Kash Patel’s Own Words on Epstein Files Come Back to Bite Him

FBI Director Kash Patel has failed to follow through on his own promises regarding the Epstein files.

Months before Patel’s name was floated to run the bureau, Patel had told podcaster Benny Johnson that he believed the documents were being shielded from public view because of “who’s on that list.” During his confirmation hearing, the 45-year-old swore there would be “no stone left unturned” in the quest to make the Epstein files completely transparent.

But it all came to a head during a heated House Oversight Hearing Wednesday, when members of the lower chamber forced the bureau chief to confront the incongruencies between his prior stances and his recent lagging actions.

“This spring, you ordered hundreds of agents to pore over all of the Epstein files but not to look for more clues about the money network, or the network of human traffickers,” said Representative Jamie Raskin. “You pulled these agents from their regular counterterrorism or drug trafficking duties to work around the clock—some of them sleeping at their desks—to conduct a frantic search to make sure Donald Trump’s name and image were flagged and redacted wherever they appeared.”

Raskin then highlighted a July memo from the bureau, in which Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi determined “no further disclosure” regarding the Epstein files and the FBI’s investigation “would be necessary or appropriate.”

“In a few short months, how did you go from being a crusader for accountability and transparency with the Epstein files to being part of the conspiracy and cover-up?” Raskin continued. “The answer is simple. You said it yourself: because of who is on that list.”

Patel’s apparent disinterest in catching child predators has extended far beyond his back-and-forths in Congress. Instead, there appears to be a top-down transformation at the agency influenced by Patel’s personal ideology: Just about every agent on the FBI’s Baltimore domestic terrorism squad was directed to refocus their attention on detaining immigrants, forcing agents to pause investigations into violent child predators and pedophilia networks, MSNBC reported Tuesday.

While Patel is grilled on Capitol Hill, another fire appears to be growing against him in the inner echelons of the Trump administration. Patel’s clumsy handling of the manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer left the White House thoroughly unimpressed, with insiders reportedly on the lookout for Patel’s replacement.

Former Trump impeachment lead counsel and current Representative Daniel Goldman aimed some sharp remarks at Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as his Justice Department seeks to hit CodePink with a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charge for yelling at President Trump while he was at dinner last week.

Trump called for the protestors to be jailed on Monday via RICO. On Tuesday Blanche told CNN he was happy to oblige.

“RICO is available to all kinds of organizations committing crimes and committing wrongful acts, not just organized crime, or ISIS, or terrorist organizations, and so it depends,” Blanche said Tuesday on CNN when asked to justify treating CodePink like the mob or a terrorist group. “It is again, sheer happenstance, that individuals show up at a restaurant where the president is trying to enjoy dinner in Washington, D.C. and accost him with vile words and vile anger … does it mean that it’s completely random that they showed up? Maybe. But to the extent that it’s part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States, there’s potential investigations there.”

Goldman rebuked Blanche’s comments online.

“I charged RICO cases. Yelling at the President is not a racketeering act and cannot be the basis for a criminal charge. @DAGToddBlanche knows better,” Goldman wrote Wednesday morning on X. “He is corrupting the DOJ with ridiculous comments like this.”

This all comes as the Trump administration moves to crack down on free speech as part of a mass disinformation campaign in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing. But to use RICO charges to achieve that is an extreme overreach at best.

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has thrown his hat in the ring for governor.

Raffensperger garnered national attention in 2021 when he refused to “find” Donald Trump enough votes to throw Georgia’s 2020 presidential election results. Five years on, Raffensperger’s candidacy will prove a political litmus test for conservative appetites in the South, and whether or not they’re willing to veer away from MAGA’s clutches.

“I’m a conservative Republican, and I’m prepared to make the tough decisions. I follow the law and the Constitution, and I’ll always do the right thing for Georgia no matter what,” Raffensperger said in an announcement video.

Raffensperger will join an already crowded Republican primary for Georgia’s top position. His challengers include Georgia Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones—a Trump loyalist who has already received the president’s endorsement—and state Attorney General Chris Carr, who has similarly embraced the president’s politics in an effort to curry favor with his supporters.

But no one else on the ticket will likely draw MAGA eyes like Raffensperger, who half a decade later is still mired in the political turmoil of standing up to the movement’s figurehead.

In campaign videos, Raffensperger frames himself as a tough-on-liberals Republican who fought “and won” against the likes of former state Representative Stacey Abrams and former President Joe Biden, upholding traditional party ideals such as lowering taxes while focusing on the production of “good paying jobs.”

