Federal Judge Kills Trump’s Plan to Get Out of Releasing Epstein Files

President Trump’s recent bid to quell outrage over his administration’s perceived lack of transparency about the late sex criminal (and the president’s onetime friend) Jeffrey Epstein has hit a stumbling block.

Trump over the weekend requested that grand jury transcripts related to United States v. Epstein be unsealed—a seeming sop to his angry supporters that falls far short of the release of all Epstein-related Justice Department files, which many are demanding. But on Wednesday, a federal judge in Florida denied the DOJ’s request.

In a 12-page opinion, Judge Robin L. Rosenberg wrote that “the Court’s hands are tied,” as Trump’s DOJ failed to argue that its request fell under an exception to “the general rule of secrecy” governing grand jury materials, instead invalidly claiming “special circumstances.”

The Trump administration even acknowledged that its petition wouldn’t pass muster, Rosenberg wrote, as the DOJ conceded that the court couldn’t flout existing precedent regarding grand jury materials. So, Rosenberg ruled, “consistent with [that precedent] and the Government’s concessions, the request to disclose is denied.”

The Justice Department has filed two other requests for Epstein grand jury testimony, both in New York. While those are still pending, the Florida decision is bad news for the president, who’s surely hoping for as swift an end as possible to MAGA’s fury over the Epstein story.

The Trump administration reportedly plans to eliminate an Environmental Protection Agency rule that’s crucial to the federal government’s ability to combat climate change.

According to The New York Times, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin is anticipated to officially do away with the agency’s “endangerment finding” in the coming days. The landmark 2009 rule scientifically establishes greenhouse gases as hazards to public health and welfare, and serves as the backbone of the agency’s ability to regulate such gases under the Clean Air Act.

The news of Zeldin’s plan comes on the very same day the United Nations’ top court ruled that countries have a “duty” to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Those that fail to take steps to protect the planet from climate change, the International Court of Justice said, may run afoul of international law.

Zeldin in March announced that the EPA was reconsidering the endangerment finding as part of a broader effort to drive “a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.”

The planned move shows Trump’s EPA acting in accordance with the president’s long-standing conviction that climate change is a hoax. His administration’s second term priorities have included—among other iniquities—increasing American reliance on fossil fuels, gutting climate research, passing the “most anti-environment bill in history,” per Sierra Club, and once again withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

Reliance on artificial intelligence is breaking down the Food and Drug Administration.

Health officials in the Trump administration have vaunted the burgeoning technology as a way to fast-track and streamline drug approvals, but that hasn’t been the case. Instead, the program is cooking up nonexistent studies, a process referred to as “hallucinating,” according to current and former FDA officials that spoke with CNN.

“Anything that you don’t have time to double-check is unreliable. It hallucinates confidently,” one agency worker told the network.

Insiders claim that the program, Elsa, is helpful when it comes to summarizing meetings or email templates, but its usefulness ends there.

“AI is supposed to save our time, but I guarantee you that I waste a lot of extra time just due to the heightened vigilance that I have to have” regarding fact-checking potentially fake or misrepresented studies, another FDA employee told CNN.

Hallucinations are a known problem with generative AI models—and Elsa is no different, according to Jeremy Walsh, the head of AI at the FDA.

“Elsa is no different from lots of [large language models] and generative AI,” Walsh told CNN. “They could potentially hallucinate.”

It’s not the first time that the Department of Health and Human Services has majorly fumbled its use of artificial intelligence.

In May, AI researchers claimed there was “definitive” proof that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team used the tech to write his “Make America Healthy Again” report, and had completely botched the job in the meantime.

Kennedy’s report projected a new vision for America’s health policy, taking aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods, and pesticides. But a NOTUS investigation found seven studies referenced in Kennedy’s 68-page report that the listed study authors said were either wildly misinterpreted or never occurred at all. Researchers noted 522 scientific references in the report that included the phrase “OAIcite” in their URLs—a marker indicating the use of OpenAI.

