Trump's Predator Problem

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

 Kelsey Dallas and Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Monday announced that it will not hear an appeal by President Donald Trump seeking review of the $5 million jury verdict entered against him in the sexual abuse and defamation case filed by journalist E. Jean Carroll. The petition for review was conferenced by the justices for the first time on June 25 after being scheduled for a conference in February and then rescheduled more than a dozen times.

Carroll filed the lawsuit that led to Trump’s petition in 2022 in a federal court in New York. She asserted that Trump had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at a Manhattan department store in 1996 and then defamed her in 2022 after she went public with her assault allegations. A jury ultimately awarded Carroll $5 million, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld that verdict.

Marilyn W. Thompason at The Guardian:

A woman known as Jane Doe 4 in the Jeffrey Epstein files is “staying off the grid” and lives in fear of retaliation from the Trump administration amid an escalating controversy over its handling of her case, according to a family member.

“Trauma is brutal. Chronic trauma destroys,” said the relative, who described the woman’s life as layers of abuse dating back to early childhood. “She’s coping as best she can.”

The woman had four interviews with FBI agents in 2019 that keep resurfacing in the Epstein sex-trafficking scandal. She made unproven allegations she was abused by the New York financier in the 1980s, then sexually assaulted by Donald Trump, when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The White House has called her allegations “completely baseless” and “backed by zero credible evidence”, a claim it said was supported by the fact that the Biden administration’s justice department knew about the allegations but “did nothing with them”.

She is one of the only alleged Epstein victims to have directly accused Trump, and irregularities in the justice department’s handling of her case files have now become a rallying point for critics of acting attorney general Todd Blanche, who is the US president’s nominee for permanent appointment.

A federal judge in Washington last week gave Blanche until 2 July to produce unredacted versions of files the justice department has already released, or provide an explanation for why it cannot produce the unredacted records. The Department of Justice (DoJ) was also ordered to release interview notes related to Jane Doe 4’s allegations. The decision was part of a civil case against Blanche brought by journalist Katie Phang.

 

Epstein and the Midterm

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Several top Democratic candidates in the midterms are airing scathing ads linking their Republican foes to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — betting that the Trump administration's reluctance to release the Epstein files still resonates with voters.

Why it matters: Democrats are mostly focusing on high prices, health care and Trump's war against Iran, but some also are trying to tie Republicans to the late sex offender as part of a broader message accusing the GOP of protecting the corrupt elite.

Zoom in: In the hotly contested Ohio Senate race, Democrat Sherrod Brown has spent nearly $1.5 million on TV ads slamming his GOP rival, freshman Sen. Jon Husted, for previously taking donations from Epstein financial client Leslie Wexner, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.
...

Graham Platner, the presumptive Democratic nominee in the Maine Senate race — a must-win contest for the party's hopes of gaining a majority in the Senate — also is making anti-Epstein messaging part of his strategy to unseat Republican Sen. Susan Collins.In a six-figure TV ad, Platner accuses Collins of selling out voters to "the president and to the Epstein class," as an old video of Epstein and Donald Trump flashes across the screen.

In Georgia's Senate race — one of the GOP's best opportunities to flip a seat this year — Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) likewise has argued in speeches and media interviews that Trump's administration is made up of "the Epstein class."

The Day of Melania

 Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

Stephen Collinson at CNN:

The most plausible explanation for first lady Melania Trump’s out-of-the-blue address on the Jeffrey Epstein drama was that she was trying to make it go away.

But her stunning on-camera statement Thursday from the White House Cross Hall — the spot where her husband last week spoke to the nation about the Iran war — will almost certainly have the opposite effect.

“I am not Epstein’s victim. Epstein did not introduce me to Donald Trump,” she said, in a statement that was all the more remarkable since there had been no widespread public speculation about the matter in recent days.

It brings to mind this scene in All the President's Men (which premiered exactly 50 years earlier).

Howard Simons: Did you call the White House press office?

Bob Woodward: I went over there; I talked to them. They said Hunt hadn't worked there for three months. Then a PR guy said this weird thing to me. He said, "I am convinced that neither Mr. Colson nor anyone else at the White House had any knowledge of, or participation in, this deplorable incident at the Democratic National Committee."

Howard Simons: Isn't that what you expect them to say?

Bob Woodward: Absolutely.

Howard Simons: So?

Bob Woodward: I never asked about Watergate. I simply asked what were Hunt's duties at the White House. They volunteered he was innocent when nobody asked if he was guilty.

