Justice Department Tries to Redact Trump’s Face in Epstein Files

The Department of Justice made a lame attempt to cover up Donald Trump’s face in a photo in the latest trove of Jeffery Epstein files.

The photo appears to be of Trump making a speech at an event. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon sent it in a text message to Epstein in 2019. In it, a small portion of Trump’s head, including his ear, are still visible next to a black box covering the rest of his face.

Why attempt to cover up this photo? On its own, it doesn’t incriminate Trump in any of Epstein’s crimes, and previous file releases have already established that Bannon and Epstein had a long correspondence. It seems as though it was an attempt to conceal Trump, although he is still identifiable underneath the black box. The rest of the files contain multiple references to Trump, his Mar-a-Lago estate, and his family members. They also contain interviews with Epstein’s victims, some of whom refer to the president.

The government has only released half of its total Epstein records, despite being required by law to release all unclassified files by six weeks ago. Trump continues to deny a close relationship with the convicted sex trafficker, despite mountains of evidence that one existed. It seems that the DOJ and Attorney General Pam Bondi are assisting the president in trying to minimize the obvious.

A whistleblower’s lawyer accused Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard of burying their client’s complaint about her, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

In a letter sent to Gabbard’s office in November, attorney Andrew Bakaj accused the director of preventing a complaint detailing her wrongdoing from reaching lawmakers. The complaint, which was originally filed with the intelligence community’s inspector general in May, is so highly classified that Bakaj himself has not been able to review it.

Typically, an employee is able to share a complaint alleging wrongdoing directly with lawmakers, as long as the director of national intelligence instructs them on how to securely transmit it. But months after the complaint was originally filed, it reportedly remains locked away in a safe, a person familiar with the matter told the Journal.

“From my experience, it is confounding for [Gabbard’s office] to take weeks—let alone eight months—to transmit a disclosure to Congress,” said Bakaj in a statement.

In addition to accusing Gabbard of wrongdoing, the complaint reportedly implicates “an office within a different federal agency” and raises potential claims of executive privilege, officials told the Journal. One official warned that disclosure of the complaint could cause “grave damage to national security.”

The intelligence community’s inspector general determined that the specific allegations against Gabbard weren’t credible, but it could not make a determination about the other claims, according to a representative for the federal watchdog. Bakaj said he was never informed that any determination was reached.

Last week, Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the Fulton County, Georgia, election office. Having been completely sidelined from the typical responsibilities of the director of national intelligence, Gabbard has apparently spent months leading an investigation into President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Donald Trump threatened to sue comedian Trevor Noah for daring to mention his long-standing connection with child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Practically everyone at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards jabbed and sneered at the president and his administration, but the South African celebrity was the man who really got his goat, inspiring Trump to post a legal threat to Truth Social.

“The Grammy Awards are the WORST, virtually unwatchable!” Trump wrote at 1:01 a.m. Monday.

“CBS is lucky not to have this garbage litter their airwaves any longer,” he said, referring to the music institution’s 2024 contract to move its award ceremony to ABC for the next decade, ending a 53-year run at CBS.

“The host, Trevor Noah, whoever he may be, is almost as bad as Jimmy Kimmel at the Low Ratings Academy Awards,” Trump continued. “Noah said, INCORRECTLY about me, that Donald Trump and Bill Clinton spent time on Epstein Island. WRONG!!!

“I can’t speak for Bill, but I have never been to Epstein Island, nor anywhere close, and until tonight’s false and defamatory statement, have never been accused of being there, not even by the Fake News Media.

“Noah, a total loser, better get his facts straight, and get them straight fast,” he said. “It looks like I’ll be sending my lawyers to sue this poor, pathetic, talentless, dope of an M.C., and suing him for plenty$. Ask Little George Slopadopolus, and others, how that all worked out. Also ask CBS! Get ready Noah, I’m going to have some fun with you!”

Hours earlier, while setting up the nominees for the “Song of the Year” category, Noah quipped that the highly coveted prize was nearly as desired by artists as Greenland is by Trump—for a very particular reason.

“Song of the Year—that is a Grammy that every artist wants almost as much as Trump wants Greenland, which makes sense because Epstein’s island is gone, he needs a new one to hang out with Bill Clinton,” Noah told the crowd.

Trump has long relied on the legal system and lawsuits in order to settle his problems, using the incredible financial heft of his real estate empire or other investments to smother his opposition.

Donald Trump and his allies stayed connected to Jeffrey Epstein well after they claimed they had stopped communicating.

