State Department Cuts Key Office Amidst Raging Epstein Files Outcry

While Donald Trump tries to completely dismiss Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex ring scandal as a Democratic “scam,” his administration has quietly axed a key office related to investigating human trafficking.

The White House hacked 1,353 positions from the State Department on Friday, gutting parts of the agency that don’t align with MAGA values, reported Mother Jones. Those include offices focused on promoting democracy, ending genocide, quelling political extremism, and combating human trafficking.

Employees at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office, believed that they would be spared from State Secretary Marco Rubio’s cuts, which were permitted by the Supreme Court last week after months-long delays. They were under the impression that their office would be folded into the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. They were wrong: half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees were effectively terminated by reduction-in-force notices Friday.

The cuts reduced the office to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months ago, thanks to Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, according to Mother Jones.

“Everyone was caught off guard,” one source familiar with the cuts told the magazine.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” they continued, underscoring the enormous brain drain and loss of expertise and international connections that the cuts will induce. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”

But the Trump administration has defended the cuts. A State Department representative justified dismissing federal employees en masse on the basis that “the world has changed.”

“As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative,” the spokesperson told Mother Jones.

Trump and his associates have ideated paring down the federal workforce since he was on the campaign trail, with details of diminishing the executive branch explicitly laid out in Project 2025. Trump appealed to fiscal conservatives to advance the cuts, claiming that his administration was focused on driving down the federal budget in order to reduce the deficit.

But that has not been the case. Instead, Trump pushed several exorbitantly expensive policies in his “big, beautiful bill,” including a whopping tax cut for the wealthiest individuals in America at cost to the middle and lower classes that is estimated to add trillions to the budget.

By and large, Americans are dumping Donald Trump’s policies.

Within the first seven months of his second term, Trump has managed to add trillions to the deficit, eviscerate agencies like the Education Department, rattle the economy, shake America’s strongest alliances, develop concentration camps for his sweeping deportation program, and strip popular social programs such as Medicaid from millions of Americans.

But despite following through on his campaign promises, Trump has failed to earn majority support for any major issue, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research published Thursday.

Approximately half of U.S. adults—49 percent—believe that Trump’s policies have “done more to hurt” them than help them since he returned to the White House, according to the survey. Twenty-two percent of that group reported that Trump’s policies have not made much of a difference in their lives, while just 27 percent—little more than a quarter—of the polled population responded that Trump had actually helped them.

“As it sits today, I don’t know his policies have made much of a difference in my day-to-day life,” Landon Lindemer, a 29-year-old logistics manager from suburban Atlanta who voted for Trump three times, told The Associated Press.

Public polling on Trump’s handling of several key issues produced similar results to his overall job performance rating, which sits at around 40 percent. Trump failed to accrue more than 50 percent support on any topic, including immigration, which has historically been one of his strongest polling issues. Just 43 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s immigration policies, compared to 49 percent who said as much in March.

Support also waned for the president’s federal spending habits: weeks after Trump forced through his “big, beautiful bill,” just 40 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s government spending, a six percent drop compared to those who felt that way four months ago.

Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, however, have remained relatively stagnant, with four in 10 Americans approving of Trump’s performance on the key factor.

Timothy Dwyer, a 26-year-old self-described independent with conservative leanings based in Dyersburg, Tennessee, told the AP that Trump’s plan tariffs have “really sucked.”

“He’s turned us into a toilet and has absolutely made us the laughing stock of the world,” Dwyer told the newswire.

President Trump is bringing Juul back.

After a federal ban in 2022 kneecapped the popular vape company, the Food and Drug Administration, under the watch of MAHA Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now moving to loosen regulations and approving its full return to the domestic e-cigarette market, according to The Wall Street Journal. The FDA has authorized Juul’s original vaporizer, as well as its tobacco and menthol-flavored cartridges, according to sources who spoke with the Journal. The decision means the agency believes the company provides greater benefits to adult smokers than any harm to general public health.

Former President Joe Biden’s FDA briefly banned Juul from U.S. markets in 2022 due to its failure to provide the government with sufficient health and safety information. The agency later rescinded the ban, although it still dealt significant damage to the company’s profit and reputation.