The Streisand Effect, according to Wikipedia:

The Streisand effect describes a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.

 Bill Kristol:

Melania’s focus was on . . . Melania. She began, “The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today.” Her purpose, she said, was to defend “my reputation,” to clear “my good name.” (Emphasis mine.)

And so she asserted that “I have never been friends with Epstein” and that “I . . . was never on Epstein’s plane.” She also claimed that “My email reply to [Epstein’s imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine] Maxwell cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence.1 My polite reply to her email doesn’t amount to anything more than a trivial note.”

Left unsaid, but not unimplied, was that none of these claims could be made about her husband. He was a pal of Epstein’s. He was on Epstein’s plane. His relationship with Epstein, as exemplified for example in his contribution to Epstein’s birthday book, was more than “casual” or “trivial.”

Melania also chose to express concern for Epstein’s victims, something her husband has conspicuously not done.

And she went on to say that

Now is the time for Congress to act. Epstein was not alone. Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized. Of course, this doesn’t amount to guilt, but we still must work openly and transparently to uncover the truth.

So the Epstein investigation is not, as her husband has asserted, a “hoax.” Nor is it yet time, as her husband has said, to move on. The truth hasn’t yet been uncovered, and we need to uncover it. And if doing so leads more “prominent male executives” to resign, so be it. One wonders: Could Melania have one prominent male chief executive in mind?

Melania chose not to include in her statement any assertion of her husband’s innocence of complicity in the Epstein affair.

Melania is perhaps not a deep thinker, but she’s no fool. Since immigrating to the United States three decades ago, Melania Knauss has done well for herself. She’s shown that she has a shrewd sense of how to operate in her adopted country. She’s risen to the top, while mostly avoiding being directly engulfed in all the scandals that have raged around her.

 

Bye Bye Bondi

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

 Josh Dawsey et al. at WSJ:

On Wednesday morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi descended the sun-splashed steps of the White House with President Trump, smiling at him just before entering the presidential limousine for a two-mile ride to the Supreme Court.

It was on that short ride in “The Beast” when Bondi learned she was being removed from her job.

During the drive, Trump told her, “I think it’s time,” she would later tell an associate.

The ensuing hours were as awkward and chaotic as Bondi’s 14-month tenure as the nation’s top law-enforcement official. Trump and Bondi briefly sat near each other during the Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship, but the president soon switched chairs. Later, Bondi would ask Trump if she could keep her job until the summer. The president declined.

Trump had decided earlier in the week that he was replacing her. He was frustrated she didn’t do more to contain fallout from the department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files and incensed that she had not successfully prosecuted a number of his political enemies. Trump has floated Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin as attorney general to other advisers but hasn’t decided on anyone, according to White House officials. He is also interested in evaluating how soon-to-be interim Attorney General Todd Blanche performs, they said.

Bondi and Trump had talked about her leaving since around the beginning of the year, according to a person familiar with the discussions, and he had regularly expressed dissatisfaction with the speed at which she handled his agenda. She is expected to leave the Justice Department in about a month.

On numerous occasions, she seemed to go out of her way to appease him, launching what many prosecutors in the department viewed as weak probes of Trump’s favored targets. Some of those cases were later blocked by judges or grand juries. The Justice Department even had a giant banner with Trump’s face on it hung on its main building, an unprecedented move that illustrated his control over the agency. Last week, she appointed a prosecutor to look into allegations of election fraud in 2020 in a bid to address another gripe the president had.

It was never enough.

Trump Coalition

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments -- now including a war in the Middle East.

Ian Ward at Politico:

With the 2026 midterms fast approaching, those divides have fueled speculation that MAGA voters might defect en masse from the GOP in November. But that’s not the primary threat facing the Trump coalition: Recent polling suggests that self-identified “MAGA Republicans” are standing firmly with Trump on the war and a host of other divisive issues, underscoring the stubborn reality that — as Trump has pithily put it — “MAGA is me.”

Yet as several conservative commentators have recently pointed out, Trump didn’t win reelection in 2024 merely on the strength of MAGA voters. His winning coalition paired his core MAGA constituency with a broader constellation of other non-traditional Republican constituencies — disillusioned Democrats and “MAHA moms” and “manosphere” podcast bros among them.

It is that broader Trumpian coalition — rather than the core base of MAGA supporters — that some Trump backers fear has been endangered by Trump’s policy choices. As the conservative activist Mike Cernovich put it this week, “A generational coalition, squandered.”

