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    Tears and solemnity at Cheney funeral – but no memorial for those killed in Iraq

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    You suspected that Maga had not conquered the Washington national cathedral when Bill Kristol was spotted at a men’s urinal conversing with Chris Wallace. You knew it for sure when James Carville, Anthony Fauci and Rachel Maddow were seen sitting close to one another in the nave.The funeral of the 46th US vice-president, Dick Cheney, who died earlier this month aged 84, was a throwback to a less raucous and rancorous time. Ex-presidents and vice-presidents, Democratic and Republican, made small talk, but Donald Trump, who spent Thursday crying treason and calling for Democrats to be put to death, and his deputy JD Vance were not invited.More than a thousand guests saw eight military body bearers place Cheney’s flag-draped casket on a catafalque as gently as lowering a baby in a crib. Then two hours of plangent music, solemn processions and tearful eulogies beneath stained glass and a soaring vaulted ceiling amounted to a requiem for the Republican party.Cheney used to be known as its Darth Vader and, fittingly, the neo-Gothic church’s exterior boasts a hand-carved grotesque of the Star Wars character. Vader terrorised the galaxy but saved his son and renounced the dark side of the Force on his deathbed. Cheney had imperial ambitions of his own but gained a measure of redemption by defending his daughter and democracy from Trump.There is some irony because, just as Joe Biden, who attended the funeral, paved the way for Trump’s return through his own stubborn egotism, so Cheney opened a Pandora’s box and unleashed the furies by helping expand the vast presidential powers that Trump enjoys today.As probably the most consequential vice-president in history, Cheney’s prosecution of the war on terror – he championed sweeping surveillance powers under the Patriot Act and defended controversial “enhanced interrogation” techniques – handed Trump a playbook to crack down on civil liberties at home and abroad.And the vice-president’s baseless advocacy for the 2003 invasion of Iraq – stating “there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction” – was arguably the breaking point in public trust of the political class that fuelled Trump’s rise as an outsider pledging to drain the swamp.There were no cathedral services with pipe organs playing for the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the Iraq war and its aftermath. So Thursday’s honouring of Cheney – a gathering of the Washington elite, overwhelmingly white – was also an exercise in omission, a holy lesson in what a nation sees when it looks in the mirror and the things that cannot be said.A martian landing in the cathedral with no prior knowledge would have heard of a patriotic public servant described by his longtime cardiologist Jonathan Reiner as “a still point in the turning wheel”, and of a fisherman, horseman and man of the American west who loved John Wayne films, described by one of his devoted grandchildren as “vice-president turned rodeo grandpa”.Former NBC News correspondent Pete Williams, who was Cheney’s spokesman at the Pentagon, recalled “a good and decent man” and told the story of a letter sent to Cheney from a woman in Indianapolis who found his qualities to be attractive: “I showed this letter to Secretary Cheney and he took it home to brag about it.”Former president George W Bush, his tie blue, his hairline receding, eulogised Cheney as “solid and rare and reliable”, praising a man whose “talent and his restraint” exceeded his ego and was “smart and polished, without airs”.It fell to Bush to make only the most tangential reference to Cheney’s involvement in one of America’s darkest chapters. “This was a vice-president totally devoted to protecting the United States and its interests. There was never any agenda or angle beyond that. You did not know Dick Cheney unless you understood his greatest concerns and ambitions were for his country.”Translation: Cheney was not driven by ideology like the neocons Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz but merely wanted to protect the homeland.Liz Cheney – ousted from the congressional Republican party over her opposition to Trump – gave a similarly subtle nod to how, later in life, Cheney emerged as a critic of his own party’s populist drift (he called Trump a “threat to our republic” and even endorsed Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election).Noting that John F Kennedy, a Democrat, inspired her father to enter public service, she said: “He knew that bonds of party must always yield to the single bond we share as Americans. For him, a choice between defence of the constitution and defence of your political party was no choice at all.”Defending democracy at home while destroying democratic aspirations overseas was the paradox of Cheney and, indeed, of US power stretching back decades. Jeremy Varon, author of Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War: The Movement to Stop the War on Terror, speculates the double standard is based on the logic of us versus them.He said in a recent interview: “As an American, he can be covetous of the preservation of American democracy and feel that ensuring that America’s security is the best way to ensure the survival of the American democratic project. But in the name of national security, America will brutalise and run roughshod over the basic democratic right of self-determination of foreign peoples.”After sharing memories of being dragged to civil war battlefields by her father as a child, Liz Cheney rounded off her eulogy by paraphrasing Shakespeare: “Goodnight sweet dad, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” An alternative might have been: “I come to bury Cheney, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones. So let it be with Cheney.” More

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      Democrats condemn Trump after he says they should be punished ‘by death’ over video post

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      Democrats expressed outrage after Donald Trump accused a group of Democratic lawmakers of being “traitors” and said that they should be arrested and punished “by death” after they posted a video in which they told active service members they should refuse illegal orders.The video, released on Tuesday, features six Democratic lawmakers who have previously served in the military or in intelligence roles, including senators Elissa Slotkin and Mark Kelly, and representatives Maggie Goodlander, Chris Deluzio, Chrissy Houlahan and Jason Crow.“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this constitution,” the lawmakers said in the 90-second video. “And right now, the threats to our constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home. Our laws are clear, you can refuse illegal orders, you can refuse illegal orders, you must refuse illegal orders. No one has to carry out orders that violate the law or our constitution.”That seemed to prompt a furious response from the US president.On Thursday morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL.”In another post, he wrote: “This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? President DJT.” In a third post, he added: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” He also reposted a statement that said: “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!”Following Trump’s statements on Thursday, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic whip Katherine Clark and Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar released a joint statement condemning the remarks.“Political violence has no place in America,” they wrote. “Representatives Jason Crow, Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander and Chrissy Houlahan and Senators Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin all served our country with tremendous patriotism and distinction. We unequivocally condemn Donald Trump’s disgusting and dangerous death threats against members of Congress, and call on House Republicans to forcefully do the same.”The Democratic leaders also said that they had been in contact with the House sergeant at arms and the United States Capitol police “to ensure the safety of these members and their families”.“Donald Trump must immediately delete these unhinged social media posts and recant his violent rhetoric before he gets someone killed,” the statement added.The lawmakers who appeared in the video also released a statement.“We are veterans and national security professionals who love this country and swore an oath to protect and defend the constitution of the United States,” they said. “That oath lasts a lifetime, and we intend to keep it. No threat, intimidation, or call for violence will deter us from that sacred obligation.”“What’s most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law,” they continued. “Our service members should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders. It is not only the right thing to do, but also our duty.”They added: “Every American must unite and condemn the president’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.”Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, also condemned Trump’s remarks and posted on X: “Let’s be crystal clear: the President of the United States is calling for the execution of elected officials.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe added: “This is an outright THREAT. Every Senator, every Representative, every American – regardless of party – should condemn this immediately and without qualification.”Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, defended Trump’s claim that the Democrats had engaged in “sedition”, describing the video as “wildly inappropriate”, adding: “It is very dangerous, you have leading members of Congress telling troops to disobey orders, I think that’s unprecedented in American history.”Johnson also reportedly told the Independent that in what he read of Trump’s posts, Trump was “defining the crime of sedition”.“But obviously attorneys have to parse the language and determine all that. What I’m saying, what I will say unequivocally, that was a wildly inappropriate thing for so-called leaders in Congress to do to encourage young troops to disobey orders,” Johnson added.During a White House press conference on Thursday afternoon, when asked by a reporter, “Does the president want to execute members of Congress?”, Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, responded: “No.”“Let’s be clear about what the president is responding to,” Leavitt said. “You have sitting members of the US Congress who conspired together to orchestrate a video message to members of the US military, to active duty service members encouraging them to defy the president’s lawful orders.She said: “The sanctity of our military rests on the chain of command, and if that chain of command is broken, it can lead to people getting killed, it can lead to chaos, and that’s what these members of Congress … are essentially encouraging.” More

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      White nationalist Nick Fuentes is exposing a civil war among US Republicans: ‘We look like clowns’

