It Sure Looks Like Trump Is in the Epstein Files, Robert Garcia Says

Donald Trump is not cleared of wrongdoing in relation to the Epstein files, according to House Oversight Ranking Member Robert Garcia.

Speaking on former Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony before the Oversight Committee Tuesday, Garcia contradicted Oversight Chair James Comer, who claimed Barr said that “he had never seen anything that would implicate Trump in any of this.”

Instead, Garcia wrote in a statement, “Barr could not clear President Trump of wrongdoing.”

“Chairman Comer should release the entire unedited transcript of his interview to the public,” Garcia said.

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

Since then, new reporting has pointed to several new ties between the pedophilic financier and the man sitting in the Oval Office, revealing that the pair had a remarkably close relationship. Some of those details include a salacious letter Trump penned to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and testimony from the former COO of Trump’s Atlantic City casino that placed Epstein and Trump with three underage girls in the late 1980s.

And the Trump administration likely knows all about it: The Wall Street Journal reported in July that the Justice Department had notified Trump months earlier that his name appeared several times in the Epstein files.

But rather than release the Epstein files and provide the transparency so demanded by his supporters, Trump decided to go in a different direction, attempting to distract from the base-shattering scandal while seeking a new “list” from Epstein’s incarcerated longtime associate and girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Let’s put all of these tapes and depositions out to the public,” Garcia told Meidas Touch Tuesday. “We have nothing to hide here.”

“What I would say is that in no way [did] Bill Barr’s testimony—change the direction of this case,” he continued. “In no way did Bill Barr say anything that was groundbreaking in a way to halt our desire and need for justice for these victims and our certainty that Donald Trump and his name and other folks that may have been involved in different ways with Epstein are not in these files. We know that they are.

“So Bill Barr’s testimony was an act of Republicans trying to control a narrative,” he added.

Nobody is getting under MAGA skin like California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The Democratic bully-for-good has been on a social media crusade this week, rising to the top of algorithmic feeds by parodying Donald Trump’s posting style and his attention-grabbing stunts. Some of those low-brow trolling efforts include reposting a photoshopped image of Mount Rushmore with Newsom’s face on it, a mock-up of Newsom as a king on the cover of Time magazine, as well as an AI-hatched depiction of Newsom surrounded by Tucker Carlson, the late Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock (and then writing in all-caps that he hates Kid Rock.)

The déjà vu is intended to serve as a jarring mirror for Republicans still allied with the authoritarian president, and, incredibly, it’s working.

“He’s trying to mimic President Trump,” Trump’s first term chief strategist Steve Bannon told Politico Playbook. “He’s no Trump, but if you look at the Democratic Party, he’s at least getting up there, and he’s trying to imitate a Trumpian vision of fighting, right? He looks like the only person in the Democratic Party who is organizing a fight that they feel they can win.”

“People in the MAGA movement and the America First movement should start paying attention to this, because it’s not going to go away, they’re only going to get more intense,” Bannon added.

The California governor’s social media strategy is a novel one for Democrats, fighting the right’s AI-generated slop with even more AI-generated slop. In one particularly viral post, Newsom ragged on the president’s latest variant of “covfefe,” mocking Trump for posting “bela” to his most frequented communication platform, Truth Social.

“DONALD (TINY HANDS), HAS WRITTEN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY THIS MORNING—UNFORTUNATELY (LOW IQ) HE SPELLED IT WRONG—‘BETA,’” Newsom wrote. “SOON YOU WILL BE A ‘FIRED’ BETA BECAUSE OF MY PERFECT, ‘BEAUTIFUL MAPS.’ THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!—GCN”

Newsom, in his own words, has “changed.”

“The facts have changed; [Democrats] need to change,” Newsom told Fox LA’s Elex Michaelson Tuesday.

Breaking character momentarily during a press conference last week, Newsom said that he hoped the dumbed-down antics would serve as a “wake-up call for the president of the United States.”

“I’m sort of following his example. If you’ve got issues with what I’m putting out, you sure as hell should have concerns about what he’s putting out as president,” Newsom continued. “I think the deeper question is how have we allowed the normalization of his tweets, Truth Social posts over the course of the last many years, to go without similar scrutiny and notice?”

Newsom’s nonsense has ruffled feathers all the way to the Oval Office. Asked for a request to comment to Politico, the White House issued what could be the first official statement in meme format.

