Mike Johnson Lets Slip How He Hopes to Block Epstein Files Release

House Speaker Mike Johnson has tapped Senate Majority Leader John Thune to take up the torch of blocking the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein.

During a press conference Tuesday, Johnson announced that he would support the House petition to release the government’s files on the alleged sex trafficker—but not without throwing one final wrench in the plans of lawmakers who support the measure.

The staunch Donald Trump ally hinted that Republicans would likely attempt to stall the measure in the Senate, saying that he had been in contact with his upper-chamber counterpart to express his lingering concerns about the bill.

“And of course they share those concerns, as well,” Johnson said. “And so I am very confident that when this moves forward in the process, if and when it is processed in the Senate—which is no certainty that that will be—they will take the time methodically to do what we have not been allowed to do in the House: to amend this discharge petition, and to make sure that these protections are there.”

It’s worth noting that if Johnson had simply put this legislation to a vote, instead of requiring lawmakers to seek a discharge petition, he could have potentially amended the bill.

Among supposed concerns about not protecting the identities of victims, or not adequately preventing the release of child sexual abuse materials, Johnson has expressed fears that the release could potentially disclose “non-credible allegations” and risk “creating new victims.”

Representative Thomas Massie, one of the lawmakers behind the petition, said Tuesday Johnson’s so-called concerns were a “red herring” and warned they could simply be another “delay tactic.”

The Kentucky Republican also criticized Johnson’s claim about “non-credible allegations” in a post on X.

“Do not let the Senate add an amendment to avoid disclosing those rich and powerful men who have evaded justice for so many years. Is Johnson calling all victims ‘non-credible?’” Massie wrote.

Johnson’s 180 on the Epstein petition itself isn’t particularly surprising, considering that Trump has also changed his tune, in order to emphasize the convicted sex offender’s ties to Democratic figures. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has fractured over some members’ blatant unwillingness to move forward with the files’ release.

Ahead of the vote, victims rallied for the files’ release, with one calling Trump a “national embarrassment.”

President Trump gave a lavish welcome to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on his visit to the U.S. Wednesday, complete with a red carpet reception at the White House.

Bin Salman technically isn’t Saudi Arabia’s head of state, as that title belongs to his father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, but that didn’t stop Trump from bringing out military cavalry, sparing no exceptions to the pomp that normally accompanies a state visit.

MBS, as he is commonly known, has not visited the United States since Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the crown prince and a Washington Post columnist, was murdered at a Saudi consulate in 2018 and then dismembered with a bone saw. At the White House, Trump glossed over that scandal, saying, “What he’s done is incredible, in terms of human rights and everything else.”

When a reporter asked about the U.S. intelligence’s conclusion that MBS had personally ordered Khashoggi’s killing, Trump asked who the reporter was with and rushed to defend the crown prince.

“He knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that,” Trump said, later adding, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

MBS is in Washington for defense and business deals, including the sale of F-35 jets to the country, opposed by Israel, which insists on Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with it beforehand. Saudi Arabia says it wants Israel to make clear and definitive steps toward establishing a Palestinian state before it joins other Arab countries in the Abraham Accords.

In the meantime, though, Trump just cares that Saudi money gets spent in the U.S. and on his family’s businesses. Saudi Arabia’s poor human rights record doesn’t matter to the president, as long he sees oil and dollar signs.

President Donald Trump offered a mind-boggling defense of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Tuesday when asked about the foreign kleptocrat’s orchestrating the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

During a joint press conference in the Oval Office, Trump responded with hostility when ABC News reporter Mary Bruce asked Trump whether it was “appropriate” for the president’s family to do business in Saudi Arabia while he was in the White House, before turning her attention to the crown prince.

“And your royal highness, the U.S. intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist. 9/11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. Why should Americans trust you, and the same to you, Mr. President?” Bruce asked, but Trump was already trying to interrupt her.

“No, who are you with?” the president snapped.

“I’m with ABC News, sir,” she replied.

