Justice Department Tries to Downplay Epstein Files Mentioning Trump

The Justice Department is now downplaying the Epstein files they took so long to release by claiming that they’re full of “untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump.” 

“The Department of Justice has officially released nearly 30,000 more pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein,” the DOJ wrote Tuesday on X. “Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”

“Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims.”

While there certainly is some uncorroborated information in the files, there is also a wealth of new, possibly incriminating evidence about President Trump. One file contains an email from an assistant U.S. attorney from January 2020 that reads, “For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than has previously been reported.”  

Another file contained a 2019 letter from Epstein addressed to “L.N.” or Larry Nassar, the former U.S. gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing scores of women and girls.

“As you know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home,” Epstein wrote, appearing to reference his later death by suicide. “Good luck! We shared one thing… our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair,” he said, signing off “J. Epstein.” 

Even as more information rolls in, it should come as no surprise that the Justice Department—which has been completely subservient to the president—continues to provide cover for him even as they release the heavily redacted files. 

“‘We’re releasing the documents, but please know in advance they’re fake, irrelevant, already debunked, totally harmless, and also important enough to issue a press statement about,’” one conservative X user posted. “If the DOJ tells you what to think before you read the documents, you already know they’re lying.” 

A bunch of masked male Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in tactical gear broke into the women’s bathroom of Cato nutrition bar factory in New York, even forcing a stall open while a woman in there used the toilet. They can be heard telling her to pull her pants up.

The raid occurred in September, but the troubling footage was just recently revealed in court filings.

The officers justified their invasive actions by telling Cato’s owners that they had a warrant for a violent felon. In reality, the warrant they did have only allowed them to go into the building and seize documents, not kidnap a woman while she was on the toilet.

ICE eventually detained and questioned 57 people, even those who asked for a lawyer. At least 21 were deported and separated from their families.

“I guess we found the men going into women’s bathrooms,” one X user mused.

The government found a photograph of Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Steve Bannon’s phone. So, why did they redact it?

Buried in the latest trove of documents released by the Department of Justice Monday, one email appeared to be from a federal investigator who said they’d discovered something while digging through Bannon’s iPhone 7.

“As I was going through the images from that phone, I found an image of Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Bannon’s phone,” the email stated, passing it forward “in case it was of any importance” to someone handling “both cases.”

“Thanks very much for flagging—no need to do anything on this one,” the person responds.

Despite the fact that the Epstein Files Transparency Act only required the Trump administration to redact identifiable information of survivors—something that the government failed to do—the photograph of Trump and Maxwell was redacted in its entirety in the DOJ’s release. The sender and recipients’ names have also all been redacted.

So, what is it about this photograph in particular that warranted redaction?

Over the course of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Trump was photographed several times with Maxwell. The two attended parties and fashion events, and even traveled together.

It seems that Trump may be receiving some special treatment. In other photographs released as part of the government’s document dumps, former President Bill Clinton’s face remained visible while the faces of some other individuals were redacted. The DOJ even went so far as to release a statement to get ahead of the “untrue and sensationalist claims” about Trump contained in their own release.

The batch of files released Monday contained multiple disturbing revelations, including one email that suggested Trump flew on Epstein’s jet “many more times than previously has been reported,” and Epstein’s apparent suicide note that mentioned Trump’s love of “young, nubile girls.”

Epstein files leaked on Monday night confirmed what so many people already suspected: President Trump spent much more time with Epstein—and young women—than he’s said he has. 

An email from an assistant U.S. attorney from January 2020 reads, “For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than has previously been reported.” 

“He is listed as a passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, including at least four flights on which Maxwell was present,” the attorney continued, noting that Trump brought his wife, son Eric, and daughter Tiffany at times.

On one flight, the only three listed passengers were Trump,  Epstein, and a 20-year-old whose name has been redacted, likely a victim of Epstein and Maxwell. 

