“Cowardly”: Epstein Victim Torches Government’s Actions on Case

Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers are blasting the government for its mismanagement of the Epstein files case, and calling for survivors’ perspectives to be formally considered.

After hearing that Vice President JD Vance called a “strategy session” about the Epstein files, in what is presumably another attempt to rectify the administration’s botched efforts at transparency, the family of Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre spotted that the guest list had some notable omissions.

“We understand that Vice President JD Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein,” said family members in a statement Wednesday to MSNBC.

They asked that survivors be given an opportunity to testify, with Giuffre’s family volunteering to testify in her stead. “Their voices must be heard, above all,” the statement said.

Another accuser, Annie Farmer, issued a letter to the court supporting the release of Epstein’s and Ghislaine Maxwell’s grand jury documents. Farmer, via her lawyers, expressed anger at the meager amount of justice that has been brought for “over one thousand victims” who suffered at the hands of Epstein and Maxwell.

“To date, however, the combined forces of our country’s law enforcement agencies have only ever arrested these two individuals in connection with crimes committed against countless young women and girls, and the Government’s recent suggestion that no further criminal investigations are forthcoming is a cowardly abdication of its duties to protect and serve,” the letter says.

The letter goes on to request that the grand jury files be unsealed to “help expose the magnitude and abhorrence of Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes.”

Farmer also expressed horror at how Maxwell is “attempting to escape justice” by angling for a pardon.

An underage sex-trafficking scheme should have consequences for every abuser, not just the man at the top. These statements should remind Donald Trump and his administration that to survivors and their families, their fumbling of this case is not just a campaign promise betrayed, it is a miscarriage of justice.

Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s stupendous evidence that former President Barack Obama masterminded the Trump-Russia investigation boils down to a single word choice.

Gabbard was pressed to explain her theory—which has been roundly condemned as a thinly veiled distraction from the Trump administration’s Epstein files scandal—during an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham Tuesday.

“You said there was irrefutable evidence that Obama was the mastermind of this intelligence manipulation and the perpetuation of the Russia hoax. What is that irrefutable evidence for our viewers tonight?” asked Ingraham.

Gabbard, in turn, directed Fox’s audience to her office’s website, which hosts heavily redacted versions of her report.

“And those who go in and read this will see how President Obama directed that a National Security Council meeting be called to talk about Russia, that the report that came out of that meeting was filled with tasks that were delivered by James Clapper’s assistant to [FBI Director] John Brennan and to other elements of the intelligence community,” Gabbard said.

“And very specifically, they were tasked to create an intelligence assessment that detailed how Moscow tried to influence the election—not if, but how,” she said.

But that differentiation doesn’t mean very much within the larger context of the Russia investigation, which established—via a Republican-led House investigation as well as a bipartisan Senate investigation fronted by now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio—that Russia had worked to intervene in the 2016 election. So having a president inquire “how” that occurred, rather than “if” it occurred, makes sense.

In MAGA world, however, the difference is apparently treasonous. Several of Donald Trump’s allies have called for investigations as to whether the forty-fourth president committed “treason” by looking into Russian influence in the 2016 election.

Other efforts to reframe what Trump has deemed a “hoax” have also proven to be duds. Last week, a declassified report intended to add fuel to a debunked theory that Hillary Clinton cooked up the Trump-Russia connection actually revealed that a critical document to the plot was the likely invention of Russian spies, undermining the administration’s revisionary campaign.

Republican Utah state Senate President J. Stuart Adams used his power to change local law to help a family member facing charges of allegedly raping a 13-year-old.

Adams’s family member, an 18-year-old high school student, was arrested and looking at four first-degree felonies. Then Adams stepped in.

Before Adams, 18-year-olds who had sex with 13-year-olds in Utah were treated like the adults they legally were and could face first-degree felony charges of child rape. In Utah, anyone under the age of 14 cannot legally consent. Adams successfully changed the law to allow 18-year-olds charged with child rape to be essentially tried as minors if they were enrolled in high school at the time of their crime. Adams’s family member was in high school, and although the law was not made retroactive, the 18-year-old-still went from facing years in prison to accepting a plea deal for reduced charges and no jail time beyond the week already served after the initial arrest.

