President Donald Trump and his predecessor Barack Obama have met for a substantive conversation exactly once: November 10, 2016, two days after Trump won his first election. It was Trump’s first time in the Oval Office. By most accounts, it was a little awkward.
Eight years and eight months later, the meeting cropped up again this week in a very different context. On Sunday, Trump posted an AI-generated video using footage from the session to depict FBI agents bursting into the office, pulling Obama from his chair and handcuffing him as he falls to his knees.
In the video, Trump watches on with a grin. His campaign anthem “Y.M.C.A.” blares in the background.
For years — since well before he launched a bid to become president himself — Trump has marinated in a singular fixation on the 44th president, whom he almost always refers to as “Barack Hussein Obama.”
This week, Trump’s preoccupation with Obama — and specifically his role in probing Russia’s role in the 2016 election — reemerged in dramatic fashion, drawing a rare rebuke from Obama’s office and reigniting the bitterest feud inside the rarified club of presidents.
The temperature ratcheted up Wednesday when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard came to the White House briefing room to directly accuse Obama of “leading the manufacturing” of an intelligence assessment she said was designed to undermine Trump. She said criminal referrals had been made to the Justice Department.
“There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact,” she said, adding the actions “can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy against the American people, our republic and an attempt to undermine President Trump’s administration.”
Trump revived his old — but never forgotten — grievance as questions swirl about his own handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, pivoting quickly from a reporter’s question Tuesday about an Epstein associate to a lengthy diatribe in which accused his predecessor of treason.
Critics saw in Trump’s response a clear attempt to divert attention from a controversy that has put him at odds with influential members of his own base. Yet his resentments toward Obama predate any one effort at deflection, and aides say Trump has been as animated about his new accusations in private as he’s been this week in front of cameras.
His enmity has alternated between strategic attempts to erode Obama’s legacy and what advisers have described as more visceral disdain for someone Trump views as both unwarrantedly popular and the root of many of his troubles since entering politics a decade ago.
“Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Tuesday. “Obama’s been caught directly.” Both Gabbard and press secretary Karoline Leavitt dodged questions at the press briefing Wednesday about Obama having immunity as a former president.
During his first term, Trump’s gripes ran the gamut, from complaints about Obama’s handling of foreign policy to outlandish accusations he spied on Trump Tower.
Since retaking office in January, however, Trump had mostly been directing his ire toward his more immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, whom he portrays as a largely comatose bystander to his Democratic advisers’ radical agenda.
Obama and Trump even appeared to have a friendly conversation in the pews at Washington National Cathedral in January when they both attended the late President Jimmy Carter’s funeral. Trump invited Obama for a round of golf at one of his clubs, a person familiar with the conversation said.
“Boy, they look like two people [who] like each other,” Trump said a few days later when asked about the footage. “And we probably do.”
Now, probably not.
“He’s guilty,” Trump said Tuesday of Obama, sitting alongside the Philippine president. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of.”
The basis for Trump’s claims came via a report, issued last week by Gabbard, that sought to undermine an assessment made in 2017 that Russia sought to influence the election the year earlier in favor of Trump.
That assessment was later backed up by a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that was endorsed by every Republican on the panel, including then-Sen. Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s Secretary of State and acting national security adviser.
But Gabbard and Trump came to a different conclusion, and have accused Obama and top officials in his administration of manipulating intelligence to support a theory that Russia swung the results of the election.
Their findings appear to conflate Russia’s attempts to sow dissent through leaks and social media campaigns with efforts to hack election infrastructure and change vote totals, which intelligence officials have said did not happen in the 2016 contest.
Nonetheless, Trump framed the new report Tuesday as the “biggest scandal in the history of our country.”
“Obama was trying to lead a coup,” Trump said. “And it was with Hillary Clinton.”
A few hours later, a spokesman for Obama dismissed the accusations, making sure to note that ordinarily the former president ignores Trump’s “constant nonsense and misinformation” but could not, in this case, remain silent.
“These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction,” said the spokesman, Patrick Rodenbush.
Trump has long viewed the Russia investigation as a cloud over his first presidency, one cooked up by his political rivals to subvert his legitimacy and undermine his ability to win an election.
In his second term, Trump has prioritized retribution against those who led investigations into him — and, in his mind, made his first term miserable.
Even though Obama was out of power by the time a special counsel was appointed and Congress began probing, Trump has singled out the former president as the “ringleader” of the effort.
“This is, like, proof — irrefutable proof — that Obama was seditious,” Trump said, adding a few seconds later that assigning blame on lower-level officials was a mistake: “I get a kick when I hear everyone talks about people I never even heard of,” he said. “No, no, it was Obama. He headed it up. And it says so right in the papers.”
