Note, as we discuss at the very end of this, we’re wondering when/if you think we should record next week. We could do it on Wednesday, Friday, or not at all. Let us know!
Also, here’s that graphic Nicole mentioned, which shows that we’re firing cancer researchers and VA nurses and replacing them with ICE goons.
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It is official conventional wisdom.
Trump is retreating on Jeffrey Epstein.
Or rather, Democrats led by Ro Khanna, survivors, and a handful of Republicans who could not give a fuck, starting with Tom Massie, forced Trump to retreat.
Retreat. RETREAT!! Bill Kristol wrote.
And they’re laughing at the position it puts Mike Johnson in. (Well, not CNN. CNN pretends Johnson had a “strategy” on Epstein.)
President Trump’s stunning reversal on the “Epstein files” discharge petition has undercut months of work by Speaker Mike Johnson.
Why it matters: The Epstein issue has plagued the House since the summer. Now the speaker is about to suffer a clear defeat over Reps. Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna’s (D-Calif.) discharge petition.
- Johnson cut the week short before the August recess after Democrats forced multiple votes on releasing the files. He then kept the House out of session for nearly two months — a move that, intentionally or not, delayed the discharge petition from reaching the floor.
- “What I am opposed to is the reckless disregard that was used in drafting this discharge petition,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday.
But on Sunday, Trump reversed months of calls to block an Epstein vote, saying Republicans should vote for it. On Monday, he said he’d sign the bill.
- Tuesday’s vote is expected to pick up significant GOP support, including from Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.), the highest-ranking woman in the House GOP leadership.
Zoom in: Johnson’s posture about the legislation hasn’t changed, a source familiar with his thinking told Axios.
- But after months of railing against it, he opened the door Monday to supporting it.
The focus here is on Mike Johnson. Not the way Democrats chased Johnson out of DC a week early this summer, literally stealing him of the power of his gavel, then forced his members to stay home (and Adelita Grijalva to wait to be serve her constituents) for two months while Americans suffered the costs of the shutdown.
It doesn’t consider that by undercutting Johnson, Trump risks destroying the way he set Johnson up as his functionary. Trump and Johnson are both treated as the agents here.
Both NYT and CNN view this as a rare retreat from Trump.
For the first 10 months of his presidency, Mr. Trump has steered the narrative and bullied Congress into doing whatever he wanted with almost no pushback. But as Republicans gear up for midterm elections and some begin to plot a future after Mr. Trump, the Epstein episode is a rare instance in which he has lost control.
For months, House Republicans had dreaded the prospect of a vote on releasing the Epstein files. Such a moment would leave them torn between pressure from a fervent base demanding that they support the release of the files and a vengeful president who was demanding the opposite.
Mr. Trump’s about-face was a bow to the inevitable that came after it had become clear that many, if not most, Republicans were planning to support the measure, wary of appearing to aid in a coverup for a sex offender.
Kyle Cheney is one of the only people noting that this is not coming in isolation, citing these six (he says seven) signs that Trump is losing his grip.
He included seventh on social media: 7) Voters overwhelmingly rejects Rs in off-year elections.
I’d add to this list: Trump’s coalition is also unraveling over whether they should be enthusiastic champions or opponents to Nazism, both a squalid fight played out in real life, and potentially useful given revelations that one of his House Nazis, Paul Ingrassia, also interceded to help accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate.
If we use it right, we can use the anti-Nazi backlash as a way to offer an exit ramp to Republicans fleeing the ship, one JD Vance, at least, intends to go down with.
But the Epstein retreat comes amid another important retreat, one only partly captured by Cheney’s list. Last week, the reality that American can’t grow (much) bananas or coffee caught up to Trump and after he single-handedly spiked the price of key breakfast goods, Trump started to retreat — like the Epstein vote — before his partners-in-crime, this time the Supreme Court, abandoned him.
Trump is trying to do with tariffs what he is also trying to do with Epstein, squeeze some victory out of his defeat, float rebates as a way to avoid explaining to voters that Trump single-handedly made Barbie unaffordable for Christmas and, depending on how SCOTUS rules, the possibility he created an enormous hole in his budget and the onerous process of paying back importers.
