FBI’s Process to Check Epstein Files for Trump Mentions Was Pure Chaos

Analysts tasked to review the Epstein files allege that there was a “log” to track mentions of Donald Trump.

Allison Gill, a legal analyst known for her work covering Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump, reported Sunday that some of the 1,000 personnel from the Information Management Division and the FBI New York field office who were instructed to review documents pertaining to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein noticed Trump’s name in the fold. Anonymous sources told Gill that a “log” related to Trump’s repeat mentions was drafted.

The liberal legal blogger had put out a call on social media hoping to interview former analysts and, within “24 hours,” she said she “received several messages.”

“Individual analysts were told to flag mentions of Trump by document and page number by logging them in an Excel spreadsheet, then they’d hand in their spreadsheet at the end of their (sometimes 24 or even 48-hour) shift,” Gill wrote, underscoring that agents were directed not to flag Trump “until later in a process that began mid-March.”

Analysts that spoke with Gill alleged that the process was “chaotic,” with instructions and orders “constantly changing,” even on a daily basis.

“One person I spoke to on the condition of anonymity said that many agents spent more time waiting for new instructions than they did processing files,” Gill wrote.

She noted that, due to the crazed nature of the operation, the files were stored on a “shared drive” that anyone within the division could access, with the “usual permission restrictions” not in place.

“This left the Epstein and Maxwell files open to viewing by a much larger group of people than previously thought,” Gill wrote.

Staff were additionally instructed that Attorney General Pam Bondi would have sole discretion over what would be released to the public.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin challenged the administration last week about the operation. In a letter addressed to Bondi on Friday, Durbin accused the Justice Department chief of pressuring FBI staff to review “approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” he said.

Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times; Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday; and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

After defending Bondi for several weeks, deriding his Epstein-conscious supporters as “stupid,” and claiming that there was no evidence of Epstein’s so-called “client list,” Trump now seems content with allowing his attorney general to take the fall for the cataclysmic fiasco.

“One thing that’s been clear is his feelings about it,” an unnamed White House official told NBC News. “This now resides within the DOJ.”

Hunter Biden has some choice words for the celebrities and commentators who helped cast doubt on his father Joe Biden’s fitness for office. In an interview with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan released Monday—the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race—the majority of Hunter Biden’s venom was directed toward George Clooney.

Biden railed against the actor for his July 2024 New York Times op-ed urging Joe Biden to bow out, which the younger Biden described as misleading and an attempt to “cut the knees out from a sitting president.”

Hunter Biden also suggested Clooney had harbored ill-will toward Joe Biden because the then president said he would not act on the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a warrant that the actor’s wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, played a key role in bringing about.

After Callaghan shared a story of his own, alleging that Clooney had influenced fellow actor Jack Black to separate from his bandmate, Kyle Gass, for joking about the July 2024 attempt on Trump’s life, Hunter Biden cut in, saying, “Fuck him! Fuck him, fuck him and everybody around him.”

Biden said that Clooney is “not a fucking actor” but “a brand,” continuing sarcastically, “And by the way, and God bless him, you know what? He supposedly treats his friends really well. He buys them things, and he’s got a really great place in Lake Como, and he’s great friends with Barack Obama.

“Fuck you! What do you have to do with fucking anything? Why do I have to fucking listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full-page ad in the fucking New York Times to undermine the president?” Biden continued, before taking aim at others who encouraged Biden to drop out in 2024.

Among other barbs, he said that Democratic strategist James Carville “hasn’t won a race in 40 fucking years”; that former Obama adviser David Axelrod “had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama, not because of fucking David Axelrod”; and that the Pod Save America hosts “were junior fucking speechwriters on Barack Obama’s Senate staff, who have been dining out on the relationship with him for years, making millions of dollars.”

“They’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anybody in history, and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever run,” Biden said.

Shortly thereafter, Callaghan brought up CNN host Jake Tapper, who co-authored the 2025 book Original Sin about the “cover-up” of Joe Biden’s “decline.” Biden said Tapper “has the smallest audience on cable news” and that his “ratings just went to shit” after releasing the book, which he claimed was motivated in no small part by personal animus. “You know, like Jesus Christ, Jake, grow the fuck up.”

A federal judge compared Donald Trump to Henry II for his blatant efforts to punish his administration’s critics.

