Epstein Fallout Explodes Around the World—but Not on Team Trump

The ripple effect of the most recent release of the Epstein files has traveled across the water, causing high-profile resignations and even criminal charges everywhere, except where they’re needed most: the White House. 

Dubai Ports World CEO Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, whom Jeffrey Epstein thanked in an email for a “torture video,” resigned from his post on Friday. The company announced his replacement in a statement that made no mention of Epstein. 

Former Obama White House counsel and Goldman Sachs chief legal officer Kathryn Ruemmler also had an extensive, close personal relationship with Epstein. The high-ranking Democratic lawyer spent significant time with Epstein well after his 2008  conviction, tagging along on “lunches and dinners with celebrities, apartment hunting, and personal beauty appointments,” according to documents reviewed by CNN. On Thursday, she resigned from Goldman Sachs. 

And that same day, even Thorbjorn Jagland—the former prime minister of Norway—faced consequences for his alleged financial ties to Epstein. He had his diplomatic immunity revoked and has been charged with “gross corruption” in Norway.

These are perhaps the most direct and tangible consequences for having a relationship with the infamous sexual predator, aside from the now former Prince Andrew, who was essentially booted from the British royal family for his extensive allegations of sexual abuse alongside Epstein. And yet multiple people within the current Trump administration are in the files—and remain unaffected. 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who lived next door to Epstein in New York, went on the conservative Pod Force One podcast last year and told an elaborate story about how he swore to never meet with Epstein again after a strange interaction in 2005. But the files revealed that Lutnick was lying blatantly, and that he took his entire family to Epstein’s island seven years after he said he cut off ties. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Dr. Mehmet Oz invited Epstein over for a Valentine’s party in 2016—eight years after Epstein was registered as a sex offender. Both men have received the full support of the Trump administration, even as calls for their resignations have increased, along with actual results around the world. That’s nothing to say of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, Elon Musk, and many more with ties to the disgraced sex offender.

If the former prime minister of a major European country, an international CEO, and the general counsel of Goldman Sachs can all get sacked over their clear connections to Epstein, why can’t Lutnick, Oz, or any other government official who was involved with Epstein after his sex offender registry do the same? 

The Department of Homeland Security wants to beef with Cardi B? Are you sure?

At the opening night of her “Little Miss Drama Tour” in Palm Desert, California, Wednesday, Cardi B joked that she would defend her Mexican and Guatemalan fans against Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, according to TMZ.

“Bitch, if ICE comes in here, we gon’ jump they asses,” Cardi B said, as the crowd cheered.

“I’ve got some bear mace in the back! They ain’t taking my fans, bitch,” she continued. The rapper then launched into one of her most popular songs, “I Like It,” featuring J. Balvin and Bad Bunny, whose recent Super Bowl halftime show offered a political lightning rod for MAGA.

On Thursday, the DHS social media team took time out of its busy schedule of posting neo-Nazi memes and anti-American propaganda to hit back at Cardi B.

“As long as she doesn’t drug and rob our agents, we’ll consider that an improvement over her past behavior,” the DHS official account posted, referring to the rapper’s past statements about her encounters with some customers while she was working as an adult entertainer.

Cardi B was unsurprisingly quick with a clapback. “If we talking about drugs let’s talk about Epstein and friends drugging underage girls to rape them,” she wrote on X Thursday. “Why yall don’t wanna talk about the Epstein files?”

Cardi B’s outspoken criticism of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown comes as the rapper’s longtime nemesis Nicki Minaj has gone full MAGA.

Expired-special-employee Corey Lewandowski took it out on federal officials when he couldn’t get his way with a highly unusual quest.

Lewandowski, who entered the ranks of the Department of Homeland Security thanks to close proximity to rumored beau Kristi Noem, reportedly attempted to get his hands on a badge and federally issued gun, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The 52-year-old was relegated to the position of “special government employee” after he was denied the job of Noem’s chief of staff. His request to top ICE officials to receive a badge and weapon was highly unusual—not only due to the informal nature of his employment at DHS, but also because Lewandowski never received the basic prerequisite of law enforcement training.

In one instance detailed by the Journal, the Trump administration was planning to tap former ICE official Tom Feeley as the agency’s new director. But Lewandowski’s request—and Feeley’s rejection of it—subsequently lost Feeley the job.

Feeley wasn’t the only one to lose their DHS gig over Lewandowski’s power-hungry crusade. Realizing that he needed a legal justification for the gun, Lewandowski turned to ICE’s legal office, asking officials there to issue him a legal note recommending the weapon. One of the agency’s top attorneys, Ken Padilla, similarly refused.

Days later, Padilla was placed on administrative leave, and was later demoted and relocated to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, according to sources that spoke with the Journal.

Eventually, Lewandowski got what he wanted, managing to get other attorneys in the office to cave to his demands. In the end, it was Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons that signed off on Lewandowski’s request via autopen.

Lewandowski has been tied into MAGA’s inner fold for years, having made his name as Donald Trump’s first campaign manager in the 2016 presidential race.

