Trump Finds Another Way to Take Revenge on Murdoch for Epstein Letter

In retaliation for reporting on Donald Trump’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, the White House is ousting The Wall Street Journal from the press pool for the president’s upcoming trip to Scotland.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement Monday that no publication is “guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” according to Politico. “Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board. Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”

Leavitt is, of course, referring to the Journal’s recent bombshell report that, in 2003, Trump sent a lewd 50th birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump denies the veracity of the letter and is meritlessly suing the paper over its report—further stoking the ongoing firestorm over the administration’s perceived lack of transparency surrounding the case of the late financier and sex criminal.

Politico reports that the White House declined to comment on whether the Journal’s removal from the press pool would be permanent. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump punished a publication by restricting its ability to cover his administration. After all, his ban on the Associated Press for failing to change its style guide to ratify his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” remains in effect.

Be it in retaliating against publications deemed insufficiently friendly, seizing control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association, or altering the makeup of the press room such that administration officials receive more questions from unctuous right-wing media groups, Trump’s White House appears as hell-bent as ever on defanging the press of its ability to function as a watchdog of the government.

Donald Trump is letting his underlings take the fall for the administration’s seismic Epstein scandal.

Facing enormous pressure from his base last week, Trump ordered the Justice Department to release additional documents pertaining to its investigation into Epstein. The White House did not specify at the time if the documents would be made public, and did not explain the sudden contradiction after Trump had spent the better part of the last week insisting that the Epstein fiasco was a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

But by Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was deflecting questions to the subordinate agencies for updates on the case.

“Why doesn’t the president just order the FBI to release the full Epstein files and just get it all out there?” a reporter asked Leavitt in a gaggle outside the White House.

“The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any credible evidence, they should do so. As to why they have not, you should ask the FBI about that,” Leavitt said, directing journalists to FBI Director Kash Patel.

Trump is, apparently, happy to let his Justice Department chief, Attorney General Pam Bondi, take the blame, suddenly reversing course on his fervent defense of Bondi in the weeks since her own agency issued a memo contradicting her on the existence of the pedophilic sex trafficker’s so-called “client list.”

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

But 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.”

And more details are emerging: Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin challenged the administration last week regarding its “chaotic” review of tens of thousands of documents related to the Epstein investigation, accusing Bondi of pressuring FBI staff to flag and then cover up mentions of Trump in the records.

Minnesota state Senator Nicole Mitchell announced Monday that she plans to resign, just days after she was convicted of felony burglary. 

Mitchell’s resignation will leave the Senate tied between Republicans and Democrats until Governor Tim Walz  calls a special election, putting the state Democratic Party’s majority in jeopardy unless they win it. Mitchell said she plans to step down by August 4. 

Mitchell was found guilty on Friday for first-degree burglary and possession of burglary tools for breaking into her stepmother’s home last April. The situation surrounding her arrest is bleak. While she initially maintained her innocence, she later admitted that she broke into her stepmother’s home to retrieve some of the belongings of her late father, like a flannel shirt. Mitchell told officers that her stepmother, who has Alzheimer’s, cut off communication with her after her father’s death.  

“I have never done anything like this,” she said while being arrested.  “I just wanted to get a couple of my dad’s mementos.” 

“I know I did something bad,” she said later. She faces up to 20 years in prison. Mitchell’s sentencing has not been scheduled yet. 

The Congressional Budget Office released its final cost estimate for Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill Monday, finding that the law will add a whopping $3.4 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade and knock millions of Americans off of Medicaid.

“That increase in the deficit is estimated to result from a decrease in direct spending of $1.1 trillion and a decrease in revenues of $4.5 trillion,” according to the CBO’s report. This was a marked increase from the CBO’s January estimate that the national budget would increase the deficit by only $2.7 trillion by 2035.

The CBO also predicted that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” now signed into law, will leave an estimated 10 million more people without health insurance in 2034.

Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the American Center for Progress, wrote in a post on X that the budget would strip away roughly $900 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade, the largest cuts ever to that program.

Trump had repeatedly vowed that he wouldn’t touch Medicaid funding, and one Republican lawmaker was forced to alert the president that the health insurance program was indeed the target of massive cuts contained in his own bill to fund tax breaks for the rich.

Trump’s budget has also set in motion $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the CBO found that the provision requiring states to match SNAP funds would “impose the largest intergovernmental mandates.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s dynamic estimate suggests that, with interest, the bill will add a whopping $4 million to the deficit. CRFB president Maya MacGuineas released a statement following the CBO’s final tally.

“Yes, we should expect a shorter-term economic sugar high as stimulus makes its way through the economy. But modelers from across the ideological spectrum universally agree that any sustained economic benefits are likely to be modest, or negative, and not one serious estimate claims this bill will improve our fiscal situation,” she said. “Rather, positive growth effects are likely to be swamped by the effects of higher debt and interest rates.”

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.