Why Trump Made a Sudden 180 on Releasing Epstein Files

Donald Trump has changed his mind and now wants House Republicans to vote to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The president announced his reversal on Truth Social Sunday night, saying, “We have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat ‘Shutdown.’”

Why the sudden flip-flop, especially since House Republicans have been trying to delay a vote to force the release of the Epstein files for months? Well, after the House Oversight Committee released pages and pages of damaging correspondence from the Epstein estate, Trump feels as though he’s going to lose anyway. House GOP leadership was already projecting that as many as 100 Republicans could vote to release the files.

By agreeing now, Trump is trying to get ahead of the release and placate his fellow Republicans, who have no defensible reason to keep blocking the files with their base clamoring for their release. Over the past week, emails and text messages have revealed that Trump was very close to Epstein in recent years, despite his many denials. Trump is eager for the stories to end and the issue to fade out of news coverage, and now he wants to rip off the Band-Aid.

“The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE! All I do care about is that Republicans get BACK ON POINT,” his Truth Social post said.

It’s a rare instance that the president has caved to pressure from Congress, and shows some cracks in his control over the GOP. What happens now? Will Senate Republicans also vote to release the files? And what is in the files that the president has fought so hard to keep hidden?

Outspoken GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says she has received multiple threats of doxing and violence, and she directly blames President Trump and his “dog whistle” rhetorical attacks for endangering the lives of her and her family. 

The jabs became more serious  last Friday, as Trump announced that he’d be “withdrawing” his support from Greene after she pressed for the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released in full, broke with Trump on inflation and affordability, and criticized his foreign policy decisions on bailing out Argentina and bankrolling Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” Trump wrote Friday, claiming that Greene was only publicly disagreeing with him because he told her not to run for senate or governor in her home state of Georgia, which Greene denies. 

Over the next few days, Trump went on to say that Greene (who he called “Marjorie Taylor Brown” because of green turning brown when it rots) “betrayed the entire Republican Party when she turned Left” and that she was a fake Republican, a “traitor,” and a “disgrace” to the “great Republican party.” 

Greene was quick to respond. 

“I stood with President Trump when almost no one else would. I campaigned for him all over this country and spent millions of my own dollars helping him get elected,” she said Sunday on CNN. “That’s why being called a ‘traitor’ isn’t just hurtful, it puts a target on my back and puts my life in danger.”

Greene elaborated on that danger in a post on X later that same evening. 

“The hoax pizza deliveries have started now, to my house and my family members. Update: we also received a pipe bomb threat on my construction companies office building. President Trump’s unwarranted and vicious attacks against me were a dog whistle to dangerous radicals that could lead to serious attacks on me and my family,” Greene wrote. “Unfortunately, I’ve been down this road before. As a matter of fact, as I campaigned all over the country and defended President Trump, I received dozens of swatting calls on my house and my family members homes along with these hoax pizza deliveries, but even more severely I have received some of the most death threats of any Member of Congress that led to multiple men being convicted and serving time in prison. And all of that came from the left.

“Now that President Trump has called me a traitor, which is absolutely untrue and horrific. Mark Levin has been calling me a traitor. And so have other prominent likely paid social medial activists. This puts blood in the water and creates a feeding frenzy. And it could ultimately lead to a harmful or even deadly outcome.”

The president had no regard for Greene’s fear. 

“Wacky Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown (Remember, Green turns to Brown where there is ROT involved!) is working overtime to try and portray herself as a victim when, in actuality, she is the cause of all of her own problems,” he wrote on Truth Social. “The fact is, nobody cares about this Traitor to our Country!”

Trump is no stranger to inciting violence through rhetoric, but this is a significant shift given how loyal Greene was to Trump and the MAGA agenda. Still, she has no intention of dropping her push for the release of the Epstein files.

“I stand with these women, I stand with rape victims, I stand with children who are in terrible sex abuse situations, and I stand with survivors of trafficking,” Greene said on CNN. “I will not apologize for that. I believe the country deserves transparency in these files. And I don’t believe that rich powerful people should be protected if they have done anything wrong.” 

President Donald Trump’s obsessive focus on deporting immigrants has led to extreme changes at the Department of Homeland Security and undermined efforts to combat child exploitation and sex trafficking, a new report found.

According to The New York Times, the department has been forced to shift its priorities and sideline other important law enforcement activities to make way for the president’s agenda.

Agents investigating sexual crimes against children have been temporarily reassigned, a national security probe into the Iranian black market slowed and lost momentum, and agents working on sex trafficking issues have been forced to pause their work in order to support the Trump administration’s deportation goals. Even the Coast Guard has been pulled in to aid the deportation work, the Times reported.

The new data that the report is based on comes from previously unseen internal DHS documents, and interviews with more than 60 officials.

People inside the agency spoke of being “berated” by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller for not arresting enough people. Yet the Trump administration’s extensive focus on immigration hasn’t played out the way they might have imagined. Less than 40 percent of people ICE arrests carry criminal convictions, the report says.

The Trump administration’s pressure campaign extended to all parts of the agency.

As of August, there are currently more than 60,000 people being detained by DHS, and the Trump administration has shown no signs of pulling back anytime soon.

