DOJ Identifies UAE Sultan Behind Epstein Email on Torture Video

Representative Thomas Massie has identified Emirati businessman Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem as the recipient of the “I loved the torture video” email from disgraced sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. The sultan’s name was initially redacted.

“A sultan seems to have sent this,” Massie said Monday evening, after viewing the unredacted files. “DOJ should make this public.”

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche quickly replied to Massie. “You looked at the document. You know it’s an email address that was redacted. The law requires redactions for personally identifiable information, including if in an email address,” he said. “And you know that the Sultan’s name is available unredacted in the files.”

Blanche’s post was hit with a community note that disputed his reasoning.

“The Epstein Files Transparency Act allows redaction of PII only in very narrow circumstances, such as an unwarranted invasion of privacy or the risk of jeopardizing a federal investigation,” it read. “It is unlikely the cited email would meet that criterion.”

As Massie concluded, Blanche “tacitly admitted that Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem was the sender of the torture video.”

Sulayem is currently the chairman and CEO of DP World, an international logistics company worth billions headquartered in Dubai.

The public version of the email, dated April 24, 2009, shows Epstein messaging someone, “where are you? Are you ok, I loved the torture video.”

That person responds back, “I am in china I will be in the US 2nd week of May.”

It is unclear what the nature of the “torture video” Epstein refers to is. But given just about everything else we know about him, it’s hard not to imagine that this is exactly what it looks like, if not worse.

The DP World executive had a rather intimate correspondence with Epstein.

“This girl is russian father Cypriot mom I met her two years ago she goes to t=e American university in Dubai,” Sulayem wrote to Epstein in September 2015, in another email that identifies him by name. “She got engaged but now she back with me. The best sex I ever had amazing body.”

There are also multiple receipts from the sultan for a 23andMe test and a 2012 dinner invitation to Epstein’s home.

Neither DP World nor Sulayem have publicly commented.

Country music rapper Kid Rock is still trying to convince the public that his bad lip-sync job was a great performance.

The MAGA musician went on Fox News Monday in a fruitless attempt to salvage the national reception of his set from the night before, when he headlined Turning Point USA’s version of the Super Bowl halftime show. During the prerecorded performance, Kid Rock’s mouth regularly did not match the booming voice coming from the speakers.

“There were a lot of questions about what happened during your first song onstage. People were talking about it. It seemed to be a little bit out of whack. What was going on there?” asked host Laura Ingraham.

“Yeah, so it was out of sync,” Rock said, apparently blaming Turning Point’s events production team for delaying his allegedly live vocals.

He then announced that, in order to prove the “haters” wrong, he was planning to do another set in his Nashville living room with a DJ not only to prove he can he sing but to showcase how a delay can happen live.

“Because number one, if it would have been a lip sync like people are trying—like the left is trying to throw me under the bus again, the mainstream media, the social media trying to amplify it—it would have been super easy to sync it up if it was prerecorded,” Rock continued. “It was very difficult for the Turning Point production crew—who, by the way, I can’t say enough good things about.

“It was just a syncing issue that they have, and I know they tried to get it right, it was very difficult,” Rock insisted. “But I’ll answer all the haters tomorrow, and we’ll put ’em back in the ‘shut up and go back trying to report the fake news.’”

Droves of viewers caught on to Rock’s bad lip sync Sunday, likening his vocal talent to famed fakers Ashlee Simpson and Millie Vanilli. Others claimed that Rock’s set was “worse” than one of Frankie Valli’s cashed-out 2024 performances, in which the “Sherry” singer hardly moved his mouth at all.

Just a fraction of the country actually watched the conservative-funded alternative to international phenomenon Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, however. Early estimates reported that while 128 million Americans tuned in to watch Bad Bunny rap in Spanish, just 6.1 million people streamed Turning Point’s option on YouTube.

Sorry, Canadians, it’s time to pack up your skates—Donald Trump says China is going to take away your ice hockey.

In a scattered tirade on Truth Social Monday evening, Trump claimed that Canada’s national pastime was coming to an end while threatening to block the opening of a newly constructed 1.5 mile-long bridge connecting Ontario to Michigan.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote.

Trump seemed particularly pissed that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had distanced himself from the United States, and “wants to make a deal with China—which will eat Canada alive.”

