Woman Told FBI Trump Tried to Recruit Her From His Tower

A woman claimed she was approached by two “recruiters” who were scouting young women at Donald Trump’s Manhattan skyscraper to have sex with him—and also tried to lure her to a party at the home of Jeffrey Epstein.

Buried in the Department of Justice’s massive trove of files on Epstein, an interview conducted by the FBI on June 19, 2020, included allegations that the president had previously used Trump Tower as a hunting ground for young women, RawStory reported Wednesday.

In the early 1990s, the woman worked at a luxury shoe store near Trump Tower, and would study in the building’s public atrium during her lunch breaks. One day, she met a colleague at the atrium who pointed out two men lurking nearby.

“[She] described one of the men was dark haired and looked like Antonio Banderas, while the other man was blonde and looked like the surfer type,” the FBI report stated. “Her colleague told her that the men constantly picked up [redacted] women.”

The woman was then approached by the dark-haired man, who struck up a conversation with her. “He asked if she knew who Donald Trump was and told her he was meeting people that day,” the report stated.

“[She] told the man that she knew who Trump was. The man asked if she wanted to meet Trump and told her that she did not need to work so hard to go to school,” the report stated. “The man winked and said he could do whatever she liked.”

“[She] felt that it was clear that sex was on the table, even though the man never mentioned sex,” the report stated. “[She] felt these men were playing the role of recruiters for Trump.”

“The man told her that if she did not want to meet Trump right then, she could go to a party. The man told her that she could bring a friend if the friend looked like her, but she could not bring a guy,” the report stated. The invitation for the party had Epstein’s address on it, the woman told the FBI.

When she declined the invites, she said she began receiving death threats. “The threats consisted of the men saying that they knew where she worked and could find her. [She] never told the police because she did not think they would believe her,” the report stated. They never approached her again.

Over the next six months, the woman saw the two men continue to approach young women in the atrium at Trump Tower. She saw “girls, usually blondes, approximately 15/16 years old with one of the two men and saw them get on an escalator,” the report stated. She never saw anyone meet with Trump.

The woman also recalled a story from another woman who worked in Trump Tower, whose daughter had been brought up to meet Trump while she waited for her mother to get off of work. Later, that second woman claimed that “something horrible happened to her daughter that day.”

“The daughter had dropped out of school, got into drugs, and committed suicide,” the woman told the FBI.

While the interview was taken in June 2020, it was not officially filed until January 2021.

This is just the latest allegation against the president to be uncovered from the Department of Justice’s massive cache of documents on Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker. Still, former 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.

Congress is finally demanding answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Iran.

Senators are threatening to cut off Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon provides more details about the deadly U.S. strike that hit a school full of children on February 28, Politico reported Wednesday.

At the time, Pentagon intel had led them to believe that the school was actually an Iranian base. It was not. The DOD initially did not take responsibility for the strike.

The vast majority of the 175 people killed in the strikes were children, according to Iranian officials.

Senators have also asked Hegseth to turn over all the video footage of his department’s bombing campaign against small boats in the Caribbean, for which the death toll recently surpassed 205 people.

The U.S. has been attacking boats off the coast of Venezuela since September 2, in what it claims is a broad effort to stamp out drug smuggling into the U.S. By December, Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio confessed during a classified meeting that there was no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela. Instead the administration had learned the boats were carrying cocaine—bound for Europe, rather than America.

“That is a massive waste of national security resources and your taxpayer dollars,” Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said at the time.

The details of Hegseth’s punishment were folded into a Senate Armed Services Committee’s defense policy bill, specifying that Congress would withhold 75 percent of his travel budget until lawmakers received adequate documentation for the aforementioned atrocities.

It’s the second such time that lawmakers have tried this gambit. Late last year, lawmakers passed defense legislation that cut a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget under similar demands. The raised stakes, however, suggest that lawmakers did not get what they asked for.

Even Trump’s MAGA allies in the upper chamber seem disgruntled with the Pentagon’s lack of transparency. They’ve complained that Defense officials have kept them in the dark about major national security decisions—a frustration only further intensified by the administration’s cloaked proceedings around the Iran peace deal.

The Department of Defense revealed it used Elon Musk’s Grok AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran.

