FBI Told to Flag Mentions of Trump in Epstein Files, Dem Senator Says

Dick Durbin is leading the Senate Judiciary Committee in an effort to receive more transparency regarding the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files, particularly an order from Attorney General Pam Bondi for FBI agents to “flag” any mention they made of President Trump.

In a letter addressed to Bondi on Friday, Durbin wrote: “According to information my office received, you then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline.”

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned,” he added.

There was likely something for those agents to flag, given Trump’s well-documented relationship with the defamed sex trafficker. There’s the 2002 New York magazine quote where Trump referred to Epstein, his friend of “15 years,” as a “terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side.” And there was the recent Wall Street Journal report that showed Trump writing a strange birthday message to Epstein in 2006, with the closing line “may every day be another wonderful secret.”

But what else was flagged under Bondi’s watch, and what happened to it? Durbin’s report asks just that:

Why were personnel told to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned?

1. Please list all political appointees and senior DOJ officials involved in the decision to flag records in which President Trump was mentioned.

2. What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?

Trump’s rollout of the Epstein files has been so disorderly that it has Democrats and the most hardcore MAGA loyalists asking the exact same question: What is the truth about Epstein?

The due date for Durbin and the committee’s request is August 1. Trump and Bondi have yet to comment.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says that Americans should expect future natural disasters to be handled similarly to the recent deadly flooding in Texas—and no, she wasn’t being ironic. 

During a press conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Thursday, Noem was in denial about just how badly she’d managed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to flooding in Texas earlier this month. 

“What you saw happen in Texas was much more how FEMA will look in the future. It won’t look like the response to [Hurricane] Katrina, or the response to even [Hurricane] Helene, and what happened in North Carolina, where people waited weeks and weeks and months and months for help,” she said.  

But Noem had severely botched FEMA’s Texas response by failing to renew contracts with companies staffing FEMA call centers, resulting in a majority of calls going unanswered for days as the flood waters raged. The secretary dismissed the reporting as “fake news.”

Noem also reportedly delayed FEMA’s initial response by instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. FEMA officials, who were unaware of the new rule, didn’t receive Noem’s go-ahead for 72 hours. 

Last month, Donald Trump said he plans to “phase out” FEMA after this year’s hurricane season, and future disbursements would come straight from him. “We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here, could be homeland security,” Trump said at the time. Clearly, putting Noem in charge of personally approving decisions in a disaster comes at a cost, and the Trump administration’s mismanagement of relief is more far-reaching than just the flooding in Texas. 

Twenty Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration Wednesday, claiming that the White House had acted illegally when cancelling FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which funds infrastructure projects such as levees, shelters, and seismic testing to protect people against extreme weather. 

The most radical thing about Elon Musk this month is his staggering unpopularity.

Public opinion of the world’s richest man fell by 66 points since his foray into politics, according to a CNN poll released Thursday.

Musk was the most popular person according to a Bloomberg poll in June 2016—but nearly a decade later, his ratings have tanked. This month, just 23 percent of those polled viewed Musk favorably, with 60 percent having an unfavorable opinion of him, making net favorable opinion of the conservative tech tycoon -37 points, CNN reported. Much of that has happened over the past four months, during which his favorability ratings with the GOP have sunk by 55 points.

His sagging numbers have affected the viability of Musk’s third party dreams: Americans report that while they want a third party as an alternative to Democrats and Republicans, they decidedly do not want one started by Musk. Just 22 percent of voters actually favored a Musk-run third party, while 74 percent opposed it, according to CNN.

Other recent reports found similar results. A YouGov poll released Monday found that while nearly half of surveyed Americans—45 percent—felt that a successful third party was imperative for the country, just 11 percent of those polled said they would support Musk’s.

While Americans have long complained of red tape and waste at the upper echelons of the federal government, they did not enjoy the metaphorical “chainsaw” that Musk’s DOGE took to federal agencies and their services. Americans especially did not like Musk’s involvement, a New York Times review of several surveys reported in April.