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      View image in fullscreenFive days a week, thousands of fans gather online to watch Nick Fuentes hold court about the dangers of non-white immigration, feminism and “organized Jewry”. Usually dressed in a dark suit and tie, he lectures to his far-right followers, known as “Groypers”, about what he argues is the insufficient radicalism of Donald Trump’s Republican party and what he describes as the perfidies of the state of Israel and its American supporters.Fuentes’s fixation with Israel is not rooted in concern about the war in Gaza but a belief, in his telling, that Jews are responsible for most of society’s problems. Fuentes, who is 27 and lives in Illinois, has called Adolf Hitler “really fucking cool” and compared the Holocaust to the baking of cookies.Despite that – and despite having said that the Republican vice-president, JD Vance, is a “race traitor” for marrying an Indian American woman – Fuentes has ascended in recent weeks from the influential but unacknowledged outer dark of the American right to a position within striking distance of the mainstream Republican party. He has been interviewed on several major platforms in rapid succession, culminating in a friendly, two-hour chat last month on Tucker Carlson’s popular online talkshow. He and Carlson discussed a variety of subjects, including their shared dislike of Christian Zionists. Fuentes also said, casually, that he was a fan of Joseph Stalin.The result of that interview has been a bitter and widening civil war within the American right that has exposed longstanding fissures – between conservatives and populists, Zionists and Israel skeptics, mainstream Maga right and far right – as well as revealed the extent to which a Republican party that has been flooded in recent years by extremists now seems unable to contain them, or even agree if it should. A power struggle already under way inside many rightwing organizations, people familiar told me, has now spilled into the open.After Carlson interviewed Fuentes, some Republican politicians, including the senators Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz, condemned his decision to do so. Pressure also built on the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank with personal and commercial ties to Carlson, to distance itself from him. Instead, the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, issued a video statement which noted that while antisemitism “should be condemned”, “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class”. A “venomous coalition”, he said, was trying to “cancel” Carlson.This delighted Fuentes. The Heritage Foundation was “the brain of the conservative movement”, he correctly told his viewers on a recent evening, whose policy ideas and talking points are “sort of like gospel for [Republicans] in the US Congress. It’s a big deal.” Staff from the Heritage Foundation often go on to work for Republican legislators and draft federal law; Groyperism, he argued, was now “inside the institutions”.View image in fullscreenRoberts soon backtracked. He issued a second statement more explicitly condemning Fuentes. He has also apologized for using the terms “venomous coalition” and “globalist class”, saying he did not realize their antisemitic connotations.But a civil war broke out at the organization, in the form of information leaks, anguished meetings, and fighting on social media. Many current or former employees expressed horror at Roberts’s seeming initial reluctance to distance Heritage from the far right. “I gave my soul to that place …” someone told me, choking up. (Like some others I spoke to, this person asked for anonymity to speak freely and to avoid drawing online harassment.)Not everyone sees it that way, however. Under the slogan “No enemies to the right”, some populists have fiercely defended Carlson, or argued that the controversy is being exploited by “BoomerCons”, “Reagan zombies” and “right liberals” trying to protect a dying conservative establishment from a new right populist tide.The turmoil has engulfed more and more of the right. Earlier this month, two board members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), another influential conservative group, resigned; in a public letter, they alleged that a “cadre” hostile to liberal democracy – with an agenda different from, and more radical than, Trump’s – have “worked together, behind the scenes, to wrest control of conservative institutions from actual conservatives”, in the process infiltrating “white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry”.They noted that ISI recently unveiled a new podcast whose first guest, Curtis Yarvin, has defended slavery, said that white people have inherently higher IQs than black people and called for the American republic to be replaced with a dictatorship. Conservatism, they argued, was in an “existential” crisis.Coming shortly after Politico revealed that a number of prominent young Maga activists had a racist and antisemitic group chat, and in the aftermath of a poor Republican election showing and rising Maga disappointment in Trump’s second term, this internecine battle has become a referendum on the future of the right – as well as a vivid illustration of how conservative institutions anxious to prove themselves radical enough for the age of Trump are now squeezed between a strident Maga mainstream and a naked far right.No one wants responsibility for creating the monster. Yet everyone I spoke to, when pressed, agreed on at least one thing: that the Fuentes-Carlson-Heritage scandal has exposed a deep schism in the right that will explode open when Trump departs the White House. So far, the person most pleased about that is Fuentes.If you are young, male and spend a lot of time online, you have probably encountered clips of Fuentes – somehow square-jawed and baby-faced simultaneously, and usually either grinning wolfishly or leaning at the viewer with a news anchor’s seriousness.Although Fuentes is banned from YouTube and other platforms for violating hate-speech policies, Elon Musk allowed him back on X last year on freedom-of-expression grounds. Since then, Fuentes’s posts and video clips seem to have become algorithmically turbocharged; on election night, 2024, he took to social media to deride pro-choice women: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” His post was viewed more than 90m times; some schools reported boys taunting female classmates with the phrase. (Fuentes could not be reached for comment.)In October, before it was removed, his podcast briefly became the highest-trending on Spotify, ahead of the podcasts of Joe Rogan, Amy Poehler and Carlson himself. In recent months, Fuentes has appeared on popular shows including Red Scare, the PBD Podcast and System Update with Glenn Greenwald.Fuentes grew up in a middle-class, mostly white, suburb of Chicago, in a Catholic family. Neither of his parents attended college. (His father is of Mexican American descent, hence his Hispanic surname.) He was a debating star in high school and the student body president. His parents – though not his twin sister – may partly share his racist views, according to Patch and Mother Jones.As a teenager, Fuentes adored talk radio, particularly Mark Levin, a rightwing and staunchly Zionist commentator known for his outraged tone and for arguing with callers. Fuentes listened to him “every day” in high school, he told Carlson: “I actually liked how he was kind of obnoxious and mean to his callers, vicious … I thought that was funny. But I’ll never forget one show … he says: ‘America is becoming a majority non-white country. Does anybody think that’s a good idea?’ And I was thinking to myself, yeah, that actually doesn’t sound so good.”When he arrived at Boston University, in 2016, he shocked liberal classmates by wearing a Maga hat and telling a video interviewer that he was voting for Trump. “People were threatening to find him and beat him up,” a student who led a libertarian group at BU at the time told me.The libertarian group decided to hold a public debate between Fuentes and a leftwing student, two days before the presidential election; 400 students turned up. Fuentes attacked multiculturalism, according to a campus newspaper, but denied he was racist. “It has nothing to do with race, everything to do with culture,” he said. “Asia has taken our culture and done well for themselves. The Middle East? Not so much.”View image in fullscreenDespite a hostile crowd, Fuentes was “articulate and confident, and had that air of somebody good at public speaking”, the libertarian-group leader recalled. Fuentes’s politics at that time seemed to be “standard Maga. I mean, there was nothing that Trump himself hadn’t said.”Impressed by his debate performance, some fellow young conservatives got Fuentes a slot on Right Side Broadcasting Network (RSBN), a startup that aspired to be unapologetically Maga at a time when Trump was still polarizing within the right. This would be a pattern: seeing Fuentes’s oratorical gifts, conservatives would elevate him, then regret it.Fuentes soon alienated his new friends by bucking the pro-Israel line standard at many conservative publications. He also exhibited more unsettling behavior. RSBN was forced to apologize when Fuentes, during an anti-Islam rant, called for the “globalists … that run CNN” to be “deported or hanged”. Soon after, a conservative social media account leaked a candid video in which Fuentes described interracial sex as “degenerate” and said that he was harmed in daily life by Jews.The leaker hoped to discredit Fuentes, but only half succeeded. Drummed out of the Maga mainstream, he embraced a new and potent audience. After he was seen in 2017 at the notorious Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, he dropped out of college and became a full-time white nationalist.Fuentes cultivated himself as a suited-and-tied pundit dedicated to the Maga-adjacent slogan “America first”. In 2021, he held the inaugural America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) as a far-right response to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which he is barred from attending. He was also present at the 2021 riot at the US Capitol, though he did not enter the building.Fuentes also began embracing the rhetoric of Christian nationalism, casting himself as a traditionalist Catholic, decrying feminism and using crucifixes as props – although a rival white nationalist who lived with Fuentes for a time has said that he rarely attended mass and loved HBO shows such as Euphoria and The Sex Lives of College Girls. Fuentes has also argued that many women “want to be raped” and has claimed, perhaps facetiously, that “the only really straight heterosexual position is to be an asexual incel”.Around 2022, Fuentes became friendly with the rapper Kanye West, whose own views had grown antisemitic and conspiratorial. That relationship climaxed, that year, with Fuentes and West dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. (Trump later said he did not know who Fuentes was.) Trump’s agreement to meet them was widely criticized, but did not incite nearly the outrage on the right that Carlson’s interview has now.That is because Trump is “he-who-must-not-be-critiqued”, David French, the conservative New York Times columnist, told me. “We’ve seen this a lot in the second Trump term. People feel free to get angry at Pam Bondi over the Epstein files, or at Pete Hegseth, or at Robert F Kennedy Jr, but Trump is always left out of it.”Yet Fuentes’s mainstreaming is forcing open a bloody ideological divide that only Trump’s cult of personality has so far kept scabbed over. “This anger,” French said, “is a preview of the fractiousness we’re going to see when Trump is no longer the superhero of the new right.”Today, Fuentes’s main media outlet is his nightly live stream on Rumble, an online broadcasting platform. He is often hours late to his own show. While they wait for “Nicker”, fans with usernames such as “CruiseBasher”, “ShekelSnatcher” and “BadGoy74” argue with each other and trade racist jokes. Sometimes users spam the chat with false information that the evening’s program has been cancelled, leading others to wonder if they are spies of the Mossad.Once he’s on air, Fuentes’s show is much the same each night. He attacks the Maga right from the further right – forcing mainstream populists to either engage with him, thereby letting Groyperism into the tent, or refuse and be painted as centrist sellouts. The late Maga activist Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was one of his biggest quarries; in 2019 Groypers began harassing Turning Point events and heckling Kirk for supporting Israel.“My job,” Fuentes said in 2021, “is to keep pushing things further … We’re going to get called racist, sexist, antisemitic, bigoted, whatever. When the party is where we are, two years later, we’re not going to get the credit.” But “that’s OK … We are the rightwing flank of the Republican party.”Part of Fuentes’s power is that he is also a free agent – an enfant terrible who can react to events in a way that others on the right cannot. He can criticize Trump (“tired”, with an administration that “is cooked”), or Vance (“a dork”), or mock Maga conspiracy theories that others are reluctant to acknowledge are silly. And he can attack what was until recently one of the right’s last true sacred cows: Israel.For years modern conservatism was defined by rules set down by its intellectual architect, William F Buckley. Starting in the second half of the 20th century, the right “fused” three seemingly unrelated tenets – social conservatism, foreign policy hawkishness and free-market libertarianism – into the united front of the Reagan revolution.That coalition endured for decades. It also came to adopt a reflexively pro-Israel stance, particularly as evangelical Protestants, some of whom believe that Christians are biblically required to support modern Israel, became a key Republican voting bloc. Rightwing Israelis also cultivated a close relationship with the American right because they believed that conservative evangelicals would prove more reliable Zionists than liberal Jewish Americans.In the eyes of many conservatives, Buckley’s equally important legacy was practicing “hygiene” by ejecting cranks and bigots from the movement. He exiled a number of writers – such as Peter Brimelow, Sam Francis, John Derbyshire and Joseph Sobran – for racist or fringe thinking, and in 1991, he accused the conservative writer and politician Pat Buchanan, who was known for fulminating against Israel and its US supporters in terms that seemed to single out Jews, of rhetoric “amount[ing] to antisemitism”.Buchanan was also a hardline immigration restrictionist, isolationist and advocate for tariffs to protect American workers – views that were out of step with the right of the 1990s, but which now look like an uncanny prediction of Maga populism.Today a critical mass of people at conservative organizations, including many younger staff, are more sympathetic to Buchanan’s vision than to Buckley’s or Reagan’s. Many view US institutions as irredeemably decadent and corrupt, and are less interested in “conserving” them than burning them to the ground. In some cases they are hostile not just to progressivism, but to liberal democracy itself.This turn has been more radical than many older conservatives “have been willing to admit to themselves, and a lot more radical than I think the American electorate really understands”, Laura K Field, a political theorist and the author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, told me. Her book charts how the ideas of a small group of reactionary intellectuals influenced the Trumpian right.In the process of this turn, she said, Buckley’s cordon sanitaire against the far right – which some skeptics say was overstated to begin with – ha “completely broken down”. Parts of the new right are eager to rehabilitate Buchanan and others expelled from conservatism decades ago, as well as mainstream newer figures such as Fuentes and Yarvin.At the same time, populist Maga views that were once controversial in the Republican party – on tariffs or immigration, for example – have become standard positions, meaning that firebrand pundits who like to frame themselves as radical outsiders (Carlson, Steve Bannon) are keen for new ways to differentiate themselves from the establishment.