Raffensperger didn’t shy away from participating in the conservative culture war, either. In the same video, the secretary of state promised to deliver a “bold conservative agenda” as Georgia’s next governor. That plan, though vague, partly focused on putting parents “in charge” of their kids’ education, as well as banning transgender surgery for minors.

How seriously Georgia is affected by transgender surgeries is unclear, though a study by UCLA found that just 3.3 percent of American youths across the country identify as transgender or gender nonconforming.

Raffensperger is now the second gubernatorial hopeful to have openly defied Trump. Georgia’s former Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan announced Wednesday that he is running for governor—as a newly minted Democrat.

The immigration raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia earlier this month, which saw more than 300 South Korean workers detained and, last week, flown back to Seoul, has proven to be an enduring, self-inflicted disaster by the Trump administration.

Reports of the harrowing conditions the workers experienced continue to emerge, as South Korea this week announced its intention to investigate human rights violations. “One by one, we were cuffed at the wrists, then chained at the waist and shackled at the ankles. Then we were put on the bus. I couldn’t understand why we were being treated this way,” one worker told the BBC for a Tuesday story.

The worker said the detention center was “very cold. We weren’t even given blankets for 2 days. I was wearing a short sleeve T-shirt, so I put my arms inside my clothes and wrapped myself in a towel to try to stay warm at night,” he said. “The worst part was the water. It smelt like sewage. We drank as little as possible.”

Meanwhile, the raid seems poised to inflict significant economic harm on the U.S. and the Peach State. Construction on the raided facility is reportedly paused until 2026. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung has warned that South Korean firms “will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States” in light of the incident—and indeed, several have already suspended U.S. projects.

President Trump, evidently feeling the heat, took to Truth Social on Sunday: “I don’t want to frighten off or disincentivize Investment into America by outside Countries or Companies,” he wrote. “We welcome them, we welcome their employees, and we are willing to proudly say we will learn from them.”

Much of the blame for the incident and its fallout belongs to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, according to a Tuesday report in Forbes. Charles Kuck, an immigration lawyer representing several of the workers (who he says were in the U.S. on business visas and though a visa waiver program) told the publication that the arrests were “entirely driven” by Miller’s quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day.

“ICE agents screwed up by arresting people who did not abuse the visa, were eligible to engage in the type of work for which they were admitted, but ICE considered it a successful operation because they met Miller’s quota,” Kuck said.

President Donald Trump is mounting a pressure campaign to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, without providing any evidence to support the charges against her, ABC News reported Wednesday.

After five months of digging, investigators have yet to produce a shred of evidence that James falsified bank documents to secure favorable terms on a mortgage for her Virginia home, multiple sources briefed on the probe told ABC News.

Still, Trump has directed top officials at the Justice Department to aggressively pursue an investigation against James. Two Trump stooges, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Ed Martin, the head of the DOJ’s Working Weaponization Group, have urged U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Erik Siebert to seek an indictment against James.

When federal prosecutors declined, Pulte encouraged Trump to fire Siebert and have him replaced with someone who would do his bidding, sources told ABC News.

Pulte and Martin have staked their claim that James committed mortgage fraud on a single document claiming that the home she purchased in 2023 would be her primary residence. But investigators haven’t been able to prove she knowingly lied, or that the document was even considered by loan officers. Lawyers that drafted the document said the error was the result of a template that wasn’t corrected, sources said. Every other document submitted for the mortgage accurately stated she would not reside at the home.

Pulte has also lobbed similar claims of mortgage fraud at other Trump opponents, such as Democratic Senator Adam Schiff and Federal Reserve Chair Lisa Cook—which have already begun to fall apart.

Since Trump entered office, the administration has set off on a campaign of retribution against James. Months after the probe into her residences started in April, the DOJ launched an investigation into whether she violated Trump’s constitutional rights in taking legal action against him in a winning bank fraud case, costing him $454 million for his family’s business practices.

The Trump administration wasn’t even trying to determine if Ghislaine Maxwell’s testimony could be deemed credible.

In a CNN interview Tuesday night, in which he urged Americans to hear out the convicted sex offender’s side of the story, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the point of his August interviews with Maxwell was to “give her an opportunity to speak,” which he claimed no one had done before.

“She had been in prison for many many years, and she had offered to speak on many many occasions, and she was never given that opportunity,” Blanche told CNN, referring to Jeffrey Epstein’s media-savvy criminal associate and girlfriend.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. She was deposed in the 2016 defamation lawsuit against Epstein brought by one of his most vocal victims, Virginia Giuffre, and refused to testify in her own criminal trial in 2021. She is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.

