Trump’s Acting A.G. Says He Won’t Release Even One More Epstein File

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche claims that his department released every single Epstein file—and that if any weren’t released, it’s because they “were not responsive to the law.”

“You have the authority to go ahead and release more [of the Epstein files], do you not?” Blanche was asked Tuesday on Fox News. “And you have the authority to go to Congress, perhaps?”

“No, we have released everything,” Blanche replied. “So listen, we reviewed six million pieces of paper. What we released with anything that’s associated with the Epstein file. So we are not sitting on a single piece of paper.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing that should be released. If we find something else tomorrow, we’ll release it. I don’t anticipate we will. So the misguided assumption that there is more to be released is because we reviewed millions and millions of pages within the department, millions of which had nothing to do with Epstein.… If we didn’t release it, it’s because it was not responsive to the law, and therefore not part of the Epstein files.… By law, we had to make certain redactions.… But we said to Congress, any congressman can come in and spend as much time as they want looking at everything unredacted.”

“I don’t know how this department or this president can be more transparent than saying ‘American people, here is every single document in our entire database. And if we had to redact it … anybody can come look at it if you’re a member of Congress.’”

This is facetious at best. As reported earlier this year, 2.5 million documents in the Justice Department’s investigative files on Epstein have yet to be released publicly, and many of the 3.5 million pages that were released have been redacted to hell.

“Todd Blanche needs a reminder that there’s a legally binding subpoena for documents that is different than the law,” Democratic Representative Robert Garcia wrote on X. “This investigation is not a hoax. The DOJ needs to release the rest of files.”

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution explicitly protects freedom of religion, preventing the government from prohibiting the free exercise of one’s own beliefs, and forbidding the government from establishing an official religion or from favoring one over another.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration flagrantly defied it.

On Easter Sunday, Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, sent out a blatantly Christian email to some 100,000 government employees. The subject line read: “He has risen!”

“Happy Easter—He is Risen indeed!” starts the email, obtained by The Washington Post. “Today we celebrate the greatest story ever told, the foundation of our faith, and the abiding hope of all mankind.

“From the foot of the Cross on Good Friday to the stone rolled away from the now empty tomb, sin has been destroyed,” continues the email, signed by the secretary. “Jesus has been raised from the dead. And God has granted each of us victory and new life. And where there is life—risen life—there is hope.”

Staffers were shocked by the constitutional violation.

“This has never happened before,” one government employee, who described the email as “grotesque,” told Wired. “I have never gotten a message like this from anyone.”

The same employee noted that such a message wouldn’t even be expected from military chaplains, commissioned officers who provide religious services.

Another employee, a 15-year veteran of the department, told the Post, “I have never seen that overtly of a religious email in all my years of government service.... It’s a separation of state and religion for a reason.”

Yet another employee found it telling that Rollins was “forcing religion down everybody’s throat,” noting that non-Christian USDA employees had expressed concern about their futures in the department.

A USDA spokesperson insisted to Wired that Rollins was “within her rights” to issue an Easter-themed missive.

But the note was just one of many breaches by the Trump administration of America’s longstanding religious freedom. Weeks into his second term, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the official White House Faith Office, led by televangelist pastor Paula White-Cain. That same week, Trump issued another executive order to “end the anti-Christian weaponization of government.”

Months later in July, the Office of Personnel Management issued a similar memo, effectively allowing federal employees to attempt to convert their colleagues in the workplace and encourage them to pray in the workplace.

The Department of Labor also established its own faith office, where its religious leader, Kenneth Wolfe, hosts monthly worship services.

“Generally, people who are working for the government understand that their job is to work on behalf of all Americans,” an unnamed source at the Labor Department told Wired. “And this is something very different. This is very explicitly Christian, and even within the realm of Christianity, a very narrow representation of that.”

“People are uncomfortable. I know several who are offended and angry,” they continued. “These [worship services] are very Christian in nature.”

The evangelical infusions have been unabashed and shameless. In January, the niece of Martin Luther King Jr. and the senior adviser on faith and community outreach at USDA, Alveda King, told DOL employees that “we have different denominations, different faiths, and some have no faith.”

“Those are the ones I would be more concerned about,” King emphasized.