Ohio Senator John Husted accepted thousands of dollars in donations from one of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators, before voting against releasing the Department of Justice’s files on the alleged sex trafficker.

As long as Husted has been in office, he has accepted money from Les Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret whose name was inexplicably redacted out of the Epstein files until earlier this week. The Ohio Republican has raked in more than $116,000 from Wexner since 2001, when he first entered public office as a member of Ohio’s state House of Representatives.

Husted accepted $3,500 from Wexner as recently as July—only two months before he voted to block the release of the Epstein files, according to campaign finance records reviewed by TiffinOhio. In November, Husted, a steady MAGA sycophant, again voiced opposition to releasing files. But days later, the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed through the Senate by unanimous consent.

Husted wasn’t the only one who accepted money from the Wexner: The billionaire doled out more than $250,000 in donations to Republican candidates in the past year, especially ones in his home state of Ohio, according to NOTUS.

In June, Wexner gave $3,500 to Senator Bernie Moreno, and a month later, the Republican senator claimed that the frenzy to release the Epstein files was being “fueled” by the media and Democrats—despite mounting calls from members of his own party to release the documents. In September, he joined Husted in voting against the files’ release, before ultimately agreeing to support the Epstein Files Transparency Act’s passage in November.

Wexner also gave $3,500 to Republican Representative Mike Carey, as well as one Democrat, Representative Joyce Beatty.

Wexner was among the six powerful men who had their names redacted by the DOJ, and his name appeared on a list of potential co-conspirators.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is under fire for pink-slipping a Coast Guard pilot and then rehiring them moments later, over a blanket.

Noem and her expired-special-employee chief adviser (and rumored beau) Corey Lewandowski are no strangers to a toxic work environment—rather, they seem to enjoy creating them. The duo are known for frequently berating their senior-level staff and have even demanded that employees submit to polygraph tests as exhibitions of loyalty.

But days after federal agents working under Noem’s purview shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the DHS secretary snapped.

A maintenance issue on one of her planes had forced her to land and deboard to another aircraft, The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday. The sudden switch inspired Lewandowski to fire the U.S. Coast Guard pilot from the first plane, though the pilot’s abilities weren’t the problem: Noem was upset that her blanket had not followed her to her second plane.

The pilot was told to take a commercial flight home when they reached their destination, according to the Journal’s report.

But moments later, Noem had to backtrack on the pilot’s terminated employment, though she didn’t do so in any admission of wrongdoing. Instead, Noem tapped the pilot to fly her around again because “no one else was available to fly them home,” reported the Journal.

A DHS spokeswoman declined to address the episode but told the newspaper that the secretary had “made personnel decisions to deliver excellence.”

Some of those personnel decisions have been nothing short of seismic. In 2025, Noem and Lewandowski completely reengineered Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their image, firing or demoting approximately 80 percent of the agency’s field leadership.

Their 2026 plans for the agency involve a massive “wartime recruitment” hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new ICE officers in the coming year. Part of that strategy includes spending millions on social media advertisements targeted at gun rights advocates, UFC enthusiasts, and manosphere podcast audiences.

Meanwhile, AI-induced slip-ups have “sent many new recruits into field offices without proper training,” according to law enforcement officials.

Office of Budget and Management Director Russell Vought killed USAID, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, and is now using the money he “saved” to bankroll his security detail.

A Reuters report Friday states that the Project 2025 architect who promised to put federal employees “in trauma” is spending $15 million of former USAID funding—money that would have gone toward fighting HIV, polio, malaria, and other diseases—to pay his U.S. Marshal security through the end of the year.

One source told Reuters that Vought has more than a dozen U.S. marshals in his security detail.

While Vought allegedly faced a threat on his life last month, the irony of the man who ripped disease-fighting funding away from some of the most at-risk people in the world only to use it to beef up his personal bodyguard staff is impossible to ignore.

This is yet another example of Trump officials’ questionable personal spending habits. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Department of Homeland Security is leasing a $70 million jet that Secretary Kristi Noem and her alleged boyfriend Corey Lewandowski use to travel in luxury. And what’s up with that $400 million White House ballroom?

Disgraced sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein said he had “new administration people” visiting his Little Saint James Island in 2016—just a month before President Trump’s first inauguration. 

In a December 2016 email to Bill Gates, Epstein told him to “come to visit the island. New administration people visiting.” 

We can only speculate which people from the colorful cast of Trump characters were on pedophile island, but one possibility is Steve Bannon, Trump’s then adviser, who had a genuine friendship with Epstein. Stephen Feinberg, now Trump’s deputy secretary of defense, was also close to Trump in his first term and has been named in the files.

“These people are playing in our faces,” political commentator Nina Turner wrote on X. ”They need to be charged. Period.”

“Donald Trump did drain the swamp, right from the White House to Epstein Island,” one X user wrote.

This document only publicly reaffirms the connection to the perverted financier that people in both Trump’s first and second term have had—and in some cases lied about. On Thursday, another email from 2016 showed Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz inviting Epstein to his Valentine’s Day party—eight years after Epstein was registered as a sex offender. And on Wednesday,  Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted he visited Epstein’s pedophile island with his wife and children in 2012 after he lied dramatically about cutting off all contact with the predator. 

