Lindsey Graham Hit With Embarrassing Epstein Fact-Check on Live TV

Republicans are losing their grip on Donald Trump’s latest Epstein cover-up.

Speaking with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham tripped up a supposedly “new” development in the Russian collusion investigation, suggesting that more evidence had emerged tying former President Barack Obama to the nearly 10-year-old national security scandal.

Amid rising intraparty tensions over Trump’s apparent ties to pedophilic sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the president wildly suggested last week that Obama had interfered with the results of the Trump-Russia investigation, claiming that it was actually Hillary Clinton who received aid from the foreign power. But Graham carried the torch over the weekend, reiterating the president’s theory on air while claiming that National Security Director Tulsi Gabbard recently found that Obama had forced investigators to “keep looking” after initial findings had pointed to no collusion.

“I think somebody needs to look at what we found,” Graham said. “So what we’re looking at is what role did Obama play in 2016 that changed the narrative that resulted in 2017? I’m not alleging he committed treason, but I am saying that it bothers me, it’s disturbing.”

But then host Kristen Welker played back a montage of Graham’s previous comments, proving that Graham originally agreed with the findings of the intelligence community—long before Trump tried to opportunistically rewrite history.

“Senator, are you now saying that you don’t believe Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election?” Welker pressed.

Apparently getting frustrated, Graham again stressed that new evidence had emerged that changed his opinion.

“Hold on, Senator, as you know, former President Obama has weighed in through a spokesperson,” Welker interrupted. “He says that’s just patently false. I actually spoke to Susan Miller, who’s a former senior CIA officer who helped oversee the 2017 intelligence assessment on Russian interference. She says it’s completely false that Obama or anyone else asked them to change or sway their investigation. She says, and she’s a Republican, that they all would have quit if that happened.”

And then Welker asked the million-dollar question: “Senator, are you trying to rewrite history to distract from the Epstein matter, Senator?”

“I’m trying to let you know, and the media know, that we found something we didn’t know before,” Graham insisted, continuing to defend Trump. “At the end of the day, I’m not calling for a prosecution against President Obama for treason, but I am calling for an investigation.

“The only people colluding with the Russians were the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Graham continued.

But Welker wasn’t having it.

“Senator, you’re saying there’s something new,” Welker replied. “This report goes back to 2020. It’s five years old. There’s actually nothing new in this report and nothing that changes any conclusion.”

“Whatever,” Graham responded.

The Mueller report was published in 2019. The 22-month investigation found that Russia did interfere with the 2016 election, but did not find sufficient evidence to prove that the 2016 Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia to undermine the election results. The report did not take a clear stance on whether Trump had obstructed justice.

Donald Trump is once again claiming that windmills are making whales go crazy.

Trump’s long-awaited EU trade deal announcement went off the rails Sunday as the president detoured into yet another lengthy and far-fetched diatribe against wind energy.

“And the other thing I say to Europe: We will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States,” Trump said. “They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery. Our valleys. Our beautiful plains—and I’m not talking about airplanes, I’m talking about beautiful plains.”

Before he started ranting about wind energy, European Commissioner Ursula von der Leyen had been attempting to discuss immigration. But after briefly lying about his massive, inhumane deportation scheme, saying, “We have nobody coming in, and we have hundreds of thousands of people being taken out—and the bad ones first,” Trump changed the subject to wind turbines.

“When they start to rust and rot in eight years, you can’t really turn ’em off, you can’t bury ’em,” Trump claimed. “They won’t let you bury the propellers, you know, the props, because they’re a certain type of fiber that doesn’t go well with the land, that’s what they say. The environmentalists say you can’t bury them, because the fiber doesn’t go well with the land.”

Windmill blades, which are made of fiberglass and plastic, can be buried in landfills at the end of their 20-year life cycle. To counter the growth of these wind turbine graveyards, scientists have even developed recyclable blades. But Trump doesn’t actually care about any of that—moments after deferring to environmentalists in his argument, he called them “political hacks” who wanted to hurt the United States.

Trump was far from done. The president went on to complain that wind energy was more expensive than other alternatives. In reality, wind energy has emerged as a competitively priced energy alternative.