“There’s a constant yearning for something more and more radical,” Field said. “Rightwing support for Israel is almost like the last thing standing.”And cracks are showing in that support. The most radical and influential rightwing intellectuals today tend to be Catholic, not Protestant, without older evangelical Protestants’ historical investment in Israel. At the same time, younger evangelical Protestants increasingly regard Christian Zionism as a bizarre and embarrassingly dated tic of their boomer parents.Those demographic changes coincide with rising public anger, across the political spectrum, at the US’s role in a grinding foreign war that has killed thousands of civilians to no apparent end, and with the rise of a Christian nationalism that has replaced the earnest philosemitism of older Christian conservatives with a religious fervor that views Jews with polite distance or even suspicion.All of which contributed to the Heritage Foundation – caught between a historically pro-Israel, hawkish older right and a radical new one – walking right into disaster. Founded in 1973, the thinktank is a fundraising powerhouse with a staff of 400 and a budget of $100m. Among the major right-of-center thinktanks, it is known as the most political and perhaps least intellectual, and as a wobbly weather vane that has often, in recent years, seemed to be trying to “catch up” to Maga populism and prove a slavish loyalty to Trump.In 2023, the Heritage Foundation released Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto for the incoming second Trump administration that proposed, among other things, criminalizing pornography and loyalty-testing civil servants. Democrats successfully seized on the document as a talking point. Angry at the fallout, and at Heritage’s presumptuousness, Trump temporarily distanced himself from the organization.In 2021, Kevin Roberts became the new president of the Heritage Foundation – taking over from Kay Cole James, a black woman and former George W Bush official whom Carlson had attacked on Fox for being too sympathetic to the George Floyd protests.In contrast, Roberts is an ardent culture warrior who wears cowboy boots, drives a diesel Ford F-150 with a “Don’t Tread on Me” license plate, and idolizes Buchanan. He was previously the president of a tiny conservative Catholic college in Wyoming whose students learn Latin and horseback riding and can attend Byzantine mass. The stageplay Heroes of the Fourth Turning, shortlisted for a 2020 Pulitzer, is set at a thinly fictionalized version of the college. (Roberts and Heritage did not respond to requests for comment.)Roberts is part of a circle of radical new right intellectuals who call themselves “post-liberals”, Catholic integralists or “national conservatives”. Many are traditionalist Catholics (or Eastern Orthodox), often converts, and, like Roberts, have ties to Opus Dei, the ultraconservative Catholic order. They believe that the consensus that Buckley upheld was not true conservatism, but merely a right-leaning liberal capitalism that sacrificed America to globalization, mass immigration, consumerism, foreign misadventure and secular decadence. The group are close to Vance, who has described himself as post-liberal. (Vance did not respond to a request for comment.)“I think you’ll never get on the board of Heritage, ISI, or whatever unless you’re part of this true believer circle – a real post-liberal, and a hardcore traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox,” someone close to those organizations told me.View image in fullscreenRoberts is indulgent of friends and allies. In 2022, the Dispatch exposed a young conservative writer who had previously criticized Groyperism, Nate Hochman, for participating in a private online debate with Fuentes in which he had criticized Fuentes’s tactics but told him: “I respect some of what you’re doing.” (“In an attempt to get him to engage,” Hochman said at the time, “I said some really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe.”) Roberts later had Hochman on his podcast, in what seemed like an effort to rehabilitate someone he considered unfairly treated. Hochman then got a job with the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, before being fired in 2023 after creating an unauthorized campaign video containing Nazi symbolism. (Hochman, who now works for Senator Eric Schmitt, could not be reached for comment.)Despite Roberts’s bona fides, some observers told me, he has a fatal flaw common to leaders on the new right: he is ideologically insecure, and anxious to be perceived as sufficiently hardcore in a movement where moderation is viewed as cowardice and transgression signals that one is strong enough to battle for civilization.“We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said last year. On another occasion, he said: “The future won’t belong to soft men chasing comfort. It will belong to those who risk safety to defend their homeland, their families, and their faith.” (Roberts has denied that his views are extreme, suggesting elsewhere that international elites who “erase borders, criminalize faith, and preach globalism” are the extremists.)In a scathing essay, Oren Cass, a policy commentator whose economic ideas have been popular in some Maga circles, recently described Roberts as someone who had tried to hold a day job as a “credible conservative leader” while moonlighting as a “cheerleader for fever-swamp extremism”.Roberts plays with “divisive, nonsensical gasoline, aimed at impressing a narrow constituency”, Cass argued – and last month that gasoline finally met “a sufficiently hot and prominent surface that it blew up in his face”.Since being fired from Fox News in 2023, Carlson has started an independent online talkshow that has quickly become one of the most popular in America. Embracing a longform conversational format similar to Joe Rogan’s, he has interviewed a variety of guests that would have been outre at Fox, including the podcaster Darryl Cooper, who argued that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the second world war. As a source for his claims, Cooper later cited the work of the Holocaust denier David Irving.Carlson’s show has also devoted an extraordinary amount of coverage to the US’s relationship with Israel – raising legitimate concerns about US foreign policy and the war in Gaza, but with a fervor and unevenhandedness that made some conservatives uneasy.When Carlson’s Fuentes interview debuted, on 27 October, it hit the conservative world like a meteor. Speaking on Megyn Kelly’s show, Carlson said that he was trying to gently moderate Fuentes’s views. A piece in the Federalist argued, similarly, that Carlson was trying to “offer Fuentes some fatherly correction and redirection”. (Carlson declined to comment for this article, saying in a text message that he gave his “full views” to Kelly.)Many conservatives were less persuaded – and the Heritage Foundation was in the meteor’s blast radius. Roberts was well-known friends with Carlson, and until earlier this year Heritage sponsored episodes of Carlson’s show. Soon after the Fuentes interview, a blurb from Carlson disappeared from the Heritage website. Staff wondered if Roberts would do anything to draw further distance, or simply take the prudent course of saying nothing. Instead, he issued the video defending Carlson.The situation exploded. Angry staffers began posting the phrase “NAZIS ARE BAD” on social media. Robert George, a Princeton legal scholar on Heritage’s board of trustees, tried to build a board majority to oust Roberts, according to the New York Post, and has since resigned. A number of conservatives on a Heritage antisemitism taskforce also quit in protest.“Any tent that’s big enough to include Groypers and neo-Nazis shouldn’t be called conservative,” Mark Goldfeder, who resigned, told me. “It’s something else entirely.”On 5 November, Heritage had a long, emotional, all-hands meeting, footage of which leaked online. Roberts apologized for his handling of the controversy. “I made a mistake,” he told staff, adding: “You can say you’re not going to participate in canceling someone … while also being clear you’re not endorsing everything they’ve said, you’re not endorsing softball interviews.”Roberts also said that he had not understood who Fuentes was. Although he is the leader of one of the most important political thinktanks in the US, and paid more than $800,000 a year, he said that he mainly watched “sports”, and did not “consume a lot of news”.After he spoke, staff gave questions and remarks. These exchanges illuminate a fascinating generational divide at the organization; at times the meeting seemed like a rightwing answer to the kinds of confrontations that swept left-leaning institutions around five years ago, when older liberals at newsrooms, non-profits and educational organizations seemed to speak a different language from their more radical younger colleagues.Many of the most veteran employees spoke first, some with voices trembling with emotion, to decry antisemitism and white nationalism. Asking why now would be any different, a staffer who had worked at Heritage for 47 years invoked Buckley’s purging of the far right: “Did we ‘cancel’ David Duke? Yes. Did we ‘cancel’ the John Birch Society? Yes … Because they were harmful. Because if they’re in your movement, you look like clowns.”On the other hand, “a handful of young colleagues and I had no issue with the points you made in the original video,” a young female staffer said. “Gen Z has an [increasingly] unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.”Referring to a proposal by some Jewish conservatives to host Shabbat dinners for Heritage staff as an intercultural exercise, Evan Myers, an adviser to Roberts, said: “For many Christians, Friday is a special day of prayer and abstinence to commemorate the death of Christ … I assume that no staff will be required to attend the Shabbat dinners.” He was concerned, he said, that the dinners might be a “litmus test”.During the meeting, Roberts said that his chief of staff, Ryan Neuhaus, had ghostwritten the video defending Carlson, and implied that Neuhaus had misled him into thinking that other staff had approved it. (Neuhaus, who has since resigned, could not be reached for comment.)Around the time of the video, Neuhaus also began retweeting posts on X defending Carlson and arguing that the right would be better off today if conservatives had never “cancelled” Pat Buchanan, John Derbyshire and Sam Francis. One was a photo of Buchanan holding an antique revolver, captioned: “Slowly but surely he will be vindicated.”On 7 November, two days after the Heritage Foundation meeting, the board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) convened for its own tense meeting.In August, ISI unveiled a new podcast, Project Cosmos, whose first guests were Patrick Deneen, a post-liberal political theorist, and Yarvin, the neo-monarchist. Although there had been two ISI board meetings since Project Cosmos entered production, two members of the board, Christopher Long and Thomas Lynch, have alleged that they were never told the podcast existed.At the meeting, they confronted the other members with things Yarvin has said – such as, “If Americans want to change their government, they’re going to have to get over their dictator-phobia” and “Although I am not a white nationalist, I am not exactly allergic to the stuff” – and argued against platforming him.They were overruled. When they called a vote of no confidence in John Burtka, ISI’s president, they lost 13-2. Lynch and Long then resigned. They were replaced on the spot by Jordan Teti, a Los Angeles attorney, and Susan Hanssen, a professor of history at the University of Dallas. (Hanssen’s father appears to be the FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who pleaded guilty in 2001 to spying for the Soviet Union and Russia.)“This group … don’t care about the law, and don’t believe in restraints on power,” a person familiar with ISI said. Some “are self-proclaimed ‘neo-monarchists’. It’s hard to believe, right? But that’s what they say they are.”ISI and Burtka did not respond to interview requests, though some activists and intellectuals on the new right have disputed the characterization of recent events. They argue that Reaganite conservatives unhappy at the direction of the right are trying to use the Carlson controversy to smear isolationism and Israel skepticism by associating them with Fuentes’s antisemitism – thereby hindering Vance, who is considered sympathetic to the new right, from succeeding Trump as the leader of the Republican party.The old right are “panicking [about] losing their once total monopoly on conservative institutions”, Chad “CC” Pecknold, a professor of theology at the Catholic University of America, said in an email. They “want to demonstrate that they still have power, and have chosen the run-up to the midterms as the time to do maximum damage on new right opponents. They are looking for scalps, and will take any opportunity to smear leaders who have usurped what they regard as their rightful place.”Even conservatives on the other side acknowledge that they do not represent the zeitgeist. People like Fuentes and Yarvin, French said, “are extraordinarily popular – far more popular, in many ways, than the people critiquing them”.View image in fullscreenTrump and Vance have mostly remained out of the fray so far, though Trump told a reporter on Sunday that “you can’t tell [Carlson] who to interview” and on 5 November Vance wrote on X that “infighting is stupid.” Vance is in a difficult spot: Carlson helped get him selected as Trump’s running mate, and Carlson’s son, Buckley Carlson, works for Vance.Vance spoke at a Turning Point event in Mississippi, two weeks ago, where a man in the audience had a question for him: “I’m a Christian man, and I’m just confused,” the man said. “There’s this notion that we … owe Israel something, or that they’re our greatest ally, or that we have to support this [foreign aid package] to Israel to cover … ethnic cleansing in Gaza. I’m just confused why this idea has come around, considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution of ours.”The man’s reference to “prosecution”, or persecution, may have been describing recent attacks on Palestinian Christians, but Vance’s answer was also odd; he seemed to discuss Judaism with the conciliatory tact with which an American vice-president might normally describe a foreign nation: “Jews do not believe that Jesus Christ is the messiah; obviously, Christians do believe that,” he said. “There are some significant theological disagreements between Christians and Jews. My attitude is, let’s have those conversations.”Some of the conservatives I spoke to seemed like they were grappling with a dissonance – that they had spent so long in political battle with the left that they were having trouble, psychically, coming to terms with the idea that the call might be coming from inside their own house.“Perhaps Roberts made a bad leadership decision – he shouldn’t have released the video, or they shouldn’t have had a relationship with Tucker,” someone tied to Heritage said despairingly. “But if we look at the root, underlying thing, is it really about Tucker? About Fuentes? About the video? Or is it about this” – the speaker searched for the right word – “undercurrent that’s pushing all of this?” More

