Lazy Caturday Reads

Posted: August 2, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: authoritarianism, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Prisons, cat art, caturday, concentration camps, Dmitri Medvedev, Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, ICE, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein files, nuclear submarines, Pete Hegseth, Philip Hegseth, Russia, tent cities, Use of military for immigration enforcement | 5 Comments

Good Day!!

Michael Cox, in the style of Amadeo Modigliani

The top stories today focus on Trump’s failing economy and his firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer after she released weak job numbers yesterday. Dakinikat provided a deep dive into the economy yesterday and addressed the firing in the comments to her post, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t spend much time on economic issues, which are not my area of expertise, to put it mildly.

I’m still laser focused on the Epstein/Maxwell story. I’m currently reading Julie Brown’s book on the case, Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, and it is fascinating and enlightening. Brown is was responsible for keeping the case alive–after Epstein received a only slap on the wrist for his crimes–with her investigative stories in the Miami Herald

I’m also concerned about the news that Trump has moved nuclear submarines closer to Russia, perhaps as a threat to Putin and as another attempt at distraction from Epstein/Maxwell news.

Another important story breaking today is about Trump’s plans to further involve the military in his deportation efforts and build more concentration camps to detain migrants.

Two economic stories of possible interest

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board: The Trump Economy Stumbles.

President Trump has now imposed his new tariff regime on the world, and the triumphalism is palpable in MAGA land. But maybe hold the euphoria, as this week’s reports on jobs and the economy suggest the new golden age may take a while to appear.

Friday’s labor report arrived with a particular jolt, with a mere 73,000 net new jobs in July. Even more bearish were the downward revisions of 258,000 jobs in May and June. Job gains over the last three months are barely more than 100,000.

The details in the report provide little solace. The jobless rate ticked up only to 4.25% from 4.1%, but that was in part because the labor force continued to shrink. The labor participation rate fell again to 62.2% and is now down half a percentage point in a year.

Employers aren’t laying off workers, but they have all but stopped new hiring. Notably, most of the new jobs are in healthcare and social assistance, which rely heavily on government spending. This continues the Biden-era trend that Trumponomics was supposed to change. Not so far.

The much-advertised rebirth of U.S. manufacturing also hasn’t arrived. The economy shed 11,000 manufacturing jobs in July, following a loss of 26,000 in May and June. The ISM Manufacturing Index fell again in July to 48, the fifth straight month below 50.

A bit more:

One labor market problem may be the crackdown on migrant workers. The foreign-born workforce has fallen by about a million since Mr. Trump took office. The National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan think tank, says immigrants accounted for over half of the labor force increase in each of the last three decades. Fewer workers means fewer new jobs as employers conclude they can’t fill them.

How much of this jobs and growth slowdown owes to Mr. Trump’s tariffs? It’s hard to say for sure. But it has occurred in the wake of Mr. Trump’s April 2 tariff shock, his rapid backtrack from the highest rates, and then his willy-nilly threats and deal-making with the world. The policy uncertainty has surely affected business hiring and investment. How can you hire or invest if you don’t know what your cost of goods will be, or from which supplier you will be able to buy at a competitive price?

On that score, Mr. Trump’s latest tariff blast this week hasn’t put an end to the uncertainty. Much of the world will now pay 15%, if Mr. Trump sticks to his deals. But some of the biggest U.S. trading partners—Mexico, Canada, China and India—remain in tariff limbo. Brazil will pay 50%, though it has a trade surplus with the U.S. And what did Switzerland ever do to Mr. Trump to deserve 39%? Charge too much for a watch?

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?: Trump Shoots the Messenger. Firing the BLS Commissioner moves us into banana republic territory.

One basic character of the politicization necessary to create an authoritarian regime is that public employees are reluctant to share information that displeases their political bosses. When those bosses can fire them, the incentives to suppress uncongenial information, or provide false information, become overwhelming.

Modigliani’s Cat by Eve Riser Roberts

Over time, life in these countries become bifurcated. Statistics become propaganda. There is an official reality, which many proclaim but few believe, and actual reality. And at some point actual reality catches up with the fantasy.

We have seen examples of this dynamic already play out in the Trump administration. Career civil servants have been reluctant to contradict, for example, Musk’s false claims about fraud in government, or Kennedy’s nonsensical claims about vaccines, knowing that doing so would probably cost them their jobs. In certain areas, such as environmental policy, the people that produce factual information that the administration dislikes are being fired.

Trump just took his attack on reality to a different level, by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why? Because he did not like the job numbers her agency produced.

In related news, we just saw the last credible BLS data for the rest of the Trump administration….

Trump’s claim is that the head of the BLS is somehow “rigged” the data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” “We need accurate Jobs Numbers” that reflect Trump’s opinion that “The Economy is BOOMING.”

As Trump fires an official because he does not like the job numbers, he proclaims that says that such numbers “can’t be manipulated for political purposes.” But revisions to job numbers are routine, and there is no reason to assume that an official would willingly publish false data knowing the ire that would follow from the White House.

Trump has no evidence for what he claims. He simply does not like reality, and will do what he can to deny it. And as tariffs kick in, and Trump’s layoffs of public employees becomes incorporated into jobs data, that reality will look worse and worse.

Read the rest at the Substack link.

Epstein/Maxwell News

Anna Betts at The Guardian: Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell transferred to lower-security prison in Texas.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the associate of Jeffrey Epstein who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, has been transferred from a federal prison in Florida, to a lower-security facility in Texas, the US Bureau of Prisons said on Friday.

“We can confirm, Ghislaine Maxwell is in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at the Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Bryan, Texas,” a spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said in a statement.

Maxwell’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, also confirmed the transfer but declined further comment. FPC Bryan is described as a “minimum security federal prison camp” that houses 635 female inmates.

According to the Bureau of Prisons’ inmate locator, the Texas facility is also home to Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former CEO of the California-based blood-testing company Theranos, who is serving a lengthy sentence for fraud. Real Housewives of Salt Lake City TV star Jen Shah is also serving time there for fraud.

Oh good. Maybe they can all hang out.

Maxwell’s move from FCI Tallahassee, a low-security prison, to the federal prison camp in Bryan comes roughly a week after she was interviewed in Florida over two days about the Epstein case by the deputy US attorney general, Todd Blanche, who is also one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers.

Amadeo Modigliani, by Nancy Alari

Blanche had said that he wanted to speak with Maxwell – who was sentenced in 2022 for sex trafficking and other related crimes – to see if she might have “information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims”.