At the time, administration officials brushed off the controversy as a temporary flub. But the new over-reliance on the tech indicates that the MAHA report was actually a horrifically dangerous precedent, allowing the White House to tiptoe into the realm of unvetted and unverified AI usage to form the basis of America’s public health policy.

The Trump administration’s massive prisoner swap last week, which saw 10 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents imprisoned in Venezuela freed in exchange for about 250 Venezuelans deported and detained in El Salvador amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, has been framed as an effort to keep America safe.

But as part of that exchange, Trump freed one man convicted of a grisly murder. Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Venezuela, was not a political prisoner. Rather, he was convicted of brutally murdering three people at a law office in Spain in 2016, El País reported. Ortiz is exactly the kind of person Trump lies about every immigrant south of the border being, and yet he’s being welcomed back on American soil with open arms and warm smiles.

Ortiz, a former Marine, was convicted and jailed for a triple homicide in which he axed one man in the head, slashed a woman’s throat, and beat another woman to death before lighting the office on fire. Ortiz then fled to Venezuela, where he had dual citizenship and could not be extradited. He was arrested shortly thereafter and last year was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Thanks to Trump, the convicted murderer barely served his sentence. And even if you think the Venezuelan government’s conviction of Ortiz was unreliable, consider that the Spanish government tried to arrest him first.

Ortiz can be seen smiling for a picture on a State Department plane with the nine other freed prisoners, holding an American flag.

The Trump administration rounded up immigrants without due process and sent them to rot in one of the most inhumane prisons in the world, only to use them in a prison swap that freed a convicted murderer. Just as every other action he’s taken has proved, it isn’t actually about keeping violent, dangerous criminals out, it’s about making sure more people of color don’t come in. If the former were true, Ortiz would still be locked up in Venezuela right now.

Donald Trump’s approval rating has officially reached an all-time low—for his second term in the White House, that is.

“The USS Donald Trump is taking on a lot of water,” said CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten Wednesday. He reported that Trump’s net approval rating had sunk to -11 points.

“His net approval rating has dropped nearly 20 points in the aggregate since the beginning of his presidency,” Enten said. “The American people do not like what they’re seeing, and Donald Trump’s administration is in a ton of trouble at this point, in the minds of the American voters.”

Enten reported voters had come to disapprove of Trump on practically every single issue of the day. Trump had a net approval rating of -14 points on the economy and foreign policy, with his never-ending tariff negotiations earning him a -15 point approval rating on trade. On immigration, which is arguably Trump’s best issue, his net approval rating was only -5 points.

But Enten did have one piece of good news to offer.

“There is one other presidency that has a lower net approval rating at this point than this one,” Enten said. “The bad news is that it was Donald Trump’s other presidency, his first presidency.”

At this point in Trump’s first stint in the White House, Trump had a net approval rating of -16 points. Enten added that since 1953, the average U.S. president has had a net approval rating of 27 points, placing Trump laughably behind.

Unsurprisingly, the issue voters felt Trump was performing the worst on was Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker whose ties to the president have been resurfaced amid the Trump administration’s hapless flip-flopping on the release of materials related to Epstein’s crimes.

This is bad news for Republican lawmakers who have thrown their lot in with Trump. The House GOP is delaying, perhaps indefinitely, its own nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents, and previously blocked a Democratic attempt to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files, with zero Republicans supporting the measure.

CNN’s Poll of Polls, which tracks Trump’s average approval and disapproval rates in national polls, found that only 41 percent of voters approved of Trump, while 57 percent disapproved.

Last month, Enten analyzed five recent polls that cumulatively indicated that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was historically unpopular, with 49 percent of the country believing it will hurt their families as opposed to the 23 percent who think it will help them.

In the government’s latest bid to distract from Donald Trump’s emerging ties to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard unveiled supposedly “new evidence” Wednesday that members of the Obama administration had pushed the “lie” that Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton. 

