Trump administration orders release of Epstein court documents
The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.
The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.
Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.
The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.
Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.
The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.
Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.
In other developments:
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Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.
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Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.
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Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.
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The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.
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Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.
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Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
Key events
Carter Sherman
The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.
A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.
“It is unacceptable that the state department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.
“This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,” added Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the matter.
The department decided to destroy the contraceptives because it could not sell them to any “eligible buyers”, in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending US aid to organizations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas, according to the state department spokesperson.
David Smith
The “Make America Great Again” (Maga) base is in revolt as never before. The trigger was Donald Trump’s broken promise to publicly release details about Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender, who was facing federal charges of sex-trafficking minors when he died in jail in 2019.
Spurred by the president and his allies, Trump’s movement has long latched on to the Epstein scandal, claiming the existence of a secret client list and that he was murdered in his cell as part of a cover-up. But last week the justice department and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced there was no evidence that the disgraced financier kept such a list or was blackmailing powerful figures.
Far from closing the case, the memo deepened supporters’ obsession and sense of grievance. A movement defined by the view that elites rig the system against them felt cheated. Trump made efforts to douse the flames with ever-shifting explanations, excuses and distractions but merely poured fuel on the fire.
To some, his erratic and evasive behaviour implies a guilty secret. It also evokes a line from President John F Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” Having spent years embracing QAnon-tinged propaganda that casts him as the only saviour who can demolish the “deep state”, Trump is now seen as co-opted by its corrupt bureaucracy.
Senior Brazilian official says judiciary won’t be intimidated by US visa bans
Brazil’s judiciary will not be intimidated by a US decision to target officials involved in the trial of former president Jair Bolsonaro with visa bans, a senior judicial official said late on Friday, criticising the move as arbitrary, according to Reuters.
In an escalation of tensions between US President Donald Trump and the government of Latin America’s largest economy, Washington imposed visa restrictions on Friday on supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes, his family and other unnamed court officials. The visa bans were a response to the supreme court’s decision to issue search warrants and restraining orders targeting Trump ally Bolsonaro, who is accused of plotting a coup to overturn the results of a 2022 election he lost.
Solicitor general Jorge Messias, the top judicial official for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s executive branch, said in a statement posted on X that prosecutor general Paulo Gonet was also targeted by the ban. “Rest assured that no improper manoeuvre or sordid conspiratorial act will intimidate our country’s judiciary in the independent and dignified exercise of its task,” he added.
According to Reuters, Messias said the Brazilian officials were subject to “arbitrary acts of visa revocation by a foreign nation on account of their fulfilment of their legitimate institutional responsibilities in accordance with constitutional terms”.
In addition to Moraes, seven other justices from Brazil’s 11-member supreme court were also hit by the US visa restrictions, government institutional relations minister Gleisi Hoffmann said on Friday. They include justices Luís Roberto Barroso, Dias Toffoli, Cristiano Zanin, Flávio Dino, Cármen Lúcia, Edson Fachin, and Gilmar Mendes.
The prosecutor general’s office and the supreme court did not immediately respond to Reuter’s requests for comment.
Trump has criticised the proceedings against Bolsonaro as a “witch-hunt”, a term he has used to describe his own treatment by political opponents, and has called for the charges to be dropped. In a letter last week, he announced a 50% tariff on Brazilian goods starting 1 August, opening the message with criticism of the trial.
Bolsonaro is on trial before Brazil’s supreme court on charges of plotting a coup to stop Lula from taking office in January 2023. Bolsonaro has denied that he led an attempt to overthrow the government but has acknowledged taking part in meetings aimed at reversing the election’s outcome.
Capt Adam Van Gerpen, public information officer for the Los Angeles fire department told ABC that people inside the club came out to help in the minutes before emergency crews arrived to help the victims, after a vehicle drove into a crowd along Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.
According to the Associated Press (AP), he said:
They were all standing in line going into a nightclub. There was a taco cart out there, so they were … getting some food, waiting to go in. And there’s also a valet line there. The valet podium was taken out, the taco truck was taken out, and then a large number of people were impacted by the vehicle.
Also, the Los Angeles City fire department (LAFD) issued an update on their initial statement, saying that 124 fire personnel assisted at the scene.
It added that the LAFD had coordinated transport for seven people in a critical condition, six in a serious condition and 10 in a fair condition. Seven patients refused transport after assessment on the scene, said the LAFD.
Number injured in Hollywood vehicle incident revised to 30, says LAFD
The Associated Press has more on the story that a vehicle drove into a crowd in Hollywood, injuring more than 20 (see 4am PDT). That number has been revised to 30.
Victims were transported to local hospitals and trauma centers, according to Capt Adam Van Gerpen, public information officer for the Los Angeles fire department. At least three were in critical condition after being injured along Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood, the fire department said in a statement earlier.
