Republican-Led House Oversight Makes Major Move On Epstein Case

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee will meet with 10 victims of serial sexual abuser and wealthy socialite Jeffrey Epstein. The meeting will seek to shed more light on “the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation of Mr. Jeffrey Epstein and Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell, the circumstances and subsequent investigations of Mr. Epstein’s death, the operation of sex-trafficking rings and ways for the federal government to effectively combat them, and potential violations of ethics rules related to elected officials,” Oversight Chair James Comer noted.

This bipartisan effort comes after months of distraction and denial from the Trump administration—from Attorney General Pam Bondi first claiming she had the Epstein files on her desk, to later saying there actually were no files and the case was effectively closed, to President Trump himself proclaiming that anyone who still cared about the said files is a big stupid idiot. That fiasco only fed more attention to the case, and now nearly 70 percent of the country believes that someone in the government (perhaps … the president) is hiding something. House Speaker Mike Johnson even called summer recess early to avoid having to vote on Epstein related issues. Now, as Congress returns, eyes are turning back to it.

If the House Oversight’s move wasn’t concerning enough for the Trump administration, Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie will be holding a public press conference at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. “I pray Speaker Johnson will listen to the pleas of these victims for justice and quit trying to block a vote on our legislation to release the Epstein files,” Massie wrote on X.

Massie and Khanna filed a bipartisan discharge petition calling on the Justice Department to release the Epstein files in full. The move struck a nerve with Trump, who called Massie “the worst Republican congressman.”

We’ll see if Trump has anything more to say on Wednesday morning.

“These victims haven’t spoken for decades. When Epstein got that lenient plea deal, no one talked to the victims or their lawyers,” Khanna said to Fox News Digital on Monday. “There are a lot of other rich, powerful men, politicians, business leaders, who have committed abuse and who have not been held accountable. That’s what we’re going to hear on September 3, and people are going to be outraged, and I don’t see how, after that, the House can’t vote for the release of these files.”

Owen Shroyer, a host for Infowars, announced Monday that he is leaving the conspiracy-driven news platform due to a fight with its founder, Alex Jones. Jones believed Shroyer was too “anti-Trump,” according to the outgoing host.

“I have nothing but respect and appreciation for Alex and everything we’ve done at Infowars,” Shroyer said in a livestream late Monday. “I’m not sure that was mutual, but it doesn’t really matter.”

Prior to his decision to leave, Shroyer said, “Alex had been coming into my show [War Room], and talking about how I’m negative and calling me a pessimist, and all this other stuff, which is fine.” Shroyer said. “He says I’m too negative, he says I’m a pessimist, whatever, I’m too anti-Trump.”

Shroyer decided to take time off, thinking “maybe he’s right.” But their issues persisted when he returned.

“It’s not to say that I didn’t have creative control over the Infowars War Room,” Shroyer said. “But I mean, imagine. It’s like somebody staring over your back 24/7. And so every single day that I came back, it was either a guest I was told I had on at the last minute or it was him coming into the studio—he wants me to cover this, he wants me to cover that.”

On Thursday, these frustrations came to a head, as Shroyer said he prepared a three-hour show that he thought he would host where a “babysitter wouldn’t be looking over my shoulder.”

“I was wrong,” he continued. “It happened, and I just said I’m out.”

On air, Jones attributed Shroyer’s absence to a family emergency, but, Shroyer said, “There was no family emergency. I walked off the show.”

Jones on X Tuesday said he wishes Shroyer the best, but denied insinuations of censorship, which he claimed were drummed up to promote the departing host’s next venture.

“I only encouraged him to be more positive in general about the fact that humanity has come a long way in the great awakening,” Jones wrote—the “great awakening” referring to a time during which humanity is “waking up” to the supposed sinister plans of a global elite cabal. “I am surprised by the censorship claim he is hinting at but if he thinks he needs to say that to build his show that will be on him.”

A new poll has found that Americans have lost faith in the American dream. 