“The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup,” Trump wrote, implying that a new trade deal with China could have extreme—and inexplicable—cultural consequences. This kind of racist nonsense is to be expected from a president who’s built his career on taking slap shots at immigrants.

While Carney had attempted to thaw economic relations with China last month, he has also been very clear that Canada has “no intention” of pursuing a free trade deal with China, acknowledging that it would completely rupture his country’s relationship to the United States. That doesn’t mean he held back from criticizing Trump on the world stage, though.

Trump whined that Canada would no longer stock American booze, even though that decision was in retaliation for his sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs, and that it still had steep tariffs on U.S. dairy products—even though those tariffs only apply after the U.S. makes a Trump-negotiated quantity of tariff-free dairy sales to Canada.

On the subject of the new bridge, the president falsely claimed that Canada owned both sides of the new bridge and “built it with virtually no US content.”

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s spokesperson, Stacey LaRouche, pointed out that while Canada had completely financed the $4 billion bridge, it was “built by union construction workers from both sides of the border—and it will be operated under a joint ownership agreement between Michigan and Canada.”

On the other side of the bridge, Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens expressed disbelief at Trump’s rant. “It’s just insane,” he said. “I really can’t believe what I’m reading.”

Nor should he—because it’s all complete nonsense.

Representative Thomas Massie got the Justice Department to unredact billionaire and former Victoria Secret CEO Les Wexner’s name in the Epstein files, all while exposing the DOJ’s complicity—or incompetence—in the process. 

Massie was one of a few members of Congress who were able to view the Justice Department’s unredacted files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on Monday. 

After viewing the files, Massie asked why the name of a “well known retired CEO” was redacted.  

In response, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche claimed that Wexner’s name was redacted because it was on the same page as the names of victims. “We have just unredacted Les Wexner’s name from this document, but his name already appears in the files thousands of times,” Blanche announced. “DOJ is hiding nothing.”

Massie responded quickly. 

“This is significant because Kash Patel testified to Congress that FBI had no evidence of other sex traffickers. This is FBI’s own 2019 document listing Wexner as coconspirator in child sex trafficking. It wasn’t unredacted until tonight,” he said, suggesting that FBI Director Patel may have very well committed perjury when he testified to Congress. “Here DOJ acts as if they were justified in redacting the men’s names simply because the document contains victims’ names. Tonight they learned you can redact victim names while still publishing the other names, per our law.”

It’s clear at this point that the DOJ is not prioritizing transparency, it’s prioritizing status and reputation. The FBI considered Wexner as a potential co-conspirator in child sex trafficking seven years ago, and for the last seven years, Wexner has walked the earth as a free—and very rich—man. And if the FBI was sitting on Wexner’s name for that long, who else is hiding under those black bars?

Donald Trump spoke to Palm Beach police back in 2006 about Jeffrey Epstein’s inappropriate activities with teenage girls, newly released government files show.

The Miami Herald reports that In July of that year, as Epstein’s criminal sex charge became known to the public, Trump spoke to Michael Reiter, Palm Beach, Florida’s chief of police at the time, about what Epstein was up to.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told the police chief, according to a recently released October 2019 FBI interview with Reiter.

The information contradicts what Trump has publicly said about Epstein’s crimes and when he knew about them. In July 2019, during his first presidential term, Trump was asked by reporters if he knew that Epstein sexually assaulted girls. Trump replied, “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.”

Trump’s interview with Reiter tells a different story, according to the FBI file. He called Ghislanie Maxwell Epstein’s “operative,” saying that “she is evil and to focus on her.” Trump also said that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there,’” and that he threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago country club.

Reiter retired as police chief in 2009, and confirmed to the newspaper that he was interviewed by the FBI in 2019 and that he spoke to Trump in 2006. An FBI official denied that Trump spoke to the police chief, however.

“We are not aware of any corroborating evidence that the President contacted law enforcement 20 years ago,” the official told the newspaper.

Meanwhile, Maxwell refused to answer any questions during her deposition with the House Oversight Committee Monday, saying through her attorney that she would only speak if given clemency by President Trump from her 20-year prison sentence related to her assistance to Epstein’s sex crimes. One wonders how much more Maxwell and the president know about all of Epstein’s misdeeds that they aren’t talking about, and what they are hiding about themselves.

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.