Both of these may be (attempted) tactical retreats. Pam Bondi may attempt to bottle up the Epstein files at DOJ. Some of Trump’s stupid tariffs were lawfully enacted, and also stupid.
But it’s important to note that these retreats are happening in parallel, not least because tariffs are one area where Republicans have always agreed with Democrats, even while hoping someone else would make the problem go away.
The thing about Bill Pulte’s corruption is that a fair number of Republicans seem have it in for him, too (as laid out in this Politico piece in September).
That may help to explain the 3,000 word profile airing the family’s dirty laundry while detailing that Pulte’s closest ties to his family’s developing empire are to some decrepit trailer parks.
He did not issue press releases about the five mobile home parks his companies acquired in Florida for about $3 million in the two years before he was nominated to become the F.H.F.A. director in January.
Recent visits to two of the mobile home parks revealed a broken fence and overflowing trash bins. The dozen or so trailers at the parks were aging. Some had windows covered with faded American flags and cardboard. Duct tape patched torn screens.
Documents show Mr. Pulte was the signatory on a $2 million mortgage taken out on three of the properties in August 2024. The woman listed as an agent on some of the mobile home parks also works in his charitable organization. In January 2024, he told an interviewer on an investing podcast that the “Pulte Family” was buying mobile home parks and planning to revamp them amid a market of rising rents.
In the same interview, Mr. Pulte said he planned to make them into “nice communities.”
But his companies have been slow to make repairs, said residents of three of the parks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
A resident of one property, in Lake Worth in Palm Beach County, said he had gone months without a working stove, despite asking the management company to fix it. Another resident said he had spent $300 to repair his broken air-conditioning unit. Some trailer park leases warn tenants that if they miss rent payments, which are due weekly, “they will be removed for trespassing by the local sheriff!!”
At some properties, rents have been rising. A resident at a mobile home park in Cottondale in the Florida panhandle said in a filing in Jackson County Court this summer that his monthly rent had increased to $950 from $550 after Mr. Pulte’s company took over. At a park in Ruskin, south of Tampa, rents recently rose $100 a month — about 16 percent — to pay for a new dumpster, several residents said.
None of the mobile home properties carry the Pulte family’s name.
One of the quickest ways to taint someone in Trump’s eyes is to make him look squalid.
Meanwhile — and purely by happenstance — the Epstein dump James Comer released to distract from Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking included a document that seems to be Epstein’s side of the split with Trump.
In a February 1, 2019 email first sent to himself (possibly BCCed to someone else?), and then sent to Michael Wolff, Epstein transitions directly from a claim in one of the letters from which Comer was trying to distract — that Trump came to his house a lot while someone Epstein trafficked was there, purportedly Virginia Giuffre — to his description over the fight about the property that Trump would one day launder into cash from Dmitry Rybolovlev, the fight that Trump had also publicly used to explain the split. Much of Epstein’s focus was on his suspicions that Trump didn’t have the money to buy the mansion in the first place and probably didn’t pay taxes on it.
But amid the description, Epstein describes that “his friend pulty the developer” was part of Trump’s bid. If that is Pulte, it would be Pulte’s father who, like Trump’s dad, fronted him in the real estate business. [Update, corrected per this report. h/t DrAwkward]
In Epstein’s mind, then, there’s a tie between Trump’s knowledge he “stole” his spa girl and the fight over the Palm Beach mansion, a fight in which “pulty the developer” played some part.
But all that is in the past.
Let’s move onto concerns about the present and future.
AP reports that an aide to Pulte pulled information on single home mortgage rates and shared it with a competitor. When Fannie executives pointed out this was collusion, they were fired (another part of the explanation for Pulte’s purge last month).
A confidant of Bill Pulte, the Trump administration’s top housing regulator, provided confidential mortgage pricing data from Fannie Mae to a principal competitor, alarming senior officials of the government-backed lending giant who warned it could expose the company to claims that it was colluding with a rival to fix mortgage rates.
Emails reviewed by The Associated Press show that Fannie Mae executives were unnerved about what one called the “very problematic” disclosure of data by Lauren Smith, the company’s head of marketing, who was acting on Pulte’s behalf.