Details of that meeting have not been made public but Maxwell’s lawyer described it as “very productive”, adding that Maxwell answered the questions “honestly, truthfully, to the best of her ability”.

The interview took place amid growing political and public pressure on the Trump administration to release additional federal documents related to the Epstein case – a case which has, for years, been the subject of countless conspiracy theories.

Earlier in July, the justice department drew bipartisan criticism and backlash after announcing that it would not be releasing any more documents from the investigation into the late Epstein, who died in prison in New York in 2019 while awaiting federal trial. This was despite earlier pledges to release more files, by the US president and the US attorney general, Pam Bondi.

Allison Gill notes that this transfer was highly irregular:

The reason for the move is listed as a “lesser security transfer” (code 308) according to a transfer document I reviewed, which is completely inappropriate of for inmates who are in the early stages of serving their sentences, according to another source. “This is such obvious corruption. I have never seen this before,” said another person at BOP familiar with the situation.

The unit that approves waivers for sex offenders to be moved to minimum security camps is the Designation and Sentence Computation Center near Dallas. Currently, the senior deputy assistant director is Rick Stover, a career BOP employee who speaks frequently with White House officials.

I can’t help but wonder whether this is part of a deal struck between Maxwell and Blanche in exchange for her testimony.

It sure looks like it.

CNBC: Jeffrey Epstein victims and family blast Trump for Ghislaine Maxwell prison transfer.

Two sexual abuse victims of Jeffrey Epstein and the family of late Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre on Friday blasted President Donald Trump after learning that Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell had been transferred to a less restrictive prison in Texas from Florida….

“President Trump has sent a clear message today: Pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter,” the statement said, noting that the two women and Giuffre’s family had not been notified of Maxwell’s transfer before media reports of it….

“It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received,” the statement said.

“Ghislaine Maxwell is a sexual predator who physically assaulted minor children on multiple occasions, and she should never be shown any leniency,” the statement said.

“Yet, without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum security luxury prison in Texas,” the statement said.

“This is the justice system failing victims right before our eyes. The American public should be enraged by the preferential treatment being given to a pedophile and a criminally charged child sex offender. The Trump administration should not credit a word Maxwell says, as the government itself sought charges against Maxwell for being a serial liar,” the statement said.

“This move smacks of a cover up. The victims deserve better,” the statement said.

No kidding. And as we all know, the coverup is usually worse than the crime.

This is interesting, from Alison Detzel at MSNBC: Legal expert breaks down the ‘curious’ timeline of Ghislaine Maxwell’s DOJ meeting.

Before Maxwell’s arrival in Texas was reported, MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin was asked about the interactions between Maxwell and the Trump administration on Thursday’s “Deadline: White House,” and called the timeline “curious.”

Rubin recounted that before that late July meeting between Blanche and Maxwell, the Trump administration, through Solicitor General D. John Sauer, submitted a brief to the Supreme Court arguing Maxwell’s conviction should stand. (Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 after being convicted of sex-trafficking-related crimes.) In that July 14 filing, Sauer shot down Maxwell’s claim that she was protected from prosecution due to Epstein’s 2007 plea agreement in Florida.

But the following day, Rubin recalled, on July 15, Trump was contacted by reporters from The Wall Street Journal about an alleged birthday card he had written to Epstein in 2003. Trump has denied the Journal’s reporting, but the president was inundated with questions about the details of his relationship with Epstein.

One week later, Blanche posted to social media that the Justice Department would reach out to Maxwell for an interview, and later that week, he met with her in Florida.

Rubin noted that the government had “two days of conversations with her, not in the federal prison where she’s serving time, but in a U.S. Attorney’s Office, so she theoretically could be more comfortable during those conversations.”

While we know that the meeting took place, Rubin stressed that many of the details are still unknown: “We still don’t know who else from the Department of Justice was there. We don’t know how that conversation was recorded, if at all. And yet, we still don’t know what the resolution is.”

So what changed? Was it just about the birthday note/drawing? Or did Trump learn something else about how he was portrayed in the FBI files?

Cat in a Hat, inspired by Amadeo Modigliani painting, by Olga Koval

One more Epstein story from Newsweek: Donald Trump’s Name in Jeffrey Epstein Files Redacted by FBI: Report.

The FBI redacted Donald Trump‘s name, along with the names of other prominent public figures, from references in the Jeffrey Epstein files, three people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg‘s Jason Leopold.

Internal directives instructed about 1,000 FBI agents to flag any mention of Trump during a March review of roughly 100,000 pages of records, people familiar with the process told Bloomberg.

The Justice Department said the review turned up no “client list” or evidence linking Trump to criminal activity, despite his name appearing in Epstein’s contact book and flight logs….

The president and senior White House officials have repeatedly said in recent weeks that there was no reason to release the remaining Epstein files, and they have sought to move on from the saga despite calls from Trump’s base to release all documents as promised.

The Bloomberg report said that earlier this year, FBI agents were directed to search for all documents associated with the Epstein case and determine which could be released, totaling tens of thousands of pages, following Attorney General Pam Bondi‘s request for them.

During the review, in March, FBI personnel were said to have identified numerous references to Trump and other high-profile people, with the names then redacted by FOIA officers because they were private citizens at the time—a common practice under FOIA case law.

Trump Moves Nuclear Submarines

Brad Lendon at CNN: Trump is moving nuclear submarines following remarks by an ex-Russian president. Here are the subs in the American fleet.

US President Donald Trump said Friday he was ordering two US Navy nuclear submarines to “appropriate regions,” in response to remarks by Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and current deputy chairman of its Security Council.

In what he called an effort to be “prepared,” Trump said in a Truth Social post that he had “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.”

The president did not specify what type of submarines were being moved or where to, and the Pentagon usually reveals little about any of its subs’ movements.

The US Navy has three types of submarines, all of which are nuclear-powered, but only one of which carries nuclear weapons.

Ballistic Missile Submarines

The US Navy has 14 Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs), often referred to as “boomers.”

SSBNs “are designed specifically for stealth and the precise delivery of nuclear warheads,” a Navy fact sheet on them says.

Each can carry 20 Trident ballistic missiles with multiple nuclear warheads. Tridents have a range of up to 4,600 miles (7,400 kilometers), meaning they wouldn’t need to move closer to Russia to hit it – in fact, they could do so from the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian or Arctic oceans….