“You need subsidy for wind, and energy should not need subsidy. With energy you make money, you don’t lose money,” Trump claimed.

The president then immediately admitted that he didn’t actually care about the cost.

“But more important than that, it ruins the landscape, it kills the birds, they’re noisy,” Trump continued. “You know you have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had one or two whales wash ashore, and over the last short period of time, they had 18. Because it’s driving them loco. It’s driving them crazy. No, windmills will not happen in the United States.”

Trump had previously claimed that offshore windmills were driving whales “crazy” and causing them to wash up on shore, dead, in 2023. However, there “is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Three years later, and the president still can’t stop spreading absurd misinformation about wind energy. “People oughta know, these windmills are very destructive, they’re environmentally unsound,” he claimed.

After seeing some windmills during his Lynchian golfing expedition in Scotland, it seems that the president just can’t get wind energy off of his mind. During a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer Monday, Trump continued to rave about windmills claiming that they kill birds, which they do, but no more than fossil fuel operations—or house cats.

Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s culture-warrior superintendent of public instruction, is a self-avowed opponent of pornography in education—so much so that he’s accused schools of “pushing pornography” for containing decidedly nonpornographic books like The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.

Now he’s under investigation after allegedly displaying a pornographic video on a TV in his office during the closed-door portion of a Board of Education meeting last week.

According to Oklahoma politics site NonDoc, board member Ryan Deatherage noticed the video on a screen in Walter’s office while a parent discussed appealing a district transfer denial. Deatherage says the video featured “multiple nude women” and “some sort of ‘chiropractic table.’”

As Deatherage considered how to broach the subject, fellow board member Becky Carson—the only other person with a view of the screen—spotted it too. “I was like, ‘What am I seeing?’” Carson told NonDoc. At first, she wondered, “Is that woman naked?” before thinking that “she’s got a body suit on.” After noticing nipples and pubic hair, she realized, “That is not a body suit.”

Both board members described the footage as “retro,” and said it did not feature intercourse.

Carson confronted Walters, telling NonDoc she asked what was on the TV, with Walters acknowledging that “he saw it.” “Turn it off. Now,” Carson recalls saying. Walters asked, “What is this? What is this?” and fumbled to turn it off while saying, “I can’t get it to turn off. I can’t figure out how to turn it off.”

Lawmakers in the state’s legislature have called for an investigation, reports The Oklahoman, with Republican House Speaker Kyle Hilbert saying Walters should “unlock and turn over all relevant devices,” and Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton saying Carson and Deatherage’s accounts “paint a strange, unsettling scene that demands clarity and transparency.”

Walters’s response to the new incident has been all but graceful. A spokesperson told NonDoc their story was “a junk tabloid lie,” telling a reporter to “get a job at” a different independent publication “and let us know when you are going to write a real story.” Walters told Fox 25 the accusation was “blatantly dishonest” and politically motivated.

On Sunday, Walters shared a statement on X, calling the accusations “categorically false” and adding, “I have no knowledge of what was on the TV screen during the alleged incident, and there is absolutely no truth to any implication of wrongdoing.”

Walters went so far as to say the story amounts to the “tactics of a broken establishment afraid of real change.” In confronting him for displaying pornographic content during an official meeting, he claimed, “They aren’t just attacking me, they’re attacking the values of the Oklahomans who elected me to challenge the status quo.”

Remarkably, this is not the first time Walters is accused of subjecting unsuspecting Oklahoma lawmakers to porn.

In March 2023, he emailed several pornographic images to state legislators, claiming he was supplying them with evidence they’d requested of inappropriate material in Oklahoma schools. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle were left confused and upset, as the email was entirely devoid of context, containing no mention of schools that allegedly had the material.

The Washington Post reports that President Trump is infuriated that the Epstein files are still dominating headlines, even as he throws distraction after distraction to the public.

Two sources close to the president also told the Post that the rift between the Justice Department and the FBI is just as bad as it looks.

