Republicans Issue Subpoena for Epstein Files—With One Big Exception

The Republican-led House on Tuesday issued subpoenas to the Justice Department and high-ranking officials for files related to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. But there was one notable name missing from the list of subpoenas: President Donald Trump.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer issued 11 subpoenas in total, including some to prominent politicians from Republican and Democratic administrations: Bill and Hillary Clinton, former FBI Director James Comey, multiple former attorneys general including Merrick Garland and William Barr, and former special counsel Robert Mueller, according to The Washington Post.

But Trump himself is notably absent from that list.

The subpoenas are a result of a bipartisan effort on behalf of the House to release the files. On July 23, Democratic Representative Summer Lee of Pennsylvania brought a motion to subpoena the DOJ, which passed in the House Oversight Federal Law Enforcement subcommittee with three Republicans joining Democrats in the vote.

Trump’s former Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta is also missing from the list of subpoenas. In 2008, as U.S. attorney in Miami, Acosta gave Epstein a secret plea deal for soliciting a minor for prostitution—a crime that, if charges had been brought federally, could have resulted in a life sentence. Acosta resigned from the Trump administration in 2019 amid scrutiny during Epstein’s sex-trafficking case.

Despite the public’s overwhelming interest in transparency regarding Epstein, Trump has denied and deflected, blaming the controversy on a Democratic hoax and belittling members of his base who are still interested in seeing the files. Before the Justice Department issued a “case-closed” memo last month, Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump that his name was in the files, which isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s seen the mountain of evidence that Trump and Epstein were friends.

This story has been updated.

Deciding to condition FEMA aid on support for Israel has not panned out well for the Trump administration.

Grant orders issued by the agency directed states and cities to certify that they would not avoid or end “commercial relations specifically with Israeli companies” while receiving the federal disaster relief funds, Reuters reported Monday, citing official notices it had obtained. But in the wake of the news, fierce bipartisan backlash effectively forced the White House to nix the operation.

MAGA influencers including Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Matt Walsh came out in staunch opposition to the effort, accusing Donald Trump of failing to put “America first.”

“Remember to pledge allegiance to Israel before your house is destroyed by a fire or hurricane, it could save your life,” wrote Fuentes on X.

Owens, meanwhile, claimed that Trump had “fully betrayed America” for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If you cannot see that now you are completely blind,” the talk show host wrote. “Best 100 million Miriam Adelson ever spent.”

Walsh simply stated, “There is just no way to reasonably claim that this qualifies as ‘America First’.”

Hours after initial reports broke about the conditioned aid, the Department of Homeland Security issued a statement insisting that “there is NO FEMA requirement tied to Israel in any current NOFO.”

But that doesn’t mean that future funding is protected from similar efforts. The notice underscored DHS’s ability to deny funds to any entity it deemed affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which aims to curb Israel’s violence in Gaza by peeling financial support away from the nation and its businesses.

“No states have lost funding, and no new conditions have been imposed,” the notice reads. “FEMA grants remain governed by existing law and policy and not political litmus tests. DHS will enforce all anti-discrimination laws and policies, including as it relates to the BDS movement, which is expressly grounded in antisemitism. Those who engage in racial discrimination should not receive a single dollar of federal funding.”

But a review of the order shows that it did indeed originally contain language conditioning aid on support for Israel. Following the backlash, the language was quietly edited to remove the reference to anti-Israel boycotts.

And as journalist Saagar Enjeti noted on X, “the DHS … makes it clear the admin reserves the right to deny these funds … based on the Anti-Boycott Act.”

“They still might do it. They’re just not saying it out loud right now,” he added.

The off-color FEMA order was just the latest in a long line of warnings from the Trump administration regarding its alliance with Israel and Netanyahu. The Department of Homeland Security announced in April that boycotting Israel was forbidden for any state or city intending to receive federal funding, and the White House has rescinded billions of dollars from universities around the country for failing to meet Trump’s metric of support for America’s genocidal Middle Eastern ally.

President Trump faced a surprisingly tough interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box Tuesday morning, as host Joe Kernen, who has often praised the president in the past, grilled him on his ousting of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over his claims that the job numbers were “rigged.”

Trump fired accused the former commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, last week after accusing her of propping up former President Biden and attempting to undermine himself. The firing came after an abysmal July job report, leading many to the reasonable conclusion that Trump is shooting the messenger while wrecking the economy, and now plans to install a lackey to replace McEntarfer.

On Squawk Box, Kernen noted that Elaine Chao, a former Trump transportation secretary and Bush II labor secretary, had said there’s no way that McEntarfer could have rigged the numbers.

“She said the commissioner doesn’t even really get involved with the actual minutiae of putting all these things together and there’s no way she could have chosen to rig these numbers to make ’em look bad,” Kernen said. “It’s just a big leap to go to rigged—and also it makes, Mr. President, it makes anyone you pick—critics are going to say, ‘Hey, he’s picking a guy or gal that’s giving him the numbers he wants.’ So it undermines confidence in the system to some extent.”

Trump replied: “I think when somebody says the commissioner is not involved, I don’t want to get into any arguments with anybody—why should I? She’s a very nice woman. But when they say that nobody is involved, that it wasn’t political—give me a break.”

