Obama Lawyer Asked Epstein for Advice on Private White House Dealings

An Obama-era attorney disclosed “non-public” information to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein with regard to the White House’s response to the Secret Service’s sex scandal.

Kathryn Ruemmler worked as Goldman Sachs’s chief legal officer until last week, when the star attorney was forced to resign over her myriad ties to the man she warmly referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey.”

But recently released emails from 2014 reveal that the counsel’s fondness for the “international man of mystery” inspired her to loop him into the inner sanctum of the federal government, going so far as to dish White House secrets to the convicted sex criminal, reported Bloomberg Thursday.

At the time of her emails, the White House was embroiled in a global controversy: In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents (and military men) had decided to booze their way through a presidential trip in Cartagena, Colombia, hiring prostitutes along the way. The elite law enforcement personnel did so, despite the fact that Colombian sex workers were frequently hired as spies by the country’s powerful drug cartels, sparking questions about possible national security concerns in the fallout.

Ruemmler was one of the staffers handling the White House’s official response to the fiasco. Two years after the disastrous Cartagena trip, she reached out to Epstein for his assistance on the case, forwarding him a draft email that contained sensitive information about the role that the White House played in investigating the sexual misconduct.

In return, Epstein offered advice and edits. “Breathe, smile. You’re free,” he wrote in one message.

The exchange took place six years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting children as young as 14 to have sex with him. The Justice Department’s review of the Epstein files concluded that the well-connected financier had harmed more than 1,000 women and children in his global sex-trafficking ring, all of whom “suffered unique trauma.”

Jennifer Connelly, a spokeswoman for Ruemmler, told Bloomberg that the former White House counsel “has done nothing wrong and has nothing to hide. Nothing in the record suggests otherwise.”

“Ms. Ruemmler has deep sympathy for those harmed by Epstein and if she knew then what she knows now, she never would have dealt with him at all,” Connelly said.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding onto upward of 50 terabytes that the agency has not yet disclosed. The recent releases, which include millions of pages of documents, amount to roughly 300 gigabytes, or 2 percent of the estimated total.

Is Donald Trump delaying action in Iran so he can go to the Winter Olympics?

This week, the so-called peacemaker president has assembled the greatest amount of air power in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but reportedly hasn’t approved military action against Iran—yet.

One factor in the president’s pending decision is the ongoing Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, sources familiar with the matter told The Washington Post Thursday.

There has been increasing speculation that Trump is planning to make a surprise appearance at the men’s hockey finals on Sunday, if Team USA—the favorites to win gold—qualify for the match. Trump also announced last week that a presidential delegation led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon would attend the closing ceremony in Milan on Sunday.

The decision to launch a military strike on Iran would potentially jeopardize travel plans for Trump and his officials. (Obviously, it could also jeopardize a lot more—but that doesn’t seem to be Trump’s chief concern here.)

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of his so-called Board of Peace in Washington Thursday, Trump offered Iran 10 days to come to a diplomatic solution—or risk military action. That would give him just enough time to visit Milan, likely so he can get loudly booed just like Vice President JD Vance was at the opening ceremony.

In the meantime, the U.S. military has deployed 13 warships and a large fleet of aircraft to the Middle East, with a second aircraft carrier en route to the region.

Federal judges have ordered the release of at least three of 10 West African immigrants who were swarmed by federal agents in multiple immigration raids in October and November on New York City’s Canal Street, a popular site for street vendors.

Serigne Diop, Mamdou Ndoye, and Abdou Tall will be released, while the other seven men remain in ICE detention centers in Louisiana and New Jersey.

Manhattan District Judge Vernon S. Broderick noted that Immigration and Customs Enforcement failed to provide a warrant or probable cause to arrest Ndoye, in particular, writing, “Absent such procedures, the agency will be free to either engage in preplanned decisions to unlawfully detain individuals and then come up with post hoc rationalizations, or merely randomly stage ‘encounters’ without the intent to unlawfully detain individuals and then create post hoc rationalizations for these unlawful detentions.”

“The court-ordered releases for these three individuals confirm what we all know, which is that federal law enforcement officers carried out illegal and unconstitutional roundups on the streets of Chinatown,” said Elora Mukherjee, the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic.

The Department of Homeland Security insists that the arrests were justified.

“Despite activist judges, President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem will continue fighting for the arrest, detention, and removal of criminal illegal aliens who have no right to terrorize our communities,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.

The Department of Justice’s headquarters in Washington now features a banner of Donald Trump.

The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, also called Main Justice, on Thursday became the latest federal building to get plastered with a portrait of the Supreme Leader—in a symbolic blow to the agency’s independence.

After the Watergate scandal, the Department of Justice installed new safeguards to ensure the DOJ remained a “neutral zone” from the politics of the White House, and made assurances that the department’s attorneys “must always be committed to good judgment and integrity,” according to the Brenner Center for Justice.

