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      US judge rejects Trump administration’s bid to unseal Epstein grand jury transcripts

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      A US federal judge on Wednesday denied a justice department request to unseal grand jury transcripts related to a criminal investigation of the late sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein in south Florida from the mid-2000s.The move is the first ruling in a series of attempts to release more information on the case by Donald Trump’s administration, which has been mired in a scandal in recent weeks, after the justice department announced it would not be releasing any additional files related to the Epstein case – despite earlier promises from the president and the the US attorney general, Pam Bondi.The justice department’s memo sparked renewed focus on and scrutiny of Trump’s past ties to Epstein and drew backlash from some Trump supporters and conservative commentators.On Friday, the justice department filed a motion asking the court to unseal the grand jury transcripts related to the federal investigations into Epstein in 2005 and 2007, according to court documents.But on Wednesday, US district judge Robin Rosenberg ruled that the department’s request in Florida did not fall into any of the exceptions to rules requiring grand jury material be kept secret.Rosenberg wrote that the court’s “hands are tied” and said the government had not requested the grand jury’s findings for use in a judicial proceeding, pointing out that district courts in the US are largely prohibited from unsealing grand jury testimony except in very narrow circumstances.“Eleventh circuit law does not permit this court to grant the government’s request,” Rosenberg wrote. “The court’s hands are tied – a point that the Government concedes.”The justice department still has pending requests to unseal transcripts in Manhattan federal court related to a later indictment brought against Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial, and his former associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. More

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      Obama’s office issues rare rebuke to Trump’s ‘ridiculous’ allegations about 2016 election – live

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      In a statement sent to reporters on Tuesday, a spokesperson for former president Barack Obama dismissed Donald Trump’s “ridiculous” accusation that Obama had committed “treason” in 2016, by directing his administration to reveal, after the 2016 election, that the Russian government had attempted to boost Trump’s candidacy.Here is the full statement from Obama’s spokesperson, Patrick Rodenbush:
      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. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.
      Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.
      The statement came after Trump claimed on Tuesday that documents reviewed by his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, prove that Obama was “guilty”.But Gabbard’s accusation is based on the false claim that Obama and officials in his administration had suppressed “intelligence showing ‘Russian and criminal actors did not impact’ the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure”.Obama and his administration never made that claim. Instead they made the case that Russia had attempted to interfere in the 2016 election through a social-media influence campaign and by hacking and releasing, via Wikileaks, email from Democratic officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign aides. That conclusion was borne out by special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report and by a bipartisan 2020 report by the Senate intelligence committee whose members included then senator Marco Rubio.Speaking in the Oval Office during a meeting with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Trump deflected a question about Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade, calling the uproar over Epstein “sort of a witch hunt”. He then added the baseless claim that, in 2020, Obama and those around him also “tried to rig the election, and they got caught”.“The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold”, Trump added.The senate voted 50-48 on Tuesday to proceed to debate on the nomination of Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove, to fill a vacancy as a judge on a federal appeals court. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska was the only Republican to join all of the chamber’s Democratic senators in voting against Bove.There has been speculation that Trump wants his former lawyer, who is just 44, to be in place for possible consideration for a spot on the supreme court if either Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas retires soon.After Trump appointed him acting deputy attorney general, Bove ordered federal prosecutors in New York to dismiss corruption charges against the city’s mayor, Eric Adams, in return for his cooperation in immigration enforcement.Danielle Sassoon, the acting US attorney for the southern district of New York, refused and wrote to Bove that the mayor’s lawyers had “repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed”.Sassoon also wrote that Bove had scolded a member of her team for taking notes at the meeting with the mayor’s legal team and ordered that the notes be confiscated.As our colleague Chris Stein reported, Bove’s nomination for the lifetime position has faced strident opposition from Democrats, after Erez Reuveni, a former justice department official who was fired from his post, alleged that during his time at the justice department, Bove told lawyers that they “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’ and ignore any such court order” blocking efforts to remove immigrants to El Salvador. In testimony before the committee last month, Bove denied the accusation, and Reuveni later provided text messages that supported his claim.Republicans announced Tuesday that the House of Representatives will call it quits a day early and head home in the face of persistent Democratic efforts to force Republicans into voting on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.The chamber was scheduled be in session through Thursday ahead of the annual five-week summer recess, but on Tuesday, the Republican majority announced that the last votes of the week would take place the following day. Democrats in turn accused the GOP of leaving town rather than dealing with the outcry over Donald Trump’s handling of the investigation into the alleged sex trafficker.“They are actually ending this week early because they’re afraid to cast votes on the Jeffrey Epstein issue,” said Ted Lieu, the vice-chair of the House Democratic caucus.Republicans downplayed the decision to cut short the workweek, while arguing that the White House has already moved to resolve questions about the case. Last week, Trump asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents.“We’re going to have committee meetings through Thursday, and there’s still a lot of work being done,” said the majority leader, Steve Scalise. “The heavy work is done in committee and there is a lot of work being done this week before we head out.” He declined to answer a question about whether votes were cut short over the Epstein files.Senator Elizabeth Warren said Donald Trump’s claim that he expects to receive $20m in free advertising, public service announcements or similar programming from the new owners of CBS, “reeks of corruption”.Warren was responding to Trump’s boast that he would be paid $20m by the new owners of the network in addition to the $16m from the current owners he received on Tuesday to drop his lawsuit claiming that he had been damaged by the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year.On Monday Warren, and fellow senators Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden, wrote to David Ellison, whose company Skydance needs federal approval to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck any “secret side deal” with Trump, or had played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show.After Trump claimed that he did make a deal with Ellison’s company before federal approval was granted, Warren asked Skydance to confirm the news in a social media post of her own.“CBS canceled Late Night with Stephen Colbert—a show they called ‘a staple of the nation’s zeitgeist’—just three days after Colbert called out Paramount for its $16 million settlement with Trump”, Warren wrote in a second post. “Was his show canceled for political reasons? Americans deserve to know.”Later on Tuesday, Congressman Seth Magaziner, a Rhode Island Democrat, responded to Trump’s boast about the $20m he expects from the network’s new owner with the comment: “He’s bragging about taking bribes… In broad daylight.”In a statement sent to reporters on Tuesday, a spokesperson for former president Barack Obama dismissed Donald Trump’s “ridiculous” accusation that Obama had committed “treason” in 2016, by directing his administration to reveal, after the 2016 election, that the Russian government had attempted to boost Trump’s candidacy.Here is the full statement from Obama’s spokesperson, Patrick Rodenbush:
      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. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.
      Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.
      The statement came after Trump claimed on Tuesday that documents reviewed by his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, prove that Obama was “guilty”.But Gabbard’s accusation is based on the false claim that Obama and officials in his administration had suppressed “intelligence showing ‘Russian and criminal actors did not impact’ the 2016 presidential election via cyber-attacks on infrastructure”.Obama and his administration never made that claim. Instead they made the case that Russia had attempted to interfere in the 2016 election through a social-media influence campaign and by hacking and releasing, via Wikileaks, email from Democratic officials and Hillary Clinton’s campaign aides. That conclusion was borne out by special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report and by a bipartisan 2020 report by the Senate intelligence committee whose members included then senator Marco Rubio.Speaking in the Oval Office during a meeting with the president of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, Trump deflected a question about Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade, calling the uproar over Epstein “sort of a witch hunt”. He then added the baseless claim that, in 2020, Obama and those around him also “tried to rig the election, and they got caught”.“The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold”, Trump added.