While Adams swears his family member’s charges had nothing to do with his pushing of the rule change, the prosecution, defense, and judge alike all acknowledged that it played a major role in changing the charges.

The victim’s family was devastated. “It was out of nowhere,” the middle schooler’s mother told The Salt Lake Tribune. “I felt like I was punched in the gut.”

“I feel like a law is the law, regardless of who you are, but that wasn’t what was going on here,” she continued. “I feel like [Adams’s relative] just got special treatment … and nobody was going to say anything about it.”

This piece has been updated to correct the explanation of the law and to remove potentially erroneous references to the genders of the suspect and victim, which are publicly unknown.

A number of FEMA employees were told via email Tuesday night that they would be reassigned to ICE.

Sources familiar with the matter say that those who received the email were probationary employees who had been on administrative leave for months after the Trump administration attempted to fire them, according to The American Prospect.

The email told FEMA employees that they would be reassigned to ICE “due to the mission requirements of the Department [of Homeland Security].” The DHS houses both ICE and FEMA.

The kicker: If the workers don’t accept the new position, they could be fired.

Showering ICE with resources has become a central feature of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. Congress has just awarded $170 billion toward immigration enforcement, with ICE getting an unprecedented $75 billion of that sum. Meanwhile, ICE agents are complaining about the unrealistic quotas placed on them by deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and wondering why they’re spending so much time “arresting gardeners.”

And FEMA, which provides crucial services to Americans experiencing natural disasters, is already in dire straits: While Texans were overwhelmed by flooding, the agency didn’t answer two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line, reported The New York Times. As climate catastrophes become more and more common, the president wants to eliminate the agency meant to respond to them altogether.

The priorities of the Trump administration have never been clearer: Remove immigrants at all costs, disasters be damned.

Donald Trump claimed he’s been left out of the loop by his own administration regarding its handling of the Epstein case yet again.

Speaking with reporters at the White House Tuesday, the president said that the Justice Department had left him in the dark about the decision to transfer Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison after the convicted sex trafficker sat down for interviews with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“Were you aware of, and did you personally approve the prison transfer for Ghislaine Maxwell that your Justice Department—” asked CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

“I didn’t know about it at all, no,” Trump answered. “I read about it just like you did.”

Trump further claimed that the transfer is “not an uncommon thing,” but legal analysts strongly disagree. Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig told CNN that the move was “so unusual” because Maxwell did not meet the DOJ’s typical standards for consideration as a “cooperating witness.”

Honig explained that a “cooperator” is a person who has been “thoroughly vetted, deemed to be credible, and somebody who DOJ has brought actual prosecutions based on their testimony.”

“She’s done none of those things,” Honig said. “So she’s already gotten a substantial benefit, yet without doing the things that you would ordinarily require of what I would consider a proper cooperating witness.”

Honig further underscored that it would take a “special exemption” from a higher authority to move a convicted sex offender from a maximum-security facility to a minimum-security “camp.”

“It certainly appears as if she’s being given some benefit for what she told Todd Blanche,” Honig told the network.

Maxwell has directly appealed to the president and the Supreme Court in pursuit of a pardon. A senior Trump administration official told CNN last week that Trump was not considering clemency for the convicted sex trafficker, though Trump emphasized to reporters just days prior that he was “allowed” to give her one.

Trump similarly purported last month to have no idea that his own administration was planning to meet with Maxwell, a woman whom he had met and interacted with several times over the last three decades, as she was his “bud” Jeffrey Epstein’s closest confidant.

Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking in 2022, when she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for her role in the pedophile network, helping Epstein abduct and abuse underage girls over the span of a decade.

DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, a.k.a. “Big Balls,” was jumped in Washington, D.C., earlier this week—and his former boss, Elon Musk, is using the attack to call for a federal takeover of the District.