Musk’s place in American politics has become particularly tenuous since he publicly severed ties with Donald Trump last month, trying (and failing) to kill the president’s “big, beautiful bill” and accusing the president of being involved with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Despite Musk threatening to primary all Republicans who supported the budget bill, he was unable to sway a single vote.

President Trump’s followers offered a measly defense against The Wall Street Journal’s exposé of the president’s close relationship with defamed pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. 

The Journal reported that Trump wrote a 50th birthday letter to Epstein in which he used the word “enigma.” 

“Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?” Trump wrote. 

The MAGA base is claiming that Trump would never use a word like enigma. 

“I asked Grok to search every record of Trump speaking or writing to determine if he has ever used the word “enigma” before, and Grok says there is no record of him ever saying or speaking the word,” wrote Sean Davis, founder of The Federalist, a conservative news outlet. 

Billionaire Bill Ackman also chimed in. 

“I find it to be an enigma that Donald Trump would use the word enigma,” he wrote.  

Grok, Ackman, Davis, and others across MAGA claiming the same thing are very loud and very wrong. There is video footage of Trump saying the word they claim he’s too real (or maybe too stupid?) to use. 

“Carson’s an enigma to me,” Trump said at a rally in 2015, using the word with confidence when describing then-candidate Ben Carson. “Carson’s an enigma.” 

Trump didn’t just use the word correctly, he used it twice in that one speech. The word also appears multiple times in Trump’s books.

Trump earlier tried to discredit the Journal’s report by saying he would never, ever doodle. (Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein allegedly contained a drawing of a nude woman.)

“I never wrote a picture in my life,” Trump said. 

That was also easily debunked, as Trump has made countless sketches that have been auctioned off for thousands of dollars. It’s honestly surprising how weak Trump and MAGA’s excuses are, especially given how indignant and upset he and his inner circle have been acting since the article dropped. He said he doesn’t draw, but there have been multiple drawings of his on the market. His followers say he wouldn’t say those words, but he’s on camera saying them. He would have been better off just outright denying the letter, rather than trying to pick specific parts of the report to rebuff.

Donald Trump’s threats to sue The Wall Street Journal have extended to the daily’s owner, Rupert Murdoch.

The president has promised to sue the newspaper over its latest report that Trump penned a cozy and salacious letter to his “pal” Jeffrey Epstein for the child sex trafficker’s 50th birthday. By Friday, that scheme had extended to include Murdoch, the multibillionaire conservative media mogul who Trump claimed he would force to “testify” in the lawsuit.

“I look forward to getting Rupert Murdoch to testify in my lawsuit against him and his ‘pile of garbage’ newspaper, the WSJ. That will be an interesting experience!!!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The Journal reported that Trump wrote the letter at Ghislaine Maxwell’s request, as part of a compilation of messages celebrating the glitterati socialite in 2003. Other notable figures accused of being involved in the project include Harvard University professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who defended Epstein during his first criminal trial, and billionaire Leslie Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret and co-founder of Bath & Body Works, Inc. Dershowitz did not deny to the Journal that he may have taken part in the collaboration.

“A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret,” Trump concluded his letter to Epstein, according to the Journal.

The Journal reported that Trump’s letter was framed by a crude drawing of a nude woman, done in Sharpie. His signature on the note was scrawled between the woman’s legs and resembled pubic hair.

“The Wall Street Journal printed a FAKE letter, supposedly to Epstein,” Trump posted to Truth Social Thursday shortly after the report’s publication. “These are not my words, not the way I talk. Also, I don’t draw pictures. I told Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper. Thank you for your attention to this matter!  DJT”

Facing enormous pressure from his base, Trump ordered the Justice Department to release additional documents pertaining to its investigation into Epstein. The White House did not specify if the documents would be made public, and did not explain the sudden contradiction after Trump had spent the better part of the last week insisting that the Epstein fiasco was a Democrat-invented “hoax.”