The Name You Thought Was in the Epstein Files Is in the Epstein Files

Well, The Wall Street Journal has confirmed what has been apparent for quite some time: President Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files multiple times.

An exclusive Wednesday report in the Journal states that Attorney General Pam Bondi notified the president that his name was in the files back in May. The report directly contradicts Trump’s claim that Bondi told him he was not in the files, which he told reporters last week.

This revelation offers some explanation as to why the Trump administration, after years of promising to release the files, abruptly decided that there was no further work to be done on the matter. It also may explain why the president himself has been so quick to anger and defensiveness in recent days any time the subject of his friendship with the defamed sexual predator has come up. The confirmation of Trump’s presence in the infamous documents comes just as Speaker Mike Johnson ended a legislative session early just to avoid voting on whether to release more files.

All of the internal uproar over this, from FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino going AWOL at work, to Trump calling anyone who is still worried about this code red–level issue a “bad person” can be linked back to the fact that Trump does not want people to know that his name is in the files. If past is prologue, the administration will likely dismiss this report as “fake news” from a biased outlet. But those charges likely won’t stick with an issue of this magnitude. In fact, the president seems to only be driving attention to the story at this point, as each distraction Trump has brought up since he decided to close the case has only led to increased scrutiny from the press—as well as both his most vehement enemies and his most loyal supporters.

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard went full Russian asset Wednesday during a wild White House press briefing. 

Standing behind a White House podium, Gabbard started quoting old Russian intelligence and claimed that Moscow’s foreign intelligence agency SVR was in possession of “high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary’s ‘psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers.”

That strange little detail came from the freshly declassified 2020 report by the House Intelligence Committee that Gabbard insists holds evidence that former President Barack Obama committed a so-called “coup” against Donald Trump by alleging Russian interference in the 2016 election. 

According to the report, ahead of Trump’s ascendance to the White House, Obama asked for an Intelligence Community Assessment to “review their work to date” on Russia’s influence campaign. Gabbard claims that issues with the production of that January 2017 report are evidence that the Obama administration plotted to spread a false narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin aspired to see Trump in the White House—a preference that the foreign autocrat readily admitted.  

When asked about it Wednesday, Gabbard could not account for why Trump had not declassified these supposedly damning materials during his first term. 

She was also unable to provide any explanation for why Trump’s secretary of state, former Florida Senator Marco Rubio, had made opposite findings when he spearheaded a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report. That report found that Putin had directed an “aggressive, multifaceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence, the outcome of the 2016 presidential election” and had done so with the intent of weakening Clinton’s campaign and seeing Trump elected. 

It’s also probably worth remembering that Trump’s first-term White House was reportedly “awash in speed,” handing out powerful sedatives and stimulants like candy.

It should come as no surprise that Gabbard is already parroting Russian intelligence because it’s exactly the kind of thing that concerned critics of her nomination—and enthused Moscow. 

Gabbard has previously defended Russia’s incursion into Ukraine, claiming that the U.S. had provoked Russian aggression and that Ukraine housed U.S.-funded biolabs that were developing secret bioweapons—a piece of foreign state propaganda that earned her the reputation as a Russian asset. 

Former Virginia Representative Abigail Spanberger sounded the alarm about Gabbard on MSNBC in November, noting that, if confirmed, Gabbard would be responsible for putting together the president’s daily briefings and would likely include Russian propaganda. 

Outgoing Republican Senator Thom Tillis just wants President Trump to “release the damn files” in regard to Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased pedophile and Trump’s former friend.

“The promise to release the files during the campaign was either overplayed and we got a nothingburger if the files get released, or it’s something really disturbing and that’s actually an even more compelling reason to release it,” Tillis said at an Axios event on Wednesday.

Tillis, a North Carolinian who has said he will resign at the end of his third term next year, is one of the few Republicans in the Senate who has been consistent on this, as the rest of the party capitulates to Trump and attempts to distract the public by voting against further inquiries into the files’ release.

Tillis also noted that he doesn’t see this issue just going away during Congress’s summer recess, as House Speaker Mike Johnson hopes it will.

“I think the files should be released, let the light of day, let the sun shine through, and that’s the best way to get past it,” Tillis said. “Otherwise, if anybody thinks that this is going to go away because the House left a day early or something, it’s going to be like those zombies in The Walking Dead: Every time you think you’ve killed it, another one is just going to come running out of the closet after you.”