Olga Koval, Cat is on the chair, inspired by Amadeo Modigliani painting

Guided missile submarines

In the 1990s, the Pentagon determined the Navy didn’t need as many Ohio-class SSBNs in the nuclear deterrent role, converting four of them into guided-missile submarines (SSGNs).

Retaining the same overall specs as the boomers, the SSGNs carry Tomahawk cruise missiles instead of the Trident ballistic missiles.

Each can carry 154 Tomahawks with a high-explosive warhead of up to 1,000 pounds, and a range of about 1,000 miles….

Fast-attack submarines

These form the bulk of the US Navy’s submarine fleet and are designed to hunt and destroy enemy subs and surface ships with torpedoes. They can also strike land-based targets with Tomahawk missiles, though they carry the Tomahawks in much smaller numbers than the SSGNs.

Are More Concentration Camps Like Alligator Alcatraz Coming?

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Domestic Use of Military Set to Get Worse, Leaked Memo Shows.

President Donald Trump has already enmeshed the United States military in domestic law enforcement operations involving immigration to an unprecedented degree. He has authorized a major military buildup at the border. He has maximized the use of military planes for deportations, complete with the White House pumping out imagery of migrants getting frog-marched onto souped-up military aircraft. He sent the National Guard into Los Angeles amid large-scale protests there—and then sent in the Marines.

But an internal memo circulated inside the Department of Homeland Security suggests that Trump’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement on immigration could soon get worse. The memo—obtained by The New Republic—provides a glimpse into the thinking of top officials as they seek to involve the Defense Department more deeply in these domestic operations, and it has unnerved experts who believe it portends a frightening escalation.

Woman red dress grey cat, by Theresa Tanner, based on a painting by Modigliani.

The memo lays out the need to persuade top Pentagon officials to get much more serious about using the military to combat illegal immigration—and not just at the border. It suggests that DHS is anticipating many more uses of the military in urban centers, noting that L.A.-style operations may be needed “for years to come.” And it likens the threat posed by transnational gangs and cartels to having “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells and fighters operating freely inside America,” hinting at a ramped-up militarized posture inside the interior.

“The memo is alarming, because it speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment,” Carrie Lee, senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told me. “The military is the most powerful, coercive tool our country has. We don’t want the military doing law enforcement. It absolutely undermines the rule of law.”

The memo was authored by Philip Hegseth—the younger brother of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—who is a senior adviser to Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem and DHS liaison officer to the Defense Department. As such it also sheds light on Hegseth the Younger’s role, which has been the subject of media speculation labeling him an obscure but influential figure in his brother’s MAGA orbit.

The memo outlines the itinerary for a July 21 meeting between senior DHS and Pentagon officials, with the goal of better coordinating the agencies’ activities in “defense of the homeland.” It details goals that Philip Hegseth hopes to accomplish in the meeting and outlines points he wants DHS officials to impress on Pentagon attendees.

Participants listed comprise the very top levels of both agencies, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and several of his top advisers, Joint Chiefs chairman Dan Caine, and NORTHCOM Commander Gregory Guillot. Staff include Phil Hegseth and acting ICE commissioner Todd Lyons….

Please read the rest if you have time.

Samantha Michaels at Mother Jones: ICE Plans to Build More Tent Jails for Immigrants. What Could Go Wrong?

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), now the best-funded federal lawenforcement agency in the United States, is embarking on a plan to drastically expand its detention infrastructure. But considering the $45 billion it’s been given for the job, the agency’s vision for its new facilities seems startlingly low-tech.

In July, the Wall Street Journal got its hands on internal government documents revealing that ICE wants to incarcerate more immigrants in tents, or “hardened soft-sided facilities.” The administration hopes to erect thousands of these tents “as quickly as possible to expand detention capacity…at US military bases and adjoining bricks-and-mortar ICE jails,” the Journal reported. Officials say they like this approach, at least for now, because they can quickly set up tons of beds in a few new locations rather than finding space at existing facilities here and there.

But tents raise serious humanitarian and safety issues. “There’s a reason no one wants to live in a tent,” says Eunice Cho, an attorney who challenges unconstitutional conditions in immigrant detention centers with the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “There are many, many logistical problems—with sanitation, getting food. They certainly are not weatherproof. They do not have the setup to make sure people’s medical concerns are addressed.”

Prior to 2025, ICE did not use tents for long-term detention, but soft-sided facilities are not completely new in the incarceration realm. Here are some recent examples, each highlighting problems that are almost sure to repeat themselves as the Trump administration rolls out its plan.

Michaels provides a detailed history of tent cities in the U.S. The article is well worth reading in full.

Those are my offerings for today. What do you think? What else is on your mind?

Wednesday Reads: The Epstein Scandal and Other News

Posted: July 30, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Chuck Schumer, Donald Trump, Earthquake in Russia, Emil Bove, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, Mar-a-Lago spa, Starvation in Gaza, Todd Blanche, tsunami warnings, Virginia Giuffre | 2 Comments

Good Afternoon!!

Trump is keeping the Jeffrey Epstein scandal alive with his multiple explanations about his long-time relationship with the notorious pedophile and sex trafficker and how he supposedly ended it. He just can shut up about it.

and Trump’s Shifting Explanations Are Prolonging The Epstein Scandal He Wants To End.

The president has repeatedly professed a desire to move on from questions about whether he’s included in Department of Justice files outlining the investigation of Epstein’s sex trafficking charges. Yet Trump has provided seemingly conflicting information about his relationship with Epstein — helping sustain a scandal that has hounded him more than any other, even though his friendship with Epstein ended more than two decades ago and Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell six years ago.

The White House has long insisted Trump and Epstein’s friendship ended after the president kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago at some point for being a “creep,” although previous reports suggested their friendship ended years earlier, when Trump outbid Epstein for a piece of property in Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump, when speaking with reporters who traveled with him to the United Kingdom on Monday and Tuesday, gave yet another explanation for their break.

“He stole people that worked for me,” Trump told reporters on Monday during a meeting with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. “I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ And he did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out and that was it.”

On Tuesday, aboard Air Force One, Trump suggested it was possible Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died of suicide last year, was among the employees Epstein “stole.” In 2000, Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell recruited Giuffre to be Epstein’s masseuse while Giuffre was working at Mar-a-Lago, leading to years of abuse.

“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump said. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her.” He added: “She had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”

Every new comment Trump makes about Epstein leads to another series of stories illustrated by the many photos of the president with his former friend. The text often contains Trump’s creepy praise, from 2002, for the deceased sexual predator: “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before boarding Marine One from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on June 24, 2025 Photo by MANDEL NGAN, AFP via Getty Images

William Kristol at The Bulwark: Don’t Stop Now! You’re Doing Great!

