Howard Lutnick Suddenly Changes Entire Story About His Epstein Ties

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee claimed Wednesday that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lied several times during his testimony about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

During a closed-door hearing to discuss his ties to the alleged sex trafficker, Lutnick reneged on his past claims about Epstein recording his guests’ sexual misconduct and using it to blackmail them, Representative Ro Khanna told reporters after the hearing. Lutnick had previously called Epstein “the greatest blackmailer ever.”

“So, somebody obviously got to him, from the administration. In fact, he said he talked to people in the administration and that’s why he’s changed his tune,” Khanna said. “And the question is not just why he’s lying, the question is why he’s covering up. The question is why he’s no longer willing to share what he knows about Epstein’s abhorrent behavior.

“If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript he would’ve fired Howard Lutnick. It was very embarrassing,” the California Democrat added.

Lutnick swore in an interview last year he did not see Epstein after 2005, but he did coordinate a family trip (with his young kids) to the financier’s “pedophile island” in 2012. Lutnick previously confirmed that he’d kept in touch with Epstein over the years, even after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor.

“Howard Lutnick should resign,” Virginia Representative Suhas Subramanyam told reporters following the hearing. “That was absolutely mind-boggling, what we just heard in the room. He was evasive, nervous. He was dishonest.”

“He would not admit to lying, which he clearly did in the podcast,” Subramanyam referring to Lutnick’s remarks on the New York Post’s Pod Force One in October 2025, when the secretary claimed that after meeting Epstein, he decided he would “never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”

“I had to ask him whether he and I were in the same room, just now, because I couldn’t understand his meaning of ‘we were in the same room together,’” Subramanyam said.

Lutnick also refused to provide any explanation for why he and his family traveled to Epstein’s island.

“We asked him over and over again, ‘Why did you go to the island?’ He says he doesn’t remember, that it was inexplicable, and he simply didn’t know how to answer the question at that point,” Subramanyam said.

The Tennessee GOP’s new election map would eliminate the state’s only Democratic representative and carve up the majority-Black Memphis-area district he represents.

The map would divide Democratic Representative Steve Cohen’s Shelby County district, giving Republicans a 9-0 majority in the state. The Memphis metropolitan area would be divided up into three separate districts.

“This is insane. The GOP’s newly proposed TN Congressional maps would have people in Shelby County all the way to Williamson County—200+ miles apart—being “represented” by the same Congressman,” Cohen wrote on X after the map was announced. “It’s a blatant, corrupt power grab that would destroy the Black community’s and our entire city’s voice.”

The redrawn map is the latest in a barrage of Republican gerrymandering efforts in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana ruling crippled Section 2 the Voting Rights Act last month, which granted protections to African Americans and other racial minorities.

The new map is expected to pass in a Thursday vote.

The Justice Department sued the state of Colorado Wednesday over a gun control law that has been on the books for more than a decade.

The state passed the law, House Bill 13-1224, in 2013, months after a gunman opened fire on a movie theater in Aurora, killing 12 people and injuring 70 others. The law formally banned the sale, transfer, and possession of magazines carrying more than 15 rounds of ammunition within state lines.

It’s the second such attack this week by the Trump administration on Colorado’s various attempts to curb gun violence. On Tuesday, the DOJ took aim at the city of Denver for a 1989 city law that banned assault weapons.

The nation’s premier law office has argued that both laws violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms. In its complaint, the DOJ claimed that the state’s use of the phrase “large capacity” amounted to “politically charged rhetoric.” The agency further claimed that the phrase “large capacity” was incorrect due to the popularity of semiautomatic guns such as the AR-15, which DOJ attorneys said would make 15 round ammunition “standard capacity.”

Mass shootings are a global scourge that only the U.S. has failed to adequately address. Gun violence in America has become so ubiquitous that it is almost silent: in the first five months of the year, 145 mass shootings across the country claimed the lives of 185 victims and injured another 561 people, according to data collected by the Gun Violence Archive.