Tillis recently made waves for his spirited opposition to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which the senator referred to as a betrayal of Republican promises.

Even Donald Trump’s most sycophantic followers are turning on the president.

Jacob Chansley—better known as the QAnon shaman—denounced the MAGA leader Wednesday morning, responding to a post of Trump’s 2023 mugshot by decrying the president as a “fraud.”

“Fuck this stupid piece of shit,” Chansley wrote in a since-deleted post that accrued more than 34,000 views.

In a follow-up post, Chansley wrote: “Oh yea & Fuck Israel! And Fuck Donald Trump!”

Chansley captured national attention when he stormed through the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an elaborate, horned fur headdress. In the aftermath of the attack, a face-painted Chansley emerged as one of the central figures of the revolt. Once at the Capitol building, Chansley was in the first group of rioters to break inside. Wielding a bullhorn, he worked to “rile up the crowd and demand that lawmakers be brought out,” according to a sentencing memo.

In late 2021, a federal judge sentenced Chansley to 41 months in prison for his role in the January 6 insurrection. But that was undone hours after Trump was inaugurated at the start of this year, when he included Chansley in a clemency order for some 1,600 of his supporters who were involved in the riot.

Trump has held messiah-like status within QAnon’s conspiratorial circle for years thanks to their principal belief that, despite being named and photographed as an associate of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Trump would rid the world of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run the government and media.

In turn, Trump readily welcomed the cockeyed adoration. In 2020, he offered the movement plausible deniability at an executive level—claiming that while he didn’t know much about QAnon, he couldn’t disprove its theories. Just two years later, Trump was regularly circulating bits of the conspiracy on TruthSocial and reposting images of himself wearing Q pins emblazoned with the cult’s messaging, “A Storm Is Coming,” referring to Trump’s supposed final victory, when QAnon supporters expect him to mass-execute his opponents.

QAnon supporters turned out en masse in November to help Trump return to the Oval Office. But Trump’s sudden backpedalling on unearthing records related to the Epstein investigation has left a bitter taste in those supporters’ mouths. Their relationship was further strained when Trump referred to his Epstein-minded allies as “stupid,” “naive,” and “foolish,” accusing them of being “duped” by Democrats who he claimed invented the Epstein “hoax.”

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, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s highly advertised investigation into former President Barack Obama has come up remarkably short.

Speaking at a White House press briefing Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly accused the former president of initiating a “coup” against Donald Trump’s political aspirations—though she was pretty thin on evidence.

“What do you now have that refutes” previous investigations into the matter, inquired a reporter.

“I will encourage you, in my role as director of national intelligence—my job, again, I said when I came into this role, was to make sure we are telling the truth to the American people, and that we are ensuring the intelligence community is not being politicized,” Gabbard began, before handing off the burden of responsibility for proving her theory.

“So I’m not asking you to take my word for it,” she continued. “I’m asking you in the media to conduct honest journalism, and the American people, to see for yourself in the documents that we’ve released—now, close to 200 pages—that point in multiple references, multiple examples, to include comments that have been made by senior intelligence professionals, who are some still working within these agencies today, that confirm the conclusions that we have drawn: that President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a yearslong coup to undermine Trump’s presidency.”

The reporter then pressed if Gabbard believed that previous investigations, which included probes by special counsel Robert Mueller as well as a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee led by now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio, had either “missed that” or “covered it up.”

“Look at the evidence, and you will know the truth,” Gabbard responded.

Last week, Gabbard declassified a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee report, leveraging the document as evidence that Obama had pushed for an Intelligence Community Assessment to be released in January 2017 before Trump was to be inaugurated. Days before releasing the report, Gabbard wrote on X that Americans would “finally learn the truth” of how Obama had, according to her, “invented” the Trump-Russia “hoax.”

Trump picked up the theory and ran with it, using the new conspiracy as cover from his own explosive scandals. Deflecting a question about his widely reported ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday, Trump claimed that the only “witch hunt” America’s press should be focused on is the one in which he claimed his administration “caught” Obama “absolutely cold” trying to “rig” the 2020 presidential election.

Obama spokesman Patrick Rodenbush excoriated the administration in turn, referring to the allegations as “a weak attempt at distraction.”

“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes,” Rodenbush said Tuesday in a statement, underscoring that any treason charges would also implicate Rubio—the second-highest-ranking official in Trump’s Cabinet.

When asked to clarify how Obama could be charged with treason when he has presidential immunity, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she trusted the Justice Department to sort it out.

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.