While so many government agencies have been gutted, depriving Americans of much needed aid and assistance, DHS has received a hefty funding boost. ICE is expected to grow its staff by 66 percent over the next few years.

Hany Farid, a computer scientist who worked on software that detects child sexual abuse materials and aids law enforcement, told Times reporters that it was heartbreaking. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children,” he said.

The internet had a field day this week when the House Oversight Committee released thousands of billionaire child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s emails to the public—including an exchange with his brother Mark that seemingly referred to Donald Trump performing fellatio on someone named “Bubba.”

Now, Mark Epstein has come out to remove a modicum of the mystery surrounding the remark, by revealing who Bubba is not.

In the message in question, from March 2018, Mark Epstein told his brother to ask former Trump adviser Steve Bannon whether Russian President Vladimir Putin “has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.”

Jeffrey Epstein replied, “and i thought- I had tsuris,” using the Yiddish word for “troubles.”

Because “Bubba” is a nickname for Bill Clinton—who, like Trump, had a relationship with Epstein—social media was awash with jokes and speculation that Mark Epstein was, in jest or not, describing kompromat depicting the current and former presidents.

Mark Epstein issued a statement Saturday, shared online by Business Insider’s Jacob Shamsian, which described the emails as “simply part of a humorous private exchange between two brothers.”

“For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former President Bill Clinton,” the statement continues. “Any attempt to conflate that reference with President Clinton, or to read sweeping implications into them, misrepresents both the purpose and the tone of the original correspondence.”

But while clarifying the unserious nature of the message, the statement leaves the true identity of Bubba unknown.

Senator Bill Cassidy gave a puzzling answer about his role in placing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services.

During a Sunday appearance on Face The Nation, moderator Margaret Brennan asked if Cassidy—a physician whose support of vaccines has put him at odds with Kennedy—regrets his February confirmation vote.

Brennan observed that Cassidy decided to vote for Kennedy after receiving assurance that a key CDC vaccine advisory committee would be maintained “without changes”; Kennedy went on to fire all of its members, anyway, and appoint new ones, including vaccine skeptics, in their place.

In lieu of an answer, Cassidy offered the following gem: “You live life forward. Again, you just do,” he said, going on to quote Matthew 6:34. “Let the day’s own troubles be sufficient for the day.”

The senator continued, “He and I have publicly disagreed on some matters, but I strongly agree with him on others, and so, so that’s how I’ll answer your question.”

“That sounds, um, like yes,” Brennan noted.

Online, social media users mocked Cassidy’s enigmatic comments. “Translation: Yes, but I’ll pretend it’s a philosophical riddle,” wrote one. “Cassidy sounds like a fortune cookie,” posted another.

Before giving his nonanswer, Cassidy noted that “every reporter asks me that.” One would think he’d have a better response by now.

Far-right politician Marjorie Taylor Greene became embroiled in a bitter public fight with President Donald Trump this weekend which led her to receive threats against her life, she said—but she still supports him.

Their falling out highlights a growing divide in MAGA world, as Trump’s connections to convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s clumsy attempts to make the issue go away enrage some members of his base.

Greene, a Republican representative from Georgia, recently joined Democrats and three other House Republicans in signing a discharge petition intended to force a vote to make the DOJ’s Epstein files public, which displeased the president.

Greene said she texted Trump Friday about the files, and urged the president to be transparent and support the full release of the documents. She shared screenshots on social media of the purported texts.

In response, apparently, the president grew enraged, and denounced his former supporter in a post on Truth Social on Friday. Trump said he was withdrawing support for Greene and referred to her as a “raging Lunatic,” among other things. He kept going on Saturday, inventing new disparaging nicknames for his former ally and calling her a traitor.

Greene said she found his aggressive response “shocking,” that he had said things that were simply not true, and that she had received threats after his attacks on social media.

But speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday morning, the Georgia Republican pointed out that she had supported Trump and the Trump administration in the past, and still would.

“I stood with President Trump when virtually no one else did,” she said. “Campaigned all over the country, spent millions of my own dollars helping him get elected, and I think that’s incredibly important, and I do support him and his administration.”

His remarks had been hurtful, she said. “However, I have something in my heart that I think is incredibly important for our country, and that is to end the toxic fighting in politics. And this has been going on for years.… The most hurtful thing he said, which is absolutely untrue, is he called me a traitor. That is so extremely wrong. Those are the types of words used that can radicalize people against me and put my life in danger.”

It’s worth mentioning here that Greene has engaged in more than her share of vile, hateful rhetoric over the years. She’s espoused white supremacist and antisemitic views, endorsed conspiracy theories, and more.

The president’s attacks on her, however, seem to have crossed some sort of a line, as far as Greene was concerned.

“What do you think happened, what do you think is the reason for this is?” Bash asked.

“Unfortunately, it has all come down to the Epstein files,” Greene said.

Later in the interview, Bash asked if she could see a situation in which she and the president resolved things.

“I certainly hope that we can make up,” Greene said.

President Donald Trump is lashing out at Indiana Republicans for rejecting his redistricting effort in the state.