“Who?” he asked.

“ABC News, sir,” she repeated.

“Fake news. ABC fake news. One of the worst, one of the worst in the business,” Trump said.

Trump then launched into a rant claiming he had “nothing to do with the family business” and that his family’s company had done “very little with Saudi Arabia, actually.”

“As far as this gentleman is concerned, he’s done a phenomenal job,” Trump said, referring to MBS. “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial, a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”

MBS offered his own response. “I feel painful about families of 9/11 in America, but we have to focus on reality,” he said, claiming that Osama bin Laden had used Saudi citizens in his attacks in order to destroy the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia.

“About the journalist, it’s really painful to hear [of] anyone that’s been losing his life for no real purpose or nothing illegal way. And it’s painful for us in Saudi Arabia,” the crown prince said. He claimed that the government had done “all the right steps” in investigating Khashoggi’s death and determined that “nothing happened like that.”

According to a 2021 assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, MBS had “approved” Khashoggi’s murder in 2018, during Trump’s first term, and supported “using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad.”

A federal judge has thrown out Texas’s gerrymandered congressional maps.

Judge Jeffrey V. Brown ruled Tuesday that the Lone Star State must return to its 2021 maps for the 2026 election, writing that “substantial evidence” proved Texas had “racially gerrymandered” its latest districts.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. But Texas’s decision to do so in the middle of the decade—at Donald Trump’s direction—raised alarm.

Trump had suggested that Texas could give Republicans five more House seats by flipping a handful of blue districts in the Lone Star State next year via “a very simple redrawing.” In July, the Justice Department threatened to take legal action on the matter, asserting that at least four Texas congressional districts were “unconstitutional” since the presence of multiple racial groups had made white people the regional electoral minority.

Mere days after the DOJ letter, Governor Greg Abbott added redistricting to the special session’s legislative agenda.

“Lawmakers reportedly met that request to redistrict on purely partisan grounds with apprehension. When the governor announced his intent to call a special legislative session, he didn’t even place redistricting on the legislative agenda,” Brown wrote in his ruling. “But when the Trump Administration reframed its request as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board.”

Redistricting is perfectly legal—so long as it complies with federal law. Trump’s directive for Texas forced the state to focus on race rather than politics in defiance of national nondiscrimination laws. Brown noted in the legal opinion that if the effort had intended to thwart Democratic strongholds in the state, it would have also targeted majority white Democrat districts,” but those were “conspicuously absent.”

“In other words, the Governor explicitly directed the Legislature to redistrict based on race. In press appearances, the Governor plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts,” Brown wrote.

Brown determined that reverting to the 2021 map was a more adequate solution than providing the state with another opportunity to draw up a plan, since the 2021 iteration was not only developed by the state legislature (as opposed to the state judiciary) but has successfully been used in two previous congressional elections as well as an ongoing special election.

Democrats celebrated the news.

“Womp, Womp,” responded Texas State Representative Gene Wu, the chair of the state Democratic caucus.

Trump issued similar directives for a handful of other red states, including Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Illinois, and Florida.

The aggressive redistricting effort elicited shock and contempt from two of the country’s most populous (and Democratic) regions—California and New York. Both states have since launched their own redistricting wars to potentially offset Texas’s altered numbers, though the initiative may seriously offset House seats in the coming years in light of Tuesday’s ruling.

This story has been updated.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene seemed to call out Donald Trump Tuesday at a press conference surrounded by victims of child sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

“I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five—no actually six years for. And I gave him my loyalty for free. I won my first election without his endorsement, beating eight men in a primary, and I’ve never owed him anything, but I fought for him for the policies and for America First,” Greene said outside of the Capitol. “And he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition.”

Greene laid out her reasons for supporting the release of the Epstein files, using her strongest words against the president to date.

“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is a, is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me,” Greene added.

Greene was one of three Republican signatories to the original discharge petition triggering a vote on the Epstein files. The House is expected to vote Tuesday on a bill to release the government’s files on Epstein, and it is now expected to easily pass with Republican and Democratic support.

