Yet Another Red State Kills Trump’s Redistricting Dreams

Republicans in a red state have failed to initiate their pro-Trump gerrymandering efforts for the second time this month.

On Friday, Indiana’s state Senate Republicans announced that they failed to gather enough votes to redistrict their state in their favor ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

“Over the last several months, Senate Republicans have given very serious and thoughtful consideration to the concept of redrawing our state’s congressional maps,” state Senator Rodric Bray said, according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle’s Niki Kelly. “Today, I’m announcing there are not enough votes to move that idea forward, and the Senate will not reconvene.”

This is a massive failure in the GOP’s plan to redraw districts in the middle of the decade to help it gain more seats in Congress. Last week, Kansas Republicans gave up on a weeks-long effort to accelerate the redrawing of their state’s congressional map. Days later, a Utah judge rejected a Republican-drawn map and instead instituted the state’s first blue-leaning one in 25 years.

Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were apparently so close that the billionaire child sex offender once paid the now-president a hefty bet.  

Emails released by the House Oversight Committee show an exchange between Epstein and alternative medicine advocate Deepak Chopra discussing a time to video chat, when Chopra asked Epstein if he knew Trump’s second wife, Marla Maples. Epstein replied, “Yes  ,  in fact when she told donald she was pregnant. I lost a 10k dollar bet with him, and sent him a truck of baby food in payment. but i have not spoken to her in many years since then.”

The email, dated July 29, 2016, didn’t end there. Epstein added that “she can tell you the story of her friend who was caught having sex with her shoes. yes-shoes.” 

The entire exchange took place months before Trump would win the presidential election for the first time, and details the extent of the president’s relationship with the now-dead Epstein. When Trump and Maples got married in 1993 at the New York Plaza Hotel, Epstein was in attendance. Maples and Trump would divorce in 1999 after having one child together, Tiffany. 

Chopra and Maples spoke together at a “Sages & Sciences Symposium” in 2010, and Maples posted a picture of the two together on Instagram in 2016, in which she called him her friend. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The Independent that “These emails prove literally nothing.”

On the contrary, these emails show that Epstein and Trump have a long-standing relationship, refuting the president’s denials. They may have even spent time together while Trump was president. With every new release of Epstein’s correspondence, Trump’s denials are looking more and more pathetic. 

Jeffrey Epstein’s victims are pleading with Congress to release the Epstein files.

In a haunting letter, the family members of deceased abuse survivor Virginia Giuffre—along with several victims who have accused Donald Trump of participating in Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring—asked lawmakers to “be brave” in the coming days as they vote to potentially make the case files public.

“There is no middle ground here. There is no hiding behind party affiliation,” they said, in a letter jointly addressed to members of the House and Senate.

“Epstein and [Ghislaine] Maxwell’s crimes exposed a double standard of justice, where rich and powerful men and women evade repercussions. Despite years of work to bring them to justice, most of Epstein and Maxwell’s co-conspirators remain completely free, continuing to amass power and prestige, living without apparent shame.

“As you gather with your family this season, remember that your primary duty is to your constituents,” the writers continued. “Look into the eyes of your children, your sisters, your mothers, and your aunts. Imagine if they had been preyed upon. Imagine if you yourself were a survivor. What would you want for them? What would you want for yourself? When you vote, we will remember your decision at the ballot box.”

Pressure on lawmakers dramatically ramped up this week after a discharge petition to force a vote on the files’ release succeeded. Just ahead of the petition passing, the House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 documents Wednesday that it had obtained from Epstein’s estate, revealing that Trump was a frequent topic in correspondence between Epstein and his pen pals.

In a 2011 email, Epstein expressed he was grateful Trump had stayed quiet about details of his life. The “dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote, despite the fact that Trump had spent hours at one of Epstein’s properties with a known victim.

In a 2017 exchange with former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, Epstein said that Trump was the worst individual he knew.

“I have met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump,” Epstein wrote. “Not one decent cell in his body.”