“Lauren, the information that was provided to Freddie Mac in this email is a problem,” Malloy Evans, senior vice president of Fannie Mae’s single-family mortgage division, wrote in an Oct. 11 email. “That is confidential, competitive information.”
He also copied Fannie Mae’s CEO, Priscilla Almodovar, on the email, which bore the subject line: “As Per Director Pulte’s Ask.” Evans asked Fannie Mae’s top attorney “to weigh in on what, if any, steps we need to take legally to protect ourselves now.”
While Smith still holds her position, the senior Fannie Mae officials who called her conduct into question were all forced out of their jobs late last month, along with internal ethics watchdogs who were investigating Pulte and his allies.
This effort seems to stem from Pulte’s response to Trump’s orders to push builders to build more single family homes.
Pulte’s power over the mortgage lending industry is unusual. Not long after his Senate confirmation, he appointed himself chairman of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which hold trillions of dollars in assets. The companies serve as a crucial backstop for the home lending industry by buying up mortgages from individual lenders, which are packaged together and sold to investors.
The three competing roles present the potential for a conflict of interest that is detailed in emails reviewed by AP. Like many matters of public policy in Trump’s Washington, it appears to have begun with a social media post.
In October, Trump criticized the homebuilding industry, which he likened to the oil-market-dominating cartel OPEC.
“They’re sitting on 2 million empty lots, A RECORD,” the president posted to his social media platform, Truth Social. “I’m asking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get Big Homebuilders going.”
“On it,” Pulte posted in response on X.
That is, Pulte may have abused his overlapping roles running the country’s housing finance in an attempt to solve the fact that he’s not otherwise good at his job.
And so he tried to cheat.
And when caught cheating, he fired the people who caught him.
The fact that Pulte keeps getting caught botching his day job — the one that, when he fails, could tank the entire US if not global economy — has not distracted him from his real love: framing Trump’s enemies.
This time, Eric Swalwell was the target.
A top housing official in President Donald Trump’s administration has referred California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell to the Justice Department for a potential federal criminal probe, based on allegations of mortgage and tax fraud related to a Washington, D.C., home, according to a person familiar with the referral.
He is the fourth Democratic official to face mortgage fraud allegations in recent months.
Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, alleged in a letter sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Wednesday that Swalwell may have made false or misleading statements in loan documents.
The matter has also been referred to the agency’s acting inspector general, this person said.
“As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me,” Swalwell said in a statement to NBC News.
Perhaps Pulte has a whole portfolio of flimsy claims about Trump’s enemies in a folder somewhere, to deliver up to Trump every time someone, even some Republican, raises real concerns about his basic competence.
Thus far, it seems to have insulated him from any real accountability.
On the same day Adelita Grijalva will finally be sworn in and provide the 218th vote to force a vote to release the Epstein files, Oversight Dems have released three records from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate making it clear Trump is more implicated in Epstein’s crimes than he has let on.
There’s one email that will ensure that Melania Trump backs off her threat to sue Michael Wolff. He and the sex trafficker were discussing how to craft an answer Trump could give to CNN about their relationship during the 2015 election.
Effectively, Epstein was offering to provide Trump an answer to make things easy on Trump.
The most damning describes Epstein, discussing with Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011 one of the victims spending “hours at [Epstein’s] house with Trump.
That conversation transpired in April 2011, just a month before Trump dropped out of the presidential race.
The most intriguing was another email exchanged with Wolff, just six months before Epstein was arrested and then suicided, in which Epstein claimed Trump was lying when he “said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.”
One of the first times this claim was aired was in a 2007 Page Six story that preceded many of the details becoming public.
Meanwhile, the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach last night confirmed a Web site report that Epstein has been banned there. “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” a source told us. “Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.” Epstein denies he is banned from Mar-a-Lago and says, in fact, he was recently invited to an event there.
Trump has, at times, admitted he served as an anonymous source for Page Six.
Trump repeated this story, in two parts, in July.
First, days after Todd Blanche sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump described that Epstein “hired help” from Trump, and continued doing so even after Trump “said, don’t ever do that again,” implying that he told Epstein to stop.
What caused the breach with him? Very easy to explain. But I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it. But for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk. Because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, don’t ever do that again. He stole people that worked for me. I said, don’t ever do that again. He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out. And that was it.
