Trump Desperately Tries to Kill Petition to Release Epstein Files

President Donald Trump’s administration warned Republicans Tuesday that voting to release more files on Jeffrey Epstein would be seen as an act of war.

Republican Representative Thomas Massie is leading the charge on moving for a House vote to release the Epstein files in full, following the GOP-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s lackluster release of more than 33,000 documents on the child sex offender Tuesday night, 97 percent of which had already been made public.

Representatives Massie and Ro Khanna had previously introduced a bipartisan bill in July to get the Justice Department to release the full cache of the Epstein files within a month. Then, on Tuesday, Massie filed a discharge petition.

The White House was less than pleased.

“Helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration,” a White House official said in a statement to CNN.

Massie has already managed to secure signatures for the petition from some of the biggest firebrand Republican representatives, including Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Their support means Massie needs only two more signatures to force a vote.

“There’s a major pressure campaign from the White House right now, and also from the speaker,” Massie said on Tuesday. “But I think there are enough Republicans who are listening to their constituents and care about these victims that we’ll get the 218 signatures we need.”

In her latest seeming appeasement to President Donald Trump amid his federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser on Tuesday ordered that the city work with federal law enforcement indefinitely.

With the one-month limit (sans congressional approval) on Trump’s takeover approaching, Bowser issued an executive order stating that D.C. will “ensure coordination with federal law enforcement to the maximum extent allowable by law within the District.” The order also requires that D.C. “continue to communicate its priorities to federal counterparts and other ways the federal government can assist the District.”

No expiration date is provided for the directive, which the Democratic mayor described as a “pathway forward beyond” Trump’s dubiously grounded 30-day crime emergency.

Trump is already delighted by Bowser’s order, a White House official told The Washington Post, and the president described the D.C. mayor as “very helpful,” in a press conference Tuesday.

While Bowser’s order takes a largely warm stance on the takeover, it does lay out plans to “advance requests” that “federal partners” make efforts to “maintain community confidence in law enforcement,” including by not wearing masks to conceal their identities—a practice that has, thus far, seemingly persisted despite Bowser’s objections.

Bowser has faced criticism for her increasingly conciliatory approach to Trump’s takeover, which is opposed by eight in 10 D.C. residents, according to a Washington Post poll last month. At a press conference last week, Bowser said she “greatly appreciate[s] the surge of officers.”

Prior to Bowser’s executive order Tuesday, a coalition of progressive groups in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter criticizing her perceived embrace of Trump’s occupation. “Your talk about crime fighting and crime rates only lends credence to the federal overreach, invites future attempts to degrade our home rule, and feeds a narrative that dehumanizes our neighbors and puts them at greater risk,” they wrote.

“History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter continued. “There is no strategy in appeasement, only the reality that the more we give, the more they will take.”

President Donald Trump ended his press conference in a huff Tuesday, after snapping at a reporter who asked him about his administration’s legal loss in California.

The journalist asked the president to respond to a federal judge’s ruling that the Trump administration’s decision to deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles had blatantly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, an act prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law.

“Well, it was a radical left judge, but—very importantly—what did you not tell me in that question, or statement, that you made?” Trump asked, muttering a bit to himself.

“Well, I was asking for your response,” the reporter said.

“No, no, you didn’t say what the judge said though,” Trump said. “The judge said, ‘But you can leave the 300 people that you already have in place, they can continue to be in place.’ That’s all we need. But why didn’t you put that as part of your statement?”

Trump appeared desperate to reframe the judge’s ruling as a victory instead of a defeat, and was defensive that the simple question hadn’t aligned with that framing.

“’Cause, the judge, the same judge, ruled exactly as you said, except the judge said that you could leave the 300 people that you already have in place, they can stay, they can remain, they can do what they have to do,” Trump continued, before abruptly dismissing the reporters from the press conference to which he’d arrived an hour late.

The president was referring to U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruling that the Trump administration was not required to withdraw 300 National Guard troops already stationed in Los Angeles but that the government could not use them as it had, to “set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”

The judge barred the administration from using the military in California “to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants” in ways that violate the Posse Comitatus Act. He gave the Trump administration until noon on September 12 to comply.

Acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli gave no indication that the Trump administration planned to abide by the judge’s ruling, claiming that federal agents had needed protection from “thugs” supported by Democratic officials.

This weekend, the internet hummed with rumors that President Donald Trump, 79, had died. The half-joking gossip was spurred by a week-long stretch with no public appearances, as well as comments by Vice President JD Vance about his readiness to assume the presidency should a “terrible tragedy” occur.

Trump on Tuesday was asked about the speculation by Fox News reporter Peter Doocy, in the president’s first public appearance since then: a press conference during which he seemed his usual self—although the back of his right hand (which has received increasing attention of late for a recurring bruise, often covered with ill-matched concealer) did appear discolored.

“How did you find out over the weekend that you were dead?” Doocy asked—as the president remained silent and his gaze darted to the right. “You see that?” Doocy followed up, to which Trump replied, “No.”

Trump was clued in by the reporter, as Vance could be seen smiling over the president’s shoulder.