The whistleblower complaint against Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard was related to a conversation between two foreign nationals about Jared Kushner, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter who spoke with The Wall Street Journal Thursday.

The Journal could not determine where the foreign nationals were from, or what they had discussed about Kushner. But if verified, the allegations against the president’s son-in-law recorded in the conversation would be significant, U.S. officials told the Journal. They added that there was currently no corroborating evidence, but that didn’t mean the allegations lack any merit.

Senior Trump administration officials denied the allegations about Kushner but did not offer any more details about the conversation, in order to preserve security around a sensitive surveillance method.

Kushner is deeply embedded in the Trump administration’s national security dealings—as a front for a series of pretty blatant real estate and land development grifts. Kushner has previously been under scrutiny for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In May, a whistleblower accused Gabbard of restricting the distribution of a highly classified intelligence report for political purposes. Typically, an employee is able to share a complaint alleging wrongdoing directly with lawmakers, as long as the director of national intelligence instructs them on how to securely transmit it. But eight months later, and the whistleblower’s complaint was still not transmitted to Congress—and was reportedly locked away in a safe. A heavily redacted version of the report finally arrived in Congress last week.

Christopher Fox, the inspector general for the intelligence community, claimed that Gabbard was only informed in December that she needed to provide security guidance in order to transmit the complaint. Former I.C. Inspector General Tamara Johnson had determined that the allegation against Gabbard “did not appear credible,” but Fox noted that that determination had “no legal effect” on the whistleblower’s right to submit the complaint to Congress.

In May, Kushner reportedly advised administration officials in negotiations with Arab leaders, ahead of Donald Trump’s trip to the Middle East.

What country can flex that the man in charge of its public health policy proudly snorts cocaine off of toilets? As far as this writer is aware, just the United States.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boasted about his drug-huffing past during an interview with podcaster Theo Von Thursday, claiming that his strong immune system was all thanks to times that he railed lines from the porcelain throne straight to the dome.

Referring to times during the pandemic when he insisted on attending 12-step meetings in person, Kennedy insisted that his brazen attitude toward viral infections was due to the fact that he “used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats.”

Kennedy then explained that the real disease, to him, was his addiction, which he said would “kill him” if he didn’t attend daily recovery meetings.

For a quick comparison on the rapid degradation of American politics: Just last week marked the 10-year anniversary of when Jeb Bush encouraged a small but tepid audience to “please clap”—a misstep that, at the time, was received with such abhorrence by the American public that it almost immediately spelled the end of his political career.

Yet somehow, Kennedy will likely move on from this interview completely unfazed by the blatant admission of his illicit behavior.

Meanwhile, the 72-year-old’s bizarre health conspiracies have wreaked havoc on America’s public health policies. During a measles outbreak in Texas last year, Kennedy refused to endorse the tried and true measles vaccine, recommending instead that susceptible residents self-medicate with vitamins. He has transformed HHS, replacing independent medical experts on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He also overhauled the child vaccination schedule without notifying his staffers, a decision that could potentially affect vaccine access and insurance coverage for millions of American families in the coming years.

And last month, the health secretary unveiled the outcome of his department’s monthslong project to reimagine the food pyramid. The result: an upside-down triangle in which butter, steak, and cheese play a leading role.

The lone Democrat in the Senate to vote to keep the Department of Homeland Security funded was none other than Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman.

The progressive turned Trump sympathizer voted to advance a bill funding DHS for the next year, using the justification that he opposes government shutdowns for any reason. Every other Democrat in the Senate, including centrists such as Maine’s Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, and Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, voted against the funding. The bill ultimately failed to move forward, despite Fetterman’s best efforts.

Fetterman posted a video on X Thursday claiming that “shutting DHS down has zero impact and zero changes for ICE.”

“ICE already has $75B in funding from the BBB that I did not vote for,” Fetterman said, referencing Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill that was passed in July. “But it will hit FEMA, Coast Guard, TSA and our Cybersecurity Agency. As a Democrat, I can’t vote to shut down critical parts of our government.”

“The Republicans have to work with us, and they haven’t even come to the table on addressing our concerns,” Masto said, adding that she would oppose even temporary funding for DHS because progress on reforming ICE and the Border Patrol had stalled. New Jersey’s Cory Booker said Wednesday that Congress “cannot give another dollar” to DHS.

“You have a reckless, out-of-control agency that is violating the rights of Americans. Literally, shooting and killing Americans unjustly. And my colleagues do not seem to be aggrieved about this. The small-government conservatives don’t think that this is in any way an overreach of executive power into the lives of community members,” Booker told Chris Hayes on MS NOW.

Fetterman has called for President Trump to fire DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, warning last month that “she is betraying DHS’s core mission and trashing your border security legacy.” But otherwise, he has taken a right-wing stance on immigration, supporting ICE and Trump’s mass deportation agenda despite the fact that his own wife, Gisele, was once undocumented.