Draft dodger Donald Trump claimed to be a “war hero” while gushing similarly about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While calling in to The Mark Levin Show Tuesday night, Trump defended his old pal “Bibi”—and took the opportunity to pat himself on the back too. 

“He’s a good man, he’s in there fighting. He’s fighting, you know they’re trying to put him in jail on top of everything else. How about that? He’s—he’s a war hero, because we worked together. He’s a war hero, I guess I am too. Nobody cares, but I am too, I mean, I sent those planes,” Trump said, likely referring to his controversial strike on nuclear facilities in Iran.   

But Netanyahu isn’t a war hero—he’s a war criminal accused of committing crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for his arrest. Netanyahu’s sweeping military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 60,000 people, including civilians, children, and journalists. Incarcerated Palestinians in Israel have reported horrific torture and abuse at the hands of their captors, according to the United Nations. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has displaced nearly two million Palestinians and resulted in a widespread famine that threatens to kill thousands more. 

Earlier this month, Trump and Netanyahu reportedly got into a shouting match over the phone when the Israeli leader tried to claim that there was no starvation in Gaza. But less than a month later, Trump is back to singing his praises—and trying to take credit for the violence he has sown. 

And Trump is far from a war hero himself, no matter how many conflicts he claims to have resolved—and being complicit in Netanyahu’s war crimes certainly isn’t helping. 

President Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi has clashed with ethics officials over her openness to accepting gifts and favors—something her boss also struggles with mightily.

The New Yorker has reported that Bondi argued with ethics folks over keeping a FIFA soccer ball, sitting in President Trump’s box at the FIFA Club World Cup at MetLife Stadium, and holding onto a box of cigars that MMA fighter and convicted rapist Conor McGregor had initially given to Trump. Bondi ended up sitting in the box seats.

“Every new Administration needs time to adjust to ethics rules that might seem trivial,” one source told The New Yorker. “What wasn’t normal was the amount of pushback that we got.”

DOJ protocol only allows employees to accept “gifts of $20 or less per occasion, not to exceed $50 in a year from one source.”

The woman in charge of the DOJ has already eclipsed that with just one gift, as those FIFA Club World Cup box seats with Trump ran anywhere between from $5,300 to $73,000.

This kind of blatant corruption is par for the course from the administration. Bondi has yet to comment on The New Yorker’s reporting.

California Republicans have filed a lawsuit in hopes of halting Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to fight the Texas GOP’s Trump-ordered gerrymandering with retaliatory redistricting in the Golden State.

As Texas Republicans make a Machiavellian move between censuses to rejigger congressional maps in their party’s favor ahead of the 2026 midterms, Newsom has unveiled a tit-for-tat legislative package dubbed the “Election Rigging Response Act,” or ERRA. Newsom’s plan would redraw California’s maps to offset GOP gerrymandering in Texas or other red states.

In hopes of putting the new maps before California voters in a November 4 special election, state Democrats have expedited the process using a common legislative tactic known as “gut and amend”—in which the content of an existing, unrelated bill was replaced with the redistricting proposal.

Floor votes on the ERRA are expected to take place later this week. But not if California Republicans legislators can help it.

On Tuesday, four Republican legislators in California filed an emergency petition with the state’s Supreme Court, claiming that Newsom’s effort violates the state’s requirement that pieces of legislation undergo a 30-day review period after being introduced.

The lawmakers’ 411-page petition asks that the Supreme Court stay any legislative action on the ERRA for 30 days. Their case will hinge on whether California Democrats’ use of “gut and amend” lawfully bypassed the 30-day hold.

Notably, the Republican lawmakers do not challenge “the use of gut and amend for all purposes,” their petition states; their concern “is confined to the narrow case where the Legislature blatantly and intentionally uses it to circumvent a constitutional right of the people to adequate time to review proposed legislation.”

One of the Republican litigant-legislators, State Assemblyman Tri Ta, accused California Democrats of having “effectively shut voters out of engaging in their own legislative process.”

Responding to the lawsuit, a Newsom spokesperson has told the press: “Republicans are filing a deeply unserious (and truly laughable) lawsuit to stop Americans from voting? We’re neither surprised, nor worried.”