In March, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth urged Americans to pray “every day” on their knees “in the name of Jesus Christ.” Employees say the hyper-fixation on Christianity has made the federal government a very uncomfortable place to work, spurring an environment in which staffers fear religion-based retaliation. Another staffer told Wired plainly that the “vibes are bad.”

“They always spend a lot of time carrying on like, ‘No one’s forcing you to pray, these are voluntary,’” they said. “But it’s happening in the middle of a government workplace.”

Republican Senator Roger Marshall wants Americans to stop complaining about gas prices because they’re necessary for “national security.”

Speaking on Newsmax’s Wake Up America Tuesday morning, Marshall was asked about the Iran war, and the Kansas politician was dismissive of its negative economic effects on the American people.

“I’m sorry the gas prices are going up, but help is on its way, and your national security, yes, is even more important than your pocketbook,” Marshall said.

Marshall doubled down when asked how long Americans would be paying higher energy costs, saying, “I think back to my grandparents and their generation that served in World War II.”

“Could you imagine trying to tell the president, ‘Look, you only got so many days to defeat Hitler or defeat Japan?’ We have to do it till we get the outcome that we want. I hope it’s weeks and not months, but at the end of the day, Americans are going to be safer,” Marshall said.

This is all rather callous to say with gas prices averaging $4 per gallon across the country and more than $5 per gallon in places like California and Oregon, all because of a war of choice that had nothing to do with any imminent threats to the U.S. The latest threats to national security were actually caused by President Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, and Marshall is stubbornly defending the war out of loyalty to him.

Pope Leo XIV warned on Tuesday that democracy risks becoming a “majoritarian tyranny” if not rooted in moral law.

The warning came in a letter addressed to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

“Far from being a mere procedure, democracy recognizes the dignity of every person and calls each citizen to participate responsibly in the pursuit of the common good,” Leo wrote. “Democracy remains healthy, however, only when rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person. Lacking this foundation, it risks becoming either a majoritarian tyranny or a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites.”

While the statement didn’t mention President Trump by name, it’s hard not to see Leo’s warning as the latest installment of their ideological feud. Trump says the pope, of all people, is “weak on crime,” and doesn’t understand why his Holiness is opposed to an illegal and deadly war on Iran. Leo has responded with the case for a democracy rooted in Catholic social teaching that “regards power not as an end in itself, but as a means ordered toward the common good.”

The letter also comes just a day after the pope stated that he was not a politician and had “no fear” of the Trump administration. Read his letter here.

President Donald Trump has finally weighed in on that FEMA official who claims he teleported to a Waffle House—and it’s a doozy.

Gregg Phillips, who serves as associate administrator for the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has repeatedly doubled down on claims that he was instantaneously transported 50 miles to one of the popular chain restaurant’s locations.

In a brief interview with CNN’s KFile, Trump was directly asked about Phillips’s wild journey.

“What does teleport mean? Was he kidding?” Trump said.

After being assured that Phillips was very much not kidding, Trump replied: “I don’t know anything about him teleporting.… It just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.”

Trump’s apparent disbelief underscores just how little the president knows—or cares—about anyone who works for him. Phillips has made a slew of outrageous claims in the past. He previously claimed to have spoken with God and with Satan, and claimed that he was “already dead” but was kept around to do God’s work. Phillips has said that many of these instances occurred while he was undergoing self-directed treatment for metastatic bone cancer, using ivermectin and fenbendazole.

After a 2025 incident where he said he collapsed at a Lowes and came to in a McDonald’s parking lot, with 15,000 steps logged in his health app and a Big Mac in his lap, he insisted: “The whole space and time thing, continuum, got all—it fell with me.”

“This isn’t a health thing. This isn’t the cancer. This isn’t me. This is a spiritual thing,” he said.

But one of his rather outrageous claims may have been exactly what kept him in Trump’s circles. Phillips is a major proponent of the “Big Lie,” the conspiracy theory that Trump only lost the 2020 election because it was rigged against him.

Since Phillips’s outlandish claims first began to circulate in March, FEMA’s No. 3 official has been relegated to the sidelines of his own agency—enraging Phillips, multiple insiders at FEMA told CNN.