FBI Deputy Director MIA as Fury Over Epstein Files Grows

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino is so upset with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s dismissal of the Epstein case that Bongino took the day off on Friday and may quit. Far-right commentator and Trump confidant Laura Loomer broke the story on Friday morning, and it was confirmed by Axios shortly after.  

“Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are LIVID with Pam Bondi over her DOJ memo and the lack of transparency from her office regarding the Jeffery Epstein files,” Loomer wrote on X. “Source tells me Dan Bongino is taking the day off today from his job as Deputy Director of the FBI, and there’s now speculation on whether or not he will return to his job at the @FBI over his disgust with Blondi’s lack of transparency and handling of the Epstein files.” 

“Pam Blondi has brought total embarrassment to President Trump,
Vice President JD Vance, Dan Bongino, and Kash Patel. She has also LIED to the American people,” added the conservative commentator, before offering some of her own insider analysis. “Kash Patel and Dan Bongino should call for Blondi’s public resignation today to save themselves and to also push for full transparency into the Epstein files. This is an issue the American people care deeply about. Someone needs to be fired for this. Giving Blondi courtesy to resign is more than she deserves. Trump should just FIRE her.” 

Axios confirmed that Bongino and Bondi clashed on Wednesday, and Bongino did not show up to work on Friday, though administration officials told the publication he’s not quitting just yet.

Welcome to Day 3 of the Epstein fallout. The MAGA feud has escalated since first catching fire on Sunday, when Bondi’s Justice Department and the FBI published a memo stating that there is no Epstein “client list” and that the disgraced millionaire pedophile did indeed kill himself—two points that directly contradicted the MAGA conspiracy theories that have engulfed a notable portion of the base for years now. The right was particularly incensed that the news also came from Bondi, Bongino, and FBI Director Kash Patel—three people who each previously insinuated or outright declared that there is some kind of coverup happening, and that Epstein may not have committed suicide. Now they’re trying—and failing—to move along like nothing happened. 

Bongino was apparently upset with Bondi for riling up the base too much by making the Epstein files, and the “client list” seem more consequential than they ended up being. Now Bondi is the center of MAGA’s ire. 

Only time will tell how much power Loomer’s call to fire Bondi will have on the administration. She was instrumental in getting former national security adviser Mike Waltz fired from the Trump administration for being a “neocon,” amid the Signalgate scandal.

Bongino and Patel are upset with Bondi for making promises none of them could keep. And the MAGA base is upset with all of them for failing to carry out their deep-state- busting mission by revealing Epstein’s client list and exposing the all-powerful pedophile cabal. But one person who no one on the right wants to blame for the Epstein files rollout crashing and burning so spectacularly is President Trump himself. Why are there so many calls to fire Bondi when Trump was sitting next to her in his Cabinet meeting on Tuesday defending her handling of the case and acting like anyone still interested in this infamous case was crazy? 

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” Trump said then. “This guy has been talked about for years. You’re asking—we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And, are people still talking about this guy? This creep?”

People calling for Trump to fire Bondi seem to think that the attorney general is operating independently of the president. But who, if anyone, would be better able to deliver the unredacted list, the missing minute, or anything else related to their Epstein obsession, than their president? 

With the stroke of a pen, Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe signed off on legislation repealing the paid sick leave provision of a ballot measure that roughly 58 percent of Missourian voters approved in November.

The now-struck provision, which went into effect in May but will cease at the end of August, required employers to give workers one hour of earned paid sick time for every 30 hours worked, and 56 hours (or just seven days) of paid sick time per year. Businesses with fewer than 15 employees were only required to give workers 40 hours per year.

In a statement touting how “conservative leadership” supports Missourian “families,” Kehoe called the provision, which would have helped an estimated 728,000 private sector employees in the state, “onerous.”

In November 2024, the paid sick leave mandate passed with 1.69 million votes—not far off, notes Elizabeth Crisp of The Hill, from the 1.75 million with which Kehoe took the governorship in November. Republican lawmakers sprang into action to walk back the will of their constituents after the ballot measure passed, and, within months, a bill to repeal it had passed the state House along partisan lines.