Gabbard declassified a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee report that found former President Barack Obama had pushed for an Intelligence Community Assessment to be released in January 2017, ahead of Trump’s presidency. The assessment produced by the CIA, FBI, and NSA determined that Putin had “aspired” to see Trump enter the White House, while the House Intelligence Committee had not previously been made aware of Putin’s preference for Trump, according to the report. 

The House report found that the Intelligence Committee assessment was prepared by only five CIA analysts and was “not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.” Some CIA officers expressed concerns that the expedited timeline meant the assessment did not meet publication standards.

Gabbard seems to think this is an incredibly damning revelation and that the report alleges Obama ordered a so-called “rewrite” of the intelligence assessments. Her office has the conspiracy-style infographics to prove it—even the White House shared a cringey meme depicting a “Russia Deep State Starter Pack.” 

Gabbard claimed on X that Obama had ordered the Intelligence Committee to produce an assessment that “they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.”

But it’s not clear that Obama ordered any changes to the committee’s assessment at all, instead simply ordering it to review its work to date. 

The committee also found that former CIA Director John Brennan had ordered the publication of 15 supposedly “implausible” reports referring to Putin’s preference for Trump.

Maybe instead of all of the speculation over Putin’s hopes and dreams, someone should just ask the foreign dictator whether he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election? Oh wait, someone did. 

“Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal,” Putin said during a 2018 press conference with Trump. Maybe that could help settle things? 

Last week, Gabbard released a declassified report alleging that members of the Obama administration had “manufactured and politicized” intelligence to create the narrative that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. It’s also worth noting that shortly after the 2016 election, the Obama administration insisted that hackers had not affected the vote tallies.

This is the third week of fallout from the Justice Department’s memo announcing that Epstein kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following. Now Trump said he hopes to shift the attention away from his administration by setting the mob on a new political witch hunt.  

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy appeared to have a mental episode live on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Tuesday, adding yet another entry to the long, bipartisan list of alarming age-related lowlights from our country’s leaders. 

“I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks—everybody else …” said Kennedy, 73, before trailing off. You can see it in his face—his eyes and mouth particularly—as he struggles to remember what he meant to say or where he is before ultimately giving up and freezing. 

The broadcast quickly got Kennedy off the screen while Kudlow blamed technical difficulties. 

What Kennedy meant to say was “Jesus loves him, but everyone else thinks he’s an idiot,” a phrase he’s repeated countless times over the years. Kennedy’s moment is reminiscent of Mitch McConnell freezing multiple times in 2023, and with the same dissociative look as Kennedy, simply trailing off mid-sentence, looking as if he forgot who or where he was. 

Gerontocracy has been an issue for some time now, as leaders with clear and obvious health issues often remain in office for far longer than they should, usually out of pride and denial.  Representative Gerry Connolly, Dianne Feinstein, and most famously President Joe Biden are other examples. 

The Department of Homeland Security is urging Americans to dish the dirt on their undocumented ex-lovers.

“From domestic abuser to deported loser,” the official X account for the agency posted Tuesday, sharing the contact number for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tip line.

The unsavory ploy was in response to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who recounted a recent incident in which he said his office “got a tip from someone whose abusive ex overstayed a tourism visa.”

“He is now cued up for deportation,” Uthmeier wrote.

ICE handles more than 15,000 calls per month, according to the agency’s tip line FAQ.

Federal authorities have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—but actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful temporary residents possessing visas or green cards.

But the new urgency behind deportations under the Trump administration has not brewed a happy scenario behind the scenes for federal immigration agents. Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor Veronica Cardenas told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale at the moment.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic reported that ICE agents were considering quitting the agency altogether, calling the job “infuriating.”

“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” one agent told the magazine, complaining that his focus had been redirected to “arresting gardeners.”

Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney who had resigned from the agency’s legal department, told The Atlantic that the operation had become “a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.” Miller was embroiled in another callous scandal last week when video footage of him as a teenager resurfaced in which he referred to the torture of Iraqis as a “celebration of human life and dignity.”

