Epstein Accomplice Goes Missing Right Before He Was Going to Spill

Jean-Luc Brunel was ready to testify against Jeffrey Epstein in 2016 in exchange for immunity from his own alleged crimes against women and girls.

But when Epstein heard of Brunel’s plans, he reached out to attorney and former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Rummler, and Brunel went quiet, according to The Wall Street Journal. Epstein would walk free for three more years.

Recently released files from the Justice Department show that Brunel, a high-powered modeling scout, was working with lawyers representing Epstein victims in February 2016.

“One of Epstein’s bfs, Jean Luc Brunel, has helped get girls. He is wanting to cooperate,” according to a federal prosecutor’s notes. “Brunel is afraid of being prosecuted.”

Separate files indicate that Epstein found out about Brunel’s potential move against him in May 2016, and sent a typo-ridden email to an alleged girlfriend, former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler.

“I spoke to Mic=el Kodesch. jean lucs friend.? he said that boies&=bsp; got jean luc full immunity and was taking him in to the us attny nxt t=esday. last week they said it was this week, &=bsp; he asked for 3 million dollars so that jean luc . would no= go in, [sic]” Epstein wrote, indicating that Brunel was offered $3 million by someone to keep quiet. “Neither he nor Jean luc lawyer titone are capable of t=lling the truth. howver he said that jean luc was worried=that if he didnt go in on tuesday they woudl arrest him.”

Ruemmler responded to Epstein a few hours later asking him to call and explain, which is understandable given the incoherence of the email. The next day, she sent Epstein an email that read: “Awake now. Talking to Poe in 20 mins.” Poe likely referred to Gregory Poe, Epstein’s attorney in Washington, D.C.

It’s unclear what Poe and Ruemmler discussed, but whatever it was, it seems to have been enough to shut Brunel up and keep Epstein a free man for three more years. Poe insists that he never talked to Ruemmler or Epstein about Brunel.

“It set us back a couple of years,” said attorney David Boies, who filed lawsuits on behalf of some Epstein victims. “We know from our lawsuits that there were more than 50 girls that were trafficked after this.”

A close colleague of Epstein’s, Brunel likely used his position to traffic young women. He was charged in 2020 with rape of minors in France, but was later found dead in his cell in 2022 before any trial could begin. And Ruemmler, who spent significant time with Epstein well after his 2008 conviction, tagging along on “lunches and dinners with celebrities, apartment hunting, and personal beauty appointments,” announced last week that she was resigning from Goldman Sachs.

Four journalists and a lawyer were arrested in Cameroon trying to cover Donald Trump’s secret deportation program.

The journalists were interviewing deported immigrants at a government detention center in the capital, Yaoundé, when they were detained by police along with a lawyer representing most of the 15 detainees. The compound was known to house African immigrants deported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The detainees, none of whom are Cameroonian citizens, all had protection orders from U.S. courts barring them from being sent to their home countries for fear of persecution, The New York Times reported. The journalists were separated from the lawyer and taken to the country’s judicial police headquarters to be interrogated.

Three of the journalists are based in Cameroon and were on assignment for the Associated Press. The other journalist is Randy Joe Sa’ah, a freelancer who has worker for the BBC. The AP told the Times that the reporter was slapped but not seriously injured, although Sa’ah and the attorney, Joseph Awah Fru, said that the reporter appeared to have been beaten up and told him that he was attacked by police.

Some of the journalists were held in a cell for hours, Fru and Sa’ah said. Police took their cameras, laptops and phones before releasing them, claiming they contained sensitive government information. The Times unsuccessfully tried to reach police and the Cameroonian Ministry of Justice, and it’s not known if any of the five men face legal charges.

Neither the White House nor the State Department have publicly announced any kind of deal with Cameroon to accept deported immigrants. Some of the migrants held in Cameroon told the Times that they were pressured by local authorities to return to their home countries or be detained indefinitely in Cameroon.

“The state cannot prevent the public from knowing where they are keeping deportees who are not even citizens,” Fru said to the Times. “That goes to the whole idea of shady deals in the dark.”

Third-country deportations to countries like El Salvador were struck down in federal court last week, with U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg ruling that the immigrants were denied proper notice, due process, or court hearings. Did the immigrants in Cameroon face similar treatment?

