Exxon Abruptly Drops Lawyers Who Were Named in Epstein Files

It seems even giant oil companies have more scruples than the Trump administration and its allies.

Exxon swiftly dropped a couple of its longtime lawyers earlier this month after the attorneys’ names were revealed in the Epstein files, the sprawling investigation into prodigious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Exxon and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison notified courts in Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Washington state that the white-shoe law firm would no longer represent the company in several cases attempting to hold the oil behemoth accountable for climate change, reported Politico’s climate newswire E&E News.

Attorneys with Paul Weiss will continue to represent Exxon in a case in Massachusetts. No other law firms withdrew their staff from the aforementioned cases.

The legal filings did not provide a specific reason for the firm’s departure, but they came amid growing public scrutiny related to Paul Weiss’s longtime chairman, Brad Karp, who was recently revealed to have had email exchanges with Epstein. One such exchange drew particular ire from the firm’s partners, documenting an instance in which Karp offered his pro bono legal opinion on a plea deal related to Epstein’s solicitation of a minor for prostitution.

Karp spent his entire 40-year career at Paul Weiss and led the firm as chair for 18 years. As such, he helped build the careers of many of the attorneys at Paul Weiss. Under his stewardship, the firm became Exxon’s chief legal defense, representing the company in more than a dozen consequential cases. He was stripped of his leadership position at the company last week, citing recent “distractions,” though he will stay on as partner.

Yet Republicans in Congress—and presiding officials in the Trump administration—have so far failed to hold anyone named in the Epstein files accountable. Perhaps most notable of the scot-free bunch is the president himself, who was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files.

All in all, Donald Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache. But last week, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer and did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.

Donald Trump’s White House is urging Americans not to be “Panicans” as the president’s approval ratings continue to slip around the world.

In an article published Monday titled “Don’t Be a Panican. We’re Winning—and We’re Not Slowing Down,” the White House begged Americans not to “take the bait” presented by the “Fake News and Radical Left.” Instead, they should embrace the government’s “undeniable” truth.

“America is safer, stronger, richer, and more secure than at any point in decades,” the White House said. Who said propaganda had to be subtle?

What exactly is the “bait” the White House is worried Americans will take? What they’re seeing with their very own eyes. In the last month, the Trump administration has overseen and defended the killing of two American citizens in broad daylight, detained children, and terrorized immigrants and protesters.

If the White House was actually concerned about Trump’s popularity, the president could try to stay away from the easy pitfalls of harassing Olympic athletes and one of the most popular musicians in the world. And there’s also the matter of sharing videos so appallingly racist that one Republican said he was “praying” it wasn’t real. (It was.)

The truth is that the so-called “Panicans” are coming, because panic is spreading. A recent poll found that the majority of Americans believed that Trump’s first year in office was a failure—and that was before any of the stuff in the previous paragraph happened! Things have gotten so bad that even voters without a college degree—one of Trump’s key demographics—are abandoning the president.

Where exactly does the White House hope to redirect your attention? To the Dow Jones Industrial average, which closed at above 50,000 points last week. Meanwhile, Americans are staring down the most dismal jobs market since the pits of the pandemic, and many grocery store items only become more expensive—despite the president’s repeated promises to lower them.

As George Orwell wrote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Of course, the “most essential command” of a fascist regime should never include a stupid word the president made up—but really, what could be more Orwellian than that?

After reviewing the Justice Department’s unredacted Epstein files on Monday, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin is convinced that the Department of Justice is in “cover-up mode.”

Members of Congress were allowed to view the unredacted versions of all DOJ files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for the first time on Monday. After viewing those files, Raskin questioned the redactions the DOJ made in the publicly released files.

“There is no way before Attorney General Bondi arrives on Wednesday that we’re going to have the opportunity to go through every redaction in order to ask thorough questions,” Raskin told reporters on Monday.

“Do you think that’s the connection, that they held up releasing this so that everybody wouldn’t be as thoroughly prepared for her testimony Wednesday?” a reporter asked, referring to Bondi’s scheduled hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.

“I think that the Department of Justice has been in a cover-up mode for many months, and has been trying to sweep the entire thing under the rug,” Raskin continued. “We need to be having hearings with survivors to hear from them about their experiences so that they can explain what happened, and so that they can begin to set forth a theory of what took place. We need to be investigating the money, we need to be investigating the organizational hierarchy.... There’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. It doesn’t work like that.”