      Despite the best efforts of Donald Trump and his allies to change the subject, the Jeffrey Epstein firestorm – which Trump today derided as “a witch hunt” – just won’t die. This morning, the justice department announced it hopes to meet with Ghislaine Maxwell to find out if she has “information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims” of Epstein. Deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said he anticipated meeting with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and other crimes, “in the coming days”. “We are grateful to President Trump for his commitment to uncovering the truth in this case,” David Oscar Markus, an attorney for Maxwell, wrote on X, inspiring suggestions that Maxwell will seek for a pardon or commutation of her sentence from Trump.

      But the New York federal court handling the Epstein and Maxwell case said it would like to “expeditiously” resolve the Trump administration’s request to unseal grand jury testimony, but it could not do so due to a number of missing submissions. The justice department did not submit to the court the Epstein-related grand jury transcripts it wants to unseal, the judge said, and requested that the justice department submit the transcripts by next Tuesday under seal, so that the court can decide on the request to unseal them. The government had also not “adequately” addressed the “factors” that district courts weigh in considering applications for disclosure, including “why disclosure is being sought in the particular case” and “what specific information is being sought for disclosure”, the judge wrote.

      And despite the GOP’s valiant attempts to blame this all on the Democrats, there is ever more proof in the congressional pudding that this is very much a bipartisan issue (let’s not forget, it was Trump’s Maga base that kicked this all off). The embattled House speaker Mike Johnson (who is among those Republicans who have actually called for the evidence to be released) shut down operation of the chamber a day early, scrapping Thursday’s scheduled votes after the party lost control of the floor over bipartisan pressure to vote on releasing Epstein-related files. That means there won’t be any more floor votes until lawmakers return from summer recess in September.

      The House Oversight Committee also voted to subpoena Maxwell for testimony after recess.

      Trump announced that the Philippines will pay a 19% tariff rate following the conclusion of a trade deal with the United States.

      The New York Times defended the Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration decided to bar the global outlet from the White House press pool following its investigative coverage of ties between Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a public statement, a Times spokesperson said the White House’s actions represented “simple retribution by a president against a news organization for doing reporting that he doesn’t like”, warning that “such actions deprive Americans of information about how their government operates”.

      NPR’s editor-in-chief, Edith Chapin, has told colleagues that she is stepping down later this year. It comes just days after federal lawmakers voted in support of Trump’s plan to claw back $1.1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the umbrella organization that funds both NPR and the non-commercial TV network PBS.