Donald Trump likes to hear himself talk….He became president because of his talent as a demagogue. And what makes a con man and a demagogue successful is the ability to talk persuasively—even if untruthfully.

So talking has served Trump well. He has confidence in his ability to talk his way to money and power—and he has confidence in his ability to talk his way out of a jam. He’s done it often enough.

He now thinks that he can do it again. So he talks about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal virtually every day. That includes yesterday, on Air Force One, when he walked over to talk to the press.

Trump was asked about his comment the day before in which he said he had cut ties with Epstein not, as he had previously maintained, because of a real estate dispute, but because Epstein “stole people who worked for me.”

Reporter: You’re saying Epstein poached two of your staffers?

Trump: . . . Yeah, he took people and because he took people, I said don’t do it anymore—they work for me. Beyond that, he took some others and once he did that, that was the end of him.

So Trump knew that Epstein “took” multiple “people” from Mar-a-Lago.

A reporter asked the logical next question: “Were some of the workers taken from you, were some of them young women?”

Trump began by answering, “Well I don’t want to say.” Perhaps Trump had an instinct he was getting into deeper waters. But he couldn’t resist continuing to talk. “Everyone knows the people who were taken.” So, he went on, “the answer is yes, they were.” And Trump provided a little more detail as he continued talking: “People were taken out of the spa . . .’”

Of course, it’s well known that when Ghislaine Maxwell approached Virginia Giuffre at Mar-a-Lago in 2000, the then 16-year old Giuffre was working at the spa. So a reporter asked: “Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?”

Trump kept on talking. “I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her.”

So: Trump knew that Epstein (and Maxwell) had “taken” or “stolen” Virginia Giuffre and “some others” from Mar-a-Lago. And, of course, Trump knew about Epstein’s proclivities for younger women at the time. Two years after Giuffre was “stolen” from him, he infamously told New York magazine that Epstein liked “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Or as he reportedly wrote in his now-famous 50th birthday note to Epstein a year after that, in 2003, “Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?”

Trump knew what Epstein was up to. He was fine with it. He didn’t care.

Other News

Jennifer Bendery at HuffPost: Senate Confirms Emil Bove, Trump’s ‘Enforcer,’ To A Lifetime Federal Judgeship.

Senate Republicans on Tuesday confirmed Emil Bove to a lifetime federal judgeship, choosing to ignore credible allegations that Bove had told Justice Department attorneys to defy court orders and say “fuck you” to judges who ruled against them.

Bove was confirmed, 50-49. Every Democrat opposed him, along with two Republicans: Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Susan Collins (Maine).

Emil Bove

Bove, 44, will now serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, which has jurisdiction over cases in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey and the Virgin Islands.

Given his age, he will potentially sit on this court for decades.

Bove is easily President Donald Trump’s most alarming court pick in his second term. He was previously Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney and, until now, has been Trump’s so-called “enforcer” at the Justice Department, where he’s spent months carrying out an apparent campaign of retribution against Trump’s perceived political enemies.

As a senior DOJ official, Bove ordered the firings of federal prosecutors who worked on criminal cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. He ordered career prosecutors to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams in a clear quid pro quo deal. He also called for the firings of senior FBI officials who were involved in the Jan. 6 probes.

Bove has faced damning allegations from former senior DOJ attorney Erez Reuveni, who claimed in a whistleblower disclosure that Bove had told DOJ attorneys to ignore court orders, mislead judges and tell them “fuck you” if they ruled against the department in a case involving the removal of hundreds of immigrants to a prison in El Salvador.

More awful stuff about Bove at the link.

Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian: It’s Not a Linguistic Debate, it’s Man-Made Starvation.

Horrific man-made starvation in Gaza afflicting everyone from civilian children, to doctors caring for the sick and dying, to journalists struggling to survive so they could cover the catastrophe could have been avoided.

Months ago, Donald Trump, who holds sway over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, could have demanded an end to a war that no longer serves any military purpose. (Over 70% of Israelis want the war to end.) Unbelievably, he did not insist on ceasefire as a condition for U.S. strikes on Iran—yet another cruel, mortifying failure to deploy our influence by a pathetically inept “dealmaker.”

Palestinians gather to receive food from a charity kitchen in Gaza City on Monday. Photograph by Khamis Al-Rifi, Reuters

Israel, which has moral and legal obligations to protect civilians under its occupation, could have refrained from imposing a blockade, which only worsened the food shortage, empowered Hamas, and caused more violence. Instead, Netanyahu (whose coalition partners still speak about ethnic-cleansing) insists that there is no starvation, a monstrous lie illustrative of a government that has lost its moral bearings.

Israel could have allowed the existing humanitarian infrastructure to continue feeding Gazans rather than insist Hamas was systematically stealing food (a charge debunked by the IDF) and erect an inexperienced, incompetent distribution entity that predictably was overwhelmed.

The results have been horrific and predictable. “Throughout that two-month period, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza steadily worsened, as international criticism grew in proportion,” the Times of Israel reported. “It reached a crescendo last week as 28 Western allies, including the UK, Australia, Canada, France, and Italy, said in a joint statement that the war in Gaza ‘must end now,’ arguing that civilian suffering had ‘reached new depths.’” In recent weeks, over 800 Palestinians were killed while desperately scrambling for food.

Read the rest at the link.

AP on the huge earthquake in Russia: Tsunami evacuations ordered in South America, but worst risk appears to pass for US after huge quake.

One of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded struck off Russia’s sparsely populated Far East early Wednesday, sending tsunami waves into Japan, Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast. Several people were injured, but none gravely, and no major damage has been reported so far.

Authorities warned the risk from the 8.8 magnitude quake could last for hours, and millions of people potentially in the path of the waves were initially told to move away from the shore or seek high ground.

The worst appeared to have passed for many areas, including the U.S., Japan and Russia. But along South America’s Pacific Coast, new warnings were forcing evacuations in Chile and Colombia.

In the immediate aftermath of the quake off Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, residents fled inland as ports flooded, and several were injured while rushing to leave buildings.

In Japan, people flocked to evacuation centers, hilltop parks and rooftops in towns on the Pacific coast with fresh memories of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused a nuclear disaster.

Cars jammed streets and highways in Honolulu, with standstill traffic even in areas away from the sea.

That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?

Lazy Caturday Reads: Will The Epstein Scandal Be Trump’s Watergate?

