Trump’s DOJ Reveals It Has Recording of Ghislaine Maxwell

A new CNN report reveals that the Trump administration possesses recordings of the Justice Department’s much-scrutinized closed-door meetings with Ghislaine Maxwell.

The recordings, per CNN, are now being transcribed and digitized, and “discussions over potential publication of the transcripts and audio” are ongoing. If the transcript is released, portions “that could reveal sensitive details like victim names” will likely be redacted.

Last month, Trump’s former personal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche met with Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Jeffrey Epstein sexually abuse underage girls.

Blanche said the point of the meeting—an apparent attempt to quell the furor over Trump’s lack of transparency on Epstein—was to ask Maxwell, “What do you know?”

After day one of the interview, which stretched over two days, Blanche wrote on X that the DOJ “will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time.” Maxwell’s attorney called it a “productive day.”

But many critics saw the meetings as a breeding ground for corruption, as Maxwell may have been incentivized to clear the name of the president—a former friend of Epstein whose name reportedly appears multiple times within the files—in exchange for clemency or a pardon.

Trump, meanwhile, distanced himself from Blanche’s meetings with Maxwell.

“I don’t know anything about it. They’re going to, what? Meet her?” Trump said when asked about the meeting late last month. “I don’t know about it, but I think it’s something that be—sounds appropriate to do, yeah.… I didn’t know that they were going to do it. I don’t really follow that too much.”

Trump has done little to dispel concerns that he may use Maxwell as a way out of the Epstein scandal, repeatedly reminding reporters that he’s “allowed” to grant her a pardon.

Releasing the Maxwell interviews might be a good first step for the self-proclaimed “most transparent” presidential administration to resolve the ongoing controversy.

But it would still fall far short of persistent demands to simply release the Epstein files in full. To do so, the president could waive his privacy rights to allow the mentions of him in the files to be unredacted—though I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Laura Loomer’s conspiratorial followers are already cannibalizing her for participating in “the swamp.”

Just a day after reports emerged that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had tapped the far-right “9/11 truther” to help identify leakers among his staff, Loomer has now herself become the subject of intense scrutiny. Some conspiracists are accusing her of being a “plant” for pharmaceutical companies concerned about administration policies that could cut into their bottom dollar, reported The Bulwark.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: An analysis by The Daily Beast found that at least 16 individuals were fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents.

But now her intraparty success is coming back to bite her. At issue is the recent firing of Dr. Vinay Prasad, who until last week was in charge of the Food and Drug Administration division that oversees vaccines and gene therapies. Prasad resigned from his position after Loomer accused him of being disloyal to the president, alleging he owned a Trump voodoo doll. (The claim is a mischaracterization of a rhetorical anecdote Prasad spelled out in a podcast episode.)

Of note for far-right influencers: Prasad was in the midst of duking it out with Massachusetts-based drug manufacturer Sarepta over the company’s drug Elevidys, which treats Duchenne muscular dystrophy. The FDA put Elevidys’s clinical trials on hold last month after two patients died while taking the drug, and after another individual passed away while taking a related treatment. All three people died from acute liver toxicity.

Shortly before Prasad resigned, the FDA reversed course on its decision, deciding that some patients who still had the ability to walk could receive the drug.

Loomer’s peers considered the connection between her attacks on Prasad, the new FDA decision, and Prasad’s firing fairly obvious.

Right-wing Big Pharma critic Kevin Bass accused Loomer of being a “plant” to “oust FDA official Vinay Prasad.” American Majority CEO Ned Ryun wrote that Loomer was “funded by Sarepta Therapeutics to take Vinay out,” referring to the influencer as “completely nuts.”

“The reason I find this and you so loathsome is that this behavior is the antithesis of the MAGA and MAHA movements,” Ryun added.

Loomer has rejected the claims, writing to her 1.7 million followers on X that she hasn’t accepted any money from Big Pharma.

Last week, Representative Delia Ramirez, a Guatemalan American representing Illinois’s 3rd district, spoke at the second Panamerican Congress in Mexico City. A snippet of her remarks has infuriated MAGA commentators, lawmakers, and even the Department of Homeland Security.

But the outrage stems from an apparent mistranslation by right-wing news site The Blaze, which reported that Ramirez said: “I’m a proud Guatemalan, before I’m an American.”

A video of the event shows Ramirez, who began her speech in English, saying she wanted to conclude her remarks with a few words in Spanish (“...quiero terminar diciendo unas palabras en español…”), because she is “very proudly Guatemalan” (“...porque yo soy guatemalteca con mucho orgullo…”). But, she continues, “Primero que soy americana”—which translates roughly to “First, I am American.”

While the latter statement is oddly worded, making a direct translation difficult and leaving some ambiguity in Ramirez’s meaning, The Blaze’s version is evidently quite a leap (and also strips the remark of its context).

But, as Mark Twain is often falsely quoted as saying: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” The Blaze’s snippet and translation was shared far and wide in the MAGA-sphere.

Fox News published a story on it. Senator Mike Lee asked his followers on X, “Are you comfortable with this?” Representative Andy Ogles demanded that Ramirez be denaturalized, deported, and removed from the House Committee on Homeland Security, posting, “We know where her allegiances lie.” The DHS’s official X account shared the snippet with a Theodore Roosevelt quote about there being “no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”

As the bad-faith right-wing firestorm blazed, Ramirez issued a statement calling the attacks “a weak attempt to silence my dissent and invalidate my patriotic criticism of the nativist, white supremacist, authoritarians in government.”

“Anyone who denies our claim on this country simply because we dare to honor our diverse heritage and immigrant roots only exposes how fragile and small-minded their own idea of America really is,” Ramirez said.

This story has been updated.

There’s only one person who Americans hate more than Benjamin Netanyahu: Elon Musk.

In a Gallup favorability poll on 14 U.S. and global figures released Tuesday, Musk came in with the lowest net favorability rating at -28 points. Benjamin Netanyahu, the far-right prime minister of Israel and champion of the country’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, is slightly less hated at -23 points.

Multiple officials in Donald Trump’s administration, including Trump, have fallen in popularity: JD Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marco Rubio, Musk, and Trump himself have all lost favorability since January’s poll.

Rubio is down 24 points, from a positive eight-point net favorability in January to -16 in the latest poll, which Gallup suggests could be linked to his key role in shutting down USAID. Musk, who is also precipitously down 24 points, now has a nearly two-to-one negative image: 33 percent of people surveyed view Trump’s ex-BFF favorably, and 61 percent view him unfavorably.

Trump, Kennedy, and Vance have all experienced declines of 13 or 14 points since January. Biden, who also has a negative net favorability (tied with Vance for -11), is actually slightly up in favorability since January—likely due to the fact he’s not president anymore.

At the top of the list? The Chicago pope himself, Pope Leo XIV. The pope has a +46 net favorability, far ahead of the second- and third-most-favorable figures, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Bernie Sanders, who come in at 18 and 11 points, respectively.

The writing’s on the wall: The American public doesn’t look kindly upon mass starvation, but there is no sin greater than the Tesla Diner.

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.