The FDA has not yet publicly commented on the news of Juul’s reauthorization, nor has RFK Jr.

But now, the iconic flash-drive shaped e-cigarette that rose to prominence with teens and young adults during Trump’s first term is back on the streets.

A resurfaced video of a younger White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller shows the president’s ghoulish policy adviser raving that “torture is a celebration of life.”

In a video dated 2003, 17-year-old Miller sits backward on a school bus speaking about the United States’ invasion of Iraq.

“To the issue of the Iraqi civilians, I think that as many of them should survive as possible, because the goal of any military conflict is to kill as few people as possible,” Miller said.

“But as for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, I think the ideal solution would be to cut off their fingers.”

“I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely, we’re not a barbaric people, we respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity,” he continued, as teenagers off screen burst into laughter.

“We need to remember that as we enter these very dark and dangerous times in the next century. And I only hope that many of my peers and people who will be leading this country will appreciate the value and respect that torture shows towards other cultures,” Miller said.

Twenty-three years later, Miller is a central figure leading the United States, and his inhumane immigration policies have marked the way for hundreds of people to be detained in tortuous conditions and deported to dangerous third countries and foreign gulags.

Speaking to Vice in 2017, former White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the video as being inauthentic.

“This is clearly a sketch comedy routine performed by teenagers and for teenagers as part of a video yearbook,” she said. “This teenage skit does not reflect any policy position, past or present, held by Stephen Miller. This is another comical overreach by the media.”

But there’s plenty of reasons to consider Miller’s heinous statements legitimate.

Miller was raised in California, where his “evolving political views could not have been more at odds with those of progressive, inclusive Santa Monica, a fact in which he delighted,” wrote Vanity Fair special correspondent William D. Cohan in 2017 after Miller had helped craft the Trump administration’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.

Miller’s former classmates recalled that he would challenge Latino students to speak English and loudly opposed putting student announcements in multiple languages—an attitude that mirrors the Trump administration’s recent policy to end all multi-lingual services purporting to promote the use of English.

In 2002, Miller wrote a whiny op-ed for the Santa Monica Lookout, railing against the “political correctness” he believed had taken over his school, and declaring that “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”

Once a wildly conservative wunderkind, now simply a seething racist, it seems that Miller hasn’t changed at all.

One of Donald Trump’s former employees is drawing a line connecting Jeffrey Epstein and the real estate mogul.

The former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Jack O’Donnell, told CNN Wednesday that he once had to reprimand Trump for bringing a 19-year-old into the casino with the child sex trafficker in tow.

The incident occurred while O’Donnell was atop the casino, between 1987 and 1990, according to the former C-suite executive.

“He frequently came down to Atlantic City, the two of them, to attend special events,” O’Donnell told the network. “In my mind, it was his best friend, you know, from really the time I was there for four years.”

Host Erin Burnett then rolled a 2019 clip of Trump in which the 45th president denied reported ties between himself and Epstein, claiming that he only knew the New York financier “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” and that he was “not a fan” of Epstein’s.

But O’Donnell said that didn’t square with what he witnessed between the pair during his time running the popular casino.

“One incident that I think kind of proves their closeness and how much they hung out together—one time, a Monday morning, I came in and the commission was waiting, the inspectors were waiting in my office, and Donald and Jeffrey had come into the casino in the wee hours of Sunday morning, 1:00, 1:30 in the morning,” O’Donnell told CNN.

“You know, two buddies, they had three women with them, and the commission was waiting for me because they had determined that the women that they brought down were underaged to be in the casino,” O’Donnell continued. “And when I asked them how they knew that, by the way, one of them was the number three-ranked tennis player in the world, okay, and this guy happened to be a tennis fan, and he said, ‘Jack, I know she’s 19 years old.’”

The commission effectively gave Trump a free pass that night, deciding not to fine him or the casino for bringing someone underaged into the casino, O’Donnell recalled. But in turn, O’Donnell had to “read [Trump] the Riot Act.”