Then, the next day, Trump confessed that Virginia Giuffre was one of the “young women” that Epstein “stole.”
Reporter 1: I’m just curious. Were some of the workers that were taken from you — were some of them young women?
Trump: Were some of them?
Reporter 1: Were some of them young women?
Trump: Well, I don’t wanna say, but everyone knows the people that were taken. It was, the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story’s been pretty well out there. And the answer is, yes, they were.
[inaudible]
Trump: In the spa. People that work in the spa. I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa. Hired. By him. In other words, gone. And um, other people would come and complain. This guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether they were spa or not spa. I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine and then not too long after that he did it again and I said Out of here.
Reporter 2: Mr. President, did one of those stolen persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?
Trump: Uh, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.
Both these limited hangouts, delivered in the wake of Blanche’s interviews with Maxwell, blame Epstein for stealing his girls.
But it wasn’t Epstein stealing the girls and he didn’t tell Epstein to stop.
He told Maxwell to stop.
And then he lied and claimed he had kicked Epstein out as a result.
And then Todd Blanche moved Epstein’s co-conspirator, who didn’t mention the girl Trump spent hours with or remind Blanche of Trump’s knowledge she was trafficking girls from his club, into comfier digs.
And here’s the picture of Scattery Island I referenced. Here’s a story about Moneypoint halting coal burning.
Listen on spotify (transcripts available)
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The NYT has now provided backstory to a part of the Epstein birthday book even more obscene than Trump’s own letter: the picture, submitted by Joel Pashcow, of Epstein holding a check doctored after the fact to look like it was signed by Trump.
The photo is captioned,
Jeffrey showing early talents with money + women! sells “fully depreciated” [redacted] to Donald Trump for $22,500. Showed early “people skills” too. Even though I handled the deal, I didn’t get any of the money or the girl!
The photo is actually the third page of Pashcow’s submission. After a page full of images of girls in suggestive positions, Pashcow included a clear allusion to Epstein’s predation, a progression from offering balloons to prepubescent girls in 1983 to him receiving massages from topless young women in 2003, the year of the birthday book. (It’s unclear whether the 2003 image is meant to be Mar-a-Lago or Epstein’s private island.)
The NYT offers this explanation for the photo:
It shows a photograph of Mr. Pashcow at the resort with Mr. Epstein, another man and a woman whose face is redacted. Mr. Pashcow is holding an oversize check that appears to have been doctored, with a seemingly phony “DJ TRUMP” signature.
A handwritten note under the photo, which was taken in the 1990s, joked that Mr. Epstein showed “early talents with money + women,” and had sold a “fully depreciated” woman to Mr. Trump for $22,500.
The woman, whose name is also redacted in the files released by the House Oversight Committee, was a European socialite then in her 20s, according to two people familiar with the original photo. She had briefly dated both Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump around that time, according to court transcripts and a person close to Mr. Epstein. The birthday book entry appears to be a reference to the competition between the two men for the woman’s affections.
The nature of the woman’s relationship with Mr. Epstein is murky. The New York Times is not naming her because she may have been one of his victims.
A lawyer for the woman said she knew Mr. Epstein in “a professional capacity” when she was a student but severed ties with him in 1997. She did not know anything about the letter or its “derogatory content,” the lawyer added.
Between the comment from the woman’s lawyer — who said she severed ties with Epstein in 1997 — and NYT’s photo analysis, they date the photo to a narrow period of time in 1996 to 1997.
A visual analysis by The Times found that the photo was taken at Mar-a-Lago after the resort opened as a club in 1996 and was landscaped with palm trees and other features. In the background of the photo, a thatched hut is visible in front of a line of palm trees. The area is bordered by a white picket fence and what appears to be the white band of a tennis net is visible in front of the hut. The features match what was captured at the club by the renowned tennis photographer Art Seitz in February 1997.
That’s the news report.
The trick is that many of these submissions are full of inside jokes, peddling the kind of masculine bravado often divorced from facts. Why did Pashcow show a progression from 1983 to 2003 in the earlier drawing depicting grooming, for example, when the earlier date shown, 1983, postdated his time — from 1974 to 1976 — at Dalton School, the most obvious explanation for depicting Epstein with younger girls?