Senate Republicans passed the bill after using a rare procedural maneuver to quash a Democratic filibuster. The bill garnered the votes of all but one Republican lawmaker, Lincoln Hough, who thought his fellow Republicans should have let debate run its course.

“Our rules of that chamber are unique to foster compromise and push people to negotiate,” Hough told The Springfield Daily Citizen at the time, calling the vote a “degradation of the institution of the Missouri Senate.”

When the legislature sent the bill to Kehoe’s desk, Senate Minority Leader Dough Beck told St. Louis Public Radio: “What we saw today was the Republican supermajority, whether they did it because of corporate greed or their corporate overlords telling them what to do, they took away sick pay for millions of workers in the state of Missouri.”

Then they came for the children: even in self-designated sanctuary cities such as Manhattan, apparently no one is safe from the ire of federal immigration agents under the Trump administration.

Youman Wilder, a baseball coach for middle and high school students, was leading a group of 11 kids through batting cage practice near 72nd Street in Riverside Park last month when he caught ICE agents interrogating some of the minors.

“I go over quickly and the agents are asking the kids inappropriate things like where they are from, their country of origin, so I say, ‘Whoa, whoa,’ and I tell the officers that their questions are inappropriate, and that I’m going to tell my kids not to answer them,” Wilder told the West Side Rag.

Wilder said the officers identified themselves as ICE agents, were armed with guns and tasers, and had “ICE” printed across the front of their tactical vests.

The coach—who received his master’s degree in law—told the kids that they didn’t need to answer the agents’ questions, instructing them to instead line up on the opposite side of the batting cages. But ICE didn’t like that: Wilder said that’s when one of the agents raised their voice at him, accusing him of being a “YouTube lawyer.”

“I said no, I just know how the Constitution works,” Wilder told Eyewitness News.

But the agents continued to threaten him, per Wilder, talking about cuffing the coach and openly questioning what the kids would “have to lose by answering” if they were in the U.S. legally. “I told them that they still have their Fifth and Fourth Amendment rights, and that they don’t have to speak to you or help with any investigation,” Wilder told the Rag.

All the kids, according to Wilder, were born in the U.S. and are U.S. citizens, born to parents from Africa, South America, and Mexico.

“It’s all about civics. If you don’t know your rights, they will trample on them,” Wilder told the Rag. The coach also expressed his shock and dismay at the amount of people who watched the interaction but failed to intervene.

“There were people watching and the agents were telling them to move back, that they would be arrested for interfering, and not to take pictures,” Wilder told the Rag. “The worst thing is that the six or seven people who were watching, followed their orders!”

“I never in my life thought this was going to happen in the Upper West Side in New York City,” Wilder told Eyewitness News. “That whole thing, until it happens to you, you’re not aware? It happened to us.”

Wilder has since changed the location and practice times for his team, but some kids and their parents have been so rattled by the event that they haven’t returned to practice.

“I knew that they could arrest me, but I knew that they couldn’t keep me,” he said. “My whole thing is that I’m African American, and most of my kids are Latino and Black, so it was all about how do I get these kids home. I never raised my voice. I just talked about the law. And I was just focused on how can I get these kids to where they need to go, when they are in my care.”

Wilder was “the only thing that stood between those kids in Riverside Park and a Florida detention center buried deep in the Everglades,” Upper West Side Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal wrote in a newsletter earlier this month. Rosenthal told Eyewitness News that Wilder was right to intervene and had the legal authority to do so.

Although President Donald Trump has heaped endless praise on the federal deportation agency, ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable, forced to primarily detain noncriminal immigrants in order to meet their quota: 3,000 arrests per day, per Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s demands.

President Trump on Friday morning threw barbs at Trump-appointed Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, against whom he’s railed over and over again in recent months due to the Fed’s refusal to cut interest rates.

The central bank’s decision not to do so, however, seems to rest ultimately at the feet of Trump’s economic mismanagement, as Powell said earlier this month that the Fed would have lowered rates this year were it not for Trump’s tariffs.

But as TNR’s Timothy Noah observes, Trump interprets Powell’s judgment as evidence that he “wants him to fail, because Trump is incapable of not taking anything personally.” As a result, the Fed chair has of late been on the receiving end of innumerable schoolyard insults from the president: “numbskull,” “dumb guy,” “major loser,” “low IQ,” “Trump hater,” and so on.

