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      Trump knew about Epstein’s conduct, newly released emails suggest

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      Damning new emails that suggest Donald Trump knew about the conduct of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were released Wednesday, including one in which Epstein said “of course [Trump] knew about the girls” procured for his sex-trafficking ring, and another that said Trump “spent hours” with one victim at Epstein’s house.The release of the three messages by Democrats on the House oversight committee is likely to heap significant pressure on the White House to publish in full the so-called Epstein files reportedly detailing the long-running scandal that has overshadowed Trump’s second term in office.Later on Wednesday, the committee’s Republican majority countered by releasing its own tranche of 23,000 documents, accusing Democrats of “cherry picking” the memos “to generate clickbait”.Trump, meanwhile, fired off a post to his Truth Social platform in which he said Democrats “are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects”.The president urged House members to focus instead on the upcoming vote to reopen the government: “There should be no deflections to Epstein or anything else, and any Republicans involved should be focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”Numerous victims have said they were assaulted at Epstein’s infamous parties that took place at his home in New York, his Florida mansion and at his compound at Little St James in the US Virgin Islands, to which “clients” would be ferried by private jet.In one of the memos released Wednesday, Epstein alleged to his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in April 2011 that Trump had had a lengthy engagement in the company of one of the disgraced financier’s sex-trafficked victims.“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [victim’s name redacted] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned,” the message reads.In her reply, Maxwell says: “I have been thinking about that.”A second message, sent by Epstein to Trump biographer Michael Wolff in January 2019, indicates that Trump had asked him to resign from Mar-a-Lago, the president’s exclusive members-only club in Florida.But, Epstein says, he was “never a member ever” and adds “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”.Epstein’s longtime friend and co-conspirator Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence after her conviction for sex-trafficking crimes, including procuring girls to be abused.A third message, sent by Epstein to Wolff in December 2015, solicited the author’s advice about fashioning a response for Trump to questions CNN was reportedly preparing to ask him about their relationship.“If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein asks.“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff responds.“If he 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 …“Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”Trump has consistently denied having knowledge of Epstein’s activities, which included the operation of a sex-trafficking ring that procured teen girls for wealthy and influential associates. Epstein killed himself in 2019 while in federal custody.Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, in a lunchtime press briefing at the White House, called the release of the emails “a manufactured hoax by the Democratic party” to distract from the reopening of the government.She also expanded on an earlier statement in which she identified the unnamed victim in the redacted email as Virginia Giuffre, who named Epstein, Maxwell and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, among her abusers, but never publicly accused Trump.In her posthumous memoir, Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, Giuffre said she was recruited by Maxwell from Mar-a-Lago, where she worked as a teenager. She died by suicide in April aged 41.“Ms Giuffre, and God rest her soul, maintained that there was nothing inappropriate she ever witnessed, that President Trump was always extremely professional and friendly to her,” Leavitt said.“It’s a question worth asking the Democratic party why they chose to redact that name of a victim who has already publicly made statements about her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and is, unfortunately, no longer with us.”Leavitt insisted that “these emails proved absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong”.Democrats, however, have accused the White House of covering up Trump’s alleged involvement and have consistently called on Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney general, to release documents about the scandal, which have come to be known as the Epstein files.In a statement, the oversight committee’s ranking member, Robert Garcia, said: “The more Donald Trump tries to cover up the Epstein files, the more we uncover. 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.”Other Democrats joined calls for more transparency from the White House.Ro Khanna, a California Democratic representative, said that this was “exactly why” he was working with the Republican representative Thomas Massie to force a House floor vote on the full release of the Epstein files.“The public deserves transparency and the survivors deserve justice,” he said.In a post to X, Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota senator, wrote: “Americans deserve the full truth. The administration needs to keep its promise and release the Epstein files.”A vote could come quickly as the House prepares to reconvene Wednesday after the lengthy government shutdown.The Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, who has wavered on the release of the full tranche of Epstein investigation records, has said he will swear in Arizona’s newly elected representative Adelita Grijalva, set to be the 218th signature needed on a discharge petition that would force a vote.“Republicans are running a pedophile protection program. They are intentionally hiding the Jeffrey Epstein files,” Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said on Tuesday, accusing Johnson of delaying Grijalva’s swearing-in for seven weeks to defend Trump.Maxwell, meanwhile, is seeking a commutation of her sentence from Trump, according to Democrats on the House judiciary committee.The supreme court last month rejected Maxwell’s appeal to overturn her criminal conviction.Additional reporting by Shrai Popat More