      A US appeals court declined to lift restrictions imposed by Trump’s administration on White House access by Associated Press journalists after the news organization declined to refer to the body of water long called the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

      The state department claimed one of the reasons for the US’s withdrawal from Unesco was the organization’s decision to admit Palestine as a member state, which was “contrary to US policy and contributed to the proliferation of anti-Israel rhetoric within the organization” [a charge the Trump administration frequently directs at the United Nations at large]. The state department also said that remaining in Unesco was not in the national interest, accusing it of having “a globalist, ideological agenda for international development at odds with our America First foreign policy”. Trump pulled the US out of Unesco during his first term too.

      Elon Musk may return to US politics, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing SpaceX documents and people familiar with the content.

      Trump said he had received from CBS parent company Paramount $16m as part of a lawsuit settlement and that he expects to receive $20m more.

      A panel of judges in the US district court in New Jersey declined to permanently appoint Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba as the state’s top federal prosecutor, according to an order from the court.
      The editor-in-chief of the US public radio network NPR has told colleagues that she is stepping down later this year.Edith Chapin’s announcement comes just days after federal lawmakers voted in support of Donald Trump’s plan to claw back $1.1bn from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the umbrella organization that funds both NPR and the non-commercial TV network PBS.Chapin informed Katherine Maher, NPR’s chief executive, of her intention to step down before lawmakers approved the cuts but will stay on to help with the transition, according to what she told the outlet.Chapin has been with NPR since 2012 after spending 25 years at CNN. She has been NPR’s top editor – along with chief content officer – since 2023.In an interview with NPR’s media reporter, David Folkenflik, Chapin said she had informed Maher two weeks ago of her decision to leave.“I have had two big executive jobs for two years and I want to take a break. I want to make sure my performance is always top-notch for the company,” Chapin told NPR.Nonetheless, Chapin’s departure is bound to be seen in the context of an aggressive push by the Trump administration to cut government support of public radio, including NPR and Voice of America.Trump has described PBS and NPR as “radical left monsters” that have a bias against conservatives. In an executive order in May, the president called for the end of taxpayer subsidization of the organizations.Trump later called on Congress to cancel public broadcaster funding over the next two years via a rescission, or cancellation, request. That was approved by both houses of Congress on Friday, taking back $1.1bn.In an essay published by the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday, Guardian writer Hamilton Nolan said that while NPR and PBS will survive, “the existence of small broadcasters in rural, red-state news deserts is now endangered”.Elon Musk, who infamously served as a senior adviser to Donald Trump before a very public – and very spectacular – bust-up with his former buddy, may return to US politics, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing SpaceX documents and people familiar with the content.The company added that the language laying out such “risk factors” in paperwork sent to investors discussing a tender offer, according to Bloomberg. It is also believed to be the first time this language has appeared in these tender offers.Earlier this month, Musk announced his decision to start to bankroll a new US political party – the “America” party – and suggested it could initially focus on a handful of attainable House and Senate seats while striving to be the decisive vote on major issues amid the thin margins in Congress.The tech billionaire had previously stepped back from his role in Trump’s White House as he sought to salvage his battered reputation which was hurting his companies, including Tesla.He then fell out with Trump over the president’s signature sweeping tax and spending bill, which Musk slammed as “bankrupting” the country (the bill also repeals green energy tax credits that benefit the likes of Tesla).Donald Trump said CBS parent company Paramount paid $16m on Tuesday as part of a lawsuit settlement and that he expects to receive $20m more.Paramount earlier this month agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former vice-president Kamala Harris that the network broadcast in October.“We have just achieved a BIG AND IMPORTANT WIN in our Historic Lawsuit against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount… Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social.A panel of judges in the US district court in New Jersey declined to permanently appoint Donald Trump’s former lawyer Alina Habba as the state’s top federal prosecutor, according to an order from the court.Habba has been serving as New Jersey’s interim US attorney since her appointment by Trump in March, but was limited by law to 120 days in office unless the court agreed to keep her in place. The US Senate has not yet acted on her formal nomination to the role, submitted by Trump this month.The court instead appointed the office’s number two attorney, Desiree Grace, the order said.Last week, the US district court for the northern district of New York declined to keep Trump’s US attorney pick John Sarcone in place after his 120-day term neared expiration. Sarcone managed to stay in the office after the justice department found a workaround by naming him as “special attorney to the attorney general”, according to the New York Times.Habba’s brief tenure as New Jersey’s interim US attorney included the filing of multiple legal actions against Democratic elected officials.Her office brought criminal charges against US representative LaMonica McIver, as she and other members of Congress and Newark’s mayor, Ras Baraka, tried to visit an immigration detention center.The scene grew chaotic after immigration agents tried to arrest Baraka for trespassing, and McIver’s elbows appeared to make brief contact with an immigration officer.Habba’s office charged McIver with two counts of assaulting and impeding a law enforcement officer. McIver has pleaded not guilty.Habba’s office did not follow justice department rules which require prosecutors to seek permission from the Public Integrity Section before bringing criminal charges against a member of Congress for conduct related to their official duties.Her office also charged Baraka, but later dropped the case, prompting a federal magistrate judge to criticize her office for its handling of the matter.Until March, Habba had never worked as a prosecutor.She represented Trump in a variety of civil litigation, including a trial in which a jury found that Trump had sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in a New York department store changing room 27 years ago.In 2023, a federal judge in Florida sanctioned Trump and Habba and ordered them to pay $1m for filing a frivolous lawsuit which alleged that Hillary Clinton and others conspired to damage Trump’s reputation in the investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.Donald Trump has said that the Philippines will pay a 19% tariff rate following the conclusion of a trade deal with the United States.