Why Did DOJ Give Ghislaine Maxwell These Epstein Files on Trump?

The FBI conducted four interviews with a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child, and Trump’s Justice Department gave all four of those interviews to Ghislaine Maxwell before her trial, as reported by Roger Sollenberger. Only one of those interviews is in the publicly searchable Epstein files—and it was removed and put back earlier this week.

“By choosing not to release three FBI interviews with an underage Trump accuser—interviews the DOJ gave to Maxwell at trial—Trump’s DOJ allowed Maxwell to retain potential blackmail over the president,” Sollenberger wrote Friday on X. “But that leverage over Trump vanishes if DOJ made them public, as law requires.”

The woman sat down for the interviews with the FBI after filing a lawsuit against the Epstein estate. In the publicly available interview, she claims that she was “brutally and forcibly battered, assaulted, and raped by these other men she met through Epstein. On one occasion, one of these prominent men forcibly slapped Jane Doe 4 in the face after she was forced to perform oral sex on him. This same man forcibly raped her, penetrating her both vaginally and anally. On information and belief, Epstein was aware of and, indeed encouraged, the assault of Jane Doe 4 by these other men.”

This lawsuit matches the FBI’s lone public interview with her, in which she names Trump.

“[REDACTED] stated Epstein introduced her to Trump who subsequently forced her head down to his exposed penis which she subsequently bit,” the FBI said. “In response, Trump punched her in the head and kicked her out.” This allegedly occurred in the mid-1980s when she was “approximately 13-15 years old.”

Trump has of course denied any wrongdoing.

There are three more interviews that this woman has with the FBI, and we don’t know what else she says or who else she names. But Maxwell does.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer’s husband has been banned from the department’s headquarters in Washington after he allegedly sexually assaulted two female staffers, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Dr. Shawn DeRemer, a 57-year-old anesthesiologist from Portland, Oregon, will no longer be able to visit his wife at work, after at least two female staffers told officials that he touched them inappropriately. A building restriction notice viewed by the Times put it gently: “If Mr. DeRemer attempts to enter, he is to be asked to leave.”

One of the incidents, which occurred during working hours, was caught by security cameras, people familiar with the matter told the Times. The footage showed DeRemer giving a female staffer an extended embrace, and it was reviewed as part of a criminal investigation, one of the people told the paper.

A police report documenting a December incident of forced sexual conduct at the Labor Department was filed by Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department in late January.

Concerns about DeRemer were initially raised in January, as part of an internal investigation into alleged misconduct by his wife. In an explosive complaint to the Inspector General’s Office, Chavez-DeRemer was accused of abusing her position by having an inappropriate sexual relationship with a member of her security detail.

She was also accused of drinking during the workday and of committing travel fraud by making her chief of staff schedule official taxpayer-funded trips she could use to see friends and family. Her lawyer has denied these allegations.

The Trump administration has taken more than a year to roll out a fraction of the Epstein files, but literally overnight, Donald Trump decided that it would be no problem at all to dump everything the government has on alien life.

The president announced late Thursday that he would direct agencies to “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.”

Trump noted the spontaneous release was due to the public’s “tremendous interest,” though that’s not the entire story.

Hours earlier, Trump was caught off guard by a reporter’s question relating to Barack Obama’s recent revelation that aliens are real.

“Have you seen any evidence of nonhuman visitors to earth?” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Trump on Air Force One.

“Well, he gave classified information, he’s not supposed to be doing that,” said Trump, who was charged for mishandling and illegally keeping classified documents after losing the 2020 election.

“So aliens are real?” Doocy pressed.

“Well I don’t know if they’re real or not, I can tell you he gave classified information; he’s not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake,” Trump replied, cracking that the only aliens he was aware of in the U.S. were “illegals.”

Obama casually fessed to his belief in aliens during a speed round of playful questions on the No Lie With Brian Tyler Cohen podcast Saturday, informing listeners that “they’re real, but I haven’t seen them.” The former president added that there was no facility storing aliens at Area 51, “unless there’s this enormous conspiracy, and they hid it from the president of the United States.”

He clarified his comments the following day, writing on social media that the universe is so vast that the likelihood of extraterrestrial life is “statistically” probable.

“But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!” Obama posted.

Trump’s eagerness to satiate apparent public demand on the existence of aliens only further underscores the absurdity of the endless delays holding back the full, legally mandated release of the Epstein files.

Recent reports indicate that the DOJ has only released a fraction of the Epstein files, potentially holding on to 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.

President Trump is continuing his crusade against voting rights, claiming that mail-in ballots are “crooked as hell” and that eliminating them will guarantee Republican dominance of elections for the next half-century.

“Mail-in ballots are crooked as hell. We’re the only country in the world that use this type of mail-in ballot, the only country in the world,” Trump said at a rally in Rome, Georgia, on Thursday. “I’ll tell you what, Republicans have to win this one. We’ll never lose a race for fifty years, we won’t lose a race.”

He then launched into his broader attack on voting rights, which many see as a last-ditch attempt to salvage the GOP’s chances in the November midterm elections, which are predicted to go poorly for them.

“We want voter ID, we want proof of citizenship, and we don’t want mail-in ballots except for the military far away, except for people that are ill, disabled, or people that are away. Even for a vacation! We’ll be generous,” Trump added.

Trump had no complaints about mail-in ballots when he won the presidency in 2024. And the U.S. is not the only country to use them: 34 countries and territories use some kind of postal voting. Twelve even allow all voters to vote by mail, including the U.K., Germany, Poland, Greece, and Canada.

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 works as Goldman Sachs’s chief legal officer, but last week, the star attorney was forced to resign over her myriad ties to the man she warmly referred to as “Uncle Jeffrey.” Her resignation goes into effect on June 30.*

But recently released emails from 2014 reveal that the counsel’s fondness for the “international man of mystery” inspired her to share a draft of an official White House press response with him, dishing then-unreleased information 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 spoke with Epstein about the situation, 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.

* This article previously misstated when Ruemmler’s work at Goldman Sachs ends, as well as the nature of her outreach to Epstein.

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.