Seeing Trump’s face on the facade of Main Justice simply verifies what Americans have been witnessing for months: Trump has completely taken over the federal agency intended to implement an impartial—and nonpartisan—rule of law.

Earlier this month, DOJ officials began to hold daily meetings to discuss Trump’s efforts to investigate and punish his perceived political enemies, such as former special counsel Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The president later joked that he had a “right” to weaponize the DOJ.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice appears to be engaged in a large-scale cover-up to protect many of the individuals implicated in the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein—including the president himself. The agency’s leader, Attorney General Pam Bondi, has repeatedly lied about Trump’s alleged wrongdoing, and reoriented her department to exact his revenge fantasies and defend his billionaire buddies.

It won’t be bigger or better, but the Trump administration is reportedly working to create a U.S. dupe of the World Health Organization.

The Department of Health and Human Services is proposing a plan that would cost taxpayers $2 billion a year to recreate the same systems that the country had access to when it was a member of the WHO, according to officials that spoke with The Washington Post Thursday.

The Trump administration pulled the United States out of the WHO on January 22. In a statement, DHS blamed the exit on the global public health entity’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet Donald Trump—who railed against the WHO for years—saw it differently. On his first day back in office, Trump chalked the withdrawal up to “unfairly onerous payments,” claiming that the cost of membership within the WHO was disproportionately shouldered by the U.S.

But the federal directive has not quelled nationwide demand for health data. Over the last several weeks, Illinois and California both sidestepped the government to independently join the WHO’s Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network, or GOARN, in newly localized efforts to stay abreast of changes in global health.

The White House’s plan to recreate the WHO’s health surveillance operation would involve the creation of laboratories, data-sharing networks, and rapid-response systems that the U.S. abandoned when it withdrew from the WHO last month—only this time, it will cost Americans much, much more.

The total cost could be as much as three times the price of America’s WHO membership. Citing figures in the proposal, U.S. officials told the Post that America’s contributions to the WHO fell somewhere between 15 and 18 percent of the entity’s total annual funding of $3.7 billion. On the high end, that would represent a $666 million annual membership fee.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration worked decisively last year to gut USAID, which did much of the work that the White House is planning to do with its slapdash WHO replacement.

But the Trump administration would apparently prefer to spend more, not less, for an inferior product.

Public health researchers were appalled by the initiative, arguing that the U.S.-led operation would not serve as an adequate or effective replacement to the WHO’s data-sharing program.

“Spending two to three times the cost to create what we already had access to makes absolutely no sense in terms of fiscal stewardship,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. “We’re not going to get the same quality or breadth of information we would have by being in the WHO, or have anywhere the influence we had.”

President Trump wants to build a 5,000-person military base in Gaza.

Board of Peace contracting records viewed by The Guardian show that the Trump administration plans to use more than 350 acres of desolate land in southern Gaza full of twisted metal from multiple Israeli bombing campaigns to construct a massive base with 26 armored watchtowers, bunkers, an arms range, and a storage warehouse—all encircled in barbed wire.

The base will serve as the headquarters for the upcoming International Stabilization Force, which the Trump and the Jared Kushner–led Board of Peace say will have de facto control of Gaza. It is unclear what the rules of engagement for this force will be, and whether they will collaborate with the United Nations in any way.

“The Board of Peace is a kind of legal fiction, nominally with its own international legal personality separate from both the UN and the United States, but in reality it’s just an empty shell for the United States to use as it sees fit,” Rutgers law professor Adil Haque told The Guardian.

More importantly, this move shows once again that even amid the destruction and violence of Israel’s genocide, Palestinian sovereignty is still of no concern to the Trump administration, or any parties involved in this so-called Board of Peace.

“Whose permission did they get to build that military base?” asked Palestinian Canadian lawyer Diana Buttu.

Donald Trump announced Thursday that he wants the United States to contribute $10 billion to his so-called Board of Peace—essentially forming a slush fund of taxpayer money the president can use however he likes.

Speaking at the board’s inaugural meeting in Washington, Trump assured the folks watching at home that $10 billion was “a very small number when you look at that compared to the cost of war.”

There’s just one problem: Transferring billions of taxpayer dollars would require congressional approval. And Trump has not gotten that.

So far, Trump’s foreign policy has been nothing short of an assault on Congress’s power of the purse. The president has unilaterally declared war against foreign drug smugglers, launching a series of deadly extrajudicial strikes on vessels the government claims—but refuses to prove—are carrying drugs. (These strikes are still ongoing: 11 people were killed as recently as Monday.) Not to mention the massive military operation Trump mounted to depose a foreign leader and steal that country’s oil—all without Congress’s ever declaring war.

Now Trump wants to use U.S. money to facilitate Jared Kushner’s master plan for Gaza—just another luxury real estate grift.