Trump initially launched into the lengthy screed when asked a question about the Justice Department’s plans to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, the Epstein associate who is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for conspiring with the late sex offender to sexually abuse minors.
That Trump pivoted almost immediately — and without a great deal of explanation — from answering the Epstein question to his diatribe on Obama did little to dispel the impression he was using the issue to deflect from a scandal now entering its third week. Trump has been explicit that he believes the Epstein case is getting too much attention.
“We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” he wrote on social media Tuesday.
But his anger toward Obama, voiced repeatedly over the course of his meeting, spoke to something deeper than a diversion tactic. It was a glimpse into a lingering grudge that appears unlikely to ever entirely disappear.
The resentments stretch back more than a decade, to the “birther” conspiracy Trump fueled years before vying for the presidency himself. His indignation appeared to deepen when Obama made fun of him during a 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner speech and television cameras found Trump scowling in the audience.
By the time Obama was handing off power to Trump, the seeds of suspicion had been planted, even if the two men put on a show of comity in the Oval Office.
Trump’s aides now look back on that period as a moment of deception.
“I watched a clip of (Obama) this weekend saying, you know, I’m going to do everything I can to help Donald Trump come in. That’s how our country will be successful. He said that to President Trump’s face in the Oval Office during that transition period,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week on the “Ruthless Podcast.”
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“Meanwhile, he was holding secret meetings in the White House with top law enforcement and intelligence officials to put out this fake intelligence and mislead the American public,” she went on.
It’s all a distant cry from the mostly cordial — at least in public — relations between presidents that had been the norm for decades. That standard mostly died during Trump’s first term.
Since their single meeting in 2016, Trump and Obama have barely spoken, except for pleasantries at state occasions.
Former first lady Michelle Obama has taken to skipping any event where Trump might also appear.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
Gabbard Releases New Documents Targeting Obama Administration, as Justice Dept. Forms Task Force
The director of national intelligence intensified attacks on assessments about Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election.
The Justice Department announced on Wednesday the formation of a task force to look into unsubstantiated allegations by President Trump that President Barack Obama and his aides ordered an investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia to destroy Mr. Trump.
The announcement, which came in an ambiguous, bare-bones statement on the department’s website, was a continuation of Mr. Trump’s campaign of retribution. It also represented yet another Trump pivot away from the political morass of the Jeffrey Epstein files in targeting Mr. Obama, whose presidency set off a wave of reactionary anger that helped propel Mr. Trump from a punchline to political dominance.
The move came hours after Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, ramped up her attacks on Mr. Obama, releasing a document that she said undermined the conclusion of his intelligence agencies that Russia favored the election of Mr. Trump in 2016.
Ms. Gabbard said that after Mr. Trump’s first election, Mr. Obama ordered an intelligence analysis that was subject to “unusual directives” from him. She criticized that assessment as using unclear or unknown sources.
Under questions from reporters, she said Obama administration officials had led to a “yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy” against Mr. Trump.
Asked if she thought Mr. Obama was implicated in criminal behavior, Ms. Gabbard said she had referred documents to the F.B.I.
“The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment,” she said. “There are multiple pieces of evidence and intelligence that confirm that fact.”
The documents Ms. Gabbard has produced, both Wednesday and last week, show that Obama administration officials wanted to complete a review before they left office and put pressure on the intelligence agencies to work quickly, but there is no evidence of criminal behavior.
The document released on Wednesday was a report that the House Intelligence Committee originally drafted in 2017, when Republicans led the panel. The report took issue with the conclusion reached in December 2016 that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had favored Mr. Trump.
Only Republicans on the committee participated in the drafting of the 2017 report and revisions in 2020.
The new material provides some interesting insights into the development of the review of Russian activity by American spy agencies, and the debate over their assessment. But none of the new information changes the fundamental view that Russia meddled in the election and that Mr. Putin hoped to damage Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.
Ms. Gabbard has won praise from Mr. Trump for her investigation into the intelligence findings and spoke at length about how the 2016 assessment was part of a witch hunt against him. The president has been under sharp criticism for his handling of documents related to the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, and his attacks on the Obama administration appear to be part of a distract-and-deflect strategy.
The report was released with relatively few redactions, prompting criticism from Democrats.
“The desperate and irresponsible release of the partisan House intelligence report puts at risk some of the most sensitive sources and methods our intelligence community uses to spy on Russia and keep Americans safe,” said Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Officials familiar with the matter said that another, more heavily redacted version took care to hide more information about U.S. sources and had been considered for release. Ms. Gabbard said on social media that Mr. Trump had declassified the report.