More interestingly, why did Pashcow include a seven year-old picture from Mar-a-Lago in a 2003 birthday book? Perhaps that was just the most expressive picture Pashcow had in his possession with Epstein. Or perhaps he was trying to make a more subtle double entendre, one that like everything else could just be masculine bravado.
Per the NYT, the woman “was a European socialite then in her 20s” when the picture was taken in 1996 or 1997. Per her lawyer, the association with Epstein was professional, not romantic. But there is a reference in testimony from Epstein’s assistant at Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial to Epstein sending a woman flowers — a woman known to have been on at least one date with Trump. According to Epstein’s assistant, she “felt like they” — Epstein and this particular woman mentioned at trial, who may or may not be the woman in the photo — “were a couple.” (The testimony was presented to show that by the time of the trafficking for which Maxwell was tried, Maxwell and Epstein were no longer themselves a couple.)
The reason Trump is believed to have dated this woman at least once is because she reportedly was the woman whom Trump was with on the night in 1998 — per the official story — that Trump first met Melania. Melania’s book described,
I noticed a man and an attractive blonde approaching us.
[snip]
He was accompanied by a beautiful date, so I initially dismissed our conversation as mere pleasantries exchanged at an industry event.
The picture was taken in 1996 or 1997. At the time Pashcow included this photo in Epstein’s book, Melania had moved in with Trump, but he had not yet proposed.
Since DOJ assigned 1,000 FBI agents in March to review all the Epstein files, since July 7, when DOJ announced it would not release any more files, Melania has aggressively tried to tamp down Michael Wolff’s claims that Epstein had a larger role in her introduction to Trump than the official story claims. She posted the excerpt of their meeting on July 18. She got Daily Beast to issue a retraction on July 31. She got James Carville to issue a retraction about a week later. She attempted — but thus far has failed — to get Hunter Biden to retract a reference to Michael Wolff’s public claims another week later.
A week after that, she got Harper Collins to remove a reference to a Michael Wolff claim in digital copies of a new book on Prince Andrew.
In recent days, such claims have all been sourced to Wolff, but as Hunter said to Channel 5, in an article responding to Epstein’s arrest in 2019 the NYT sourced the very same claim to Epstein himself.
But while Mr. Trump has dismissed the relationship, Mr. Epstein, since the election, has played it up, claiming to people that he was the one who introduced Mr. Trump to his third wife, Melania Trump, though neither of the Trumps has ever mentioned Mr. Epstein playing a role in their meeting. Mrs. Trump has said that her future husband simply asked for her phone number at a party at the Kit Kat Club during Fashion Week in 1998.
Whatever the truth of the story, Epstein certainly boasted when he was alive there was more to it.
Which is the kind of thing that depraved men might make jokes about when they believed no one was watching.
When Manu Raju challenged Mike Johnson on Trump’s claim that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was a hoax, Mike Johnson didn’t deny knowing that Trump had said that (even during the survivors’ press conference), the tactic he almost always uses when asked to condemn Trump’s atrocities. Instead, he claimed that, “when [Trump] first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mare-a-Lago, he was an FBI informant to try to … take this stuff down.”
This adopts a favorite tactic right wingers used during the Russian investigation, to claim that Carter Page’s explicit willingness to share non-public information with known Russian spies and his pursuit of money from Russia to support a pro-Russian think tank was no big deal because he was an “informant” for CIA, when in reality he was just an American that the CIA was permitted to talk to learn what Russian spies had done, not someone who was cooperating with intelligence collection.
Indeed, according to Rolling Stone, Johnson’s comment set off a frenzy at the White House as people tried to figure out WTF Johnson was saying.
According to five Trump administration officials and others close to the president, Johnson’s “informant” claim on Thursday sparked widespread confusion within the ranks of Trump’s government, with several senior officials blindsided or just completely perplexed by what the Trump-aligned House speaker could have possibly meant.
For some in the administration, the confusion spilled over into Saturday, with some officials still unsure about whether Johnson was citing some explosive, unheard-of insider information, or if he misspoke or was freelancing extemporaneously.