“So what I did is I gave her that opportunity to speak,” Blanche—Trump’s former personal attorney—continued. “Whether her answers were credible or truthful, there’s a lot of information out there about Mr. Epstein, about her, and whether what she said is completely wrong or completely right or a little of both—that’s the reason why we released the transcript.

“It’s really up to the American people to determine what they believe [whether] her answers were credible or whether they found her not credible,” Blanche said, again referring to an individual who refused to testify on multiple occasions and was already found guilty by a jury of her peers for sex-trafficking children.

Despite already having the Epstein files on hand, Blanche interviewed Maxwell again last month regarding details of Epstein’s potential associates, in an apparent attempt to satiate the president’s restless base.

The information exchange resulted in a very convenient transfer for Maxwell—one of the worst sex criminals of the century—shipping her from a Florida prison to a low-security prison camp in Texas that lawmakers have described as “not suitable for a sex offender.” Maxwell’s attorneys are also pressing the White House for a pardon.

While Trump administration officials attempted to publicly justify reopening conversation with Maxwell, questions abound about her credibility and why her answers in 2025 would differ from her original interviews with federal officials.

President Donald Trump went on a wild rant against former special counsel Jack Smith for allegedly investigating Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA.

“Why was the wonderful Turning Point under INVESTIGATION by ‘Deranged’ Jack Smith and the Corrupt & Incompetent Biden Administration,” Trump wrote. “They tried to force Charlie, and many other people and movements, out of business. They Weaponized the Justice Department against Sleepy Joe Biden’s Political Opponents, including ME!”

The short answer to Trump’s question is because of his alleged efforts to remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Chairman Chuck Grassley said that Turning Point USA, Kirk’s conservative youth organization, was one of several Republican organizations targeted by Arctic Frost, an FBI probe into Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

A read-out published by Grassley explained that operation Arctic Frost was a joint effort started in April 2022 between the FBI, the DOJ Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the National Archives and Records Administration that had been assigned to Smith.

Turning Point USA received a subpoena in December 2022, along with several other event-organizing groups, such as the Make America Great Again PAC. These groups had been subpoenaed along the “thread” of possibly supplying money for the deadly riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Kirk had publicly promoted the January 6 rally, as well as Trump’s infamous call to “fight like hell,” before the riot turned deadly, according to The Guardian. Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of Kirk’s organization, had been one of a dozen groups to deliver busloads of Trump allies to the “March to Save America.”

Unable to dwell on a single thought, even in writing, Trump continued to rant about a gag order placed on him by New York state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, after the president led attacks against Merchan’s family and staff nearly a year ago.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement report revealed that officials at Camp East Montana, the new detention facility at Fort Bliss, have already violated dozens of federal standards for immigrant detention since welcoming detainees in August, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

Construction began hastily in late July, after the government awarded a nearly $232 million contract to Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics to establish and operate a 5,000-bed short-term immigrant detention facility. The company specializes in supply chain management, and has no experience in detention—and it’s showing.

The first detainees arrived on August 1, only days after construction began. Just 50 days later, and with 1,400 detainees in its charge, the facility had racked up at least 60 violations, according to a recent ICE inspection.

Detainees at Camp East Montana were held in large tents on an active construction site without basic amenities, similarly to detainees at the now shuttered Alligator Alcatraz. Some toilets and sinks did not work for the first few weeks, according to an August memo obtained by the Post. Detainees were not given access to telephones, the Post reported, only tablet computers that sometimes didn’t work.

Ricardo Quintana Chavez, a 57-year-old asylum-seeker who was held at Fort Bliss for 24 days before being deported to Peru, told the Post that water seeped into his cell when other people used the showers.

Chavez also told the Post that he was rarely allowed outside. ICE policy requires one hour of recreation a day, five days per week, but inspectors at Camp East Montana found that detainees were only given 40 minutes of recreation per session, and some only received three sessions over a two-week period. Chavez also said he was fed junk food, such as cookies, candies, and potato chips, instead of substantive meals.

Detainees were kept in the dark about their cases, and many said they didn’t know who their deportation officer was, in violation of ICE standards. Chavez told the Post that he received no information about the status of his asylum case over his three-week stay at Camp East Montana.

ICE inspectors also said that officials at the detention center failed to provide proper and mandatory medical care for detainees, failing to conduct intake screenings and complete medical charts that could be used to identify medical and mental conditions.