“It was a beautiful visit, and we concluded our Trade Deal, whereby The Philippines is going OPEN MARKET with the United States, and ZERO Tariffs,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after Filipino president Ferdinand Marcos’s visit to the White House.“The Philippines will pay a 19% Tariff. In addition, we will work together Militarily,” Trump wrote, referring to Marcos as “a very good, and tough, negotiator”.On this subject, a US appeals court has declined to lift restrictions imposed by Donald Trump’s administration on White House access by Associated Press journalists after the news organization declined to refer to the body of water long called the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as he prefers.The full US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit kept in place a 6 June decision by a divided three-judge panel that the administration could legally restrict access to the AP to news events in the Oval Office and other locations controlled by the White House including Air Force One.The DC circuit order denied the AP’s request that it review the matter, setting up a possible appeal to the US supreme court.In a lawsuit filed in February, the AP argued that the limitations on its access imposed by the administration violated the constitution’s first amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech.Trump in January signed an executive order officially directing federal agencies to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. The AP sued after the White House restricted its access over its decision not to use “Gulf of America” in its news reports.The AP stylebook states that the Gulf of Mexico has carried that name for more than 400 years. AP said that as a global news agency it will refer to the body of water by its longstanding name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen.Reuters and the AP both issued statements denouncing the access restrictions, which put wire services in a larger rotation with about 30 other newspaper and print outlets. Other media customers, including local news outlets with no presence in Washington, rely on real-time reports by the wire services of presidential statements, as do global financial markets.The Trump administration has said the president has absolute discretion over media access to the White House.The AP won a key order in the trial court when US district judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, decided that if the White House opens its doors to some journalists it cannot exclude others based on their viewpoints, citing the First Amendment.The DC circuit panel in its 2-1 ruling in June paused McFadden’s order. The two judges in the majority, Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, were appointed by Trump during his first term in office. The dissenting judge, Cornelia Pillard, is an appointee of Democratic former president Barack Obama.Further to my last post, the New York Times is defending the Wall Street Journal after the Trump administration decided to bar the global outlet from the White House press pool following its investigative coverage of ties between Donald Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.In the public statement, a Times spokesperson said the White House’s actions represented “simple retribution by a president against a news organization for doing reporting that he doesn’t like”, warning that “such actions deprive Americans of information about how their government operates”.“The White House’s refusal to allow one of the nation’s leading news organizations to cover the highest office in the country is an attack on core constitutional principles underpinning free speech and a free press,” the spokesperson said.“Americans regardless of party deserve to know and understand the actions of the president, and reporters play a vital role in advancing that public interest.”The White House is facing backlash after banning the Wall Street Journal from the press pool set to cover Donald Trump’s upcoming trip to his golf courses in Scotland.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the change was made “due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct”, referring to the newspaper’s recent article alleging the US president sent Jeffrey Epstein a 50th birthday letter that included a drawing of a naked woman. The US president promptly sued the paper for $10bn. The WSJ has stood by its reporting.“This attempt by the White House to punish a media outlet whose coverage it does not like is deeply troubling, and it defies the First Amendment,” said Weijia Jiang, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, in a statement to the Guardian. She added:
      Government retaliation against news outlets based on the content of their reporting should concern all who value free speech and an independent media.
      We strongly urge the White House to restore the Wall Street Journal to its previous position in the pool and aboard Air Force One for the President’s upcoming trip to Scotland. The WHCA stands ready to work with the administration to find a quick resolution.
      Jiang said the administration had yet to clarify whether the ban was temporary, or if it was permanently barring Wall Street Journal reporters from the press pool.Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in a statement to CNN:
      It’s unconstitutional — not to mention thin-skinned and vindictive — for a president to rescind access to punish a news outlet for publishing a story he tried to kill.
      But hopefully the Journal reporters who were planning to join Trump for his golf trip are relieved that they can spend their newfound free time investigating more important stories, from Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein to his unprecedented efforts to bully the press.
      It marks the second time the Trump administration has punitively barred a publication from the press pool in this way. Earlier this year the White House banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office, Air Force One and other exclusive access after the outlet declined to use Trump’s new moniker for the Gulf of Mexico. A decision for the administration to control the press pool came shortly after. More