Posted: July 26, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, pardons, Space Cat and the Kittens, the coverup is worse than the crime, Todd Blanche, Watergate | 11 Comments

Good Morning!!

The Caturday illustrations today come from a children’s book: Space Cat and the Kittens, by Ruthven Todd. The illustrator is Paul Galdone. I know it’s a little incongruous to include cute kitten pictures in a depressing political post, but perhaps they will provide a bit of relief from the ongoing evil deeds of Donald Trump and his gang.

Here is the summary of the book from Amazon:

Flyball, the famous Space Cat, is a father now! He and Moofa, the last of the Martian fishing cats, are the proud parents of a pair of mischievous, fun-loving kittens, Marty and Tailspin. The whole family joins Colonel Fred Stone and a new friend, Bill, on a mission to Alpha Centauri to seek out places where humans can live. Along the way, the crew makes an amazing discovery — a planet abounding in iguanodons, pterodactyls, tyrannosauri, and a host of other prehistoric creatures.

Now for today’s news. I admit it. I’m obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell story. And so is Donald Trump. He’s living in fear of the gory details of his close relationships with Epstein and Maxwell seeing the light of day. He ran away to play golf and open a new golf course in Scotland yesterday, but he can’t completely escape drip drip drip of revelations. Could this be the scandal that really damages him?

Jeff Zeleny and Adam Liptak at CNN: Trump flees Washington controversies for golf-heavy trip to Scotland.

Fleeing Washington’s oppressive humidity and nonstop questions over heated controversies, President Donald Trump is once again taking weekend refuge at his golf clubs — this time more than 3,000 miles away in Scotland.

While the White House has called his five-day trip a “working visit,” it’s fairly light on the formal itinerary. Trump is poised to hold trade talks Sunday with the chief of the European Union and is scheduled to meet with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Monday.

But he’s expected to spend most of his trip out of public view at two of his golf resorts – Trump Turnberry in the west and Trump International about 200 miles away in the north, near his mother’s ancestral homeland….

Even as protesters demonstrated against Trump here on Saturday, the four nights in temperate Scotland come as a summertime respite after six months back in office. His administration is engulfed in a deepening political crisis over its handling of disclosures around the case of Jeffrey Epstein, accused sex trafficker and former friend of the president’s.

Nearly every time Trump has spoken with reporters in recent weeks, he’s been pressed with new questions about the Epstein scandal, many of which are fueled by deep suspicions that he and his followers have been stirring for years. New revelations about his personal ties to the disgraced financier have kept the matter alive.

Scottish folks do not like Trump, to put it mildly.

Authorities in Scotland have spent weeks preparing for Trump’s arrival. Assistant Chief Constable Emma Bond told reporters the security operation would be the largest the country has mounted since the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, including local officers, national security divisions and special constables.

The overall tone toward Trump has been markedly less fond, however. The Friday edition of The National, a liberal-leaning newspaper that supports Scottish independence, rolled out a not-so-welcoming message to Trump with a blaring and bold front-page headline: “Convicted US Felon to Arrive in Scotland.”

A group called Stop Trump Scotland, a coalition of demonstrators, organized protests at Aberdeen and outside the US consulate in Edinburgh as part of a “Festival of Resistance.” A few hundred people turned out Saturday to raise their voices against the visiting American president, waving colorful signs and chanting slogans….

It’s the first visit Trump has made to the country since 2023, when he broke ground on the golf course dedicated to his mother. But returning this weekend as the sitting American president has roused critics, including Green Party leader and member of parliament, Patrick Harvie.

“Donald Trump is a convicted criminal and political extremist,” Harvie told reporters in Scotland this week. “There can be no excuses for trying to cozy up to his increasingly fascist political agenda.”

I hope they make him miserable.

William Kristol at The Bulwark: It’s Starting to Smell Like Trump’s Watergate.

On June 6, 2025, Donald Trump’s FBI Director, Kash Patel, discussed the Jeffrey Epstein files with podcaster Joe Rogan. “We’ve reviewed all the information,” Patel stressed, “and the American public is going to get as much as we can release.”

One month later, on July 6, a joint, unsigned statement from the FBI and the Department of Justice announced that nothing would be released—except for a prison video. The video turned out not to be, in fact, the “raw” video the statement promised. But it was in any case an attempt at misdirection—an effort to get people to focus on the question of Epstein’s death, rather than on the crimes he committed when alive.

Space cats and brontosaurus

For that is where the danger to Trump lies. And, naturally, that is what is now being covered up.

As a story in yesterday’s New York Times makes clear, the documents about Epstein’s crimes were pretty much ready for release three months ago. The FBI and Justice Department had conducted extensive reviews and re-reviews of the files. They had considered what should and shouldn’t be released due to legal and privacy concerns.

The Times explains:

After the F.B.I. finished its review of the files, the materials were handed over to a team of dozens of Justice Department lawyers who were given the job of double-checking the bureau’s redactions to ensure that neither too much nor too little information was disclosed, according to a person familiar with the process. The lawyers, drawn from multiple divisions from within the department, sat at their desks beginning in late March or early April reviewing documents for the better part of two weeks, the person said. . . . By mid-April, the department’s review had been largely completed.

So in mid-April, the Trump administration was, it seems, very close to being ready to go with the oft-promised release of the bulk of the Epstein files.

But then, in May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy Todd Blanche briefed President Trump on the files. According to the Times, they told the president his name appeared multiple times.

Two months later, a decision: No files would be released….

But it is the safest of safe bets that Bondi and Patel didn’t simply sit and reflect and deliberate and come to a judicious determination not to release the files. We know Trump had been briefed on the files. We don’t know what subsequent conversations he had about them, or with whom. But we can safely conclude that the Justice Department and the FBI don’t make joint determinations on matters of great interest to the president without consulting him—indeed, without taking direction from him.

It is also the safest of safe bets that it was Trump’s determination that no further disclosure would be “appropriate or warranted.” And it is the safest of safe bets that Trump made that determination because he knew that no further disclosure would be in his interest. At this juncture, it’s impossible, indeed irresponsible, not to note that both Bondi and Blanche served as personal lawyers for Trump prior to taking on their government roles.

Epstein is President Trump’s coverup, as surely as Watergate was President Nixon’s.

And as we all know from Watergate, the cover-up is always worse than the crime. And the cover-up is moving in overdrive.

