Trump Tears Into Female Reporter for Daring to Ask About Epstein

The ongoing drama surrounding the Epstein files is really starting to get under the president’s skin.

Donald Trump skewered CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins Tuesday afternoon after she inquired about the child sex trafficker’s myriad victims.

“But what would you say to people who feel like they haven’t gotten justice?” asked Collins.

“You are so bad,” Trump said. “You are the worst reporter. No wonder CNN has no ratings, because of people like you.”

“You know she’s a young woman, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” Trump continued. “I’ve known you for 10 years, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a smile on your face.

“You know why you’re not smiling?” he added. “Because you know you’re not telling the truth.”

Earlier this week, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News that pretty much all of the rich and powerful people who partied with the “pedophile island” operator were off the hook as the administration had not found sufficient evidence to prosecute Epstein’s connections.

That included the president. On Sunday, Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer but did not find credible evidence against Trump warranting further investigation.

Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the DOJ’s Friday document dump, which consisted of some three million previously unseen pages.

All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

But it’s far from the first time that Trump has turned to misogyny in order to shut down reporting on the Epstein files. In November, Trump ended a line of questioning on the topic by a Bloomberg News reporter by barking at her, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

It’s rough working for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota these days. Many of the office’s lawyers and staff have quit over the Justice Department’s handling of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in the state, specifically the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

In federal court Tuesday, the stress apparently got to a lawyer volunteering to help the short-staffed office. 

Attorney Julie Le was representing the government at a hearing over ICE’s failure to follow court orders and immediately release people that it had wrongfully detained. When Judge Jerry Blackwell asked why the agency is not complying, Le said that the government was “overwhelmed” by the legal challenges to Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, and that trying to get ICE to comply with court orders has required nonstop work for an office depleted by resignations. 

“I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I can get 24 hours of sleep,” Le said. “The system sucks, this job sucks, I am trying with every breath I have to get you what I need.” 

Blackwell said that he called the hearing to stress that ICE and other government agencies are not above the law.

“Some of this is of your own making because of non-compliance with orders,” Blackwell said.

Le normally doesn’t work for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. She used to work as an attorney for ICE in immigration court, and last month volunteered to help prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office deal with the many habeas petitions from immigrants in ICE detention seeking their release. But Le admitted to Blackwell that ICE is out of its depth, and was not prepared to argue cases in federal court. 

“We have no guidance or direction on what we need to do,” Le said.  

President Trump’s Minnesota crackdown has proceeded with little regard for the law, drawing a backlash from local residents who have scrambled to protest against the massive deployment of federal agents and their violent tactics. Since the deaths of Good and Pretti, those protests have only intensified, and Trump’s response has been to double down. The U.S. attorneys who haven’t quit in protest now have to deal with the legal fallout. 

A federal agent used his cell phone to take a picture of Marimar Martinez after she was shot five times by Border Patrol in Chicago—a chilling image that haunts her to this day.

Martinez testified in Congress Tuesday about how she was shot after she followed an agent’s car in Chicago while trying to warn her neighbors. DHS initially claimed that when the officers exited their vehicle, Martinez tried to run them over, “forcing the officers to fire defensively.” She was charged with felony assault of a federal officer despite ending up in the hospital herself.

In her testimony, Martinez revealed a new detail about what happened after she was shot.

“After being at the hospital for less than three hours, I was discharged from the hospital into custody of the FBI. As we left the hospital, I was escorted out through the back in a wheelchair. I observed over dozens of Border Patrol agents waiting outside the hospital,” Martinez said. “One of the agents came up to me with his cell phone and took a photograph of me. It was the same agent who had previously kept coming in and out [of my hospital] room, and I had to repeatedly tell him to leave. I told him I did not consent … but he did not care. It still haunts me that this agent has my photo on his phone. Was this the agent that shot me? Was this a trophy for him?”

Why did a federal agent keep coming into Martinez’s room while she lay in her hospital bed? And why did he have to take her picture if she had already been arrested, if not to keep a “trophy” for himself as Martinez suggested? Recall that Charles Exum, the agent who shot Martinez, bragged in text messages afterward, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book, boys.”

While ICE has reportedly been scanning protesters’ faces, this instance feels much more personal.

Renee Good’s brother hoped her senseless killing at the hands of a federal agent would have brought an end to Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown. Instead, he hasn’t seen any change.

Addressing a public congressional meeting Tuesday to examine the violent tactics of Department of Homeland Security immigration enforcement agents, Luke Ganger spoke about his sister, who was the first U.S. citizen to be shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last month.

“In the last few weeks, our family took some consolation thinking that perhaps Nee’s death would bring about change in our country, and it has not,” he said.

“The completely surreal scenes taking place on the streets of Minneapolis are beyond explanation. This is not just a bad day or a rough week or isolated incidents. These encounters with federal agents are changing the community, and changing many lives, including ours, forever,” he said. “I still don’t know how to explain to my four-year-old what these agents are doing when we pass by.”

Ganger said his four-year-old daughter “knows that her aunt died and that somebody caused it to happen.”

