Technically correct.
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How ‘bout the Washington Epsteins?
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How it’s even this high is just incomprehensible to me.
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Two words: land lines
(Or is that one word?)
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July 21, 2025 (Monday)
After a long, productive day, I thought I’d just hop out on the water for an hour or so before I started writing tonight’s letter. But that hour stretched on into a magical and expansive evening when I went much farther than I had planned. As I paddled under a bright blue sky with the sun setting beside me, it became clear to me that I needed a break from the cramped confines of our daily news.
I did think to take a picture for you all while I was out there so that you could have a break, too. This is an odd sunset picture because it is facing east in the last light of the sun setting in the west. The whole sky was worth leaving the desk for.
Let’s enjoy a night off. I’ll be back at it tomorrow.
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July 22, 2025 (Tuesday)
First thing this morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X a statement from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche saying that under Bondi’s direction, he had talked to the lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche wrote that he anticipated meeting with Maxwell in the coming days.
“President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence,” he wrote. “If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” This offering appeared designed to show that the White House wants to release information that might be in the Epstein files, but as observers note, the president could just release the files themselves if he wanted to.
In fact, yesterday, the administration did just that. Over the objections of his family, the Trump administration released records compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The files contain more than 240,000 pages of records and have been sealed since 1977, when the FBI turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The acting archivist of the United States is Marco Rubio (who is also secretary of state, interim national security advisor, and acting administrator of what’s left of the U.S. Agency for International Development).
While this document dump appears to have been announced in order to distract from the Epstein files, it seems unlikely to do so. MAGA and other Americans are interested in the Epstein files because they expect the files will show that the government has been covering up for powerful men who have been able to rape children without facing legal accountability. In contrast, the King files will likely show the government harassing a citizen to pin illegal activity on him, a different side of the same coin that suggests the government is working for rich and powerful white men.
The King files were compiled by the FBI in projects associated with its COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program, that operated between 1956 and 1971. These projects illegally surveilled and worked to discredit Americans that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover thought were a danger to American society. Hoover singled out King as a target, bugging his home and hotel rooms and urging him to take his own life.
Attorney General Bondi also announced that the Department of Justice has released additional documents from the FBI’s investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s email server. In 2016, after then-candidate Donald Trump insisted that her use of a private server had been criminal and made “Lock her up!” a chant at his rallies, the FBI concluded that while Clinton had been “extremely careless,” she did not act with criminal intent. She was never charged.
Last night, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent members of the House of Representatives home early for their summer break rather than take a vote on whether to release the Epstein files. The House will not reconvene until September 2.
Last night at 9:03 p.m., the White House account posted on X an image of Trump in front of American flags, eagles, and fireworks with the caption: “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER. President Donald J. Trump.”
Things seem a little unstable at the White House.
That panic continued today. When a reporter asked about Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell, Trump exploded, attacking former president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump claimed they "tried to rig the [2016] election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that.”
Trump was referring to the allegations Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made on Friday, when she called for the prosecution of former president Barack Obama and former senior national security officials for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump that indicated Russian operatives had worked on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.
Gabbard told Congress last March that the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon, putting her at odds with Trump, who justified his attack on Iran with the insistence that the country was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. Her defense of Trump now seems likely to help her restore her favor with the White House.
“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They’re the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn’t have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”
Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.”
Trump appears to be touching all his greatest hits in an attempt to regain control of the narrative. But the more he protests that he is not connected to the Epstein files, the more he reinforces the idea that he is. That nervousness showed in the attempt this weekend, uncovered by Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley, to reassure major media outlets that the White House had neutralized the Epstein story. Mathis-Lilley noted that the stories making that argument in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all had the same source: Trump ally Steve Bannon.
After Trump’s outburst today, President Obama’s spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush issued a statement saying: “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.
“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”
Today CNN published more newly discovered photos of Trump and Epstein together.
And as of yesterday, there is a billboard in New York City’s Times Square asking: “TRUMP, WHY WON’T YOU RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES?”