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      US House calls early summer recess amid turmoil over Epstein files

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      Republicans announced Tuesday that the House of Representatives will call it quits a day early and head home in the face of persistent Democratic efforts to force Republicans into voting on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.The chamber was scheduled be in session through Thursday ahead of the annual five-week summer recess, but on Tuesday, the Republican majority announced that the last votes of the week would take place the following day. Democrats in turn accused the GOP of leaving town rather than dealing with the outcry over Donald Trump’s handling of the investigation into the alleged sex trafficker.“They are actually ending this week early because they’re afraid to cast votes on the Jeffrey Epstein issue,” said Ted Lieu, the vice-chair of the House Democratic caucus.Republicans downplayed the decision to cut short the workweek, while arguing that the White House has already moved to resolve questions about the case. Last week, Trump asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release grand jury testimony, although that is expected to be only a fraction of the case’s documents.“We’re going to have committee meetings through Thursday, and there’s still a lot of work being done,” said the majority leader, Steve Scalise. “The heavy work is done in committee and there is a lot of work being done this week before we head out.” He declined to answer a question about whether votes were cut short over the Epstein files.At a press conference, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, insisted that Congress must be careful in calling for the release of documents related to the case, for fear of retraumatizing his victims.“There’s no purpose for Congress to push an administration to do something that they’re already doing. And so this is for political games,” he said. “I’m very resolute on this, we can both call for full transparency and also protect victims, and if you run roughshod, or you do it too quickly, that’s not what happens.”Questions surrounding Epstein’s 2019 death and his involvement in running a sex-trafficking ring that allegedly procured underage girls for global elites flared up earlier this month after the justice department announced its determination that he committed suicide in a federal prison, and he had no client list that could be released.The disclosure, along with the department’s statement that it would release no further information about the case, sparked an uproar among many supporters of the president, who believed he would get to the bottom of a supposed “deep state” plot to cover up Epstein’s ties to global elites. Some of Trump’s own officials had promoted such expectations, including Bondi, who in February told Fox News that Epstein’s client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”.Congressional Democrats have sought to capitalize on the rare split between the president and his supporters, with an eye towards retaking the majority in the House next year. The venue for those efforts has been the rules committee, the normally low-key body that all legislation must pass through before it is considered by the full House.Democrats on the committee last week repeatedly offered amendments to unrelated legislation that were designed to compel the release of the Epstein files, forcing Republicans to vote them down – a politically difficult vote for many in the party, as it could potentially be used to accused them of wanting to keep the files secret.Frustration among the GOP peaked on Monday, when Democrats planned to use a rules committee hearing to offer more Epstein amendments, and the GOP reacted by refusing to vote on any more rules, essentially paralyzing the House floor. Johnson has attempted to stem the controversy by agreeing to allow a vote on a non-binding resolution on the file’s release, but that won’t happen before the August recess.On Tuesday, a House oversight subcommittee approved a subpoena proposed by Republican congressman Tim Burchett for the testimony of Ghislaine Maxwell, a close associate of Epstein who is serving a 20-year prison sentence related to the sex trafficking case. The justice department is also seeking to speak with her, and it is unclear when she might appear before Congress.Meanwhile, Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican who has repeatedly broken with his party, and Democratic congressman Ro Khanna have collaborated on a legislative maneuver that will force a vote on releasing the Epstein files, though that is not expected to take place until after the House returns from its recess, in the first week of September.Joe Morelle, the number-two Democrat on the House appropriations committee, warned that cutting short the workweek costs time that lawmakers could use to consider spending legislation that must be passed by the end of September to prevent a government shutdown.“We haven’t done appropriation bills, and yet we’re going to take extra days off simply because we don’t want to go through the discomfort of pushing the president to do what he’s promised to do, what the attorney general has promised to do, what the FBI director has promised to do, that they’re now violating their pledge and their commitment to do,” Morelle said. More

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      Trump administration orders release of Epstein court documents amid mounting pressure – US politics live

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      The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.In other developments:

      Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.

      Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.

      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.

      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.

      Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.

      Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
      As Donald Trump tries to claim he was “not a fan” of Jeffrey Epstein, photos, videos and anecdotes paint a picture of their relationship, writes Adam Gabbatt:Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.The post-election intelligence estimates contrasted with findings reached before the election, which indicated that Russia probably was not trying to interfere.In extraordinary comments calling for prosecutions, she added:
      The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.
      Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.
      No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.
      Indigenous leaders have warn higher education institutions will close if the funding-slashing 2026 budget proposal passes, Meliss Hellmann reports:The former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison will testify at a US House panel hearing next week about countering China’s “economic coercion against democracies,” the committee said on Friday.Rahm Emanuel, the former US ambassador to Japan, will also testify before the House select committee on China.Relations with China, already rocky after Australia banned Huawei from its 5G broadband network in 2018, cooled further in 2020 after the Morrison government called for an independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus.China responded by imposing tariffs on Australian commodities, including wine and barley and limited imports of Australian beef, coal and grapes, moves described by the United States as “economic coercion”.Morrison was defeated in a bid for reelection in 2022. His successor, Anthony Albanese, visited China this week, underscoring a warming of ties.Away from the main story on the blog today, Japan’s top tariff negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, said on Saturday he planned to visit Washington next week to hold further ministerial-level talks with the United States.Tokyo hopes to clinch a deal by a 1 August deadline that will avert President Donald Trump’s tariff of 25% on imports from Japan.“I intend to keep on seeking actively an agreement that is beneficial to both Japan and the United States, while safeguarding our national interest,” Akazawa told reporters in the western region of Osaka, according to Reuters.Akazawa was visiting Osaka to host a US delegation, led by treasury secretary Scott Bessent, that participated in the US national aay event at World Expo 2025. Akazawa said he did not discuss tariffs with Bessent.Here is the Guardian’s story on Donald Trump’s plans to sue the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over its Jeffrey Epstein report:Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.The lawsuit seeks at least $10bn in damages.It came after the Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared.It was reportedly a contribution to a birthday album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in Florida after being found guilty of sex-trafficking and other charges in 2021.“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,” the Journal reported of the alleged drawing. The letter allegedly concluded: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”Trump vehemently denied the Journal report and claimed the letter was fake. He said on Truth Social that he warned Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, the newspaper’s parent company, that he planned to sue.Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.In the filing, Trump calls the Wall Street Journal’s report “false and defamatory” and demands at least $10bn in damages and court costs from Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal reporters, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and related corporate entities.Read the court documents in full at the below link:A lawsuit. Angry calls to editors. Public denunciations. In the wake of the Wall Street Journal’s story claiming Donald Trump contributed to a “bawdy” letter to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – featuring a drawing of a naked woman’s silhouette around a typewritten personal message – the president’s relationship with the outlet’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, appears on the surface to have deteriorated from temperamental to terminal.Just a few days ago, the 94-year-old mogul was spotted among the president’s high-profile guests at the Fifa Club World Cup final. Following the publication of the article, however, Murdoch now finds himself on the president’s lengthy list of media opponents threatened with court action.In an unprecedented environment in which a sitting president regularly takes direct aim at the media, there have been numerous claims of big outlets making decisions that make life easier for their billionaire owners. Yet the Journal published the Epstein allegations even after Trump picked up the phone to its British editor, Emma Tucker, to demand that she ditch the story. Trump also claims Murdoch himself was approached to stop the article, to no avail.According to some media watchers, it is the latest sign that Murdoch is taking a different approach to Trump’s return than some of his fellow billionaire moguls. Even before the Epstein story dropped on Thursday, Murdoch’s Journal continued to criticise Trump from the right over some of his early decisions.The justice department said in the court filings that it will work with prosecutors in New York to make appropriate redactions of victim-related information and other personally identifying information before transcripts are released.“Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims,” Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general wrote.But despite the new push to release the grand jury transcripts, the administration has not announced plans to reverse course and release other evidence in its possession. Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, had hyped the release of more materials after the first Epstein files disclosure in February sparked outrage because it contained no new revelations.A judge would have to approve the release of the grand jury transcripts, and it’s likely to be a lengthy process to decide what can become public and to make redactions to protect sensitive witness and victim information.The records would show testimony of witnesses and other evidence that was presented by prosecutions during the secret grand jury proceedings, when a panel decides whether there is enough evidence to bring an indictment, or a formal criminal charge.The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.In other developments:

      Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.

      Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.

      Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.

      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.

      Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.

      Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.” More

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      ‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt

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      The Guardian view on Maga and Jeffrey Epstein: the truth about Donald Trump and conspiracy theories | Editorial

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      Donald Trump has thrived on conspiracy theories – “birtherist” lies that Barack Obama was born outside the US; the lunacies of the Q-Anon movement; false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. All centred on the idea that the “deep state” was lying to, and thus cheating, ordinary people. Mr Trump was their tribune.It’s hard not to feel schadenfreude now that he’s at the sharp end of a theory that he at times encouraged and allies eagerly pushed: claims that the prison death of the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein might not be suicide after all, and that wealthy and well-connected associates were trying to hush up connections to the financier. Mr Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised that “truckloads” of documents would help reveal the truth and claimed that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now”.Then, abruptly, the department of justice said that the financier’s death was not murder, that no more files on the investigation against him would be released, and that there was no list of “clients”. The administration says that Ms Bondi was referring to general files on the case. In short: many of those who promoted the idea that vast, vile secrets were being concealed now claim that there are no secrets at all – with no clear explanation for their volte-face.The result has been uproar in the Maga movement, with far-right politicians and media figures including Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer and Alex Jones among the unsatisfied. Mike Johnson, speaker of the House and a key ally, said that the justice department should “put it out there”.Mr Trump attempted to dismiss the story as “boring”, before attacking his own supporters as “weaklings” for “[buying] into this ‘bullshit’”. Then, hours after a Wall Street Journal report that he sent a “bawdy” letter to Epstein – which he denies – he told Ms Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony on the sex-trafficking case.Epstein’s crimes are fact, not a “hoax”, and it’s also fact that he had repeated contact with high-profile figures, including Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Mr Trump himself – who once remarked of the financier: “Terrific guy … It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The files need not suggest, let alone confirm, any wrongdoing to embarrass anyone mentioned in them: highlighting the association is enough.At the heart of all Maga conspiracies lies another kernel of truth: that the rich and powerful often get away with exploiting vulnerable people through connections to the state. Yet Trump voters fail to see how that relates to the administration’s broader actions.They are unmoved by his reverse Robin Hood budget legislation, which snatches from the poor to give to billionaires – like those in his cabinet. It’s less visceral than Epstein’s crimes, and its brazenness may, counterintuitively, make it less viral. Many on the right blame imaginary weather modification, rather than the global heating caused by fossil fuel dependence, for Texas’s deadly floods. Conspiracy theories give those who feel powerless a sense of power; of knowing something that others can’t see. Even so, the truth revealed by the Epstein scandal – that ordinary Americans are deeply angry at the unfairness and abuses created by elites – is worth heeding, and demands a better political and economic response.