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      Ghislaine Maxwell eyeing commutation, whistleblower tells House Democrats

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      Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime associate and co-conspirator who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex-trafficking crimes, is reportedly preparing a “commutation application” for the Trump administration to review, according to new allegations from a whistleblower shared with House Democrats.Democrats on the House judiciary committee announced on Monday that they had received information from a whistleblower that indicates that the British former socialite, 63, is working on filing a commutation application. They also said Maxwell had been receiving special treatment at federal prison camp Bryan in Texas – the minimum-security facility she was transferred to earlier this year.Congressman Jamie Raskin, the ranking member and top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, stated in a news release that the prison’s warden was also “helping” Maxwell “copy, print, and send documents” to support her bid for clemency.The exact content of this “commutation application” was unclear, Raskin added.Raskin states that according to the whistleblower, Maxwell has been receiving “customized” meals that are “personally delivered” to her cell, and that the warden has “personally arranged” private meetings for Maxwell and her visitors. The visits allegedly include providing a “special cordoned-off area” for visitors to arrive, as well as “an assortment of snacks and refreshments for her guests”.Maxwell’s visitors were also reportedly permitted to bring computers, which, Raskin described in the news release as an “unprecedented action by the Warden given the security risk and potential for Ms Maxwell to use a computer to conduct unmonitored communications with the outside world”.In one alleged instance, the whistleblower said that when phone lines went down for other inmates, Maxwell was given specific instructions about who she should tell her contacts to call and how those personnel would then connect to relay the call to Maxwell.The whistleblower further reportedly told the House Democrats that when Maxwell wanted to review and edit documents “quickly”, she “essentially used” the warden as her “personal secretary and administrative assistant”. The news release states that Maxwell’s correspondents would email documents directly to the warden, who would provide them to Maxwell, “who would review and edit them and provide them back to the Warden to scan and provide to the original sender”.Other privileges allegedly granted to Maxwell also include time to “play with” a service dog – a perk that the news release states is not “ordinarily allowed” –   as well as private after-hours access to the prison exercise area.Maxwell’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Guardian regarding the whistleblower’s claims.In a statement to the Guardian, Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said that “the White House does not comment on potential clemency requests”.“As President Trump has stated, pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell is not something he has thought about,” Jackson added.Over the weekend, reports surfaced that Maxwell told friends and family in emails from prison that she was “much happier” at the Texas facility than her previous prison.In August, Maxwell was moved from a low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to the minimum-security camp in Texas, where most of the inmates are serving time for non-violent offenses and white-collar crimes. The transfer, which experts described as “unprecedented”, occurred just days after she was interviewed about the Epstein case by the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche – who also previously served as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer.That interview came as the Trump administration was facing mounting pressure to release more documents related to the Epstein investigation and amid intense speculation around the president’s own personal ties to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, who was found dead in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting prosecution on sex-trafficking charges.In the news release on Monday, Raskin also announced that he had sent a letter to Trump demanding answers about the whistleblower’s allegations, and also called on the president to reject Maxwell’s commutation request.“You should not grant any form of clemency to this convicted and unrepentant sex offender,” Raskin wrote in the letter. “Your Administration should not be providing her with room service, with puppies to play with, with federal law enforcement officials waiting on her every need, or with any special treatment or institutional privilege at all.”Raskin requested that Blanche appear for a public congressional hearing to discuss the revelations and also posed three questions to Trump.Raskin asked whether Trump had discussed a potential commutation, or any form of presidential clemency, for Maxwell with Blanche or others; whether he had directed Blanche or anyone else in the administration to provide Maxwell with the transfer to the prison camp, or to give her favorable and preferential treatment in prison; and lastly whether Maxwell, her attorneys, family or representatives have made any promises to Trump or his attorneys.Raskin has asked for a response to the questions by 24 November.In another statement on Monday, Democratic representative Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the committee on oversight and government reform, called on Republican House speaker Mike Johnson and Republican representative James Comer, who chairs the oversight committee, to “publicly oppose a commutation or pardon by President Trump.“Ghislaine Maxwell is a convicted sex offender who helped Jeffrey Epstein commit atrocities and rape against women and girls for decades,” Garcia said. “For months, we have been warning the American people that Trump’s Department of Justice is providing her with unprecedented benefits as a prisoner, including moving her to a less restrictive facility.“Thanks to brave whistleblowers and our partners on the judiciary committee, we have more evidence that Maxwell is seeking a pardon or commutation,” he added.In October, the US supreme court declined to hear an appeal from Maxwell on her sex-trafficking conviction. 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      House Democrat accuses Trump’s DoJ of ‘gigantic cover-up’ over shut Epstein inquiry

