DOJ Briefly Erases Long List of Tips Against Trump in New Epstein Docs

In the latest part of its Epstein files rollout, the Justice Department released a long list of sexual abuse allegations against Donald Trump. Then it temporarily retracted it.

The DOJ published three million pages of the Epstein files Friday, more than a month past its congressionally mandated deadline. The trove included one particularly shocking document: an FBI tip line record that included previously unreported sex abuse allegations against the president, some of which involved minors.

The tip line includes unsubstantiated and potentially uninvestigated claims of abuse, sometimes by way of secondhand information.

In one such undated line, a self-described friend of one of Trump’s alleged victims submitted a tip.

“[Redacted] reported an unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in NJ,” the top entry of the tip sheet reads. “The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump. The friend said she was also abused by [Jeffrey] Epstein.”

The page notes that the friend “was sent to the Washington Office to conduct an interview.”

But just a couple of hours after the DOJ published the tip sheet, the document was removed from the larger document cache.

“Page not found,” read the page that replaced by the original document link. “We are sorry, the page you’re looking for can’t be found on the Department of Justice website.”

The altered webpage is incorrectly dated, as well, suggesting that it was last updated May 30, 2025.

Then, inexplicably, the document was accessible again.

Email messages and signatures attached to the document signal that it was partially censored and transferred between FBI agents in August, when a journalist filed an information request in relation to New York property brothers turned child predators Tal, Oren, and Alon Alexander.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is buying up warehouses across the country to build a massive network of detention centers.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have already been spent to create huge immigrant jails, often in small towns, Bloomberg reports. The agency paid $102 million for a warehouse near Hagerstown, Maryland, and $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona.

And that’s just the cost to purchase the buildings—ICE also has to pay to turn them into jails with bathrooms, beds, dining, and recreation facilities. A third warehouse purchase in El Paso, Texas, could be one of the largest jails in the United States when completed, housing 8,500 beds.

ICE plans to use up to 23 warehouses around the country to detain immigrants in even more cities, including in Minnesota, Indiana, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The new strategy is a shift for ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, which has been relying on many tent camps, such as the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” in south Florida.

People who live near the proposed jails are pushing back against the plan, with protesters showing up in Hagerstown to protest on January 20 despite freezing temperatures. In Oklahoma City, the owners of a warehouse backed out of a deal Thursday to build an ICE facility, following local backlash to the plan. Similarly, the owners of a warehouse in Salt Lake City announced they had “no plans to sell or lease the property in question to the federal government” after protesters showed up at their offices.

In all, there have been protests or packed public meetings in at least 15 communities where ICE is planning to build a facility, The Washington Post reports. In many places, state and local officials are arguing that these detention centers would be a threat to public safety, strain local infrastructure, and violate zoning laws. And ICE has a history of failing to meet government standards for detention facilities: At one of its tent camps in El Paso, Texas, last September, inspectors found 60 different violations.

ICE’s warehouse plan is full of flaws, but the chief obstacle is the opposition from local residents, which only grows with every negative ICE headline. Will this mega network of warehouse jails get built, and will they even be safe to house thousands of people, including possibly U.S. citizens?

After a magistrate judge left Attorney General Pam Bondi furious by rejecting a criminal complaint against journalist Don Lemon on January 18, she tried to get her revenge Friday morning. The Department of Justice arrested Lemon in Los Angeles on charges related to his involvement in an ICE protest at a Minnesotan church.

But only a few hours after the fact, the DOJ’s case is falling apart again. MS NOW reported that various DOJ prosecutors in both Minnesota and Los Angeles have refused to be involved in indicting Lemon.

Authorities continue to be vague about why exactly Lemon is being prosecuted. Bondi wrote on X that Lemon—alongside journalist Georgia Fort and two activists, Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy—had been detained “in connection with [a] coordinated attack” on the St. Paul church, but has not said what the charges are. FBI spokeswoman Lourdes Arocho said Lemon was arrested in Beverly Hills “on a federal warrant issued in another district.”

Lemon covered the church protest as a member of the media, a fact he made quite obvious at the time. He interviewed both protesters and the pastor of the church at the event. An appeals judge said of Lemon and his producer’s conduct: “There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”

Trump’s idea in prosecuting Lemon, perhaps, is not that he’ll be found guilty but that the DOJ can discourage journalists from reporting on things the president doesn’t like by getting them to waste time and money in legal battles.

“They probably don’t have any expectation that this prosecution will stick,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar at Stanford Law School, told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “But they do know they will put Don Lemon through the grinder in the meantime.”

Donald Trump has sued the IRS and the Treasury Department after an agency contractor leaked his tax returns, revealing that he hadn’t paid income tax for a decade—but his lawsuit isn’t likely to stand up to scrutiny.

In court documents filed late Thursday, Trump demanded that the agencies cough up a minimum of $10 billion in damages that would be paid out on the taxpayer’s dime. But there are several issues with the suit itself that raise questions about whether the case can be litigated at all.

First, Trump, in a personal capacity, is suing the IRS and the Treasury for a breach that occurred between May 2019 and September 2020. The problem: The breach occurred during the first Trump administration, when Trump himself was in charge of governing those institutions.

Further still, the bulk of the 27-page complaint appears to have passed the statute of limitations. As Ed Whelan, the former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, noted online, the first claim in Trump’s complaint must be brought “within two years after the date of discovery” by the offended party.

“Trump knew of the leaks back in 2020. The complaint feebly tries to get around this problem by contending that Trump and his fellow plaintiffs ‘were not able to bring an action against an unknowable, indeterminate defendant to vindicate their rights’ until they were notified of criminal charges against Littlejohn,” Whelan wrote, referring to Charles Littlejohn, the accused contractor.

Littlejohn is currently serving five years in prison for the breach, which he pleaded guilty to in 2023.

“But Littlejohn isn’t the defendant. Treasury and IRS are,” Whelan observed. “And Trump knew back in 2020 that they had allowed the allegedly unlawful leaks. So that claim is time-barred.”

Trump is suing the government in conjunction with his two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as the Trump Organization.

“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” the lawsuit states.

The second claim listed in the lawsuit, which relates to the privacy clause, similarly expired, according to Whelan.

“Seems to me that it wasn’t long ago that conservatives decried vexatious litigants and those who tried to fleece American taxpayers,” Whelan snarked.

The White House is gloating about the arrest of journalist Don Lemon, posting a picture of the former CNN correspondent with the message, “When life gives you lemons” and a chains emoji on X Friday morning.

Boasting about a Black journalist’s arrest with a chains emoji was certainly a choice, evoking racist imagery. Federal agents arrested Lemon Thursday night along with one other Black journalist, Georgia Fort, and two Black activists, Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy. All of them were connected to the anti-ICE protest at a Minneapolis church earlier this month where an ICE agent was serving as pastor. A federal magistrate judge had rejected a criminal complaint against Lemon last week, reportedly enraging Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Three of the protest organizers were also arrested last week, with Bondi posting, “Listen loud and clear: WE DO NOT TOLERATE ATTACKS ON PLACES OF WORSHIP” and the White House sharing a doctored image of one of the organizers, civil rights attorney and Minneapolis activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, supposedly crying as she was arrested.

Arresting protesters and journalists is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The White House appears to be trying to intimidate anyone who opposes its racist immigration agenda—and even the journalists attempting to document it.