The White House’s Epstein Distraction Campaign Is Getting Desperate

The White House just botched the distraction from its Epstein scandal.

A declassified report, intended to add fuel to a debunked theory that Hillary Clinton cooked up the Trump-Russia connection in 2016, actually reveals that a critical document in the plot was the likely invention of Russian spies.

The 29-page annex to the special counsel’s 2023 report includes alleged communications made by Clinton that several Republicans have claimed were intended to “smear” Trump with Russian collusion. But the documents outline that, despite having spent considerable time and resources to prove the connection was real, special counsel John H. Durham could not do so.

The foundational document includes an email, dated July 27, 2016, and allegedly sent by a Soros Open Society Foundations staffer, that claimed the Democratic presidential candidate had signed off on a proposal to tie Trump to Russia in an effort to distract from the fact that she sent and received emails during her time as secretary of state from a private server.

“HRC approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections,” the email reads in part. “That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level. The point is making the Russian play a U.S. domestic issue.”

Durham concluded that the purported communication was most likely manufactured.

Trump administration officials, however, were quick to hype the supposed findings of the release. FBI Director Kash Patel bragged on social media that the annex included “evidence that the Clinton campaign plotted to frame President Trump and fabricate the Russia collusion hoax,” and CIA director John Ratcliffe said in a statement that the documents proved there was “a coordinated plan to prevent and destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.”

Amid rising intraparty tensions over Trump’s apparent ties to the pedophile and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the president has wildly alleged that investigations into his presidential campaign’s ties with Russian assets were the invention of President Barack Obama. Several of his allies have followed suit, calling for investigations as to whether the forty-fourth president committed “treason.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee met with the U.S.-backed aid organization that’s been setting death traps for starving Palestinians.

Huckabee said Friday morning that he and special envoy Steve Witkoff visited Gaza to “learn the truth” about the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF, whose aid sites have become the locus of mass casualty events on a near-daily basis.

The United Nations reported Thursday that at least 859 Palestinians have been killed while attempting to receive aid at GHF sites between May 27 and July 31, mostly by the Israeli military.

Huckabee seemed pleased after receiving a briefing from the Israeli military and meeting with GHF workers on the ground. “GHF delivers more than one million meals a day, an incredible feat!” Huckabee wrote in a post on X.

But GHF has now been implicated in hundreds of Palestinians deaths, as the widespread famine in Gaza worsens.

“Israeli forces are not only deliberately starving Palestinian civilians, but they are now gunning them down almost every day as they desperately seek food for their families,” said Belkis Wille, associate crisis and conflict director at Human Rights Watch. “US-backed Israeli forces and private contractors have put in place a flawed, militarized aid distribution system that has turned aid distributions into regular bloodbaths.”

GHF’s funding sources are opaque, but Trump said Friday that Israel had agreed to match a $30 million donation, according to Reuters.

GHF has also been criticized as systematically ineffectual. Anthony Aguilar, a retired 25-year U.S. Army veteran and Green Beret who’d been working for the group as a security contractor described GHF as “an enterprise that has failed from the beginning.”

“It’s abhorrent. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be comedy. It’s not comedy, because it is absolutely tragic,” he told Mother Jones. Aguilar also alleged that his fellow contractors used nonlethal and lethal munitions in unauthorized ways, cheering as they fired blindly into a crowd of Palestinians.

For his part, Huckabee doesn’t seem all that interested in easing the humanitarian crisis in Gaza—seeing that it would require him to acknowledge Palestinians’ humanity. Earlier this week, Huckabee said that France’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state was “like letting the Nazis have a victory after World War II.”

And for all of Trump’s too-little too-late statements about the starvation in Gaza, he seems to feel about the same. After Canada issued a statement backing a two-state solution Thursday, Trump lashed out in a Truth Social post, threatening a prospective trade deal between the U.S. and Canada.

Laura Loomer is feeling emboldened, as the Trump White House this week further deepened the impression that it farms out personnel decisions to the far-right provocateur.

Loomer, who seems to enjoy ready access to the president’s ear, on Thursday unveiled a tip line to help fire more Trump officials. “Know an Obama-Biden holdover inside the Trump admin who needs to be exposed for their misdeeds?” she posted on X. “Contact the Loomered Tip Line.”