“We still need good attorneys at ICE,” Boyd said. “There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

With the Jeffrey Epstein affair having now put President Trump in the rare defensive position for multiple weeks, the president is seething, per Politico’s conversations with unnamed sources within and close to the White House.

In recent days, the president has endeavored to draw national attention to anything other than his perceived bungling of the case of the late notorious sex criminal and his former friend.

But try as Trump might to bend the news cycle to his will, the public eye remains trained, for the time being, on the Epstein issue.

A source close to the White House reportedly told Politico that Trump “is clearly furious,” and it’s “the first time I’ve seen [the Trump camp] sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official reportedly said the president “feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention.” Regarding Trump’s current mindset, the official said, “When you’re working 12 to 15 hours a day to solve real problems and you turn on the TV and see people talking about Jeffrey Epstein, that’s frustrating.”

The frustration is, in part, a recognition that the Epstein issue is “a vulnerability” for the Trump administration, added another source—this one a “White House ally,” who described the controversy as an unforced error on the part of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, both notable (but far from the only) examples of Trump officials who previously stoked the Epstein flames now scorching the president.

“They’re the ones that opened the can of worms on the Epstein conversation. No one made them do this, which makes it sting even worse,” the source said. Trump’s team “would like to move on and talk about the things they think are Ws,” but remains bedeviled by this “overshadowing news cycle.”

Indeed, as congressional Democrats seize on the issue—with some Republican colleagues also joining the charge—the press is, seemingly by the minute, unearthing details about Trump’s relationship with the disgraced financier, and the president’s base is as fired up over the matter as ever. Epstein’s ghost isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Stewart Rhodes is as dyed-in-the-wool MAGA as it gets.

The Yale-educated founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group embraced Donald Trump in 2016—sharing his animus toward the supposed “deep state” cabal controlling Washington—then, naturally, took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. (“We should have brought rifles.… I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost,” he told fellow militia members days later.) Trump, in turn, commuted his 18-year sentence.

Now, Rhodes has joined the ranks of MAGA faithful urging the seemingly reluctant president to provide full transparency on the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Justice Department and FBI earlier this month roiled his base with a memo dismissing conspiracy theories alleging that Epstein had kept a client list and did not commit suicide in prison. The president has, in recent days, taken to calling what was once a cause célèbre in Trumpworld a Democratic “hoax.”

At a meeting of the anti-government True Texas Project last week, per video obtained by The Daily Beast, Rhodes expressed his disappointment that Trump was, by his reckoning, being led astray by the deep state.

“I believe 90 percent of his own base understands that Epstein was up to something, and we know that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rhodes said.

“It’s really disheartening to see President Trump just declare that to be a hoax. I don’t think it is. And I think it’s going to cause him trouble in his own base. It already is,” he continued, per the Beast. “Someone in his circle has convinced him that, ‘Oh this is like Hunter Biden’s laptop story.’ It’s not. This is the deep state’s dirty laundry in the deep state’s greatest Achilles’ heel.

“Their job now is to distract him, run the clock out until he’s gone without him actually going after the root of the deep state, the heart and soul of it,” Rhodes went on. “And I do believe the heart and soul of the deep state is all the dirty laundry that’s held in all those files in the FBI, CIA, NSA against all these political elites.”

Rhodes evidently maintains his faith in Trump as a noble crusader for the truth. In the comments reported by the Beast, he ignores the prospect that Trump’s foot-dragging on Epstein could, possibly, owe to the so-called Epstein files’ inclusion of embarrassing disclosures about the president—who, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased financier that new reporting is bringing more clearly into view.

Attributing Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt to divine intervention, Rhodes remarked, “God saved him for a purpose, and that purpose is to defeat the deep state. It’s not to make great trade deals. It’s not to have a great economy. It’s not any of that stuff. The real heart and soul of it is to defeat the deep state, because if he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be exponentially worse for all of us.”

He urged those in attendance to “keep pushing.”