Karoline Leavitt Panics After Question on Lutnick’s Epstein Ties

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt abruptly ended a press briefing Tuesday after being asked about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s ties to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s a miracle Leavitt didn’t burst a blood vessel after a Bloomberg reporter asked whether the Trump administration still supported Lutnick after the secretary confirmed earlier in the day that he kept in contact with Epstein for years after he previously claimed to have cut ties with him. Lutnick even coordinated a family trip to the financier’s “pedophile island” in 2012, four years after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution of a minor.

“So, does the White House stand behind Secretary Lutnick right now, or given what he has said today, has there been any shift in how the White House is viewing Secretary Lutnick’s performance?” the reporter asked.

“No, Secretary Lutnick remains a very important member of President Trump’s team, and the president fully supports the secretary,” Leavitt replied.

“I will just point out that there are a lot of wins in the news this week that people in this room have not asked about, because you continue to ask questions about the same subject, so let me point them out for you,” Leavitt continued, before launching into a prepared propaganda spiel that the White House had published on its website the day before.

Leavitt touted the Dow Jones Industrial Average closing at a record high last week, a historically low national homicide rate (which had already started to plunge during the Biden administration), national median rents dropping to a four-year low, and mortgage affordability hitting a four-year high.

Some of the things she listed were not actually wins for Americans, but rather wins for Trump. Leavitt celebrated that a federal appeals court had upheld the Trump administration’s policy of detaining undocumented immigrants en masse, and a recent statement from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons objecting to surgical intervention for transgender minors.

“So, we’re gonna get back to business. The president is very busy today and you will see him all tomorrow at the event in the East Room touting his administration’s energy policy,” Leavitt said before quickly exiting the room.

While the White House appears increasingly frustrated that the media isn’t saying what they want it to say, the American people and its leaders are clearly deeply disturbed by the Trump administration’s deepening ties to Epstein, as the calls for Lutnick to resign only continue to grow.

Vice President JD Vance and his wife honored the victims of the Armenian genocide on Tuesday, sparking immediate backlash from Washington to the Middle East. The problem? His boss doesn’t recognize the World War I–era atrocity.

Vance shared an image of himself and his wife, Usha Vance, on X, honoring the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed in the ethnic cleansing. But moments after he hit “post,” the statement was deleted.

“Today, Vice President Vance and Second Lady Usha Vance attended a wreath laying ceremony at the Armenian Genocide memorial to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide,” Vance initially wrote.

It was not immediately clear why Vance retracted the public message, though there would be plenty of obvious reasons to do so. Donald Trump has refuted congressional and academic consensus on the matter, refusing to describe the extermination event as a “genocide.”

Vance’s office blamed the slip-up on a staffer, according to a pool report circulated by CNN’s Jake Tapper.

“This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the Vice President’s activities,” Vance’s office said in a statement.

The mass killing was conducted between 1915 and 1917 by the Ottoman Empire, paving the way for a homogenous ethnostate that would, a handful of years later, become the Republic of Turkey. Turkish government propagandists have long maintained that the Armenian genocide is a fiction and that deporting Armenians was a legitimate action—ignoring the estimated 1.2 million Armenians killed as the Ottomans forced them on a death march into the Syrian desert.

Trump repeatedly rejected congressional efforts to recognize the genocide during his first administration, but could not intervene in 2021 when then-President Joe Biden acknowledged Congress’s 2019 vote on the phrase and changed long-standing presidential policy by finally recognizing the calamity with the appropriate language.

Even before the mishap, Vance was already trailblazing administrative policy: His visit Monday marked the first time that any U.S. president or vice president had stepped foot in Armenia.

But back home, Vance’s blunderous backpedal was not received well by the Armenian American community.

“Turkey never tires of humiliating America,” said Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America, in a statement on X. “This time, forcing a sitting US Vice President to delete his post about the Armenian Genocide.”

“While it’s no surprise to see Turkey still strong-arming global leaders to enforce its Armenian Genocide gag-rule,” Hamparian continued, “it is deeply troubling to witness Vice President Vance—a man who loudly proclaims solidarity with Christian victims of persecution—display such weakness in the face of this foreign pressure.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked in her Tuesday press briefing about Vance tweeting and then promptly deleting the post about the Armenian genocide. She curtly said there had been “no change of policy” since Trump’s statement on April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day, when he did not refer to the ethnic cleansing as a genocide.

A Trump-appointed judge blocked an attempt by the Department of Justice to seize the state of Michigan’s voter rolls Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Hala Jarbou ruled that federal law does not require Michigan to turn over voter registration lists or voters’ personal information, and dismissed the case. The Trump administration wanted an electronic copy of Michigan’s voter registration list of eight million voters, complete with full names, birth dates, addresses, and either driver’s license numbers or partial Social Security numbers. It will likely appeal the ruling.