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      A top Democrat has demanded to know why the Trump administration “inexplicably killed” a criminal investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators as he accused the justice department of a “shameful and gigantic cover-up”.Jamie Raskin, a House judiciary committee ranking member and congressman from Maryland, claimed the decision to end the investigation in July had shielded an alleged network of “powerful individuals accused of enabling and engaging in the massive billion-dollar sex trafficking operation” while ignoring the accounts of women exploited by Epstein.In a letter to the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Monday, Raskin asked: “Why would the Trump Administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) kill an ongoing criminal investigation into a massive and decades-long criminal sex trafficking ring that preyed on girls and young women? Who exactly are you intending to protect by this action?”Raskin demanded to know why the investigation had abruptly ended despite the fact that nearly 50 women had provided information to prosecutors and the FBI as part of the years-long investigation into Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who was jailed in 2022. He claimed the women had identified to investigators at least 20 co-conspirators.“The information provided by this huge group of women was precise and detailed: they described how Mr Epstein, Ms Maxwell, and their co-conspirators orchestrated a sophisticated and clandestine sex trafficking conspiracy that trafficked them to at least 20 men,” Raskin wrote.“These survivors shared with the DOJ and FBI the specific identities of many of these co-conspirators, how this operation was structured and financed, and which individuals facilitated these crimes.”Efforts to pursue these leads appear to have been halted when Trump came into office, a press release from the committee claimed.The Epstein case has been under renewed scrutiny since the justice department and the FBI concluded in a memo in July that no secret client list of Epstein existed and no further charges were expected as investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”. The memo contradicted previous claims made by Trump and Bondi, as well as conspiracy theories alleging Epstein was at the center of a larger plot.Raskin said the US attorney’s office for the southern district of New York had been running an investigation into the disgraced financier’s alleged co-conspirators until January 2025, when prosecutors were ordered to transfer the case files to the justice department’s headquarters in Washington DC.Since then, “the investigation into co-conspirators has inexplicably ceased, and no further investigative steps appear to have been taken”, Raskin wrote, citing information provided by lawyers representing Epstein’s accusers.He said the women had made clear to the justice department and the FBI that Epstein and Maxwell did not act alone. “Yet, the Trump Administration has inexplicably killed this investigation, declared these survivors ‘not credible,’ and falsely claimed no evidence exists to support charges against additional co-conspirators,” Raskin added.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe accused the justice department of abandoning promises made under the Biden administration to coordinate with victims in its pursuit of Epstein’s co-conspirators. “Your DOJ has abandoned those promises in pursuit of a shameful and gigantic cover-up,” he wrote.Raskin has asked Bondi for details of investigative steps relating to the case undertaken by the justice department since January 2025.In an email response, justice department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre blamed Democrats and the shutdown.“The Democrats have shut down the government and Congressional correspondence during a lapse in appropriations is limited. We look forward to continuing our close cooperation with the Committee in pursuit of transparency, as we have already provided 33,000 pages to the House Oversight Committee – more than was ever requested by the committee when the Ranking Member’s party was in the majority, once the Democrats stop playing games with taxpayer dollars and vote to re-open the government.” More

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      Democratic representative urges former prince Andrew to testify over Epstein

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      A Democratic congressman on Friday called for the former prince Andrew Mountbatten Windsor to testify before the US House of Representatives committee that is conducting an inquiry into the government’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case.The statement from Ro Khanna, a California Democratic representative, who serves on the investigative House oversight committee, comes after the UK trade minister, Chris Bryant, suggested that since Mountbatten Windsor has been stripped of his royal titles, he should answer demands for information about his dealings with Epstein, an alleged sex trafficker who died by suicide while in federal custody six years ago.“Just as with any ordinary member of the public, if there were requests from another jurisdiction of this kind, I would expect any decently minded person to comply with that request,” Bryant said.Khanna told the Guardian: “Andrew should be called to testify before the oversight committee. The public deserves to know who was abusing women and young girls alongside Epstein.”Republicans hold the majority in the House, but amid public outcry over Donald Trump’s handling of the Epstein case approved an inquiry by the oversight committee into how the government handled his prosecutions. Interest in the case flared in July, after the justice department announced a much-rumored list of Epstein’s sex trafficking clients did not exist, and it would share nothing further on the case.The House investigation has thus far resulted in the release of tens of thousands of pages of documents – including a lewd drawing apparently made by Trump for Epstein’s 50th birthday – as well as depositions from former top government officials.As a member of the minority, Khanna does not have the power to subpoena Mountbatten Windsor’s testimony. Spokespeople for the committee’s Republican chair, James Comer, did not respond to questions about whether he believes the former prince should be questioned.Khanna and Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman, have introduced a bill to force the release of files related to Epstein, but Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, a top ally of the president, has refused to bring it up for a vote. Massie and Khanna have circulated a discharge petition that will require the bill be voted on, if 218 members of the House sign it.“This is what my effort with Representative Massie has been about: transparency and justice for the survivors who have been courageously speaking out,” Khanna said.The petition has been signed by all 213 House Democrats, as well as four Republicans. The 218th signature is expected to be Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election in Arizona last month, and awaits swearing in by Johnson. However, the speaker has refused to do so until the House comes back into session, and says he will not tell lawmakers to return to Washington until the Senate approves a measure to end the ongoing government shutdown. More