“This is a pretty substantial distraction,” said one person close to the situation. “While many are trying to keep the unity, in many ways, the DOJ and the FBI are breaking at the seams. Many are wondering how sustainable this is going to be for all the parties involved—be it the FBI director or attorney general.”

This is all of course completely self-inflicted, as the Trump administration has failed to deliver on massive promises on the Epstein files and then angering its base even more as it attempts to cover its tracks.

“They completely miscalculated the fever pitch to which they built this up,” former Reagan Justice Department official Stephen A. Saltzburg told the Post. “Now, they seem to be in full-bore panic mode, trying to change the subject and flailing in an effort to make sense of what makes no sense.”

In the midst of the chaos, Trump is hesitant to fire people like Attorney General Pam Bondi or Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, even as both have badly contradicted themselves on Epstein, because he “does not want to create a bigger spectacle by firing anyone,” a source close to the situation said.

The diversions have been clear and obvious. A rushed Martin Luther King Jr. files release against the will of his family, a trade deal with the European Union, unsubstantiated accusations of treason lobbed at his ultimate nemesis, former President Obama—none of which have succeeded in actually getting his base off the trail of one of their most important issues.

“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week, one of many questionable posts he made about the deceased sex offender and financier with whom he was close with.

The wagons are beginning to circle now, as the House is expected to subpoena the Epstein files when they return next month, and have already subpoenaed imprisoned Epstein accomplice Ghilaine Maxwell to testify before Congress in August.

Republican Texas state Representative Giovanni Capriglione co-authored the law that bans nearly all abortion in the state. And on Friday, the District 98 representative was publicly accused of having “funded several abortions for his own personal gain.”

The accusations against the legislator, who earlier this week ended his bid for an eighth term in office, come from Alex Grace, a former exotic dancer. On Friday, the right-wing publication Current Revolt published a video interview with Grace, in which she reportedly claims she had a yearslong affair with Capriglione, with their relationship beginning in 2004 when she was 18 years old.

Grace said Capriglione’s hypocrisy on issues like abortion contributed to the end of their fling. “He is someone that portrays himself to be so anti-abortion, yet he has funded several abortions for his own personal gain,” Grace alleged—though she refrained from providing further details, saying, “you’re just going to have to go with my word.”

Capriglione was the author of Texas’s “trigger” abortion ban, which outlawed abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The law makes performing an abortion, at any time from the moment of fertilization, punishable with life imprisonment or a civil penalty of $100,000. He has also, per The Texas Tribune, backed laws making it a civil offense to pay for someone to receive an abortion.

Capriglione on Friday issued a statement admitting to infidelity, without mentioning whom it was with, but denying having ever funded an abortion: “Years ago, I selfishly had an affair. I’m not proud of this. Thank God my wife and family forgave me, and we moved past it and have the strong marriage we do today.… The rest is categorically false and easily disproven.… I have never, nor would I ever, pay for an abortion.”

The lawmaker chalked the revelation up to “blowback” for “holding the wealthy, the powerful, the corporate elites, and the Austin insiders to account.”

Capriglione also vowed to pursue “legal remedies,” and Current Revolt publisher Tony Ortiz says he received a legal threat from the lawmaker on Wednesday evening. The day prior, Capriglione had announced the end of his reelection campaign.

Since the story broke, The Texas Tribune reports, Republican Representative Briscoe Cain, another prominent anti-abortion lawmaker in Texas’s House, called for Capriglione’s resignation, and urged the body’s Committee on General Investigating to probe the matter.

“I just signed the largest trade deal in history, I think maybe the largest deal in history, with Japan,” Trump boasted Tuesday. But a new report from The Financial Times demonstrates that U.S. and Japanese officials don’t see eye to eye on what exactly the countries agreed upon.

According to Trump and his administration, in return for a reduction in tariffs, Japan would invest $550 billion in certain U.S. sectors and give the United States 90 percent of the profits.

But Japanese officials say profit sharing under the agreement isn’t so set in stone: A Friday slideshow presentation in Japan’s Cabinet Office, contra the White House, said profit distribution would be “based on the degree of contribution and risk taken by each party,” per The Financial Times.