Kash Patel, now Mr. Trump’s F.B.I. director, was a key author of the report released on Wednesday, according to officials.
The House report found that most of the judgments made by the intelligence community in 2016 were sound. But it argued that the work was rushed, as a recent tradecraft analysis by the C.I.A. also found. The assessment that Mr. Putin had favored Mr. Trump did not follow the “professional criteria” of the other findings, the House report said.
The findings were at odds with a bipartisan series of Senate reports from a committee that included Marco Rubio, then a Republican senator from Florida and now Mr. Trump’s secretary of state. The Senate Intelligence Committee affirmed the work of the C.I.A. and the other intelligence agencies on the 2016 assessment.
Mr. Warner said Wednesday that the bipartisan effort by the Senate included a yearslong investigation that went through millions of documents and 200 witness interviews. It concluded, he said, that “Russia launched a large-scale influence campaign in the 2016 election to help then-candidate Trump.”
John H. Durham, a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr during Mr. Trump’s first term, also failed to find any evidence undermining the intelligence agencies’ conclusions.
But the House report said the judgment about Mr. Putin’s preference was based on a single source who was biased against the Russian government. The raw intelligence was fragmentary and lacked context, the report added.
The detailed discussion of the source has not been made public before, although the U.S. decision to extract and relocate him, first to Virginia, has become public. Russia officials made the source’s identity public and said he was an aide to a senior Russian official.
The 2017 report portrays the information as incomplete and subject to interpretation, pointing to a single piece of intelligence from the man that said Mr. Putin had decided to leak emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee because Mrs. Clinton had better odds of the election and Mr. Trump, “whose victory Putin was counting, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.”
But current and former American officials pushed back on the characterization of the source’s intelligence, saying he was well placed and had provided sound information to the United States on Mr. Putin’s intentions.
While details about the debate over the source are new, the overall view of the House Intelligence Committee was well known, and members frequently took issue with the finding. But the full report with details of the C.I.A.’s work on the 2016 intelligence assessment has not been released.
Attacking the conclusions of the 2016 assessment that Russia sought to denigrate Mrs. Clinton and help Mr. Trump has been a hobby horse of some of the president’s supporters. Republicans have long taken particular aim at the idea that the Kremlin favored Mr. Trump, arguing instead that Russia was simply trying to sow chaos or undermine democratic institutions.
Ms. Gabbard echoed that position on Wednesday.
The attacks on the documents have intensified in recent weeks as first the C.I.A. and then Ms. Gabbard’s office have raised questions about the effort.
While Mr. Trump’s Republican supporters criticized the assessment during his first term, the president focused much of his ire on Robert S. Mueller III, the former F.B.I. director appointed to investigate any ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
The newly released House document also takes a close look at the role that a dossier prepared by a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, played in the 2016 assessment.
Trump administration officials have maintained that the 2016 intelligence review was tainted by unverified information in the so-called Steele dossier. A classified annex to the report mentioned the dossier, but former officials said the C.I.A. did not take it seriously and did not allow it to influence their assessment.
Few if any of the claims in Mr. Steele’s work about Mr. Trump have been verified in the ensuing years.
In interviews this week, former officials insisted the Steele dossier did not influence the findings of the 2016 assessment. But the House report took issue with that, noting that in one of the bullet points in the original, classified version, the assessment referred readers to the annex discussing the dossier. The House report said the two-page annex summarizing the dossier “misrepresented the significance and credibility” of Mr. Steele’s work.
The dossier “was written in an amateurish conspiracy and political propaganda tone that invited skepticism, if not ridicule, over its content,” the report continued.
The House review also said one C.I.A. officer said he confronted John O. Brennan, the agency’s director at the time, with the flaws of the dossier. Mr. Brennan, according to the House report, acknowledged the flaws but added, “doesn’t it ring true.”
Mr. Brennan, who emerged as one of the sharpest critics of Mr. Trump, has long denied that the dossier colored the assessment and said that he backed C.I.A. officers who wanted it kept out of the main body. He has said he placed the dossier in the annex at the insistence of the F.B.I.
Former Obama administration officials acknowledged in hindsight that including the unverified dossier in the annex was a mistake, given the justifiable criticisms Republicans had of Mr. Steele’s assertions. But the officials said the F.B.I. felt it had no choice but to include it in the annex to avoid appearing as if they were hiding something from Mr. Trump.
C.I.A. officials wanted to be sure the F.B.I. signed on to the overall assessments, and they felt that the bureau would do that only if the annex was included, former officials said.
Ms. Gabbard has said she wants to end the weaponization of intelligence. She has condemned politicians for what she sees as the use of selective bits of intelligence against their opponents.
