Wednesday Reads

Good Afternoon!!

I was going to write about how the Democrats actually won the government shutdown. But bigger news has broken. I’ll get to the shutdown story after that and then some news about Kash Patel, Trump’s incompetent FBI director.

It looks like the Epstein shit is about to hit the fan.

Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell

James Hill, Lauren Peller, Katherine Faulders, and Jay O’Brien ABC News: House Democrats release new Epstein emails referencing Trump.

Sex offender Jeffrey Epstein referred to Donald Trump as the “dog that hasn’t barked” and told his former companion Ghislaine Maxwell that an alleged victim had “spent hours at my house” with Trump, according to email correspondence released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump,” Epstein wrote in a typo-riddled message to Maxwell in April 2011. “[Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”

“I have been thinking about that … ” Maxwell replied.

That email exchange — which came just weeks after a British newspaper published a series of stories about Epstein, Maxwell and their powerful associates — was one of three released by the Democrats from a batch of more than 23,000 documents the committee recently received from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena.

The other messages are between Epstein and author Michael Wolff.

“I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you–either on air or in scrum afterwards,” Wolff wrote to Epstein in December 2015, six months after Trump had officially entered the race for the White House.

“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever,” Epstein wrote, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop” [….]

Wolff in a phone interview on Wednesday said of the 2015 exchange that he couldn’t remember “the specific emails or the context, but I was in an in-depth conversation with Epstein at that time about his relationship with Donald Trump. So I think this reflects that.”

“I was trying at that time to get Epstein to talk about his relationship with Trump, and actually, he proved to be an enormously valuable source to me,” Wolff said. “Part of the context of this is that I was pushing Epstein at that point to go public with what he knew about Trump.”

You can read the original emails along with more context at the ABC link.

A bit more from the emails from Hailey Fuchs at Politico: Jeffrey Epstein, in newly released email, says Trump ‘knew about the girls.’

Also in the emails released by Oversight Democrats Wednesday, Wolff wrote in a 2015 message to Epstein that he heard Trump – then a presidential candidate – would be asked by CNN about the convicted sex offender. Epstein asked Wolff what he thought an ideal response from Trump would be.

Michael Wolff

“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff responded. If [Trump] says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency.

“You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you,” Wolff continued, “or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”

Wolff added that Trump could potentially praise Epstein when asked. Wolff’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The materials were received by the House Oversight Committee last Thursday, meaning the move by Democrats to release the materials was likely timed to coincide with the House’s return from a lengthy recess to vote Wednesday evening on ending the prolonged government shutdown.

Michael Gold at The New York Times (gift link): Epstein Alleged in Emails That Trump Knew of His Conduct.

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

Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA)

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

“These latest emails and correspondence raise glaring questions about what else the White House is hiding and the nature of the relationship between Epstein and the president,” Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said in a statement.

The three separate email exchanges released on Wednesday were all from after Mr. Epstein’s 2008 plea deal in Florida on state charges of soliciting prostitution, in which federal prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges. They came years after Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein had a reported falling out in the early 2000s.

See the ABC story above for descriptions of the emails.

House Democrats, citing an unnamed whistle-blower, said this week that Ms. Maxwell was preparing to formally ask Mr. Trump to commute her federal prison sentence.

The emails were provided to the Oversight Committee along with a larger tranche of documents from Mr. Epstein’s estate that the panel requested as part of its investigation into Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges.

Republicans argued that Democrats omitted context from the emails they released.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee accused Democrats of politicizing the investigation. “Democrats continue to carelessly cherry-pick documents to generate clickbait that is not grounded in the facts,” a committee spokeswoman said. “The Epstein Estate has produced over 20,000 pages of documents on Thursday, yet Democrats are once again intentionally withholding records that name Democrat officials.”

The Republicans also identified the victim whose name was redacted in the emails as Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide in April. Ms. Giuffre had said that Ms. Maxwell recruited her into Mr. Epstein’s sex ring while she was working at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, as a teenager.

In a 2016 deposition for a civil case, Ms. Giuffre was asked if she believed Mr. Trump had witnessed the sexual abuse of minors in Mr. Epstein’s home. “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said.

“I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein,” Ms. Giuffre added. “I’ve heard he has been, but I haven’t seen him myself so I don’t know.”

Use the gift link to read the whole article.

This afternoon at 4:00, Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) will finally be sworn in. She will then sign the discharge petition to require the DOJ to release all of the Epstein files.

Kaanita Iyer at CNN: Rep.-elect Grijalva says she plans to confront Johnson at long-delayed swearing-in ceremony.

Arizona Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who is set to be sworn in on Wednesday, said she will confront House Speaker Mike Johnson after waiting nearly 50 days to be seated as a member of Congress.

