Here’s How Trump Is Responding to Being Named in Epstein Documents

The first series of Jeffrey Epstein documents have been released, and as expected they name Donald Trump. And how is the country’s social media–obsessed former president responding? Well he’s gone surprisingly mute.

Donald Trump’s last slew of posts on his Twitter-dupe social media platform TruthSocial seemed like an effort to flood his MAGA followers’ timelines with unrelated content. In a series of rapid-fire posts Thursday morning, Trump shared endorsements for his presidential campaign as well as a slew of videos from news outlets validating his legal strategy in his upcoming criminal trials. He also made more than two dozen posts attacking E. Jean Carroll, all within the span of half an hour.

Despite the flurry of activity, there are absolutely zero mentions of the revelatory unsealing of nearly 900 pages of a lawsuit launched by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre, nearly a decade ago, even though she’s one of Trump’s former employees, meeting Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell roughly two weeks into her employment at Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, according to court documents.

Along with Trump’s, some of the major names that jump off the pages range from some of the world’s biggest politicos to show-stopping entertainers. They include former President Bill Clinton, British Prince Andrew, Epstein, and Trump legal ally Alan Dershowitz, Michael Jackson, David Copperfield, and Stephen Hawking.

Their presence in the documents is not proof of any legal wrongdoing.

A Clinton spokesperson has redirected attention to a 2019 statement put out on behalf of the forty-second president denying any knowledge of Epstein’s pedophilic, sex-trafficking empire.

“In 2002 and 2003, President Clinton took a total of four trips on Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane: one to Europe, one to Asia, and two to Africa, which included stops in connection with the work of the Clinton Foundation,” read the statement.

The list of Jane and John Does, which was formed nine years ago, after Giuffre filed a defamation claim against Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, was partially released on Wednesday. More of the documents could be unsealed sometime today.

Many of the names are expected to be publicly known Epstein associates, including employees of the financier. Other possible names to be unveiled could include Epstein’s clients and perpetrators, though the judge has specified that the identities of minors or sexual assault victims will not be released.

A senior Education Department official and the department’s only Palestinian American political appointee has resigned over Joe Biden’s response to the war in Gaza.

Tariq Habash, who sent his resignation letter on Wednesday, is at least the second high-ranking Biden administration official to resign in protest over the Israel-Palestine war.

“The actions of the Biden-Harris Administration have put millions of innocent lives in danger, most immediately for the 2.3 million Palestinian civilians living in Gaza who remain under continuous assault and ethnic cleansing by the Israeli government. Therefore, I must resign,” Habash said in his letter.

“I mourn each and every loss, Israeli and Palestinian. But I cannot represent an administration that does not value all human life equally.”

Nearly all of the 2.3 million people living in the Gaza Strip have been displaced due to Israel’s unrelenting bombardment of the region. Palestinians were forced to flee to designated “safe zones,” only for Israel to bomb those areas as well. Almost 22,500 Palestinians have been killed, the majority women and children. Some organizations, such as the nonprofit Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, put the death toll at nearly 30,000.

South Africa asked the International Court of Justice in late December for an urgent order declaring that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in its nearly three-month assault on the Gaza Strip. White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby criticized South Africa’s lawsuit on Wednesday as “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

“I cannot be quietly complicit as this administration fails to leverage its influence as Israel’s strongest ally to halt the abusive and ongoing collective punishment tactics that have cut off Palestinians in Gaza from food, water, electricity, fuel, and medical supplies, leading to widespread disease and starvation,” Habash said in his letter.

Over the last three months, our government has aided in the indiscriminate violence against Palestinians in Gaza—over 22,000 civilians killed, thousands more buried under rubble, and the vast majority displaced from their homes. Despite claims that Israel’s focus is on Hamas, its military actions simultaneously persist across the West Bank where there is no Hamas governing presence, with hundreds of Palestinians killed in the West Bank before October and hundreds more killed since. Additionally, thousands of Palestinians have been detained, arrested, and held without charge or trial—a violation of international humanitarian law. Meanwhile, the President has publicly questioned the integrity of Palestinian death counts frequently used by our own State Department, the United Nations, and numerous humanitarian non-governmental organizations. Our representatives at the United Nations have repeatedly voted against the vast majority of the international community, including vetoing resolutions calling for a ceasefire. And administration leaders have even repeated unverified claims that systematically dehumanize Palestinians.

Habash is now the second Biden official known to have resigned in protest over the administration’s response to the situation in Gaza. Josh Paul, who had worked at the State Department for 11 years, resigned in October, slamming the government for its “one-sided” policy that prioritized Israel at the expense of Palestinian civilians.

“I cannot work in support of a set of major policy decisions, including rushing more arms to one side of the conflict, that I believe to be short-sighted, destructive, unjust and contradictory to the very values that we publicly espouse,” Paul said in a statement.

Also in October, a director of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights resigned, condemning the organization, the U.S., and Western media for their stance on the war. Craig Mokhiber, who had worked with the U.N. for more than three decades, called the situation in Gaza a “text-book case of genocide.”

“Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it,” he said.

Read Tariq Habash’s full letter here.

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley is apparently willing to sacrifice just about anything for her political career—even her husband’s name.

In a true Selina Meyer move, the former South Carolina governor apparently decided that her then boyfriend’s name wasn’t fashionable enough for her political motivations.

“You may be wondering how ‘Bill’ became South Carolina First Gentleman Michael Haley,” Haley wrote in her autobiographical 2012 book, Can’t Is Not an Option: My American Story.

She then outlines how she suddenly decided he no longer looked like a Bill, opting instead to call him by his second name, Michael, which her friends quickly adopted.

“From that point on, I started calling him Michael, and all my friends did the same. When he transferred to Clemson his sophomore year, my friends became his friends, and before we knew it, he was universally known as Michael,” Haley wrote.

“He looks like a Michael,” she added.

U.S. House candidate Mayra Flores got caught up in a sticky situation on Wednesday when it became apparent that the Mexican-born politician has been ripping and reposting photos of Mexican food from other online accounts, all while claiming it as her own cooking.

The Texas Republican, who is running again for the seat she previously held from 2022 to 2023 representing Texas’s 34th congressional district, was called out in several posts on Twitter that tied photos of self-proclaimed, self-made grub from her Instagram account to other sources online.

“The ranch life with family is the best,” Flores captioned one photo of corn flour gorditas cooking over a wood-burning fire pit, although the photo was posted more than a year earlier to a Guyana tourism Facebook page.

In another post sharing a photo of eggs and tortillas, Flores claimed she was a “proud Latina who knows how to cook,” adding that “homemade Mexican food tastes better from a gas stove.”

Except that photo too was ripped from another source and was originally posted on Facebook in 2021 by Izabal magazine.

Flores has deleted at least one of the stolen photos since online sleuths began taking note.

In a text messaged statement, Flores told the The Texas Tribune it wasn’t her “intention to mislead.”

“The photo simply reminded me of my upbringing in Mexico and childhood,” she added. “I deleted the tweet to clear up any confusion. I actually spend my Christmas at ranch with my In-Laws. Happy New Year!”

When asked to specify which photos she was referring to, Flores told the Tribune to turn its attention toward the border.

It’s a strange twist for a politician who previously accused first lady Jill Biden of allegedly believing you can win over Latinos with food.

“[Democrats] think that by giving us tacos, playing Latin music, that’s all it’s going to take for us to vote for them. It’s not,” Flores told Fox Business in August 2022.

Ron DeSantis wants to bring back an extreme 1950s-era immigration policy that saw the mass deportation of up to 1.3 million migrants.

During a Wednesday night town hall, DeSantis floated the idea of resurrecting President Dwight Eisenhower’s racist-named “Operation Wetback.” That program sparked the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, as authorities employed military-style tactics to deport Mexican immigrants, some of whom had been naturalized.

When asked if every undocumented migrant would be deported, DeSantis said, “Everybody is subject to that.”

“We’re gonna do the Biden eight million, that’s a big task,” he continued, referring to the Republican estimate that eight million migrants have supposedly entered the country during Joe Biden’s time in office. “Eisenhower had a program in the ’50s, so we’re gonna do that.”

Anywhere from 300,000 to 1.3 million people were deported under Operation Wetback, which lasted for three months in 1954. Historians say it is impossible to know exactly how many people were forcibly removed, because some people reentered the U.S. and were deported again.

The policy disrupted families, communities, and U.S. business operations that relied on migrant labor. Tens of thousands of people were sent to random parts of Mexico, where they struggled to find their footing. The conditions in which they were detained and transported were brutal, and thousands of people died from sunstroke and disease.

DeSantis has promised repeatedly to crack down on immigration, often in cruel and inhumane ways. This is the second time he is raising the idea of bringing back Eisenhower’s policy. He also suggested in September that the United States shoot alleged cartel members on sight at the border. DeSantis offered no details on how to actually identify a cartel member by sight alone.

The Florida governor doubled down Wednesday on his terrible immigration policy ideas in an op-ed for the Des Moines Register. He promised to declare a national emergency over immigration, crack down on asylum requests, and to finish building the border wall and make Mexico pay for it. DeSantis also threatened consequences for Mexico and other Central American countries for letting so many migrants reach the U.S. border.

“Florida under my leadership has been a bulwark of immigration enforcement,” DeSantis bragged. “I sent illegal aliens out of Florida’s communities and to so-called ‘sanctuary cities,’ such as Martha’s Vineyard. And I signed the strongest anti-illegal immigration legislation in the country.”

He failed to mention that he has been accused of human trafficking by sending migrants to other states. Massachusetts officials are urging the Justice Department to look into Desantis’s actions.

Many of Florida’s new immigration laws have disrupted businesses, with farmers saying that migrant workers are avoiding the Sunshine State altogether. Backlash has been so bad that even Republican lawmakers have had to admit they messed up.