Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist. Especially Epstein.
Jay O'Brien, John Parkinson, and Lauren Peller at ABC:
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, a key member of President Donald Trump's Cabinet, is facing bipartisan calls to resign over new revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Documents released by the Justice Department late last month show Lutnick remained in contact with Epstein as recently as 2018, years after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes including soliciting prostitution from a minor.
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Lutnick, who lived next door to Epstein for over a decade, previously suggested he had distanced himself from Epstein back in the mid-2000s prior to Epstein's conviction in 2008.
"So, I was never in the room with him socially, for business or even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn't going because he's gross," Lutnick said on the "Pod Force One" podcast back in October.
"That's my story. A one and absolutely done," Lutnick said.
But one email from Epstein's schedule for May, 1, 2011, showed plans for drinks with Lutnick.
And in December of 2012, other documents showed Lutnick and his family planned to visit Epstein's private island. That same month, both Lutnick and Epstein invested in the same business, according to legal documents.
Jack Blanchard and Dasha Burns at Politico:
WHAT WE’RE ALL READING: Ten days on from the DOJ’s mass dump of Epstein files data, the revelations keep coming. The files thus far have largely exposed a murky world of conspiring elites with questionable moral standards.
Digital democracy: And we are witnessing this through the prism of an entirely new phenomenon — an internationally crowdsourced scandal, unfolding in real time across your social media feed. In many cases, citizen journalists have been nearly as capable as professional journalists and investigators at finding insightful documents within the millions of DOJ files and bringing them to the fore.
Parlor games: Washington being what it is, the universal access to raw investigative data has given rise to another new fad. People are also scouring the Epstein files for references to their bosses, their corporate rivals, their political enemies — even their own families. Gossip about some of the highest-profile revelations had been swirling in D.C. circles for days in advance, uncovered by the associates of those involved. Plenty of people are hunting not for criminal behavior, but for the intrigue.
“We are all searching the files: for colleagues, competitors, clients,” one well-connected PR operative tells POLITICO’s Daniel Lippman. “It’s shocking to see what some of the most powerful people in the world say to each other in private — and it’s also shocking how many folks we know are mentioned in some capacity, even completely innocuously.”