While she has portrayed the release of the documents as a corrective to the errors and missteps of the Obama administration, former officials and even some allies of Ms. Gabbard have said her effort to throw a lifeline to Mr. Trump is an example of the very politicization she has vowed to stamp out.
Donald Trump’s name reported to feature in DoJ files about Jeffrey Epstein
Wall Street Journal report says president’s name appears ‘multiples times’ as Congress subpoenas Ghislaine Maxwell
Donald Trump faced a fresh crisis on Wednesday as it was reported that his name appears in US justice department files about Jeffrey Epstein and the Congress subpoenaed testimony from the sex offender’s partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell.
The US president’s spokesman denied an account in the Wall Street Journal newspaper that Trump was told in May by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, that he is named in the now notorious Epstein files.
Citing senior administration officials, the Journal said Trump was also informed that many other high-profile figures were named and the department did not plan to release any more documents related to the investigation.
The White House sought to downplay the relationship between Trump and Epstein. Spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an emailed statement: “The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Trump filed a $10bn defamation lawsuit against the Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, last week over an article about an alleged sexually suggestive letter bearing Trump’s name that was included in a 2003 album compiled for Epstein’s birthday. The president has denied writing the letter and has since sued the Journal.
The White House subsequently banned one of the Journal’s reporters from Air Force One for an upcoming trip to Scotland.
The justice department concluded earlier this month that there was not a basis to continue the Epstein investigation, triggering a fierce backlash among Trump’s support base over what they have long seen as a cover-up of Epstein’s crimes and high-level connections.
It has also fuelled speculation about Trump’s 15-year friendship with Epstein. In June Elon Musk, a billionaire friend-turned-foe of the president, tweeted that Trump is “in the Epstein files”.
The Journal reported on Wednesday: “When justice department officials reviewed what attorney general Pam Bondi called a ‘truckload’ of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, they discovered that Donald Trump’s name appeared multiple times.”
Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, said in a statement: “Nothing in the files warranted further investigation or prosecution, and we have filed a motion in court to unseal the underlying grand jury transcripts. As part of our routine briefing, we made the President aware of the findings.”
This came shortly after a federal judge in south Florida denied a justice department request to unseal grand jury transcripts related to Epstein, the first ruling in a series of attempts by Trump’s administration to release more information on the case.
The request stemmed from federal investigations into Epstein in 2005 and 2007, according to court documents. US district judge Robin Rosenberg found that the justice department’s request in Florida did not fall into any of the exceptions to rules requiring grand jury material be kept secret.
The justice department has pending requests to unseal transcripts in a Manhattan federal court related to later indictments brought against Epstein and his former associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
In 2008 Epstein cut a deal with federal prosecutors in Florida that allowed him to escape more severe federal charges and instead plead guilty to state charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and solicitation of prostitution.
The wealthy financier later was arrested in 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges. His former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was charged with helping him abuse teenage girls.
Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in New York City about a month after he was arrested. Investigators concluded he killed himself. Maxwell later was convicted at trial and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The justice department has asked lawyers for Maxwell if she would be willing to speak with prosecutors, and Blanche said on Tuesday he expected to meet with her in the coming days.
Democrats and about a dozen Republicans in the House of Representatives are also pressing for answers. On Wednesday the powerful House oversight committee voted 8-2 to subpoena the justice department to release files related to Epstein, with three Republicans joining all Democrats. They also subpoenaed Maxwell for a deposition at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida, on 11 August.
The committee chair, James Comer, wrote in a subpoena cover letter to Maxwell: “While the Justice Department undertakes efforts to uncover and publicly disclose additional information related to your and Mr Epstein’s cases, it is imperative that Congress conduct oversight of the federal government’s enforcement of sex trafficking laws generally and specifically its handling of the investigation and prosecution of you and Mr Epstein.
“In particular, the Committee seeks your testimony to inform the consideration of potential legislative solutions to improve federal efforts to combat sex trafficking and reform the use of non-prosecution agreements and/or plea agreements in sex-crime investigations.”
Trump’s Epstein nightmare worsens amid new revelations and a GOP revolt
The Jeffrey Epstein morass surrounding President Donald Trump is deepening amid growing defiance by some Republicans and despite the administration’s most inflammatory attempt yet at distraction.
New reports Wednesday that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name appeared in documents related to the case of Epstein, an accused sex trafficker, offered a plausible explanation for the president’s growing fury over the drama.
They will fuel accusations of a cover-up since the administration has refused to release the files.