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      Top Democrat on House oversight panel demands Pam Bondi release Epstein files

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      The top Democrat on a congressional committee investigating the government’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s case demanded on Wednesday that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, turn over files related to the alleged sex trafficker, citing revelations from the posthumous memoir of a prominent abuse survivor.Virginia Giuffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, published this week, details how Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell groomed and manipulated her.In Congress, the House oversight committee has been investigating the government’s handling of the prosecution of Epstein, who died in 2019 while in federal custody. In his letter to Bondi, the committee’s Democratic ranking member Robert Garcia said that the attorney general must hand over further documents about the case, citing details of Epstein and Maxwell’s abuse Giuffre reveals in her book.“Virginia Giuffre’s allegations are heartbreaking and horrific, including testimony that prominent world and US leaders perpetrated sexual assault and sex trafficking of girls and young women. Ms Giuffre clearly contradicts the agency’s claim that the Epstein files did not justify further investigation,” Garcia said in a statement.He called on the justice department to comply with a subpoena that the Republican-led panel’s members approved in August, writing to Bondi: “Your refusal to release the files and your continued disregard of a congressional subpoena raises serious questions about your motives.”Concerns over Epstein’s case flared up in July, when the justice department announced the alleged sex trafficker had died by suicide and no list of his clients existed to be released. That contradicted claims made by Trump and Bondi, as well as conspiracy theories alleging Epstein was at the center of a larger plot.In response, the House oversight committee opened its inquiry into the government’s handling of the case, while the Trump administration moved unsuccessfully to release transcripts of the grand jury that indicted Epstein. A top justice department official also interviewed Maxwell, who is incarcerated, and she was later relocated to a lower security prison.Trump has condemned the outcry over Epstein as a “Democrat hoax”. Despite that, three House Republicans have joined with all Democrats on a petition that will force a vote on legislation to release files related to the case, which is expected to be resolved once the ongoing government shutdown ends.Giuffre died by suicide in April this year, aged 41. After the Guardian published extracts of her memoir last week, the UK’s Prince Andrew gave up his honors and use of the Duke of York title. He has denied allegations he sexually assaulted Giuffre when she was 17, and admitted no liability when settling a civil case she brought for a reported £12m (about $16m).The House oversight committee’s investigation has led to the release of a lewd drawing Trump is said to have made for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Tens of thousands of pages of documents have already been released, many of which were already public. More

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      Speaker Mike Johnson says he won’t block House vote to release Epstein files