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      Trump’s ‘affordability’ efforts are a mess of absurdity and magical thinking | Steven Greenhouse

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      When running for president last year, Donald Trump wooed and wowed voters by vowing to reduce prices “starting on day one”. But once he was inaugurated, he seemed to pay precious little attention to prices and affordability.All that changed, however, when inflation-weary voters thrashed Trump and the GOP on election day this month – within days, the Trump administration launched a slapdash effort to focus on affordability. Unfortunately, the campaign is a hot mess: a pile of absurdity, contradictions, magical thinking, scapegoating and good ol’ Trumpian dishonesty, with Trump repeatedly blaring that “prices are down”.Two days after election day, Trump got his administration’s affordability drive off to a disastrous start when he said, “Our groceries are way down. Everything is way down … So I don’t want to hear about the affordability.”With those words, billionaire Trump – who spends a lot of time palling around with fellow billionaires – showed utter contempt for the millions of Americans who struggle with affordability every time they go the grocery store. Trump told them they got it all wrong. He told them that they shouldn’t bother him about the trivial issue of affordability when he has bigger things to worry about, such as, perhaps, his obsession with winning the Nobel peace prize. Trump in effect said: I don’t feel your pain.Trump’s statement about everything being “way down” was absurdly obtuse and dishonest. How in the world could every price be way down when his cherished tariffs were pushing up prices? Banana prices are up 6.9% over the past year, beef is up 14.7% and coffee up 18.9% (in part because of the huge, punitive tariffs Trump placed on Brazil’s coffee and beef). Between January and September, prices rose in five of the six main grocery groups tracked in the Consumer Price Index, including meats, poultry and fish (up 4.5%); non-alcoholic beverages (up 2.8%); and fruits and vegetables (up 1.3%).Despite these numbers, Trump keeps pushing his big lie about affordability. Since election day, he has said there’s “virtually no inflation”, “prices are way down” and “it is far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden”. Trump said all this even though prices overall have unarguably risen since Biden left office. Right now, inflation is running at a 3% annual clip, which is 50% higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal. In another falsehood, Trump boasted that gas prices have fallen to nearly $2 a gallon, even though his Department of Energy says they average $3.19.Hit in the head by reality (and declining opinion polls), some Trump aides evidently told the Maga king that his “prices are down” rhetoric made him sound dangerously out of touch with typical Americans, many of whom are angry about prices continuing to climb after Trump promised to bring them down. Trump’s advisers seized on one quick fix to reduce some prices: roll back some of Trump’s beloved tariffs. That sensible idea contradicted Trump’s absurd assertion that new tariffs wouldn’t raise prices for US consumers.With some tariffs being rolled back on coffee, beef, tomatoes and bananas along with other tropical fruit, Trump will no doubt trumpet to the world that he’s cut prices as soon as those foods start declining in price. That would be like an arsonist boasting that he put out a fire that he had started.When Trump spoke last Monday to a “summit” of McDonald’s executives and franchisees, he once again showed that he’s out of touch – with typical Americans and the truth. He said, “This is … the golden age of America because we are doing better than we’ve ever done as a country.” He sought to calm angry consumers by adding: “Prices are coming down and all of that stuff.” That’s easy for a billionaire to say, but it’s hard for millions of Americans not to fret about prices “and all of that stuff” and not just because 42 million Americans faced having their food stamps cut off and 24 million face having their health premiums soar, often by over $1,500 a year, because Trump and the Republican-led Congress will not extend Obamacare subsidies.Sorry, Mr President, but Americans strongly disagree with your claim that it’s a golden age. According to a Pew poll in October, 74% of Americans think economic conditions are fair or poor, while just 26% think they are good or excellent. What’s more, according to a CNN poll last month, 61% of Americans say Trump’s policies have “worsened economic conditions in this country”.Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, recently contradicted Trump’s boasts of a golden age. Bessent said that far from booming, some parts of the US economy “are in recession”. The manufacturing sector that Trump vowed to save appears to have contracted eight months in a row and lost about 33,000 jobs since January. Pointing to this economic weakness, Bessent called on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates – a move that would help affordability.Seeing the huge public dismay about affordability, Trump has resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the book. He promised to, in effect, buy off disgruntled Americans, in this case, with “a dividend of at least $2,000 a person (not including high income people!)”. For many struggling Americans, that must sound like manna from heaven, but it’s unlikely that Congress, already alarmed about huge budget deficits, will enact that idea.Trump’s statement that the $2,000 won’t go to “high-income people!” feels like a confession that his “big, beautiful bill” gave far too much in tax cuts to the rich and too little to everyone else. It also shows that the public’s complaints are hitting home that Trump has become the president by, for and of the billionaires.In a recent speech, Bessent said that the administration is “improving affordability” by holding down spending, noting that this helps hold down interest rates. But Trump’s proposed $2,000-a-person payment would undercut all that. It would increase federal spending and thereby push up interest rates and probably inflation, too, by putting more money in consumers’ pockets.In another supposed fix for affordability, Trump put forward the hare-brained idea of creating 50-year mortgages, with the notion that this would help reduce monthly mortgage payments. But the truth is that 50-year mortgages, compared with 30-year mortgages, would do little to lower monthly mortgage payments. They would often reduce payments by just $100 or $200 a month. The bad news is that 50-year mortgages would, as David Dayen has written, often more than double the already huge amount of interest that homeowners pay and would greatly slow their accumulation of equity.In their affordability campaign, Trump and his truth-challenged crew are yet again blaming Biden for the country’s economic problems, including rising prices. JD Vance said: “We inherited a disaster from Joe Biden,” while Kush Desai, a White House spokesperson, said, “Cleaning up Joe Biden’s inflation and economic disaster has been a top focus for President Trump since day 1.”This is absurd, untruthful rubbish. As I’ve written, Biden handed Trump a very strong economy, with inflation way down, economic growth strong and unemployment low. But Trump’s policies, especially his tariffs, have created an economic mess, pushing up prices and slowing GDP growth.Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, says that 22 states are already in recession, with their economies damaged by Trump’s tariffs. Zandi fears that if big states like California and New York tumble into recession, the US could slide into a broad economic slump. During recessions, consumers overall have less money to spend, and inflation typically declines. Unfortunately, with Trump’s much-ballyhooed affordability campaign likely to do little to hold down prices, his most effective “tool” in achieving increased affordability could prove to be pushing the nation into recession.That’s something that struggling Americans really can’t afford.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Trump signs bill to compel release of more Epstein documents