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Nothing quite says “I’m innocent” like frantically pointing at other people and yelling “Whatabout that guy!?!”
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July 23, 2025 (Wednesday)
This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that’s not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”
At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.
Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.
What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.
Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary’s ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.
Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.
This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.
In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.
Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”
While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”
The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, “specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?” and he responded, “No, no, she’s—she’s given us just a very quick briefing." Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats.
House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters today that the House didn’t need to do anything to release the Epstein files because the administration was “already doing everything within their power to release them,” and indeed, the Trump administration made a show of saying it would ask the courts to unseal the transcripts of the Epstein grand jury. But legal analysts say those records would cover only Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for Epstein. In any case, a federal judge denied that request today after the government attorneys did not submit an argument that met the requirements for unsealing the evidence.
Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.
The Democrats on a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, supported by three Republicans, also voted to subpoena the Justice Department for its files on Epstein, although writing the subpoena will take negotiation. “If the Republican Party, if our colleagues on this committee don’t join us in this vote, then what they’re essentially doing is joining President Donald Trump in complicity,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), who introduced the subpoena motion, told reporters.
It does not seem likely the Epstein story is going away anytime soon.
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July 24, 2025 (Thursday)
The Epstein list made it into last night’s premiere of the twenty-seventh season of the television series South Park when Satan, in bed with Trump, commented, “It’s weird that whenever it comes up, you just tell everyone to relax.”
The episode hit the president’s lawsuit against the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, which paid Trump $16 million to settle his complaint that it had edited an interview with then–Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris misleadingly. Paramount also said it would not renew comedian Stephen Colbert’s contract just days after the deal was announced. Paramount and Skydance Media are in the midst of an $8 billion merger, and they needed the approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to complete the deal. Today, Skydance Media promised to eliminate Paramount’s diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and to root out the “bias” at CBS News in order to win the administration’s support for the merger. This afternoon, the FCC approved the deal.
Charlotte Clymer of Charlotte’s Web Thoughts notes that on Monday, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a $1.5 billion, five-year deal with Paramount for global streaming rights to the show. This new episode skewered Paramount’s cozying up to Trump.
Clymer points out that the South Park writers go on to portray Trump exactly as they once did Saddam Hussein, not only putting him in bed with Satan as they did Saddam, but also giving Trump the ‘“[s]ame mannerisms. Same voice inflections. Same love affair with Satan. Same dictatorial chaos. In fact, Satan references this by telling Trump he reminds him of a guy he used to date.” Clymer notes that the writers of one of the country’s hottest shows are “communicating that they think Trump is a bullsh*t, two-bit dictator.”
The Bulwark’s Joe Perticone reported today that in a decade of reporting on Congress, he has never seen such a level of panic among Republican lawmakers. In the past, he notes, Trump could weather crises because Republicans closed ranks around him. The Epstein issue, though, has driven a wedge through the Republicans themselves, some of whom are turning against Trump just as the House of Representatives is headed back home. There, Republican members will hear directly from constituents who are angry over the administration’s about-face on releasing more information about Epstein and his associates.
Trump boasted to the House Republicans on Tuesday that his poll numbers are the best he’s ever had, but in fact a Gallup poll out today shows his approval rating at its lowest in his second term: just 37% of American adults approve of his performance in office. Journalist Bill Grueskin notes that this puts Trump six points below where Biden was after the final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. The biggest shift has been among Independents. Only 29% of them say they approve of his job performance, down from 46% at the beginning of his term.
Gallup reports that 60% of American adults disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration, with only 38% approving. That is unlikely to change as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), newly flush with funding from the budget reconciliation bill, ramps up both immigration sweeps and detention. Neither is popular with Americans as they hear stories of overcrowding at ICE facilities and inhumane and unsanitary conditions.
On Tuesday, Nicole Acevedo of NBC News reported that detainees at the detention center in the Florida Everglades spoke of “torturous conditions in cage-like units full of mosquitoes,” with lights on at all times, lack of food and medical treatment, and unsanitary conditions. On June 20, she reported, the U.S. was holding more than 56,000 people in detention centers, the highest number in U.S. history. Nearly 72% of those held had no criminal history.