The issues:

• Iran
• Antisemitism 
• Immigration
• Epstein files
• MAHA
• AI
• Gender politics
• Identity

The Epstein Story Isn't Going Away

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Scandals persist.  Especially Epstein.

 Julie K. Brown and Claire Healy at Miami Herald:

Three FBI interviews that contain graphic sexual and physical assault allegations against President Donald Trump were released Thursday by the Justice Department. The reports were follow-up interviews a woman gave to the FBI in 2019, when the agency was investigating Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking crimes.

There is no indication in the reports whether the FBI was able to verify her claims. The White House on Thursday called the woman’s allegations “baseless.” But a DOJ source told the Miami Herald that agents found her to be credible – and that they would not have interviewed her four times if they thought she was lying. In the end, she declined to cooperate with their investigation, and they lost touch with her, the source said.

Favour Adegoke at Yahoo:

Federal investigators have released a new legal document that contains several suspicious findings in relation to Epstein's death by suicide.

According to the New York Post, one of the guards tasked with monitoring Epstein's tier, Tova Noel, searched for the latest update on the sex offender just moments before he was found dead by hanging in his cell, and also made an unexplained bank deposit of $5,000 ten days prior.

Noel was one of the officers who were accused of falsifying records to claim they checked on Epstein throughout the night of his August 10, 2019, suicide.

However, the document reveals that she googled "latest on Epstein in jail" at 5:42 am and then again at 5:52 am. It was about 40 minutes after her colleague, correctional officer Michael Thomas, found Epstein dead.

The document notes that Noel also searched for furniture online and reportedly missed out on completing her routine checks on Epstein, while Thomas checked for motorcycles.

Pushback Against Trump

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.   But there are some green shoots, too.

Mike Allen at Axios:

Look how 2026 has started for Trump, and the new pushback he faces, as synthesized by Axios' Zachary Basu:

⚖️ Retribution: A federal grand jury unanimously rejected the Justice Department's attempt to indict six Democratic lawmakers over a video they made urging service members to refuse unlawful orders. It's at least the fifth time that charges against Trump's adversaries or protesters have been turned away by a grand jury. A federal judge also shut down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's attempt to punish Navy veteran Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) over his role in the video.
🚨 ICE raids: Trump's border czar Tom Homan announced an end to the 10-week ICE surge in Minneapolis yesterday. The president acknowledged his mass deportation campaign could use a "softer touch."
🪖 National Guard: Trump withdrew federalized National Guard troops from L.A., Chicago and Portland after repeated legal defeats and opposition from local leaders, dealing a blow to his efforts to crack down on crime in Democratic-run cities.
📦 Tariffs: Six House Republicans joined Democrats to pass a resolution rescinding Trump's tariffs on Canada. The vote became possible only after a smaller group of Republicans staged a floor rebellion against GOP leadership.
🗂️ Epstein files: Trump's push to shut down MAGA's Jeffrey Epstein obsession backfired spectacularly. The Justice Department is still grappling with backlash, with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) voicing rare criticism over revelations that DOJ tracked what lawmakers searched while reviewing the unredacted files.
📽️ Racism: A chorus of Republicans, led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), condemned Trump's reposting of a video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. The White House initially defended the decision to post the video, but removed it from Trump's account, blaming a staffer. Later, the president said he "didn't make a mistake."
🇩🇰 Greenland: Trump dominated Davos last month with his threats to seize Greenland by any means necessary — only to retreat amid market turmoil, European fury, warnings from congressional Republicans, and a vague "deal" promising the U.S. greater access to the Arctic territory.
🏦 Fed: The DOJ's criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell has drawn deep skepticism from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who has vowed to block confirmation of Powell's successor, Kevin Warsh, unless the probe is dropped.

Epstein Files, Continued

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.

...

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.”

Epstein Files Release

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.

Aaron Blake at CNN:

President Donald Trump’s name shows up a lot in the latest batch of files, which includes material ranging from investigative documents to emails to news clips. A few of the mentions stand out so far.

First is an email chain from August 2025 in which an apparent FBI employee displays a list of apparently unsubstantiated tips involving Trump and Epstein – many of them quite salacious.

“Yellow highlighting is for the salacious piece,” one official writes to explain how the allegations were being sorted.

Trump has never been accused by law enforcement of Epstein-related wrongdoing, and he has denied engaging in any.