The inaugural meeting of Donald Trump’s Board of Peace took place Thursday morning in Washington, convening leaders from two dozen countries in order to oversee the Gaza Peace Plan. But Trump, who spoke at the top of the assembly, very obviously had a difficult time pronouncing his peers’ foreign names.

“President Mirsu-oyev of Uzbekistan who is—where?” Trump said, referring to Shavkat Mirziyoyev. “There he is. A friend of mine, he’s got one of the most difficult names in history, but that’s okay, doesn’t matter.”

Trump tried to avoid other names, such as Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, whom Trump appeared to nearly refer to as a dictator.

“Say hello to the d—general/president,” Trump said as he pointed at Sisi, according to AFP reporter Shaun Tandon.

The “leader of the free world” also bungled naming the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan, whom he couldn’t seem to remember while boasting about ending their 30-year conflict.

“It was a great thing you did, you and your new friend,” Trump said in a wordy story that haphazardly avoided pronouncing the names of Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. “These are two tough cookies.”

Trump initially floated his “Board of Peace” idea back in September as part of a 20-point peace plan to control Gaza, promising to include major heads of state as well as former world leaders, such as former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair.

But the board’s charter makes little mention of Gaza. Instead, its goals appear to be as lofty as they are broad, seeking to “promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.”

The concept came under new scrutiny in January in light of Trump’s escalating aggression toward Greenland and NATO. Trump has also invited leaders of nations with terrible track records on human rights, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, to join the board.

Longtime U.S. allies warned that the “Board of Peace” could upend world order, with several refusing to join the board at all, including France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Slovenia.

The Department of Justice spoke four separate times to a woman who credibly accused Donald Trump of having sex with a minor he met through Jeffrey Epstein—but most accusations against the president appear to have been removed from the government’s documents on the alleged sex trafficker.

A 21-page slideshow buried in the massive trove of Epstein-related documents included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985, Trump forced a woman to give him oral sex when she was in her early teens. When the woman bit down on Trump’s exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. That same woman told the DOJ that Epstein had introduced her to Trump in 1984.

Yet last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that there was “no evidence” that Trump had committed any crime—adding to the growing pile of denials from Trump officials that constitute a sweeping cover-up of the president’s alleged wrongdoing.

Justice Department records indicate that the FBI spoke to this woman not once but at least four separate times, according to independent journalist Roger Sollenberger. Now those records appear to have been removed from public viewing—despite the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires all documents relating to the alleged sex trafficker to be made public.

Sollenberger discovered a record of four separate interviews, which took place in the summer of 2019, in a separate database of documents downloaded from the government’s public files on Epstein. That document indicated that the first of the four interviews was conducted on July 24, 2019, and the last conducted on October 16, 2019. That document was given to Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers as part of her trial, though the specific allegations predated Maxwell’s involvement with Epstein, Sollenberger wrote.

The woman’s first interview was entered into the FBI’s case files on August 9, 2019, just one day before Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. FBI agents typically have a deadline of five working days to file interview write-ups, indicating an abnormal 16-day gap, Sollenberger noted.

The global elite are beginning to face consequences for their affiliations with Jeffrey Epstein, and the dominoes may soon cascade into American politics.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former British prince and Duke of York, was arrested Thursday (his birthday) on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Recently released documents from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Epstein files trove surfaced disturbing images of Mountbatten-Windsor climbing over and inappropriately touching Epstein’s young victims.

His arrest is the latest notable instance in which someone with extensive ties to the child sex trafficker has actually faced a modicum of justice, sparking what some observers argue is a shift in the tides for Epstein’s alleged criminal associates—perhaps including Donald Trump.

As The Mirror’s columnist Christopher Bucktin noted Thursday, “Whatever the eventual outcome, the message was unmistakable: status alone no longer guarantees insulation from criminal investigation.”

Bucktin referred back to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s apparent refusal to hold Epstein’s associates accountable, including repeatedly denying requests during a congressional hearing last week to reopen investigations into Epstein’s connections based on the recently made public mounds of evidence in the DOJ’s files.