Even if Trump did ask Congress for the funds, it doesn’t seem likely that it would approve. Currently, Democrats and the White House remain in a deadlock over funding for the Department of Homeland Security, resulting in a partial government shutdown. With midterm elections (and a potential upheaval in Congress) on the horizon, now isn’t exactly the best time for the president to make a major foreign policy slush fund, as Republicans may be hoping to convince their constituents they still put America first.

There is one other source of money Trump could potentially dip into. The president previously sold permanent seats on his board for $1 billion a head, but refused to say where that money was going.

President Trump has once again dozed off on camera at his own event.

Footage shows Trump looking extremely drowsy at his inaugural “Board of Peace” meeting on Thursday at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. His eyelids grew heavy during Major General Jasper Jeffers III’s presentation, and if he didn’t fall asleep completely, he at least looked incredibly disinterested in his own creation.

Trump continued to doze as several international dignitaries spoke.

The “bored of peace” jokes write themselves.

This is only the most recent instance of Trump’s drowsiness getting the best of him. The 79-year-old’s eyes were completely shut at multiple points of his whole-milk legislation signing ceremony last month. He struggled to stay awake during a marijuana rescheduling executive order signing, looked absolutely exhausted at his own Cabinet meeting in December, and fell asleep once again at a Rwanda–Democratic Republic of the Congo peace agreement signing.

This is clearly a pattern of behavior that wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for the average 79-year-old man, but this is the president. Questions of cognitive decline and fitness for office are valid, and should be raised as midterms approach.

Even Florida cops are pulling their support from Representative Randy Fine over the Republican’s recent Islamophobic tirade.

Just days before Ramadan, Fine turned a simple joke about Islam’s prohibition against dogs into plain old bigotry, writing on X that “if they force us to choose, the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.”

Fine’s blatant religious intolerance inspired Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood to rescind his endorsement Thursday, writing on Facebook that Fine’s anti-Muslim commentary had carved “a path I just can’t follow.”

“I respect his fight for his faith and his beliefs. But I have to part ways when that fight turns into an attack on our Muslim neighbors,” Chitwood wrote, adding that Fine’s hatred doesn’t “align with my responsibility to stand up and protect the entire community.”

There are two Islamic congregations in Volusia County, compared to thousands of Protestant and Catholic parishioners, according to data from the Association of Religious Data Archives. Yet Chitwood—unlike Fine—recognizes that his public office requires him to protect and represent all religious bodies with equal fervor. In his missive, Chitwood noted that the county’s Muslim residents, who include business leaders, philanthropists, doctors, and teachers, had provided significant contributions to the community.

But it’s far from the first time that Fine has made vile, xenophobic remarks. The Arizonan-born MAGA diehard—who boasted last year that he was AIPAC’s “fastest-ever endorsement”—has come out in favor of starving Gazans, advocated for the mass deportation of Muslim American citizens from the U.S., and pushed for a bill that would allow drivers to mow down pro-Palestinian protesters if they blocked the road.

Chitwood noted in his post that he “[appreciates] the good work Rep. Fine has done to protect our Jewish neighbors, but as Sheriff I just can’t turn a blind eye to the harm he’s doing to our Muslim community.”

“In Volusia County, that community is small, but no less deserving of protection,” he wrote.

After a “frank” conversation with Fine, Chitwood posted another statement to his page, this time penned by Fine, at the lawmaker’s request.

“I respect Sheriff Chitwood and every thing he’s done to keep Volusia County safe, no matter your religious faith,” Fine said, according to Chitwood’s post. “We agree that no one should face discrimination for who they are and that no one should be able to use their faith to force their values on others.”

President Donald Trump won’t stop bragging about saving lives while making plans for war behind the scenes.

Speaking at the inaugural meeting of his so-called Board of Peace in Washington Thursday, Trump boasted to world leaders about ending foreign wars around the world and saving millions of lives.

Across the world, however, the supposed peacemaker president has overseen a massive military buildup in the Middle East, with the U.S. military deploying 13 warships and a large fleet of aircraft. A second aircraft carrier is on the way. Trump has officially mobilized the second-greatest collection of air power in the Middle East since the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, according to The Wall Street Journal.

At the meeting Thursday, Trump urged Iran to reach a deal through diplomacy or face military action. “We have to make a meaningful deal, otherwise bad things happen,” Trump said.

Trump has reportedly yet to make a final ruling, but Israel raised its alert level Wednesday, indicating a joint attack could be imminent.

While playing peacemaker, Trump didn’t shy away from threats altogether. Like a true mafioso, he warned dignitaries who’d refused his invitation to join the Board of Peace not to “play cute” with him. The list of countries that have rejected his offer isn’t short: It includes France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Vatican, to name a few.

Trump’s self-proclaimed reputation as a peacemaker is nothing short of preposterous. In January, he ordered a deadly military operation in Venezuela in order to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and swipe the country’s wealth of oil. Trump’s Pentagon has also mounted an ongoing series of deadly military strikes on boats the U.S. government claims—but refuses to prove—are smuggling drugs.