Trump has seemingly given up on blocking and delaying the vote, but not without calling the Georgia congresswoman “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene” in recent days and mocking her claims of receiving threats. With these latest remarks, it seems Trump and Greene’s relationship could soon be irreparable.

The survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking empire are begging Donald Trump to stop turning their suffering into a political issue.

Speaking during a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol Tuesday, a group of the financier’s victims excoriated Trump’s dogged efforts to minimize interest in the case as a “national embarrassment.”

Jena-Lisa Jones, who publicly accused Epstein in 2019 of abusing her in his home years earlier, described the process to obtain transparency into the government’s investigation as “distressing.”

“First, the administration said it would release everything, and applauded President Trump for that,” Jones said. “Then it fought to release nothing.

“Now that the checks and balances of our democracy have worked, and the bill is getting passed to release the files, we are hearing the administration say they intend to investigate various Democrats who were friends with Epstein.

“I beg you, President Trump—please stop making this political. It is not about you, President Trump. You are our president, please start acting like it. Show some class, show some real leadership. Show that you actually care about the people other than yourself,” Jones continued. “I voted for you, but your behavior on this issue has been a national embarrassment.”

The women met on Capitol Hill hours ahead of a House vote that could unlock public access to the Epstein case files.

The Trump administration first bungled the release of the files in July, when the Justice Department issued a memo that contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the alleged existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” Since then, Trump has attempted to brush off the scandal, repeatedly referring to it as a Democrat-invented “hoax.”

Pressure on lawmakers dramatically ramped up last week after Representative Adelita Grijalva was sworn in, adding the final signature necessary to force a vote in the House on the files’ release.

The House Oversight Committee also released more than 20,000 documents that they had obtained from Epstein’s estate, revealing that Trump was a frequent topic of conversation between Epstein and his pen pals.

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.

Their split sent Trump into a tailspin, inspiring him to meet with conservative lawmakers one-on-one in an apparent pressure campaign to kill the vote. But by Sunday, Trump appeared to acknowledge that he had lost the battle—at least in the House—writing on Truth Social that Republicans should release the files because they had “nothing to hide.”

But the sudden reversal didn’t win him any favors with Epstein’s survivors.

“To the president of the United States of America, who is not here today, I want to send a clear message to you,” said Haley Robson, who was 16 when she met Epstein. “While I do understand that your position has changed on the Epstein files and I’m grateful that you have pledged to sign this bill, I can’t help to be skeptical of what the agenda is.

“I want to relay this message to you: I am traumatized. I am not stupid,” Robson added, repeating herself. “I am traumatized. I am not stupid.”

When misogynistic influencer Andrew Tate and his brother left Romania in February to return to the United States, a Trump administration official intervened on their behalf with Customs and Border Protection.

ProPublica reports that Paul Ingrassia, a White House lawyer who had previously represented the Tate brothers and once bragged about having a “Nazi streak,” intervened on their behalf when customs officials seized their electronic devices at the airport in Fort Lauderdale. 

Ingrassia, working as the administration’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, personally sent a letter to senior DHS officials urging them to return the devices. Ingrassia’s letter, obtained by ProPublica, told the officials that seizing the items was not a good use of the department’s time or resources, and that the request came from the White House. 

The letter reportedly alarmed the officials, who thought they could be interfering in a federal investigation if they returned the devices. Tate is under investigation for criminal and civil charges in Romania and the U.K. relating to sexual assault, tax evasion, and human trafficking. A woman in Florida has also sued Tate for coercing her into sex work. 

Ingrassia’s request disgusted at least one government official because of its “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.”

“It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person told ProPublica. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.”

Ingrassia already has a negative reputation inside and outside of government. Currently working for the General Services Administration, he was forced to withdraw his nomination to the Office of Special Counsel last month after text messages surfaced where he made blatantly racist comments. 