This email completely undermines Trump’s various stories regarding his friendship with Epstein, from saying that he viewed Epstein as some kind of creep to be kept at arm’s length, to saying he barely knew him. Regardless of how their relationship ended, the president was flying around on a private jet with a sexual predator who abused children—which explains the lengths the administration went to keep these files from coming out even as a notable portion of their voter base recognized it as an issue. 

It will be interesting to hear Trump and his helpers explain this one. Why would Trump fly on the sex trafficker’s plane multiple times? Did he just not know then too? 

“Trump was on Epstein’s plane, with Epstein victims,” one X user wrote. “Yet another reason why he was trying to keep the Epstein files from ever seeing the light of day.”

What do Jeffrey Epstein, Larry Nassar, and Donald Trump all have in common?

Buried in the latest trove of documents released by the Justice Department Monday, a postcard addressed to “L.N.” or Larry Nassar, the former U.S. gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing scores of women and girls, mentioned Trump by name—and more.

“As you know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home,” Epstein wrote, appearing to reference his later death by suicide. “Good luck! We shared one thing… our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair,” he continued, signing off “J. Epstein.”

The government also released an image of the envelope, which was addressed from Epstein to “inmate” Nassar, and was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein died at the Metropolitan Correction Center in New York City. The letter, marked as return to sender, was addressed to Nassar at USP Arizona, where the high-profile pedophile had been held before he was transferred in 2018.

It had previously been reported that Epstein attempted to reach out to Nassar, but that his letter had been returned. The government’s documents suggest that the letter was first discovered weeks later in September 2019, and was submitted for a handwriting analysis in July 2020. It’s not clear what the results of the writing test were.

The latest batch of documents released by the Department of Justice mention Trump’s name hundreds of times. One 2020 email sent by a federal prosecutor asserted that Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware).”

The previous batch of documents published Friday were heavily criticized for being incomplete. While the government made sweeping redactions to entire pages of documents, it apparently failed to redact the names of multiple survivors.

Just days after plastering his name onto the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., President Trump will be naming a new class of battleships after himself.

Trump is planning to make the naming announcement of the Navy’s new battleships alongside Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida on Monday. An anonymous Pentagon official told The New York Times that Trump will call them “Trump-class” battleships.

The ship will be part of Trump’s vision of a new “Golden Fleet.” Each ship is expected to cost at least $5 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

As The New Republic’s Matt Ford wrote earlier this week—as bleak as the Gulf of America, the Trump Kennedy Center, the War Department, and others sound, Trump won’t be president forever. If he can change them just that easily, there’s no reason the next Democratic administration should hesitate to change them back.

CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss told 60 Minutes producers she was killing their story on the CECOT megaprison in El Salvador, where Trump deported more than 250 Venezuelan immigrants,  because it did “not present the administration’s argument.”

“What we have is Karoline Leavitt’s soundbite claiming they are evildoers in America (rapists, murderers, etc.). But isn’t there much more to ask in light of the torture that we are revealing?” Weiss wrote in a Sunday memo. “Tom Homan and Stephen Miller don’t tend to be shy. I realize we’ve emailed the DHS spox, but we need to push much harder to get these principals on the record.”

Weiss’s decision to kill the story because it didn’t have enough perspective from DHS officials—who had already declined to speak with 60 Minutes—was met with uproar when it was leaked on Monday. But she doubled down. 

“We need to be able to get the principals on the record and on camera,” she said on a Monday staffing call, insinuating that the testimonies of CECOT inmates were insufficient.

Killing a story about a brutal megaprison because the folks that are sending people to the brutal megaprison aren’t featured prominently enough has not been favorably received. 

“The Trump administration sent dozens [of] young men with no criminal record to be tortured and abused in a foreign prison,” podcaster Jon Favreau wrote. “@bariweiss can keep reporting, delaying, or kill the story altogether, but the basic facts have been well-documented in multiple court cases, including by Trump’s own DOJ and Trump-appointed judges.” 