In a sworn statement in federal court, the DOD’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, defended the chatbot’s existence as a “a matter of paramount national security,” saying that it was used to fire “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours” in the Iran war.

Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is being sued by the NAACP in Mississippi for allegedly running at least 57 gas-burning turbines to power its Colossus 2 data center without the necessary permits or pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act. Stanley issued his statement as part of the federal government’s effort to get the lawsuit tossed out on national security grounds.

It’s the first time that the Trump administration has admitted to using Musk’s AI in the Iran war, following reports that the military may have used AI targeting in its bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 175 people. Last year, the DOD awarded xAI a $200 million federal contract to install “Grok for Government” into its systems, ignoring a laundry list of issues with the platform.

Grok has often gone on antisemitic rants; it has pushed debunked claims of white genocide in South Africa, insulted X CEO Linda Yaccarino with sexual comments, and been used to generate explicit photos of women and children. Other government agencies even see the tool as a security risk. Why, then, is the DOD defending its existence and continued use for the military?

The Trump administration spent nearly $15 million to rid the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool of algae. They were not successful.

Within days of the pool’s refilling, the green algae hasn’t just returned but is having a “field day” thanks to high phosphate levels in the water, according to an algae researcher at the Smithsonian who spoke with CNN Tuesday.

CNN sampled and tested some of the pool’s water with the help of a swimming pool store. They found that the water contained phosphate levels “far higher than what is recommended to keep algae at bay,” based on estimates for a pool that holds 6.5 million gallons of water.

The Department of the Interior has so far blamed the algae’s resurgence, in part, on residual algae that had accumulated in the pool’s pipes—which it apparently neglected to clean as part of the multimillion-dollar restoration.

Washington’s hot and humid weather has also contributed to the bloom, as the Trump administration filled the Reflecting Pool with fresh water and, consequently, more oxygen. By the weekend, the green, plantlike form had coated the bottom of the pool in several areas and floated to the surface.

Now park workers are throwing darts at the wall trying to clean up the monument in time for America’s semiquincentennial. On Tuesday, hi-vis park workers were spotted dumping gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the Reflecting Pool. A close-up of their equipment revealed that they were using a 12 percent concentrate, a level that can cause problems if inhaled and burns if the chemical touches the skin, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hydrogen peroxide is generally considered less environmentally destructive as its compounds readily break down in water, but the high concentration could nonetheless pose a risk to some of the pool’s frequent visitors, such as ducks or other birds.

Photojournalists also snapped shots of buckets of Induclor around the memorial, a chlorine compound used to control bacteria, algae, slime, and fungi in water, reported The Washington Post.

Fixing the Reflecting Pool is a headache that’s plagued pretty much every administration since its construction in 1923, because what makes the Reflecting Pool beautiful is exactly what makes it so difficult to maintain.

The pool’s expansive length is possible due to the use of multiple large concrete slabs at its bottom. But those slabs are also prone to serious, structural leaks, which requires the White House to replace roughly 16 million gallons of water each year. And the pool’s shallow depth—which creates its mirror-like appearance—also detracts from the pool’s health by creating a breeding ground for algal blooms that turn the water green.

President Trump appears to be completely smitten with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El Sisi, professing his love for the authoritarian leader at the G7 summit in France on Wednesday.

“I met him early in the campaign when Crooked Hillary and I were running against each other, right, and I was told that the president of Egypt is here. That was a big deal. It’s still a big deal for me to be with the great president of Egypt, but not as big as it used to be before I ran. So he was in a hotel and I met him, and we fell in love. Deeply in love,” Trump said, while seated next to the Egyptian leader. “And he didn’t even want to see Hillary. He said, ‘You’re going to win, I don’t want to meet her. You’re going to win.’ He didn’t want to see her, remember that? So we had a good relationship right from there.… We had great chemistry, and I stayed twice as long as I was supposed.”

Sisi has long supported Trump, from the infamous picture of him, the president, Melania Trump, and King Salman of Saudi Arabia touching a glowing orb in 2017 to his current role promoting the Trump administration’s plans in the Middle East. He has been accused of employing torture and forced disappearances, as well as discrimination against the LGBTQ community, by multiple human rights groups.