DOJ Releases Ghislaine Maxwell Transcript in Rush to Appease MAGA Base

The Justice Department released transcripts of its interviews with Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell on Friday, the Associated Press reported.

The DOJ interviewed Maxwell as part of its scramble to regain the public’s trust after botching the rollout of the Epstein files. After Attorney General Pam Bondi promised the release of Epstein’s so-called “client list,” she then went on to say the list did not exist.

In the interview, Maxwell reportedly recalled meeting Donald Trump in the early 1990s, when her father, Robert Maxwell, owned the New York Daily News.

“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.

In the interview, Maxwell did not incriminate anyone, including former President Bill Clinton, Trump, or any other high-level officials. She also maintained that Epstein’s so-called “client list” did not exist.

“There is no list. We’ll start with that,” Maxwell said.

Maxwell’s interview aligns with what Bondi and the Trump administration have claimed about the list, but may disappoint those who expected a bombshell about Epstein’s supposed ties to influential politicians and decision-makers.

Maxwell also took the opportunity to heap praise on Trump. “President Trump was always very cordial and kind to me,” she said. “I just want to say that I find—I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve liked him.”

She also said she “loved going” to Mar-a-Lago.

Of Trump’s relationship with Epstein, she described it as mainly a social one, saying she’d never seen Trump at Epstein’s home or in a private setting. And certainly not getting a massage.

“I actually never saw the president in any sort of massage setting. I never witnessed the president in any inappropriate setting in any way. The president was never inappropriate with anybody,” she said.

Maxwell also said she had never recruited a masseuse from Mar-a-Lago, contrary to what Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s accusers, said about how she was trafficked by Maxwell in 2000. At 16, Giuffre worked as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, where she was approached by Maxwell to work as a traveling masseuse, which led to her abuse by Epstein, Maxwell, and their associates, she said. Giuffre died by suicide this year.

Trump, however, has told a different story. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One last month, Trump claimed that Epstein “stole” several of the president’s underage resort employees—including Giuffre.

Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Epstein traffic underage girls, isn’t necessarily the most trustworthy of sources. She’s angling for a pardon from the president and so would have every reason to downplay any ties between Trump and Epstein, who had a documented multidecade relationship.

It’s yet to be seen whether the transcripts will quiet MAGA’s uproar about the administration’s lack of transparency on the infamous sex trafficker.

This story has been updated.

In Portland, Oregon, Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s use of chemical weapons has chased away a K-8 school just weeks before the start of the academic year, Rolling Stone reports.

The Cottonwood School, a publicly funded charter school, was, until this month, located adjacent to the city’s ICE facility. But in recent months, as protests against Trump’s mass deportations ramped up around the facility, ICE agents began to deploy tear gas against demonstrators.

According to the school’s executive director, Laura Cartwright, chemical munitions began to stray onto school grounds.

“At the end of the school year, we started noticing more activity at the ICE building, and there were chemicals being used on a regular basis and munitions being found on our playground,” she told local NBC affiliate KGW.

Cartwright also told Portland’s ABC affiliate that they were finding the munitions on a daily basis.“We were getting footage in the evenings of green gases, and gases being used near our gardens and enveloping our area,” she said.

As Rolling Stone reported, in June, the fence of the school’s play area displayed a laminated message. Its reported content, which matches a statement Cottonwood posted to Facebook, denounced the “harm being inflicted on our neighbors, ecosystem, students and school” and called on ICE to cease using weapons such as tear gas, “‘green’ gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets reported near our campus.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve experienced this, Cartwright told Rolling Stone. The school, after all, weathered protests against police brutality in Portland in 2020. (Per KGW, the school emerged from that summer relatively unscathed.)

Historically, the Cottonwood School has operated “harmoniously with the protesters,” Cartwright explained to Rolling Stone. “Our issue is the chemical weapons being used against them that were impacting our space.… We can’t have children picking up a plastic tear-gas ball that’s going to pop.”

As enrollment began to take a hit and it became clear that remaining in place was untenable, the school ultimately decamped to another Portland neighborhood.

Alina Habba is whining that federal judges aren’t respecting the president after one ruled that she’d been unlawfully serving as acting U.S. attorney for New Jersey for over a month.