On Friday, Indiana state Senator Rodric Bray, a Republican, announced that, after “thoughtful consideration” of a plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps to help the Republicans gain more seats in Congress, “there are not enough votes to move that idea forward, and the Senate will not reconvene.”

In response, Trump on Sunday cast aspersions on Bray and a fellow Republican state senator, Greg Goode, for “not wanting to redistrict their State, allowing the United States Congress to perhaps gain two more Republican seats.” 

He called the two “politically correct type ‘gentlemen’” and “RINO Senators”—meaning Republicans in name only.

Trump also blasted Indiana’s Republican governor, Mike Braun, who supported the redistricting effort but, in the president’s view,  may not be giving his all “to get the necessary Votes.” Trump applied pressure to Braun, whom he described as his “friend,” adding, “Mike wouldn’t be Governor without me.”

The president concluded his tirade by threatening Indiana Republicans who oppose his redistricting scheme with a primary challenge.

Indiana is just one red state Trump is pressuring to redraw its congressional maps in his favor, as Texas, North Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri have already done so. Democratic officials in California and Utah have adopted redraws of their own, and others are attempting to do the same.

President Donald Trump and his Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, are apparently continuing their war on the media.

The president on Saturday took aim at comedian Seth Meyers, who, on Late Night with Seth Meyers the day prior, said Trump is “the most unpopular president of all time.” The notoriously thin-skinned Trump took to Truth Social, diagnosing the host with an “incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term MAGA frequently uses to dismiss its critics, and urging NBC to fire him.

About a half-hour later, Carr made a point to post a screenshot of Trump’s comments, without further comment, on X.

As Matthew Gertz of Media Matters noted, Comcast, the parent company of NBC, is reportedly looking to acquire some of Warner Bros. Discovery, which would require Carr’s approval.

The posts are just the latest example of the president seeking to censor those he believes have cast him in a critical light; he recently threatened the BBC with a billion-dollar lawsuit.

The targeting of Meyers especially recalls Trump and Carr’s jawboning of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. After Kimmel ridiculed MAGA’s response to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Carr threatened those who platformed the host. Broadcasting companies with business before the FCC then pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live, which was subsequently cancelled by ABC before the network reversed course.

At the time—before Kimmel’s show returned to air—Trump claimed shows are “not allowed” to excessively bash him and urged NBC to suspend Meyers’ show, as well as The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, are rallying in opposition to the invasion of their city by federal immigration enforcement agents under President Donald Trump.

On Saturday, Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin announced that the Trump administration is “surging DHS law enforcement to Charlotte” in an operation dubbed “Charlotte’s Web.”

Agents conducted searches and arrests across the Democratic-led city, which is home to a significant immigrant population. Thus far, the operation has targeted local retail stores and a church. Many businesses closed down because, as a local bakery owner told The Charlotte Observer, “They’re not chasing criminals. They’re chasing anyone who looks, speaks like me, who has an accent like me, who looks like me.”

In one incident, agents detained a U.S. citizen—who had also been stopped previously by agents—after shattering the window of his truck.

In a statement, Charlotte’s mayor and other local officials said the operation was “causing unnecessary fear and uncertainty in our community as recent operations in other cities have resulted in people without criminal records being detained and violent protests being the result of unwarranted actions.”

Hundreds have peacefully protested the agents’ presence, with one major demonstration at a park in uptown Charlotte, and others at locations where Border Patrol agents were spotted.

“They’ve been doing terrible things in Chicago, and we’re not happy that they’re bringing it here to North Carolina,” one protester, who held a sign that read “Stop kidnapping our neighbors,” told the Observer.

As President Donald Trump and Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s feud over Jeffrey Epstein boils over, survivors of the late sex criminal have reportedly issued a collective statement of support for the Georgia Republican.

The bizarre development comes amid a deepening internal rift in the MAGA movement.

The letter, as reported Saturday by MeidasTouch News, thanked Greene “for standing up against the intimidation, silencing, and abuse that Epstein survivors have endured for decades.”

“When you speak the truth and refuse to bow to threats, you become a survivor by proxy—an ally who carries part of the fight with us,” the message continued. “That courage matters. You have our full support. We stand united with you against any attempt to bully, rewrite history, or shut down accountability.”

The 27 reported signatories, who faced or were otherwise impacted by Epstein’s abuse—such as Maria and Annie Farmer, Courtney Wild, and the family of Virginia Roberts Giuffre—promised to defend Greene “with everything we have” and offered “to help and to talk.”

Greene, a far-right politician, former Trump disciple, and frequent purveyor of bigotry and conspiracy theories, has drawn the president’s ire in recent days for her efforts to compel government transparency on the Epstein case.

She was among four House Republicans to back a successful bid to force a (now forthcoming) floor vote on the release of the Justice Department’s Epstein-related documents.

The president, in turn, has publicly withdrawn his support of Greene, dubbing her a “RINO”—or Republican in name only—as well as nicknames like “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene” and “Marjorie Taylor Brown” (because, he explained, “Green grass turns Brown when it begins to ROT!”).

Greene on Saturday said Trump’s abuse has “fueled and egged on” threats against her.