Just two days after the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue branch, Ken Pagurek, resigned out of frustration with the administration’s work to destroy the agency, and the same day FEMA acting director David Richardson would not commit to the agency’s continued existence, Colleen DeGuzman of the Texas Tribune reported that the U.S. Department of Defense had awarded a $1.26 billion contract to build the largest detention facility in the U.S. at Fort Bliss, an army base in El Paso, Texas. The facility will be designed to hold 5,000 people in tents, and it is expected to open in September 2027. DeGuzman notes that the company that was awarded the contract, Acquisition Logistics, appears not to have experience running detention centers.
On Friday, July 18, the government of El Salvador repatriated more than 250 Venezuelan men who had been held at the notorious CECOT prison after being sent there by the Trump administration. The administration maintained it was not responsible for the men after they left U.S. territory, a claim the government of El Salvador repeatedly refuted. But with the repatriation of the men in exchange for the release of ten U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents held as political prisoners in Venezuela, the State Department claimed the exchange was “thanks to President Trump’s leadership and commitment to the American people.”
The former CECOT prisoners are telling the story of their four-month incarceration, detailing human rights abuses: beatings, being shot with pellets, deprivation of due process, torture.
Today Neiyerver Adrián Leon Rengel filed an administrative claim against Homeland Security for wrongful detention when it sent him to the terrorist CECOT prison in El Salvador. The filing is the first step in a lawsuit. “I want to clear my name,” he told Jazmine Ulloa of the New York Times. “I am not a bad person.”
The Trump administration received a rebuke yesterday in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to CECOT. The administration brought Abrego back to the U.S. only after it indicted him on charges of human smuggling. Once back, he was imprisoned in Tennessee, and the administration threatened to deport him again if he were released from custody pending trial.
Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland prohibited officials from taking Abrego into custody and said the administration must give him at least three days’ notice if it intends to deport him.
Shortly afterward, U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. ordered that Abrego be released from criminal detention, saying the government had not shown that he is a threat. While the administration insists that Abrego is a gang member, Crenshaw wrote that he had seen no evidence that Abrego “has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is [an] MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.” Jacob Knutson of Democracy Docket noted that Abrego requested to stay his release for 30 days, and a magistrate judge issued that stay yesterday.
The administration is facing rough waters elsewhere, too. On Monday the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its final score for the budget reconciliation bill that poured money into border security. Although Republicans insisted it would not add to the deficit, the CBO predicts it will in fact increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion and push 10 million people off health insurance. Most of the cost for the bill will come from the Republicans’ extension of tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy.
In the Washington Post today, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, noted that while the Republicans insisted that extending the tax cuts should not be counted toward raising the deficit because they were part of “current policy,” they “entirely rejected” the current policy argument when it came to extending the increase in the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credit (PTC) established under Biden. Unlike the tax cuts for the wealthy, Republicans are letting that tax credit die, a change that will mean a tax increase of $335 billion for working families over the next ten years.
The loss of the PTC will not only drive healthcare up more than $18,000 a year for a typical 60-year-old couple making $82,000 a year, Sperling writes, but will also drive healthier Americans out of the market, making healthcare coverage more expensive for those who remain in it. Sperling notes that unlike many of the cuts in the budget reconciliation bill, the PTC will expire this year, making voters aware of what the Republicans have done before the midterms—a reality that might have been behind the recent calls from some Republican lawmakers to extend the PTC.
Yesterday, Dan Lamothe and John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that the messages Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent in a Signal chat came from an email with “SECRET” classification, meaning that disclosing that information could cause serious damage to national security. Senior members of the administration have repeatedly denied that classified information was shared in the chat.
Finally today, cryptocurrency reporter Molly White noted that a memecoin by cryptocurrency billionaire Justin Sun, who has invested about $213 million in cryptocurrency projects connected to Trump, posted a meme showing its mascot, sporting an evil grin, manipulating the White House with the mechanical system of a puppeteer. Over the image, the meme read: “You never truly know who’s pulling the strings.”
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