      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      in US Politics

      Trump’s endless toying with conspiracy theories has finally come back to bite him | Moira Donegan

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      Donald Trump’s followers, and the conspiracist influencers turned government officials through whom he persuades them, have turned on the president and US attorney general after they declared an end to federal inquiries into Jeffrey Epstein’s death. But it would be a mistake to think that the investigation scandal is sui generis. It’s more like the culmination of a long-running trend, one in which Trump’s exploitation of the conspiracist fictions, distrust of institutions, and prurient fascinations of his base have finally come back to bite him.A pedophile ring at the center of power is a recurring theme in rightwing conspiracy theories of the Trump era. During the 2016 presidential election, supporters of Trump, then an outsider challenger for the Republican nomination, began to spread dark claims about his rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton. Online, far-right trolls and members of the population now called “low trust voters”– people who believe that something nefarious and conspiratorial is going on in the halls of American power, even if they don’t know exactly what – speculated that Clinton was at the head of a huge human trafficking and pedophilic abuse ring based inside Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington DC. There was no secret ring. But that didn’t stop a disturbed man from showing up with a gun.Pizzagate, as it was called, gave way to QAnon, the elaborate mass delirium in which Trump supporters believed that they were receiving secret messages from Q, a fictitious but supposedly highly placed security official. QAnon, too, centered around the notion that powerful people – Democrats, mostly, but also some Hollywood celebrities – were secretly running a vast pedophile network. In his dispatches, Q detailed Trump’s efforts to dismantle a deep state ring of child sex trafficking. None of that was true, either, but that didn’t stop thousands from believing in it.Trump exploited these fictions, nodding to them deliberately with varying degrees of enthusiasm and plausible deniability. They were useful to him, stories in which he was a hero, and his political opponents were maximally morally repulsive. The conspiracies helped paper over the gap between the near-messianic esteem in which Trump’s followers hold him, and the shambolic, incompetent and often cruelly sadistic character of his actual administration. And the content of the stories – dealing as they did in secrecy, power, helpless innocents and forbidden sex – made them potent tools, igniting the fiercest passions and darkest imaginations of his fans.To a man with a bottomless appetite for self-aggrandizement and no principles, the conspiracy theories’ emergence must have seemed like a great stroke of luck. Trump lies like he breathes, and the national media, his fellow politicians, and all manner of experts have lost both the ability and the will to correct the record. Over the past 10 years, through the force of his personality and with mounting attacks on universities, journalists and other outlets for knowledge building, fact-finding, and expertise, he has helped to accelerate a total epistemic collapse in national politics. Policy and public opinion alike are now unmoored from factual reality. What is true is no longer what matters.The story of Epstein, the dead financier and prolific sexual abuser of young women and girls who killed himself in a jail cell in 2019, was in retrospect always bound to become a central character in these vast fantasies. Part of the reason is because of the true horror of Epstein’s crimes, and the uncanny ways some of the facts of his story – as demonstrated in court transcripts, unredacted documents, testimony from his victims, and the dogged, years-long investigations of the Miami Herald’s Julie K Brown – mirror some of the darkest details of QAnon’s fever dreams. A billionaire investor with ties to a shocking number of prominent people across the political spectrum – prominently including Trump himself – Epstein carried out his abuse of dozens of teenage girls over the course of years, allegedly trafficking them for abuse on his private island and aboard his private plane, and, according to some of the girls, now women, who have testified about their experiences with him, pawning them off for abuse by his rich friends. He was a man who lived in tremendous luxury, who mingled with the rich and famous, and who treated human beings – girls – as objects to be consumed, with a kind of casual indifference to their will or wellbeing. He was evil – and, to those on the right who seem to understand both conspicuous consumption and the sexual abuse of women as markers of status, he was also darkly aspirational. In some of the breathless coverage of Epstein, particularly as it emerged on the podcasts and web forums of the conspiracist right, you could detect in the fascination with Epstein not only moral revulsion but an acute envy.It’s unclear why Trump is now trying to wrap up a conspiracy theory that has paid such dividends. Perhaps, as some are suggesting, Trump worries that sustained attention on Epstein’s case will draw more attention to his own abuse of women, though such revelations about Trump have been many, and have not hurt him before. Perhaps he just thinks that he cannot deliver, from his perch atop the federal bureaucracy that is so implicated in crimes and cover-ups in the imaginations of his supporters, the kind of earth-shattering revelations that the conspiracy theory’s narrative structures demand. Either way, Trump has turned abruptly and dramatically against the Epstein theory. He’s trying to reassert control over reality, trying to dictate which fantasies his movement adopts, and which they leave behind. It’s not working. The post-truth conspiracist world he helped to usher in is too unwieldy to be redirected at will.There’s a grim irony in the fact that it is a case of sexual violence that has underscored the dangers of epistemic collapse for Trump himself, because sexual violence represents an arena where a post-truth reality long predates him. No one knows better than sexual violence victims, who are routinely disbelieved, dismissed, or punished for telling the truth, what it means for the facts of your own life not to matter as much as the passions and prior commitments of your audience.What people tend to forget about Epstein’s life – clouded as it has been by all the speculation about his death – is that much of what he was doing to those women and girls was out in the open. Epstein had already been convicted and served prison time on charges pertaining to his sexual abuse; when he’d gotten out, he’d resumed his place among the rich and famous: his status was undiminished by the revelation of his violence. Maybe this is the real delusion at the heart of the conspiracy theories about Epstein and the other pedophile rings that populate the rightwing imagination: not that widespread sexual abuse happens, but that it is concealed, hidden, waiting to be unveiled by the righteous. For sexual abuse, at least, the real horror has always been this: that no one cares enough about the victims for the abusers to have to hide.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Stephen Colbert on Trump’s Epstein controversy: ‘Desperately looking for a scapegoat’