The FT also reports conflicting messages between Washington and Tokyo as to whether that $550 billion commitment is, as team Trump sees it, a guarantee or, as Japan’s negotiator Ryosei Akazawa sees it, an upper limit and not “a target or commitment.”

Mireya Solís, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Financial Times that the deal contains “nothing inspiring,” as “both sides made promises that we can’t be sure will be kept” and “there are no guarantees on what the actual level of investments from Japan will be.”

The inconsistent interpretations of the deal could possibly be owing to the fact that it was hastily pulled together over the course of an hour and 10 minutes between Trump and Akazawa on Tuesday, according to the FT, which cited “officials familiar with the U.S.-Japan talks.” And, moreover, “Japanese officials said there was no written agreement with Washington—and no legally binding one would be drawn up.”

Some are thus beginning to wonder whether Trump’s avowed “largest deal in history” even technically counts as a deal at all. Brad Setser, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote on X: “If something like this is not ‘papered’ it isn’t really a deal.”

As federal immigration agents attacked a U.S. citizen, they warned him: “You’ve got no rights here.”

What began as a simple traffic stop for Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old Floridian, in May, turned into a traumatizing arrest when U.S. Customs and Border Protection arrived at the scene.

Alongside his mother and two undocumented male companions, Laynez-Ambrosio was laughed at, ridiculed, and violently detained by a group of officers, according to video footage secretly captured by the teenager, first reported on by The Guardian.

“Wait, hold up,” Laynez-Ambrosio said when agents opened the door of their company work van. “You guys have no rights to do that.”

“We don’t have rights to do that?” one agent said, laughing.

The video footage, panning upward, then shows the border patrol agents restraining one individual in a chokehold. All three men were forced out of their vehicle and onto the ground. As another companion is manhandled by three officers in tactical gear, the sound of a stun gun is heard going off, sending the man crashing onto the floor as he cries and shakes in agony.

“You can’t be doing that,” Laynez-Ambrosio said.

“Get on the ground,” an officer screams at him.

“I’m not going to get up, I’m going to just stay like this,” Laynez-Ambrosio responds. “Y’all scaring the dude.… I’ve got rights to talk.”

“You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother,” an agent told Laynez-Ambrosio.

“I do,” Laynez-Ambrosio insisted. “I was born and raised here.”

In the aftermath of the violence, the ICE agents can be heard laughing and making light of the pain they inflicted on their arrestees, referring to the Taser use as “funny,” and insulting its target as a “dick.”

“You can smell that … $30,000 bonus,” said another officer.

Later, the officers can be heard claiming that more individuals have started to resist their arrests, anticipating even more extreme uses of force in future.

“We’re going to end up shooting some of them,” an agent said, referencing Laynez-Ambrosio’s attempts to assert his rights. “This kid goes like … ‘No, you can’t do that’; I’m not doing shit. We told you already to get out, you either get out or I’m going to pull you out.”

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 residents possessing visas or green cards. So far this year, ICE agents have been caught interrogating children, deporting U.S. citizens, and stuffing uncharged prisoners into America’s very own concentration camp.

As the Trump administration guts and otherwise interferes with federal statistical agencies, nearly 90 percent of economists recently surveyed by Reuters are concerned about the reliability of official government data on the economy.

From July 11 to 24, Reuters polled economists—including “Nobel Laureates, former policymakers, academics from top U.S. universities, and economists from major banks, consultancies and think tanks”—and found that 89 of 100 of them “were concerned about the quality of official U.S. economic data,” with 41 saying they are “very concerned.”

Reuters’ report shows that alarm over Trump’s cuts to key agencies that collect and deliver data, such as statistics on jobs and inflation (to say nothing of other data impacted by Trump, such as that on health, weather, and education), has reached fever pitch.

Erica Groshen, former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, told Reuters, “I can’t help but worry some deadlines [for future data releases] are going to be missed and undetected biases or other errors are going to start creeping into some of these reports just because of the reduction in staff.”

Groshen also noted “another very big risk”: that “all of the current administration’s changes will make civil service employees more like political appointees.”

