State Department Cuts Key Office Amidst Raging Epstein Files Outcry

While Donald Trump tries to completely dismiss Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex ring scandal as a Democratic “scam,” his administration has quietly axed a key office related to investigating human trafficking.

The White House hacked 1,353 positions from the State Department on Friday, gutting parts of the agency that don’t align with MAGA values, reported Mother Jones. Those include offices focused on promoting democracy, ending genocide, quelling political extremism, and combating human trafficking.

Employees at the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, known as the TIP Office, believed that they would be spared from State Secretary Marco Rubio’s cuts, which were permitted by the Supreme Court last week after months-long delays. They were under the impression that their office would be folded into the Office for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. They were wrong: half of the office’s full-time civil and foreign service employees were effectively terminated by reduction-in-force notices Friday.

The cuts reduced the office to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months ago, thanks to Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, according to Mother Jones.

“Everyone was caught off guard,” one source familiar with the cuts told the magazine.

“The sheer number of cuts has really decimated the office,” they continued, underscoring the enormous brain drain and loss of expertise and international connections that the cuts will induce. “That takes years to build up. It’s not like you can just reassign a few people in the office and somehow it’s going to work.”

But the Trump administration has defended the cuts. A State Department representative justified dismissing federal employees en masse on the basis that “the world has changed.”

“As we looked comprehensively across the Department, we saw that many of these offices had served an outdated purpose, had strayed from their original purpose, or were simply duplicative,” the spokesperson told Mother Jones.

Trump and his associates have ideated paring down the federal workforce since he was on the campaign trail, with details of diminishing the executive branch explicitly laid out in Project 2025. Trump appealed to fiscal conservatives to advance the cuts, claiming that his administration was focused on driving down the federal budget in order to reduce the deficit.

But that has not been the case. Instead, Trump pushed several exorbitantly expensive policies in his “big, beautiful bill,” including a whopping tax cut for the wealthiest individuals in America at cost to the middle and lower classes that is estimated to add trillions to the budget.

By and large, Americans are dumping Donald Trump’s policies.

Within the first seven months of his second term, Trump has managed to add trillions to the deficit, eviscerate agencies like the Education Department, rattle the economy, shake America’s strongest alliances, develop concentration camps for his sweeping deportation program, and strip popular social programs such as Medicaid from millions of Americans.

But despite following through on his campaign promises, Trump has failed to earn majority support for any major issue, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research published Thursday.

Approximately half of U.S. adults—49 percent—believe that Trump’s policies have “done more to hurt” them than help them since he returned to the White House, according to the survey. Twenty-two percent of that group reported that Trump’s policies have not made much of a difference in their lives, while just 27 percent—little more than a quarter—of the polled population responded that Trump had actually helped them.

“As it sits today, I don’t know his policies have made much of a difference in my day-to-day life,” Landon Lindemer, a 29-year-old logistics manager from suburban Atlanta who voted for Trump three times, told The Associated Press.

Public polling on Trump’s handling of several key issues produced similar results to his overall job performance rating, which sits at around 40 percent. Trump failed to accrue more than 50 percent support on any topic, including immigration, which has historically been one of his strongest polling issues. Just 43 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s immigration policies, compared to 49 percent who said as much in March.

Support also waned for the president’s federal spending habits: weeks after Trump forced through his “big, beautiful bill,” just 40 percent of Americans said they approved of Trump’s government spending, a six percent drop compared to those who felt that way four months ago.

Trump’s approval ratings on the economy, however, have remained relatively stagnant, with four in 10 Americans approving of Trump’s performance on the key factor.

Timothy Dwyer, a 26-year-old self-described independent with conservative leanings based in Dyersburg, Tennessee, told the AP that Trump’s plan tariffs have “really sucked.”

“He’s turned us into a toilet and has absolutely made us the laughing stock of the world,” Dwyer told the newswire.

President Trump is bringing Juul back.

After a federal ban in 2022 kneecapped the popular vape company, the Food and Drug Administration, under the watch of MAHA Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is now moving to loosen regulations and approving its full return to the domestic e-cigarette market, according to The Wall Street Journal. The FDA has authorized Juul’s original vaporizer, as well as its tobacco and menthol-flavored cartridges, according to sources who spoke with the Journal. The decision means the agency believes the company provides greater benefits to adult smokers than any harm to general public health.

Former President Joe Biden’s FDA briefly banned Juul from U.S. markets in 2022 due to its failure to provide the government with sufficient health and safety information. The agency later rescinded the ban, although it still dealt significant damage to the company’s profit and reputation.

The FDA has not yet publicly commented on the news of Juul’s reauthorization, nor has RFK Jr.

But now, the iconic flash-drive shaped e-cigarette that rose to prominence with teens and young adults during Trump’s first term is back on the streets.

