Epstein, Jeffrey E (1953- )

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    When Getting Fired Is Only the Beginning for Federal Workers

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    One thing is clear from a reporter’s conversations with laid-off federal workers this year: The cuts have been anything but straightforward and efficient.The week after Martin Basch was fired from his federal job in February, he started applying for state unemployment benefits in Ohio, his home state, determined to find a new path.But he soon found himself facing an unexpected snag: He kept receiving paychecks, beyond his official termination date of March 14.This might not seem like a problem. But for Basch, it was a sign of the chaotic and costly limbo in which he and many other federal workers have found themselves as President Trump seeks to streamline the federal government.I’ve been talking to federal workers for months about the mass firings’ impact on them, and one thing has been clear: The cuts have been anything but straightforward and efficient.For many, the layoff was just the beginning. Workers have found themselves locked in a Kafkaesque cycle of getting fired and rehired, and some have struggled to track down the documentation they need to move on.Basic questions, elusive answersTheir terminations came abruptly, and with little explanation. Legal challenges have added more chaos as judges ordered thousands of fired workers to be temporarily reinstated, and higher courts have reversed some of those decisions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Morally Offensive and Fiscally Reckless’: 3 Writers on Trump’s Big Gamble

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      Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation with Nate Silver, the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” and the newsletter Silver Bulletin, and Lis Smith, a Democratic communications strategist and author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story,” to discuss the aftermath of the passage of President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill.Frank Bruni: Let’s start with that megabill, the bigness of which made the consequences of its enactment hard to digest quickly. Now that we’ve had time to, er, chew it over, I’m wondering if you think Democrats are right to say — to hope — that it gives them a whole new traction in next year’s midterms.I mean, the most significant Medicaid cuts kick in after that point. Could Trump and other Republicans avoid paying a price for them in 2026? Or did they get much too cute in constructing the legislation and building in that delay and create the possibility of disaster for themselves in both 2026 and 2028, when the bill’s effect on Medicaid, as well as on other parts of the safety net, will have taken hold?Lis Smith: If history is any guide, Republicans will pay a price for these cuts in the midterms. In 2010, Democrats got destroyed for passing Obamacare, even though it would be years until it was fully implemented. In 2018, Republicans were punished just for trying to gut it. Voters don’t like politicians messing with their health care. They have been pretty consistent in sending that message.I’d argue that Democrats have an even more potent message in 2026 — it’s not just that Republicans are messing with health care, it’s that they are cutting it to fund tax cuts for the richest Americans.Nate Silver: What I wonder about is Democrats’ ability to sustain focus on any given issue. At the risk of overextrapolating from my home turf in New York, Zohran Mamdani just won a massive upset in the Democratic mayoral primary by focusing on affordability. And a message on the Big, Beautiful Bill could play into that. But the Democratic base is often more engaged by culture war issues, or by messages that are about Trump specifically — and Trump isn’t on the ballot in 2026 — rather than Republicans broadly. The polls suggest that the Big, Beautiful Bill is extremely unpopular, but a lot of those negative views are 1) among people who are extremely politically engaged and already a core Democratic constituency, or 2) snap opinions among the disengaged that are subject to change. Democrats will need to ensure that voters are still thinking about the bill next November, and tying it to actual or potential changes that affect them directly and adversely.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance’s Big, Beautiful Task

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      The vice president is selling Trump’s domestic policy bill amid signs Democratic attacks are breaking through.Vice presidents always have hard jobs.They have little practical authority. They are the face of decisions they are not empowered to make. They get assignments that are hard to ace (like Vice President Kamala Harris’s deployment to address the “root causes” of migration).This morning, I headed to a machine shop in West Pittston, Pa., where Vice President JD Vance was stepping up to shoulder what is becoming a delicate task: selling President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”Stumping for your boss’s signature legislation might not ordinarily be an arduous assignment. But at least at this early point, the law, for which Vance cast a tiebreaking vote, is simply not very popular. Some Republicans have warned that it will cost their party seats; one is already trying to roll back the bill’s cuts to Medicaid.Making matters worse for Vance, hints of distrust were in the air, given the furor over the administration’s decision not to release more information about the investigation into the convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.The machine shop began filling up with devoted Trump and Vance fans, who arrived in Trump 2028 hats or T-shirts showing the moment the president survived an assassination attempt last summer. But even here, there were questions about the new law, and signs that Democrats’ efforts to highlight it as regressive and call it a giveaway for the wealthy were breaking through.“The Democrats are saying that, I forget the number, but, like, millions of people are going to lose their health care and that kind of thing. And I just want to know if that’s true,” said Jane Mizerak, 68, a Republican from the nearby town of West Wyoming, who said she had voted for Trump each time he had run for president.Republicans Rebound in Support for ImmigrationPercent saying immigration is a good thing for this country today

      Source: Gallup surveys of U.S. adults from 2001 to 2025. By The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Does Trump Silence the Epstein Conspiracy Theories?