The allegations appear to be unverified, and the officials note that some are secondhand information. The document notes that in many instances, there was no contact made with the individuals who sent in the allegations, or no contact information was provided.

Some of the allegations were followed up on. One was sent to the FBI’s Washington field office to conduct an interview, and another was deemed not credible, according to the document.

There are also allegations made in the document against former President Bill Clinton, who has denied wrongdoing related to Epstein.


Two files featuring that particular email were later removed temporarily from DOJ’s website then restored. A DOJ official said the document had gone down “due to overload.”

It’s not clear why officials created the list of allegations related to Trump last year. But the political sensitivities of Trump’s proximity to Epstein – with whom he associated for years before Trump said he ended their relationship in the mid-2000s – were made abundantly clear last year when Trump at one point falsely denied having been told his name was in the files.

MTG's Epiphany (No Joke)

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.

Robert Draper at NYT:

Eleven days after Charlie Kirk was killed in September, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the third-term Georgia congresswoman, was watching his memorial service on TV as the luminaries of the conservative movement and the Trump administration gathered to pay tribute to the young activist.

What stayed with Greene long afterward were the last two speakers who took the stage. First there was Kirk’s widow, Erika, who stood in white before the crowd filling the Arizona stadium, lifted her tear-filled eyes and said that she forgave her husband’s killer. And then there was President Trump. “He was a missionary with a noble spirit and a great, great purpose,” he said of Kirk. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene wrote to me in a text message months after the memorial service. And the contrast between Erika Kirk and the president was clarifying, she added. “It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

...

This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

...

 Greene’s last exchange with the president was by text message on Nov. 16. That day, she received an anonymous email in her personal Gmail account that threatened her college-aged son: “Derek will have his life snuffed out soon. Better watch his back.” The email’s subject heading used the nickname Trump had given her the day before: “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

Greene promptly texted that information to the president. According to a source familiar with the exchange, his long reply made no mention of her son. Instead, Trump insulted her in personal terms. When she replied that children should remain off limits from their disagreements, Trump responded that she had only herself to blame.

Trump's identification with Christianity is nothing but a label. He literally does not understand Christian teachings 

Epstein Files Releases

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.

David Enrich at NYT:

In a 2020 email released on Monday by the Justice Department, a federal prosecutor informed colleagues that President Trump’s name appeared on the flight logs for Jeffrey Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware).”

The email, written in January 2020 by an unidentified federal prosecutor in Manhattan, noted that Mr. Trump was listed as a passenger on Mr. Epstein’s jet at least eight times from 1993 to 1996, including a few instances in which other passengers apparently included young women. The prosecutor wrote the message for “situational awareness” and “didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road,” according to the email.

The frequency of Mr. Trump’s travel on Mr. Epstein’s planes may have been news to prosecutors at the time, but the trips have since become public knowledge.

The logs tracking the comings and goings of Mr. Epstein’s planes, as well as their passengers, were exhibits in the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, one of Mr. Epstein’s closest associates. They show that Mr. Trump was among numerous prominent individuals — including former President Bill Clinton — who were repeat passengers.

Last year, Trump lied through his teeth about flying on Epstein's plane:

Willa Pope Robbins at Mediaite:

Information released by the Department of Justice in some of the files surrounding convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was not properly redacted, with blacked-out text becoming visible with a simple copy and paste.

When the DOJ posted documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act on its website beginning Friday in accordance with the midnight deadline, the level of redacted information drew instant outrage.

But as more information continued to be released, amounting to nearly 30,000 documents, some viewers found that blackout intended to protect sensitive information was easily sidestepped by simply copying the text into a separate document

In 2019, Paul Manafort's lawyers made the same mistake. 

 

Epstein Redactions

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.

Joe Walsh at CBS:

The Justice Department released thousands of new records on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Friday, but at least 550 pages in the documents are fully redacted, CBS News has found.

The newly released files included photos of several prominent people in Epstein's orbit, images from his homes and investigative records that detail disturbing allegations against the late sex offender. But the heavy redactions in many of the records have drawn criticism from Democrats and some Republicans, as the department defends its handling of the files.

One series of three consecutive documents — totaling 255 pages — is entirely redacted, with each page covered by a black box. A fourth 119-page document labeled "Grand Jury-NY" is also entirely redacted. It's unclear what proceedings it stemmed from, but the document listed immediately before it is a transcript in which a prosecutor asks a grand jury in 2020 to consider evidence for a superseding indictment of Epstein's convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Epstein Update Mid-December

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.

Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate at NYT:

But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.

Beginning in the late 1980s, the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend, The Times found. Mr. Epstein was then a little-known financier who cultivated mystery around the scope and source of his self-made wealth. Mr. Trump, six years older, was a real estate scion who relished publicity and exaggerated his successes. Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.

Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes.

With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.

“I just think it was trophy hunting,” Stacey Williams, who rose to fame as a star of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions during the 1990s, said in an interview with The Times. In social media posts and interviews with news outlets in recent years, Ms. Williams has described how Mr. Trump groped her in 1993 at Trump Tower while Mr. Epstein — whom she was then dating — watched. “I think Jeffrey liked that he had this Sports Illustrated model who had this name, and that Trump was pursuing me,” she said. Mr. Trump has denied her account.

To shed light on their friendship, The Times interviewed more than 30 former Epstein employees, victims of his abuse and others who crossed paths with the two men over the years. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship and scoured court documents and other public records.

Many of the people interviewed by The Times asked to share their stories anonymously, saying they feared for their safety at the hands of supporters of Mr. Trump, a president who has deployed the might of the federal government to target and punish his political opponents. Some Epstein victims have already received death threats for demanding a full accounting of the government’s investigations, according to a statement released by more than two dozen of them last month.

Bad November for Trump

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is has been full of ominous developments.

Chris Megerian at AP:

Thanksgiving may not provide Trump with much political respite after Democrats won sweeping victories in New Jersey, Virginia and elsewhere earlier this month. Some research indicates that holiday meals could cost more this year , despite the president’s insistence otherwise , a reminder of persistent frustration with elevated prices.

Meanwhile, Trump is struggling to advance a plan to end the Russian invasion of Ukraine after an earlier version faced swift criticism from European allies and even some Republicans. The U.S. military is also poised to target Venezuela with military strikes, part of an anti-drug operation that could ultimately destabilize the country’s leadership. [CBS poll finds 70% would oppose an attack on Venezuela.]

In Washington, Trump faces the possibility of a splintering Republican coalition ahead of next year’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress. Some members of his party already took the rare step of crossing the president by successfully pushing legislation to force the Justice Department to release more documents about the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Trump faced a setback in court this week when a federal judge tossed cases against James Comey and Letitia James, two targets of the president’s retribution campaign.

Releasing the Files?

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. 

Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck and Theodoric Meyer at WP:

On Tuesday, the House and Senate agreed to pass a bill calling on Attorney General Pam Bondi to release all unclassified information and files related to the sprawling sex trafficking investigation into the onetime powerful financier.

The Justice Department so far has continued to say nothing about how it would respond to that demand. There are many reasons to doubt that a bulk release of the files is imminent.

If President Donald Trump wanted Bondi to release all of the Epstein files, he could have ordered her to do so at any point in the past six months. He didn’t.

On Sunday, when Trump did an about-face and said House Republicans should vote in favor of releasing the Epstein files, he notably did not say he favored releasing them. Instead, he said in a social media post that the House “can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!”

What Congress is “legally entitled to” is a more complicated question than the rhetoric from Capitol Hill might imply.

The legislation that Congress agreed to pass Tuesday gives the Justice Department a few exceptions under which it can refuse to release material. Among them: If release “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution.”

On Friday, Trump ordered Bondi to launch a new federal investigation related to Epstein — this one aimed at his ties to several prominent Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, megadonor Reid Hoffman and former treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers. Bondi said the top federal prosecutor in New York City would take on the task.

That investigation could become a reason for the Justice Department to block release of many files. Bondi and her deputies have previously said they cannot release information about active investigations.

 

Epstein Stonewalling: Perverse Effects

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. 

At Politico, Jack Blanchard and Dash Burns report:

The House of Representatives will vote today to release the Epstein files, and the outcome is already a dead cert. After Donald Trump’s dramatic U-turn on Sunday, Republicans are expected to support the effort from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) en masse. And as Dasha revealed last night, the White House now expects this bill to become law. What a world.

But because there are still ways for the administration to withhold or redact files, suspicions will not go away.

How different the summer and autumn could have been for Trump if he’d picked a different approach. On the podcast this morning, Dasha characterizes this as the “double-edged sword” of the president’s “attack, attack, attack” mentality: It is, after all, this same aggressive resilience that propelled him back into the White House for a second term. But it doesn’t always serve him well in the day to day.