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      Donald Trump signed a bill Wednesday directing the justice department to release files from the investigation into the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, surrendering in the face of joint pressure from Democratic opponents and the president’s conservative base.The signature marked a sharp reversal for Trump, who had the authority as president to release the documents himself, but chose not to.Democrats have gloried in the controversy over the files and the possibility they may contain compromising information about Trump, who had a personal friendship with Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.Trump sought to flip that script after signing the bill in a posting to Truth Social that pointed out Epstein’s ties to the Democratic party.“Perhaps the truth about these Democrats, and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein, will soon be revealed, because I HAVE JUST SIGNED THE BILL TO RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES!,” Trump wrote on Wednesday night.The justice department has 30 days to release all files related to Epstein, including the investigation into his death by suicide in a federal prison cell. The legislation permits redacting identifying information of victims, but specifically bars officials from declining to disclose information over concerns about “embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity”.Trump waffled on the issue for years before finally succumbing to political pressure. On the campaign trail, he pledged to release the Epstein files. Once in office, he changed his position, calling the issue a “hoax” and railing against those who wanted to make the documents public.But he reversed course in recent days after it was clear the House of Representatives would pass legislation, saying “we have nothing to hide” and that “it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown’”.After Trump indicated his approval of the bill, Republican holdouts swiftly moved it through the House and then the Senate. Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, had stalled the bill for months, and after the House passed it, Johnson said he hoped the Senate would amend it, which it did not.The justice department said earlier this year that it had released all the documents it could about Epstein without hindering investigations or revealing information about his victims.“Much of the material is subject to court-ordered sealing,” a justice department memo from July said. “Only a fraction of this material would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial, as the seal served only to protect victims and did not expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.”It’s not clear what the department will release in response to the bill – the bill details a host of potential items that must be released, but provides exceptions for some materials.The bill calls for the attorney general to make unclassified Epstein-related documents publicly available “in a searchable and downloadable format”, including all investigations into Epstein, his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, flight logs and travel records, individuals referenced or named in connection with his crimes, entities that were tied to his trafficking or financial networks, immunity deals and other plea agreements, internal communications about charging decisions, documentation of his detention and death, and details about any file deletions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe department will have 30 days to turn over the documents. The bill provides for some exceptions, including redactions of victims’ identifying information or personal files, any depictions of child sexual abuse, releases that would jeopardize active investigations or prosecutions and depictions of death or abuse.Members of Congress released tens of thousands of documents that resurfaced and added depth to relationships Epstein had with prominent figures, including Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, and Michael Wolff, the writer and Trump biographer.Trump and Epstein were once friends, and Trump’s name is in some of the documents released by members of Congress so far, though the mentions do not mean he was a party to any of Epstein’s criminal activity.Documents released by Democratic members of the House oversight committee included an email from Epstein to Wolff in which Epstein said of Trump: “Of course, he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.” In another, he called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked”.Epstein emailed people about Trump regularly, usually derogatorily. “I have met some very bad people,” he wrote in one email. “None as bad as Trump. Not one decent cell in his body.” More

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      Justice department will release Epstein files within 30 days, says US attorney general – US politics live

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      The US justice department will release files from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein within 30 days, attorney general Pam Bondi has said, after Congress voted nearly unanimously to force Donald Trump’s administration to make them public.The scandal has been a thorn in Trump’s side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. Many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death, which was ruled a suicide, in a Manhattan jail in 2019 as he faced federal sex trafficking charges.At a news conference today, Bondi confirmed that the DOJ will release its Epstein-related material within 30 days, as required by legislation that passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate yesterday. “We will continue to follow the law and encourage maximum transparency,” she said.But that release may not be comprehensive, as the agency may have to hold back material that could impact Trump-ordered investigations of Democratic figures who associated with Epstein.The department will also protect the identities of any sex-trafficking victims whose names appear in the documents, she said.The FBI intercepted phone calls, texts and other electronic communications of people who work or have worked for the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, as part of a federal corruption investigation of his former chief of staff and two Democratic operatives, according to letters to the targets reviewed by The Los Angeles Times.The former aide to Newson, Dana Williamson was arrested last week on federal charges that she allegedly stole $225,000 from a dormant state campaign account of the state’s former attorney general, Xavier Becerra.According to the 23-count indictment, Williamson conspired with Becerra’s former chief deputy in the California attorney general’s office and ex-chief of staff Sean McCluskie, along with lobbyist Greg Campbell to bill Becerra’s dormant campaign account for bogus consulting services.Williamson has pleaded not guilty to the charges.Prosecutors said the investigation began three years ago, during the Biden administration.The legal notifications from the FBI, mandated by the 1968 Federal Wiretap Act, are sent out to people whose private communications have been captured on federal wiretaps after investigations.A spokesperson for Newsom’s office said the governor did not receive a letter and the governor is not involved in the case against Williamson. Newsom was not mentioned in the indictments against the three aides.As of 3.52pm ET, on a grey afternoon in Washington, we’ve yet to hear from the White House about whether the press will watch Donald Trump sign the bill directing the justice department to release unclassified documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.We’ll make sure to update you if that changes.The president has nominated a new director of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), in a move that allows the current acting director, Russell Vought, who also serves as the director of the office of management and budget, to remain in his position and continue dismantling the agency.Trump’s decision to nominate Stuart Levenbach, an official in the budget office, as the permanent director provides a crucial loophole that allows Vought to stay put, three weeks before he would otherwise have to step aside. Federal law says that an acting official can only serve for 210 days, unless the president nominates another person for the position.Vought took over the CFPB earlier this year, and has consistently pushed for the watchdog’s elimination, including trying to fire most of its staff.Today, Elizabeth Warren – the top Democrat on the Senate banking committee – said that Levenbach’s nomination was “nothing more than a front for Russ Vought to stay on as acting director indefinitely as he tries to illegally close down the agency”.Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmental activist who unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, will run for California governor, he announced on Wednesday.The 68-year-old joins a crowded field of candidates seeking to replace Gavin Newsom, and in a statement released this week pledged to focus on the state’s intractable affordability crisis.“Californians deserve a life they can afford. But the Californians who make this state run are being run over by the cost of living. We need to get back to basics. And that means making corporations pay their fair share again,” Steyer said.With Newsom termed out from running again, several prominent Democrats have entered the race, including former congresswoman Katie Porter; Xavier Becerra, a former US cabinet member; Antonio Villaraigosa, a former state lawmaker who served as the LA mayor; and Betty Yee, who was the state controller from 2015 to 2023. Congressman Eric Swalwell is expected to announce plans to run.Porter was considered the frontrunner until October when video emerged of her appearing frustrated with a journalist during an interview with a local news outlet and threatening to walk out. In the aftermath of the incident, Republican Chad Bianco, the Riverside county sheriff who is running for governor, took the lead in polling. Steve Hilton, a former David Cameron adviser and Fox News host, is also running as a Republican.A majority of nationally registered voters said they would back a Democratic congressional candidate if the 2026 midterms were held today, according to a new poll by NPR/PBS News/Marist University.While 55% of respondents said they would support a Democrat, 41% would support the Republican, and 3% would back another candidate.Notably, 39% of the Americans surveyed said that they blame Democrats for the record-breaking government shutdown. Trump received 34% of the responsibility, while 26% blame congressional Republicans.