AR-15s are nothing short of civilian-killing machines. As The New Republic’s Colin Dickey noted in his review of American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15, Eugene Stoner’s 1954 invention “exists to extinguish human lives.”

The gun’s popularity within the contemporary American canon comes from an early failure to land its place in the military arsenal that it was designed for, kneecapped by Army bureaucracy that frowned upon a weapon developed out of house.

The gun’s subsequent infiltration of the public sphere has made the AR-15 the best selling rifle in America. Roughly a third of Americans are estimated to own a gun, according to a 2022 Ipsos poll, while one in 20 U.S. adults are expected to own an AR-15, according to a Washington Post/Ipsos survey that same year.

Further still, the modular rifle has become ingrained into the American consciousness by way of mass casualty events, favored by killers who are looking to do as much damage to the human body as possible. At least 10 of the 17 deadliest mass shootings in U.S. history saw a gunman wield an AR-15 style rifle.

Despite Republican attempts to portray Democratic efforts to curtail the weapon’s availability as an infringement on the lifestyles of blue collar countrymen, invoking images of farmers and backwoods hunters, the vast majority of AR-15 owners are actually non-rural, with 48 percent living in suburban sprawl and 24 percent living in cities. Additionally, AR-15 owners tend to be some of the wealthier among us, with 56 percent having annual incomes in excess of $100,000, according to the Post/Ipsos survey.

Over the last decade, gun rights groups have spent more than $141 million on political lobbying, with GOP legislators reaping the bulk of it, according to data from OpenSecrets. Meanwhile, the money behind “gun rights” lobbying groups has dwarfed gun control efforts every year dating back to 1998.

By 2024, six of the top 10 congressional recipients that have profited the most from gun rights groups were MAGA. Among them was now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who received more than $376,000 from gun rights groups during his time in office. The lobby’s unbroken influence over the political right has swept votes on issues ranging from bans on assault weapons to high capacity magazines.

This story has been updated.

Fox News was on the scene immediately when the FBI raided Virginia state Senator L. Louise Lucas’s legislative office in Portsmouth, Virginia, on Wednesday, and that may not have been by accident.

Portsmouth is in the southeastern corner of the state, far from Washington, D.C. or Fox’s headquarters in New York, and somehow, the network’s London correspondent, Alex Hogan, was able to capture federal agents entering Lucas’s office.

According to Department of Justice rules, advance notice to the media requires approval at the highest levels.

“In order to promote the aims of law enforcement, including the deterrence of criminal conduct and the enhancement of public confidence, DOJ personnel, with the prior approval of the appropriate United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General, may assist the news media in recording or reporting on a law enforcement activity,” the DOJ’s Justice Manual states.

In another section, the manual states that “in cases where a search warrant or arrest warrant is to be executed, no advance information will be provided to the news media without the express approval of the appropriate United States Attorney or Assistant Attorney General. This requirement also applies to operations in preparation for the execution of a warrant.”

Both of these rules suggest that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche or one of his direct subordinates gave notice to Fox News before the FBI executed its search warrants Wednesday, suggesting that he wanted the case to get attention for partisan reasons. Lucas is not only a leading Democrat in Virginia, but she was instrumental in pushing for congressional redistricting in the state to favor Democrats.

President Trump was angered after Virginia passed a constitutional amendment to temporarily allow its congressional maps to be redrawn last month, and Blanche has demonstrated his willingness to use the full power of the DOJ to go after Trump’s enemies. And getting the right-wing media to cover an FBI raid on a Democratic politician is the perfect way to make Trump happy.

The Department of Justice has dropped thousands of criminal cases in order to aid and abet Donald Trump’s agenda—and now it seems to be on the verge of assisting some of the president’s allies.

The DOJ seems to be preparing to end a nearly two-year probe into Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles, WTVF reported Tuesday. The agency has so far returned his phone and destroyed the evidence they collected from it, according to the Tennessee Lookout.