The president was also rebuffed in court last month for trying to get Oregon and California to hand over their voter registration data. It’s all part of a plan to centralize voter information under the direction of the White House, raising issues of what the Trump administration plans to do with that data.

Trump’s Department of Justice has reportedly sent draft agreements to several states that would give the federal government the ability to flag voters’ names and order states to remove them from the rolls. Some Republican-run states, such as Alaska and Texas, have agreed to do this, while other states, controlled by both Democrats and Republicans, have refused.

In Minnesota, the Trump administration tried to use the federal immigration crackdown in the state to leverage Governor Tim Walz into handing over not only his state’s voter registration data but also Medicaid and SNAP records. Walz said no.

President Trump has been fearmongering about the 2026 midterm elections for months, making baseless claims about voter fraud and election rigging recycled from 2020. In recent weeks, Trump has spoken of “taking over” elections. This, coupled with the FBI raid of a Georgia elections office last month and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s suggestion to send ICE to the polls, reveals how much Trump wants to rig the midterms.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Todd Lyons faced tough questions while defending his agency’s wanton violence before a meeting of the House Homeland Security Committee Tuesday—but none tougher than those from Representative LaMonica McIver.

“Mr. Lyons, do you consider yourself a religious man?” McIver asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Lyons replied.

“Oh, yes! OK, well how do you think Judgment Day will work for you with so much blood on your hands?” the New Jersey Democrat asked.

“I’m not gonna entertain that question, ma’am,” Lyon said.

“Oh, OK, of course not. Do you think you’re going to hell, Mr. Lyons?” McIver pressed.

Their exchange was interrupted by the smack of committee Chair Andrew Garbarino’s gavel, who urged the lawmakers to “adhere to established standards of decorum and debate.”

“Mr. Chairman, I was asking a question,” McIver replied. “You guys are always talking about religion here and the Bible, I mean, it’s OK for me to ask a question, right?”

McIver continued: “How many government agencies, Mr. Lyons, are you aware of that routinely kill American citizens and still get funding?”

Again, Lyons refused to “entertain” the question.

“Of course you’re not, exactly. Once again, questions that you cannot answer,” McIver replied.

“This is why we need to abolish ICE,” McIver urged, before yielding back her time.

Last year, McIver was arrested during a visit to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Jersey and charged with “assaulting, impeding, and interfering [with]” law enforcement officers as they moved to unlawfully arrest Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. McIver has pleaded not guilty and recently moved to appeal a judge’s decision not to dismiss all of the charges.

Those weren’t all the questions that Lyons refused to answer. The ICE chief wouldn’t say whether any federal agents had been fired since the deadly shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Lyons also wouldn’t say whether those two deserved to die because the investigations into their deaths were still ongoing.

Instead, Lyons insisted that it was the ICE agents who were really the victims of their own sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown, and refused to commit to unmasking the agents under his supervision.

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.

Donald Trump’s threat to block the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which would connect Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, not only strains already tense relations with Canada, but could also hurt Republicans in the battleground state of Michigan. 

The president threw a tantrum on Truth Social Monday, saying that he would “not allow” the 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. We will start negotiations, IMMEDIATELY.” 

How Trump would block the bridge from opening when major construction is already completed is unclear, although he falsely claimed that Canada owns “both the Canada and the United States side and, of course, built it with virtually no US content.” In reality, Canada has paid the full cost of over $4 billion to build the bridge, which is jointly owned by the state of Michigan and the Canadian government but fully operated and maintained by Ottawa.  

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said that the bridge will be an economic boon to the state, with her spokesperson Stacey LaRouche telling CNN in a statement Tuesday that it is “all about jobs.” 

“It’s good for Michigan workers and it’s good for Michigan’s auto industry. As a reminder, Canada financed the construction of the bridge – which 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,” LaRouche said. “This project has been a tremendous example of bipartisan and international cooperation. It’s going to open one way or another, and the governor looks forward to attending the ribbon cutting.” 

The agreement, made in 2012, requires all iron and steel in its construction be produced in the U.S. or Canada, with neither country being favored. Trump either has no idea, or is deliberately lying, frustrating local officials. 

“It’s just insane,” said Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens regarding Trump’s post, noting that steel on the Michigan side of the bridge was all made in the U.S. “I really can’t believe what I’m reading.” 

Trump is going out of his way to antagonize Michigan voters, simply because he’s still mad at Canada for some imagined trade slight, raising and lowering tariffs against the U.S.’s northern neighbor on a whim. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made an emphatic speech at Davos last month, announcing that his country would seek economic independence from the U.S. 

Trump has doubled down in response, threatening to raise tariffs on Canada even further if it follows through on an expansive trade deal with China. Now, it seems Trump doesn’t care if the state of Michigan suffers over his beef with Canada, and it could backfire on him starting with November’s midterm elections.