      The US justice department will release files from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein within 30 days, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has said, after Congress voted nearly unanimously to force Donald Trump’s administration to make them public. At a news conference today, Bondi confirmed that the justice department will release its Epstein-related material within 30 days, as required by legislation that passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate yesterday. “We will continue to follow the law and encourage maximum transparency,” she said.

      However, the department may have to hold back material that could affect Trump-ordered investigations of Democratic figures who associated with Epstein. They could argue that releasing certain documents would be prejudicial.

      The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has said it will not release a full US jobs report for the month of October, following the country’s longest ever federal government shutdown. Instead, the available figures will be published with November’s data in mid-December, the BLS said. The October data is expected to show negative job growth after about 100,000 federal workers participated in the deferred-resignation program and formally left payrolls in late September during the shutdown.

      In federal court today, Lindsey Halligan, the president’s handpicked choice for interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, and another prosecutor acknowledged that the entire grand jury never saw the final indictment against James Comey. Halligan charged the former FBI director with lying to Congress in September. But when the prosecution was questioned by Judge Michael Nachmanoff today, they admitted that the a new version of the indictment was not presented to the full panel after it rejected one of the charges.

      The US has signalled to Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine must accept a US-drafted framework to end Russia’s war that proposes Kyiv giving up territory and some weapons, two people familiar with the matter have told Reuters. The sources, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the proposals included cutting the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, among other things. Washington wants Kyiv to accept the main points, the sources said.
      In federal court today, Lindsey Halligan (the president’s handpicked choice for interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia) and another prosecutor acknowledged that the entire grand jury never saw the final indictment against James Comey.Halligan charged the former FBI director with lying to Congress in September. But when the prosecution was probed by Judge Michael Nachmanoff today, they admitted that the a new version of the indictment was not presented to the full panel, after they rejected one of the charges. Instead, Halligan gave the grand jury’s foreperson an updated version to sign. “The foreperson and another grand juror was also present,” she confirmed to Nachmanoff.“There is no indictment,” said Comey’s attorney Michael Dreeben, arguing that this error is grounds for dismissal.A Republican attempt to censure Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic delegate, over her real-time texts with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein collapsed on the House floor on Tuesday night, prompting a confrontation on the chamber floor and accusations that party leaders had struck a deal to protect members on both sides facing ethics controversies.The measure, which would have formally reprimanded Plaskett and removed her from the House intelligence committee over her text message exchanges with Epstein during a hearing, failed by a vote of 209 to 214.Republicans Don Bacon of Nebraska, Lance Gooden of Texas and Dave Joyce of Ohio voted with all Democrats against the resolution, while three other Republicans voted present.When newly released materials exposed Plaskett, a Democrat from the US Virgin Islands, for exchanging real-time messages with Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing, all Democrats voted against her censure.Then, immediately after the vote, Democrats withdrew a planned censure resolution against Cory Mills, a Florida Republican representative facing allegations of stolen valor, financial misconduct and domestic abuse. Mills has denied the accusations.The sequence prompted Lauren Boebert, a representative of Colorado, to shout at fellow Republicans on the House floor, wagging her finger and at one point directly confronting Mills.Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican representative from Florida, attempted to raise a parliamentary inquiry asking Mike Johnson, the House speaker, to “explain why leadership on both sides, both Democrat and Republican, are cutting back-end deals to cover up public corruption in the House of Representatives”.“Get it, girl,” Boebert shouted in response.The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has said it will not release a full US jobs report for the month of October, following the country’s longest ever federal government shutdown.Instead, the available figures will be published with November’s data in mid-December, the BLS said.The October data is expected to show negative job growth after around 100,000 federal workers participated in the deferred resignation program and formally left payrolls in late September during the shutdown.The announcement will have major implications for the Federal Reserve, whose officials are debating whether to lower interest rates again when they meet next month.On this the New York Times notes: “Policymakers have grown more divided in recent weeks, with those inclined to cut rates emphasizing their concerns about the labor market and those hesitant to make a move focusing on the risks posed by inflation reaccelerating again. Typically, new economic data would help to resolve some of those differences. But the Fed will not have much new data in hand much new data before it has to make its decision on 10 December.”The US justice department will release files from its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein within 30 days, attorney general Pam Bondi has said, after Congress voted nearly unanimously to force Donald Trump’s administration to make them public.The scandal has been a thorn in Trump’s side for months, partly because he amplified conspiracy theories about Epstein to his own supporters. Many Trump voters believe his administration has covered up Epstein’s ties to powerful figures and obscured details surrounding his death, which was ruled a suicide, in a Manhattan jail in 2019 as he faced federal sex trafficking charges.At a news conference today, Bondi confirmed that the DOJ will release its Epstein-related material within 30 days, as required by legislation that passed the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate yesterday. “We will continue to follow the law and encourage maximum transparency,” she said.But that release may not be comprehensive, as the agency may have to hold back material that could impact Trump-ordered investigations of Democratic figures who associated with Epstein.The department will also protect the identities of any sex-trafficking victims whose names appear in the documents, she said.The US president says the United States is “going to be selling Saudi Arabia some of the greatest military equipment ever built” and says “the airplanes” would be “approved very quickly”.Yesterday, Trump confirmed the US would sell F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, marking the first sale of the advanced fighter jets to a Middle Eastern state other than Israel.Trump also says that $270bn in agreements and sales were being signed between “dozens of companies” today.Trump reiterates that he signed an agreement designating Saudi Arabia a major non-Nato ally at last night’s dinner with the crown prince.“We’re taking our military cooperation to even greater heights by formally designating Saudi Arabia as a major, non-Nato ally, which is something that is very important to them,” Trump said last night.The US currently has 19 other countries listed as major non-Nato allies, including Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar.“A stronger and more capable alliance will advance the interests of both countries, and it will serve the highest interest of peace,” Trump said during the dinner.Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, have been delivering remarks to the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center. I’ll bring you any key lines that come out of that here.The US has signalled to Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine must accept a US-drafted framework to end Russia’s war which proposes Kyiv giving up territory and some weapons, two people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The sources, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said the proposals included cutting the size of Ukraine’s armed forces, among other things. Washington wants Kyiv to accept the main points, the sources said.Earlier, we covered Axios’s report of a secret US 28-point peace plan, hammered out with Russia (and without any direct input from Ukraine and other European allies), that is now on the table to end the war. According to Axios’s sources, the plan’s 28 points fall into four general buckets: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future US relations with Russia and Ukraine.And this morning, Politico reported, citing a senior White House official, that “they expect a framework for ending the conflict to be agreed by all parties by the end of this month – and possibly ‘as soon as this week’”.Trump administration officials told the outlet last night that they were on the brink of a major breakthrough and it seemed as though the plan would be presented to Zelenskyy as a fait accompli.“What we are going to present [to Ukraine] is reasonable,” the senior White House official told Politico, with the mood in the administration one in which Zelenskyy, under pressure on the battlefield and at home in the face of a mounting corruption scandal, must accept what’s on offer.You can follow my colleague Jakub Krupa’s coverage of the war here:Lawyers for James Comey are arguing that the case against the former FBI director is nothing more than a personal attack, born out of Donald Trump’s desire to prosecute his political adversary.“This is an extraordinary case and it merits an extraordinary remedy,” Comey’s defense lawyer, Michael Dreeben, said today at a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. Dreeben added that the president’s public comments about Comey are “effectively an admission that this is a political prosecution and not based on evidence”.A reminder that Comey is charged with lying to Congress in 2020, and has pleaded not guilty.On Monday, another federal judge found evidence of “government misconduct” in how Lindsey Halligan, the interim US attorney general for the eastern district of Virginia, secured criminal charges against the former FBI director, and ordered that grand jury materials be turned over to Comey’s defense team.Later today, we’re expecting a vote in the House that would repeal a provision tucked into the stopgap spending bill passed last week (which ended the record-breaking government shutdown) that allows senators to sue the federal government because their phone records were subpoenaed in 2023 by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.Most Republicans in the House have derided the measure, while the Senate majority leader, John Thune, remained convinced it was necessary. “The House is going to do what they’re going to do with it,” he said of the lower chamber lawmakers. “It doesn’t apply to them.” However, a number of GOP senators have indicated they’re happy to do away with the provision. This even includes some of the eight lawmakers whose phone data the FBI sought and obtained as part of Jack Smith’s investigation.That vote is currently scheduled for 8:15pm ET.The Senate has now officially received the bill, passed in the House, which calls on the justice department to release the complete Epstein files. On Tuesday the upper chamber passed the legislation with unanimous consent – which means it now heads directly to Donald Trump’s desk for his signature.As I noted in my last post, we’re not clear on when that will be, since his schedule hasn’t been updated. More

