FBI’s Biggest Office Reduced to One Job: Redacting Epstein Files

The FBI’s New York field office normally handles counterintelligence, counterterrorism, public corruption, international drug trafficking, and financial crime investigations. Right now, though, it has been ordered to prioritize redacting sensitive information in the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Vanity Fair reports, citing multiple sources, that nearly a thousand agents, who normally work on national security issues in the bureau’s largest field office, are working night and day combing the documents instead of on their regular jobs.

“It’s literally all hands on deck,” one unnamed source told the magazine. “I even saw an agent walking in with a pillow.” One former agent called the situation “ludicrous.”

Trump said on the campaign trail last year that he’d consider releasing Epstein’s client list, which purportedly includes the names of rich and powerful people who participated in the disgraced financier’s sexual crimes. The administration’s release of “phase one” of the files on February 27, containing previously published information, enraged Trump’s supporters who were expecting the juicy stuff incriminating Democrats and liberals. Trump himself, however, showed up seven times in the released material.

Later, Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel complaining that she was told that the Justice Department had received all of the Epstein documents, only to find that the FBI’s New York office still had thousands of unreleased pages. Presumably, that’s what the agents in that office are currently working their way through and painstakingly redacting.

Bondi claimed earlier this month on Fox News that she was rushing to get a “truckload” of Epstein documents released to the public, which one longtime FBI agent told Vanity Fair didn’t make sense.

“There’s no master file in the New York office. That doesn’t exist,” the former agent said. ”There’s not some crusty agent with his feet on bankers’ boxes.”

What sensitive information could the FBI be redacting from the Epstein files? Bondi claims that any new redactions would only be to “protect grand jury information and confidential witnesses” as well as national security information. But Trump’s mention might be slowing things down, particularly if his relationship with Epstein was deeper than he has claimed. The Justice Department and FBI are now run by his loyalists, who very likely could be putting his interests ahead of the public’s.

Even the deep-red Wyoming constituents who booted out Liz Cheney are upset with the wanton way in which DOGE has gone about “eliminating fraud.”

“I’m a retired military officer.… At 18, I rose my hand to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic,” a woman said at Representative Harriet Hagemen’s town hall on Thursday. “I am still a Republican. I am—bless his heart—a Simpson Republican that believes in working together across the aisle,” she continued, referring to the recently deceased longtime Senate whip Alan Simpson from Wyoming.

“My question: Having looked at … DOGE … you are a lawyer, where is this fraud? What company, what organization, what personnel are we going after?”

“I’ll just start reading some of it, I’ll just start reading it right now if you’d like me to,” Hageman responded. “I’ll just focus on USAID spending right here.”

“I didn’t say spending, I said actual fraud!”

“This is what it is, this is the spending associated with the fraud. This is the fraud, spending is the fraud.… This is fraudulent spending,” Hageman retorted as the crowd yelled at her in disagreement.

The “fraud” that Hageman is referring to is money that was legally allocated by Congress for a variety of different programs like international aid and research grants. This is the language the Trump administration has adopted to make their federal purge seem like a positive thing. “Fraud” has been attributed to everything from contraceptives to Habitat for Humanity.

Elon Musk is paying Wisconsin residents $100 each to sign a petition denouncing “activist” judges, collecting troves of voter data in the final days before a crucial state Supreme Court election.

Donald Trump and the billionaire bureaucrat leading the Department of Government Efficiency have spent the last week railing against one federal judge who dared to question the administration’s deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members, who were transported to a prison in El Salvador without due process and in defiance of a federal court order.

Now Musk is attempting to artificially shift public opinion by circulating a petition against “activist” judges and offering compensation in return.

“By signing below, I’m rejecting the actions of activist judges who impose their own views and demanding a judiciary that respects its role—interpreting, not legislating,” the petition said, according to Axios.

Musk’s petition comes little over a week before Wisconsin’s Supreme Court election, in which Musk has already put a whopping $20 million behind conservative candidate Brad Schimel.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court is set to weigh questions on hot-button issues, including the use of voter drop boxes in elections, abortion access, and redrawing congressional maps. A Republican majority on the court could influence the outcome in any of these cases, which would have national repercussions.

While Musk won’t know how respondents to the petition answer, after they receive their $100 credit, Musk will walk away with their information and be able to contact them again in the future. Like, in the days before the election on April 1.

“No District Court Judge, or any Judge, can assume the duties of the President of the United States. Only Crime and Chaos would result. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday.

“Unlawful Nationwide Injunctions by Radical Left Judges could very well lead to the destruction of our Country! These people are Lunatics, who do not care, even a little bit, about the repercussions from their very dangerous and incorrect Decisions and Rulings,” he wrote in another post Thursday. He urged judges to stop placing injunctions on his potentially unlawful actions.

Donald Trump’s death knell to the Education Department isn’t likely to go over well with the American public.

The president stripped apart the centralized authority overseeing the American educational system on Thursday via executive order, marking the end of a 45-year-old institution. But hours after Trump signed the agency’s death certificate, even Fox News was sharing polls indicating that the vast majority of the country is unlikely to support the president’s sweeping move.

“Most voters oppose Trump’s efforts to reduce the number of government employees, changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and, ranking near the bottom in support: his campaign promise to close the Department of Education,” the network reported.

Fox also aired a full-screen of the company-hosted poll, published Thursday, which revealed 65 percent of respondents opposed the agency’s end. That number included 92 percent of Democrats, 81 percent of independent voters, and 33 percent of Republicans.

The same poll suggested that nearly seven in 10 Americans are concerned that Trump’s executive actions “may permanently alter the country’s system of checks and balances.”

The Department of Education has historically been responsible for approving, monitoring, and distributing federal financial aid, such as Pell Grants and other aid made available to the public via the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. It’s in charge of assessing and analyzing America’s K-12 systems, as well as aggregating data and research on American educational policies. The department also oversaw the implementation of Title IX and ensured that the American public had equal access to a valuable education.

It’s unclear what the future will look like for a college-going American public with such a massively diminished department.

The Education Department annually distributes $120.8 billion in grants and federal loans to college-bound students, according to the office of Federal Student Aid. The Department of Education was already the smallest Cabinet agency, with just over 4,000 employees. Its budget constituted roughly 4 percent of overall spending, costing American taxpayers $268 billion in 2024, just $14 billion more than it had when President Jimmy Carter brought it into existence in 1979.

After The New York Times reported Thursday that Elon Musk would be getting a secret Pentagon briefing on the potential for war with China the next day, the tech oligarch was livid.

Musk posted about the article on his X account early on Friday morning, including a screenshot of President Trump criticizing the article in his post and calling the Times “pure propaganda.”

“Also, I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” Musk threatened. “They will be found.”

The Times article in question infuriated the president, who rejected the report and claimed that while Musk was scheduled to visit the Pentagon Friday, China wasn’t on the agenda.

“[The Times] said, incorrectly, that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon tomorrow to be briefed on any potential ‘war with China.’ How ridiculous?’ China will not even be mentioned or discussed. How disgraceful it is that the discredited media can make up such lies. Anyway, the story is completely untrue!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also denied the report, with Parnell saying Musk was “just visiting” the Pentagon and Hegseth saying Musk’s meetings at the building will be “informal.” But after their denials, The Wall Street Journal corroborated the Times’s reporting.

Musk has many business interests in China, and depends on the Chinese market for his companies—a red flag for someone with a security clearance and billions of dollars in U.S. government contracts. On top of that, Musk is the world’s richest person and wields tremendous power within the Trump administration for someone whose official title is “senior adviser” to the president. Why then is he receiving top secret defense meetings?