And although there is no evidence that Trump was involved in any wrongdoing or that he knew of Epstein’s criminal activities when they ran in the same social circle decades ago, there is bound to be intense speculation about the nature of mentions about the president in the investigative files.
The storm is also intensifying in Congress.
A vote in the House Oversight Committee to subpoena the Department of Justice for files related to Epstein worsened Trump’s political headache, since it revealed the appetite for more disclosure among some MAGA Republicans. The GOP-majority committee also voted to subpoena testimony from Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison term.
Trump responded to the ballooning crisis with the oldest trick in his political book, pushing a conspiracy theory against Barack Obama — a decade and a half after his false claims about the 44th president’s birthplace electrified his coalition and political career. He enlisted the top US intelligence official, Tulsi Gabbard, who misleadingly claimed in a theatrical White House appearance that Obama’s handling of Russian election meddling in 2016 amounted to a coup to destroy Trump’s first presidency, a day after her boss accused his predecessor of treason.
There is no evidence that Trump did anything wrong or illegal in his interactions with Epstein. But days of stalling by the White House and new disclosures drove speculation to a fever pitch over their relationship in the 1990s and early 2000s, long before the wealthy financier was charged with sex trafficking and abuse and died in prison in 2019.
The frantic confluence of events Wednesday underscored Trump’s failed attempts to put a lid on the Epstein drama, the most serious challenge to his authority over the MAGA base in either of his administrations. In fact, the storm is now gathering its own momentum, and it’s increasingly hard to see how the president calms it.
The controversy is overshadowing Trump’s recent political successes, including trade deals he announced with Japan and the Philippines and recent legal victories enabling a key goal: the gutting of swaths of the federal government. And it’s outracing House Speaker Mike Johnson’s attempts to contain it.
Trump’s name is included in Epstein document
Among developments on Wednesday with the greatest capacity to damage Trump politically were revelations that Bondi warned him in May that his name appeared in documents related to the Epstein case.
The conversation, which also included Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, was characterized by two White House officials as a “routine briefing” that covered the scope of the Justice Department’s findings. Trump’s name appearing in the files, they said, was not the sole focus of the discussions. Bondi also told Trump that several other high-profile figures were mentioned. She also briefed that investigators did not find evidence of an Epstein client list or that suicide was not his cause of death — two key elements of a MAGA conspiracy.
Simply being mentioned along with hundreds of others in documents does not imply wrongdoing by the president. And White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a statement to CNN that Trump had kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club because he regarded Epstein as a “creep.”
Still, details of Bondi’s briefing, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, offered new context about the political controversy that erupted over the Epstein files, since it took place three months after Bondi raised huge expectations for disclosure by telling Fox in February that she had Epstein’s client list sitting on her desk.
It’s hardly a surprise that Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files, since his former friendship with the disgraced financier was well known. The men were pictured together on multiple occasions. And Trump’s name was included in flight logs of Epstein’s plane that were among documents released by Bondi earlier this year in a political stunt meant to reward conservative bloggers.
But Wednesday’s revelations are politically difficult for Trump since they will renew speculation that the administration’s refusal to release Epstein documents, as his top aides promised on the campaign trail, is motivated by an attempt at a cover-up.
Now that it is established that Trump’s name is in the documents, speculation will go into overdrive on the nature of the mentions and whether they add to the public knowledge of Trump’s ties to Epstein and whether he knew anything about the offenses with which the financier was later charged. Again, this does not imply Trump himself did something wrong. But since he’s the sitting president, the focus on him and his handling of the Epstein matter in government will be intense.
This is especially the case since Bondi and Kash Patel, who now heads the FBI, had vehemently demanded the release of Epstein documents before finding themselves on the other side of the conspiracy theory they had puffed up when they took top jobs. Their agencies issued a joint statement earlier this month saying that there was no evidence of a client list or to support the conspiracy theory that Epstein was murdered.
But the pattern of inconsistencies and denials that typically fuel Washington’s scandal machine are piling up. Trump, for instance, appeared to deny this month that Bondi had told him his name was in the Epstein files, which he then claimed were made up by Obama and fired former FBI Director James Comey.
Ironically, the growing clamor is a test case of why grand jury material and other documents are typically sealed. That’s partly out of a need to protect the reputations of people — including witnesses, victims and blameless third parties — who are identified during an investigation but are not charged with any offenses.
But the MAGA movement is obsessed with conspiracy theories and has a bedrock belief that Washington is run by a cabal of “deep state” elites who suppress the truth. This tempted Trump, Bondi and other officials to tap into the political well and to promise the release of previously sealed information on famous cases also including the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
When the administration then refused to make public all the evidence about Epstein, top officials looked like they’d become avatars of the deep state they once decried.