“I guess you could say that my tip line has come to serve as a form of therapy for Trump administration officials who want to expose their colleagues who should not be in the positions that they’re in,” Loomer told Politico. She also mentioned that she has “people in the West Wing,” as well as fans and informants “in pretty much every single agency within the federal government.”

Loomer promised that the string of staffing shake-ups for which she’s already responsible—including firings of federal prosecutors, National Security Council personnel, and top National Security Agency officials—is only the beginning. She told Politico she plans to purge “hundreds” more in her effort to address a “vetting crisis” supposedly plaguing the Trump administration, which she considers to be overrun with Democratic sleeper cells.

Strikingly, within the course of 24 hours earlier this week, Loomer played a direct role in two high-profile departures.

First, she ginned up a campaign against supposed “progressive leftist saboteur” Vinay Prasad, a top Food and Drug Administration official, who stepped down on Tuesday so as not to be “a distraction.” Loomer then targeted Jen Easterly, a newly announced distinguished chair at West Point and former Biden official (who also worked for the Bush II administration), as a “Biden holdover.” Not only did the secretary of the Army then order West Point to fire Easterly, but it also announced plans for the academy to adjust its hiring practices, seemingly obliging Loomer’s demands that it further weed out “moles.”

“So many scalps this week! Stacking them up” Loomer posted to X Wednesday, before adding, the following day, “I will continue my independent vetting operation to help protect President Trump, his administration and the American people from nefarious people.”

A federal judge ruled on Thursday against the Trump administration’s plans to end Temporary Protected Status for 60,000 immigrants from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua, saying that the decision was partly motivated by the “discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population.”

TPS is a protected status that allows immigrants to live and work in the United States if conditions in their home countries are deemed unsafe. The administration has already ended the protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians, Ukrainians, and people from Afghanistan and Cameroon.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem put Nepalese, Honduran, and Nicaraguan immigrants next on the chopping block, claiming that the situations in their home countries no longer qualified them for the protections.

But Judge Trina L. Thompson disagreed, saying that the termination was too hasty without an “objective review of the country conditions,” like political violence in Honduras and the impact of recent hurricanes in Nicaragua, as reported by the AP.

“The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek. Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood,” Thompson said.

She also agreed with the plaintiffs’ lawyers that the decision to remove protections was part of upholding racist campaign promises rather than the product of any legitimate review. On the campaign trail, Trump echoed common talking points of the “great replacement” theory, a conspiratorial belief that white people will be replaced by people of color in the U.S.

“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” Thompson added.

The protections will remain in place while the case proceeds. The next hearing is November 18.

The Smithsonian has removed Donald Trump from its exhibit on impeachments under pressure from the White House, reported The Washington Post. The remainder of the exhibit focuses on Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, effectively returning the exhibit to the way it looked in 2008.

A temporary label had been plastered on the exhibit since 2021, playfully notifying visitors: “case under redesign (history happens).” The “American Presidency” wing’s updated signage now explains that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal” over the course of American history.

The change was the result of a White House–initiated content review in the wake of an art director’s ousting.

“In reviewing our legacy content recently, it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section in The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden exhibition needed to be addressed,” a Smithsonian spokesperson told the Post in a statement. “The section of this exhibition covers Congress, The Supreme Court, Impeachment, and Public Opinion. Because the other topics in this section had not been updated since 2008, the decision was made to restore the Impeachment case back to its 2008 appearance.”

Trump is the only U.S. president to be impeached twice—in 2019 and 2021—but a Smithsonian visitor wouldn’t know that by searching the exhibit’s digital companion, which doesn’t offer much information on either of the impeachment cases. And while searches of the museum’s collection yield dozens of results for America’s other impeachment subjects, a search for Trump only provides one “Impeach Trump” button from a 2017 protest.

At least one curator at the Smithsonian’s American History Museum has been on a quest to better document Trump’s impeachments. In 2020, a political history curator told the Post that he was hunting for the right objects to tell that story and that work was underway to amend the exhibit. He did not offer a date for the exhibit’s completion, however.

The Smithsonian responded to the Post in a statement promising that “a future and updated exhibit will include all impeachments.”

It is not clear, however, if that future updated exhibit will appear during Trump’s second term.