When queried by Trump biographer Michael Wolff in 2019 about the extent of the president’s knowledge of abductions of young girls, Epstein remarked: “Of course he knew about the girls he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

The White House immediately brushed off the reports, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisting that the emails prove nothing. Trump, in turn, has accused Democrats of inventing the Trump-Epstein connection, repeatedly referring to it as a “hoax.”

In the halls of Congress, conservative lawmakers are turning on Trump. Senior Republicans privately expect dozens of their party members—“possibly 100 or more”—to vote in favor of a bill that would make the federal government’s trove of Epstein files publicly available, Politico reported Wednesday. A handful have already voiced their intention to back the forthcoming bill, including Representatives Eli Crane, Don Bacon, and Warren Davidson.

Border Protection commander Gregory Bovino has finally left Chicago, after a federal judge said he’d lied about using excessive force to target protesters opposing immigration operations.

During an appearance on Fox News Thursday, Bovino, who’d been tasked with leading “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, said that he had retreated to West Virginia, where he was “undergoing training with several hundred border patrol agents.” Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, is home to Custom and Border Protection’s Advanced Training Center.

The CBP chief said he could soon redeploy in either New York, Chicago, or Charlotte, North Carolina, adding that he could “guarantee” that Illinois Governor Pritzker would see “a lot more” immigration enforcement in Chicago.

Earlier this week, officials told CBS News that Bovino planned to leave, taking many of his Border Patrol agents with him.

It seems that Bovino left with his tail between his legs, after suffering a lashing from a federal judge. Last week, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a preliminary injunction barring federal agents from using tear gas and other riot prevention methods against protesters, “unless such force is objectively necessary to stop an immediate threat.”

Ellis said that Bovino had admitted to lying about being hit in the head with a rock before deploying tear gas canisters on protesters in Little Village, during his hourslong deposition, and that she’d reviewed video that “disproved” his prior claim. Ellis also said she’d reviewed a trove of evidence that federal agents had used excessive force against protesters, despite little evidence of any actual criminal activity.

Her preliminary injunction requires officers to issue two clear warnings before administering crowd-control measures, to place identifiers conspicuously on their person, and to wear a body camera. In line with her request from a previous hearing, the government’s lawyer confirmed that Bovino would now wear a body camera.

Several prison employees at the facility holding Ghislaine Maxwell have been fired since internal whistleblowers revealed the extent of the child sex criminal’s cozy digs.

News of their termination came by way of Maxwell’s attorney, who on Friday cited the recent release of Maxwell’s emails by Representative Jamie Raskin earlier this week as the rationale for the prison staffers’ sudden firing.

“The release to the media by Congressman Raskin, of Ms. Maxwell’s privileged client-attorney email correspondence with me is as improper as it is a denial of justice,” Leah Saffian, a California-based attorney who has long represented Maxwell, said in a statement.

“There have been appropriate consequences already for employees at Federal Prison Camp Bryan,” Saffian continued. “They have been terminated for improper, unauthorised access to the email system used by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to allow inmates to communicate with the outside world.”

Maxwell was transferred to a minimum-security prison camp mere days after she met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July to help curate a new list of Jeffrey Epstein’s potential associates.

The information exchange resulted in an extremely cushy 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.”

The British ex-socialite has since raved about her new digs, celebrating the difference between the two facilities as akin to having “dropped through Alice in Wonderlands [sic] looking glass,” according to emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee.

She has also been granted many privileges not typically afforded to inmates, including meal service in her cell, unlimited toilet paper, and access to private visitations in a chaplain’s office outside standard visiting hours. Her requests to be separated from other inmates have also been granted, with tables and cellmates reportedly being relocated at her whim.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail 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. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now.

Kash Patel allowed a radio host conspiracy theorist to fill the number two spot at the FBI without first passing a polygraph test.

Deputy Director Dan Bongino reportedly received a waiver for a polygraph test, according to four people who spoke anonymously with ProPublica Friday.

Typically, polygraph tests are required to establish approval for the “Top Secret” security clearances necessary to work at the agency. Recipients are asked questions about their criminal history, drug use, foreign contacts, and any mishandling of sensitive documents. Their results are used to determine whether they can have access to classified information.