As anger built in the MAGA base, the Justice Department launched an effort to get court permission to unseal grand jury testimony in the case. But a federal judge in Florida on Wednesday ruled against the release of material that represents only a small portion of the thousands of documents in the Epstein case file. The DOJ move is a legal long shot, but it may still serve the purpose of building political cover for the administration as supporters demand more transparency.
Johnson can’t contain GOP revolt on Epstein
Trump’s growing nightmare was exacerbated in a rare show of defiance by Republicans in Congress on Wednesday.
A subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee voted 8-2 to subpoena the Department of Justice to release files related to Epstein. Republican Reps. Nancy Mace, Scott Perry and Brian Jack joined with Democrats in a revolt against Johnson’s leadership.
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, meanwhile, subpoenaed Maxwell, a day after Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, announced that he’d visit her in prison to see if she has more information on Epstein’s offenses. Blanche’s move raised alarms because Trump, with his pardon power, could commute her sentence or pardon her, suggesting an incentive for Maxwell to offer testimony that might help him. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, citing two people familiar with the meeting, reported that it is expected to take place on Thursday.
The actions of the Oversight Committee suggested there is genuine desire for more accountability among some Republicans despite the possibility that it could inflict political damage on the president.
This suggests that any hopes harbored by Trump and Johnson that the furor might abate over the summer recess will prove to be ill-founded.
Johnson has accused Democrats of playing political games over Epstein, since the documents they now want released were not made public during the Biden administration. And he denied that his attempt to shut down House votes on the matter before September meant he was losing control of his conference.
“No one in Congress is blocking Epstein documents. No one in Congress is doing that,” the speaker said Wednesday. “What we’re doing here, Republicans are preventing Democrats from making a mockery of the Rules Committee process because we refuse to engage in their political charade.”
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer taunted Johnson, accusing him of “skedaddling out of town early.” The New York Democrat added, “If the speaker thinks he can make the Epstein escapade disappear by sending folks home early, he’s got another thing coming.”
The looming political question is whether fury over the Epstein saga among prominent MAGA media figures and influencers is mirrored more broadly in Trump’s base. Summer recess town halls involving GOP members could begin to answer that question. A Quinnipiac poll released on July 16 showed splits on the issue. While 40% of Republicans backed how Trump was handling the issue, 36% disapproved. But a CBS/YouGov poll Sunday showed that only 11% of Republicans said Epstein-related issues matter a lot to how they evaluate Trump’s presidency.
Trump’s deploys classic political fallback — attacking Obama
Trump has responded to the building Epstein scandal with increasingly heated attempts to distract attention and to provide alternative programing for the conservative media universe.
Gabbard’s appearance in the White House briefing room on Wednesday represented the most striking effort yet to weaponize elements of the federal government to advance Trump’s personal political aims.
The director of national intelligence declassified a highly sensitive congressional report written by Republicans in the first Trump presidency to bolster her claim that the Obama team plotted to ruin her boss’s first administration with its investigations and public statements on Russian election meddling.
“The evidence that we have found and that we have released directly point to President Obama leading the manufacturing of this intelligence assessment,” Gabbard said. She focused in particular on the report’s conclusion that an intelligence community finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin developed a preference for Trump in 2016 and wanted to help him win was based on poor sourcing.
“They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true,” Gabbard said.
While there was a debate among intelligence analysts about Putin’s intent, Gabbard’s presentation represented an attempt to cherry-pick evidence that is not reflected in other congressional and government assessments of Russian election meddling.
The overwhelming consensus in Washington, including from a report released in 2020 by the Senate Intelligence Committee on which Secretary of State Marco Rubio served, is that Russian interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win and to hurt Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The documentation that Gabbard produced did not back up Trump’s absurd claims of treason by Obama or her own assertion that there was an orchestrated plot to discredit Trump. Democrats accused her of jeopardizing the safety of US intelligence sources and offering valuable information to the Russians while sending a message to assets that it was not safe to report politically sensitive information.
Even if Obama did something wrong, Trump’s argument that he should be in prison would be undercut, ironically, by one of his own famous legal victories. Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in a case related to Trump’s indictment on charges of election interference related to the 2020 election that ex-presidents enjoy substantial immunity from prosecution.
The choreographed outrage in the White House briefing room, meanwhile, showed that the Russian election-meddling controversy — one of Trump’s greatest obsessions — is back and is sowing yet more division and mistrust among voters. Gabbard’s decision to revive it was a reminder that Putin’s scheme was one of the highest-yielding, lowest-cost intelligence operations in history.