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      in US Politics

      House votes 427-1 to release Epstein files; Senate majority leader says chamber will take up vote ‘fairly quickly’ – US politics live

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      The US House overwhelmingly approved a bill demanding that the Justice Department release all files related to its investigation into the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The finally tally was 427-1, with five members not voting.Cheers rang out in the chamber, when the gavel banged the vote closed.Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a staunch ally of Donald Trump, was the sole House member to vote against the measure.The near-unanimous vote was the culmination of a months-long effort led by a bipartisan group of House members that initially faced deep opposition from the president and House leadership. But as it became clear the Speaker’s manoeuvring to prevent a vote on the petition would not succeed, Trump reversed course and threw his support behind the effort.The bill next moves to the Senate. If it is approved by the upper chamber, it would then go to Trump for his signature. Trump told reporters on Monday he would sign the legislation if it reached his desk – still an if.Democrats, as well as the bill’s bipartisan sponsors, have called on Trump not to wait for Congress to act and instead to order the Justice Department to release the files, which he has the power to do.Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, called Donald Trump’s remarks on Tuesday, in which the president dismissed concerns about the Saudi regime’s 2018 murder of the Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, “a disgrace” in an email to TheWrap.As our colleague Julian Borger reports, when an ABC News reporter confronted Trump’s guest, Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, over the US intelligence assessment that he ordered the brutal murder of the dissident Saudi columnist, Trump stepped in to defend the Saudi leader, saying that “a lot of people didn’t like” the murder victim before pointing at bin Salman, and adding: “things happened, but he knew nothing about it”.Trump then attacked the reporter, Mary Bruce, and suggested that the FCC should strip ABC of its broadcast license because she asked what the president called “a horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question” of the Saudi leader, a man the president said was “highly respected”.Trump’s comments were a disgrace,” Baron wrote to TheWrap, a media business outlet. “‘Things happen,’ he said. Actually, someone made them happen. And that was the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. He had Jamal Khashoggi assassinated, and then he and his government lied about what happened.”Trump couldn’t care less about the killing of a journalist unless he viewed that journalist as a supporter of his,” Baron continued. “In this instance, he suggests the killing was justified on the grounds that ‘a lot of people didn’t like’ Khashoggi. And then he ignores the facts of the brutal murder itself, suggesting MBS was clueless. Just when you think Trump has gone as low as possible, he goes still lower.”Three weeks after Trump left office in 2021, US intelligence agencies concluded that the crown prince, known as MBS, “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi” and noted “the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad”.

      The US House overwhelmingly approved a bill demanding that the Justice Department release all files related to its investigation into the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The finally tally was 427-1, with five members not voting. The near-unanimous vote was the culmination of a months-long effort led by a bipartisan group of House members that initially faced deep opposition from the president and House leadership. But as it became clear the Speaker’s manoeuvring to prevent a vote on the petition would not succeed, Trump reversed course and threw his support behind the effort.

      The bill next moves to the Senate. If it is approved by the upper chamber, it would then go to Trump for his signature. After the House voted today, the Senate’s top Republican, John Thune told reporters that a vote on the bill would happen “fairly quickly”. Thune added that it’s “not likely” the legislation will have any further amendments. This, despite calls from House speaker Mike Johnson and several GOP lawmakers, to make changes to further protect victims’ identities. A reminder, provisions to redact names and child abuse materials are already part of the legislation. For his part, Donald Trump has signaled he would sign the bill if it reached his desk.

      A panel of federal judges has ruled that Texas cannot use the 2025 congressional map for the midterms. Instead, the state must use the 2021 boundaries in the upcoming election. The map, drawn by the GOP lawmakers in Texas at the behest of Donald Trump, was the catalyst of a nationwide redistricting battle. In response, California voters passed a ballot initiative to redraw their own maps, offsetting the five seats that Republicans gained in Texas in the process. In today’s ruling, the judges, which included a Trump appointee, said that the creation of a new map appeared unconstitutional and “racially gerrymandered”.

      Meanwhile, at the White House today, the president welcomed Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman. It was the crown prince’s first visit to Washingtong since the 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Istanbul. In the Oval Office, Trump brushed off questions from a reporter about MBS’s role in Khashoggi’s killing, saying “things happen”. The president added that bin Salman “knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that”. In 2021 US intelligence concluded that bin Salman had approved the capture or killing of Khashoggi, a fierce critic of the Saudi regime.

      When it came to matters of business, MBS announced Saudi Arabia was raising its planned investments in the US to almost $1tn, up from $600bn that the Saudis said they planned to invest when Trump visited the kingdom in May. Trump also confirmed that he had agreed to sell the Saudis F-35 fighter jets despite some concerns within the administration that the sale could lead to China gaining access to the US technology behind the advanced weapon system.

      The Department of Education (ED) announced today that it is outsourcing a number of its functions to different agencies, in a move that is part of the administration’s wider plans to totally dismantle the department. The ED said that through six new interagency agreements, with the Department of Labor, Department of the Interior, and Department of Health and Human Services, it would “break up the federal education bureaucracy” and “move closer to fulfilling the President’s promise to return education to the states”.
      The Department of Education (ED) announced today that it is outsourcing a number of its functions to different agencies, in a move that is part of the administration’s wider plans to totally dismantle the department.The ED said that through six new interagency agreements, with the Department of Labor, Department of the Interior, and Department of Health and Human Services, it would “break up the federal education bureaucracy” and “move closer to fulfilling the President’s promise to return education to the states”.Trump ran on the promise that he would do away with the department responsible for the country’s education policy, and in March, he signed an executive order to dismantle the agency. Shuttering it outright requires congressional approval, but under the guise of education secretary, Linda McMahon, the scope of the department has diminished.The House of Representatives just voted to rebuke retiring Democratic congressman Chuy García for what his detractors said was a scheme to ensure that his chief of staff would be the only Democrat left on the ballot next year in his heavily blue district.The resolution, proposed by fellow Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, passed with almost all Republicans in favor, along with 23 Democrats. Three Democrats voted present.Perez accused Garcia of “election subversion” for announcing that he would not seek re-election next year, while, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported, quietly collecting signatures for his chief of staff, Patty Garcia, to be on the ballot. The two Garcias are not related.Democratic party leaders in the House had encouraged members to vote against the resolution, issuing a joint statement where they decried the “misguided resolution” and defending Chuy Garcia as “a good man who has always prioritized the people he represents, even while experiencing unthinkable family tragedy.” His wife is struggling with multiple sclerosis, and Garcia has said he is stepping down on the advice of his cardiologist. In 2023, his office announced the death of his daughter Rosa at the age of 28.Fabiola Rodriguez-Ciampoli, a spokesperson for the congressman, said, “he followed every rule and every filing requirement laid out by the state of Illinois. At a moment like this, he hopes his colleagues, especially those who speak about family values, can show the same compassion and respect that any family would want during a health crisis.”Others disagreed, with longtime Democratic strategist David Axelrod calling his actions “old-style, Chicago machine tactics to ensure his chief-of-staff would be the only name on the Dem ballot. It’s election denial of another kind!”Democratic senator Andy Kim said: “Chuy Garcia’s decision to end his re-election at the last second and plant his chief of staff as the only candidate to succeed him was undemocratic and should not be allowed. Standing against corruption means standing up no matter which political party violates.”John Thune, the majority leader and top Senate Republican, said that a vote on the full release of the Epstein files will happen “fairly quickly”.Speaking to reporters on the Hill after the House voted, almost unanimously, for the justice department to release their complete trove of documents relating to the disgraced financier, Thune said that it’s “not likely” the legislation will have any further amendments. This, despite calls from House speaker Mike Johnson and several GOP lawmakers, to make changes to further protect victims’ identities.A reminder, provisions to redact names and child abuse materials are already part of the legislation.As we mentioned earlier, the sole holdout in today’s vote to release the justice department files on Jeffrey Epstein was Republican congressman Clay Higgins. He said that the bill, in its current form, doesn’t adequately protect victims, survivors, and “thousands of innocent people”.The Louisiana lawmaker added:
      If the Senate amends the bill to properly address privacy of victims and other Americans, who are named but not criminally implicated, then I will vote for that bill when it comes back to the House.
      However, there are provisions in the legislation, as written, which redacts identities and examples of child abuse. If the upper chamber issues an amendment, the House will need to vote on the bill again. A move that the bipartisan co-sponsors say is a delay tactic and unnecessary.In a statement after Tuesday’s vote, congressman Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House oversight committee demanded that the Senate majority leader John Thune take up the bill “immediately”.“Donald Trump is panicking and trying to stop our investigation. We need to know what he’s hiding, and what powerful men are responsible for the rape and abuse of children and women,” Garcia said. “And let’s be clear – Donald Trump has the power to release the files today. But he chooses to delay and deflect.”He added: “No more lies. No more secrets. We will get justice for the survivors. Release the files, NOW.”The US House overwhelmingly approved a bill demanding that the Justice Department release all files related to its investigation into the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. The finally tally was 427-1, with five members not voting.Cheers rang out in the chamber, when the gavel banged the vote closed.Congressman Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a staunch ally of Donald Trump, was the sole House member to vote against the measure.The near-unanimous vote was the culmination of a months-long effort led by a bipartisan group of House members that initially faced deep opposition from the president and House leadership. But as it became clear the Speaker’s manoeuvring to prevent a vote on the petition would not succeed, Trump reversed course and threw his support behind the effort.The bill next moves to the Senate. If it is approved by the upper chamber, it would then go to Trump for his signature. Trump told reporters on Monday he would sign the legislation if it reached his desk – still an if.Democrats, as well as the bill’s bipartisan sponsors, have called on Trump not to wait for Congress to act and instead to order the Justice Department to release the files, which he has the power to do.While the House votes, the Guardian’s congressional correspondent Chris Stein sends this dispatch from Capitol Hill.As the House debates the bill to require release of the government’s investigative files related to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, survivors of his abuses clapped from the chamber’s gallery, prompting an admonition from the chair.“I rise today to acknowledge the survivors, family members and advocates who are here today and have never given up the legislation in front of us, at its core is about something very simple: The survivors deserve justice. The American people deserve the truth,” said Democratic congresswoman Adelita Grijlava.“Protecting women and children from pedophiles should not be a Democratic issue. Should not be a Republican issue. It should be a human rights issue and a matter of justice. I urge my colleagues to vote yes.”The group broke into applause after Grijalva — who, after a lengthy delay, provided the final signature on a discharge petition that forced a vote on this bill — finished her remarks.The Republican lawmaker presiding over the House then addressed the group, saying “the chair will remind all persons in the gallery that they are here as guests of the House, and that any manifestation of approval or disapproval of proceedings is in violation of the rules of the House.”Jamie Raskin, the Democratic congressman managing the party’s debate, chimed in, saying: “I’ll just add, they’re here as honored guests of the House, and we’re delighted they’re here.”Congressman Jamie Raskin, who has been leading the debate for Democrats on the House floor, issued a forceful rebuttal of the Speaker’s comments before the chamber moved to a vote.“We want the whole truth to come out,” Raskin said, arguing that it was Johnson and Republicans who have been dragging their feet on releasing the files, including delaying the swearing in of Adelita Grijalva, who provided the 218th signature to advance the petition.“Even the British Monarchy wouldn’t put up with this,” Raskin continued. “How about the American democracy? How about we say: ‘No way we’re not going to allow this cover up to go on for one day more.’” More