It seems that Bongino may not have been asked about any of this, and yet, as deputy director, he has access to a trove of sensitive information, including the President’s Daily Brief, that collates essential information from the intelligence community. He is also responsible for day-to-day operations at the FBI and green-lighting surveillance operations.

Those familiar with Bongino’s rise to deputy director, after he had no prior experience at the agency, said issuing him a waiver was unprecedented. Multiple former FBI officials told ProPublica that they could not recall a single instance where a top-ranking official such as Bongino had received a waiver for a polygraph test, or anyone who had failed one.

Bongino and two other top-ranking officials reportedly received waivers from Patel.

In a statement to ProPublica, FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said: “It is false that the individuals you referenced failed polygraphs.”

“The FBI follows all laws and procedures on personnel security measures, and any implication otherwise is false,” Williamson wrote. “Furthermore, while the FBI does not comment on confidential security information, particularly in matters of personnel, this article is riddled with falsehoods—it misrepresents polygraph protocol, inaccurately portrays FBI security measures, and makes multiple false claims about FBI employees who have done nothing wrong.”

The spokesperson also claimed that polygraphs were “not required” for political appointees at the agency. But several experts, including Daniel Meyer, a former executive director for the inspector general of the Intelligence Community External Review Panel, and three other lawyers specializing in national security told ProPublica that those Schedule C employees would not typically be excluded from the tests.

A former senior FBI official told ProPublica that while the existence of the waiver may suggest Bongino did not pass the polygraph test, it was possible he received a preemptive exemption. The outlet could not determine whether Bongino sat for a polygraph test.

Michael Flynn is seeking restitution from the government to the tune of $50 million.

Donald Trump’s onetime national security adviser is now negotiating a settlement with his Department of Justice, claiming that he was unjustly prosecuted by former special counsel Robert Mueller for lying to the FBI about conversations with a Russian official. Flynn initially pleaded guilty and then fought the prosecution, eventually receiving a pardon from Trump in 2020.

Flynn later filed a lawsuit against the government for damages, only to have a federal judge dismiss the case in December last year. While the Biden administration fought Flynn’s case, the Trump administration seems open to a settlement.

The move mirrors Trump’s attempt to get $240 million from the DOJ to settle his own claims of politically motivated prosecution. Flynn notoriously lasted only 22 days as Trump’s first national security adviser in 2017, resigning over his conversations with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. at the time, Sergey Kislyak.

Since then, Flynn has been one of the leading evangelists of the QAnon conspiracy theory and has also pushed Christian nationalism. If he actually gets his hefty settlement (with Trump’s approval), it’ll show that he’s still friendly with the president and the Republican Party, leaving the door open for conspiracy theorists to push their agenda.

On Friday, Rashida Tlaib and 20 other members of Congress put forth a resolution to recognize “the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” something the United States has consistently refused to do, even in the face of U.N. evidence.

“Under the Genocide Convention,” the resolution reads, “the crime of genocide is committed when one or more categories of underlying acts are committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such, namely—(1) killing members of the group; (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or (5) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” 

It continues: “The overwhelming evidence is clear that the State of Israel has committed acts …  within the scope of the Genocide Convention against Palestinians in Gaza, including by—(1) killing members of the group; (2) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (3) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (4) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” 

The resolution goes on to note that Israel has killed “at least 67,160 Palestinians in Gaza, the majority of whom are women and children, since October 2023” and that 83 percent of them were civilians. It also highlights the Israeli military killing at least 250 journalists and at least 543 aid workers from the United Nations, Doctors Without Borders, World Central Kitchen, and the Palestine Red Crescent Society.

Israel has wounded at least 169,679 Palestinians in Gaza, “creating the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,” the resolution continues. It also mentions that 500 schools, every university, 53 cultural sites, and 92 percent of all residential buildings have been destroyed by Israel. 

The signees make a point to note that Israel’s genocide has been largely bankrolled by the U.S. government and the American taxpayer, stating that “the United States provided an estimated $21,700,000,000 in military aid to Israel, and during that same period, the White House authorized or notified over $30,000,000,000 in additional new arms sales agreements to be paid for and delivered in future years.”