A July 2025 Wall Street Journal-NORC survey found that nearly 70 percent of registered voters said that the idea that “if you work hard, you will get ahead,” no longer held true, or never did. The Journal reported that it was the highest percentage in nearly 15 years of surveys. 

Forty-six percent of respondents said that the ideal once held true but not anymore, and 23 percent said it never held true—a five point increase from the previous two years of surveys. 

The survey also found that pessimism was plaguing Democratic voters: 90 percent of Democrats held a negative view of prospects for themselves and their children, while only 55 percent of Republicans felt down about their futures. 

Across generations and demographics, respondents fretted that the next generation would struggle to buy homes or save for retirement, and believed that the previous generation had an easier time securing homes, being full-time parents, and launching businesses.

An engine for some of this uncertainty is the substantial disconnect between the traditional measures of economic growth and the real economic experiences of Americans. While the economy was comparatively robust under President Joe Biden, many Americans still experienced economic hardship. That disconnect was part of why President Donald Trump was elected into office, where he has promised to improve the nation’s economy—and managed to destabilize the global one.  

Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have decimated key trading partnerships, obliterated thousands of jobs across the country, and sent prices soaring—with even worse to come. The Trump administration’s silver lining: You and your children, and your children’s children, can work in the same factory forever.

Is it any surprise, then, that the survey also found that American exceptionalism has taken a hit? Only 17 percent percent of respondents said that America had the best economy in the world, while 40 percent said other nations had better economies—a 15 point increase from 2021. 

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Tuesday ruled that the Trump administration’s use of military troops in Los Angeles was a blatant, illegal violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. Breyer has blocked the president from deploying the National Guard to California again. 

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, Defendants— President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense— deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced,” Breyer wrote in his decision. 

“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” he continued. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.... Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.” 

Breyer put the ruling on hold for 10 days, as the Trump administration is likely to appeal.

The president sent 4,000 National Guards troops and 700 active-duty Marines  to Los Angeles after he claimed that “violent mobs” were attacking ICE officers—the same officers snatching their friends, family, and neighbors from their homes and workplaces. That was a clear exaggeration then, and now Breyer has made it known now that it was a complete violation of U.S. law as well. 

This move, if extended, will likely have a significant impact on Trump’s stated plans to expand his military takeover of Washington, D.C., to other cities like New York, Baltimore, and Chicago. The president has used exaggerated numbers and descriptions of these cities in recent weeks as his federal takeover of D.C. continues, serving at least in some capacity as a trial run for similar actions elsewhere. 

This story has been updated. 

Iowa Senator Joni Ernst reportedly told confidantes that she would not seek reelection in the 2026 midterms.

Multiple sources told CBS News that Ernst plans to announce her decision next Thursday.

The Iowa Republican’s apparent decision comes just a few months after a horrifying gaffe at a town hall.

When constituents expressed concerns that people would die as a result of President Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, she responded by saying, “Well, we all are going to die.” And as voters reeled from her callous comment about millions of Americans being booted from their Medicaid coverage, Ernst doubled down.

The senator’s comments seriously tainted her political reputation, sparking widespread speculation that she would not run again. But Ernst sent mixed signals, refusing to say whether or not she would seek another term.

In June, she brought on Bryan Kraber to manage her 2026 reelection campaign, signaling her intent to turn her sinking ship around. But she also delayed her annual “Roast and Ride” fundraiser until October. Typically, Ernst—who has been in office since 2015—holds the event in June.

A few Iowa Democrats have already waded into the race, including State Senator Zach Wahls, Des Moines School Board chairwoman Jackie Norris, and State Representatives J.D. Scholten and Josh Turek. Turek even used Ernst’s infamous existential blunder in an ad announcing his candidacy for her Senate seat.

As recently as last week, Ernst claimed she wasn’t concerned about Democratic challengers in her state. “Bring it on, folks. Because I tell you, at the end of the day, Iowa is going to be red,” she said.

One source told CBS News that Ernst feels that she achieved her goal of serving two terms, and now intends to head for the private sector.

This story has been updated.

