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According to a former Donald Trump communications official, there is no way that the president and his White House should be at the center of the Jeffrey Epstein files scandal which should be handled instead by the Department of Justice.

During an appearance on CNN's State of the Union" panel segment, Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served in the first Trump administration as the director of strategic communications, stated she was shocked at Trump's advisers letting the Epstein firestorm get out of hand.

Speaking with host Jake Tapper, she pointed out, "Sometimes when you've got a bad news story, the best thing you can do is just move away and focus on something else."

"This did not need to be a weekls-long story that's now permeated pop culture and beyond," she elaborated. "Donald Trump, many people around him ran on getting to the bottom of what happened with Epstein, bringing people to justice. He needs to somehow get this back to the Department of Justice, say he's not talking about it."

"Don't be talking about pardons for Ghislaine Maxwell and others and be able to focus on his agenda," she explained before adding, "The fact that this has dragged out for so long is just pure malpractice by those advising him and the president's inability to stay on message."

"He's got to get back to a proactive message, because this is something that –– we're a year and a half out from the midterms, there's going to be 20 other news cycles that happen before then. But people actually care a lot about this, and it will matter to House members who are up [for re-election]."

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The Republican senator who admitted that he killed a Senate effort to release the Jeffrey Epstein files in full because he wants to give Donald Trump "cover," was repeatedly corrected on the details about the convicted pedophile's case on CNN on Sunday morning.

Appearing with "State of the Union" host Jake Tapper, a combative Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) insisted over and over again that nothing from the Epstein grand jury presentation can be released by Attorney General Pam Bondi.

That led host Tapper to continually explain that a judge is only blocking the DOJ from releasing testimony and that the Trump-appointed Bondi is free to release federal evidence, which led the GOP lawmaker from Oklahoma to argue with him repeatedly.

In one exchange, Tapper explained, "I understand you're talking about a resolution you offered calling for the grand jury to release transcripts from the grand jury investigation into Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and a judge said no. But there's troves of information that the administration could release tomorrow if they wanted to and they've been promising to and they haven't. "

"Well, Jake, that's not that's not true, you know," Mullin shot back. "You know better than that, too, because you know, every piece of file that they have, every video, every every document, every flight log has all been heard by a grand jury. They've all been seen by a grand jury and we want the judges to release it. Pam Bondi has called on the judge to release it. Trump has called on the on them to release it and and the Congress has called on them to release it. But we can't because there is a true co-equal branches of government. So we can't force a judicial branch to do anything."

"Just because something has been shown before a grand jury, that doesn't mean it is only going to be –– it can only be released to the public by a judge. If the FBI has it, they can release it," Tapper explained.

Mullin later stated, "Remember, there was a plea deal that was struck in 2009, way before I was in office, way before Trump was even considering to be in office, way before Pam Bondi was in his office, way before Kash Patel was director. 2009, there was a sweetheart plea deal that was made underneath the Obama administration with Epstein and that sweetheart has not been exposed.”

Tapper countered, “It was 2008. The U.S. attorney at the time was a guy named Alex Acosta. He was a Bush appointee. He went on to become President Trump’s secretary of labor. It all took place in 2008.”

“Who was in office at the time?” Mullin asked to which the CNN host answered, "George W. Bush."

"No, 2009 is when the case came out. And Obama was in office at the time," the GOP lawmaker argued.

“It’s not true,” Tapper stated before later adding, "The point is that the sweetheart deal, which was completed in 2008, was under the Bush administration — US Attorney Alex Acosta."

You can watch below or at the link.

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The cost to rehab the controversial luxury jet generously gifted to Donald Trump by the government of Qatar remains a mystery with the figures not being made available at the same time that there are questions about a "mysterious" Pentagon fund transfer.

According to a report from the New York Times' David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, the Pentagon has gone to great pains to hide the expense to make changes to the "free" jet that is supposed to replace the aging Air Force One.

The report notes, "Officially, and conveniently, the price tag has been classified. But even by Washington standards, where “black budgets” are often used as an excuse to avoid revealing the cost of outdated spy satellites and lavish end-of-year parties," adding that the reasoning behind hiding the cost is "inventive."

That led to speculation about a recent unexplained transfer of almost a billion dollars within the Pentagon.

Writing, "no one wants to discuss a mysterious, $934 million transfer of funds from one of the Pentagon’s most over-budget, out-of-control projects — the modernization of America’s aging, ground-based nuclear missiles," Sanger and Schmitt added, "congressional budget sleuths have come to think that amount, slipped into an obscure Pentagon document sent to Capitol Hill as a 'transfer' to an unnamed classified project, almost certainly includes the renovation" of the jet that has been descibed as a "palace in the sky."

The report adds that the plane will not be ready soon, if at all while the president is in office, and "will be transferred to the yet-to-be-created Trump presidential library after he leaves office in 2029, the president has said."

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