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      President Trump is finding it hard to put the Epstein files behind him.As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump loved a conspiracy theory.He started his political career by stoking the lie that President Obama was not born in the United States. By 2024, he complained, falsely, that noncitizens would vote in the November election and throw the result to Democrats. He declared on a debate stage that immigrants in Ohio were eating people’s pets. He promised to release government files on Sept. 11 and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and told Fox News that “I guess I would” release the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, too.As president, though, he’s finding that it’s a whole lot easier to start a conspiracy theory than it is to put one to rest.That is the challenge facing Trump now, as his political supporters stage an open revolt over his administration’s decision not to release further materials about Epstein, the convicted sex offender who hobnobbed with the global elite before he died by suicide in prison in 2019.Putting the genie back in the bottleThey could be forgiven for expecting more details. Trump installed two vocal Epstein conspiracy theorists and right-wing media personalities, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, to run the F.B.I. after both men spent years telling their audiences there really was a there there. This spring, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised big revelations about the case that have come to nothing.It turns out, though, it is a whole lot easier to be a conspiracy theorist when you’re not president, you don’t control both houses of Congress, and you haven’t handpicked the leaders of the nation’s premier investigative agencies.Trump has tried to put the genie back in the bottle. He admonished a reporter for asking about the matter at a cabinet meeting last week — “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” — and then, over the weekend, told off his followers, in a lengthy social media post.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Clash of the Bilious Billionaires

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      Sometimes you’re better off letting the children fight.That was President Trump’s callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump’s social media spat with Elon Musk. It’s hard to think of two puer aeterni who are more deserving of a verbal walloping.Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their dueling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky.In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought an over-$80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he’s going to sell it.Thursday was the most titillating day here since the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy the Earth.On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. “I’m not thinking about Elon Musk,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. He added, “I wish him well.” But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Elon, telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Musk has “lost his mind” and CNN’s Dana Bash that “the poor guy’s got a problem.” Trump had to know that would be seen as a reference to the intense drug use by Musk chronicled by The Times.As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth’s, the new Trumpworld boîte on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, “MAGA will not sell out to ketamine.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      If Elon Musk and Donald Trump Make Up, Don’t Be Surprised

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      For all the insults that Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump traded on Thursday, don’t be surprised if they make up again days from now. In the meantime, they both benefit.Elon Musk was once known for doing things. The entrepreneur reached a new peak of fame on Thursday for saying things. It was mostly bad things about President Trump.The spat was revelatory, it was epic, it was historic, at least according to the thousands of earnest and excited commentaries that were instantly published.It was also a well-timed outburst.Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump did not have a feud five days ago and might not have a feud five days from now. Until proven otherwise, all of this is theater. Think of it as the political version of professional wrestling. For a few hours, everyone was diverted by the spectacle of a brawl between the world’s richest man and its most powerful person.Mr. Trump took a break from tariffs and deportations. For Mr. Musk, the episode was even more valuable. His wealth comes from the promise that Tesla, his electric car company, will own a significant slice of the self-driving future. The launch of Tesla’s robotaxi business is next week in Austin. Skepticism abounds. The more attention it gets, the bigger a disappointment it could be.Mr. Musk’s SpaceX business is even more problematic. For all its promise to set up colonies on Mars, it is having trouble with the basics. The ninth flight test of SpaceX’s Starship program a few days ago saw both the reusable booster exploding and, 40 minutes later, the rocket itself blowing up. It wasn’t the first such failure either.SpaceX, which is owned by Mr. Musk, left, is having trouble with the basics of spaceflight. Pool photo by Brandon BellWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Virginia Giuffre, Voice in Epstein Sex Trafficking Scandal, Dies at 41