The update came by way of a legal motion from Ogles’s team, nixing a long-pending emergency motion that had prevented federal authorities from reviewing evidence on his phone and email.

“In discussions with the Office of the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice, the Government has advised defense counsel that it will promptly return or destroy the property obtained pursuant to the respective search warrants at issue,” the motion read. “The emergency motions filed by Congressman Ogles in these matters are therefore moot.”

Ogles’s phone was seized by the FBI shortly after his 2024 primary win, but the investigation was related to discrepancies that appeared in his 2022 election, when he filed a campaign finance report claiming that he loaned his campaign $320,000. The detail raised alarm bells in 2024, when Ogles filed another campaign finance report to acknowledge that he had only loaned the campaign $20,000.

The following year, a U.S House Congressional Ethics panel found “substantial reason to believe” that Ogles had violated federal campaign finance laws by inflating his offices’ fundraising via a personal loan.

The lawmaker’s legal defense claimed that the FBI—as a component of the executive branch—had no right to look at the personal communications of a sitting member of the legislative branch.

“From the day the FBI showed up, I said this investigation should never have happened and that the Biden DOJ had no right to rummage through a sitting congressman’s legislative communications,” Ogles said in a press release. “I’m grateful to the Trump Justice Department for righting this wrong.”

But a wrapped DOJ investigation isn’t the end of Ogles’s legal woes: The House Ethics panel is still investigating him.

President Trump has enlisted the Justice Department to help him appeal the $83.3 million defamation judgment he owes former Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. 

The DOJ plans to ask the Supreme Court for the power to directly represent Trump in his appeal, arguing that he acted as a government employee when he first defamed Carroll in 2019. Instead of Trump v. Carroll, the case would become U.S. v. Carroll.

The DOJ plan was revealed in a filing from Trump’s personal lawyer in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, where Trump recently lost an appeal effort to avoid paying Carroll.  Trump’s lawyers also posited that Trump’s presidential immunity and the apparent harm Carroll would cause with the money as reasons for the court to delay the payment. Carroll has said she’d donate the millions upon collection.

This is the federal government spending its time and your money to help the president with a personal lawsuit from the woman he was found liable of sexually abusing in 2023. This massive lack of independence and transparency would be a world-breaking scandal for any other president. For Trump, it’s just Tuesday. 

The $83.3 million judgment remains. 

The FBI raided the Portsmouth, Virginia, office of Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas, a Democratic leader in the state behind its redistricting victory, on Wednesday, ostensibly over corruption allegations.  

Lucas, an 82-year-old great-grandmother, has been a frequent critic of Republicans and President Trump, and is an ally to Virginia’s Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger. Fox News covered the FBI raid live. 

The bureau reportedly has multiple search warrants, and is also raiding a cannabis dispensary co-owned by Lucas next door. Lucas has frequently advocated for marijuana legalization, and in 2022, her business was found by the Virginia Mercury to be selling delta-9 THC, a substance illegal to sell in Virginia, although many of the products in her store were found to be mislabeled. 

Lucas is combative on social media, posting memes in support of Virginia’s redistricting effort and going toe-to-toe with Republicans like President Trump and Senator Ted Cruz. That could be why she’s being targeted by the FBI, which under director Kash Patel has vindictively pursued Trump’s critics. 

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump dismissed claims Wednesday that the White House ballroom has suffered cost overrun after its price tag skyrocketed from $400 million in private donations to $1 billion sourced from American taxpayers. 

Trump claimed that there was no cost overrun because he’d previously announced that the cost of construction had gone up. 

“The only reason the cost has changed is because, after deep rooted studies, it is approximately twice the size, and a far higher quality, than the original proposal, which would not have been adequate to handle the necessary events, meetings, and even future Inaugurations,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. 

“This was a necessary change, it was done long ago, but the Fake News failed to report it, trying to make it look like there was a cost overrun. Actually, it is coming in ahead of schedule, and under budget!” Trump added. 

