Tolerating Scandal

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. Oppo is part of the story.But scandal does not cut the way it used to.

Erin Doherty at POLITICO:

Americans are largely tolerant of scandals among politicians. But nobody is more willing to stick by an embattled candidate than a MAGA voter.

The POLITICO Poll finds President Donald Trump’s MAGA supporters are the most loyal of any group of voters — with majorities saying they would stick by GOP candidates confronted with an array of scandals, from a DUI conviction or accepting lobbyist gifts to more serious accusations including domestic violence, sexual assault and antisemitic social media posts.

Two-thirds of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say they would continue supporting a GOP candidate accused of sexual assault — 13 percentage points higher than the share of Trump 2024 voters writ large, which include those who do not identify as MAGA. By comparison, 40 percent of voters who backed former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 would continue backing a Democratic candidate accused of sexual assault.

This article is part of an ongoing project from POLITICO and Public First, an independent polling company headquartered in London, to measure public opinion across a broad range of policy areas.


Seventy-two percent of MAGA Trump voters say they would stick with a GOP candidate accused of domestic violence, more than 10 percentage points higher than the overall share of Trump 2024 voters who would back a GOP candidate (61 percent). Thirty-nine percent of Harris voters say they’d stick with a Democrat accused of domestic violence.

Platner Plotzes

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

The Guardian:

Graham Platner, the embattled Democratic nominee for US Senate in Maine, has been accused of trying to influence the process of picking his replacement amid a chorus of calls for him to withdraw from the race.

Platner has publicly said he is “taking the time to reflect on the best path forward” after an allegation of sexual assault, which he denied, was published on Monday.

A wave of prominent Democrats, from the progressive senator Bernie Sanders to the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, urged him to stand aside.

The Maine election is seen as a key component of the party’s effort to regain control of the US Senate in November’s midterm elections. Platner remains in the race, for now.

A senior state Democrat declared on Tuesday evening that Platner’s campaign would have “no role” in selecting his replacement, claiming that his team had tried to sway the process.

Devon Murphy-Anderson, executive director of the Maine Democratic party, said: “Graham Platner’s team has repeatedly reached out to us in an attempt to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like. We have repeatedly reiterated to Graham Platner’s team that they have no role in determining our next Democratic nominee for the US Senate, nor in determining what this process looks like.

Hans Nichols and Holly Otterbein at Axios:

Republicans are preparing to welcome a potential Graham Platner replacement in Maine's Senate race with $8 million in negative ads, aiming to introduce a new Democratic nominee to voters on their own terms before Democrats can.

Why it matters: Republicans are doing something Democrats wish they could: Move on from Platner.

The progressive candidate, who said Monday he is taking time to "reflect" on his next steps, remains officially in the race and is looking to leverage his status as the Democratic nominee to influence who could replace him.

Republicans, meanwhile, see an opening: three weeks to prepare a campaign against a Democratic nominee who will have little time to introduce themselves to voters.

Driving the news: Pine Tree Results, the super PAC backing Republican Sen. Susan Collins, raised $10.5 million during the first half of the year — matching what it raised during the same period in 2025, according to a person familiar with the matter.The group pulled its anti-Platner ads Tuesday and has $8 million in cash on hand to define a likely fresh Democratic nominee for voters during a compressed campaign.

Among the donors to the pro-Collins super PAC is Blackstone president Jon Gray, a longtime Democratic donor. He contributed $250,000 well before Politico and CNN reported sexual assault allegations against Platner.

Trump v. Republicans in Congress

Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional,  state, and local elections.

Trump is acting without regard for the political needs of Republicans in Congress.  An unpopular war is just part of it. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen at Axios:

• The big picture: Trump has spent his second term steamrolling his own party, confident the lawmakers he humiliates will keep voting his way. You see it everywhere:He canceled the signing of a landmark bipartisan housing bill just hours before the ceremony — trying to strong-arm the Senate into passing the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter ID bill with no realistic path to 60 (or even 50) votes.
• He dismissed the housing bill — which his own White House had called "one of the most significant pieces of housing affordability legislation in American history" — as "of minor importance."
• He berated the "Four Republican Losers" in the Senate who voted this week to rein in his Iran war powers, calling the rebuke "poorly timed and meaningless." (Hours after his barrage, Republicans passed a symbolic reversal.)
• He blew up a bipartisan scramble aimed at renewing the government's FISA surveillance powers, demanding the SAVE Act on voting rules be bolted on. He let the authority lapse rather than back down.
• He yanked his own intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, from a confirmation hearing hours before it began, leaving the nation's spy agencies under an acting director both parties distrust.
• He refused to brief Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and other senators on his Iran deal until after the text was finally released, leaving them to defend terms they hadn't seen.
• He blindsided senators by proposing a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund just as they moved a $70 billion immigration package, defending Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the building where the senators work.

