Why Was Trump’s DOJ Tracking This Top Epstein Reporter?

Miami Herald investigative journalist Julie K. Brown—whose 2018 reporting essentially reopened the Jeffrey Epstein case—wants to know why her flight information is in the Epstein files. 

“Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?” she wrote Sunday on X. “As the flight itinerary includes my maiden name (and I did book this flight) why was the DOJ monitoring me?”

“I expected my name to be in the Epstein files, since the Miami Herald published the series ‘Perversion of Justice,’” Brown continued on her Substack. “But what I didn’t expect to see was an American Airlines flight record from 2019 with my full name on them, including my maiden name, which I don’t use professionally. It’s an unusual name, so it’s clear it’s me.” 

The released flight logs occurred during the first Trump administration, around the time of Epstein’s arrest, which begs the question: Why were they following the reporter who was instrumental in putting Epstein’s crimes back in the public eye?

If there’s more to this, then Brown may have another book to write.  

The Department of Homeland Security’s tasteless holiday shitposting may have just violated the United States Constitution.

The federal agency’s official X account published multiple posts Thursday that appeared to violate the Establishment Clause, which prohibits government actions that favor one religion over another.

“Rejoice America, Christ is born!” read one post containing a video montage of snowy scenery complete with a choir singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”

“Merry Christmas, America. We are blessed to share a nation and a Savior,” read another post.

The post also included a video montage that was clearly meant to evoke nostalgia, but it was more off-putting than anything else. The video featured archival footage of Donald Trump spliced into clips from popular holiday movies. It even included a photograph of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem holding a Christmas tree in Chicago, where she launched a deadly large-scale immigration operation, to really put the eerie in cheery.

Increasingly, it seems the Trump administration views the separation between church and state as merely a suggestion.

It’s fitting that DHS would be the source of this blatant violation, as Noem’s ethnic cleansing approach to homeland security is transparently rooted in xenophobia and Christian nationalism. And the president has continually leaned into Christian nationalist rhetoric in order to please his conservative base.

“They say separation between church and state … I said, ‘All right, let’s forget about that for one time,’” Trump said earlier this spring during a National Prayer Day event.

DHS also did its fair share of disgusting holiday posting that didn’t violate the Constitution. One post referring to “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” read: “This Christmas, our hearts grow as the illegal population shrinks.” But the Trump administration’s continued efforts to tear apart families and communities demonstrates just the opposite.

Representative Thomas Massie torched Donald Trump’s pathetic swipe at him in his outrageous Christmas post. 

The president posted a special Christmas message Thursday addressed to “the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein,” and congratulated himself for “dropping” the convicted sex offender “long before it was fashionable to do so.” 

“When their names get brought out in an ongoing Radical Left Witch Hunt (plus one lowlife ‘Republican,’ Massie!) and it is revealed that they are Democrats all, there will be a lot of explaining to do,” Trump wrote. 

Massie, who was the only Republican who co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a law compelling the Department of Justice to release every unclassified document from its investigations into Epstein, hit back at the president’s barb.  

“Merry Christmas to you too Mr. President,” Massie  wrote. “So… I’ve teamed up with radical left democrats to expose… Democrats. This 4D chess is fun!”

“What a novel idea to put country before party,” Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who introduced the original bill, replied on X. 

Massie continued to mock Trump on Friday for taking time out of his holiday to complain about him. “Imagine celebrating a blessed Christmas with your family… suddenly phones alert everyone to the most powerful man in the world attacking you… for fulfilling his campaign promise to help victims!” Massie wrote from his campaign’s X account. 

President Trump is holding two emergency summits next week at his Mar-a-Lago estate—first with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and then with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in a supposed effort to stop two wars he’s failed to end.

Axios reports that Trump will host Zelenskiy on Sunday and Netanyahu on Monday.

Trump has been claiming he is “close” to a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine for almost a year—an embarrassing development for a war he claimed he could end on his first day in office. The Ukrainian president has said that a peace deal is “90 percent ready.” Only time—and the Kremlin—will tell.

Meanwhile, Trump has been at a fork in the road in Gaza for two months, as Israel both continues to violate the ceasefire and plans to carry on its occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the region.

“We are deep in Gaza, and we will never leave Gaza. We are there to defend, to prevent what happened. We are standing, as we said,” Israel Defense Minister Israel Katz said just days ago. “We trust the rock of Israel and the IDF in defending Israel in a fierce battle between jihadist enemies of this kind and Israeli enemies of this kind.” It’s hard to picture Netanyahu doing anything to push back on that threat.

Either way, it’s clear that the man who campaigned for his own Nobel Peace Prize is scrambling to end the two major international conflicts that have plagued his second term so far.

A survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse torched President Donald Trump’s outrageous message on the alleged sex trafficker.

Trump, who reportedly had an intimate friendship with Epstein, posted a special Christmas message Thursday addressed to “the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT.”

Trump congratulated himself for “dropping” the convicted sex offender “long before it was fashionable to do so.”

But Marijke Chartouni, who has said she was sexually abused by Epstein when she was 20 years old, didn’t buy Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the convicted sex offender.

“Every accusation is a confession. Cheers,” she wrote on X.

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ by aggressively detaining a pastor.

Multiple agents in tactical gear can be seen in a video arguing with a man in his car on a video taken on Christmas Eve in Lewiston, Maine.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” one of the agents asks the man.