“I had to call him and say, ‘Look, they’ve given you a break this time, but if this happens again, the fine is gonna be substantial and it’s gonna be on your head,’” O’Donnell said. “And oh, by the way, it’s not gonna look good, you and this guy Epstein, coming down here with these young women.”

O’Donnell said he told Trump at the time that he shouldn’t be “hanging out with” Epstein.

O’Donnell further claimed that the two New York socialites must have been close to hop on a helicopter together to fly down to Atlantic City.

“They were pretty good buddies,” O’Donnell alleged.

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” And a YouGov/Economist poll conducted earlier this week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the Trump administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”

High-profile conservatives, including Elon Musk, have speculated that the administration’s continued delay in releasing the Epstein case files is due to the fact that Trump himself might be mentioned in the documents.

Only two Republican senators broke the line to vote against their party’s plan to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins joined Senate Democrats in opposition to Republican cuts to organizations like PBS and NPR, and the smaller stations that they fund. While PBS and NPR would still continue at the national level, the cuts would likely devastate those local stations that rely on them. 

The Senate approved $9 billion dollars of cuts early Thursday morning, with $1.1 billion in cuts to public broadcasting and $8.8 billion from foreign aid programs like USAID, which Elon Musk’s DOGE slashed earlier this year. 

“The vast majority of this funding, more than 70 percent, actually flows to local television and radio stations,” Collins said last month during an earlier stage of the deliberation. “In Maine, this funding supports everything from emergency communications in rural areas to coverage of high school basketball championships and [a] locally produced high school quiz show. Nationally produced television programs such as Antiques Roadshow, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, are also enjoyed by many throughout our country.” 

“I understand … the concern about subsidizing the national radio news programming that for years has had a discernibly partisan bent,” she added. “There are, however, more targeted approaches to addressing that bias at NPR than rescinding all of the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.” She backed up that thinking with her vote on Thursday morning, along with Murkowski.  

Conservatives have been obsessed with attacking NPR and PBS for years. This political decision gives them at least some of what they wanted, all while taking out programming and resources, from Sesame Street to Native American radio, that Americans of all ages genuinely use and enjoy.

“We just don’t have a lot of fat to trim elsewhere,” South Dakota Public Broadcasting executive director Julie Overgaard told The New York Times on Thursday. “On the PBS side of things, I can’t just start cherry-picking which national programs I want and only pay for those … so it really leaves me and many others with little choice but to look at the local programming that we self-generate.”

The Trump administration is looking to use more federal funds to repeat its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophilic sex trafficking ring—but only to prove Donald Trump’s theory that the scandal is a “hoax.”

Speaking with the far-right network Real America’s Voice on Wednesday night, the president suggested that the FBI should expend resources to prove Trump’s invention that the entire case against Epstein is a Democratic “scam.”

“I think they could look at all of it, it’s all the same scam, they could look at this Jeffrey Epstein hoax also, because that’s the same stuff, that’s all put out by Democrats,” Trump told the network, referring to dissenting conservatives as “naive Republicans.”

Against better sense, Trump has been working overtime to sweep the entire Epstein fiasco under the rug. That has included challenging the political identities of some members of his base, who believed Trump’s repeated promises on the campaign trail that he would release the Epstein case files as soon as he returned to high office.

“The Democrats, you know, they have bad policy, they have bad candidates, they have bad everything, but they stick together. The Republicans don’t do that,” Trump said.

Speaking with reporters at the White House earlier Wednesday, Trump said that he had “lost a lot of faith” in his supporters, accusing some conservatives of being “duped” by Democrats.

“That was run by the Biden administration for four years, I can’t imagine what they put into files,” Trump told Real America’s Voice, apparently trying to seed doubt about the ultimate contents of the Epstein case files.

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.”

But elected Republicans have unquestioningly fallen in line behind their leader: on Tuesday, the party blocked a Democrat-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

A reminder that prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together, and Trump reportedly slept with his now-wife Melania for the first time aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

But Trump also has a terrible track record with how he treats women outside of Epstein’s world: the current president was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing Elle columnist E. Jean Carrol last year, was convicted as a felon for crimes relating to his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, and famously boasted on a hot mic before his ascent to America’s political vanguard that he grabs women “by the pussy.” High-profile conservatives, including Elon Musk, have speculated that the administration’s continued delay in releasing the Epstein case files is due to the fact that Trump himself might be mentioned in the documents.