MSNBC’s Steve Benen observed in an article earlier this month that the prospect of “corruption and political mischief” interfering with federal statistics under Trump is also worth keeping in mind. “Perhaps Donald Trump, the argument goes, might use his influence to tell the Labor Department to manipulate the data and deceive the public,” Benen wrote—though he noted “there’s been no evidence of statistics being altered to fit a political narrative” to date.

Even setting that worrisome possibility aside, Trump’s war against trustworthy federal data already threatens to wreak real havoc.

During a press conference last month, Fed chair (and MAGA persona non grata) Jerome Powell explained why we mustn’t take for granted “having good data” on the economy: This information, he pointed out, “doesn’t just help the Fed. It helps the government, it helps Congress, it helps the executive branch. More importantly, really, it helps businesses. They need to know what’s going on in the economy.”

For years, Powell noted, the United States has prided itself on being a leader in “measuring and understanding what’s happening in, in our very large and dynamic economy.”

“I hate to see us cutting back on that,” he continued, “because it is a real benefit to the general public that people in all kinds of jobs have the best possible understanding of what’s happening in the economy.”

President Trump is using $10 million of our taxes to market his new golf course in Scotland.

The president traveled to Scotland on Friday for the grand opening of an 18-hole golf course in Aberdeen. He’s expected to stay for four days. His appearance will likely generate positive revenue and publicity for the course—money that will flow right back into the pockets of the Trump Organization.

HuffPost has estimated that the trip will likely cost at least $9.7 million dollars due to Air Force One operations, motorcades and helicopters, Secret Service overtime, and more. Trump has framed the international vacation as a “working trip,” and has instead emphasized his plan to meet in Aberdeen with U.K. Prime Minister Kier Starmer. But Aberdeen is not the capital of the United Kingdom, or even the capital of Scotland, making it clear this meeting was just randomly added in to use as an excuse for the golf course.

Trump has grown more and more comfortable completely blurring the lines of his private businesses and his public office. This trip will make his second-term golf tab at least $52 million in just six months, according to HuffPost. His first term was $152 million over four years.

“We’ve reached a point where the Oval Office is an extension of the Trump Organization, and American taxpayers are footing the bill,” Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington told HuffPost. “A president should not be spending time trying to make money in a foreign country while in office, but if they do, at the very least they could pick up the tab for their business trips.”

The cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s late-night show is apparently a sign of what’s to come for America’s media industry.

Speaking with CNBC Friday, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blamed the comedy show’s demise on a lack of profitability, and warned that the “media industry across this country needs a course correction.”

“The American people simply do not trust the mainstream media,” Carr said, likening the current field of late-night comedy shows to genuine news outlets.

He has a point: Media trust has never been so low in this country. A February Gallup survey found that trust in news had fallen to a five-decade low, with just 31 percent of polled Americans claiming to trust the mainstream media a “great deal” or “a fair amount,” while 36 percent said they didn’t trust traditional news sources “at all.”

But threatening to forcibly curtail content via the heavy hand of the federal government—à la some Russian- or North Korean–inspired trajectory—is not the solution.

“For broadcasters, they have a federal license and they are obligated to operate in the public interest,” Carr said. “In the extent that we’re starting to see some changes, I think that’s a good thing.”

Some of the most prominent news companies in the country have already been pressured into changing their coverage of Trump. The longtime head of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens, quit after Paramount executives attempted to interfere with the show’s content, reportedly pressuring him to change how the show reports on the president. The former president of CBS, Wendy McMahon, resigned under similar circumstances shortly afterward.

Colbert’s show—the most popular show in its time slot—was canceled three days after the comedian claimed that Paramount’s $16 million settlement with Trump over his groundless lawsuit targeting Kamala Harris’s 60 Minutes interview looked like a “big, fat bribe.”

In his first show back following the announcement, Colbert didn’t deny that it was possible the show was hemorrhaging money. However, he said he couldn’t work out the $40 million loss that an unidentified Paramount source leaked to The New York Post—until he considered another possibility.

“$40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million. But where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh yeah,” Colbert said.

The FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance Thursday.