A federal judge dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a report about a 50th birthday card he “allegedly” sent to Jeffrey Epstein.
A federal judge dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal over a report about a 50th birthday card he allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein. Plus, New York Attorney General Letitia James on the verdict against Ticketmaster and Live Nation. (The Beat's...
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First lady
Melania Trump gave
a bewildering April 9 brief speech from the White House, which nobody asked for or was expecting, in which she complained about "
false smears" connecting her with Epstein,
despite plenty of photographs that have circulated for years that show her and her husband quite cozy with the sex offender.
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Former Attorney General
Pam Bondi, who did more than anyone in the Trump administration
to make the Epstein files a political minefield, kept the scandal's renewed momentum going by
refusing to comply with a lawfully issued subpoena from the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which wanted to question her about the files.
And then acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, picking up right where Bondi left off
before Trump fired her on April 2 for this mess,
appeared on Fox News on April 14 with a message that amounted to: The Department of Justice has provided an unfettered view … to everything we want you to see in the Epstein files, and now this is over?
In his interview,
the acting attorney general insisted that the DOJ reviewed 6 million (so roughly double what has actually been released) documents and released "anything associated with the Epstein files.”
A bipartisan movement in Congress,
driven specifically by the DOJ's lack of transparency in the Epstein files,
overwhelmingly passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November. Trump, who fought to stop that legislation,
grudgingly signed it into law.
The DOJ
didn't meet the 30-day deadline to release all of the Epstein files. And the two key sponsors of the legislation, Republican U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Democratic U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna of California, told me the DOJ still hasn't complied with the law.
Blanche
told Fox News that any member of Congress can come to the DOJ and inspect the Epstein files in unredacted format. But here's what Blanche didn't say: He's making the call on what is and is not an Epstein file, and what Congress can and cannot see.
Bondi claimed she could skip the House Oversight Committee subpoena
because she's no longer attorney general. But a bipartisan mix of committee members still want to hear from Bondi, and a spokesperson for the committee said
it would work to reschedule her testimony.
It's no coincidence that Trump fired Bondi just before she's supposed to testify. He didn't want us to hear what she would say. So it's “likely”

Bondi will resist complying with her subpoena.
Hmm, a drawn-out fight about transparency and the Epstein files in the lead-up to the midterms. What could go wrong for Republicans there?
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