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      She accused Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, of recruiting her to join their sex-trafficking ring and sued Prince Andrew for sexual assault.Virginia Giuffre, a former victim of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring who said she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” as a teenager to rich and powerful predators, including Prince Andrew of Britain, died on Friday at her farm in Western Australia. She was 41.Ms. Giuffre died by suicide, according to a statement from the family. Ms. Giuffre (pronounced JIFF-ree) wrote in an Instagram post in March that she was days away from dying of renal failure after being injured in a crash with a school bus that she said was traveling at nearly 70 m.p.h.In 2019, Mr. Epstein was arrested and charged by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex trafficking and conspiracy, and was accused of soliciting teenage girls to perform massages that became increasingly sexual in nature.Barely a month after he was apprehended, and a day after documents were released from Ms. Giuffre’s successful defamation suit against him, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his cell in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan. His death, at 66, was ruled a suicide.In 2009 Ms. Giuffre, identified then only as Jane Doe 102, had sued Mr. Epstein, accusing him and Ghislaine Maxwell, his co-conspirator and the daughter of the disgraced British media magnate Robert Maxwell, of recruiting her to join his sex-trafficking ring when she was a minor under the guise of becoming a professional masseuse.Ms. Giuffre in 2023 with a photo of herself as a teenager. She said she was recruited to Mr. Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring as a minor and that she was “passed around like a platter of fruit” among his powerful friends.Emily Michot/Miami Herald, via Tribune News Service, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

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      ‘Epstein Files’ Release, Hyped by Pam Bondi, Falls Short of Expectations

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      The release of flight logs and Jeffrey Epstein’s contact list by the attorney general was met with criticism from those who had expected the documents to reveal new information.For days, Attorney General Pam Bondi had talked about releasing the “Epstein files,” supposedly secret documents the federal government has on some of the powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.But the roughly 200 pages of documents that Ms. Bondi released on Thursday contained little new information pointing to wrongdoing by anyone other than Mr. Epstein, a registered sex offender who died in jail. The document dump largely consisted of flight logs for Mr. Epstein’s planes — long ago made public — and contact information for hundreds of associates, along with brief descriptions of items found at his residences.The release was billed as a gesture ushering in a new era of transparency at the Justice Department. But the hyped first release of documents (which Ms. Bondi teased as “breaking news” in a Fox News appearance on Wednesday night) appeared to be mostly political theater. Its confusing daylong rollout even spun off a few new conspiracy theories among some Trump supporters, who view the Epstein investigation as a fountainhead for other conspiracies.On Thursday afternoon, Ms. Bondi and Kash Patel, the director of the F.B.I., offered a sneak preview of the documents to several conservative influencers, some of whom emerged from the West Wing waving chunky white binders with the label “The Epstein Files: Phase I.” One of them later called it an “interesting souvenir.”But by midafternoon, the Justice Department had not posted the contents. And Ms. Bondi was drawing criticism on social media from those who had taken her at her word the night before. The conservative personality Glenn Beck posted on X: “The Epstein files are a total joke,” and asked, “Who is subverting POTUS?”Ms. Bondi responded by promising more documents to come. Later, she said that a “source” in the F.B.I. field office in New York City had told her the bureau withheld “thousands” of previously unknown pages of Epstein-related documents and that she was determined to get them, according to a letter her spokesman provided to reporters.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Flew on Charter Jet Previously Owned by Jeffrey Epstein

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      Former President Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign said on Monday that it was unaware that a private plane used by Mr. Trump for campaign travel on Saturday was once owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and sex offender.Mr. Trump flew from Bozeman, Mont., to Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Aspen, Colo., on the jet, made by Gulfstream, to attend campaign fund-raisers after Mr. Trump’s signature Boeing 757, often referred to as Trump Force One, experienced a mechanical issue en route to a campaign rally in Bozeman on Friday.A Trump campaign official said that the campaign had called its charter jet vendor, Private Jet Services Group, after the mechanical failure to get a plane that could ferry the former president, and that the charter service had provided the Gulfstream jet. The official added that the campaign had used that private jet service as a vendor for years, and that it would take efforts to avoid using that plane in the future.A representative for Elevate Aviation Group, which owns Private Jet Services Group, hung up on a phone call requesting a comment about the aircraft. Other phone calls and text messages were not answered.Over the weekend, viral social media posts highlighted the apparent connection to Mr. Epstein. A report by The Miami Herald on Monday matched the charter plane’s tail number to a Gulfstream jet once owned by Mr. Epstein.Mr. Epstein’s planes have long been a source of public interest; he was known to travel with high-profile passengers, including Bill Clinton, Mr. Trump, Prince Andrew and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now running for president as an independent candidate. Mr. Epstein also brought young women — and girls, according to some who accused Mr. Epstein of sex trafficking — to entertain guests on board.Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein had routinely crossed paths over the decades, attending many of the same social events and being photographed together in the 1990s and early 2000s. Mr. Trump spoke enthusiastically about their relationship in the years before Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to charges of unlawful sex with minors. In 2002, Mr. Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.”Speaking in the Oval Office in 2019, Mr. Trump distanced himself from Mr. Epstein, saying that he’d “had a falling out with him.”“I haven’t spoken to him in 15 years,” he added. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.” More