GOP Senator Finally Sees “What the Big Deal Is” About Epstein Files

A Republican senator is claiming to have seen the light after new revelations from the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files.

Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said Monday that she suddenly understands “what the big deal is,” saying she had “not been one of the members who has glommed on to this as an issue.”

“I’ve sort of intentionally deferred to others to find out about it. But 9-year-old victims …” Lummis told journalist Pablo Manríquez. “Well, initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating. And the members of Congress that have been pushing this were not wrong. So that’s really my only reaction.”

Lummis coming out in support of Epstein’s victims only now is opportunism, and might have something to do with her announcing she won’t run for reelection this year. Like other Republicans in Congress, Lummis put her support of President Trump above the gravity of Epstein’s heinous sex crimes against children, preferring to remain willfully ignorant. It was well known for years that the billionaire was convicted of sexually assaulting numerous women, many of them minors.

But Trump’s desire to cover up the extent of Epstein’s crimes to protect himself was more important to Lummis, who is only speaking out now because Epstein’s crimes are a persistent issue for Republicans and the MAGA base, and she has nothing to lose since she’s retiring. In the coming days, we should expect to see more Republicans suddenly claim to be Epstein’s biggest detractors.

Representative Ro Khanna read the names of six powerful men in the Epstein files, whose names were previously hidden by the Justice Department, aloud on the House floor on Tuesday.

“Yesterday, Congressman Massie and I went to the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein files. We spent about two hours there, and we learned that 70 to 80 percent of the files are still redacted. In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason,” Khanna said. “When Congressman Massie and I pointed this out to the DOJ, they acknowledged their mistake, and now they have revealed the identity of these six powerful men.

“Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, CEO of Dubai Ports World. And billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, who was labeled as a ‘co-conspirator,’ by the FBI.” Khanna said. “Now my question is: Why did it take Thomas Massie and me going to the Justice Department to get these six men’s identities to become public? And if we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those three million files.”

Former Victoria’s Secret CEO Les Wexner was revealed as a possible co-conspirator of sex predator Jeffrey Epstein in a 2019 FBI document, even as FBI Director Kash Patel claimed under oath last year that the agency had no knowledge of any other sex traffickers in the Epstein files. And the UAE’s Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem was identified as the recipient of the “I loved the torture video” email from Epstein. The sultan’s name was initially redacted.

As for the other men—Salvatore Nuara is rumored to be a former NYPD contact from Epstein’s black book. The most notable, Nicola Caputo, is a former European Parliament member. Little is publicly known about Mikeladze and Leonov.

“But the story gets worse,” Khanna continued. “The reality is that Donald Trump’s FBI scrubbed these files in March, long before Thomas Massie and I passed the Epstein Transparency Act.… That means the survivors’ statement to the FBI naming rich and powerful men who went to Epstein’s island … they’re all hidden.”

This is an unprecedented amount of transparency that was withheld from the public for likely no other reason than to protect the rich and powerful men within these files. Only time will tell what, if anything, will happen next.

“I say enough,” said Khanna. “It’s time to begin with accountability for the Epstein class. Hold them in front of Congress, those people who visited the island or did business with Epstein after he was a convicted pedophile. Investigate them. Prosecute them. And let us return to democratic accountability in the United States of America.”

A longtime resident of deep-red Wilder, Idaho, said his small town was “nearly destroyed” by a massive federal immigration raid last year, The New York Times reported.

On October 19, dozens of federal agents wielding automatic rifles and flash-bang grenades descended on La Catedral Arena, a horse-racing track outside of Wilder. The track had long been a hub for the town’s Latino community—but had now become a target of the Trump administration’s brutal immigration crackdown.

While state and federal officials praised the raid as a crackdown on an alleged gambling ring, only four people have been scheduled for trial on gambling charges. And agents seemed to have another purpose altogether.

“The one thing everyone got asked was, ‘Where were you born?’” Neal Dougherty, an immigration lawyer, told the Times in the story published Monday. “Not, ‘Did you see gambling?’ Not, ‘Did you participate in gambling?’ Just, ‘Where were you born?’”

While a black military-style helicopter circled the scene, federal agents zip-tied the hands of most adults and some teenagers. Several hundred people were detained for four hours. In the end, 105 people were held for immigration charges, and 75 people were deported.

John Carter, a white Trump voter whose company provided security at La Catedral, told the Times that his 14-year-old daughter had had her hands zip-tied by federal agents.

“They could have gone first thing in the day with a few F.B.I. agents and just arrested the people they had warrants for,” Carter said. “Instead, they went in at the busiest time with maximum force.”