“Bari Weiss’s main criticism is that 60 Minutes doesn’t advance the story,” writer Randye Hoder chimed. “But her solution is to ask Stephen Miller to regurgitate the same talking points this admin has given from the get-go, which we’ve heard a gazillion times)!”

The Trump administration has yet to comment. View the trailer for the scrapped segment here.

Survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse are claiming that the Trump administration broke the law by failing to redact some of their names and withholding other documents.

In a joint statement Monday, multiple survivors slammed the government’s recent document dump for failing to redact “numerous victim identities” while also making “abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation.”

“We are told there are that there are still hundreds of thousands of documents still unreleased. These are clear-cut violations of an unambiguous law.”

The statement follows a survivor’s formal legal notice to Justice Department attorneys on Saturday, claiming that the government had failed to redact their name after previously withholding their file.

“The DOJ asserts that my own file requires prolonged review to determine whether redactions are appropriate—yet it had no difficulty publicly releasing my identity in mass disclosure,” the survivor wrote.

The survivor noted that the Epstein Files Transparency Act included protecting the victims’ identities as a “central statutory safeguard.” At the same time, the DOJ has already been criticized for redacting many names from the files, including Trump’s, a move totally devoid of transparency.

The survivor added that if the government’s decision to include their name unredacted had been an effort to intimidate them, it had failed. “This unlawful disclosure does not silence me. It does not frighten me. If anything, it has made me more resolved than ever to resolve in full, lawful release of the Epstein files,” the survivor wrote.

Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who sponsored the Epstein files Transparency Act, have begun threatening to fine Attorney General Pam Bondi for every day she fails to release the full Epstein files, after failing to meet Friday’s deadline.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller threw a tantrum for the stupidest reason imaginable.

A federal jury Sunday refused to convict Bobby Nunez, a 33-year-old tow truck driver in Los Angeles charged with stealing government property after he moved an SUV belonging to ICE that was blocking a driveway.*

Federal prosecutors alleged that Nunez had interfered with ICE’s violent arrest of Tatiana Mafla-Martinez, a 23-year-old Colombian woman suspected of being in the country illegally, who was later released. They claimed he had pressed the door of Mafla-Martinez’s car against one of the officers, before towing their car.

Lawyers for Nunez argued that federal agents were blocking the building’s driveway, and noted that Nunez had only moved the vehicle one block away. The SUV was reportedly returned to agents within 13 minutes. Nunez faced up to 10 years in prison.

Miller fumed over the ruling in a post on X Sunday. “Another example of blatant jury nullification in a blue city. The justice system depends on a jury of peers with a shared system of interests and values. Mass migration tribalizes the entire legal system,” he wrote.

Of course, there was no evidence to suggest that the ruling was so-called “jury nullification.” It is the latest in a string of weak cases brought forth by the Trump administration against protesters and civilians tied to immigration arrests.

* This story has been updated to reflect Nunez’s acquittal.

President Trump’s new special envoy to Greenland, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, wants to help make Greenland “part of the U.S.”

“Thank you @realDonaldTrump! It’s an honor to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the U.S.,” Landry wrote on X after Trump’s Truth Social announcement late Sunday evening. “This in no way affects my position as Governor of Louisiana!”

This is the most recent development in Trump’s monthslong campaign to essentially colonize Greenland. His primary excuse for this has been “international security,” although it’s more likely he wants to take advantage of Greenland’s value as a geopolitical asset as well as its mineral and oil resources.

“That whole area is becoming very important, for a lot of reasons. The routes are very direct to Asia, to Russia, and you have ships all over the place. We have to have protection,” he said back in March, before attacking Denmark, a NATO ally that control Greenland as an autonomous territory.

“This appointment is outrageous,” political science professor Michael McFaul wrote on X. “Imagine if Mexico appointed a special envoy to make Louisiana a part of Mexico? Our ally Denmark deserves more respect than this.”

Denmark’s leadership has reiterated that they have no plans to give up Greenland. On Monday, Denmark summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain the move.

“We insist that everyone including the U.S. − must show respect for the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark,” Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said.