According to the AP, Van Gerpen told ABC that a line of people – the majority female – were waiting to enter a nightclub when they were struck by a vehicle that also hit a taco truck and valet stand.
Paramedics discovered that one of the patients had a gunshot wound, Van Gerpen said.
“This is under police investigation,” he said. “This will be a large investigation with the LAPD.”
Sidney Blumenthal
Sidney Blumenthal, the former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has written for the Guardian about why Donald Trump cannot dispel the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein:
Some enchanted evening, Donald Trump saw a stranger across a crowded room.
It is likely that there is hardly anyone living who knows exactly under what glowing lights Donald Trump met Jeffrey Epstein, except perhaps Trump himself and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who is serving a 20-year prison term for helping to procure minors for sexual abuse. Trump said in an interview in 2002, when his Epstein relationship was still tight, that it had been a 15-year mutual admiration society. Epstein was “a terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with,” and “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”. Epstein described himself as “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years”.
The 1990s and early 2000s were the heyday of the Trump-Epstein romp. Roger Stone, Trump’s dirty trickster who was dumped from the 1994 Bob Dole presidential campaign when he and his wife were exposed apparently advertising for threesomes, was a hanger-on in the Palm Beach demimonde. “There’s 100 beautiful women and 10 guys. Look, how cool are we?” he told the Washington Post in 2016. “I was happy to be invited. I mean, it was great.”
The Trump biographer Michael Wolff told me on my podcast The Court of History how Epstein opened his safe in his New York townhouse for him to retrieve a pile of about a dozen photographs of Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach mansion. “They were kind of spread out like playing cards,” Wolff said. “And it was Trump – with girls of uncertain age. In two of them, topless girls are sitting on Trump’s lap. In another, he has a visible stain on his pants while several girls are laughing and pointing at it.” Wolff said: “I think it’s certainly not unlikely that they were in the safe when the FBI came in after his arrest and took everything.”
Read on here:
In Trump’s lawsuit against Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal, the US president calls the paper’’s report “false and defamatory” and demands at least $10bn in damages and court costs from Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal reporters, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and related corporate entities.
You can read the court documents in full here:
Health experts raise alarm over RFK Jr’s ‘war on science’ amid mass firings and budget cuts
Peter Stone
The Trump administration’s “war on science” appears to have entered a new phase in the aftermath of a recent supreme court decision that empowered health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, a prominent vaccine sceptic, and other agency leaders, to implement mass firings – effectively greenlighting the politicization of science.
The decision comes as Kennedy abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting of a key health care advisory panel, the US Preventive Services Task Force, earlier this month. That, combined with his recent removal of a panel of more than a dozen vaccine advisers, signals that his dismantling of the science-based policymaking at HHS is likely far from over.
“The current administration is waging a war on science,” warned Celine Gounder, a professor of medicine and an infectious disease expert at New York University in a keynote talk in May to graduates of Harvard’s School of Public Health.
“Today we see rising threats to the public health institutions that have kept our world safe for generations,” she said, citing “cuts to research that benefits the lives of millions, looming public health emergencies that are not being addressed with the urgency they demand, and a continued coordinated attack on the very idea of the scientific process.”
Gounder added:
Over the past few months, we have seen the Trump administration engage not only in medical misinformation, but in active censorship of scientific discourse.
Since he took the helm at HHS, Kennedy’s unscientific views on vaccines and some other medical matters coupled with the agency’s widespread research and staff cuts, have prompted protests from scientists inside and outside HHS plus lawsuits.
More than 20 injured after vehicle drives into crowd in East Hollywood, LA fire department says
Away from politics, the Los Angeles fire department (LAFD) is reporting that a vehicle has driven into a crowd of people in East Hollywood, injuring more than 20.
Up to five people are in critical condition, a further eight to ten are in serious condition and 10-15 in fair condition, the department reported on Saturday.
The incident occurred on Santa Monica Boulevard. In a statement, the department added that the LAFD was “coordinating patient triage and transport at this time”.
More details soon …
Cecilia Nowell
Democrats are condemning CBS for its recent decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes just a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump.
Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media:
If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.
In early July, Paramount settled a “frivolous” lawsuit with Trump over the president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Paramount is also seeking approval from the US Federal Communications Commission for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. On Monday, Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.
Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images
Colbert’s firing would not be the first potentially spurred by a dispute with the president. In February, after MSNBC fired host Joy Reid, Trump celebrated her show’s cancellation. Reid, a Black woman, had been a vocal critic of Trump and spoke frankly about the Black Lives Matter movement and war in Gaza. And in December, ABC News agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos with a $15m payment to a Trump foundation and museum, as well as paying $1m in the president’s legal fees.
The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has called for an investigation into Paramount’s relationship with Trump over the Skydance merger, wrote:
CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount.