The billionaire wrote that Coristine heroically stopped “a gang of about a dozen young men” from assaulting a woman in her car at night. He said that Coristine ran over to defend the woman and saved her in spite of being “severely beaten to the point of concussion.” Musk ended his retelling by calling for the federal government to take control of D.C. 

Trump used the attack on Big Balls to echo the same goal, calling for the federal takeover of D.C. and the mass criminalization of mostly working-class Black and Latino children. 

“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control. Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens.… The Law in D.C. must be changed to prosecute these ‘minors’ as adults, and lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14,” Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social. “Washington, D.C., must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the World to see. If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore. Perhaps it should have been done a long time ago, then this incredible young man, and so many others, would not have had to go through the horrors of Violent Crime. If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City.”

The Metropolitan Police Department’s report states that officers saw a group of around 10 young people surrounding and assaulting Coristine. He told police that he had pushed his “significant other” into the car as they were being surrounded. Two 15-year-old suspects were detained and charged with unarmed carjacking. 

Fearmongering is a common tactic for Trump and other conservatives, especially around events like these. But Washington, D.C.’s unique nonstate status has emboldened the president, as he has hinted at taking over the city countless times before. Everyone deserves to feel safe in the city they live in, but Big Balls getting jumped is not a valid excuse to start rounding up kids and revoking the little autonomy the city has.  

This article has been updated to more accurately reflect the police report about the attack.

Miss United States doesn’t want to be within 100 yards of Representative Cory Mills.

Lindsey Langston, a Florida Republican state committeewoman and the current titleholder for the Miss United States beauty pageant, has filed a restraining order against the Republican lawmaker, reported DropSite News. The pair dated from November 2021 until February of this year.

The Columbia County committeewoman reported Mills to local and state law enforcement for “harassment, threatening to release sexual videos, and to harm future boyfriends,” according to DropSite.

After dating for almost three years, Langston and Mills began living together last summer when Langston moved into Mills’s Florida home. But that all came to an abrupt end in February when Langston learned—via national news reports—that Mills not only had a second girlfriend but had also been accused of assaulting her at his D.C. condo. (The second girlfriend, Sarah Raviani, later denied the report.)

But ending the relationship didn’t translate to an end in communication, according to Langston, who told DropSite that Mills continued to harass her for months despite her telling him repeatedly to leave her alone.

“The threats from Cory intensified over time,” she told DropSite. “From emotional manipulation, to physical violence against whoever I date in the future, to threats of having me stripped of the Miss United States crown … something I worked extremely hard for and a dream that was placed in my heart long before I even knew who Cory Mills was.”

Langston shared troves of time-stamped evidence with local and state investigators, as well as DropSite News, to back up her allegations.

On May 19, Donald Trump signed into law the bipartisan “Take It Down Act” to curb revenge porn. That same day, Mills—a self-styled MAGA Republican who had voted in favor of the anti-intimidation legislation—sent another timely message to Langston, threatening to blow up her future yet again by weaponizing sexual images he had of her.

“Let him put his actions behind his mouth,” Mills wrote, referring to someone he believed to be Langston’s new partner. “I can send him a few videos of you as well. Oh, I still have them.”

The Trump administration is on a pro-Confederacy roll, with two monuments brought back in 24 hours.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Tuesday that a Confederate memorial would be reinstalled in Arlington Cemetery after the statue’s removal in 2023 by Hegseth’s predecessor, Lloyd Austin, the country’s first Black defense secretary.

“Moses Ezekiel’s beautiful and historic sculpture—often referred to as ‘The Reconciliation Monument’—will be rightfully be returned to Arlington National Cemetery near his burial site,” Hegseth wrote on X.

The statue is likely more often referred to by the name it’s had since its construction in 1914: the Confederate Memorial.

“It never should have been taken down by woke lemmings. Unlike the Left, we don’t believe in erasing American history—we honor it,” Hegseth continued.