In response, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden had evaded scrutiny for a lack of public appearances, before saying he’d had an “active” weekend, with media appearances, including a Friday interview (published Monday) with conservative news site The Daily Caller; posts to his Truth Social account (“long Truths, and I think pretty poignant Truths,” he said); and a trip to his Virginia golf club.

“I’ve been very active, actually, over the weekend. I didn’t hear that one. That’s pretty serious stuff,” he continued, before blaming the mainstream media for the rumors that were, in reality, driven largely by random social media users.

“Well, it’s fake news,” the president went on. “You know, it’s just so—it’s so fake. That’s why the media has so little credibility. I knew they were saying, like, ‘Is he OK? How’s he feeling? What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I just—left.’ And it’s also sort of a longer weekend, you know. It’s Labor Day weekend, so I would say a lot of people—No, I was very active this Labor Day. I had heard that, but I didn’t hear it to that extent.”

Trump did not explain the bruise on his hand.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is replacing immigration judges with hundreds of military lawyers, following the Trump administration’s monthslong purge of immigration courts.

Hegseth approved more than 600 military lawyers from the Department of Defense to serve as temporary immigration judges, nearly doubling the ranks of jurists overseeing the president’s massive deportation efforts, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. It’s a move that indicates the Trump administration was simply clearing house to install its own ranks of loyalist judges, intent on seeing the president’s deportations through.

A memo dated August 27 said that the military would begin dispatching batches of 150 attorneys to the Justice Department “as soon as practicable” and have an initial group identified by next week. Appointments would last no longer than 179 days, expiring in February, but they can be renewed.

Since President Donald Trump entered office, a series of departures and firings have left only roughly 600 immigration judges to oversee the nation’s 71 immigration courts and handle a backlog of 3.7 million cases—and the number increases every day.

Most recently in July, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers claimed that another 17 immigration judges had been fired “without cause.” In February, Kerry Doyle, a longtime immigration attorney, who was part of an upcoming class of immigration judges who were all dismissed, alleged that her dismissal was politically motivated.

As a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has reached an all-time high. At the end of August, a record number of 61,226 people were detained by ICE, and 70 percent of them did not have criminal convictions.

President Trump gave a strange, clearly made-up answer when asked about a viral video of someone tossing black trash bags out of a White House window. 

“There’s a video that is circulating online now of the White House where a window is open to the residence upstairs, and somebody is throwing a big bag out of the window,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Trump during his Tuesday press conference. “Have you seen this?” 

“No, that’s probably AI-generated,” Trump replied. “Actually you can’t open the windows, you know why? They’re all heavily armored and bulletproof.” 

“So that’s a fake video?” Doocy followed up.

“Well it’s gotta be, because I know every window up there. The last place I’d be doing it is that because there’s cameras all over the place right, including yours,” Trump responded, even though Doocy didn’t ask whether it was the president in the video.

“No, but every window … they’re bulletproof,” Trump continued. “And number one, they’re sealed, and number two, each window weighs about 600 pounds, so you have to be pretty strong to open them up. No, that has to be—where was the window? Let me see it.” 

Doocy then showed Trump the video on his phone. 

“Maybe for the renovation?” someone in the crowd called out.  

“Which is the window?” Trump asked, staring intently at the video. 

“It looks like this is the 15th Street side, I think.” 

“Yeah those windows are sealed. Those windows are all sealed, you can’t open ‘em.” 

The video was not AI-generated, it was very much real. Trump’s own officials admitted as much. 

“It was a contractor who was doing regular maintenance while the President was gone,” a White House person told Time in an article published just a few hours before Trump pulled the “that was AI” card. 

This was all very strange to watch. Trump jumping so quickly to blame AI after his own staff had already offered an explanation suggests that much of what dominates online discourse —like whether or not Trump is dying—doesn’t always reach the president’s ears. He also appeared to admit his own explanation was a lie when he later clarified, “If something happens really bad, just blame AI.”

President Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., may have helped a Republican congressman get off scot-free after he allegedly assaulted a woman. 

In February, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department arrived at Mills’s luxury penthouse on the Wharf in response to a call about a domestic disturbance. There they found Mills’s “significant other” of a year, 27, “physically shaking and scared,” according to a police report.

Mills and his wife, Rana Al Saadi, have been in the process of divorcing for almost three years. 

There are three separate police reports of the conflict. In one, Mills’s partner told police that the congressman “grabbed her, shoved her, and pushed her out of the door.” The police report also noted that she had fresh bruises on her arms, and that she played them a recorded phone call in which Mills told her to lie about where her bruises were from. Mills, 45, later showed up to the scene. When police told him he’d be placed under arrest, his significant other recanted all of her previous statements, and Mills was freed. 

The MPD later sent an arrest warrant for Mills to the U.S. attorney’s office, where interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin refused to sign it. The case remained under MPD “investigation” until Trump took over the MPD. Then it was promptly, conveniently closed. 