On his way out of town, Trump dangled a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, who spent hours Thursday and Friday being interviewed by Trump’s former defense attorney and now second in command at DOJ. It was likely a “queen for a day” interview, in which she was given limited immunity–a guarantee that she can’t be prosecuted for anything she says in the interview, as long as she tells the truth.

NBC News: DOJ granted Ghislaine Maxwell limited immunity during meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A senior administration official confirms to NBC News that Ghislaine Maxwell was granted limited immunity by the Justice Department in order to answer questions about the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Astronauts and Pterodactyls

This type of immunity allowed Maxwell to answer questions from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche without fear that the information she provided could later be used against her in any future cases or proceedings.

The immunity is “limited” because it only covers Maxwell if she tells the truth; if it’s later determined that she lied during the interviews then the deal is off the table.

An immunity agreement like this one, often called “a queen for a day” deal, is common in criminal cases when a defendant offers to cooperate with prosecutors and provide information on an investigation and potential codefendants.

As part of the agreement, that information generally cannot be used against the defendant down the road.

In exchange, prosecutors will commonly consider the defendant’s cooperation while recommending a lighter sentence for a plea deal, or in some cases outright immunity from prosecution.

Aaron Blake at CNN: Trump just made a problematic Ghislaine Maxwell situation look even worse.

Interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell is the Trump administration’s first big move to allay concerns about its hugely unpopular handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Friday wrapped up two days of interviews with Epstein’s convicted associate.

But there were already all kinds of reasons to be skeptical of this move and what it could produce, given the motivations of the two sides involved.

And President Donald Trump epitomized all of them in a major way on Friday.

While taking questions on his way to Scotland, Trump repeatedly held open the possibility of pardoning Maxwell for her crimes.

“Well, I don’t want to talk about that,” Trump said initially.

When pressed, he said, “It’s something I haven’t thought about,” while conspicuously adding, “I’m allowed to do it.”

I wonder if the MAGA crowd would be happy if Trump pardoned Maxwell? Anyone who actually cares about the victims would be outraged.

Sarah Ewall-Weiss at The Daily Beast: Ghislaine Handed DOJ 100 Names in Shameless Pardon Quid Pro Quo.

Ghislaine Maxwell, the partner of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, completed a second day of questioning Friday, sharing information on about 100 different people with the Department of Justice.

Maxwell, who was convicted of child sex trafficking in connection with the disgraced financier in 2021, met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for about three hours on Friday at a courthouse in Tallahassee, Florida.

Escaping by helicopter

She also sat down with Blanche to answer questions for about six hours on Thursday as the DOJ tries to control the fallout from its handling of the Epstein files….

The meeting between the top Trump official and Maxwell was announced by the Justice Department amid mounting pressure for the administration to release more information on the case after it said there was no Epstein client list and indicated there would be no further prosecutions in a recent memo….

A bombshell report this week by the Wall Street Journal alleged that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed Trump in May that his name was in the files multiple times, as were other names.

On Friday, the president would not rule out pardoning Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2022 for facilitating and participating in the sex trafficking of teenage girls….

Maxwell’s lawyer said in Florida on Friday that his team has not spoken to Trump about a potential pardon but indicated they will push for one.

“We hope he exercises that power in a right and just way,” Markus said.

No kidding.

Sarah K. Burris at Raw Story: DOJ’s new move raises ‘huge red flags’ — and ‘could blow up in their face’: Legal expert.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met for a second day with Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and a long-time prosecutor and former general counsel at the FBI is warning it could all “blow up in their face.”

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace noted on her Friday show that she can’t understand why Blanche would ignore the career prosecutors who have been steeped in the case for years and are aware of the details.

New York University Law School Professor Andrew Weissmann connected the dots from the cases involving Epstein and Maxwell to other Justice Department scandals, such as the one involving Mayor Eric Adams.

“Mayor Eric Adams, where this administration learned to shut out the career people,” said Weissmann. “If you are trying to get the defendant or in this case, Ghislaine Maxwell, to say something that will help Donald Trump, if that’s your goal and it’s not about sort of justice writ large, it is a continuation of your work for the president. In other words, you were his personal attorney, and you are still essentially operating as his personal attorney. If that’s your goal, you do not want the career prosecutors and agents in the room for the same reason you didn’t want them in the room for Eric Adams.” [….]

“You’re not engaging in what’s in the public interest. You’re engaging in what is in Donald Trump’s interest, and whether that is to exonerate Donald Trump, as Tim [Miller] suggested, or whether it’s to implicate other people. So, it’s sort of a distraction. Those are things that Todd Blanche can do and can do better when he doesn’t have career people in the room,” Weissmann clarified.

And, of course, Pam Bondi fired the lead prosecutor in the Epstein and Maxwell cases, Maurene Comey.

Kittens and T Rex

Glenn Thrush and Valerie Crowder at The New York Times: After Ghislaine Maxwell Interview, Concerns Mount Over Possibility of Pardon.

Ms. Maxwell has made it clear she wants her 20-year sentence thrown out or reduced or a pardon. President Trump, asked whether he would consider pardoning her, said, “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I haven’t thought about.” He made the remarks before he headed off to Scotland, wishing her well….

Mr. Blanche has described his trip as a neutral fact-finding mission, saying he would share details of the discussion “at the appropriate time” — yet he has also declared that the federal criminal investigation into targets beyond Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein remains closed. By that standard, new interviews would appear to serve a function beyond the purposes of traditional law enforcement, unless new evidence of criminality has been discovered, current and former officials said….

Teresa Helm, who was abused by Mr. Epstein and testified against Ms. Maxwell, was blunt about the consequences of such a deal in an interview with MSNBC on Friday. “It would mean the complete crumbling of this justice system that should first and foremost stand for, fight for and protect survivors,” she said, adding that the government had accused Ms. Maxwell of perjury on top of other charges.

“She should stay in prison,” said Lisa Lloyd, 65, the lone protester at the courthouse. “This is wrong. Anyone who is concerned with justice should be appalled by this.” [….]

Some conservative news outlets friendly to Mr. Trump have begun to soften their tone about Ms. Maxwell — whom they previously described as a child sex predator — suggesting she might now be trusted to tell the truth about the case. This week, a host on Newsmax who has praised Mr. Trump went so far as to suggest that Ms. Maxwell “just might be a victim” who was not given a fair legal hearing.

That is outrageous. Maxwell is far from being a victim. She lured young girls and brought them to Epstein to be abused. He couldn’t have had access to as many victims without her help. She also participated in the abuse.