“She told me that there are no bad people and that everyone makes mistakes. She has Nee’s spirit,” he said. His sister, he said, “carried peace, patience, and love for others wherever she went.”

“Our family is a very American blend,” Ganger continued. “We vote differently, and we rarely completely agree on the finer details of what it means to be a citizen of this country. We attend various churches, and some not at all. And despite those differences, we have always treated each other with love and respect. And we’ve gotten even closer during this very divided time in our country. And we hope that our family can be even a small example to others not to let political ideals divide us, to be good like Renee.

“But the most important thing we can do today is to help this panel and our country understand who Nee is, and what a beautiful American we have lost. A sister, a daughter, a mother, a partner, and a friend.”

Ganger’s call for unity bears repeating. Not a single Republican congressperson—the very same people who want you to believe that Good deserved to die—bothered to attend Tuesday’s forum.

Also testifying were Brent Ganger, another brother of Good; Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

The White House may have pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the World Health Organization, but that doesn’t mean that Americans have to.

The Illinois Department of Public Health sidestepped the federal government this week by independently joining the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the Chicago Tribune reported Tuesday. It is the second state to do so, after California joined the network last month.

Illinois officials said the decision was made in part to keep the state informed on the latest global health data.

“We knew this created serious concerns, really, in our effort as a big state in the United States to keep our awareness and [stay] alert about potential global outbreaks and how they could impact the residents here in the state of Illinois,” said Dr. Sameer Vohra, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, during a press conference. “Part of that was the fear that we would lose access to the WHO’s global surveillance system, which would really let us know about early warnings of outbreaks.”

Vohra underscored that it was critical that Illinois remain up-to-date with accurate information about surging health threats around the world, citing the Marburg virus outbreak that appeared in Ethiopia last week.

“This provides the real-time information to us,” Vohra said of GOARN. “Instead of waiting for the federal government to relay that, if and when that might happen, we’ll get direct access to that network of information.”

The Trump administration completed the U.S. withdrawal from the WHO on January 22. In a statement, the Department of Health and Human Services claimed that the global public health entity had failed not only in its efforts to address the Covid-19 pandemic but also to reform itself in the years since.

Not a single Republican member of Congress showed up to the public forum held by Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal and Representative Robert Garcia on the violence inflicted by federal immigration agents, featuring testimony from the brothers of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross in Minneapolis last month.

“With us in spirit are also Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. In spirit. They should be here in person, but they were murdered. They were murdered by their own government. They were killed in cold blood,” Blumenthal said to open up the forum on Tuesday, before turning to Good’s brothers. “I can only imagine how painful it must be for you to see that image of your sister. Which speaks to your courage. Your guts. Your grit and determination to be here today.”

Also testifying were Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by customs agents in Chicago; Aliya Rahman, who was violently detained by agents in Minneapolis while trying to go to the doctor; and Martin Daniel Rascon, who was shot at by Border Patrol in California while driving with his family.

Other Democrats who joined the hearing included Senators Amy Klobuchar, Dick Durbin, Adam Schiff, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as Representatives Yassamin Ansari, Shontel Brown, Jasmine Crockett, Summer Lee, Emily Randall, Melanie Stansbury, Suhas Subramanyam, and Rashida Tlaib.

This story has been updated.

The Department of Justice’s Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR, is charged with overseeing the country’s 71 immigration courts adjudicating a backlog of roughly 3.7 million cases. In the face of such an overwhelming project, the Trump administration has clearly enlisted its best and brightest—elsewhere, for some other task.

Daren Margolin, Donald Trump’s appointed director of EOIR, isn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, multiple people who worked alongside him told The Daily Beast.

Margolin, a retired Marine colonel who was relieved of a command position in 2013 for firing a gun inside his office, is a “total moron,” one person told the Beast.

“Such a fucking dope,” another person said.

“Nobody ever had much confidence in him,” a third person told the Beast. “I never got the impression he understood the law very well. He just wanted an easy job, where he didn’t have to learn or do anything.”

Others believed that it was Margolin’s low-achieving attitude that made him a perfect “puppet” for the Trump administration, poised for “rubber-stamping” millions of deportation orders.

“Margolin was chosen specifically because of his incompetence—he’s just going to be a mouthpiece, relaying orders and telling everybody else they have to follow them,” another person told the Beast.

Following Margolin’s appointment in October, his office announced the appointment of 11 immigration judges and 25 temporary immigration judges. Months earlier, the DOJ had lowered the requirements for who could serve as a temporary immigration judge, in a bid to replace the droves who departed or were fired after Trump entered office.

Since October, EOIR has been relatively quiet, only announcing two deputy chief appellate immigration judges and two appellate immigration judges. But George Pappas, a former Boston immigration judge fired in the early months of Trump’s second term, told the Beast that EOIR had suffered “generational damage.”

“We’re witnessing a complete dismantling of the immigration courts, which in substance are now dead,” he warned.

The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s Office is seeing a wave of resignations following the Department of Justice’s handling of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Eight lawyers are either leaving or have announced their intentions to quit the office, following six other resignations last month. The high turnover is unprecedented, as the office generally doesn’t even have that many resignations in an entire year, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports. Now there are fewer than 20 attorneys in the office to handle the state’s federal cases.