A resurfaced video of a younger White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller shows the president’s ghoulish policy adviser raving that “torture is a celebration of life.”

In a video dated 2003, 17-year-old Miller sits backward on a school bus speaking about the United States’ invasion of Iraq.

“To the issue of the Iraqi civilians, I think that as many of them should survive as possible, because the goal of any military conflict is to kill as few people as possible,” Miller said.

“But as for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen, I think the ideal solution would be to cut off their fingers.”

“I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely, we’re not a barbaric people, we respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is a celebration of life and human dignity,” he continued, as teenagers off screen burst into laughter.

“We need to remember that as we enter these very dark and dangerous times in the next century. And I only hope that many of my peers and people who will be leading this country will appreciate the value and respect that torture shows towards other cultures,” Miller said.

Twenty-three years later, Miller is a central figure leading the United States, and his inhumane immigration policies have marked the way for hundreds of people to be detained in tortuous conditions and deported to dangerous third countries and foreign gulags.

Speaking to Vice in 2017, former White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed the video as being inauthentic.

“This is clearly a sketch comedy routine performed by teenagers and for teenagers as part of a video yearbook,” she said. “This teenage skit does not reflect any policy position, past or present, held by Stephen Miller. This is another comical overreach by the media.”

But there’s plenty of reasons to consider Miller’s heinous statements legitimate.

Miller was raised in California, where his “evolving political views could not have been more at odds with those of progressive, inclusive Santa Monica, a fact in which he delighted,” wrote Vanity Fair special correspondent William D. Cohan in 2017 after Miller had helped craft the Trump administration’s travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries.

Miller’s former classmates recalled that he would challenge Latino students to speak English and loudly opposed putting student announcements in multiple languages—an attitude that mirrors the Trump administration’s recent policy to end all multi-lingual services purporting to promote the use of English.

In 2002, Miller wrote a whiny op-ed for the Santa Monica Lookout, railing against the “political correctness” he believed had taken over his school, and declaring that “Osama Bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School.”

Once a wildly conservative wunderkind, now simply a seething racist, it seems that Miller hasn’t changed at all.

One of Donald Trump’s former employees is drawing a line connecting Jeffrey Epstein and the real estate mogul.

The former president and chief operating officer of Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, Jack O’Donnell, told CNN Wednesday that he once had to reprimand Trump for bringing a 19-year-old into the casino with the child sex trafficker in tow.

The incident occurred while O’Donnell was atop the casino, between 1987 and 1990, according to the former C-suite executive.

“He frequently came down to Atlantic City, the two of them, to attend special events,” O’Donnell told the network. “In my mind, it was his best friend, you know, from really the time I was there for four years.”

Host Erin Burnett then rolled a 2019 clip of Trump in which the 45th president denied reported ties between himself and Epstein, claiming that he only knew the New York financier “like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” and that he was “not a fan” of Epstein’s.

But O’Donnell said that didn’t square with what he witnessed between the pair during his time running the popular casino.

“One incident that I think kind of proves their closeness and how much they hung out together—one time, a Monday morning, I came in and the commission was waiting, the inspectors were waiting in my office, and Donald and Jeffrey had come into the casino in the wee hours of Sunday morning, 1:00, 1:30 in the morning,” O’Donnell told CNN.

“You know, two buddies, they had three women with them, and the commission was waiting for me because they had determined that the women that they brought down were underaged to be in the casino,” O’Donnell continued. “And when I asked them how they knew that, by the way, one of them was the number three-ranked tennis player in the world, okay, and this guy happened to be a tennis fan, and he said, ‘Jack, I know she’s 19 years old.’”

The commission effectively gave Trump a free pass that night, deciding not to fine him or the casino for bringing someone underaged into the casino, O’Donnell recalled. But in turn, O’Donnell had to “read [Trump] the Riot Act.”

“I had to call him and say, ‘Look, they’ve given you a break this time, but if this happens again, the fine is gonna be substantial and it’s gonna be on your head,’” O’Donnell said. “And oh, by the way, it’s not gonna look good, you and this guy Epstein, coming down here with these young women.”

O’Donnell said he told Trump at the time that he shouldn’t be “hanging out with” Epstein.

O’Donnell further claimed that the two New York socialites must have been close to hop on a helicopter together to fly down to Atlantic City.

“They were pretty good buddies,” O’Donnell alleged.

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” And a YouGov/Economist poll conducted earlier this week found that the majority of Americans—67 percent, including 59 percent of self-identified Trump voters—believed that the Trump administration is “covering up evidence relating to the Epstein case.”

High-profile conservatives, including Elon Musk, have speculated that the administration’s continued delay in releasing the Epstein case files is due to the fact that Trump himself might be mentioned in the documents.