Epstein Survivor Says Todd Blanche Has Been Ignoring All of Them

A survivor of sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein testified at Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing on Thursday, hammering the acting attorney general for meeting with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell for nine hours while refusing to give Epstein survivors even one minute of his time.

“According to public reporting, Mr. Blanche spent approximately nine hours meeting with Ghislane Maxwell. He did not even spend nine minutes meeting with a survivor,” said survivor Dani Bensky. “Afterwards, Maxwell was transferred to what many have described as a ‘summer camp prison.’ We learned all of this through the news. Imagine what that feels like as a survivor—to sit there—if you are exploited by Ghislaine Maxwell and you’re hearing this for the first time with no explanation, no outreach, no transparency from your government.”

Bensky is referring to Maxwell’s transfer from a federal prison camp to a cushier, more open prison with unlimited toilet paper, technology access, and a pass to use prison facilities late at night, following her meeting with Blanche last July. That, along with Blanche’s highly consistent redactions, has made his handling of the Epstein files particularly questionable, Bensky noted. She also brought up Blanche’s presence in the Situation Room last year while the Trump administration was deciding how to handle its bungling of the files.

“To add insult to injury, the information that Todd Blanche gathered in the White House Situation Room last summer to curb the political fallout from the Epstein files was absolutely abhorrent. Instead of following investigative leads, our government treated … this as a political crisis that needs to be managed,” Bensky continued. “In our nation, everyone deserves equal protection under the law. Todd Blanche has been unwilling to protect Epstein survivors’ personal information, and he has been resistant to investigate the people who helped Epstein and Maxwell commit those crimes. We need an attorney general committed to ensuring that everyone who facilitated Epstein’s crimes is held accountable. Please, I implore you. Please.”

“The survivors in this room know there are investigative leads because they are our stories,” Bensky said. “Mr. Blanche knows it too. Yet he has chosen not to pursue them.”

Blanche offered pretty mixed signals on whether he’d actually meet with any survivors during his own testimony on Wednesday, telling Senator Dick Durbin that “we will never, never not talk to victims,” while in the same breath stating “if they have lawyers, as you know. I’m prohibited from meeting directly with them.”

Bensky was a 17-year-old aspiring ballerina when she was first recruited to give massages to Epstein in his penthouse. She and at least 18 other victims have come out against Blanche’s nomination for attorney general.

The cost of the Iran war could well exceed $100 billion now that the conflict has reignited.

The Trump administration has not officially released any figures related to the total cost of the war, but U.S. intelligence officials have predicted that the overall cost thus far could be greater than $100 billion, Wired reported Wednesday.

The hesitation on the final count boils down to whether or not the Pentagon decides to replace part of its airfleet that was damaged or destroyed in the war, according to insiders that spoke with Wired. If it does, the cost will go up.

The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service tallied 42 lost or damaged U.S. aircraft in a May 13 report, including an Boeing E-3 Sentry that costs upward of $270 million, an MQ-4C Triton drone that costs around $618 million, and four F-15E Strike Eagle fighter aircraft that cost roughly $65 million a pop.

The exact cost of the war has been difficult to pin down. Late last month, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, told the House Appropriations Committee that the U.S. had spent $30 billion on the Iran war. But even he must have known that figure was wildly inaccurate, considering that he had written and signed a formal request “on behalf of the president” for $88 billion in supplemental defense funding from Congress days earlier, including a $72 billion increase for the war effort.

An independent review of U.S. expenses through the four-month war was published last week by Popular Information’s Stephen Semler, who found that Trump officials had dramatically lowballed Congress on the real cost of the conflict (Semler also co-founded the U.S. foreign policy think tank Security Policy Reform Institute).

In order to build an independent analysis of the Pentagon’s expenditures, Semler analyzed procurement information, operating and support data, open-source intelligence, statements from U.S. officials, and media reports.

Over the first 120 days of the conflict, Semler tallied $28.5 billion in mobilization, administrative, and immediate combat costs; $46.7 billion spent on missiles, interceptors, and bombs; $20.3 billion on damaged or destroyed military assets; $2.9 billion on Israel’s bombs and interceptors; and an additional $4.8 billion on war costs to nonmilitary U.S. agencies. All in all, Semler estimated that the true cost of the U.S.-Iran war is closer to $103 billion.

Yet no one in charge of the government—from the White House to top congressional Republicans—has posited exactly how the U.S. will pay for the war. Whereas taxes were raised in previous wars (such as World War I, World War II, and the Korean War) in order to fund conflict, the current administration has so far offered no such solution.

In the latest example of his juvenile leadership style, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth took to social media Thursday to endorse a military flyover that dipped below the normal flight path, affected spectators below, and triggered an investigation.

During a U.S. Navy Blue Angels military flyover over a beach in Pensacola, Florida, Wednesday morning, a jet “flew too close to the crowd,” reports WSVN, sending sand, tents, chairs, and umbrellas airborne as some beachgoers screamed, covered their ears, and scrambled for cover.