“More often than not, the people who come in don’t quit, they stay,” Tom Heffelfinger, who served as a U.S. attorney for Minnesota under two Republican presidents, told the Star-Tribune. “A lot of those [assistant U.S. attorneys] see these as career jobs. This is what they want to do. If they can get the job, they stay there.”

After ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Good last month in Minneapolis, the DOJ refused to initiate a civil rights investigation into her death and instead opted to investigate her wife over her activism. This prompted six attorneys in the office to resign in January.

The more recent resignations reportedly came after a meeting of the office’s criminal division with Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen. One attorney asked Rosen why local law enforcement was shut out of the DOJ investigations into the deaths of Good and Pretti. Others asked why cases involving the alleged assault of federal officers didn’t examine officer conduct. Rosen replied that he wasn’t asking staff “to do anything illegal,” according to one staffer.

One of the departures is the civil division chief, Ana Voss, who was in charge of handling the hundreds of wrongful detention petitions filed as a result of ICE’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota. Voss wrote in a recent legal brief that she couldn’t “effectively triage and review” every judicial order. Other employees besides the attorneys have also resigned from the office, including a victim witness coordinator and an evidence technician.

The DOJ has scrambled to bring 10 attorneys from other states—five from Washington, D.C., and five from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, the legal branch of the United States Armed Forces—to try and fill the gaps. But the office is still “woefully understaffed,” according to one former U.S. attorney. Lawyers have their hands full, with 490 immigrants challenging their detention from December 1 to January 26, compared to 375 similar cases in the previous eight years combined.

“They’re in disarray,” said Doug Kelly, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in the 1980s. “I think it’s just demoralizing to the folks who are there.”

The health secretary is at odds with his own agency.

The director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Tuesday to discuss efforts to modernize the public health sector.

But his appearance spilled a deeper truth when ranking member Senator Bernie Sanders insisted that Bhattacharya clarify his position on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deeply held belief that vaccines are linked to autism.

“Do you think that deep distrust … has something to do—when you have an organization like the American Medical Association telling us that vaccines do not cause autism, but you have a secretary of HHS who says the very opposite? Do you think that causes concern and mistrust among parents?” asked Sanders.

“In 2024 there was a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that said that only about 40 percent of patients still trust their doctors,” Bhattacharya said, noting the study was published before Kennedy’s appointment. “As someone who went to medical school myself, that’s absolutely shocking.”

“Let me ask you a simple question.… Do vaccines cause autism? Tell that to the American people: Yes or no?” pressed Sanders.

“I do not believe that the measles vaccine causes autism,” replied Bhattacharya.

“Nah. Uh uh. I didn’t ask measles,” insisted Sanders. “Do vaccines cause autism?”

“I have not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism,” Bhattacharya said.

Combating autism supposedly caused by vaccines is the cornerstone of Kennedy’s public health policy. Kennedy is a leader in a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, falsely linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamin A. And just last month, he overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, potentially affecting vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

The Trump administration is targeting free speech with a little-known legal tool: administrative subpoenas.

The Washington Post reports that a retired Philadelphia man, Jon, 67, found himself in the government’s crosshairs after he emailed a lead prosecutor at the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Dernbach, who was handling the deportation case of an Afghan refugee, identified as H, asking him to consider that the man’s life was in danger from the Taliban.

“Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,” Jon wrote from his gmail account. “Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.”

Later that day, Jon received an email from Google notifying him that an administrative subpoena had been sent to them from the Department of Homeland Security “compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.” Federal agencies can issue such subpoenas without an order from a judge or grand jury, and Google gave Jon, who withheld his last name to protect his family from the government, one week to challenge it.

Laws are supposed to restrict the use of administrative subpoenas, but DHS has used the tool against dissent protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Jon could not find who in the agency issued the subpoena, let alone a record of it to show an attorney.

Days later, DHS agents showed up at Jon’s door. A naturalized U.S. citizen originally from the U.K., Jon was worried about potential violence. The agents showed him a copy of the email and asked to see his side of the story. They didn’t know about the administrative subpoena but said they received orders to interview Jon by DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Eventually, the agents agreed that Jon had committed no crimes after he told them he found Dernbach’s email address through a simple Google search. Jon secured pro bono representation by ACLU attorneys, who argue that the government is violating a statute that limits how administrative subpoenas can be used for “immigration enforcement” and that the government targeted Jon for protected speech.

“It doesn’t take that much to make people look over their shoulder, to think twice before they speak again,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, one of Jon’s attorneys. “That’s why these kinds of subpoenas and other actions—the visits—are so pernicious. You don’t have to lock somebody up to make them reticent to make their voice heard. It really doesn’t take much, because the power of the federal government is so overwhelming.”

Both Google and Meta received a record number of subpoenas in the United States during the first half of 2025 as Trump’s second term began, with Google receiving 28,622, a 15 percent increase over the previous six months. Jon was fortunate to have his case picked up by the ACLU and later reported on by a national media outlet. How many others in the U.S. haven’t been so lucky and face legal challenges for exercising their right to free speech?