Not only is Ingrassia a racist, it seems he has a misogynist streak as well. It’s no surprise that he has also been accused of sexual harassment. But in the Trump administration, all that matters is loyalty to the president, and both Ingrassia and the Tates have it.  

President Donald Trump interrupted his own scrambled attempt to elucidate his affordability pitch to talk about his favorite sandwich.

“I like the fish,” said a hoarser-than-usual Trump while speaking at the McDonald’s National Impact Summit in Washington Monday night. He waved his hand and released a throaty hiss, ostensibly to mime the fish he liked.

“I like it. You could do a little bit more tartar sauce though, please. Seriously. I hate when I say, ‘Do you have any tartar sauce? Do you understand that? Yes, he understands that.’”

Trump’s latest weird attempt to tout the McDonald’s brand in order to seem like a normal person comes just one week after McDonald’s chief executive Christopher Kempczinski told investors that ballooning prices at the fast-food chain had caused traffic from low-income households to drop by double digits.

But it seems that Trump accidentally made clear that his emphasis on the cost of living was simply an attempt to steal the issue from his political opponents, who’d used it to great effect on Election Day earlier this month.

“The word is ‘affordable,’” Trump said. “And affordable should be our word, not theirs, because the Democrats got up and said, ‘Affordability, affordability,’ and they don’t say that they had the worst inflation in history, the highest energy prices in history, everything was the worst. What they are great at is lying.”

In reality, inflation has steadily increased for the last five months in a row.

Clearly, the nation’s economic anxieties have become a sore spot for the president, who has repeatedly claimed to have brought grocery prices down despite consumers experiencing the biggest price jump in more than three years. Earlier this month, he ranted that he didn’t want to “hear about affordability.” Now he can’t seem to stop talking about it.

But he still failed to acknowledge his own role in raising prices—through tariffs and his crackdown on immigrants—and blamed former President Joe Biden for, well, everything.

“We’re gonna make the American dream a word that—two words that you didn’t have. You didn’t have those two words. Remember when Biden said, ‘It’s all about three words: the American dream’? You don’t ever want to get in that situation. Remember that? That was not good,” Trump said.

“You are so damn lucky that I won that election,” Trump said.

He’s right: If he hadn’t, we’d never get to hear him make great economic addresses like this one.

American politics has come a long way since World War II.

More than 250,000 Americans lost their lives fighting fascism in the European theater between 1942 and 1945, but decades later, that fervor to reject the destructive ideology seems to have died among the country’s ruling class.

Republicans on the House Rules Committee refused to condemn fascism Monday, voting against an amendment that would formally rebuke the hyper-nationalistic, authoritarian credo.

Lawmakers that opposed the effort included Representatives Michelle Fischbach, Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, Erin Houchin, Nicholas Langworthy, Austin Scott, H. Morgan Griffith, Brian Jack, and Chairwoman Virginia Foxx.

The conservative fascism defense comes days after the White House branded antifa—a catchall for self-described antifascists—as a foreign terrorist organization. President Donald Trump has used the famously decentralized antifascist network as a scapegoat for years, leveraging the provocative label to push narratives that an organized network of violent, far-left radicals is wreaking havoc in cities across the country.

Fascism, however, has become a remarkably touchy topic. In recent weeks, Republicans have flown into a fury over getting called fascists and accused Democrats of inciting political violence by using the term. Since at least 2015, Americans have argued over the application of the phrase, debating the merits of torching Trump’s authoritarian populist ideology as a fascist groundwork or staying silent to maintain the gravitas of the word.

But this wasn’t always true. Decades ago, fascism and its followers had a clear definition in the U.S. consciousness, especially among the Americans who spent their lives fighting it.

“A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends,” wrote Vice President Henry A. Wallace for The New York Times in 1944.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. They use isolationism as a slogan to conceal their own selfish imperialism,” continued Wallace, who served as the editor of The New Republic after the war.

“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed, is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”

This story has been updated.