Detainees’ family members and legal representatives struggled to get hold of them while they were at Camp East Montana, as their location was not available on ICE’s website. Legal representatives reported being turned away from the facility, as did Texas Representative Veronica Escobar. She said she’d complied with ICE’s demand for a week’s advance warning but was still told she couldn’t visit until construction was completed.

Michelle Brané, a former immigration detention ombudsman, said that the report was one of the most concerning evaluations of an immigrant detention center she had ever seen. “There is no way that this facility should be operating with their current numbers, let alone expanding,” she told the Post.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday was asked about how he’s profited off the presidency—and did not take kindly to the line of questioning.

Ahead of Trump’s state visit to the U.K., John Lyons, an editor at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, asked the president how much wealthier he is now than when he assumed office.

“Well, I don’t know,” Trump replied. “The deals I made, for the most part, other than what my kids are doing—you know, they’re running my business. But most of the deals that I’ve made were made before.”

The president quickly changed the subject to his latest hobby horse—the new ballroom he’s having built at the White House—before Lyons asked, “But is it appropriate, President Trump, that a president in office should be engaged in so much business activity?”

“Well, I’m really not,” Trump answered. “My kids are running the business. I’m here.” The president then derailed his own response, asking where Lyons is from and suggesting that he would hold the reporter’s queries against his home country.

“In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now, and they want to get along with me,” Trump said. “You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone.”

As Trump turned to another reporter, Lyons asked another question, and was shushed by the president, who pointed at him and sternly said, “Quiet.”

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is scheduled to travel to New York next week for the U.N. General Assembly. Trump had not previously announced, as he seemed to hint during his quarrel with Lyons, a one-on-one sit-down with Albanese. But the president apparently couldn’t help but mention it as leverage against a reporter.

Lyons’s questions come amid reports of Trump’s fortune having ballooned while in office—and of scandalous ways he’s profited off the presidency. On Monday, for instance, The New York Times published an exposé of two overlapping deals: one in which an Emirati royal’s firm invested $2 billion in a Trump family crypto business and another in which the United Arab Emirates will receive hundreds of thousands of advanced AI chips.

The White House denies the deals were linked—and, per the Times, there’s no evidence they constituted an explicit quid pro quo. (If they did, though, it would represent the biggest public corruption scandal in U.S. history by far, according to a former White House economist.)

Trump’s rapid-response social media team declared his outburst at Lyons to be a moment of strength, triumphantly tweeting that the president had “smack[ed] down a rude foreign Fake News loser.”

Friends and family of Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin, say that the national narrative has not aligned with what they know about the 22-year-old from Utah.

Speaking with independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, Robinson’s friends described him as smart, friendly, and largely uninterested in politics—a detail that has made the shooting all the more difficult for them to understand.

“I think the main thing that’s caused so much confusion is that he was always generally apolitical for the most part,” one of Robinson’s friends told Klippenstein under the banner of anonymity. “That’s the big thing, he just never really talked politics which is why it’s so frustrating.”

The Trump administration and its MAGA allies have thus far painted Robinson as an antifa (antifascist) agent, while left-wing verticals have portrayed him as a member of the far right. But close confidants say that neither is wholly accurate: Robinson held complicated, bipartisan views.

“Obviously he’s okay with gay and trans people having a right to exist, but also believes in the Second Amendment,” the friend said.

And although Robinson’s MAGA family have been giving sound bites to the press, there was a lot that Robinson’s family didn’t know about him, according to his friends. Case in point: his bisexuality, and his relationship with his roommate, a transgender person named Lance.

Even Lance was caught off guard by Robinson’s act, according to text messages that the two exchanged after Kirk was shot. The texts were published as part of Robinson’s criminal charges. When pressed as to why he murdered Kirk, Robinson told his partner: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

Robinson said he had planned the assassination for a little over a week, and added that the etched engravings on his bullet casings—which refer to a couple of popular video games—were “mostly a big meme” that he thought would be amusing to see discussed on Fox News.

Robinson had a “stone cold poker face” and could be “super hard to read,” another friend told Klippenstein. Those close to Robinson didn’t believe he was hiding anything from them. “As far as we knew he was opened up,” the second friend said.

No one could have envisioned that Robinson, a well-liked straight-A student, would be capable of or even interested in killing Kirk.

“To all of us he just seemed like a simple guy who liked playing games like Sea of Thieves, Deep Rock Galactic, and Helldivers 2, loved to fish and loved to camp,” the second friend said. “It really did seem like that’s all he was about.”

Robinson turned himself in to authorities on Friday. He was charged Tuesday with aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, and obstruction of justice, among other charges. Prosecutors announced that they are seeking the death penalty in the case.