Judge Zia M. Faruqui has handed yet another legal defeat to Trump-appointed D.C. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, calling her attempt to jail a local attorney and West Point graduate “one of the weakest requests for detention” he’d ever seen, according to WUSA9.

Anthony Bryant, who served a tour in Afghanistan, was arrested early Monday morning on charges of assaulting, resisting or impeding police, threatening a federal official and threatening to kidnap or injure a person.

Pirro’s office alleged that Bryant approached National Guardsmen who were patrolling 14th Street on Sunday night and allegedly yelled “These are our streets!” and “I’ll kill you.” Pirro also claims that Byrant “threw his shoulder” into one of the Guardsmen’s shoulders. The police found a legally registered handgun on Bryant when they arrested him.

Bryant was released after his initial arrest, but then arrested again and placed in jail on Wednesday on the order of Judge G. Michael Harvey. On Thursday, Judge Faruqui stepped in.

“This is perhaps one of the weakest requests for detention I have seen and something that, prior to two weeks ago, would have been unthinkable in this courthouse,” Faruqui said, adding that the government has a “as close to zero” chance of demonstrating Bryant was a real threat.

Bryant’s attorneys also alleged that the police report failed to mention that Guardsmen yelled slurs at Bryant, who is Black. There is no video of the alleged scene because National Guardsmen conveniently don’t wear body cameras. This made the prosecution’s claims virtually impossible to prove.

“To charge people for what seems to be lesser conduct and then say they’re so dangerous they have to be locked up,” Faruqui said. “It puts prosecutors in an impossible position.”

Bryant was released by Faruqui, ordered to hand over his firearms, and advised to avoid tense situations. Faruqui also noted that Harvey and Pirro’s urge to throw Bryant in jail for such a minor infraction was contradictory to the Justice Department’s release of hundreds of January 6 rioters who’d been jailed on charges much more serious than Bryant’s.

This all comes as Pirro’s office failed to convince three different grand juries that a D.C. woman deserved a felony charge for allegedly placing herself between ICE agents and someone they were detaining. They also failed to charge the Subway Sandwich Thrower with a felony.

House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Friday when reporters called attention to his state’s distressing murder rate.

While appearing on Fox News, Johnson was confronted with a clip of California Governor Gavin Newsom name-dropping the Louisiana Republican, while mocking President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Democratic-led cities.

“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the president of the United States will look at the facts. Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state, and district,” Newsom said during a press conference on Thursday. “Just look at the murder rate, which is nearly four times higher than California, in Louisiana.”

Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, approximately 300 percent higher than California’s homicide rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.*

Johnson didn’t even try to account for the dismal crime stats.

“Again, Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention, he can name drop me all that he wants, he needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this,” Johnson said.

“Look, we have crime in cities all across America and we’re against that everywhere and we need to bring policies to bear,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually, but we’ve got to address it everywhere it rears its ugly head.”

While Johnson isn’t stupid enough to get on board with Trump’s tactic of simply pretending Republican-led cities don’t have bad crime rates, he seems content to completely ignore the situation in his own district.

In fact, Shreveport, which is part of Johnson’s district, landed at 25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people. Newsom has claimed that Shreveport’s murder rate is six times higher than the rate in San Fransisco, a city regularly criticized by Trump and other Republicans.

No city in California made the list.

The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington, D.C., where the president has deployed thousands of National Guard troops, some of which were sent by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.

Newsom responded to Johnson’s Fox News appearance Friday by copying Trump’s social media cadence. “Mike ‘Little Man’ Johnson can’t even answer a basic question: why is Louisiana’s homicide rate nearly 4X HIGHER than California’s????? LOUISIANA IS A FAILED STATE!” he wrote in a post on X.

* This post originally misidentified how much higher the Louisiana homicide rate was compared to California.

Donald Trump has tapped Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and long-time associate of billionaire Peter Thiel, as acting director of the Centers for Disease Control.

Taking the place of Susan Monarez, whose firing has raised alarm over the dangerous incompetence of the health department under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., O’Neill will bring to the role no medical or scientific background.