The president has long asserted that his close friendship with the child sex trafficker ended after the duo had a falling out over real estate in Palm Beach, ultimately nixing contact altogether after 2006, when a grand jury indicted Epstein on state charges related to prostitution. That same year, Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago (though Epstein publicly denied the finale of his membership at the time).

But documents published Friday amid the Justice Department’s larger rollout of another tranche of the Epstein files indicate that Trump’s narrative is far from the entire story.

An email out of the trove, issued by Epstein to an individual named William Riley, revealed that the sex trafficker was planning to call Trump as late as 2011.

“Before I call Trump, with regard vrginina ,, are there any other alternatives,” Epstein wrote on April 18, 2011.

It is not clear who Riley is, though a decorated Iraq War veteran known as William Sascha Riley was identified in November as another one of Epstein’s victims by Substack writer Lisa Noelle Voldeng. Riley claimed his adoptive father, William “Bill” Kyle Riley, worked as a pilot for Epstein and trafficked him to the global predator.

As it turns out, Trump’s friends had similarly malleable principles. In an interview with the New York Post podcast in October, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick recalled an instance in 2005 when Epstein—who was at the time his Upper East Side neighbor—invited him to tour his infamous East 71st Street townhouse.

“I say to him, ‘Massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?’” Lutnick told the Post. “And he says, ‘Every day.’ And then he gets, like weirdly close to me, and he says, ‘And the right kind of massage.’”

“In the six to eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again,” he added.

But seven years after that visit, Lutnick was reaching out to Epstein to coordinate a family trip to the financier’s “pedophile island.”

“Hi Jeff, we are landing in St. Thomas early Saturday afternoon and planning to head over to St. Bart’s/Anguilla on Monday at some point. Where are you located (what is exact location for my captain)? Does Sunday evening for dinner sound good?” Lutnick wrote to Epstein in 2012, according to an email made public by the DOJ Friday.

Lutnick then mentioned he was traveling alongside another couple, and that both couples had four children each, before listing out the specific ages of all the children who would be traveling to the island with them.

Five years later, Epstein was donating to a charity of Lutnick’s choice, according to a 2017 email between Epstein and Lutnick’s associate.

Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, appeared in the government’s Friday release of additional Jeffrey Epstein tiles.

Warsh’s name appears to be on an emailed list of guests to “St. Barth’s Christmas 2010,” among others such as Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich and disgraced director Brett Ratner. Warsh also appears on a list of people attending a dinner hosted by British aristocrat William Astor.

The news comes the same day that Trump picked Warsh for the Fed, an unexpectedly conventional pick considering how desperate Trump is to sharply lower interest rates. Warsh has a history of being cautious on inflation, but has signaled a willingness for lower rates in the past few months.

Warsh has always been involved in monetary policy, having been appointed to the Fed in 2006. But his inclusion in the Epstein files is actually not surprising, considering that his wife is billionaire heiress Jane Lauder, granddaughter of Estée Lauder and daughter of Republican donor Ronald Lauder. That puts him in the same wealthy circles that Epstein himself operated in.

Still, it’s unfortunate that this would happen on the same day that he was picked for the Fed. Before Friday’s release, Warsh’s biggest controversy was his connection to Ronald Lauder, who reportedly inspired Trump’s interest in Greenland during his first term in office. Lauder has purchased commercial interests on the island.

Now Warsh may have to answer questions about how well he knows Epstein and what he was doing on St. Barts during Christmas 2010. Questions will also be raised as to whether Trump chose him because he, Epstein, and Warsh know each other from being in the same circles.

A new batch of documents released by the Justice Department on Friday confirm that sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein had active—and seemingly close—relationships with Elon Musk and Steve Bannon.

One email shows Musk reaching out to Epstein in December 2013, mentioning that he would be staying around the British Virgin Islands and St. Barts, asking, “Is there a good time to visit?”

“I will send heli for you,” Epstein replied.

A large number of texts between Bannon and Musk also appeared in the files.

“Enormous number of Steve Bannon texts in these new batches of Epstein Files,” Politico’s Kyle Cheney wrote on X. “They had an obvious familiarity/comfort, joking with each other, mocking Trump, while discussing financial arrangements, the Mueller probe, We Build the Wall, geopolitics re Qatar, UAE, Russia, China, actual contacts with foreign leaders, and making constant arrangements to meet, talk and film an Epstein documentary.”

“Did he fold on the wall,” Epstein asked in one of his texts to Bannon, likely referring to President Trump.

“Yes,” Bannon replied. “But reserves the right to call a national emergency.”

“Sounds like my suggestion,” Epstein said—with a smiley-face emoji attached.