Of course, if California Republicans are looking for a surefire way to stop retaliatory redistricting in their home state, they could also call on GOPers in other states to stand down. As the governor’s office has noted, the new congressional maps would only take effect “if other states engage in mid-cycle partisan gerrymanders.”

Oklahoma’s Education Department has approved plans to force teachers from California or New York to pass an ideology test to ensure that they aren’t too “woke” before they hire them.

The test was created by right-wing think-tank Prager University, which has made headlines recently for developing education material that minimizes American slavery. It features 50 questions about the government, gender, and religion. The Education Department posted five sample questions from the exam, including, “What are the first three words of the Constitution?” and a question about the biological differences between men and women. 

Teaching applicants from California and New York were notified that they will not be accepted without completing the test.  

“We’re not bringing in woke indoctrinators into the classroom,” said Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters. “It’s a very America-first approach.”

Walters hopes to release the exam “soon.” He has also blocked Board of Education members from viewing the exam before potential teachers receive it. 

Oklahoma Education Association president Cari Elledge told USA Today that she believes the move will only exacerbate Oklahoma’s public school teacher shortage. The state teachers union wrote in a letter that Walters “has no legal authority to vet certified teachers based on political ideology.” 

Walters has made headlines previously for trying to force Trump Bibles and prayer into classrooms, reportedly watching pornography during a school board meeting, and inviting ICE to perform raids on the children of his state while they were at school.  

In short, he appears to be a loyal MAGA soldier who happens to have an alarming amount of power over the teachers and students of Oklahoma, and this test only reaffirms that. 

Summer recess is turning out to be a crude wake-up call for Republican lawmakers, who appear to be learning just how much their constituents hate the Trumpian policies they’ve voted for.

Wyoming Representative Harriet Hageman had her own rude awakening at a Natrona County town hall on Monday when she was pressed to explain her ongoing support for Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff plan.

“Who is responsible for establishing tariffs in our country?” asked a male attendee.

“Well right now, the president has taken that authority,” Hageman said, cut off by a loud “boo” from the audience.

“Why did he take that authority? You guys gave it to him. The House of Representatives are responsible for establishing tariffs. You gave that to him,” the attendee continued, urged on by cheers and applause from the crowd.

“The next thing I’d like to ask you, when you look at the bigger picture—” he continued, before Hageman cut him off to claim that the tariffs had “raised over $150 billion.” But that only further incensed the crowd, who began to shout at their elected lawmaker.

“Who pays for them? Who pays for them? We pay for them,” the attendee on the microphone retorted.

“Inflation has not gone up,” Hageman said.

It was the third event in a matter of weeks that Hageman had bombed onstage in front of her constituents. In a heated exchange with a female attendee at a Casper town hall earlier Monday, the 62-year-old’s stated belief that mail-in ballots are not “foundational tools” of democratic elections was practically met with screams from the irate crowd.

The Wyoming Republican was also practically roasted in the rural town of Pinedale on July 29  when she justified the planned repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s landmark “endangerment finding,” which required corporations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. 

“The endangerment finding is absolutely based upon false science,” Hageman told the crowd, who jeered back at her. “Lie, lie!” they chanted over her.

“CO2 is not a pollutant,” Hageman shouted. “As far as the validity and the science that was the foundation for that, they cooked the books.”

Hageman isn’t the only MAGA legislator who has gotten scorched during the last few weeks for voting against the interests of her constituents. New York Representative Elise Stefanik was roundly booed by a feisty crowd when she emerged in Plattsburg Monday to rename a county building, and Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated during a town hall earlier this month for failing to protect SNAP benefits, veterans’ programs, and health care access, combined with voters’ simmering resentment for the GOP’s lagging on the release of the Epstein files.

In response to a perfectly reasonable query from a New York Times reporter, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday lashed out at the paper while dodging the question.

Earlier, President Trump—who, in recent days, has conducted a bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a multilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders, and a one-on-one phone call with Putin—told Fox News that he’d stepped away from his meeting with the European leaders to speak with the Russian president.

“I didn’t [call Putin] in front of them. I thought that would be disrespectful to President Putin,” Trump said. “You know, I wouldn’t do that because they have not had the warmest relations.”

At a press conference later Tuesday, the Times’ Shawn McCreesh asked an obvious question: If the current objective of ongoing Russia-Ukraine peace efforts is to “get everybody on the same page,” then, “why wouldn’t Trump just take the call from Putin while the other leaders were in the room? He said it would be ‘disrespectful’ to do that. Why is it disrespectful?”