“What the hell is he doing?” one senior Trump administration appointee told Rolling Stone, after being asked about the Johnson “informant” comment.
Other Trump advisers say it’s their understanding that Johnson was referencing past claims made in the media about Trump; however, these claims did not amount to the idea he was a federal “informant.”
This could even have been a reference to a recent comment: At the presser on Wednesday, survivors’ lawyer Brad Edwards described that when he was first seeking information about Epstein in 2009, Trump was one of the few people who cooperated, though tellingly, Trump appears to have done so without deposition.
Bradley Edwards (01:04:44):
I’ll go first and then I’ll let them. They’re much more important than me, but I don’t understand why it’s a hostile act. I can tell you that I talked to President Trump back in 2009 and several times after that. He didn’t think that it was a hoax Then. In fact, he helped me. He got on the phone, he told me things that were helping our investigation. Now, our investigation wasn’t looking into him, but he was helping us then. He didn’t treat this as a hoax.
(01:05:07)
So at this point in time, I would hope that he would revert back to what he was saying to get elected, which is, “I want transparency.” This about face that occurred, none of us understand it. In fact, I don’t understand how this is an issue that’s even up for debate. How do you not stand behind these women after you’ve heard their stories and know that hundreds of them were abused and it was only because files are being kept in secrecy. The world should know who he is, who protected him, and the other people that are out there to be investigated need to be investigated.
So Trump was willing to cooperate, but only in a way in which he managed the information provided (and avoided attesting to his claims under oath).
Josh Marshall contemplates why Trump might have been willing to share information about Epstein after their clash over a West Palm Beach estate. Relying in part on comments from Michael Wolff, who said that Epstein believed Trump narced him out, Marshall adopted the theory that Trump narced out Epstein to undercut Epstein’s threats to expose Trump’s own money laundering efforts.
Epstein was trying to buy a South Florida estate. He brought Trump along to see it one time. A short time later Epstein found out that Trump had gone behind his back and placed a higher and ultimately successful bid on the property. He’d snatched it out from under him with a much higher bid. The problem was that Trump’s entire empire in 2004 was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It made no sense that Trump was coming up with $41 million to buy this property. Epstein suspected that Trump was acting as a front for a Russian oligarch as a money-laundering scheme. And in fact Trump did purchase and flip the estate two years later to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, or a profit of over $50 million dollars.
Epstein was pissed for his own reasons (he wanted the estate). But he also suspected the money laundering scheme. So he threatened Trump that he would bring the whole thing out into the open through a series of lawsuits. Right about this same time authorities got a tip about Epstein’s activities which started the investigation that led to his eventual 2008 plea deal.
That certainly might explain the seeming coincidence of the two conflicting explanations Trump has given for the split. But Marshall misses several known parts of this timeline.
First, remember there were two grand juries in WPB: one, (05-02), convened in what must have been early 2005, and a second, (07-103), convened later in 2007. The significance of this remains unclear. None of the Epstein experts I’ve asked has any insight on whether the earlier grand jury simply reflects the earlier known investigative steps, stemming from a 14-year old girl’s complaint that year, or whether there was an earlier, separate, investigation, in which case the second grand jury might just reflect one read into the evidence of the first one. But the earlier one would more closely coincide with Trump’s split with Epstein (and the real estate deal).
And almost everyone keeps missing the timing of what Trump (as well as a Page Six source from Mar-a-Lago that could be Trump) has already confessed to.
First, Trump explained that Epstein stole a spa girl from him, Trump told him “don’t ever do that again,” and then Epstein did it again.
What caused the breach with him? Very easy to explain. But I don’t want to waste your time by explaining it. But for years I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. I wouldn’t talk. Because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, don’t ever do that again. He stole people that worked for me. I said, don’t ever do that again. He did it again. And I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out. And that was it.
Trump didn’t confess, here, that he knew Epstein stole his girls to recruit into sex slavery.
But he alluded to as much the next day, when he confessed one of the girls Epstein “stole” was Virginia Giuffre.
Reporter 1: I’m just curious. Were some of the workers that were taken from you — were some of them young women?
Trump: Were some of them?
Reporter 1: Were some of them young women?
