All posts tagged "Jeffrey Epstein"

Epstein survivors have found powerful ammunition in their fight to depose the attorney general, and it came from his own mouth.

On Thursday's episode of Katie Phang News, legal analyst and trial attorney Katie Phang laid out how lawyers for 32 women suing the FBI are leaning on remarks Attorney General Todd Blanche made during a July 16 meeting with survivors.

According to the plaintiffs' court filing, Blanche twice acknowledged in that meeting that the bureau mishandled its Epstein investigation before 2007, at one point telling the survivors, "You got screwed over by the FBI, but I cannot fix the FBI's lack of investigation."...

A protester interrupted President Donald Trump's Ohio rally Wednesday with an accusation that drew a chorus of boos before leaving with a crude gesture.

Trump was in the middle of a riff about Sen. Jon Husted's backside at the rally in Chillicothe when a man in the crowd yelled, "Trump went on Epstein's plane!" Trump supporters drowned him out with boos, and the protester flipped them the middle finger as he was hauled out. Moments later, a second protester interrupted Trump and held two middle fingers up at him while she was dragged away.

Trump turned his attention to the first heckler. "He mentioned Epstein," Trump said. "I threw Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago because I thought he was a whack job." He went on to claim that Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, "was a Democrat" and insisted, "I was totally exonerated." Trump offered no evidence that he ever threw Epstein out of his club....

A key moment has a former Trump White House insider thinking a damning new report on Jeffrey Epstein probably holds up.

Sarah Matthews, a deputy White House press secretary in Trump's first administration, said on Tuesday's episode of "The Bulwark Daily" that first lady Melania Trump's "weird random press conference" earlier this year is the "most convincing piece of evidence" that the House Judiciary Committee Democrats' report is "probably accurate."

Host Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist, opened the show by reading from the report's executive summary, which states that "Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of young women during the mid to late 1990s."...

The warning came from one of the hundreds of FBI employees tasked with a round-the-clock scramble to process more than 100,000 pages of investigative files related to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The Department of Justice was at risk of breaking the law by disclosing victims’ identities, they said.

“DOJ leadership is pushing for the release of records that, if released in their current format, would violate multiple statutes,” the FBI whistleblower wrote in a complaint filed with the agency’s Office of Integrity and Compliance, while expressing concern that the project’s “rush deadline” would “lead to mistakes that could destroy people’s lives.”...

A reporter famous for exposing notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein is warning that one of his allies is about to take power.

Julie K. Brown, whose Miami Herald investigation into Epstein's sweetheart plea deal helped reopen the case against him, wrote in a Saturday piece for her Substack newsletter, "The Epstein Files," that Stacey Plaskett, who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands in Congress, is likely to become the territory's next governor.

Her rise, Brown argued, shows "that not everyone who helped enable Jeffrey Epstein suffered career-ending consequences."...

A mobile trove of files related to Jeffrey Epstein has seen thousands of Americans line up to get a first-hand look over the past few weeks, a fierce rebuke of what Miles Taylor, former senior Homeland Security official, argued was President Donald Trump’s efforts to “censor” Epstein survivors.

“Trump tried very hard to censor the victims. What a fool. By doing that, he put them in the spotlight. So we proudly handed them a bullhorn,” Taylor wrote in an analysis published Friday on his Substack.

Trump led an aggressive campaign last year to block the release of Epstein-related files, a campaign that included unprecedented meetings in the Situation Room. And last month, three Epstein survivors were ejected from Trump’s midterm convention after an independent journalist who was accompanying them asked a GOP congressional candidate about Epstein....