“I am the pick of the president, I am the pick of Pam Bondi our attorney general, and I will serve this country like I have for the last several years in any capacity,” Habba said about the challenges to her appointment during an appearance on Fox News Thursday night.

“It’s disturbing what we’re seeing. It’s not surprising, but it’s disturbing,” she continued. “They think they have a voice for five minutes, they try to be activists.

“And Pam Bondi called it like it is. The attorney general said it today: We will not fall to rogue judges. We will not fall to people trying to be political when they should just be doing their job, respecting the president,” Trump’s former lawyer said.

But what Habba and Bondi don’t seem to get is that a judge’s job is to uphold the law, not bend to the president’s every whim.

Last month, New Jersey federal judges ousted Habba, refusing to vote to extend her 120-day appointment as U.S. attorney for New Jersey. But the Trump administration found a loophole to keep its thoughtless foot soldier in place without Senate confirmation. After Bondi fired the first assistant U.S. attorney who was approved to replace her, and then appointed Habba to that position, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer found herself as acting U.S. attorney once again.

A federal judge Thursday ruled that Habba had been illegally serving as U.S. attorney for New Jersey since July 1 and blocked her from prosecuting two criminal cases where defendants had challenged her appointment.

The combination of tariff-driven inflation and a downturn in hiring has posed a “challenging situation” for the U.S. economy, according to Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

Delivering an annual address in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Friday morning, Powell underscored that the economy was engaged in a “curious kind of balance” from a slowdown in both the supply and demand for workers.

“This unusual situation suggests that downside risks to employment are rising. And if those risks materialize, they can do so quickly in the form of sharply higher layoffs and rising unemployment,” Powell warned.

Powell pointed to the July jobs report, which revised employment data from the previous two months. The updated numbers moved the three-month growth average to 35,000, the lowest three-month period since 2010 (other than the pandemic). It was a stark contrast from the growth felt during 2024, when the measure showed an increase of 168,000 jobs per month. The July report’s downsizing also suggested that while some sectors, such as health care and social assistance, gained jobs, the vast majority of the market lost employment.

“This slowdown is much larger than assessed just a month ago, as the earlier figures for May and June were revised down substantially,” Powell continued. “But it does not appear that the slowdown in job growth has opened up a large margin of slack in the labor market—an outcome we want to avoid.

“Indeed, labor force growth has slowed considerably this year with the sharp falloff in immigration, and the labor force participation rate has edged down in recent months,” Powell said.

The Federal Reserve chair also noted that the effects of Trump’s tariffs on consumer prices are “now clearly visible,” and that the country’s central bank expects the price increases to “accumulate over the coming months.”

On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered a series of confusing comments about that morning’s FBI raid on the home of his onetime national security adviser John Bolton.

The president told reporters that he was not yet briefed on the raid on the Maryland residence of Bolton, who is a vocal critic of the president’s decision-making, character, and mental acuity.

“I saw it on television this morning,” Trump said, quickly adding: “I’m not a fan of John Bolton. He’s a real, sort of a low life.… He’s not a smart guy. He could be a very unpatriotic guy.”

Since his contentious 17-month stint in Trump’s first administration, Bolton has repeatedly drawn his former boss’s ire—including for publishing a 2020 tell-all, In the Room Where It Happened, which described Trump as incompetent and unfit for office. Trump’s first-term Justice Department investigated Bolton over the book, claiming it contained classified information. Similarly, Friday’s raid, per NBC, was part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”

During his remarks about Bolton, Trump also made a point to assert that he “could” have hypothetically been the one who ordered the search but insisted this was done by Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Justice Department.

In doing so, the president sounded not unlike a Mafia boss describing how he insulates himself from misdeeds.

“I tell Pam [Bondi], and I tell the group, ‘I don’t want to know, but just—you have to do what you have to do.’ I don’t want to know about it. It’s not necessary,” Trump said, adding, “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law enforcement officer, but I feel that it’s better this way.”

Here, Trump all but admitted to borrowing a page from England’s King Henry II, who is said to have uttered, regarding the archbishop of Canterbury, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”—and thereby enjoyed plausible deniability when his underlings killed the man vexing him.

It’s not the first time Trump has sounded like a mob boss or a monarch. And it surely won’t be the last time the administration seemingly wields the government against those deemed guilty of lèse-majesté against him.

