nationals under the AEA.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-judge-slams-supreme-court-after-ruling-2075295
As Republicans in Congress struggle to settle on a megabill they can all agree on, they might want to familiarize themselves with the story of Marjorie Margolies. Her political career stands as a warning to GOP lawmakers, especially those thinking of risking their seats to save President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda.
Three decades ago, Margolies (then Margolies-Mezvinsky) briefly became the most famous first-term member of the House of Representatives. She was elected in 1992 to represent Pennsylvania’s 13th Congressional District — a swing district in Philadelphia’s suburbs — by just 1,373 votes.
The following summer, President Bill Clinton was struggling to push his first budget through the Democratic-controlled Congress. Though the budget raised taxes only on the wealthy, Margolies had promised during her campaign that she wouldn’t vote for any tax increases. In the run-up to the crucial vote, Margolies restated her opposition. But in a phone call with Clinton just before the vote, she told him that if her support was absolutely needed, she would stand with her party.
When it became clear that Margolies’ vote was, in fact, absolutely necessary, she walked down the aisle to cast a “yes” ballot. “One Democrat after another hugged her, patted her on the back and touched her as if she were Joan of Arc,” The New York Times reported at the time. “As she finally voted aye, her Democratic colleagues cheered as the Republicans jeered, ‘Goodbye Marjorie.’”
The GOP never let her constituents forget her critical vote, and she lost her re-election bid the next year. But Margolies wasn’t the only Democrat to lose her seat. When the 1994 midterms took place, Clinton’s approval was about where Donald Trump’s is today. He had gone through a bruising two years of legislative battles over his budget, a bill to ban the sale of assault weapons and a failed attempt at health care reform. And while the U.S. economy was growing, the 1990s boom that buoyed Clinton’s popularity was still a few years away.
The average voter was mildly disgruntled; the Republican base was enraged. Democrats ceded control of the House after 40 uninterrupted years in the majority. They lost 54 seats in the chamber and eight in the Senate, as well as 10 governorships. It was the most lopsided midterm defeat for a president’s party in modern U.S. history.
In recent months, tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, rehired and threatened with firing again.
For now, they have a two-week reprieve, after a federal judge in California ordered the Trump administration not to carry out any additional firings for two weeks, but the administration has asked the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling.
But employees describe weeks of uncertainty, worry and doubt as their jobs are off, then on, then off again.
A federal judge is halting the Trump administration from carrying out, under a February executive order, mass firings or major reorganizations of multiple agencies going forward.
Senior District Judge Susan Illston on Friday evening granted a temporary restraining order sought by federal employee unions, local governments and outside organizations that rely on federal services, who argued the administration was acting outside the bounds of the law. The judge’s order, which lasts two weeks, blocks the administration’s approval or implementation of plans –- known as Agency RIF and Reorganization Plans, or ARRPs – for conducting mass layoffs and for shrinking or eliminating entire components of an agency. She is also pausing any orders from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, cutting programs or staff in accordance with Trump’s executive order and the related directives.
Illston, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton who sits in San Francisco, said at a hearing earlier in the day that presidents have authority to make changes to the government, but when it comes to large scale reorganizations, presidents “must do so with the cooperation of Congress.
- Rumeysa Ozturk ordered released immediately from Louisiana detention center
- Ozturk was detained after pro-Palestinian campus advocacy
- Judge said her detention chills free speech of non-citizens
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to immediately release a Tufts University student from Turkey who has been held for over six weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention facility after she co-wrote an opinion piece criticizing her school’s response to Israel’s war in Gaza.
U.S. District Judge William Sessions during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont, granted bail to Rumeysa Ozturk, who is at the center of one of the highest-profile cases to emerge from Republican President Donald Trump’s campaign to deport pro-Palestinian activists on American campuses.
…
Massachusetts-based Tufts has said it plans to help provide Ozturk housing upon her release. In a statement, a university spokesperson said it hoped she would be able to rejoin its community as soon as possible to resume her doctoral studies.
F*ck y** and rot in Hell, unAmerican *ssh*l* Stephen “Goebbels” Miller:
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller called the judge’s ruling another sign of what he considers a “judicial coup” in the United States. Several parts of the president’s hardline immigration agenda have been blocked by judges.
“We cannot individually litigate every single visa that we want to revoke,” Miller told reporters.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates didn’t mince words in his evaluation of Elon Musk’s role in government, fuming that “the world’s richest man” was “killing the world’s poorest children.”
Speaking with the The Financial Times, Gates expressed his disgust with Musk’s role in shuttering the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one,” said Gates, who told the Times that he’d “love for him [Musk] to go in and meet the children that have now been infected with HIV because he cut” American aid that had been going to a hospital in Mozambique.
https://apnews.com/article/bill-gates-foundation-996819a2c13c58f0c7c658a58374f236
Her crime? She attended a sit-in on March 5, was arrested, given a citation, and released.
21-Year-Old Columbia Student Protester Sues Trump to Stop Deportation – WSJ