Trump: Well, I don’t wanna say, but everyone knows the people that were taken. It was, the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story’s been pretty well out there. And the answer is, yes, they were.
[inaudible]
Trump: In the spa. People that work in the spa. I have a great spa, one of the best spas in the world at Mar-a-Lago. And people were taken out of the spa. Hired. By him. In other words, gone. And um, other people would come and complain. This guy is taking people from the spa. I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it I told him, I said, listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether they were spa or not spa. I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine and then not too long after that he did it again and I said Out of here.
Reporter 2: Mr. President, did one of those stolen persons, did that include Virginia Giuffre?
Trump: Uh, I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.
Trump doesn’t confess he knew Epstein was stealing girls for sex, but he does say, “that story’s been pretty well out there,” conceding it is what we think it is.
And in 2007 — in the period when Trump would have been cooperating with the FBI if he did do so — “the Mar-a-Lago” said the following to Page Six even before Epstein had signed the sweetheart non-prosecution agreement.
Meanwhile, the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach last night confirmed a Web site report that Epstein has been banned there. “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things,” a source told us. “Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.” Epstein denies he is banned from Mar-a-Lago and says, in fact, he was recently invited to an event there.
Before the full extent of Epstein’s abuse was public, someone at Mar-a-Lago wanted to make it clear that when Epstein did “procure girls … he tried to get [] to do things.”
We know of two girls Epstein “stole” from Mar-a-Lago. Giuffre in 2000, and this other girl whose father was a member sometime later. And even in 2007, someone who worked for Trump (if not Trump himself, who loved to source Page Six stories) admitted that Epstein “tried to get” this girl “to do things.”
Trump has already all but confessed he learned about Giuffre, did not report it, then learned about another girl, to which he now attributes his break with Epstein in the same period as the real estate deal.
And here’s the thing about Trump and Epstein, which I think helps explain why he continues to flail now.
I tried to imply in this post that Todd Blanche purposely stopped short of getting cooperation from Ghislaine Maxwell. Even if Blanche didn’t know she was lying through her teeth, within days of her proffer, someone, who could even be Blanche, dealt photos to NYT that made it clear her claim there were no video cameras at any of Epstein’s properties was false.
Blanche didn’t get truth from Maxwell. He got leverage over her, fresh lies he could prosecute her for anytime until 2030. He has locked her into the claim (which is carefully caveated so might actually be true) that she was never present when Trump did anything inappropriate with Epstein, which falls far short of her knowing that he (or Melania) did.
DOJ is treating two other Epstein co-conspirators similarly. They were mentioned in a July 16, 2019 letter supporting Epstein’s detention.
In a July 12, 2019 letter, the Government informed the Court that the Government had recently obtained records from a financial institution (“Institution-1”) that appeared to show the defendant had made suspicious payments shortly after the Miami Herald began publishing, on approximately November 28, 2018, a series of articles relating to the defendant, his alleged sexual misconduct, and the circumstances under which he entered into a non-prosecution agreement (“NPA”) with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida in 2007. The same series highlighted the involvement of several of Epstein’s former employees and associates in the alleged sexual abuse. At the Detention Hearing, the Court asked the Government to provide additional information about the individuals to whom these payments appear to have been made.
First, records from Institution-1 show that on or about November 30, 2018, or two days after the series in the Miami Herald began, the defendant wired $100,000 from a trust account he controlled to [redacted], an individual named as a potential co-conspirator—and for whom Epstein obtained protection in—the NPA. This individual was also named and featured prominently in the Herald series.
Second, the same records show that just three days later, on or about December 3, 2018, the defendant wired $250,000 from the same trust account to [redacted], who was also named as a potential co-conspirator—and for whom Epstein also obtained protection in—the NPA. This individual is also one of the employees identified in the Indictment, which alleges that she and two other identified employees facilitated the defendant’s trafficking of minors by, among other things, contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with the defendant at his residences in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. This individual was also named and featured prominently in the Herald series. [my emphasis]
These are the assistants — not Maxwell — who played a similar role as Maxwell earlier in the scheme, one of whom was suspected of threatening a victim back in 2006.