While overseeing a lawsuit Monday concerning the Trump administration’s crackdown on noncitizens’ pro-Palestinian speech, U.S. District Judge Willliam Young referred to the twelfth-century English king while mulling whether the president’s penchant for publicizing his every personal problem ever inspired his underlings to take action.

Young cited Henry II’s famous line, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The offhand remark led errant knights to murder Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who’d sought to increase the power of the Catholic Church.

Trump “doesn’t have errant knights, but he’s got Stephen Miller,” Young quipped, according to Politico’s senior legal correspondent Kyle Cheney.

Young pointed out that whenever the president had a problem with someone, especially in government, that person tended to find themselves facing a spate of problems they hadn’t had before. For example, after Trump had his explosive feud with Elon Musk, the government began to review its contracts with SpaceX. After beefing for months with Senator Adam Schiff, last week, the president accused him of “mortgage fraud” and said he should “pay the price of prison.”

Young also questioned Trump’s motor-mouthed attitude, while his administration appeared intent on violating the First Amendment.

“The president is a master of speech and certainly brilliantly uses his right to free speech,” said Young. “Whether he recognizes or not whether other people have any right to free speech is questionable.”

Last week, Young heard testimony from four veteran officers from the Department of Homeland Security who recounted their superiors’ unusual requests to arrest green card holders and noncitizen academics who had committed no crime.

Republicans are still doing everything they can to help Trump avoid answering any more questions about Jeffrey Epstein.

The House GOP is delaying, perhaps indefinitely, its own nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents. The resolution would do nothing to actually force the DOJ to follow through on this request, but even that is apparently too much for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has delayed the vote to give his party more time to control the narrative and weather the blowback it’s received from Democrats and MAGA loyalists alike.

Johnson will not bring the bill to a vote before August recess, if at all, according to Politico’s sources.

If Johnson and House Republican leadership really cared about transparency and truth on Epstein, they’d simply bring the bipartisan resolution led by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna to a vote. But they won’t, because they care more about protecting Trump than keeping promises. And the backlash continues.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People. If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-line MAGA conspiracy theorist, wrote on X Monday in reference to the GOP’s dawdling pace on the Epstein files. “Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Federal immigration officials are looking for their own path away from the Trump administration.

Veronica Cardenas, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor, told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale.

“I have been contacted by people on the inside, stating, ‘How did you leave?’ and ‘What process did that take?’” Cardenas said.

“Even at the time that I left, people were, number one, surprised—because when you join the government, people believe that there’s this sort of trajectory to it. When you leave, it does catch people off guard,” she continued. “I think people are going through that struggle, and what I would say to them is that your voice has so much power. You don’t have to do things that are unjust or wrong. Believe in yourself, step out of that.”

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 of 3,000 arrests per day, in line with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s demands.

Speaking to her own experience exiting the agency, Cardenas said that taking the jump to leave boils down to a “moral conflict.”

“We all take oaths, right? When we step into that job, we are taking an oath to protect the Constitution and to follow the rule of law,” Cardenas told MSNBC. “And then when you get into that space, and you’re looking at these decisions that are being made, and the way that they’re being made: People are being harmed, people are dying in ICE detention, in custody.

“You have this conflict with yourself: ‘These laws cannot be right, and I don’t want to enforce it anymore,’” Cardenas told the network. The former assistant chief counsel then underscored that institutional change against America’s immigration is “not coming from the inside” but the outside.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Monday urged President Donald Trump to release more Epstein files, lest his base turn against him.

The Georgia lawmaker wrote on X that Trump, having entertained a number of conspiracy theories (to which she, of course, also subscribes), must now either deliver on them or face his supporters’ wrath.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People,” Greene wrote. “If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back.”

“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies,” she continued. “They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Greene’s threat comes as Trump is still attempting to pacify supporters who are disillusioned with his handling of the case of deceased financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Earlier this month, Trump’s Justice Department and FBI displeased his base with a memo deflating Epstein-related conspiracy theories previously elevated by the president’s team (despite Trump’s own storied past with the disgraced financier). Trump has since disowned his supporters who remain interested in Epstein, calling them “weaklings” and claiming that this MAGA cause célèbre was actually a Democratic “scam” all along.

On Saturday, the president, evidently realizing the controversy isn’t going anywhere, announced that he’d requested the release of grand jury testimony related to the case of United States v. Epstein (which, if granted, would only occur after lengthy legal processes—and, even then, would fall short of many’s hopes for the release of all Epstein-related DOJ files.)