Raskin also claimed that the unredacted files contradict Trump’s infamous story of heroically kicking Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago resort.

“Epstein’s lawyers synopsized and quoted Trump as saying that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago. But he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and he had never been asked to leave. And that was redacted for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason,” Raskin said. “I know it seems to be at odds with some things that President Trump has been saying recently about how he had kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club, or asked him to leave.”

That contradictory tidbit may have been redacted for the same reasons the Justice Department delayed releasing the files for this long—no one was ever supposed to know in the first place.

Republicans are turning on CBS News chief Bari Weiss for daring to allow her broadcasting network to report on the reality of ICE arrests, as documented by the Department of Homeland Security.

CBS revealed Monday that less than 14 percent of some 400,000 people arrested by the deportation agency in 2025 had previously been convicted or even charged for violent criminal offenses, citing a leaked DHS memo.

Since the campaign trail, Donald Trump has pledged that he would utilize ICE to target the “worst of the worst” and oust violent criminals from the country. But federal agents have resorted to arresting practically anybody—including U.S. citizens and children—in order to satisfy Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s quota of 3,000 or more arrests per day. They have also shot and killed U.S. citizens, and struck terror and fury into the souls of American communities, sparking nationwide protests and local economic blackouts.

None of that, however, has held water with conservatives, who have seemingly redirected the criticism warranted by America’s immigration agencies toward the newly reimagined MAGA-friendly news outlet, refusing to believe statistics published by Trump’s own administration.

“Wrong. About 70 percent of illegal aliens deported have pending criminal charges OR prior convictions,” posted Senator Markwayne Mullin on X Monday, failing to cite a source. “Plus, drug trafficking, child pornography distribution, burglary, DUI, and human smuggling are categorized as ‘non-violent crimes.’ But when Obama does it, it’s okay. Right?”

The official X account for ICE also chimed in, claiming that “non-violent” offenders also deserved to be deported. ICE cited other charges related to drug trafficking, distribution of child pornography, burglary, fraud, DUI, embezzlement, solicitation of a minor, human smuggling, and more.

“Labeling these offenses as ‘non-violent’ does not mean they aren’t threats to public safety,” the account wrote.

The official White House “rapid response” account provided its own comment, simply scolding CBS for reporting “fake news.”

“They’re CRIMINALS and they’re NOT welcome here,” Trump’s team posted.

Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats in Congress have come to another impasse over DHS funding, which is set to expire February 13. The two parties have been unable to reach a bipartisan consensus on whether to reform the violent agency.

Democrats have agreed to pass the package so long as Republicans concede to 10 demands on how to reel in ICE agents, such as requiring them to identify themselves, take off their masks, and obtain judicial warrants before forcing their way onto private property.

GOP congressional leadership, however, does not seem willing to change the status quo at all, decrying the seemingly bare-minimum stipulations as “impossible” and “totally unrealistic.”

Donald Trump’s Justice Department is trying to help former Trump adviser Steve Bannon erase his conviction for defying a congressional subpoena.

The DOJ filed a motion in federal court Monday to throw out Bannon’s 2021 indictment for contempt of Congress after he refused to appear before the House’s January 6 committee to answer for his involvement in the Capitol insurrection. Bannon had initially tried to fight the indictment by claiming executive privilege through his work for Trump, but he would ultimately serve four months in federal prison.

Bannon was trying to appeal through the courts to get his indictment dismissed, even petitioning the Supreme Court. The DOJ had postponed responding to Bannon’s petition, but now seems to be trying to avoid the high court’s involvement. The motion was made by District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro herself, with no career prosecutors or lower-level attorneys apparently assigned to Bannon.

If the dismissal is granted, it would be yet another way Trump has attempted to whitewash the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. He successfully stalled the federal election interference case against him until he was reelected president in November 2024, when it was dismissed. Trump then pardoned everyone charged in the riots, even those who committed violent acts.

Bannon served his sentence while Joe Biden was president, but Trump can now reward his old friend, who was also proven to have had a close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein in the government’s latest release of files related to the convicted sex offender.