In response, Leavitt said, “With all due respect, only a reporter from The New York Times would ask a question like that, Shawn.”

Trump’s 27-year-old press secretary, who recently claimed that a Nobel Peace Prize for the president is “well past time,” went on to tout Trump’s diplomacy with Putin and the European leaders. (McCreesh’s question—however vapid Leavitt considered it to be—was left glaringly unanswered.)

Leavitt has a habit of verbally assailing reporters and condescending to them rather than answering their questions.

In March, Andrew Feinberg of The Independent asked about the government haphazardly classifying people as members of the gang Tren de Aragua based on their tattoos and clothing. “Shame on you,” she replied, “and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals who have—this is a vicious gang, Andrew!”

In June, Jasmine Wright of NOTUS asked Leavitt whether Trump would tolerate peaceful protest during his then-upcoming military parade, in light of the president warning that “any protester [who] wants to come out … will be met with very big force.”

“Of course the president supports peaceful protests. What a stupid question,” Leavitt said.

Fellas, is it “woke” to say slavery was bad? President Donald Trump seems to think so.

The president unleashed a lengthy tirade Tuesday against the Smithsonian Institution, and all museums across the country, claiming that they were “the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’”

“The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been,” Trump wrote. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.”

Trump has criticized education efforts that focus on racism and slavery since 2020. Instead, he prefers a white nationalist vision of the future of history that focuses on the role of white Americans above all others and diminishes the sins of slavery, segregation, and violence as mere bumps on the path toward a future that Americans ought to spend a lot more time celebrating.

In fact, the Smithsonian Institute celebrates a wide variety of accomplishments by a range of historical figures from different backgrounds. For example, the Tuskegee Airmen are immortalized alongside Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon at the National Air and Space Museum.

But Trump can’t seem to see past the variety of skin tones shown in the backward-looking lens of a history museum, and wants to tell a different, “brighter” story. Trump’s efforts to rewrite history are not only despotic, they’re plainly racist.

“I have instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made,” Trump said in his post.

Earlier this month, White House officials laid out detailed plans to eliminate exhibits that they determined represented “improper ideology,” threatening to yank funding if they refused. The memo accused the Smithsonian directly of advancing a “divisive, race-centered ideology.” The White House had previously notified the Smithsonian of a White House initiative to ensure its museums’ “alignment” with a history-whitewashing executive order that Trump signed in March.

Clearly, the president considers teaching the reality of United States history to be fundamentally unpatriotic—when just the opposite is true.

The Trump administration no longer believes the crime statistics provided by the Metropolitan Police Department.

The Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into the Washington police department Tuesday to determine whether the law enforcement bureau had manipulated data to make crime in the city seem lower than officers have claimed, reported The Washington Post.

Donald Trump had highlighted the conspiracy the night before. “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” he wrote on Truth Social Monday night, confirming the existence of the probe.

“This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing!” he continued. “Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour!”

Trump deployed 800 National Guard members to Washington and federalized the capital’s police department last week to combat what he described as a crime-riddled hellscape. To justify the government infringement, the president pointed to rising crime rates, immigrant populations, and homelessness—though the figures he used were from 2023, before violent crime plummeted across the country.

More recent numbers from the Metropolitan Police Department told a remarkably different story: Crime in the nation’s capital was actually down 35 percent in 2024 compared to the year prior. The decline tracked with a nationwide crime drop that saw homicide rates plummet across the country. They have continued to descend this year.

“According to local police data, violent crime is down 27 percent over this time last year, with homicides down 11 percent,” reported the Post.

Those digits were sunny enough that FBI Director Kash Patel used them to pat the Trump administration on the back during a press conference last week, claiming that the “plummeting” homicide numbers were thanks to the president’s policies.

“We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history,” Patel said at the time, unraveling Trump’s rationale for forcing MPD and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital moments after the president announced the directive.

On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration had made nearly 400 arrests since the beginning of the operation. At least 160 of those arrests were undocumented immigrants, reported ABC News.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is no stranger to manipulating data. Another branch of the government—the Bureau of Labor Statistics—is on its own quest to cook up flattering jobs numbers after its July report indicated that the job market had steadily lost employment since Trump announced his “liberation day” tariff plan.