In announcing his request, Trump complained on Truth Social that “nothing will be good enough for the troublemakers and radical left lunatics making the request. It will always be more, more, more.” The president appended the post with the exclamation “MAGA!”—but for swathes of his supporters, including Greene, making America great again will require more transparency than he now seems willing to provide.

Immigrants detained as part of Donald Trump’s deportation scheme are being treated like animals, according to a horrifying report published by Human Rights Watch Monday. 

The report found that detainees had been subjected to “conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards,” as the number of detainees ballooned under the Trump administration’s direction to ramp up the rate of arrests. 

The report, which focused on three immigrant detention centers in Florida—Krome North Service Processing Center, the Broward Transitional Center, and the Federal Detention Center—was based on interviews with 11 detainees, 14 immigration attorneys, and the family and friends of seven detainees who were held in detention between January and June 2025. They alleged that in these facilities, detainees suffer medical neglect and physical abuse, and are deprived of access to legal representation and safe living conditions. 

Human Rights Watch found that officers at these facilities were often abusive to the detainees. In one instance, after a group of detainees waited hours to receive food, officers forced the men to eat while their hands were bound. “We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs,” one man said, according to the report.  

In another instance, detainees in a crowded cell became agitated when officers ignored a man who was coughing up blood for hours. Eventually, officers stormed the cell and forced everyone to the ground, binding their hands with zip ties. One detainee said he heard an officer demand that the cell’s CCTV be turned off, and another said one of the officers slapped him.

In multiple cases, facility staff were dismissive and neglectful toward detainees experiencing medical emergencies, and punished those experiencing mental health crises. Authorities at Broward Transitional Center created a chilling effect by placing detainees experiencing emotional distress in solitary confinement for weeks at a time. “If you ask for help, they isolate you. If you cry, they might take you away for two weeks,” said one woman. “So, people stay silent.”

One man said that what detainees were subjected to was akin to “psychological abuse.”

“The guards treat you like garbage. Even if they speak Spanish, they pretend not to understand,” he said, adding, “You feel like your life is over.”

Detainees were forced into overcrowded cells where they would eat substandard food and sleep on cold concrete floors, with one man even convinced that he would get hypothermia because of the temperatures. Another woman, who was confined for days in an intake cell at Krome, an all-male facility, said staff refused to allow detainees to clean the single toilet, which was covered in human feces. “We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon.’ No one ever came,” she said. 

Another woman who was kept in the same intake room said the toilet was visible from visitation rooms, where men were being held. “If the men stood on a chair or on the desk, they could see right into our room and the toilet. And sometimes they got up to look at us,” she said. 

Human Rights Watch reached out multiple times to the all three facilities, but only heard back from the company that manages Krome. That company, Akima Global Services, LLC, stated,  “We cannot comment publicly on the specifics of our engagement.”

This latest report comes at the heels of stories out of Alligator Alcatraz, the Trump administration’s premier wetland-themed concentration camp, where detainees say they are kept “in cages like chickens.”

Republicans are trying to loosen gun laws in the nation’s capital.

On Sunday, the House Committee on Appropriations released the text of its financial services and general government, or FSGG, appropriations bill—and much of it contains anti–home rule riders that take even more sovereignty from Washington, D.C, and its residents.

The most alarming rider in the bill would “permit anyone with a concealed carry permit from any state or territory to carry a concealed handgun in D.C. and on [public transportation].” Current D.C. law requires the permit and weapon itself to be registered with the city’s Metro Police.

This is just one aspect of the Trump administration’s effort to recreate the city in MAGA’s image. Republicans have long cast D.C. as some unstable, crime-ridden hell hole, even as crime has gone down in nearly every category except motor vehicle theft. Robbery is down 28 percent, homicides are down 8 percent, and violent crime in general has dropped 25 percent.

Even if crime in D.C. were as bad as Trump wants us to believe, how exactly would loosening concealed carry restrictions help that? A guy from a different state with an itchy trigger finger would be able to pull out his piece on the Metro. That’s supposed to make the city and its residents feel safer?