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      Late-night hosts dig into Donald Trump’s growing anxiety over the Jeffrey Epstein files and his beef with the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.Stephen ColbertOn Thursday evening, Stephen Colbert announced that the Late Show would end in May 2026, owing to a decision by the CBS parent company, Paramount. Though Paramount said the decision was “purely financial”, the cancellation comes just three days after Colbert openly criticized the company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump for $16m.The settlement coincided with Paramount seeking approval from the Trump administration for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.In a separate message to viewers on Thursday, Colbert said he was informed of the decision the night before. “Yeah, I share your feelings,” he said as the audience booed.“It’s not just the end of the show, it is the end of the Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced, this is all just going away,” he added. “Let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish someone else was getting it. And it is a job I am looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months.”During his monologue, Colbert focused on the Jeffrey Epstein controversy consuming the White House, and “causing so much trouble for Trump that he recently ordered it to be put in a cell and for the cameras to stop working for three minutes”.“Maga is furious because they think Trump is refusing to release the Epstein files,” he explained. “In response, Trump has been saying that there are no credible files, and if there are, they’re really boring, and also Obama made them up.“That part is true, and you can read them on Obama’s annual summer Epstein client list,” he joked.“As crazy as it is, Trump is going all in on the idea that his followers have fallen for a nefarious Democratic scheme.” As Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday: “Certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats, and they’re following the Democrat playbook.”“That is ridiculous – the Democrats have never had a playbook,” Colbert joked. “It’s improv, baby!“Trump is desperately looking for a scapegoat,” so on Wednesday, he fired the Manhattan prosecutor who handled the Epstein case and “pulled the Uno reverse card”, calling on the FBI to investigate “this Jeffrey Epstein hoax”.“By which he evidently means he wants the FBI to investigate the folks who investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” Colbert said, “which is weird, but we could get a whole new spinoff of To Catch a Predator.”Seth MeyersTrump “is under a lot of pressure from all this Epstein stuff. Even his most devoted supporters are trashing him and demanding answers,” said Seth Meyers on Thursday’s Late Night before clips of numerous Republicans demanding answers and even calling for an independent special counsel.In an interview with a far-right media network, Trump called the Epstein files a “scam” that’s “all put out by Democrats, some of the naive Republicans fall right into line like they always do”.“Fall in line with what?” an exasperated Meyers asked. “Democrats didn’t say a word. Your own supporters are the ones who spent years demanding the files and obsessing over the Epstein case, which was a very real criminal case involving a very real person, and now you’re the one fanning the flames of the conspiracy by calling it all a hoax. I swear we’re like a day away from Trump claiming Jeffrey Epstein was never even a real person.”Meyers also homed in on the far-right interviewer who validated Trump with “they definitely set the Republicans up.”“Set them up how?!” he implored. “We’ve been asking this question all week: how did they set up the Republicans? They made up fake Epstein files, then kept those fake files secret, then convinced the entire Maga base to spend years demanding the release of those files, then knew they would lose the election to Trump, who would then refuse to release the files they made up? You people all need to take a fucking dementia test.”The Daily Show“We all know President Trump has spent the last two weeks in a wrestling match with the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show. “But he’s been fighting the last six months with a much more alive person: Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. And boy does Trump hate the guy.”Klepper played a series of clips in which Trump called Powell a “stupid person”, an “average, mentally, person. I’d say low at what he does” and a “numbskull … you talk to the guy and it’s like talking to nothing. It’s like talking to a chair.”“Yeah! Whatever happened to all of our exciting, dynamic Federal Reserve chairs?” Klepper joked.“The way Trump talks about him, you’d think they caught him at a Coldplay concert with Trump’s wife,” he added. “But at its heart, this is a beef about economics. Trump wants to lower interest rates to help juice the economy, but Jerome Powell is in charge of setting those interest rates, and he refuses to lower them because he’s worried that will increase inflation. And nothing, nothing makes Trump angrier than someone doing their job well.”In another clip, Trump blasted Joe Biden for nominating Powell. Except … Klepper cut to a clip of Trump nominating Powell in 2017, calling him “strong,” “committed” and “smart”.“Damn, Joe Biden looks fat as shit,” Klepper joked. “But also, I get it. I’m also trying desperately to forget everything that happened during Trump’s first term.” More