Trump originally claimed that the project would only cost $200 million, but that number later ballooned to $300 million, and then $400 million after he decided to tack on extra construction. The ballroom had previously been paid for by private donors, many of whom held multi-figure federal contracts.  

Then, earlier this week, Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley requested $1 billion for “security adjustments and upgrades” related to the ballroom’s construction. Trump is simply pretending the outrage is over the old price tag, and not the exorbitant one Senate Republicans hope to pass, which will come at a cost to U.S. taxpayers. 

Trump’s defense rings especially hollow, considering that the DOJ launched an investigation into Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the cost of renovations to the Fed’s office buildings. The suit was a pretext to attack Powell as he tried to maintain the agency’s independence from the White House. 

In March, Judge James Boasberg quashed subpoenas for the criminal case against Powell, finding that the government has produced “essentially zero evidence” to substantiate its claims.

Mississippi Republicans plan to hold a vote to redraw the state’s congressional map in a building central to the legacy of segregation.

The special legislative session is scheduled to take place on May 20 in what is now known as the Old Capitol Museum in Jackson, ostensibly due to renovations in the House chamber in the newer Capitol building. But the Old Capitol was the site of Mississippi’s vote to secede from the union over slavery in 1861, as well as the location where lawmakers met to establish the state’s 1890 constitution enshrining Jim Crow segregation against its Black population.

“I was a little taken aback with the location of the Old State Capitol,” Democratic state Representative Kabir Karriem, who heads Mississippi’s legislative Black caucus, told The Guardian. “Even though they said that they were doing some remodeling, the optics of it are horrific for 1.2 million Black folks here in the state of Mississippi.”

The redistricting vote is only possible because of the Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act set up to protect the voting rights of Black Americans across the South. The Supreme Court ruling removed protections against racial gerrymandering, allowing states like Mississippi to redraw their districts without any protections for Black voters.

The chair of the Mississippi Democratic Party, Cheikh Taylor, said the special session was about “power, and making sure Black Mississippians never have enough of it to threaten the people who currently hold it.”

“And now they plan to do it in the Old Capitol, the same building where Mississippi voted to secede from the Union over slavery, and where white supremacist delegates crafted the 1890 Constitution that stripped Black citizens of their voting rights and ushered in decades of poll taxes, literacy tests and racial terror,” Taylor, who is also a state representative, said in a statement. “Rep Kabir Karriem is right. It is a slap in the face to the 1.2 million African Americans in this state. It is also a confession. They are returning to the scene of the crime to try and finish the job.”

Republican-run states across the country are hastily moving to redraw their districts, not just because of the Supreme Court but also at President Trump’s urging as he attempts to avert a bloodbath for the GOP in November’s midterm elections. Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black people of any state in the U.S., at about 38 percent. Soon, they may not have a single member of Congress working in their interest.

Satellite imagery has revealed that Iranian airstrikes have done much more damage to U.S. military bases, fuel depots, barracks, and other outposts than the Trump administration is letting on—even as the president and his Cabinet claim to be winning the war.

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites in the Middle East have been either partially damaged or totally destroyed by Iran since the beginning of the joint U.S.-Israeli war on Iran and Lebanon. The Post reached this number by independently verifying satellite images released by Iranian state media.

The numbers are much higher than the Trump administration has publicly admitted, and the U.S. military has been forced to reduce staffing at many of the attacked sites.

“The Iranians have deliberately targeted accommodation buildings across multiple sites with the intent to inflict mass casualties,” image analyst William Goodhind told the Post. “It is not just equipment, fuel storage and air base infrastructure under fire, but also soft targets, such as gyms, food halls and accommodation.”

Seven U.S. service members have been killed in strikes and over 400 have been injured since the start of the war in February.

This reporting contradicts essentially everything Trump has said—and suggests that he severely underestimated Iran’s military capabilities before getting the country involved in another war in the Middle East.