Far-right influencer Laura Loomer complained to State Secretary Marco Rubio about U.S. support for injured Gazan children. Then the aid stopped.

The self-appointed “loyalty enforcer” has had enormous success influencing the Trump administration from the safety of her X account: At least 16 individuals have been fired from the federal government after Loomer singled them out as covert Democratic agents. But the unelected provocateur’s reach apparently extends far beyond snipping federal payrolls and into crafting and implementing foreign policy.

Over the last several weeks, Loomer had become fixated on a small number of injured Palestinian children who had arrived in the United States by way of a charity called Heal Palestine for medical treatment related to their injuries of war. The wounded kids suffered from missing limbs, severe burns, and other dire medical needs, but the McCarthy-esque agitator was unsympathetic.

Loomer openly vilified them on social media, referring to the children as “Islamic invaders” and their presence in the U.S. as a “national security threat.” She called on the White House to fire the State Department employee who authorized the children’s visas.

Last Friday, Loomer claimed that she had elevated her concerns to the agency by speaking directly with Rubio. The next day, the State Department paused all visitor visas from Gaza.

“All visitor visas for individuals from Gaza are being stopped while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to issue a small number of temporary medical-humanitarian visas in recent days,” the agency’s official X account announced.

Rubio defended the decision the following day.

“First of all, it’s not just kids,” Rubio told CBS News’s Margaret Brennan. “It’s a bunch of adults that are accompanying them. Second, we had outreach from multiple congressional offices asking questions about it, and so we’re going to reevaluate how those visas are being granted.”

Loomer, an apparently proud bigot, has often used her social media influence to flaunt and advance her racist and Islamaphobic viewpoints. But her recent proximity to Donald Trump—which she describes as a “friendship”—has hoisted her intolerant and hateful ideologies into the throng of the federal government, contorting critical national and international decisions as little more than a private citizen.

It’s been almost a year since President Donald Trump targeted Springfield, Ohio, with racist lies that Haitian immigrants had begun eating their neighbors’ pets in order to stir up his voter base. Now, the city’s Haitian immigrants, who helped revive Springfield’s struggling economy, are being chased out by Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

Springfield is currently home to an estimated 10,000-15,000 Haitian immigrants, but The New York Times reported Friday that dozens have already fled the city—and more are sure to follow.

The wave of Haitian immigration had helped Springfield, a town of just 60,000, rebound, the Times reported. Now, all that could go away.

The Trump administration has already ended some humanitarian programs that allowed Haitians to live and work legally in the United States, leaving local employers with no choice but to dismiss scores of workers. A nearby Amazon warehouse, a major employer in the area, was forced to dismiss hundreds of employees in June. The Times reported that a local food pantry at the local nonprofit St. Vincent de Paul had received twice as many Haitians families as usual on a recent Tuesday.

Thousands more Haitians are expected to lose work in February 2026, when the administration plans to end Temporary Protected Status, which prevents their deportation.

And the more Haitian immigrants are forced to lean on social services, or fill up emergency rooms because they lack access to health insurance, the more likely it is that politicians will use these changes to stoke the same issues that Trump preyed upon: scarcity and sickness.

Vice President JD Vance pushed rumors on the campaign trail that the city’s new arrivals had contributed to the spread of communicable diseases, though local health officials said there had been no discernable increase in those illnesses.

In July, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, who’d refuted but refused to condemn Trump’s racist lies last year, said that “suddenly losing a large number” of workers would have a “significant impact” on businesses. “It’s not going to be good,” he said.

Now, Haitian immigrants face three options. They could go back to Haiti, which is still plagued by widespread violence, or attempt to gain asylum elsewhere, such as Canada. Or they could remain without lawful status, facing steep economic hurdles, as targets for Trump’s massive deportation scheme.

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser turned vocal Trump critic, is the latest target of the president’s weaponization of the government against his political adversaries.

On Friday morning, the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Maryland home of Bolton, whose 17-month stint under the president was characterized by stark foreign policy disagreements until it abruptly ended.

NBC News reports that the raid is part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records”—accusations that echo Trump’s previous attempts to wield the government to silence and punish Bolton for supposedly sharing classified information in his 2020 tell-all book, The Room Where It Happened, which described Trump as incompetent and unfit for the presidency.