“I won’t be able to like sort of move on if I don’t address it personally and we’ll see what kind of reaction he has,” Grijalva, a Democrat, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” Tuesday.

Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.)

“I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to say,” Grijalva added but said she will stress that Johnson refusing to swear her in for over a month is “undemocratic.”

“It’s unconstitutional. It’s illegal. Should never happen — this kind of obstruction cannot happen again,” Grijalva said.

One more on the Epstein story from Meredith Lee Hill, Hailey Fuchs and Nicholas Wu at Politico: Here’s how the House battle over the Epstein files will play out

The monthslong bipartisan effort to sidestep Speaker Mike Johnson and force the release of all Justice Department files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein is kicking into high gear this week, setting up a December floor battle that President Donald Trump has sought to avoid….

The process of doing so will begin around 4 p.m., when Johnson swears in Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva right before the House votes to end the government shutdown — ending a 50-day wait following the Arizona Democrat’s election. Shortly afterward, Grijalva says she will affix the 218th and final signature to the discharge petition led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) to force a vote on the full release of DOJ’s Epstein files.

That in itself will be the culmination of months of drama that blew up into a full crisis for Johnson this summer, with a GOP mutiny grinding the floor to a halt and forcing leaders to send the House home early for August recess. The uproar over a possible Epstein cover-up faded but never disappeared entirely.

The problem isn’t that Democrats caved on the shutdown. Just objectively speaking, they emerge from this fight in a slightly better position than they entered it.

• They prolonged the longest government shutdown in history.
• This shutdown damaged Trump politically. (Just look at the polling.
• They centered health care costs as a major issue for 2026.
• The fake concession they got from Senate Republicans—a meaningless future vote on extending the ACA subsidies—will (a) put Republican senators on the spot and (b) create a point of vulnerability for House Republicans when they refuse to take up the bill.
• They avoided the worst-case outcome. Which is not nothing.

Please read the whole thing at The Bulwark link.

Annie Karni at The New York Times: What if Democrats’ Big Shutdown Loss Turns Out to Be a Win?

At first blush, the deal that paved the way to end the government shutdown this week looked exactly like the kind of feeble outcome many Democrats have come to expect from their leaders in Washington.

After waging a 40-day fight to protect Americans’ access to health care — one they framed as existential — their side folded after eight defectors struck a deal that would allow President Trump and Republicans to reopen the government this week without doing anything about health coverage or costs, enraging all corners of the party.

But even some of the Democrats most outraged by the outcome are not so certain that their party’s aborted fight was all for naught.

They assert that in hammering away at the extension of health care subsidies that are slated to expire at the end of next month, they managed to thrust Mr. Trump and Republicans onto the defensive, elevating a political issue that has long been a major weakness for them….

It may turn out that the long-term outcome of the longest government shutdown in history will be a grand-scale political and policy defeat for Democrats. The head-scratching end to a fight they were not willing to see through to victory deflated the party and deepened long-simmering divisions ahead of next year’s critical midterm elections. But in the shorter term, there could be benefits.

Senate Democrats believe that they held together long enough for Mr. Trump to reveal a new level of callousness in his refusal to fund food stamps for 42 million Americans who rely on the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. And they believe all of that helped contribute to a mini-blue wave last week, one that could continue if Democrats can keep the right issues at the forefront.

In my opinion, the shutdown fight demonstrated to many voters who don’t usually pay attention to politics that Trump doesn’t care one bit about their concerns.

Kash Patel’s Reign at the FBI

The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Sadie Gurman, Aruna Viswanatha, Josh Dawsey, and Jack Gillum about Trump’s FBI director: Kash Patel’s ‘Effin Wild’ Ride as FBI Director.

On Halloween morning, FBI Director Kash Patel had a big announcement to make: “The FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack,” he said in a 7:32 a.m. social-media post that referenced arrests in Michigan.

There was one problem: No criminal charges had yet been filed and local police weren’t aware of the details. Two friends of the alleged terrorists in New Jersey and Washington state caught wind of the arrests and moved up plans to leave the country, according to court documents and law-enforcement officials familiar with the investigation.

Justice Department leaders complained to the White House about Patel’s premature post, saying it had disrupted the investigation, administration officials said.

In his nine months on the job, Patel has drawn flak from his bosses in the Justice Department and from his underlings at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, where he has fired dozens of agents deemed hostile to Donald Trump or to conservative ideals.

But the Halloween announcement wasn’t the biggest controversy to envelop the director that week. Patel hit the news for taking an FBI plane to attend a wrestling event where his girlfriend, a country western singer, performed, and then to her home in Nashville. A former FBI agent, Kyle Seraphin, publicized the trip and called the taxpayer funded travel in the middle of a shutdown “pathetic.”

After that, Patel visited a Texas hunting resort called the Boondoggle Ranch, according to flight records and people familiar with the trip, which hasn’t been previously reported.