“I would like to thank the Metro Police Department for their diligent investigation into false and misleading accusations made against me by the media, ensuring that both truth and justice prevailed,” Mills said in a statement to The Hill. “The media’s claims and political spins have been debunked, and the case is closed. It’s blatantly obvious that some have attempted to over-politicize this to impact the 2026 election, but these efforts have failed.”

This seems like a pretty clear abuse of power on Trump’s part—taking over a city’s police department, which then closes an investigation into one of your party members a year before midterm elections. It certainly aligns with the other instances of this administration’s rampant corruption and cronyism. 

The MPD investigation was just one allegation against Mills. He’s also currently facing a lawsuit that charges him of using revenge porn against his ex-partner, Florida Republican state committee member and Miss United States 2024, Lindsey Langston. Mills allegedly threatened to post nude videos of Langston and promised to hurt any man she dated in the future. That case is ongoing.  

An active congressman with two allegations of assault against women is still sitting in the Capitol building thanks to the president. That’s what Trump’s version of draining the swamp actually looks like. 

Scores of scientists slammed the Trump administration’s latest climate report as a “farce” full of misinformation, The Guardian reported Tuesday.

In July, the Department of Energy published “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate,” a report claiming that the impacts of global warming had been overblown—without having it peer reviewed at all.

In response a group of 85 climate experts compiled a more than 400-page review, and found that the DOE’s report had been authored by five fringe experts who had cherry-picked cases and misrepresented research and evidence to support their flimsy findings.

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said that DOE’s climate report “makes a mockery of science.”

The document “relies on ideas that were rejected long ago, supported by misrepresentations of the body of scientific knowledge, omissions of important facts, arm waving, anecdotes and confirmation bias,” Dessler told The Guardian. “This report makes it clear DOE has no interest in engaging with the scientific community.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright personally selected five climate scientists to author the report who were “well known for manufacturing uncertainty” around climate science, the review found. The report’s authors, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven E. Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer, have each downplayed the impacts of climate change. Eleven percent of the report’s citations led to the authors’ own research, a rate that was nearly five times higher than another 2023 climate report.

Wright said the authors were chosen “for their rigor, honesty, and willingness to elevate the debate.” But the review stated that the DOE report “covers areas in which the authors are not experts,” and that the report’s many mistakes were “caused by a lack of familiarity with the science.”

Pamela McElwee, an associate professor of human ecology at Rutgers University, told The Guardian that the five people who were selected by the secretary of energy for their viewpoints “produced a shoddy mess of cherry-picked data and unsupported assertions.”

Dessler was distraught over how badly mischaracterized some research about climate-driven extreme events had been. “I mean, they just don’t understand what they’re talking about,” he said.

The scientists said that the shoddy work was in service of a predetermined outcome: a report that would help support the administration’s repeal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 Endangerment Finding, stating that the current and projected concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is vowing to keep troops stationed in Los Angeles, despite a Tuesday ruling declaring the administration’s use of the military in the city for domestic law enforcement purposes illegal.

Earlier, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s use of federal troops to perform police functions in Los Angeles violated the Posse Comitatus Act. The judge further barred the administration from using the military in California “to execute the laws, including but not limited to engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants” in ways that violate that law.

California Governor Gavin Newsom applauded the ruling on X, writing that the courts ruled that Trump’s “militarization of our streets and use of the military against US citizens is ILLEGAL.”

But Bill Essayli, the acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, told the governor that the troops are going nowhere. “The military will remain in Los Angeles,” he wrote in response to Newsom. “This is a false narrative and a misleading injunction.”

Essayli went on to argue that the military is not involved with “direct law enforcement operations” in Los Angeles. Instead, he repeated the administration’s justification for its iron-fisted military crackdown on the city, first sparked by anti–Immigration and Customs Enforcement protests in June: that troops are protecting federal agents from “thugs” supported by Democratic officials. (Several hundred National Guard troops still remain in Los Angeles.)

Essayli’s claim runs counter to Tuesday’s ruling, which found that the Trump administration indeed “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.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full. 

Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna have been trying to push a House bill that would force the Justice Department to release the Epstein files, an effort that was reignited by the Trump administration’s shady mess of a rollout that shed further light on the president’s close friendship with the defamed serial sexual predator. 

But rather than deliver transparency to the public, Johnson scheduled a vote this week that would allow Republicans to order the Oversight Committee to “continue its ongoing investigation.” The legislation does nothing to force the Justice Department to outright release the files in full, as Khanna and Massie are fighting for. 

This all comes as the House Oversight Committee plans to meet with 10 of Epstein’s victims on Capitol Hill on Tuesday to further investigate “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.” Massie and Khanna also plan to hold a press conference with the victims on Wednesday.   

“Speaker Johnson just scheduled this meaningless vote to provide political cover for those members who don’t support our bipartisan legislation to force the release of the Epstein files,” Massie wrote shortly after news of Johnson’s ghost vote broke. Massie said he plans to file his discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the files on Tuesday at 2 p.m. Johnson’s vote allows Republicans to pretend they’re doing something on the matter by simply telling the Oversight Committee to keep up the good work, serving as yet another exhibit of Republicans choosing to protect rich pedophiles.