While the raid on La Catedral Arena is dwarfed by the massive operations in major American cities, it demonstrates just how destructive Trump’s immigration enforcement can be to the very communities that support him. A whopping 91 percent of the precinct that includes Wilder supported Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Meanwhile, roughly 60 percent of the population of 1,725 people identifies as Latino.

Chris Gross, a second-generation mint farmer in Wilder, told the Times that the town relies on Hispanic labor. “Nobody thought something like this could happen here,” he said.

David Lincoln, a longtime resident of Wilder who runs a rural economic development nonprofit, said that the raid “nearly destroyed” the town.

“What happens if everyone who is Hispanic thinks they’re at risk? There’s fear now that didn’t exist here before. I don’t know how you make that go away,” he said.

Meanwhile, Wilder’s Mayor Steve Rhodes has dismissed the effect the raid had on his community. “These were not our people,” he told the Times. “What happened out at that track had nothing to do with Wilder.”

Rhodes claimed that people in Wilder don’t even think about race anyway. “I don’t know anyone in town that sees a race,” he said. But come spring, when Wilder feels the full economic weight of the people the town has lost and the labor they provided, he may yet change his mind.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick arrived on Capitol Hill Tuesday to speak with a Senate subcommittee about U.S. broadcast funding, but ended up defending himself again and again about his various interactions with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Recently released documents from the Epstein files revealed that Lutnick’s connection to Epstein was deeper than he had previously disclosed. Last year, in an interview with the New York Post podcast, Lutnick claimed he cut off all contact with “that disgusting person” after he and his wife were invited to tour Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse in 2005. Epstein was, at the time, the Lutnicks’ Manhattan neighbor.

But emails made public in the recent Epstein documents dump indicated that wasn’t true. Instead, Lutnick continued to reach out to the controversial financier, even after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.

One such instance included an attempt by Lutnick to coordinate a family trip in 2012 to the financier’s “pedophile island”—a detail that he confirmed during the Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen pressed Lutnick on his ties to Epstein twice, excoriating him for lying to the American public.

“You totally misrepresented the extent of your relationship with him to the Congress, to the American people, and to the survivors of his despicable criminal and predatory acts,” Van Hollen said.

“When you visited the private island, did you see anything inappropriate?” he pressed.

“The only thing I saw with my wife and my children and the other couple and their children was staff who worked for Mr. Epstein on that island,” Lutnick said.

“And you realize this visit took place after he had been convicted, right? I mean you made a very big point of saying that you sensed this was a bad person in 2005. And then of course, in 2008 he was convicted of soliciting prostitution of a minor, and yet you went and had this trip and other interactions,” Van Hollen said.

The commerce secretary then denied that he had dinner with Epstein at the disgraced financier’s New York home in 2011, as detailed in the files. The dinner reportedly included other high-profile New York socialites, such as alleged child molester (and famed Hollywood filmmaker) Woody Allen.

“I actually don’t know what you’re referring to,” Lutnick said. “Look, I looked through the millions of documents for my name–just like everybody else—and found that there was a document that said I had a meeting with him in May, I think, for an hour at 5 o’clock. Not for a dinner or otherwise, for an hour, at 5 o’clock.”

“There’s also a reference to the fact that Epstein had expressed an interest in meeting with your nanny. Do you know whether Jeffrey Epstein ever met with your nanny?” asked Van Hollen.

But Lutnick was not aware of such an interaction. Ultimately, he could only toss back his meager defense.

“To the best of my memory, I met him when he was next door to me,” Lutnick told the senators. “Under no circumstances is there a single word that I’ve done anything even remotely wrong in any regard. I did not have anything that you could call a relationship, anything you could call an acquaintance. I literally met him three times over 14 years. That’s all I remember, that’s all that’s in the documents.”

Progressive Analilia Mejia has pulled off a long-shot win in a special election primary for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district, defeating favorite Tom Malinowski thanks to AIPAC’s intervention in the race.

Malinowski conceded Tuesday morning, saying in a post on X that Mejia “deserves unequivocal praise and credit for running a positive campaign and for inspiring so many voters on Election Day.”

“But the outcome of this race cannot be understood without also taking into account the massive flood of dark money that AIPAC spent on dishonest ads during the last three weeks,” Malinowski’s post said.

AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent $2.3 million against Malinowski after he came out in support of conditions on aid to Israel, a moderate position gaining traction among House Democrats as more and more voters oppose Israel’s massacre in Gaza. But the move backfired as Mejia holds stronger views on Israel and Palestine, calling Israel’s actions in the territory a genocide and pledging not to accept AIPAC-funded trips to Israel.

Mejia, who helped to run Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, was endorsed by the Vermont senator along with Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her campaign was based on cost-of-living issues, with Middle East policy taking a back seat. But AIPAC’s poor judgement has now backfired.

This story has been updated.