The resolution also focuses on the genocidal language employed by Israeli leaders, quoting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, and Maj. Gen. Aharon Haliva. 

“‘Remember what Amalek did to you. We remember and we fight,’” the resolution said, quoting Netanyahu. “[This is] a reference to the Book of Samuel, in which God tells the Israelites, ‘Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey,’ rhetoric that has since been repeatedly echoed by other government officials.

“‘It does not matter if they are children. I’m not speaking out of revenge. I’m talking about a message for future generations. From time to time, they need a Nakba to feel the cost’, referring to the violent ethnic cleansing of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland by Zionist militias and the Israeli army during the establishment of the State of Israel in 1947 to 1949,” the resolution read, quoting Haliva. 

The tide of public opinion is shifting on Israel perhaps more than ever. But while this resolution is as strong a statement as we’ve gotten from congressional officials since the genocide began, there is little to suggest that it will pass the GOP-controlled House. 

Here are the representatives—all Democrats—who signed on anyway:

1. Rashida Tlaib—Michigan
2. André Carson—Indiana
3. Becca Balint—Vermont
4. Gregorio Casar—Texas
5. Maxwell Frost—Florida
6. Maxine Dexter—Oregon
7. Chuy Garcia—Illinois
8. Al Green—Texas
9. Pramila Jayapal—Washington
10. Hank Johnson—Georgia
11. Ro Khanna—California
12. Summer Lee—Pennsylvania
13. Jim McGovern—Massachusetts 
14. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—New York
15. Ilhan Omar—Minnesota 
16. Ayana Pressley—Massachusetts
17. Mark Pocan—Wisconsin
18. Delia Ramirez—Illinois
19. Lateefah Simon—California
20. Nydia Velázquez—New York
21. Bonnie Watson Coleman—New Jersey

The recently ousted leader of the University of Virginia released a tell-all memo Friday on the DEI feud with Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin that cost him his job.

In a 12-page letter to the university’s Faculty Senate, former UVA President James E. Ryan detailed how Youngkin had mischaracterized the university’s decision regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, landing it in hot water with the Trump administration and its overzealous Justice Department. The DOJ promised to “bleed UVA white” before Ryan resigned.

Ryan said his experience differed “in significant parts” from previous accounts, including from Youngkin and the school’s rector, Rachel Sheridan.

In March 2025, the school received a resolution, drafted by Youngkin’s office, on how it should handle DEI policies under Donald Trump’s second term. Ryan noted that it was the first such time that Youngkin had acted on the school’s behalf in his seven years atop the institution.

The school, however, did not adopt the resolution in full, according to Ryan. Instead, the resolution was whittled down to something that even the board’s Democratic appointees found palatable: the dissolution of UVA’s central DEI office and a reshuffling of permissible programs.

But that night, Youngkin went on Fox News with a very different message for the nation—claiming that the university board had done “something radical and sweeping” by declaring that “DEI is dead.”

“Dead” was a difficult term to decipher, according to Ryan, who noted that “it’s not clear even today what it means to kill DEI, and the governor didn’t go much beyond the soundbite.”

“For example, did it mean that we could no longer try to recruit qualified first-generation students from rural parts of Virginia, or offer financial aid, or even serve matzah in the dining halls during Passover, because each of those efforts would be advancing diversity, equity, and/or inclusion?” Ryan speculated.

While the parameters of Youngkin’s Trump-inspired DEI goals remained obfuscated, the Republican governor successfully set the University of Virginia up for failure.

The school did what it said it would do, in accordance with the agreed-upon resolution. Part of that involved a thorough review of the college’s many schools, which the school deemed would require more than the original 30-day allotted timeframe. It was Sheridan, who was then serving as chair of the board audit committee, who demanded that school officials with knowledge of the shifting DEI policies remain silent until the university board had a chance to meet.

That turned out to be a huge problem.

