Mike Johnson Pulls Plug on Congress Early to Avoid Voting on Epstein

Republicans are taking an early summer break as infighting intensifies over the Epstein scandal.

Caucus leadership is sending everyone home early, Politico reported Tuesday, canceling all votes from Thursday. The schedule change comes after the Rules Committee recessed Monday night when Democrats threatened to force a vote on the Epstein files.

Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters earlier Tuesday it was “unlikely” that the committee would reconvene, a decision that will stall any progress conservatives were hoping to make this week on several key agenda items, including an immigration bill.

South Carolina Representative Ralph Norman told ABC News Monday that several Republicans on the committee, including himself, did not want to vote on the Democrat-led effort to uncover more details pertaining to the Epstein case, deriding the vote as “grandstanding.”

It’s the second week in a row that the House has become completely paralyzed by debate over the potential release of records regarding the notorious child sex trafficker.

The botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague the Trump administration since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” A YouGov/Economist poll conducted last week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”

But if Republicans want transparency, they have a funny way of showing it. Last week, conservative lawmakers unquestioningly fell in line to support Donald Trump’s narrative that there’s nothing to see here, blocking a Democratic-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

Republicans are scheduled to meet behind closed doors Tuesday morning for their weekly conference meeting. Evacuating the lower chamber over a tough vote on the Epstein files also likely won’t play well with Trump, who is hosting a megabill celebration for Republican lawmakers at the White House Tuesday evening.

House Speaker Mike Johnson initially refuted the possibility of an early exit, telling Politico that “we’re not sending anybody home.”

But Johnson was proven wrong before Noon. House GOP leadership announced that “votes are no longer expected in the House on Thursday,” with last votes taking place on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. ET, ending the schedule a day early.

This story has been updated.

Late-night hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart cursed out Donald Trump and CBS News Monday night following last week’s announcement that the Late Show With Stephen Colbert had been canceled. 

During his show, Colbert took a moment to respond to Trump celebrating the news that the Late Show was ending. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social last week. 

“How dare you, sir,” Colbert said. “Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go fuck yourself.”

During Colbert’s show Monday, several other late-night hosts appeared in the audience to lend their support. While Weird Al Yankovic and Lin Manuel Miranda sang Viva la Vida by Coldplay, the camera scanned the audience, landing on Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen, then Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, before jumping to Jon Stewart and John Oliver. 

Finally, the camera rested on an animated Trump spooning the Paramount logo, a reference to the viral kiss cam video from a recent Coldplay concert that led to the resignation of a data company CEO. As the spotlight shone on them, the animated Trump ducked down and crawled away. 

There had been some speculation that Colbert’s ousting was the result of  his accusing Paramount of paying a “big fat bribe” to Trump in the form of a $16 million settlement over the editing of Kamala Harris’s interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes last fall. Colbert claimed that CBS had acknowledged the lawsuit was “completely without merit” but agreed to pay a large sum to ease its sale to Skydance Media—a deal that needs approval from the president.

Prior to Colbert’s show, Stewart slammed CBS for its cowardice in the face of the Trump administration during Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. Comedy Central is also owned by Paramount. 

“The fact that CBS didn’t try to save their number one rated network late-night franchise that’s been on the air for over three decades is part of what’s making everyone wonder, ‘What’s this? Purely financial? Or maybe the path of least resistance for your $8 billion merger?’” Stewart said. 

Stewart argued that the Late Show wasn’t ending for financial reasons, or even because Trump had directly threatened it. “I think the answer is in the fear and pre-compliance that is gripping all of America’s institutions at this very moment,” he said. 

Stewart argued that it was the very shows CBS sought to censor that had provided the value of Paramount’s $8 billion deal. “Shows that say something, shows that take a stand, shows that are unafraid—this is not a ‘We speak truth to power.’ We don’t,” Stewart said. “We speak opinions to television cameras. But we try. We fucking try, every night.”

“And if you believe, as corporations or as networks, you can make yourself so innocuous, that you can serve a gruel so flavorless that you will never again be on the boy king’s radar, (a) why will anyone watch you? And you are fucking wrong,” he said. 

Stewart also pointed out that straying away from criticizing Trump would do little to protect the channel from catching the president’s ire—considering Trump had just recently filed a lawsuit against his old ally Rupert Murdoch, who’d helped to transform Fox News into a Trump propaganda machine. 

Stewart concluded by urging institutions to “sack the fuck up” or “go fuck yourself.”

After nearly three weeks of uproar over his administration’s closing of the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump has instead opted to release FBI records on African American civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The public will gain access to more than 240,000 pages of records that were under a court-ordered seal in the National Archives since 1977.

Dr. King’s immediate family, including his children Bernie and Martin III, have been in open opposition to the Trump administration’s decision for some time now.

“We recognize that the release of documents concerning the assassination of our father, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has long been a subject of interest, captivating public curiosity for decades. As the children of Dr. King and Mrs. Coretta Scott King, his tragic death has been an intensely personal grief—a devastating loss for his wife, children, and the granddaughter he never met—an absence our family has endured for over 57 years,” they said in a statement posted on X. “We ask those who engage with the release of these files to do so with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief.”

It’s unclear what these records will show us, other than more personal and private information about Dr. King’s life—which would be further confirmation of the U.S. government’s incessant, malicious, and unconstitutional surveillance of Dr. King via J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operation.

“During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement,” the King siblings wrote in the same statement. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth—undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.”

Much of the “conspiracy” surrounding King’s assassination has already been parsed through, as the siblings noted.

“In 1999, our family filed a wrongful death civil lawsuit in Shelby County, Tennessee. The jury unanimously concluded that our father was the victim of a conspiracy involving Loyd Jowers and unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies as a part of a wider scheme. The verdict also affirmed that someone other than James Earl Ray was the shooter, and that Mr. Ray was set up to take the blame. Our family views that verdict as an affirmation of our long-held beliefs. As we review these newly released files, we will assess whether they offer additional insights beyond the findings our family has already accepted.”

More than anything, Trump is using Dr. King’s name recognition and the lasting trauma surrounding his legacy as a mere distraction from his own mess, as his base continues to come to terms with the major, yearslong promise he broke by abandoning the Epstein files.

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 trillion to the debt. 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.”

* This story previously misstated the impact of the bill on the national debt.

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.