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."

Swalwell Aftershocks

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Dakota Smith and Nicole Nixon at LAT:

• Former Rep. Eric Swalwell appeared positioned to lead California’s Democratic gubernatorial field after powerful state institutions and Newsom allies rallied behind the anti-Trump darling before his campaign’s sudden collapse.
• Explosive allegations that Swalwell sexually assaulted a former staffer and acted inappropriately with other women prompted his exit from the race and resignation from Congress, allegations he denies.
• Democratic leaders and the groups that backed him — including labor unions and interest groups — now face scrutiny over whether they missed red flags or ignored warnings about his rumored behavior.

Why did it take so long for the allegations to become public?  Mark Z. Barabak, also at LAT:

If the allegations are true and Swalwell is, in fact, a liar, lecher and sexual assailant, why wasn’t that widely reported up until now? Was it negligence, or gullibility on the part of the political press corps? The short answer is that a wide gulf exists between rumor and fact and Swalwell lurked in that gray space, living and thriving in the shadows between provability and denial.

It’s not unusual for rumors about financial, sexual or other peccadilloes to attend a campaign. They’re often trafficked by political rivals, which automatically raises suspicion and invites particular skepticism.

Much of the chatter never moves past a relatively small, dishy circle of political gossips because the supposed misdeeds, while titillating, can’t stand up to rigorous scrutiny. Or a legal challenge. That’s the baseline for many news outlets to broadcast or publish a story. Call them what you will — legacy, corporate, mainstream, lamestream — many of the largest, most influential sources of news and information won’t pass along allegations they can’t independently verify and, if necessary, defend in court.

The challenge is verifying all that loose talk.

Politicians don’t wear body cams, or broadcast their lives 24/7. (OK, Beto O’Rourke did livestream from a Texas laundromat during his 2018 Senate bid, holding up a soggy pair of underwear when he addressed the “boxers or briefs” question. But he’s an exception.)

Journalists don’t have subpoena power and can’t force people to tell them what they know. A reporter is only as good as his or her sources, their knowledge, truthfulness and credibility.

Reporting on misdeeds of an intimate nature can be especially difficult and complex. There’s rarely black-and-white documentation, such as a money trail leading to a hotel bedroom. It’s hard to find an eyewitness or reliable third party who can vouch for what took place between people behind closed doors. It takes time and trust to develop sources who can substantiate incidents of sexual misconduct, assault or abuse.

Swalwell Scandal

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections. 

Seema Mehta,  Dakota Smith and Nicole Nixon at LAT:

Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic front-runner in the hotly contested California governor’s race, is facing mounting calls to drop out of the contest after he was accused of sexual assault and misconduct by a former staff member and other women in reports published on Friday.

A woman who worked for the Northern California congressman said they had a consensual relationship at times, but that he sexually assaulted her twice when she was too inebriated to consent, according to a report by the San Francisco Chronicle. Three other women also have accused Swalwell of sexual misconduct, including sending unsolicited nude photos, according to CNN.

The allegations have Swalwell’s campaign teetering on collapse, with powerful labor organizations and other major supporters pulling their endorsements and canceling political ads promoting the once-promising candidate. Prominent Democrats — including U.S. Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra and former Orange County Rep. Katie Porter — are among the politicians who called on him to rdrop out of the race.

Riley Rogerson at Politico:

The situation presents a predicament for the sitting House Democratic leaders, who have insisted on letting a full Ethics Committee investigation play out before supporting formal discipline against another House Democrat accused of misconduct, Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-Fla.).

Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar of California did not speak directly to consequences in the House in a joint statement.

