Federal Judge Orders Release of Epstein Grand Jury Documents

We’re about to get more Epstein documents.

Trump-appointed Judge Rodney Smith of the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida on Friday ordered the release of previously secret grand jury transcripts from 2005 and 2007 investigations into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The move was spurred by the passing of Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act.

This comes after weeks of resistance from President Trump that culminated in him switching course and caving to demands to release the files.

“The United States seeks to unseal the grand jury materials in this case and publicly release them, as well as lift any preexisting protective orders that would prevent the Department of Justice from releasing the materials,” Smith’s order reads. “The Act applies to unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials that relate to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Other judges from Florida and New York have noted that the grand jury transcripts are unlikely to reveal any new information. The order doesn’t set a deadline for the release of the documents, which will be redacted before being released to the public.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Homeland Security has innovated a cringey new way to spread its blatantly made-up statistics documenting its ethnic cleansing campaign: introducing DHS Wrapped!

In the latest installment of the Trump administration’s weird attempts to appeal to Gen Z, the official DHS X account shared a graphic Thursday channeling Spotify’s Wrapped year-end recaps of its users’ listening habits—but instead of Sabrina Carpenter songs, the DHS version listed the stupidly named immigration operations and some statistics that didn’t quite add up.

“A year full of high stakes operations, deportations, and historic firsts. Here’s what America witnessed in 2025,” the post read.

According to the graphic, the Trump administration had deported more than 586,000 immigrants, while another 1.9 million had self-deported—but those two numbers don’t really make sense.

For the government to have deported 586,000 people, they would have needed to remove about 13,022 people every week since Donald Trump entered office roughly 45 weeks ago. DHS is reportedly removing fewer than 7,500 people every week. That’s still a terrifying number, but nowhere near the level of removals they are claiming.

It’s also unclear how many people have self-deported, and the DHS has given conflicting accounts.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that 1.6 million people had self-deported. In just a few weeks, that number has ballooned by 300,000. So, in the past month roughly the population of Jersey City just packed their bags and left?

Meanwhile, only 35,000 people have used CBP Home to leave the country, costing roughly $7,500 per self-deportation, The Atlantic reported last week. (The agency previously told The New Republic that “tens of thousands” of undocumented immigrants had used the CBP Home app to relocate to their home countries.)

The Trump administration is invoking racist tropes in a policy document, claiming that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.” 

The White House’s new National Security Strategy, posted Thursday night, called the European Union antidemocratic and seemed to make an openly bigoted jab at the demographics of European NATO states, saying, “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” 

“As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter,” the document states. 

The paper went on to say the U.S. should “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” including by supporting “patriotic” parties. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the document reads.

The administration also accused governments of “the subversion of democratic processes” to thwart public opinion to end the war in Ukraine. The document praises Europe’s far-right political parties, saying that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” gives “cause for great optimism.” 

While sitting European leaders haven’t commented, former leaders have reacted with alarm, comparing the document to rhetoric from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. 

“It’s language that one otherwise only finds coming out of some bizarre minds of the Kremlin,” said Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, on X. He pointed out the only part of the world where the document saw a threat to democracy was Europe. Bildt also described the document as “to the right of the extreme right in Europe” and “JD Vance on steroids.” 

An anonymous European diplomat also mentioned the vice president, saying the document’s “tone was not promising. Even worse than Vance’s speech in February,” referring to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference where he extolled nativism and far-right politics while downplaying the threat from Russia. 

Latvia’s former Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins told Reuters that “the happiest country reading this is Russia,” adding that “Moscow has been trying to break the transatlantic bond for years, and now it seems the greatest disruptor of this bond is the U.S. itself, which is unfortunate.”

Much of the document seems to echo the racist rhetoric coming from other parts of the Trump administration, whether it’s the dog whistles coming out of the Department of Homeland Security or the underpinnings of the administration’s immigration policies. It appears that the White House is more concerned about racial and cultural homogeneity than the real external threats.   

The Trump administration removed free national park access on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, while adding it for President Trump’s birthday. 

Now two federal holidays that celebrate Black American history will be ticketed—from around $3 to $30—while Trump’s birthday on June 14 is free entry. 

This change, first reported by SFGATE, is emblematic of the small-scale, antagonistic ways in which Trump wages his MAGA culture war on any federal mention of Black history in America, or any minority group, for that matter. 

The NPS has been a battleground for much of that war. Since taking office for the second time, Trump has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits documenting American slavery, including an iconic 1863 portrait of an ex-slave, often referred to as either Peter or Gordon, and the brutal whipping scars on his “scourged back.” 

He signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” which of course included anything relating to race relations, LGBTQ rights, and sexism. He also removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” while removing a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

This move is spiteful and self-centered, and a perfect opportunity for the president to center himself while punching down on MLK Day and Juneteenth in the name of MAGA.  

The U.S. president on Friday became the inaugural recipient of FIFA’s newly minted peace prize.

The prize was the invention of Gianni Infantino, the boss of the international soccer league, who shocked his own top officials by cooking up the concept after Donald Trump begged, pleaded, and failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in October.

“This is truly one of the great honors of my life, and beyond awards, Gianni and I were discussing this, we’ve saved millions and millions of lives,” Trump said after the medal—a sculpture of hands holding a soccer ball—had been draped around his neck. “So many different wars that we were able to end.”

But whether a soccer prize will scratch Trump’s itch for global recognition remains to be seen. Trump has coveted the Nobel Peace Prize for years, going so far as to lie about solving nonexistent international conflicts and phoning Norwegian officials this past summer in lame efforts to snag the title (Norway’s government has no influence on decisions made by the committee).

Part of the president’s obsession could stem from the fact that four other U.S. presidents have received the award, perhaps most notably Trump’s political nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

Infantino had publicly lobbied for Trump to win the award. But his failure to launch that process offered Infantino a new opening to flatter the president: inventing an entirely new award to satisfy Trump’s ego.

Trump was announced as the winner during the 2026 FIFA World Cup final draw.

This story has been updated.