Earlier in the interview, Kernen also fact-checked Trump on his claims that the BLS put out fake jobs numbers to help Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

“And so they gave phony numbers in order to win the election,” Trump said. “After I won the election—I said, ‘Too big to rig’—but, after I won the election, then they announced a downward number. In other words, to bring them back to reality. And I said, ‘Wow, supposing I would have lost, I would have blamed that and people would have said I was a conspiracy theorist.’”

In reality, that narrative is completely backward. The November BLS jobs report, released just days before the 2024 election, showed “weak growth” of 12,000 jobs for the month prior, as well as downward revisions for September and August. (Trump’s campaign even seized on this with a statement that said it showed “how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.”) However, a month after the election, the October figure was revised upward.

And, as Kernen pointed out, Trump’s claim of a downward revision of “almost 900,000” (actually 818,000) came months prior to the election, in August 2024. (Trump, at the time, baselessly hailed this routine revision as evidence of Biden and Kamala Harris “fraudulently manipulating job statistics.”)

President Donald Trump claimed in a CNBC interview Tuesday that he had “nothing to do with” Attorney General Pam Bondi’s grand jury probe into Obama officials—but he’s certainly not mad about it.

Anchor Joe Kernan asked the president, who called in to the program, “You’ve talked about how you want success, not retribution. The Justice Department is now tapping a grand jury to look into the intelligence community’s assessment of what was happening with Russia [in the 2016 U.S. election]. You have nothing to do with directing the Justice Department in that?”

“Nope, I have nothing to do with it. Pam is doing a great job,” Trump responded. “I will tell you this: They deserve it. I was happy to hear it,” he continued.

Years after a bipartisan Senate panel and the CIA confirmed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified documents that she claimed proved otherwise. Now Bondi plans to subpoena Obama-era officials for their purported role in what Trump has deemed the Russia “hoax.”

Whether or not Trump directed Bondi to relitigate an already-closed chapter of his history—conveniently launched at the same time he’s being walloped by his base for his mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and documented proximity to the dead pedophile—we can’t say for sure. But it’s certainly in line with the years of disinformation he’s spread about the matter, and his appetite for revenge.

Speaking of relitigating, Trump continued in his response to Kernan, claiming that multiple elections have been “rigged”: “What they did with the election—what they did with the last election too, but it was too big to rig—what they did in the 2020 election is grotesque, I mean that was a rigged election 100 percent.”

Kernan laughed, responding, “We can’t relitigate that. We can’t relitigate that.”

Hearing his interviewer’s casual comeback, Trump observed, “You know, a year ago you would’ve been upset if I said that. Today it’s different. Now I say it all the time: It was a rigged election.”

He’s not wrong. Trump’s relentless lies have browbeaten the American people into submission, and his administration’s claims that there was no Russian interference in the 2016 election are just another example, whether Trump’s behind the probe or not.

Now that Congress is in summer recess, homebound Republican lawmakers are learning just how much their constituents hate the president’s policies.

In his first town hall since voting in favor of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” Nebraska Representative Mike Flood had no remedy for the fire and fury of his base, who practically roasted him alive Monday night for Flood’s ongoing support for Trump.

Flood faced a barrage of excoriating questions during the jam-packed town hall, in which voters demanded to understand why their local lawmaker would vote in favor of the president’s tax bill and his immigration policies, accusing him of supporting a “fascist machine.” At one point, the crowd broke into a furious chant: “Tax the rich.”

“My question is fiscal. With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through 8.4 million dollars a day to illegally detain people—how much does it cost for fascism?” one woman pressed Flood as the crowd behind her cheered. “How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?”

But Flood’s response was no different from the party line, effectively echoing Trump’s “mandate from the people” ideology to advance undemocratic ideals.

“Americans went to the polls in November, and they had a choice between a Democratic candidate that had an open border, no enforcement, fentanyl, drugs, human trafficking, and they had a choice between that and a candidate that said close the border, get illegal immigrants out of our country, stop the fentanyl, stop the human trafficking, stop the drugs, stop the crime, stop the violence,” Flood said. “That’s what Americans voted for.

“Americans voted for a border that is secure, and I support the president enforcing our immigration laws, which, by the way, were written by Congress,” he added.

Flood’s constituents also harangued him for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, and for supporting Trump as the president circumnavigates and avoids his own home-brewed Epstein scandal.

“Let’s be very clear—at the next pro forma session of the Congress, you will find my name as a sponsor on a resolution from the House Rules Committee to release the Epstein files to protect the victims and not re-victimize them again,” Flood said, stating that he was for the release of the records despite the fact that he—along with every other Republican in the House—voted against a Democrat-led effort last month to make the files public.

The crowd, which at 750 people was the largest at one of Flood’s town halls yet, repeatedly booed the lawmaker almost from the very start. At one point, unsatisfied with his answers, constituents broke out into chants of, “Vote him out!”

Flood is unlikely to be the only conservative facing enormous backlash at home. Republicans have been instructed by the National Republican Congressional Committee to focus their time at home in August on selling Trump’s agenda to voters.