Former federal prosecutor Ankush Khardori at Politico Magazine: The Epstein Files Timeline Raises Real Questions for Trump.

The revelation this week from The Wall Street Journal about Donald Trump and the so-called Epstein files was shocking — and, for those following the administration closely in recent weeks, not shocking at all.

According to the Journal, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Trump during a White House meeting in May that his name appeared multiple times in the Epstein files. The fallout continues as we speak, with the White House and Republicans in Congress facing that age-old Washington question: What did they know, and when did they know it?

We have gathered below some of the most significant statements that Trump and his senior officials have made on the topic, focusing in particular on what they have said since Trump returned to office.

Several key themes emerge. Head straight to the timeline here.

For starters, there is a conspicuous rhetorical shift that occurs after May, when Bondi and Blanche reportedly briefed Trump. The administration’s statements became more terse, and Trump in particular began pointing the finger at people — the Democratic Party and the mainstream media — that had little to nothing to do with the Epstein frenzy.

Even before May, Trump himself tended to add qualifiers to his statements that he does not typically use when he talks about investigations — like the probe into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation by special counsel John Durham — that are of interest to him.

In an interview with Fox News last June during the heat of the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump said that he would release more information if reelected but hastened to add that he was concerned about the impact of revealing more material on third parties and the possibility that there might be “phony stuff” in the government’s investigative files. More recently, Trump has said that he supports the release of “credible” information and “pertinent” grand jury testimony while accusing the media of focusing on old news.

These are concerns that Trump does not typically invoke in other settings. Taken together, Trump’s comments suggest the possibility that he suspected that there may be politically damaging information about him in the files and wanted to preemptively discredit revelations about him. Following the reported briefing in May, Trump appears to have sought to narrow the government’s public disclosures to avoid releasing information. Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing linked to Epstein.

I’m sure he did. Read the rest at the Politico link.

Space kittens and small horse

One more from Arwa Mahdawi at The Guardian: Will the ghost of Epstein finally bring down King Trump?

Brrrr. Brrrr. Brrrrrrr. That’s the sound of Donald’s Trump’s distraction machine, which has been running at full power as the president tries his best to stop us all from talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Or, to be more specific, from talking about just how chummy he was with the dead paedophile.

Though he’s usually a master of controlling the narrative, none of Trump’s normal distraction techniques seem to be working now. Indeed, at this point we should probably rename the Streisand effect the Trump-Epstein effect because the president’s repeated insistence that there is NOTHING TO SEE HERE EXCEPT A VERY NASTY WITCH-HUNT only has people scrutinizing his dealings with Epstein more carefully. From South Park to Scotland to billboards in Times Square, Trump can’t escape his past association with Epstein.

Over the past couple of weeks, a lot of new information has come out about just how close Epstein and the president were. On 17 July, for example, the Wall Street Journal reported Trump allegedly sent Epstein a 50th birthday card in 2003 with a drawing of a naked woman and a message which said, in part, “may every day be another wonderful secret.” Trump denied writing the card and filed a $10bn lawsuit against the rightwing paper and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, a day after the outlet published the story.

Trump’s lawsuit clearly didn’t scare off the Journal because, on Wednesday, it published a new report stating Trump’s name appears “multiple times” in justice department files about Epstein. On Wednesday CNN also published newly uncovered photos and video footage of the two men together, including one of Epstein at Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples at the Plaza hotel in New York in 1993 and footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event. Then, on Thursday, the New York Times confirmed that Trump’s name appeared on a contributor list for a book celebrating Epstein’s 50th birthday, as the Journal first reported, along with a number of other well-known Epstein associates including Leslie Wexner, then the owner of Victoria’s Secret. The Times further reported that in 1997 the president had written a note calling Epstein “the greatest!” in a copy of Trump: The Art of the Comeback.

While none of these new bits of information are evidence of criminal conduct on Trump’s part, the president’s furious reaction to anything Epstein-related, along with his administration’s sudden U-turn on its promise to release damning evidence related to possible Epstein clients, certainly makes Trump look like he’s got something to hide. And it’s not just Trump, of course. The sudden flurry of reporting about Epstein means that a lot of powerful men, including Bill Clinton, who the Journal says also sent a birthday letter to the disgraced financier, have been having a bad couple of weeks.

The big question now is this: will the renewed interest in Epstein blow over in a few more weeks or could this deal a serious political blow to Trump and his lackeys? Trump is nicknamed the “comeback kid” for good reason: the man has an uncanny ability to shake off scandal. Still, nobody is completely untouchable; could the ghost of Epstein be the thing that finally topples King Trump from his throne? While that’s obviously an impossible question to answer, there are a few ways this could all play out.

Again, read the rest at the link.

That’s it for me today. As I said, I can’t stop thinking about the Epstein story. What’s on your mind today?

Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors

Posted: July 23, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Deportation, Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell, Glass House raid, House Speaker Mike Johnson, ICE, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, President Barack Obama, Sen. Ron Wyden, Tulsi Gabbard, Ventura County CA | 9 Comments

Good Morning!!

Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.

The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.

Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.

Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.

“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.

NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.

Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.

“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”

When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”

“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”

“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”

Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.

Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.

Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.

Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka

Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.

This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.

Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.

The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.

This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.

The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.

The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.

This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.

Read the rest at CNN.

Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.

It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.

Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.

The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”

Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.

Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.

…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.

And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.

Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.

New Epstein Revelations

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.

In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.

The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.

In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.

In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.

“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”

Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.

A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.

Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.

The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.

Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.

“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.

The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”

Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….

Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.

Immigration News

I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.

“Mom is gone. They took her away.”

These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.

Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.

Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.

Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.

“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.

Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).

A bit more:

Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.

Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.

But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.

And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.

Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.

That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.

Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA

During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:

If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….

Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.

But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.

Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.

The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’

Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.

Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.

“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.

When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.

“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.

In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.

The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.

Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.

I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.

Lazy Caturday Reads: Is the Epstein Scandal Doing Real Damage to Trump?

Posted: July 19, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because | Tags: Donald Trump, Epstein Files, FBI, Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, MAGA base, Pam Bpndi, Sen. Dick Durbin, Sen. Ron Wyden, sexual abuse of children, Stacey Williams | 13 Comments

Good Morning!!

Cat reading news, Deven Rex

Well, it’s been quite a week. It’s been Jeffrey Epstein all the time. For the first time, it seems that a scandal is actually sticking to Trump, although he could still escape, as he usually does. He does seem uniquely panicked though. Yesterday, he sued the Wall Street Journal for publishing a suggestive message he reportedly sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday.