The new documents raise even more questions about Musk’s accusation last year that Trump is in the files, given that Musk appears in the files himself.

While Bannon and Epstein’s close friendship has been covered before, Musk’s connections are notable given his previous threats. Last June, before any files were released, Musk accused Trump of being mentioned by name in the Epstein files, claiming that the president’s alleged attachment to the predator was the real reason the files hadn’t been released in full. And in July, Musk simply posted, “Bannon is in the Epstein files.” Now it’s abundantly clear that he is too—and possibly had a much closer relationship with Epstein than was previously known.

Musk has yet to comment on the newly released files.

President Donald Trump was named in more of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s unsealed emails on Friday.

After the Department of Justice released a new trove of emails, social media sleuths and journalists scoured the files for mentions of Trump, who had a long and well-documented friendship with Epstein.

It’s hard to say when that friendship ended, but Trump claimed in 2019 that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein for “15 years.” He has denied being a part of Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring.

But two new emails unearthed by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell appear suspicious. On March 22, 2011, Epstein emailed a man named “Nicholas L. Ribis” the following (edited to correct spelling and grammar):

The girl in the new papers that has made all this trouble said she worked at Mar-a-Lago when she was 15, in 1998. I’m virtually positive that is a lie. It was when she was 17, in 2000. Her name is [REDACTED]. Who would I go to verify? I don’t know how Donald would respond?

Epstein’s longtime accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell then replied (edited to correct spelling):

I thought you said not to involve Donald—anyway so now the die is cast—you now have to get her employment record—It will either show she started work in 1999 or 2000, as she was full-time there, and I believe you cannot be a minor and work full-time anywhere, so she had to be at least 16 to be in full-time employment. Perhaps start that way—that alone would kill her allegation that she was 15—as I said, you can’t work full-time anywhere at that age … either that or she gave fake ID to Mar-a-Lago, which is also possible …

Maxwell reminding Epstein that he said “not to involve” Trump in his sex-trafficking scandal is vague, but it could imply that Epstein knew Trump was at least partially involved in the crimes. If so, it’s no wonder that Trump’s DOJ has been periodically removing files that mention the president from the official government database.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is claiming that, somehow, the Justice Department has no knowledge on the men who used convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s network to abuse dozens of young women—and it certainly won’t be found in the millions of new documents released on Friday.

“Just to clarify, is the public going to learn the identities of the men who abused the girls with the information you’re releasing?” a reporter asked Blanche at a Friday press conference. “And if not, why not?”

“I mean, you just baked in an assumption into your question that I have never said, and I don’t know to be true,” Blanche replied. “Is the public going to learn about men that abused these girls? What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means.”

“We said in July … if we had information—we, meaning the Department of Justice—about men who abused women, we would prosecute them,” Blanche continued. “There’s a built-in assumption that somehow there’s this hidden tranche of information of men that we know about, that we’re covering up, or we’re choosing not to prosecute. That is not the case. I don’t know whether there are men out there that abused these women.

“I don’t think that the public [is going to] uncover men within the Epstein files that abused women,” he concluded.

It was ridiculous to see a top Justice Department official feign confusion at the most pertinent question that anyone could have asked him at that moment. The department released three million files related to Epstein, who was facing federal charges of sex trafficking of minors when he died. Many of his victims have come forward over the years to talk about how they were abused by Epstein and his friends.

Just this week, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell claimed that 29 friends of the late sex trafficker were “protected” by the Justice Department by way of “secret settlements.”

“So Todd Blanche is claiming: They have 6 MILLION *files* (and have released <5% of it in 3M *pages*), [and proved] that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked. But CAN’T prove who they trafficked to,” professor Adam Cochran wrote on X. “How stupid do you need to be, to believe that? Even if you somehow don’t think its Trump, then at the very least Trump’s DoJ is protecting wealthy abusers!”

Representative Ro Khanna, who co-sponsored a bill mandating the release of all unclassified Epstein files, noted that even as millions more documents dropped Friday, the right documents weren’t being released—specifically the “302” files, in which the victims identify their abusers, a convenient group of files to leave unreleased.

“If Blanche believes that there is no coverup, then he should release the 302 files. The 302 files are where the survivors name who these rich and powerful men are,” Khanna responded. “I’ve talked to the survivors. They say that they have named those people in the FBI witness interviews. So if those witness interviews are released, the American people can see for themselves who the survivors named … but if Blanche continues to not release the 302 statements, to not release the prosecution memos—then it’s a cover-up.”

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?