NBC’s Tom Winter wrote a letter asking that the names — sealed in 2019 to protect potential trial witnesses — be unsealed. But rather than just giving notice to them and asking them to make their own declarations to the court (which would need to be true), DOJ instead informed them, and provided a response on their behalf, opposing unsealing.
Pursuant to the Order, on August 26, 2025, the Government notified Individual-1 and Individual-2 of the Motion and the Order.
On August 29, 2025, the Government received a letter from counsel for Individual-1. The letter, which is attached hereto as Exhibit A, expressed Individual-1’s opposition to the Motion.
On September 5, 2025, the Government received an email from counsel for Individual-2. The email, which is attached as Exhibit B, expressed Individual-2’s opposition to the Motion.1
1 Because Exhibits A and B both contain personal identifying information for Individual-1 or Individual-2 and describe certain matters that are highly personal and sensitive, the Government respectfully submits that sealing of both exhibits is appropriate. See, e.g., United States v. Amodeo, 71 F.3d 1044, 1051 (2d Cir. 1995) (The “privacy interests of innocent third parties” should “weigh heavily in a court’s balancing equation” and can be the kind of “compelling interest” that may justify sealing or closure, and “[i]n determining the weight to be accorded an assertion of a right of privacy,” courts must “consider the degree to which the subject matter is traditionally considered private rather than public,” such as “family affairs, . . . embarrassing conduct with no public ramifications, and similar matters.”); cf., e.g., United States v. Silver, No. 15 Cr. 93 (VEC), 2016 WL 1572993, *7 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 14, 2016) (considering “personal and embarrassing conduct [with] public ramifications”).
At least one of these is necessarily (because she was named in the Epstein indictment) one of the people named in Epstein’s grand jury transcript to whom DOJ gave notice of the grand jury request before giving the victims any notice.
That is, both before and after pretending Maxwell provided truthful information and using that as an excuse to move her to comfier digs, DOJ has been solicitous of the other women who helped enslave these girls. And remains so.
Within a month, after two special elections are expected to send two more Dems to Congress, the Khanna-Massie dispatch petition will almost certainly get the required 218 votes.
And Mike Johnson will have to invent yet more false claims to excuse Republican efforts, from the very top of the party, to help Trump keep all these people silent.
[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]
For more than a week I have been watching Google Trends as Trump flings more and more spaghetti at the wall to find something that sticks.
Something with enough adhesion and coverage to hide his failure to produce the Epstein files, a kind of flying spaghetti monster more real than the snarky faux deity — sticky strands like the flip-floppery on tariffs, the unwarranted and unlawful occupation of Washington DC by National Guard, the embarrassing meeting with Putin on US soil.
US media has been helping Trump by allowing itself to be sucked into the noodly vortex with outrage du jour.
Yes, there’s a lot of outrage, and US media has failed to cover it in a way that conveys the depth of outrage. But they also allowed themselves to be led wholly off course by a convicted felon who is a serial liar and a serial business failure.
The one thing Trump has been consistently successful at in his lifetime: leading the media away from his failures.
Australia’s 60 Minutes did what CBS’ 60 Minutes in the US wouldn’t do. It stayed on course and covered the Epstein files scandal with this video aired August 17.
Google Trends, August 11, 2025 – search terms Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, tariffs, Russia
Google Trends, August 19, 2025 – search terms Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, tariffs, Russia
We cannot accept a Manchurian candidate run by Putin. We cannot accept the occupation of our cities at the Manchurian candidate’s orders.
But we absolutely cannot allow this Manchurian candidate to continue to throw tons of pasta to obscure his role in a human trafficking conspiracy.
Yes, his role, because he’s actively hiding the files by way of his proxies at DOJ, while allowing Ghislaine Maxwell privileges she should not have in the form of better detention conditions not permitted to sex offenders.
The conspiracy continues even after Jeffrey Epstein’s death; the victims are no closer to getting explanations about the human trafficking network in which Epstein and Maxwell operated, and the public including Trump’s base have been denied the files Trump promised as part of his campaign.
Press your members of Congress to get the files released. Press media outlets to stop being part of the conspiracy by inaction and to stay on the Epstein files. Don’t get buried under the flying spaghetti. Don’t let up.