“If examining credible allegations against powerful individuals, like what the U.K. is now doing, risks shaking institutions, then those institutions demand deeper scrutiny, not gentler handling,” Bucktin continued. “The rule of law cannot function on the basis that some names are simply too significant, too connected, too politically sensitive to examine.”

King Charles said much the same hours after his brother’s arrest, noting in a statement that the “law must take its course” with regard to Mountbatten-Windsor’s alleged transgressions.

Bucktin argued that “justice cannot stop at one imprisoned accomplice while others retreat behind legal teams and influence. It cannot flinch because the truth might prove politically explosive. And it cannot accept that the potential embarrassment of the elite outweighs the public’s right to accountability,” he wrote.

“A birthday arrest on suspicion of misconduct in a public office should not stand alone as a rare spectacle. It should signal something larger: that no title, no fortune, no political office is sufficient armour against the law.”

Conservative commentator Tucker Carlson—perhaps the right’s most prominent Israel critic—says he was detained by Israeli authorities in Tel Aviv on Wednesday. 

Carlson told the Daily Mail that while attempting to leave Ben Gurion International Airport, he and his staff had their passports taken, and his executive producer was interrogated after his sit-down with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.  

“Men who identified themselves as airport security took our passports, hauled our executive producer into a side room and then demanded to know what we spoke to Ambassador Huckabee about,” Carlson told the Daily Mail. “It was bizarre. We’re now out of the country.”

The Daily Mail also reported that two sources familiar with the matter said the Israeli government initially didn’t plan on letting Carlson into the country. 

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Israel denied Carlson’s claims and said he “received the same passport control questions” as other visitors to Israel. This comes the same day as reports that Trump asked Carlson and others to “turn down the temperature” on their criticism of Israel. 

This rift hinges on what some in the MAGA movement see as unfair U.S. fealty to Israel. In September, Carlson said, “Bibi Netanyahu is running around the Middle East telling people ‘I control the United States.’ I’m an American. It’s too humiliating. I can’t handle that. And I shouldn’t have to put up with that.”

President Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., on Wednesday kicked off their family’s cryptocurrency venture, World Liberty Financial, with an inaugural forum at their father’s Mar-a-Lago estate. 

Eric Trump boasted on X that the forum is “uniting visionaries from Crypto, Wall Street, tech and beyond to shape the future of finance—free from outdated banks, centralized control, and cancel culture.” In short, it was an opportunity for the Trump family to make more money off of the presidency in defiance of any ethical concerns. Eric’s brother, Donald Trump Jr., retweeted his post.

Speakers at the forum included financial executives Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, NASDAQ CEO Adenda Friedman, Canadian investor Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame, Nicki Minaj, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, and numerous others. The brothers spoke to CNBC from the forum on Wednesday, thumbing their noses at critics who say the Trump family is profiting off people seeking to cozy up to the White House and creating multiple conflicts of interest. 

“The great irony here is they didn’t give us much of a choice,” Eric said.  

“They created this monster,” Donald Jr. interjected. Eric claimed that the Trumps were “canceled” by major financial institutions for political reasons, forcing them to turn to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance. 

President Trump sued JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon last month, accusing the bank of dropping him, his family, and his various businesses after the Capitol insurrection of January 6, which they deny. Last year, Trump sued Capital One with the same accusations. 

Last May, The New York Times discovered that the sovereign wealth fund of the United Arab Emirates paid $2 billion to purchase a stablecoin called USD1 from World Liberty Financial, a blatant attempt by a foreign government to line the pockets of the president and his family. The deal was brokered by Zach Witkoff, who happens to be the son of Steve Witkoff, the U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. 

Two weeks later, Trump allowed the UAE to import a large amount of AI chips from the United States, with many of them going to a company owned by the man who controls the UAE’s fund, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. CNBC asked the Trump brothers about this in the interview, and the pair denied doing anything wrong, with Donald Jr. dismissively saying, “We’ve been dealing with the conflict of interest stuff for years.” 

In reality, Wednesday’s forum was a new chance for similar lucrative deals for the Trumps from people with connections and interests that may not be known to the public. The World Liberty Financial X page even announced new partnerships and deals on Wednesday, some involving other Trump businesses. All of this indicates that the Trump presidency is a big financial windfall for the Trump family, ethics and conflicts of interest be damned.