The man, who appears to be of Black African origin, tries to reply. “When you came—”

“Stop talking!” the officer yells back.

“You asked me my ID and I showed you ID, I’m not this one you are looking for, so how so?” the man responded.

“Are you in this country illegally?”

“No, I’m not illegally here,” he responded, while the person filming vouched for him. That wasn’t enough for the agents, as they dragged the man out of his car and onto the ground, cuffing him.

“He’s a pastor, he’s a pastor!” the bystander protests. “You’re beating a pastor!”

“Not in this state,” one of the agents replied while leading the man away.

While the Trump administration claims to care about the plight of Christians, ICE has had a particular disdain for clergymen. In September, they shot Chicago Reverend David Black, the senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, with a pepper ball right in the face while he was protesting at the Broadview ICE facility. And in August, Black pastor and Maine resident Michel Tshimankinda spent two weeks in jail after being detained by ICE. He was later released and returned to his congregation. But for ICE to do this on Christmas Eve—especially as part of an administration that postures as godly—is particularly cruel.

Indiana Senate Majority Floor Leader Chris Garten celebrated Christmas by posting AI-generated images of himself violently attacking Santa Claus in front of the Indiana Statehouse.

“When you find out the North Pole is trying to bring more bureaucratic overreach & unfunded mandates down the chimney disguised as ‘Christmas cheer.’ Not on my watch. We The People run Indiana, not the bureaucrats,” the Republican state senator wrote on X early Christmas morning. “Take it back to the North Pole big guy. Merry Christmas, Hoosiers!”

In one picture—clearly edited to make him look super muscly—Garten is seen riding bareback on a reindeer with his fist in the air, while supporters stand behind him holding signs rife with AI-induced spelling errors.

In the others, he is kicking Santa Claus down the steps, punching him while holding him down on the ground, and descending into an elbow drop.

The reviews of Donald Trump’s takeover of Kennedy Center Honors are in, and it’s official: The president shouldn’t quit his day job just yet. 

Trump had asked his fans Tuesday to let him know what they made of his stint as “Master of Ceremonies” for the yearly award show. “If really good, would you like me to leave the presidency in order to make ‘hosting’ a full time job?” Trump wrote. 

Unfortunately, the viewers’ response was resounding. 

Preliminary data from Nielsen Media Research showed the annual honors  ceremony garnered an absolutely abysmal audience. It was the “smallest audience ever on the night of December 23, 2025, averaging an estimated 2.65 million viewers,” Programming Insider posted on X. “To put that in perspective: the 2024 broadcast averaged 4.1 million.”

Maybe viewers struggled to find the event because Trump decided to change what it was called, dubbing it the “TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER HONORS” in a post on Truth Social, shortly after he slapped his name on the outside of the building. But according to an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post, CBS News staffers were instructed to call it just the Kennedy Center Honors, because an official name change requires congressional approval. The network also cut down Trump’s 12-minute opening remarks down to just two minutes in its coverage.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in Yakima, Washington, spent Christmas Eve arresting a man in a Walmart parking lot—even taking his already purchased groceries for themselves.

Four ICE officers in masks and tactical gear can be seen in a video surrounding a man with a car full of food while he loads it into his car. A woman watching the arrest asked ICE if she could take down the phone number of the man’s wife to let her know her husband had been detained. The ICE agents refused.

“No, guess he should’ve complied,” an agent said.

The agents then start to divvy up the man’s groceries, as the bystander tells them they had previously detained and deported her husband. “I fucking hate these motherfuckers,” the woman filming says as they drive off—presumably to the nearby Yakima ICE Detention Center.

Masked men abducting people and looting their groceries is unfortunately par for the course as the first year of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign draws to a close.

“Fire their asses and arrest them for theft. If there were even a scintilla of decency at DHS, that is what would happen, but there isn’t,” political scientist Norman Ornstein wrote. “Of course, when you have a leader who took $50,000 in a bribe in a cava bag, this is not surprising.”

What’s Grandpa Trump’s version of telling stories by the fire on Christmas? It seems to be unleashing a flurry of more than 100 posts on Truth Social lying, complaining, and congratulating himself.

In the early hours of Thursday, Trump published a torrent of posts targeting former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar, Senator Mark Kelly, Somalis in Minnesota, Michigan’s secretary of state, Democrats in California, and “RINOs,” just to name a few.

Following the flood, Trump penned a special message to “the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein,” and congratulated himself for “dropping” the convicted sex offender “long before it was fashionable to do so.”

“Enjoy what may be your last merry Christmas!” Trump added.

While speaking to a child later Thursday who’d made the mistake of calling NORAD’s Santa Tracker, Trump descended into a paranoid spiral.

“Well we track Santa. We want to make sure that Santa is being good. Santa’s a very good person. We want to make sure that he’s not infiltrated, that we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa,” Trump said, inventing a new problem for American children to mull.

“So, we found out that Santa is good. Santa loves you. Santa loves Oklahoma like I do. You know, Oklahoma was very good to me in the election. So, I love Oklahoma. Don’t ever leave Oklahoma, okay?”

On Christmas Eve, Trump also bid a Merry Christmas to all, “including the Radical Left Scum,” and took a moment to pat himself on the back for things he has not accomplished, like “No Inflation” and “Trillions of Dollars” from his reciprocal tariffs.