But House Republicans were already discussing by Friday evening the likely scenario that one of their own members will bring a censure effort against Swalwell, according to three people granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said in an interview that she was weighing a censure and other action against Swalwell based on the reports of sexual assault allegations against him.

Luna said she would act “if there is evidence brought forward.”

 

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.

 

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.

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 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.

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

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

Trump Scandals, Mid-November

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. 

Michael Gold at NYT:

House Democrats on Wednesday released emails in which Jeffrey Epstein wrote that President Trump had “spent hours at my house” with one of Mr. Epstein’s victims, among other messages that suggested that the convicted sex offender believed Mr. Trump knew more about his abuse than he has acknowledged.

Mr. Trump has emphatically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation. He has said that he and Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019, were once friendly but had a falling out.

But Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said the emails, which they selected from thousands of pages of documents received by their panel, raised new questions about the relationship between the two men. In one of the messages, Mr. Epstein flatly asserted that Mr. Trump “knew about the girls,” many of whom were later found by investigators to have been underage. In another, Mr. Epstein pondered how to address questions from the news media about their relationship as Mr. Trump was becoming a national political figure.

Jeffrey Epstein in 2018: "i know how dirty donald is." pic.twitter.com/JYUscFmjdW

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) November 12, 2025

 

Kevin Breuninger at CNBC:

President Donald Trump has doled out dozens of executive clemency grants in the past few weeks alone, issuing pardons and commutations to major business figures, political supporters and other allies.

Some hope he’s just getting started.

Trump started wielding his presidential mercy powers aggressively on the first day of his second term, when he pardoned roughly 1,500 people who were charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Presidential pardons erase federal criminal convictions, while commutations shorten or cancel prison sentences, and sometimes related fines.

In subsequent months, clemency recipients have included a slew of well-known names, including former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, ex-Hunter Biden business partner Devon Archer, Nikola founder Trevor Milton, reality TV stars Julie and Todd Chrisley, disgraced former U.S. Rep. George Santos and Binance founder Changpeng Zhao.

On Monday, Trump granted largely symbolic pardons to more than six dozen people who were involved in efforts to overturn his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race, U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin revealed on social media. The people included in the batch of pardons are not facing federal charges related to the 2020 election. The presidential pardon power does not extend to state-level prosecutions.

That group includes Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s onetime personal lawyer and former New York City mayor, as well as his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

 

The Smoking Birthday Drawing

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

Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo at WSJ:

Lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s estate have given Congress a copy of the birthday book put together for the financier’s 50th birthday, which includes a letter with President Trump’s signature that he has said doesn’t exist.

On Monday, House Oversight Committee members confirmed that they received a copy of the birthday book including the letter bearing Trump’s signature and a second letter that references Trump with a crude joke about a woman from another Epstein associate.

The Wall Street Journal in July reported on the book and the letter bearing Trump’s name, which contained typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman. The letter concluded: “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.” The signature was a squiggly “Donald” below the waist, mimicking pubic hair.

Trump has denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, calling it “a fake thing.” He also filed a lawsuit against the Journal’s reporters, Journal publisher Dow Jones, parent company News Corp and executives, alleging defamation and saying the letter was “nonexistent.” A Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.” 

THE DOCUMENTS ARE HERE.

Michael Gold at NYT:

The book is a collection of letters, photographs and drawings from dozens of Mr. Epstein’s associates bound into three volumes spanning more than 200 pages. While some of the messages contain mundane birthday wishes, others offer a window into a misogynistic circle of wealthy men fixated on women and sex. Many of them included suggestive stories or crude references to Mr. Epstein’s sexual appetites, and some indicated that his friends had at least some sense that he was engaged in inappropriate behavior.

Mr. Trump is mentioned in a letter in the book that appears to have been written by Joel Pashcow, the former chairman of a real estate company in New York. A photo above the letter includes a large mock check, made to look as if it is being paid from Mr. Trump to Mr. Epstein for $22,500. Beneath it, a handwritten caption referring to Mr. Epstein’s “early talents with money and women” claims that the photo shows Mr. Epstein selling a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump.

The woman’s name and photo are redacted in the caption and the image. Lawyers for Mr. Epstein’s estate told the committee that they removed the names and photos of women and minors who appeared in the book in order to ensure that any potential victims of Mr. Epstein could not be identified, according to a copy of a letter to the committee that was viewed by The Times.