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      How did your representative vote on releasing the Epstein files?

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      The US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill that will force the release of investigative files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, after Donald Trump and his Republican allies backed down from their opposition amid a scandal that has dogged the president since his return to the White House.Though Trump has for months dismissed the uproar over the government’s handling of the Epstein case as a “Democrat hoax”, he signaled his support for the House bill over the weekend, and said he would sign the measure if it reaches his desk. 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      House passes bill to release Epstein files with near-unanimous support

      by

      The US House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a bill with nearly unanimous support that will force the release of investigative files related to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, after Donald Trump and his Republican allies backed down from their opposition amid a scandal that has dogged the president since his return to the White House.The measure now awaits consideration by the Senate, where the Republican majority leader, John Thune, has not said if or when he will put it up for a vote. A spokesperson for Thune did not respond to a request for comment.Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, announced after the bill’s House passage that he would later on Tuesday ask for the chamber to pass it unanimously.“We have an opportunity to get this bill done today and have it on the president’s desk to be signed into law tonight. We should seize that opportunity,” he said.Though Trump has for months dismissed the uproar over the government’s handling of the Epstein case as a “Democrat hoax”, he signaled his support for the House bill over the weekend, and said he would sign the measure if it reaches his desk. On Tuesday morning, the Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, announced he would vote for it, making its passage certain.Democrats, along with survivors of Epstein and their advocates who were seated in a House gallery, broke into applause after the bill was passed. The sole “no” vote came from Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican who said he worried the measure would make public identifying details of witnesses, potential suspects and others caught up in the investigation.Several of the president’s allies who voted for the bill did so only after criticizing it in floor speeches, arguing Democrats were being insincere but that the House could spend no more time on the matter.“As President Trump has stated, we have nothing to hide, nothing to hide here,” said Republican congressman Troy Nehls. “I’m voting to release the files so that we can move on from the [smear] campaign the Democrats have manufactured. God bless Donald J Trump.”Republican judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan argued that Democrats could have pushed for the files’ release during Joe Biden’s presidency. “Why now, after four years of doing nothing? Because going after President Trump is an obsession with these guys.”Even as he announced his support, Johnson criticized the measure for not doing enough to protect victims of Epstein, a financier who died in 2019 by what investigators determined was suicide while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.“Everybody here, all the Republicans, want to go on record to show we’re for maximum transparency, but they also want to note that we’re demanding that this stuff get corrected before it is ever moves through the process and is complete,” Johnson said.Any changes to the bill made by the Senate would require it to be approved again by the House, probably delaying its enactment.Chuck Grassley, the Republican chair of the Senate judiciary committee, wrote on X that he had “been calling for full transparency in the Epstein case since 2019” and that the chamber should vote on the bill “ASAP”.The Epstein case returned dramatically to the public eye in July, when the justice department and FBI released a memo saying they had nothing further to disclose about the investigation. That flew in the face of statements made by Trump and his top officials that indicated they would release more information about Epstein’s offenses and ties to global elites once they took office.Shortly after, four dissident Republicans in the House and all Democrats banded together to force a vote on a bill to release the investigative files, over Johnson’s objections.The leaders of that effort cheered the imminent vote, with the Democratic congressman Ro Khanna calling Tuesday “the first day of real reckoning for the Epstein class”.“Because survivors spoke up, because of their courage, the truth is finally going to come out, and when it comes out, this country is really going to have a moral reckoning. How did we allow this to happen?” Khanna said at a press conference, adding that the case was “one of the most horrific and disgusting corruption scandals in our country’s history.”Trump’s friendship with Epstein has had staying power in American politics as the late disgraced financier had links to many other rich and powerful figures in the US and overseas. The president’s dramatic shift came after it became increasingly apparent that the bill would pass the GOP-controlled House, most likely with significant support from Republican lawmakers. Trump in recent days changed his approach from outright opposition to declarations of indifference.“I DON’T CARE!” the president wrote in a social media post on Sunday. “All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT.”Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump said he did not want the Epstein scandal to “deflect” from the White House’s successes, and claimed it was a “hoax” and “a Democrat problem”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“We’ll give them everything,” he told reporters. “Let the Senate look at it, let anybody look at it, but don’t talk about it too much, because honestly, I don’t want to take it away from us.”Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican congressman who frequently defies Trump and joined with Khanna to pursue the files’ release, noted the president’s reversal on the Epstein issue.“We fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the speaker of the House and the vice-president to get this win,” he said. “But they’re on our side today, though, so let’s give them some credit as well.”In July, Khanna and Massie turned to a procedural tactic known as a discharge petition to circumvent House leadership and compel a vote on their bill, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, if a majority of the 435-member House signs on.Johnson went to extraordinary lengths to avoid a vote on the the measure, which splintered his conference. Democrats accused the speaker of delaying the swearing-in of the Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva to prevent her from becoming the decisive 218th signatory. She signed her name to the petition moments after officially taking office last week.As president, Trump has the authority to order the justice department to release the documents in its possession, as he has previously done with the government records related to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and John F Kennedy.Emails made public last week by a House committee that has opened a separate inquiry into the scandal showed Epstein believed Trump “knew about the girls”, though it was not clear what that phrase meant. The White House said the released emails contained no proof of wrongdoing by Trump.Last week, the president instructed the justice department to investigate prominent Democrats’ ties to Epstein. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, who earlier this year said a review of the files revealed no further investigative leads, replied to Trump that she would get on it right away and has appointed a prosecutor to lead the effort.The Epstein scandal is a core issue for a swathe of Trump’s rightwing base, some of whom believe in conspiracy theories that surround Epstein and his coterie of powerful friends and associates. Unlike many other issues, the Epstein files have prompted rebellions from Trump’s supporters in politics and the media, who have called on the president to follow through on his campaign promise to release them.Meanwhile, several Epstein survivors have ramped up pressure on Congress and Trump to advance the measure.“It’s time that we put the political agendas and party affiliations to the side. This is a human issue. This is about children,” survivor Haley Robson said at the press conference. “There is no place in society for exploitation, sexual crimes or exploitation of women.”She then addressed her comments to Trump, saying: “While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files, and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is.”On Monday night, activists projected an image of Trump and Epstein on to the justice department building, accompanied by the message: “Release the files now.” More