Skydance is owned by David Ellison, the son of a close Trump ally, Larry Ellison.
In a joint statement, Paramount and CBS executives wrote that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”.
Writing on his own social media platform, Trump celebrated the show’s cancellation:
I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.
Callum Jones
Memo from the White House: inflation is “right on track”, it declared this week, citing the latest official data. Price growth is now “very low”, according to Donald Trump. The actual statistics paint a markedly different picture.
Just six months after he regained power, in part by promising to rapidly reduce prices, Trump has presided over the chaotic rollout of tariffs on an array of overseas products that many have argued risk having the exact opposite effect.
After a lull, the consumer price index (CPI) is back on the rise. In June, everything from fruit and washing machines to dresses and toys became more expensive.
Businesses in the US and around the world have struggled to keep up with the Trump administration’s erratic rollout of its aggressive trade strategy: the daily White House soap opera of warnings, threats, confusion, deadlines, delays and drama.
Putting to one side the steady stream of twists, cliffhangers and all-caps declarations, each episode has pushed US tariffs higher. The overall average effective tariff rate is now set to hit 20.6%, according to the non-partisan The Budget Lab at Yale, its highest level since 1910.
Eventually, someone has to foot the bill.
By Trump’s telling, the countries he targets will be forced to pay up. But in reality, tariffs are paid by the importer – US-based companies, in this case – and often passed on.
Tariffs are a burden. One way or another, the impact typically is felt along each link of the supply chain, from the initial manufacturer to the customer who buys the finished product. “All through that chain, people will be trying not to be the ones who pick up the cost,” noted Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, at a recent press conference.
“But ultimately, the cost of the tariff has to be paid and some of it will fall on the end consumer,” added Powell. “We know that. That’s what businesses say. That’s what the data says from past evidence. So we know that’s coming.”
The effect is not immediate, though. It might take Trump a matter of minutes to announce a tariff on Truth Social, but the full effects can take months to work their way through the economy.
Trump’s US foreign aid funding cut stalls water projects, increasing risks for millions, finds Reuters
The Trump administration’s decision to slash nearly all US foreign aid has left dozens of water and sanitation projects half-finished across the globe, creating new hazards for some of the people they were designed to benefit, Reuters has found.
Reuters has identified 21 unfinished projects in 16 countries after speaking to 17 sources familiar with the infrastructure plans. Most of these projects have not previously been reported, it adds.
With hundreds of millions of dollars in funding cancelled since January, workers have put down their shovels and left holes half dug and building supplies unguarded, according to interviews with US and local officials and internal documents seen by Reuters. As a result, millions of people who were promised clean drinking water and reliable sanitation facilities by the United States have been left to fend for themselves, reports Reuters.
Water towers intended to serve schools and health clinics in Mali have been abandoned, according to two US officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity. In Nepal, construction was halted on more than 100 drinking water systems, leaving plumbing supplies and 6,500 bags of cement in local communities, according to Reuters. The Himalayan nation will use its own funds to finish the job, according to the country’s water minister Pradeep Yadav.
According to Reuters, in Lebanon, a project to provide cheap solar power to water utilities was scrapped, costing 70 people their jobs and halting plans to improve regional services. The utilities are now relying on diesel and other sources to power their services, Suzy Hoayek, an adviser to Lebanon’s energy ministry told the news agency.
In Kenya, residents of Taita Taveta county told Reuters they are now more vulnerable to flooding than they had been before, as half-finished irrigation canals could collapse and sweep away crops. Community leaders say it will cost $2,000 to lower the risk – twice the average annual income in the area.
Trump says 10 Israeli hostages to be released from Gaza ‘very shortly’
Cecilia Nowell
Ten more hostages will be released from Gaza “very shortly”, Donald Trump said at the White House on Friday. The news comes as the president continues to push for a 60-day ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
“We got most of the hostages back. We’re going to have another 10 coming very shortly, and we hope to have that finished quickly,” Trump said during a dinner with Republican senators. He also praised his Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff as “fantastic”.
The current Israel-Hamas ceasefire proposal includes terms calling for the return of 10 hostages, and the remains of 18 others. In exchange, Israel would be required to release an unspecified number of Palestinians held in Israeli jails.
Earlier on Friday, Axios reported that the director of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, visited Washington this week in hope that the United States would support its efforts to ask other countries to take in the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians still living in Gaza. Mossad chief David Barnea told Witkoff that Israel has discussed relocating Palestinians to Ethiopia, Indonesia and Libya.
Trump has boasted that a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas would be fothcoming since posting on his social media platform on 1 July that Israel has agreed to the “necessary conditions” to finalise a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza.
Last week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the White House, where he presented Trump with a copy of a letter he had sent to the Nobel committee nominating the president for a Nobel peace prize.