But he does have a history of feverish advocacy of deregulation and libertarianism, as the progressive group Public Citizen highlighted when he was nominated for his current role at Trump’s health department.

In a 2014 speech, for instance, O’Neill—then managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital—proposed allowing drugs onto the market without first determining whether they even work. “Let people start using them, at their own risk,” he said. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”

He revealed in the same speech that, while working for George W. Bush’s health department, he opposed the Food and Drug Administration regulating firms that use algorithms in lab tests, such as biotech company 23andMe.

He’s also a proponent of legalizing the organ trade. “There are plenty of healthy spare kidneys walking around, unused,” as he put it during a 2009 talk—where he also argued in favor of generally leaving health care to the whims of the market. “Because there’s not a free market in health care, people are suffering very significant health consequences that in a free market they would not suffer,” he claimed.

The 2009 remarks were delivered at a seasteading conference. For those who don’t keep up with plutocrats’ vanity projects, seasteading is the idea of establishing autonomous, floating communities at sea. Until last year, O’Neill served on the board of a Thiel-backed seasteading venture, which was founded by anarcho-capitalist Patri Friedman—of whom O’Neill is a self-described disciple—who outlined his goal as follows, according to SFGate:

“I envision tens of millions of people in an Apple or a Google country,” where the high-tech giants would govern and residents would have no vote. “If people are allowed to opt in or out, you can have a successful dictatorship.”

O’Neill also appears to share, with many of his Silicon Valley peers, a fixation on anti-aging.

President Donald Trump is once again stomping all over Congress’s power of the purse.

The president invoked a rare “pocket rescission” to claw back roughly $5 billion from the U.S. State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the New York Post.

Trump wrote to Congress Thursday night requesting $4.9 billion in funding toward international aid efforts, including $3.2 billion in development assistance from USAID, the essential aid organization Trump bypassed Congress to dismantle.

Congress has 45 days to decide whether or not to approve Trump’s request, but the White House Office of Management and Budget says it can just freeze the funds until the fiscal year ends on September 30, ensuring the funds’ cancellation.

All of this comes as Congress stares down the barrel of an October 1 deadline to avert a total government shutdown.

“Congress can choose to vote to rescind or continue the funds—it doesn’t matter,” an official from the White House budget office said in a statement, per Politico. “This approach is rare but not unprecedented.”

While OMB, run by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, is all for a pocket rescission, the Government Accountability Office holds that such a move is illegal.

General Counsel Mark Paoletta said that when Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter made similar requests, “GAO noted the lapse without objection.” He claimed that GAO had only recently changed its tune because of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Trump also wants to scrap funding allocated to the State Department, including $521 million in contributions to international organizations and $393 million for peacekeeping activities. The president would take back another $445 million separately allocated for peacekeeping, and $322 million from a joint USAID-State Department Democracy Fund.

For the second time in just a few weeks, the Justice Department has done Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, Brad, a solid.

On Wednesday, the DOJ dropped felony wire fraud charges against a client of Brad Bondi named Sid Chakraverty, a property developer who was accused of defrauding programs meant to support women- and minority-owned businesses.

According to the motion to dismiss, filed by a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, the move was in keeping with the administration’s stance that programs “that use race- and sex-based presumptions”—as did the one Chakraverty was said to have scammed—are unconstitutional. It was an abrupt reversal from a motion the Trump appointee had signed 24 days earlier, Bloomberg reports, “defending the merits of the prosecution.”

Brad Bondi celebrated the outcome on LinkedIn, writing, “I am proud of our excellent work in winning this victory.”

This was his second victory within a month’s time thanks to his sister’s Justice Department. In July, federal prosecutors scrapped Covid-19 relief fraud charges against a Florida politician he was representing.

In both cases, the Justice Department issued identical statements to the media: “This decision was made through proper channels, and the Attorney General had no role in it.”

Back in March, yet another of Brad Bondi’s clients—former electric vehicle CEO and Trump campaign megadonor Trevor Milton—saw fraud charges against him disappear, this time due to a pardon from the president.