In a statement responding to viral footage of the commotion, the Navy acknowledged that the aircraft “flew lower than standard profiles, resulting in a disturbance on the beach,” and announced a “safety review” of the maneuver.

The incident drew some public concern.

Former Representative Adam Kinzinger, who served in the Air Force, reacted to a video of the maneuver on social media, writing, “This is not safe. I’m all for low passes, seriously but this is too much.” Another observer, a Chicago-based ABC news reporter, called the footage “jarring,” “dangerous,” and “uncharacteristic of the Blue Angels.” Meanwhile, the president’s son Eric Trump condemned “the low-T mainstream media” for reporting on the Navy’s safety review.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth chimed in Thursday with a characteristically puerile response: “The flyovers will continue until morale improves,” he posted on X. He also retweeted two posts in which screenshots of the viral video of the incident were overlayed with the words “CARRY ON PATRIOTS” and “American Empire,” respectively.

As part of his carefully crafted tough-guy image, Hegseth has made a point to express his approval of even questionable military demonstrations.

When several South Carolina Army National Guard helicopter pilots were suspended during a safety review of low-level flyovers in July, Hegseth intervened, posting on X, “We’ll fix this. Carry on, Patriots.” He similarly lifted an investigation and suspension of two Army pilots who performed maneuvers for Kid Rock above the musician’s mansion in the Nashville suburbs.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio held a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism” on Thursday, as he and diplomats from dozens of countries discussed how to further quash what they see as left-wing terrorism. FBI Director Kash Patel, White House adviser Stephen Miller, and Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar were among those in attendance.

“This is what radical leftism is. They may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time. They can call themselves anti-capitalists, or anti-imperialists, Communists, or anarchists, or Marxists,” Rubio said, tapping into the modern McCarthyism that has helped define the second Trump administration. “But the fundamental character is always the same.... It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation—an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built.... Through violence and through terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.”

Miller highlighted President Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum, or NSPM-7, which targets supposed anti-American activity on the left.

“It directs … all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists that are operating in our country,” Miller bragged. “Left-wing political terrorism seeks, as its ultimate end, the overthrow of our system and form of government—and we’ve seen this has taken place as many times, in many places, throughout the years.”

“Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery, and suffering,” he continued. “It only can travel in one direction. There’s no point at which the left-wing terrorist is satisfied with his gains, and ceases progressing.... It always becomes a gulag, it always becomes the mass imprisonment of political enemies, the stripping of their rights and freedoms … in order to establish complete and total control.”

Then Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined in on the fun, bringing up that he himself was the target of an assassination attempt by an “addled left-wing activist.”

It’s so interesting to watch these people wield what they see as this infallible moral compass, never once considering that they—and their predecessors—have created many of the conditions which have forced people to resist, whether it be abroad or domestically. Furthermore, this blanket definition of left-wing terrorism is not rooted in reality, it’s to serve their NSPM-7 agenda to crack down on dissidents. Meanwhile, they continue to fully ignore the right-wing terrorism that this administration has not only ignored, but fostered.

The Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, Mike Collins, has close ties to a white nationalist influencer: his son-in-law, David Alan Scheer II.

CNN reports that Scheer is registered to vote at a Collins-owned property, has been featured in Collins’s campaign photos, and was at Collins’s victory party after he won the Republican primary in June. Scheer, who is married to Collins’s daughter Summer, shares Nazi and antisemitic material online, including posts from the white nationalist hate group Patriot Front.

Scheer has more than 1.5 million combined followers across Telegram, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, and posts mostly about fitness, Christianity, and masculinity, according to CNN. He has also called for Muslims to be deported, and shared an antisemitic infographic that he said his wife made.

On one podcast in November, Scheer said that white people were in danger of going extinct and that restoring the United States as a white country would require “clearing our land of other people.” Also in November, Scheer posted a video to YouTube attacking “Jewish Bolsheviks” and invoking pro-Nazi conspiracies.

“Sixty million Christians that were killed by Jewish Bolsheviks in the early 1900s right before World War II,” Scheer said. “They don’t tell us the history about Germany before World War II. All we’re told is, ‘Germany bad, Hitler evil, don’t ask questions, Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust, here’s 50 movies every year about the Holocaust and why it’s so bad.’”

In a statement to CNN, Collins’s campaign did not address Scheer’s posts or beliefs, instead saying, “Rep. Collins’ lifelong support for Israel is unquestionable and backed by his consistent record in Congress of standing up for Israel and her people.”

Collins’s track record also verges on bigotry, as the congressman has complained about a halal restaurant in the House Rayburn building, harassed a Jewish reporter using antisemitic tropes, cheered on racist protesters in Mississippi in 2024, and blamed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs for train derailments. Maybe Collins has more in common with Scheer than he is willing to admit.