From Ron Filipkowski’s summary of yesterday’s politics news at Meidas:

… WSJ poured more gas on Trump’s raging Epstein inferno with a new story about a birthday card that he sent to the child trafficker and rapist in 2003. The story said Ghislaine Maxwell asked friends of Epstein to submit cards to compile as a special gift for this 50th birthday, and Trump sent one is as one of his closest friends.

… “The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”

… Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

… When asked about the letter and picture prior to publishing, Trump naturally denied everything to the Journal: “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story. I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language. It’s not my words. I’m gonna sue WSJ just like I sued everyone else.”

… The WSJ, other media sources, and social media users then posted online several drawings that Trump made at various times on different occasions to refute Trump’s claim.

Flipkowski included several of Trump’s drawings in his post.

Tyler Pager at The New York Times on Trump’s claim he never draws pictures: Trump Says He Doesn’t ‘Draw Pictures.’ But Many of His Sketches Sold at Auction.

President Trump mounted a vigorous rebuttal on Thursday night to a report in The Wall Street Journal that he sent a birthday greeting with a sexually suggestive drawing to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003.

His alibi: “I don’t draw pictures,” he wrote on Truth Social.

But a review of the president’s past reveals that, for years, Mr. Trump was a high-profile doodler — or at least suggested he was. In the early 2000s, he regularly donated drawings to charities in New York. The drawings, many of which appear to be done with a thick, black-marker and prominently feature his signature are not dissimilar to how The Journal describes the birthday note he sent Mr. Epstein.

“It takes me a few minutes to draw something, in my case, it’s usually a building or a cityscape of skyscrapers, and then sign my name, but it raises thousands of dollars to help the hungry in New York through the Capuchin Food Pantries Ministry,” he wrote in his 2008 book, “Trump Never Give Up: How I Turned My Biggest Challenges Into Success.”

After Mr. Trump was elected president, some of the drawings he signed were auctioned off for thousands of dollars — even as he wrote in his book that “art may not be my strong point.”

This is from historian Heather Cox Richardson’s recap of the day at Letters from an American:

Now we know why President Donald J. Trump earlier this week began saying nonsensically that Democrats he dislikes wrote the Epstein files. Apparently, Trump was trying to get out in front of the story Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo broke last night in the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Trump contributed what the newspaper called a “bawdy” letter to a leather-bound album compiled by Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in 2003 for Epstein’s 50th birthday….

Sisters, by Elisheva Nesis

When the FBI raided Epstein’s mansion in Manhattan in 2019, they seized piles of evidence, including stacks of compact disks bearing the labels “Young [Name] + [Name],” suggesting he had kept video evidence of men sexually assaulting underage girls.

Within hours of the discovery of Epstein’s body in his prison cell in 2019, Trump was retweeting a conspiracy theory alleging that former president Bill Clinton was involved in his death. Trump and his loyalists pushed the idea that Epstein was trafficking girls to powerful Democratic politicians and Hollywood actors, an accusation that dovetailed with the QAnon conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was secretly leading the fight against such a cabal. Trump fed the idea that if reelected, he would release the information he claimed was being withheld as part of a coverup.

In fact, the politician most closely associated with Epstein was Trump himself. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

And yet Trump supporters overlooked Trump’s long friendship with Epstein until billionaire Elon Musk resurrected the story that Trump might be implicated in the records of the Epstein investigation. On June 5, in the midst of a fight with Trump, Musk posted on social media: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!”

Read the rest at the link. Richardson provides an excellent summary of the history of the Jeffrey Epstein case.

Dan Mangan at CNBC: Trump sues Murdoch for $10 billion over WSJ story on Epstein birthday letter.

President Donald Trump on Friday followed through on his threat to sue media mogul Rupert Murdoch after his Wall Street Journal published an article saying that Trump sent his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein a “bawdy” letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday.

Trump, who angrily denies writing the letter, is seeking damages of no less than $10 billion in the lawsuit alleging defamation.

Named as defendants in the suit in federal court in the Southern District of Florida are Murdoch, his company News Corp and its CEO Robert Thomson, the Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones & Co., and the two reporters who wrote the article published Thursday evening.

A Dow Jones spokesperson sent the following statement to CNBC: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting, and will vigorously defend against any lawsuit.”

The suit comes as Trump faces growing pressure to have the Justice Department release its investigative files about Epstein, who killed himself in August 2019 after being arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.

The Journal’s article said that the letter purportedly written by Trump to Epstein in 2003 was among documents reviewed by criminal investigators who ultimately built criminal cases against Epstein and his convicted procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, who reportedly solicited the letter from the president.

For the first time, Trump’s base is questioning his excuses, although some of his followers are defending him against the Wall Street Journal revelations, according to Axios.

David Smith at The Guardian: ‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt.

I feel so betrayed and so angry. This is not what I voted for.” “This cemented permanent deep state power.” “I’m concerned about being able to trust Donald Trump to keep his word.” “What about justice for these young ladies who were trafficked? What about their justice? Don’t they deserve justice?”

Yoga with my cat, Sharyn Bursic

These were MAGAjust a few of the calls that besieged conservative radio hosts across the US this week. The president’s ardent supporters spent the past decade fulminating over various foes, from Barack Obama and the deep state to undocumented immigrants and transgender children. Now they have a new target: Donald Trump himself.

The “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base is in revolt as never before. The trigger was Trump’s broken promise to publicly release details about Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, who was facing federal charges of sex-trafficking minors when he died in jail in 2019.

Spurred by the president and his allies, Trump’s movement has long latched on to the Epstein scandal, claiming the existence of a secret client list and that he was murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up. But last week the justice department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced there was no evidence that the disgraced financier kept such a list or was blackmailing powerful figures.

Far from closing the case, the memo deepened supporters’ obsession and sense of grievance. A movement defined by the view that elites rig the system against them felt cheated. Trump made efforts to douse the flames with ever-shifting explanations, excuses and distractions but merely poured fuel on the fire.

To some, his erratic and evasive behaviour implies a guilty secret. It also evokes a line from President John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” Having spent years embracing QAnon-tinged propaganda that casts him as the only saviour who can demolish the “deep state”, Trump is now seen as co-opted by its corrupt bureaucracy.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman who ran against Trump for president in 2020, said: “I talk to the base every day and nothing animates the base more than the deep state. This Epstein thing was Trump’s promise. This was going to finally expose the deep state. Now Trump says nothing there? It ain’t going to stand.”

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