Donald Trump’s celebration of Black History Month began with him rattling off the names of every Black person in his circle.

In an extraordinarily on-the-nose, unscripted White House address, the president listed more than a dozen names of prominent Black Americans for no clear reason other than to curry favor with his predominantly nonwhite audience, leveraging the legacies and prestige of the name-dropped pals in order to bolster his own credibility.

“Mike Tyson, boy I tell ya, Mike has been loyal to me. Whenever they come out, they say Trump is a racist, Trump’s a racist, Mike Tyson says, ‘He’s not a racist, he’s my friend, he’s been there from the beginning, good times and bad,’” Trump said. “But Mike Tyson’s a great guy and he’s so loyal. Always been loyal.”

“And Herschel Walker, speaking about loyal, how good a football player was Herschel? Now he’s the ambassador to the Bahamas,” Trump said, catching himself as he realized he couldn’t remember where he appointed the onetime Georgia wannabe politician. “I don’t know, Bahamas, Bermuda, is he Bahamas, Bermuda? Whatever! It’s a nice place.”

Trump’s next mention was football player and civil rights activist Jim Brown, whom he referred to as “silent but deadly.” But he didn’t stop there.

“By the way, Lawrence Taylor, great friend. Probably the greatest defensive player probably in the history of football, he’s a great friend of mine,” Trump continued.

Trump also shouted out former Representative Alvida King, “pardon czar” Alice Johnson, HUD Director Scott Turner, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, MAGA surrogate Corrin Rankin, Diandre Johnson, Agriculture Department Director of Private and Public Partnerships Director Bruce LeVell, and Senator Tim Scott.

Trump even mentioned singer-rapper Nicki Minaj, who took a hard right turn toward MAGA Avenue three months ago when her vaccine skepticism—which by then had become a hallmark of the far right—veered into a larger conservative ideology.

Last month, Minaj appeared beside the president for the unveiling of Trump Accounts, clutching his hand and hugging the alleged Epstein associate.

President Trump mixed up two different Black Caribbean countries at a Black History Month event at the White House on Wednesday, suggesting that he couldn’t care less about them or the event.

“Herschel Walker, speaking about loyal,” Trump said while apparently naming every single Black person he knew. “How good a football player was Herschel? Herschel Walker, now he’s ambassador to the Bahamas. I don’t know. Bahamas, Bermuda, Berhamas, whatever. A nice place!”

Walker is ambassador to the Bahamas. This is just the president’s latest gaffe, as he mixed up Iceland and Greenland multiple times at Davos last month.

Jay Bhattacharya has been tapped to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—after spending years criticizing its pandemic response.

Bhattacharya will continue his role as the director of the National Institutes of Health, as well as leading the CDC on an acting basis, four people familiar with personnel decisions told The Washington Post Wednesday.

Bhattacharya has a history of undermining the CDC’s pandemic guidance. In 2020, the then NIH head, Dr. Francis Collins, labeled the former Stanford University physician and economist “fringe,” after Bhattacharya helped author the “Great Barrington Declaration,” which called for the end of the coronavirus lockdowns. In 2024, Bhattacharya criticized the CDC’s recommendation for widespread masking during the Covid-19 pandemic, calling it “pseudo science.”

Bhattacharya will replace former Deputy Health Secretary Jim O’Neill, a market-fundamentalist Silicon Valley investor and longtime associate of billionaire Peter Thiel. Bhattacharya also has the support of powerful figures among Trump supporters, including Thiel, Joe Rogan, and Elon Musk, who claims Twitter suppressed Bhattacharya’s views before the Tesla founder bought the platform.

O’Neill replaced Susan Monarez, the last Senate-approved CDC director, who was fired last summer after only 28 days in office. Monarez was ousted after she refused “to commit, in advance, to approving every” recommendation by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, “regardless of scientific evidence” and “to dismiss career officials responsible for vaccine policy without cause.”

But Bhattacharya may not be in lockstep with his boss, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., either. Earlier this month, Bhattacharya put himself at odds with the health secretary when he testified that he’d seen no evidence that vaccines cause autism.

This story has been updated.