After months of high-profile political rows, the Epstein files are now a mainstream cause — witness the survivors’ ad that aired during Monday Night Football last night; paid for by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. These things don’t come cheap.

And what we’ve seen so far has already been damaging for Trump. There’s been no smoking gun, but that image in Epstein’s birthday book — the one Trump still insists he had nothing to do with — will not fade from public memory. And people now believe Trump knew about Epstein’s crimes. A new Morning Consult poll shared with Playbook shows 60 percent of Americans think Trump knew what Epstein was up to, compared to just 15 percent who believe he did not. It’s not a great look.

Epstein, Epstein, Epstein

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.

Erica L. Green, Glenn Thrush, and Alan Feuer at NYT:

When a trove of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails were made public this week, Donald J. Trump’s name was all over them. But on Friday, when Mr. Trump demanded that the Justice Department investigate a list of powerful men mentioned in the emails, his own name was nowhere to be seen — he had singled out only Democrats.

Equally remarkable was how quickly Attorney General Pam Bondi acquiesced to his demand, even though four months ago the Justice Department formally declared that nothing in the Epstein files warranted further investigation.

That about-face, as much as any action Ms. Bondi has taken this year, demonstrated the near-complete breakdown of the Justice Department’s traditional independence to prosecute cases based on facts and the law, as opposed to presidential fiat. And, crucially, it could foreclose any further disclosures of the Epstein files.

...

Ms. Bondi’s decision to press forward with the investigation is a complete turnaround from a memo issued by the Justice Department and the F.B.I. in July, which said that officials had thoroughly scrutinized the Epstein files and had found nothing in them that could sustain opening further inquiries into anyone else.

Still, if an investigation into any one of the targets suggested by Mr. Trump were to ultimately start, it could allow the Justice Department to refuse to release any further files related to Mr. Epstein by claiming that the disclosures could harm continuing inquiries.

In his social media post connecting Democrats with Mr. Epstein, Mr. Trump named Mr. Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and the venture capitalist and megadonor Reid Hoffman

 

President Trump just attacked me and lied about me. I haven’t called him at all, but I did send these text messages today. Apparently this is what sent him over the edge.

The Epstein files.

And of course he’s coming after me hard to make an example to scare all the other… pic.twitter.com/EcUzaohZZs

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) November 15, 2025

Trump calls Marjorie Taylor Greene “Marjorie Traitor Green” on Truth Social. Is Speaker Johnson ok with this? pic.twitter.com/2S2PNz8F20

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) November 15, 2025

MAGA Grumbling

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.

Hannah Knowles at WP:

MAGA leaders erupted this week over President Donald Trump’s assertion that the United States needs foreign workers because it does not have enough “talented people,” questioning the president’s commitment to the “America First” politics he popularized.

A congressional push to release the government’s files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — a years-long cause on the right — moved forward against the wishes of the White House, even as Republicans overwhelmingly dismissed newly released emails Epstein wrote, including some about Trump.

And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a longtime Trump ally, sparred with the president on multiple fronts after suggesting that the White House was too focused on foreign affairs and denouncing recent aid to Argentina.

Trump Botches Epstein Messaging

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. 

Marc Caputo at Axios:

Four months ago, President Trump blocked the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Wednesday's disclosure of thousands of Epstein emails showed why.

Why it matters: The emails contained no real smoking gun. But they shed new light on the relationship between the two men, with gossipy, unflattering descriptions of Trump by Epstein.

Trump was put into a defensive crouch as the news dominated conversation on Capitol Hill, television and social media.

The tranche of emails released by the House Oversight Committee all but ensured the GOP-run chamber would bend to public pressure and vote for a measure to release the investigative records Trump has tried to keep hidden.The White House lobbied two key Republicans on Wednesday to drop their support for the effort, to no avail.

The big picture: Trump's reaction to the Epstein scandal is a window into how he handles major controversies that invite criticism about his leadership.Whether it's a question about the current affordability crisis, COVID in 2020 or the Russia probe in 2017, he has a penchant for pushing back against attacks by calling them Democratic hoaxes or con jobs.

He then tries to kill the controversy with such a heavy hand that it helps keep the story alive.

 

One reason why the Epstein stuff won't go away is that this is one of the rare instances where Trump is concealing and dissembling just like a normal politician trying to conceal dark deeds. Normally Trump is outrageously brazen. He commits many of his worst acts very publicly…

— David French (@DavidAFrench) November 13, 2025