House subcommittee votes 8-2 to subpoena Justice Department for Epstein files
WASHINGTON (AP) — A House subcommittee on Wednesday voted to subpoena the Department of Justice for files in the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein after Democrats successfully goaded GOP lawmakers to defy President Donald Trump and Republican leadership to support the action.
The vote showed the intensifying push for disclosures in the Epstein investigation even as House Speaker Mike Johnson — caught between demands from Trump and clamoring from his own members for the House to act — was sending lawmakers home a day early for its August recess. The House Committee on Oversight also issued a subpoena Wednesday for Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender and girlfriend of the late Epstein, to testify before committee officials in August.
Meanwhile, Democrats on a subcommittee of the powerful House Oversight Committee made a motion for the subpoena Wednesday afternoon. Three Republicans on the panel voted with Democrats for the subpoena, sending it through on an 8-2 vote tally.
The Republican subcommittee chairman, Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, said that work was beginning to draft the subpoena but did not give a timeline for when it would be issued.
“I’ve never handled a subpoena like this. This is some fascinating stuff,” said Higgins, who voted against the motion.
Democrats cheered the action as proof that their push for disclosures in the Epstein investigation was growing stronger. The committee agreed to redact information on victims, yet Democrats successfully blocked a push by Republicans to only subpoena information that was deemed to be “credible” — language that Trump has also used when discussing what he would support releasing.
“Democrats are focused on transparency and are pushing back against the corruption against Donald Trump. What is Donald Trump hiding that he won’t release the Epstein files?” said Rep. Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the oversight committee.
Democrats push for disclosure of the Epstein files
Earlier Wednesday, Johnson had said there was no need to vote on a separate piece of bipartisan legislation calling for the release of the Epstein files this week because the Trump administration is “already doing everything within their power to release them.”
Yet Democrats have delighted in pressing Republicans to support the release of the files. Their efforts halted the GOP’s legislative agenda for the week and turned attention to an issue that Trump has unsuccessfully implored his supporters to forget about.
“They’re fleeing our work, our job and sending us back home because they don’t want to vote to release these files. This is something that they ran on. This is something that they talked about: the importance of transparency, holding pedophiles accountable,” said Rep. Summer Lee, the Pennsylvania Democrat who pushed for the subpoena.
Democrats have seized on Epstein files to divide GOP
Democratic leaders are hoping to make the issue about much more than just Epstein, who died in his New York jail cell six years ago while he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
“Why haven’t Republicans released the Epstein files to the American people? It’s reasonable to conclude that Republicans are continuing to protect the lifestyles of the rich and the shameless, even if that includes pedophiles,” said House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a news conference. “So it’s all connected.”
It comes as both parties are gearing up to take their messaging to voters on Trump’s big multitrillion-dollar tax breaks and spending cuts bill. For Republicans, it’s “beautiful” legislation that will spark economic growth; for Democrats, it’s an “ugly” gift mostly to the richest Americans that undermines health care for low-income people.
Yet as furor has grown on the right over the Trump administration’s reversal on promises related to Epstein, several Democrats have seized on the opportunity to divide Republicans on the issue.
“This goes to a fundamental sense of, ‘Is our government co-opted by rich and powerful people that isn’t looking out for ordinary Americans? Or can we have a government that looks out for ordinary Americans?’” said Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who has put forward a bipartisan bill meant to force the release of the files.
Republican leaders accuse Democrats of caring about the issue purely for political gain. They point out that the Department of Justice held on to the Epstein investigation through the presidency of Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump’s Justice Department has also sought the release of testimony from secret grand jury proceedings in the Epstein case, but a federal judge in Florida rejected that request on Wednesday. A similar records request is still pending in New York..
Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government
Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Other new developments in the deepening Epstein intrigue Tuesday only underscored the president’s failed attempts to extinguish it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he does not plan to allow votes on any measures related to the Epstein matter until September, effectively bringing forward a summer recess to postpone consideration of a bipartisan measure demanding transparency and the release of files on the Epstein case.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is expected to subpoena Maxwell as “expeditiously as possible,” a committee source told CNN.
And CNN’s KFile on Tuesday reported new details about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, including photos taken at the future president’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. The pictures pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, and the White House described them as out-of-context frame grabs of videos and pictures to “disgustingly infer something nefarious.”
‘It’s time to go after people’
Trump’s aim in the Oval Office was clear.
He was cooking up a new slate of programing — featuring his favorite targets, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others — for the MAGA media machine, hoping to replace days of coverage of his administration’s missteps.
But there was also a more sinister aspect to his comments. Even though Gabbard’s claims are easily disproved, the president implied that he was serious about training the power of the US government on his political foes.