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      The Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, on Tuesday said he would not prevent a vote on legislation to make the Jeffrey Epstein files public, even as the chamber remained out of session for a fourth straight week.Johnson has kept the House of Representatives in recess ever since the shutdown began at the start of the month, after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach an agreement on extending government funding beyond the end of September.That has had the knock-on effect of delaying the success of a legislative maneuver known as a discharge petition to force a vote on a bill that would make public documents from the federal investigation into Epstein, who was charged with sex trafficking and died while awaiting trial in 2019. The justice department this year said he died by suicide, but Donald Trump and his officials have previously restated conspiracy theories that Epstein was at the center of a larger plot.The president opposes the release of the documents and called the controversy over them a “Democrat hoax”, but all House Democrats along with three Republicans have signed the petition, bringing it one signature away from reaching the 218-member threshold to trigger a vote.“If it hits 218, it comes to the floor,” Johnson told Politico in an interview. “That’s how it works: If you get the signatures, it goes to a vote.”It was speculated that the speaker could look for ways to undermine the petition. Earlier this year, Johnson backed efforts to block a discharge petition on legislation allowing proxy voting for new parents in the House.The final signature on the petition is expected to be Adelita Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat elected last month to fill her late father’s seat representing a district along the state’s border with Mexico. However, Johnson has refused to swear her in until the House reconvenes, which he says he will not allow until the government reopens.Grijalva has told the Guardian she believes that Johnson, a close ally of Trump, is attempting to delay the vote on the legislation concerning the Epstein files. But even if the bill is approved by the House, it will have to clear the Republican-controlled Senate and be signed by Trump to take effect.At a press conference earlier in the day, Johnson argued that the discharge petition was unnecessary because a House committee is conducting its own investigation into Epstein.“The bipartisan House oversight committee is already accomplishing what the discharge petition, that gambit, sought, and much more,” he said. That investigation has resulted in the release of tens of thousands of pages related to the government’s handling of the case, including a salacious drawing Trump apparently sent Epstein for his birthday.In a statement, Democrat Ro Khanna, a co-sponsor of the discharge petition, called Johnson’s comments “a big deal”.“I appreciate Speaker Johnson making it clear we will get a vote on Rep. Thomas Massie and my bill to release the Epstein files. The advocacy of the survivors is working. Now let’s get Adelita Grijalva sworn in and Congress back to work,” Khanna said.The government shutdown entered its 21st day on Tuesday with no signs of ending. The Senate’s Republican leaders have held 11 votes on a continuing resolution (CR) that would approve federal funding through 21 November, but Democrats have refused to provide the support necessary for it to clear the 60-vote threshold to advance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe minority party has countered by demanding an extension of subsidies for Affordable Care Act healthcare plans, which will otherwise expire at the end of the year. They also want curbs on Trump’s ability to slash congressionally approved funding through rescissions, and the undoing of cuts to Medicaid, which provides healthcare to poor and disabled Americans, that Republicans approved unilaterally early this year.The Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he is willing to negotiate over the Affordable Care Act subsidies, but only once the government reopens.Trump held a lunch at the White House with Republican senators in the afternoon, during which he delivered a rambling speech thanking them for their cooperation in which the shutdown was mentioned only occasionally.“From the beginning, our message has been very simple: we will not be extorted on this crazy plot of theirs,” Trump said. “Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats need to vote for the clean, bipartisan CR and reopen our government. It’s got to be reopened right now.”In a speech on the Senate floor, Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, dismissed the White House event as a “a mini pep rally” and pressed Republicans to negotiate.“Democrats were ready to work with the other side to get it done. But Republicans continue to act like these ACA premiums are not their problem,” he said. More

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      Why is the US House speaker refusing to seat an elected Democrat? | Moira Donegan