Donald Trump is desperate for anything to distract the angry mob seeking answers on alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Now, he’s hoping to toss them some dirt on Hillary Clinton—too bad nobody cares about that.

During an appearance Wednesday on Real America’s Voice, Just the News founder John Solomon reported that Trump was open to declassifying information tied to conspiracy theories about the former secretary of state.

One piece was the classified annex of Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2018 report on the FBI’s actions ahead of the 2016 election. The missing annex had become the center of right-wing conspiracies that the FBI had ignored credible information of Clinton’s wrongdoing in the investigation of her private email server.

When asked if he’d declassify the annex, Trump told Just the News, “I would do that.”

“Absolutely. I think it should be looked at. The whole thing was a scam. I would do that broadly,” Trump said.

Trump also indicated he was open to declassifying another classified annex from Special Counsel John Durham’s 2023 report, which supposedly contained evidence that Clinton had approved a proposal to “vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security services.”

“I would declassify it, yeah. Why not?” Trump told Just the News. “I would absolutely declassify it.”

But Trump’s promises are far from an actual commitment. Trump had previously pledged the “total declassification of any & all documents” related to Russiagate and Clinton’s use of a private email server during his first term, but attorneys from the Department of Justice told the Office of White House Council to simply disregard the president’s hollow threat.

Trump has been increasingly desperate to redirect the massive backlash over his administration’s toothless findings in its investigation into Epstein, which produced no additional documents and found that the sex offender kept no incriminating “client list,” even though his attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk.

The president posted a furious rant on Truth Social Tuesday, saying that any of his followers who were interested in the Epstein case were falling for Democratic “bullshit,” and compared it to the “totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election.” Similarly to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Trump now claims that Epstein files are a “hoax.”

Unfortunately for Trump, Americans don’t care about Clinton’s emails nearly as much as they care about his own administration’s scandal: Signalgate, the infamous use of a non-secure messaging app by several top Cabinet officials to discuss sensitive war plans.

After Signalgate, a YouGov survey found that nearly 75 percent of respondents believed the scandal was “very” or “somewhat” serious.

After Clinton’s email scandal in 2015, YouGov found that 56 percent of respondents thought the issue was “very serious” and “somewhat serious.” By 2022, people had become more concerned, but only 62 percent saw it as “very serious” or “somewhat serious,” likely at least in part resulting from Trump’s constant griping about it.

Meanwhile, a Quinnpac Poll published Wednesday found that 63 percent of American voters disapprove of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

Trump’s looking for anything at all that can distract the angry mob. Just in case the almond moms were sharpening their pitchforks, Trump even promised that he would get real sugar added to Coca Cola instead of high fructose corn syrup. Now there’s something everyone can get behind!

Trump’s dismissal of the Jeffrey Epstein case is giving some of his most ardent supporters—like Alex Jones—a bit of an identity crisis.

“Trump, we’ve believed in you, we’ve seen you do great work, we’ve seen the bad guys, the worst certified people on earth come after you,” Jones said in a video on Wednesday, staring directly into the camera. He then accurately detailed the Trump administration’s history of contradictory policy on the Epstein files. “And now we’ve seen you uncharacteristically flip flop on your promises back and forth. ‘There was no Epstein case, there’s nothing to see here. Ok, we’re gonna investigate it, we’re gonna put it in a special counsel, no there’s nothing there, anybody investigating it is fake news and is a traitor.’ Your most loyal supporters and good people are the ones pointing this out.”

Jones captioned the video “why is Trump destroying MAGA in real time?”

If I was a QAnon-adjacent, Epstein-obsessed MAGA conspiracy theorist, I would be feeling dejected, angry, and confused right now too. Donald Trump and his inner circle made this issue central to their campaign, making promises upon promises to reveal every secret regarding the Epstein files. Now they’re saying there’s nothing there, and that anyone who ever thought so is a complete idiot. It’s been brutally amusing to watch in real time.