This is just one dark aspect of the Republicans’ attempted takeover of D.C. The rest of the bill focuses on destroying D.C.’s right to control its own funds, particularly on political issues. As longtime D.C. House Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton reported, the bill:

• Would prohibit the use of funds to commercialize recreational marijuana.
• Would prohibit D.C. from spending its own local funds on abortion services for low-income women.
• Would prohibit D.C. from spending its own local funds to enforce its vehicle emission standards.
• Would prohibit D.C. from using local funds to carry out its automated traffic enforcement law.
• Would prohibit the use of funds to implement, administer, or enforce any COVID–19 mask or vaccine mandate.
• Would prohibit the use of funds to implement the Insurance Regulation Amendment Act of 2024, which relates to reproductive health care and gender-affirming care.

This is a real city being treated like a vassal state of MAGA.

“I am outraged at the number and scope of anti-D.C. home rule riders in the bill released today,” Norton said in a press release on Sunday. “In my long career representing D.C. residents in Congress, I have rarely seen a bill as unreasonable and patronizing to the more than 700,000 people who live in the nation’s capital as this one. I will use every tool at my disposal to stop these riders from becoming law, and I commit to reminding my fellow lawmakers across the aisle that D.C. residents deserve the same consideration as their own constituents at every opportunity.”

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan on Monday issued an opinion for our times, ordering the Trump administration “to stop violating the law!”

Specifically, the Clinton-appointed judge ruled that Trump’s Office of Management and Budget broke the law by taking down the public apportionment website where, under a 2022 law that Congress made permanent in 2023, it’s mandated to report executive decisions on federal spending within two business days.

The administration removed the website in March, and, soon after, OMB Director Russell Vought sent a letter to lawmakers saying the office decided to flout Congress and scrap the database due to the purportedly “sensitive,” “pre-decisional,” and “deliberative” nature of the information it is required to reveal.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and Protect Democracy—watchdog organizations that rely on the OMB database—challenged the move, and Sullivan on Monday issued a partial summary judgment ordering that the administration comply with the law and bring back the website.

According to Sullivan, Trump and Vought relied on “an extravagant and unsupported theory of presidential power” to “claim that their apportionment decisions—which are legally binding and result in the actual spending of public funds—cannot be publicly disclosed because they are not final decisions about how to administer the spending of public funds.”

While the Trump administration argued that the 2022 law encroaches on the executive branch’s authority, its objections amount to “a policy disagreement” with no “constitutional foundation,” Sullivan wrote.

“Defendants are complaining about the extra work the 2022 and 2023 Acts require. This is a management issue; not a constitutional one,” he wrote. And the fact that the office had previously maintained the database for nearly three years “further diminish[es] any argument that complying with the disclosure requirement is overly cumbersome or places an impossible burden.”

“The law is clear,” said Sullivan: “Congress has sweeping authority to require public disclosure of how the Executive Branch is apportioning the funds appropriated by Congress,” and “there is nothing unconstitutional about Congress requiring the Executive Branch to inform the public of how it is apportioning the public’s money. Defendants are therefore required to stop violating the law!”

Remember all of those hefty handouts Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski won in exchange for sealing the deal on Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill? It looks like the president has found a way to get out of delivering.

“I feel cheated,” Murkowski told the Anchorage Daily News Friday. “I feel like we made a deal and then hours later, a deal was made to somebody else.”

Ahead of the bill’s passage earlier this month, Murkowski had co-sponsored an amendment to ease the phaseout of tax credits for solar and wind energy under the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act. Her measure would ensure a 12-month window for clean energy projects, which would end in 2027. These tax credits would help to alleviate a looming energy crisis along Alaska’s Railbelt, the electrical grid that serves roughly 75 percent of the population, due to declining resources of natural gas.

Trump threw a wrench in that agreement Friday when he issued an executive order to “end market distorting subsidies” for green energy projects. The order directs Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to take actions to “strictly enforce the termination of the clean electricity production and investment tax credits.”

Now Murkowski claims that she and her pals were duped. “Do I feel like the administration was not being up-front with us? Yes,” she told the Anchorage Daily News.

She torched Trump’s order as “reckless,” claiming that it directly “goes against” what he signed into law earlier this month with the budget.

Murkowski was the deciding vote to pass Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the Senate, green-lighting the gutting of social programs such as SNAP and Medicaid while extending tax breaks for the rich, and agreeing to add trillions to the national deficit. She’d sent the bill back to the House with the hopes that lawmakers would continue to refine the massive tax and spending bill, only for it to be immediately passed and then signed into law.

But under the Trump administration, which regularly skirts congressional authority to withhold federal spending and obliterate government agencies, lawmakers should know better than to think the president actually cares about the law of the land.