“Having to remain silent about our response to the Board resolution left us in a difficult position because our community was curious about the changes and what it might mean for them,” Ryan argued. “At the same time, external critics interpreted our silence as inaction. We explained to Board members that we were being placed in an untenable position, given that we could not implement any changes if we could not even discuss them publicly.

“We also pointed out that the Board had merely asked for an update, which implied that more work could still be done. But they nonetheless insisted that we remain quiet. So began the narrative that we were recalcitrant and resistant to any changes, which was not true but would continue up and through my forced resignation,” Ryan wrote.

Further still, Youngkin’s comments had created false expectations in the Trump administration as to how the university would navigate the DEI demands. Three weeks after the school submitted its update to the board in late April, the school received a letter from the Justice Department, inquiring why they had not complied with the board’s resolution, using language that was more aligned with Youngkin’s remarks on Fox News than the actual text of the approved memo.

“It was unclear, and still is, why the United States Department of Justice would have the interest or authority to enforce a resolution of the Board of a state university as opposed to enforcing federal law,” Ryan wrote.

In the ensuing months, a group of UVA alumni at the Justice Department took aim at their old school. Ryan recollects the school’s communications with this DOJ team, noting that “neither of the DOJ lawyers were fans of mine.” He also chronicles the process of compiling hundreds of pages’ worth of admissions data for the Justice Department—only to have the agency turn around and mischaracterize the school’s approved requests for extensions as attempts to “stall” the process.

“Why our own lawyers did not seem to understand or appreciate that submitting information in stages would be better than submitting nothing at all, especially given the false accusations that we were stonewalling, remains a mystery to me,” Ryan continued. “I do not know if they were exercising their independent judgment or receiving directions from a Board member and/or the Attorney General’s office.”

Ryan issued his letter a day after Sheridan penned her own account of the Trump administration–infused events leading to the university president’s ouster. The boiling drama adds another flair to tensions between Youngkin and his successor, Democratic Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger, who has questioned the Youngkin-appointed board’s influence over UVA’s ability to select Ryan’s replacement.

In a Friday post, the president has ordered the DOJ to jump into an investigation of Democrats in the Epstein emails, threatening us all with a good time.

President Donald Trump had another one of his patented social media meltdowns Friday morning as he demanded a federal investigation into any of the Democrats mentioned in recent emails released from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate. Never mind that dozens of those same emails also mentioned the convicted sex offender’s awkwardly close ties to the president himself.

Seemingly as payback for the Democrats using the “Epstein hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans” to “deflect” from the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Trump said that he would direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into Epstein’s ties to various Democrats mentioned in the trove of documents. The president’s list of targets would include former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. (Trump also said the investigation would focus on J.P. Morgan and “Chase” as if the long-dead financier and the Chase Manhattan Bank of the 1950s were separate individuals.)

“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats. Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his ‘Island,’” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. (Epstein claimed multiple times in his emails that Clinton had never been to his home in the Virgin Islands.)

None of the documents released this week directly implicate Trump in any of Epstein’s alleged criminal activity, but they do directly suggest that Trump may have known about it, while fleshing out aspects of a relationship that seemed close—and to varying degrees salacious.

In emails released by Democrats, Epstein claimed that Trump “knew about the girls,” had spent hours in Epstein’s home with one of his victims, and called him the “dog that hasn’t barked.” In emails released by Republicans, Epstein suggested that he knew “how dirty Donald is,” said Trump didn’t have “one decent cell” in his body, and made multiple comments that suggested the two spent time together after he was in office.

Other prominent Republicans were also mentioned in the thousands of documents, including billionaire apocalypse prophet Peter Thiel and Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon. In one email exchange with Epstein, Bannon said he couldn’t believe no one was making “the connective tissue” between Trump and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s (then Prince Andrew) alleged sexual abuse of Virginia Giuffre. In another, Epstein gave Bannon advice on how to help Trump.

Clearly incensed by the recent reporting, Trump also shared a video clip from Fox News’s Jesse Watters Primetime to Truth Social, in which Watters lamented the Democrats’ “smear campaign disguised as a bombshell,” and claimed the only thing that the emails revealed was Trump’s “deep ties to liberals.”