“To say ‘you either agree with everything I do or you’re not in our club, I don’t want you,’ well, that sounds kind of like a thorough-bred cult to me,” he said in another video where he compared MAGA to a cult. “When somebody starts saying don’t question things or you can’t be in our club, yeah that’s a cult.”

“I have to say at this point, if you look at the scales here, whether it happened a year ago or six months ago or a month ago, stuff really started to change when Elon [Musk] left, with what he discovered,” he added. “And I think it has a lot of credibility what he said. Trump’s implicated here. I’m not saying sex abuse or kids but definitely somehow, somebody close to him … you are compromised. And If you go with the deep state and continue down this road … the coverup is even worse than whatever would have come out. So I’m loyal to the truth.”

While some MAGA loyalists have scapegoated Attorney General Pam Bondi for various reasons—like her lying about the client list being on her desk, or claims that she is a nefarious deep state operative who strong-armed FBI director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Bongino on the Epstein memo—but few have had the gall to make the connection Jones did here. Perhaps Trump wants everyone to forget about Epstein because he or his friends would be implicated. Either way, the hardcore wing of the MAGA movement is in shambles over this. And as we approach week three of the fallout, it’s unclear if they’ll ever fully recover. There may be more tears from Jones in the near future.

Elected representatives say they aren’t interested if their constituents are detained by federal immigration officials.

On Capitol Hill Wednesday, South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman, Texas Representative Troy Nehls, and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville brushed off reports that American citizens were being targeted by ICE agents in overzealous raids.

“Congressman, do you care if U.S. citizens accidentally get detained in ICE raids?” Migrant Insider’s Pablo Manríquez asked each of them.

“No, I’m not concerned about that,” confessed Norman, underscoring that he was “so appreciative” of border czar Tom Homan’s actions to force undocumented immigrants out of the country en masse.

“I’m concerned about law and order in America. If you’re an illegal, you don’t need to be here,” Norman said, apparently forgetting that ICE has no authority to arrest, detain, or deport U.S. citizens.

“But what if you’re a citizen?... It just seems to be happening a lot,” pressed Manríquez.

But Norman said he doesn’t “believe that,” highlighting concerns about alleged undocumented gang members in the country when Manríquez cited reports that U.S. veterans are getting dragged into ICE’s deportation machine.

At least one veteran has so far been detained by the aggressive agency: George Retes, a 25-year-old disabled veteran, was detained on July 10 while at work on a California farm. He was held for three days by ICE officials without access to legal representation and without any charges against him, according to Representative Pramila Jayapal’s office.

Jayapal introduced legislation Wednesday—the “Stop ICE from Kidnapping US Citizens Act”—to make ICE’s illegal actions even more blatant. The measure would prevent ICE from detaining and deporting U.S. citizens following reports that the agency had been harassing the country’s Latino population, requesting on-demand proof of citizenship.

But Norman isn’t the only lawmaker to disregard the alarming cases. Nehls attempted to undermine the traumatizing nature of detention when asked if he cared about the arrested citizens, telling Manríquez that the media shouldn’t “spin” detention for “more than it really is.”

“Are you detained for more than three days?” Nehls asked rhetorically, waving his cigar.

“In some cases, yeah,” responded Manríquez.

“Well, maybe people can’t prove that they’re American citizens, either, have the documentation,” Nehls said, apparently at a loss for words, though he did mention that he believed Homan was doing a “hell of a job.”

“It’s not a big problem. It really, really isn’t,” Nehls added.

Tuberville’s sensitive advice to Americans concerned about being illegally detained by plainclothed undercover ICE agents was simple: “First of all, don’t put yourself in a situation where that happens.”

“I’m sure with the illegals we have in this country, some mistakes happen, that always—that’s gone happen,” Tuberville said, before directing Americans to disengage from undocumented communities. “But if you are gonna be hanging around people who are not citizens of this country, some things like that are going to probably happen.”

“Don’t hang around illegals,” he warned.

Tuberville had no advice for mixed-status families.