“I think he’s doing a terrible job,” Trump told reporters on Friday, though he said he wouldn’t oust Powell. “I think we should be three points lower interest rate. He’s costing our country a lot of money. We should be number one, and we’re not, and that’s because of Jerome Powell.”

The president was quick to clarify that the United States is “number one in the world,” just not “in terms of interest,” before going on to credit himself for the country’s purported transformation from a “dead country” to “the hottest country” (a new favorite adjective of his).

“I’ll tell you a little simple—a little simple language,” Trump said. “One year ago, our country was a dead country. We were going nowhere except down. We were the laughingstock all over the world. And now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re number one everywhere, anywhere in the world. And that’s all they’re talking about, is our country.”

In reality, America’s image in the eyes of the world has, per the Pew Research Center, declined during Trump’s presidency. The U.S. is being seen as an increasingly unserious and unstable country on the international stage. And, as with Trump’s gripes with Powell, this undoubtedly owes in no small part to the president’s chaotic approach to trade policy and erratic leadership more broadly.

Immigration Czar Tom Homan just enthusiastically confirmed what we already knew: ICE is using indiscriminate racial profiling tactics to detain immigrants. 

“People need to understand, ICE officers and border patrol, they don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain ‘em and question ‘em,” Homan said when asked about a Los Angeles federal judge issuing a temporary restraining order on his west coast immigration crackdown. “Get our typical facts based on the location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions ... agents are trained what they need to detain somebody temporarily and question them is not probable cause, it’s reasonable suspicion. We’re trained on that. Every agent gets 4th amendment training over and over again.” 

What does the federal government think an immigrant looks like? Homan is essentially saying that ICE has the right to kidnap and question any Latino person they happen upon. It’s easy to see why so many law-abiding communities and families have been living in abject fear for months, scared to go to work or school or, in some cases, even leave their homes. 

Homan’s framing of probable cause and the 4th amendment is not new, nor is it unique to the Trump administration. Homan got his initial experience on this issue working for President Obama as ICE’s Executive Associate Director of Enforcement in 2014, the same year the Obama Administration reaffirmed the use of racial profiling by federal immigration agents because they couldn’t do their jobs “without taking ethnicity into account.”  

While Homan’s current comments point to increased brutality in the near future, it’s important to remember how we got here if we want to move forward on immigration in a way that is actually humane, and not handled via a gestapo-style federal militia. 

A federal judge shredded Justice Department lawyers Friday over their shoddily constructed case to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongfully removed to El Salvador earlier this year.

During a hearing, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis once again proved that she doesn’t suffer fools as she torched the government’s lawyers for failing to produce an ICE detainer for Abrego Garcia. Xinis had made the request Monday and gave the government until Thursday to fulfill the order.

When the lawyers said they were still working on it, the judge didn’t buy it.

“You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it in my view,” Xinis said, according to Politico’s senior legal affairs correspondent Kyle Cheney. The presumption of regularity gives particular deference to the executive branch for certain facts and details.

Xinis had heard roughly four hours of testimony on Thursday from Thomas Giles, assistant director for ICE enforcement and removal operations, who said that the government hadn’t yet determined what third country it planned to deport Abrego Garcia. Giles said that the government wouldn’t even begin to consider where to send him until he was back in the custody of ICE. Xinis was outraged that Giles hadn’t provided basic answers.

The judge said it was “insulting to [her] intelligence” that Giles would testify without having consulted with the office that would handle the case, according to Lawfare’s Anna Bower. As the hearing continued, she became increasingly frustrated that the government still offered no answers on its plan to remove Abrego Garcia.

Giles had claimed that Abrego Garcia would “get a fear interview if he claims fear of return” or if he has a fear “of being returned to a third country.” But Xinis hit back at the government’s claim that Abrego Garcia might be treated like any other migrant detainee in ICE custody, noting that nothing about his case has been business as usual. “That’s not credible,” she said. “I’m just telling you, I’m not buying that.”