The memorial featured a “nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy” and included “highly sanitized depictions of slavery,” according to Arlington Cemetery’s website. The statue also had a Latin inscription that characterizes the South’s secession as a “noble ‘Lost Cause.’”

The Confederate Memorial is the second monument honoring the pro-slavery South that the Trump administration has recently resurrected. The National Park Service announced Monday that it would restore and reinstall the statue of Confederate General Albert Pike that was toppled during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

NPS describes the statue as a tribute to “Pike’s leadership in Freemasonry,” leaving out his Confederate background. The move is part of Trump’s “Executive Order on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

It’s yet another instance in which the Trump administration is actively revising the past. Whether scrubbing mentions of queer and transgender Americans from the Stonewall website or quietly removing references to Trump’s impeachments from a Smithsonian exhibit (which the museum now says will be restored “in the coming weeks”), it’s clear that the administration is committed to promoting its version of the nation’s history—“truth” and “sanity” notwithstanding.

The Trump administration is contorting itself in order to not release the Epstein files.

Senior administration officials are expected to meet Wednesday night at the vice president’s residence to discuss their available options for the Epstein files—one of which reportedly includes having deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche go on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss the scandal, according to CNN.

The meeting will include Blanche as well as White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel.

“Sources say that there have also been internal discussions about what exactly Blanche’s next step could be, including holding a press conference or doing a high-profile interview, possibly with someone like Joe Rogan,” reported CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Tuesday night.

Blanche met with Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell for multiple days last month, spurring concern that the White House was considering a pardon for the convicted sex trafficker.

Another option reportedly discussed among the senior officials includes releasing the transcript or audio of Maxwell’s interview with Blanche.

The Trump administration has been in a tailspin over the case files since the beginning of July, when the Justice Department directly contradicted Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s “client list,” eliciting surprise and upset from the deepest pockets of the MAGA leader’s base.

But rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by his supporters, Donald Trump decided to go in a different direction and accrue a new list of Epstein’s clients from Maxwell. Maxwell, in turn, directly appealed to the president and the Supreme Court in pursuit of a pardon.

A senior Trump administration official told CNN Thursday that Trump was not considering clemency for the convicted sex trafficker, though Trump underscored to reporters just days prior that he was “allowed” to give her one.

Meanwhile, Americans are increasingly disturbed by Trump’s handling of the entire fiasco. A poll published by Emerson College Polling in July found that just 16 percent of Americans approved of the way Trump was managing the Epstein scandal, while more than half of polled Americans—51 percent—disapproved.

Some defenders of Texas Republicans’ plan to rejigger the state’s congressional districts at the behest of President Trump might be inclined to suggest there’s some fair rationale for the move.

Not state Representative Mitch Little, a Texas Republican who explained brazenly to CNN Tuesday that it’s a Machiavellian partisan maneuver.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar asked her guest why the Texas GOP is attempting to redistrict now when it just did so four years earlier after the last U.S. census.

Little put it plainly: “Because we can. We have the votes. It’s legal for us to do so. It’s legal for us to draw the lines based on political performance. We have three Hispanic-predominated districts in south Texas that we believe that we can carve out for Republican leadership in the United States Congress,” he said—which, he claimed, will “be a good thing for Texas.”

“Because you can,” Keilar repeated. “Why should you, though?”

Little replied: “Because it’s good for our party, it’s good for our state, and we need to ensure that Donald Trump’s agenda continues to be enacted throughout his second term,” Little said. (Note that “our party” apparently came to mind quicker here than “our state.”)

Little and his fellow Republicans, he continued, see this gerrymander “as the difference between Democrats trying to impeach President Trump again during the second half of his final term as president of the United States or accomplishing the agenda that all the voters in Texas, by a significant majority, sent him to accomplish.”

“So you’re doing this for President Trump?” Keilar pressed.

“We’re doing this for Texas,” Little insisted. “President Trump doesn’t call me. I don’t think he has my phone number. But what I would submit to you is: This is the best thing for Texas and its representation in the United States Congress.”