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      The people of Arizona’s seventh congressional district – a vast territory extending across the state’s south, along the Mexican border – have been denied representation in Congress for weeks. That’s because Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has refused to swear in Adelita Grijalva, their representative-elect, who won a special election to fill the seat vacated by her father, the late Raúl Grijalva, in a landslide late last month. Grijalva, a Democrat, has been largely ignored by the speaker. Unlike sworn representatives, she has to go around the Capitol with an escort. There’s an office with her name on the door, but she hasn’t been allowed inside, and has worked instead out of a conference room on another floor.It is an unprecedented abuse of procedural power on the part of the speaker, one that has had the effect of silencing a political opponent and denying representation to the citizens of her district. In refusing to seat Grijalva, Johnson has defied the will of Arizona’s voters, and effectively nullified, at least for the time being, a legitimate congressional election. He has persisted in this even in defiance of his own promises, after saying on Friday he would seat her this week once the House returned to session – and then telling lawmakers they wouldn’t reconvene this week after all. Last week, Grijalva showed up to a three-and-a-half-minute pro forma session, hoping to be sworn in then. (Johnson has sworn in other representatives at pro forma sessions in the past.) But the Republican presiding over the session, Morgan Griffith, ignored the effort. On a weekend talkshow, Grijalva said she had heard “absolutely nothing” from the speaker about the timing of her swearing in.Grijalva thinks she knows why. There is no political calculation that could justify Mike Johnson’s refusal to seat a duly elected member of the House: Grijalva won her race, and both his oath to the constitution and his responsibilities to the body that he leads require Johnson to seat her. But in lieu of deference to these higher aims, Grijalva suspects that Johnson is pursuing a much more cynical one: in refusing to swear her in and allow her to take up the office to which she has been elected, Johnson, Grijalva thinks, is aiming to stop her becoming the final member of Congress whose signature is needed to force a vote on the release of confidential files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Currently, the petition has 217 signatures; it needs only 218. Grijalva has pledged to support it. “Why the rules are different for me – the only thing that I can think of is the Epstein files,” Grijalva told the New York Times.The Epstein scandal, and the ensuing fallout from new and resurfaced revelations about Donald Trump’s deep and longstanding friendship with the deceased child sex trafficker and financier, has long plagued the Trump administration. One of the few genuine threats to Trump’s grip over his coalition came a few months ago, when his justice department refused to release files relating to the case, causing outrage among a group of rightwing podcasters, media personalities and conspiracy theorists who had long traded on speculation about the case and accusations that powerful Democrats were involved in a cover-up.The discharge petition, if passed, would not be likely to result in the actual release of the documents. The move has little support in the Republican-backed Senate; there is no chance that Donald Trump, who has opposed the release of the Epstein files, calling them a “waste” of “time and energy”, would sign a bill into law making them public. But what the move would accomplish is forcing a full chamber vote on the matter, requiring every member of the Republican caucus to go on the record either endorsing the release of the files – and thereby displeasing Trump – or opposing it – thereby displeasing their voters. The Times has reported that Johnson’s delay is giving the White House more time to pressure Republicans who have already signed on to the discharge petition to remove their signatures before the Grijalva is sworn in.And so it seems that Johnson is ignoring the constitution and subverting the will of the voters in order to buy time, in an effort to spare his party embarrassment over their president’s one-time close confidence with a pedophile.But the refusal to seat Grijalva has broader implications. In using his procedural control over the functioning of Congress to deny a seat to an elected Democrat, Johnson is setting a dangerous precedent and raising questions about future transfers of power. If a Democratic majority is elected in 2026, will the outgoing Republican speaker duly swear in its members? Or will he use his procedural powers to delay one, several or many of them from taking their oaths of office – either under the pretext of election fraud or personal ineligibility, or out of sheer, bald unwillingness to hand over power to members of a party that the president and his allies have repeatedly described as illegitimate?These are no longer fanciful questions; they are ones that must be asked. The Republicans who refused to subvert the law for Trump’s benefit on January 6 are now largely gone; the ones who have replaced them appear much more willing to place party before country. Every day that Grijalva is not sworn in, the shadow they cast over 2026 darkens.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump threatens to invoke Insurrection Act as Bondi faces Senate – US politics live

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      Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics as Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy more troops into Democrat-led cities.“We have an insurrection act for a reason. If I had to enact it I would do that,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, adding, “if people were being killed and courts were holding us up or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I would do that.”It came after a federal judge in Oregon temporarily halted a National Guard deployment in Portland although troops from Texas could be deployed in Chicago as soon as today despite a lawsuit from Illinois against the move.Meanwhile, Pam Bondi is likely to grilled over troop deployments as she faces the Senate judiciary committee. The attorney general is also likely to face questions over the indictment last month of the former FBI director James Comey, deadly strikes on boats believed to be carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela, as well as the brewing controversy over the release of documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.Trump is also due to welcome the Canadian PM, Mark Carney, to the White House with trade talks expected to be the main focus of discussions.Later, he will meet American-Israeli former hostage Edan Alexander as the world marks the two-year anniversary of the 7 October attacks. In Egypt, indirect talks are taking place between Israel and Hamas over Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza.And, of course, this all comes amid the backdrop of the ongoing government shutdown, now entering its second week. Stay with us for all the latest developments.In other news:

      A career federal prosecutor in Virginia has told colleagues she does not believe there is probable cause to file criminal mortgage fraud charges against New York attorney general Letitia James, according to a person familiar with the matter. The prosecutor, Elizabeth Yusi, oversees major criminal cases in the Norfolk office for the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia and plans to soon present her conclusion to Lindsey Halligan, a Trump ally, who was installed as the US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia last month.

      The US supreme court has declined to hear an appeal from Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell of her sex trafficking conviction. Maxwell in 2022 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex trafficking and related crimes.

      The Trump administration said that funds from a US government program that subsidizes commercial air service to rural airports are set to expire as soon as Sunday because of the government shutdown.

      Jimmy Kimmel emerged as more popular than Donald Trump after a spat with the president’s administration temporarily left the talkshow host off the air in September, according to a recent poll.

      Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has urged Donald Trump to scrap tariffs on his country’s imports and sanctions against its officials, as the two men held what the Brazilian presidency called a “friendly” video call. More