The government argued that Giles’s testimony had demonstrated what happened to detainees like Abrego Garcia. “Name me one alien like Mr. Abrego, who has experienced what happened to him,” Xinis fired back.

Xinis said that the government’s claim that the decision of where to send Abrego Garcia would be left to a desk officer “defies reality.”

The judge asked how the government’s claims square with a March 2025 memo and a July 9 email stating that if a third country made assurances to prevent torture or persecution, that “no further procedures” were necessary. While the government initially said that Abrego Garcia would still receive a fear interview, they eventually admitted the procedure outlined in the memo and email would likely apply to him.

The judge also slammed the government for attempting to deport Abrego Garcia after spending months claiming that he was a so-called “leader” of MS-13, while providing only paltry evidence. “What’s that going to do for any country that this man has to face a third party removal to?” she asked.

Abrego Garcia had previously received a protective order preventing his removal to El Salvador, for fear of violence—which the government ignored by removing him there earlier this year. The Maryland man was returned from El Salvador to Tennessee to face two flimsy charges related to illegally transporting undocumented immigrants for cash. Despite a judge ordering Abrego Garcia’s release from pretrial detention, he still remains in custody after claiming that he feared he’d be deported by immigration authorities—who confirmed that was their plan. But the details of that plan are still unclear.

For the low price of $45, New Yorkers can proudly display their racist attitudes against New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

Despite establishment opposition, Mamdani clinched the city’s primary in June with 56 percent of the vote. The Ugandan-born Queens lawmaker’s rise in the Big Apple has not been without intense opposition: many Democratic leaders in New York politics have still refused to endorse him, with some outright attacking him. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand baselessly claimed that Mamdani condoned “global jihad,” a statement that her communication director quickly had to walk back.

But it’s been Republicans who have proven especially venomous in the wake of Mamdani’s surprise win. On Friday, the New York Young Republican Club unveiled its newest merchandise: a blue shirt plastered with the text “Deport Zohran.”

“A new era is coming to New York City,” the item description reads. “With a dash of Che Guevera and modern populist overtones, our tee flips the script on socialism as we take back the city we love. Don’t just cast your vote, rep it too!”

(The website misspells the last name of Cuban Revolution figure Che Guevara.)

The shirt’s manufacturing details explain that it’s 100 percent cotton, side-seamed construction with shoulder-to-shoulder taping, and is “made in the USA, unlike Zohran.”

The unabashed xenophobia is no doubt thanks, in part, to Donald Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric. The president has recently directed his attention towards the Democratic Socialist, threatening to arrest Mamdani and initiate a federal takeover of New York City if the 33-year-old is elected to Gracie Mansion.

“If a Communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same. But we have tremendous power at the White House to run places where we have to,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday. “We’re going to straighten out New York. It’s going to—maybe we’re going to have to straighten it out from Washington.”

Trump did not specify by which authority he planned to intervene in New York’s democratic processes.

A new Gallup poll indicates dramatic shifts in Americans’ attitudes regarding Donald Trump’s signature issue, suggesting that the president may be overshooting his supposed mandate on immigration.

Strikingly, the share of U.S. adults who want less immigration, 30 percent, is down 25 points from last year, and the polling firm also reports that 79 percent of Americans—a record high—say immigration is a good thing for the country. More Republicans (64 percent) now hold a positive view of immigration than they have since the very beginning of the Trump era.

According to Gallup, Donald Trump’s handling of immigration is at 35 percent approval and 62 percent disapproval, and, notably, the public’s preferences are shifting away from more aggressive methods of immigration enforcement.

For example, since 2024, there have been 4- and 8-point increases, respectively, in support for paths to citizenship for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children and for those living in the U.S. illegally, whereas support for hiring more border patrol agents, expanding border walls, and deporting all undocumented immigrants are down 17, 8, and 9 points, respectively.

While Republicans still overwhelmingly favor the more strict of these policies, their preferences, too, reflect these shifts. Compared to last year, Republican support for a path to citizenship for immigrants brought illegally as children is up 7 points (now at 71 percent) and for a path to citizenship for those living in the U.S. illegally is up 13 points (at 59 percent). Meanwhile, Republican support for deporting all undocumented immigrants has taken a 7-point dip.