Patel’s travel has frustrated both Justice Department officials, who complained to the White House about it, and the White House itself, which had told cabinet officials months ago in writing to limit their travel, particularly if it was overseas or unrelated to Trump’s agenda, according to an administration official. Details about Patel’s trips to visit his girlfriend and an August trip to Scotland have been passed around the White House in recent days, officials said.

The FBI director is required by law to take the bureau’s private plane instead of commercial flights in order to have access to secure communications. If the travel is personal, the director is required to reimburse the government for the cost of a commercial flight—typically far less than the actual costs of private-jet use.

A bit more:

Last month, Patel gave Trump an unusual public presentation in the Oval Office, where he credited the president for the bureau’s successes on everything from drug seizures to the arrests of several most-wanted fugitives.

“We are absolutely crushing violent crime like never before and defending this homeland, sir,” Patel said, gesturing toward large poster boards showing a surge in arrests this summer.

Patel’s presence at the bureau has been something of a culture shock for a buttoned-up workforce, used to wearing suits and ties. Instead, Patel has appeared at events in hooded sweatshirts, jeans or hunting vests, and often speaks colloquially, calling agents “cops,” and telling podcaster Joe Rogan that the job of FBI director was “effin wild.”

He has also handed out an oversize commemorative coin to colleagues resembling the logo of the Marvel “Punisher” character, who came to embody a general distrust of the U.S. justice system. The coin also has a large number nine on it, in a reference to himself as the FBI’s ninth director.

Patel’s supporters say he is trying to present himself as down-to-earth and accessible to the workforce. He “wants the Bureau to get back to focusing on field and agent work vs. an elitist D.C. culture,” FBI spokesman Ben Williamson said. The FBI declined to discuss Patel’s plane travel, citing safety concerns. Justice Department and FBI representatives said the two agencies closely coordinated plans for the terrorism operation in advance.

The story is behind a paywall, but I was able to get through by clicking the link at Memeorandum.

The New York Times (gift link): F.B.I. Director Is Said to Have Made a Pledge to Head of MI5, Then Broken It.

At a secret gathering in May, south of London, the head of Britain’s domestic security service asked Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, for help.

British security officials rely on the bureau for high-tech surveillance tools — the kind they might need to monitor a new embassy that China wants to build near the Tower of London. The head of MI5, Ken McCallum, asked Mr. Patel to protect the job of an F.B.I. agent based in London who dealt with that technology, according to several current and former U.S. officials with knowledge of the episode.

Kash Patel and girlfriend Alexis Wilkins

Mr. Patel agreed to find funding to keep the posting, the officials said. But the job had already been slated to disappear as the White House moved to slash the F.B.I. budget. The agent moved to a different job back in the United States, saving the F.B.I. money but leaving MI5 officials incredulous.

It was a jarring introduction to Mr. Patel’s leadership style for British officials. They had long forged personal ties with their U.S. counterparts, as well as with three other close allies, in an intelligence partnership known as the Five Eyes.

The relationships among the organizations matter because many top national security officials view trust and reliability as paramount to sharing critical information with allies — vital for communication between agency directors, and hard to restore once lost.

On the same day in 1946 that Winston Churchill delivered his Iron Curtain speech in the United States, Britain and the United States secretly signed the pact that formed the basis for their intelligence alliance. It was an outgrowth of their collaboration during World War II. The partnership expanded during the advent of the Cold War to include other countries — Australia, Canada and New Zealand — earning it the name Five Eyes.

All rely heavily on American intelligence to help keep their countries safe. Though the F.B.I. is a criminal investigation agency, it is also a major part of the Western intelligence-gathering community. Alongside other U.S. agencies like the C.I.A., the F.B.I. has offices in embassies around the globe.

Mr. Patel’s inexperience, his dismissals of top F.B.I. officials and his shift of bureau resources from thwarting spies and terrorism have heightened concerns among the other Five Eyes nations that the bureau is adrift, according to the former U.S. officials and other people familiar with allies’ reactions to the bureau changes.

Five Eyes officials have watched with alarm as Mr. Patel has fired agents who investigated President Trump and invoked his powers to investigate the president’s perceived enemies. The officials and others spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Use the gift article to read the rest.

A few more interesting stories:

The Guardian: UK pauses intelligence-sharing with US on suspected drug vessels in Caribbean.

The Guardian: Venezuelans sent by Trump to El Salvador endured systematic torture, report finds.

The New Republic: Damning Video Shows DHS Agents Pepper-Spray a Baby.

Politico Magazine: ‘He’s Actually Weakening the Economy’: Why Trump’s Strategy May Fail. A top economist says Trump is doing industrial policy all wrong.

NBC News: Trump’s Pentagon name change could cost up to $2 billion.

Those are my recommended reads for today. What’s on your mind?