Bolton frequently issues scathing criticisms of Trump. In March 2024, he said the then candidate “hasn’t got the brains” to be a dictator. Months later, he said that, while Trump “falls into the general definition of fascist,” he lacks the thoughtfulness to fit the bill: “To be a fascist, you have to have a philosophy. Trump’s not capable of that,” he said.

Last August, Bolton said Trump doesn’t lie a lot, “because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference.” This February, he told CNN the president’s “mind is full of mush.”

He also regularly lays into the president for his perceived friendliness toward Russia in its war against Ukraine. In 2022, he called Trump a “useful idiot” for Putin.

And just last week, Bolton incensed the president by saying he had, in arranging his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, handed the Russian president a victory.

Bolton’s barbs have, of course, not been ignored.

Trump, for example, called the ex–national security adviser “really dumb” and a loser for his latest criticisms. And after meeting with Putin, Trump blamed “stupid people like” Bolton for “mak[ing] it much harder” to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

On Friday, top Trump officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, seemed to gloat about the FBI raid in oblique posts on X.

This latest instance of lawfare comes as the Trump administration escalates its attacks against other political opponents—most recently training its sights on Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James. This is not to mention Trump’s threats to launch even more retributive legal attacks against his perceived foe Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, among others.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced Friday that the Trump administration would stop issuing work visas for commercial truck drivers.

“The increasing number of foreign drivers operating large tractor-trailer trucks on U.S. roads is endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers,” Rubio wrote in a post on X, announcing the new policy. 

The decision appears to be spurred by a recent traffic accident in Florida that officials have described as an alleged “vehicular homicide.” A commercial truck driver was arrested earlier this month after allegedly attempting to make an unauthorized U-turn, resulting in a crash that killed three people. Because the driver, Harjinder Singh, was an undocumented immigrant from India, Republicans have been quick to politicize the accident. 

Florida Lieutenant Governor Jay Collins blamed California Governor Gavin Newsom for the crash on Thursday, because Singh had received his commercial driver’s license in California after illegally entering the United States from Mexico. “Three lives lost because of Gavin Newsom, because of California’s failed policies,” Collins said, according to Fox News. “We’re done with that shit.”

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin was also quick to point the finger at Newsom, writing on X Monday, “How many more innocent people have to die before @GavinNewsom stops playing games with the safety of the American public?”  

It’s not clear what Singh’s country of origin or immigration status could possibly have to do with his driving abilities, but that’s not stopping the Trump administration from using the fatal accident in Florida as justification to punish all immigrants. 

Rubio’s decision comes amid a national shortage of commercial truck drivers. The industry is struggling with a shortage of about 60,000 drivers, according to trade group the American Trucking Association. 

Foreign-born drivers make up about 18 percent of the total commercial truck driver workforce as of October 2024, according to the National Association of Truck Stop Owners, citing Labor Department data.

Donald Trump’s vision of the nation’s capital does not appear to be attuned to reality.

Nearly two hours after midnight, the president claimed that the federalization of Washington’s law enforcement had brought peace to the city, apparently ignoring the citywide protests rejecting the White House occupation. But Trump’s self-praise came part and parcel with an ominous threat: that a “complete and federal takeover” of Washington was still a possibility.

“Washington, D.C. is SAFE AGAIN!” Trump announced on Truth Social. “The crowds are coming back, the spirit is high, and our D.C. National Guard and Police are doing a fantastic job.”

In the first week of the operation, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that the administration had made nearly 400 arrests across the capital. At least 160 of those arrests were undocumented immigrants, reported ABC News.

“They are out in force, and are NOT PLAYING GAMES!!!” Trump continued. “As bad as it sounds to say, there were no murders this week for the first time in memory. Mayor Muriel Bowser must immediately stop giving false and highly inaccurate crime figures, or bad things will happen, including a complete and total Federal takeover of the City! Washington D.C. will soon be great again!!!”

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. But the administration is apparently not satisfied with the narrative of that data. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced a criminal investigation into the Washington police department to determine whether the law enforcement bureau had manipulated data to make crime in the city seem lower than officers have claimed.