“It’s time to start — after what they did to me and — whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said. “Obama’s been caught directly … his orders are on the paper. The papers are signed, the papers came right out of their office.”
Obama has not been “caught directly.” Gabbard’s memo, which included newly declassified documents, claimed that the administration hatched a “treasonous conspiracy” that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump.
Gabbard, who has a political incentive to repair her relationship with the president, highlighted intelligence findings that the Russians did not change election results in 2016 through attacks on voting systems. But the Obama administration never said that this happened, focusing instead of cyberattacks on Democratic campaign officials and other online disruption efforts.
Gabbard appears to be arguing that since there was no successful hacking of election machines, there was no election meddling, and that therefore the whole saga was invented by the Obama team to keep Trump out of power.
Obama’s office rebutted what it called the White House’s latest example of “nonsense and misinformation,” calling it bizarre, ridiculous and “a weak attempt at distraction.”
But in Trump’s looking-glass world, that statement was taken as evidence of guilt. “It’s the art of deflection coming from former President Obama, as well as his friends who are still in Congress today,” Gabbard said on Fox News in an interview with the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
As he often does, Trump seemed to project offenses of which he was accused, with far more evidence, onto his opponents. “What they did to this country in 2016 … but going up all the way to 2020 and the election — they tried to rig the election and they got caught,” he said.
The president’s furious tirade again revealed his frenetic mindset over a situation he repeatedly tries to fix but keeps worsening.
The episode started because some MAGA fans are angry that Trump and his team have not lived up to vows to release all Epstein files after promising to do so during the campaign. This means they’ve become, in the eyes of some base activists, the “deep state” they once decried.
The FBI and Justice Department issued a memo this month saying there was no evidence for a conspiracy theory that Epstein left a list of famous clients or that he was murdered in prison rather than taking his own life in 2019.
Trump is deeply frustrated his supporters won’t accept this. “We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” he wrote on Truth Social, after news channels spent all afternoon showing footage of his latest diatribe.
It’s impossible for outsiders to know whether the Epstein controversy is the result of a true cover-up or is one of the classic political screw-ups that often make Washington scandals worse.
But after blasting supporters who worry about the Epstein case as “weaklings,” and now going after Obama in his latest attempt at moving the goalposts, it’s Trump who is now making it impossible not to ask the question: Why is he so desperate for this to go away?
Justice Department acts like Trump’s personal lawyer
The second arm of the Trump pincer movement to try to put the Epstein saga in the past came from the Justice Department.
Only two weeks ago, the FBI and the DOJ declared in their memo that “we did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
Yet on Tuesday morning, Blanche announced that he’d test that proposition by visiting Maxwell.
“Justice demands courage,” Blanche wrote on X, insisting that “no lead is off limits.” In a statement posted by Attorney General Pam Bondi on social media, Blanche added that if Maxwell “has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.”
The latest gambit may just be an attempt to create a splash that MAGA activists concerned with the case might accept as transparency. But it is fraught with political and even legal risks for the Justice Department.
And like Trump’s previous attempts to douse the scandal, it seems already to have failed in its primary objective.
“Seems like a massive cope,” far-right activist Laura Loomer, said in a text to CNN. “Why didn’t they ask to meet with her before the memo was released on 4th of July weekend when they essentially said the case would be closed? Seems like this should have already taken place,” Loomer said.
The possibility that the approach to Maxwell is motivated by more than a political public relations exercise must also be considered. She has an incentive to offer the White House what it wants — information that could put the focus of the spotlight on somebody else.
“There is every reason to think she would give false testimony,” Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor, told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “She has no fear of giving false testimony because otherwise she is going to be spending until she’s 75 years old in prison. The only other choice is if she maybe gives the kind of testimony she thinks the White House wants to hear, then she maybe can get off.”
The idea that Maxwell is holding something back belies both the recent Justice Department memo and a wide-ranging prosecution against her that started with charges during the first Trump administration and ended in a conviction and a 20-year prison sentence during the Biden administration.
An obvious approach for Maxwell’s lawyers would be to seek to secure concessions, perhaps a shortening or a commutation of her sentence, in return for information she might provide. Jeremy Saland, a former Manhattan prosecutor, paraphrased what her counsel might request on “CNN News Central” on Tuesday: “Get me my out. Give me an opportunity.”
Still, if Maxwell did have information implicating others in Epstein’s alleged crimes, it’s unclear why she did not offer it during her own prosecution, when she might have been able to save herself.
Of course, by the time she was found guilty in 2021, Epstein was gone, and the value of testimony she might have been able to provide against him as a cooperating witness was moot.
Six years after his death, however, the political implications of the hideous crimes of which he was accused are growing uncontrollably.