These results show the president grossly overestimating his “mandate” on immigration. The numbers also give the lie to the notion, common among centrist politicians and pundits during and in the aftermath of the 2024 election, of immigration as an unwinnable issue that Democrats should surrender to hardline immigration policies.

Opposing Donald Trump’s cuts to PBS and NPR could cost Republicans a critical midterm endorsement.

The White House has asked Congress to cut $9.4 billion in spending before July 18, including $8.3 billion in rescissions to international assistance programs and ending $1.1 billion in funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which oversees PBS and NPR.

The president issued a clear threat to conservatives considering rejecting his latest legislative effort, posting to Truth Social Thursday evening that the two publicly funded media organizations had to go.

“It is very important that all Republicans adhere to my Recissions Bill and, in particular, DEFUND THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (PBS and NPR), which is worse than CNN & MSDNC put together,” Trump wrote, referring to the cable news network MSNBC. “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement.”

But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from speaking out.

South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said that he’s apprehensive to end media access in rural areas, noting that the goal amongst the opposition isn’t to elimination provisions in the package but “specifically to take care of those that were in some of these rural areas,” such as parts of South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, and Alaska, according to CBS News.

“There’s a specific group of Native American tribes that have a public radio system set up, and really the vast majority of the funding for it comes from one source, and that’s within the rescission package,” Rounds told reporters. “What we’re trying to do is to work with [the Office of Management and Budget] to find a path forward where the funding for those radio stations would be left alone.”

Montana Senator Steve Daines, West Virginia Senator Shelly Moore Capito, and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski were similarly concerned with the package’s cuts to the public broadcasting organizations. Concerns about ceding funds from the Center for Public Broadcasting, which maintains the Emergency Broadcasting System, have been particularly sharp in the wake of severe flooding in Texas, which killed at least 120 people after authorities failed to notify residents of the rising water levels.

“I hope you feel the urgency that I’m trying to express on behalf of the people in rural Alaska and I think in many parts of rural America where this is their lifeline,” Murkowski told Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought at a Senate Appropriations hearing last month. “This is where they get the updates on [landslides], this is where they get the updates on the wildfires that are coming their way.”

Rounds, Daines, Capito, and Susan Collins are up for reelection in 2026, while Murkowski has already forgone Trump’s support: the Alaska lawmaker won without his endorsement in 2022.

Whether Murkowski will follow through on her defense of the media organizations is unclear, however, after she suddenly caved on Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” earlier this month. Her vote helped to pass a piece of legislation that will make the rich richer while stripping 17 million Americans of their health care.

President Donald Trump plans to raise tariffs on Canadian imports by 35 percent, upending whatever progress the two countries had made on a trade deal, if any.

“As you will recall, the United States imposed tariffs on Canada to deal with our nation’s fentanyl crisis, which is caused, in part, by Canada’s failure to stop the drugs from pouring into our country,” Trump wrote to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in a letter published on Truth Social Thursday night. “Instead of working with the United States, Canada retaliated with its own tariffs. Starting August 1, 2025, we will charge Canada a tariff of 35 percent on Canadian products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral tariffs.”

Trump’s tariffs are more threats than actual tariffs right now and the letter itself looks like many others he has sent to foreign leaders and posted on social media. The August 1 deadline is also a significant extension from the initial July 8 one the president announced this spring. Nothing is final here, but Trump is further rupturing relations with one of the U.S.’s closest allies—and one of its most important trading partners.

Another difference in this letter—Trump is using fentanyl as a scapegoat for this destructive tariff, continuing to spread the often-debunked thinking that Canada plays some significant role in trafficking fentanyl into the U.S. when the opposite is true. Canada is not a major player in U.S. fentanyl trafficking, and the tariffs Trump is levying do not reflect the reality of the epidemic.

“Canada has made vital progress to stop the scourge of fentanyl in North America. We are committed to continuing to work with the United States to save lives and protect communities in both our countries,” Prime Minister Carney responded on X. “We are building Canada strong. The federal government, provinces and territories are making significant progress in building one Canadian economy. We are poised to build a series of major new projects in the national interest. We are strengthening our trading partnerships throughout the world.”