FBI’s Process to Check Epstein Files for Trump Mentions Was Pure Chaos

Analysts tasked to review the Epstein files allege that there was a “log” to track mentions of Donald Trump.

Allison Gill, a legal analyst known for her work covering Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump, reported Sunday that some of the 1,000 personnel from the Information Management Division and the FBI New York field office who were instructed to review documents pertaining to child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein noticed Trump’s name in the fold. Anonymous sources told Gill that a “log” related to Trump’s repeat mentions was drafted.

The liberal legal blogger had put out a call on social media hoping to interview former analysts and, within “24 hours,” she said she “received several messages.”

“Individual analysts were told to flag mentions of Trump by document and page number by logging them in an Excel spreadsheet, then they’d hand in their spreadsheet at the end of their (sometimes 24 or even 48-hour) shift,” Gill wrote, underscoring that agents were directed not to flag Trump “until later in a process that began mid-March.”

Analysts that spoke with Gill alleged that the process was “chaotic,” with instructions and orders “constantly changing,” even on a daily basis.

“One person I spoke to on the condition of anonymity said that many agents spent more time waiting for new instructions than they did processing files,” Gill wrote.

She noted that, due to the crazed nature of the operation, the files were stored on a “shared drive” that anyone within the division could access, with the “usual permission restrictions” not in place.

“This left the Epstein and Maxwell files open to viewing by a much larger group of people than previously thought,” Gill wrote.

Staff were additionally instructed that Attorney General Pam Bondi would have sole discretion over what would be released to the public.

Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin challenged the administration last week about the operation. In a letter addressed to Bondi on Friday, Durbin accused the Justice Department chief of pressuring FBI staff 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 said.

Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times; Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday; and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

After defending Bondi for several weeks, deriding his Epstein-conscious supporters as “stupid,” and claiming that there was no evidence of Epstein’s so-called “client list,” Trump now seems content with allowing his attorney general to take the fall for the cataclysmic fiasco.

“One thing that’s been clear is his feelings about it,” an unnamed White House official told NBC News. “This now resides within the DOJ.”

Hunter Biden has some choice words for the celebrities and commentators who helped cast doubt on his father Joe Biden’s fitness for office. In an interview with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan released Monday—the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race—the majority of Hunter Biden’s venom was directed toward George Clooney.

Biden railed against the actor for his July 2024 New York Times op-ed urging Joe Biden to bow out, which the younger Biden described as misleading and an attempt to “cut the knees out from a sitting president.”

Hunter Biden also suggested Clooney had harbored ill-will toward Joe Biden because the then president said he would not act on the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a warrant that the actor’s wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, played a key role in bringing about.

After Callaghan shared a story of his own, alleging that Clooney had influenced fellow actor Jack Black to separate from his bandmate, Kyle Gass, for joking about the July 2024 attempt on Trump’s life, Hunter Biden cut in, saying, “Fuck him! Fuck him, fuck him and everybody around him.”

Biden said that Clooney is “not a fucking actor” but “a brand,” continuing sarcastically, “And by the way, and God bless him, you know what? He supposedly treats his friends really well. He buys them things, and he’s got a really great place in Lake Como, and he’s great friends with Barack Obama.

“Fuck you! What do you have to do with fucking anything? Why do I have to fucking listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full-page ad in the fucking New York Times to undermine the president?” Biden continued, before taking aim at others who encouraged Biden to drop out in 2024.

Among other barbs, he said that Democratic strategist James Carville “hasn’t won a race in 40 fucking years”; that former Obama adviser David Axelrod “had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama, not because of fucking David Axelrod”; and that the Pod Save America hosts “were junior fucking speechwriters on Barack Obama’s Senate staff, who have been dining out on the relationship with him for years, making millions of dollars.”

“They’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anybody in history, and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever run,” Biden said.

Shortly thereafter, Callaghan brought up CNN host Jake Tapper, who co-authored the 2025 book Original Sin about the “cover-up” of Joe Biden’s “decline.” Biden said Tapper “has the smallest audience on cable news” and that his “ratings just went to shit” after releasing the book, which he claimed was motivated in no small part by personal animus. “You know, like Jesus Christ, Jake, grow the fuck up.”

A federal judge compared Donald Trump to Henry II for his blatant efforts to punish his administration’s critics.

While overseeing a lawsuit Monday concerning the Trump administration’s crackdown on noncitizens’ pro-Palestinian speech, U.S. District Judge Willliam Young referred to the twelfth-century English king while mulling whether the president’s penchant for publicizing his every personal problem ever inspired his underlings to take action.

Young cited Henry II’s famous line, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The offhand remark led errant knights to murder Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who’d sought to increase the power of the Catholic Church.

Trump “doesn’t have errant knights, but he’s got Stephen Miller,” Young quipped, according to Politico’s senior legal correspondent Kyle Cheney.

Young pointed out that whenever the president had a problem with someone, especially in government, that person tended to find themselves facing a spate of problems they hadn’t had before. For example, after Trump had his explosive feud with Elon Musk, the government began to review its contracts with SpaceX. After beefing for months with Senator Adam Schiff, last week, the president accused him of “mortgage fraud” and said he should “pay the price of prison.”

Young also questioned Trump’s motor-mouthed attitude, while his administration appeared intent on violating the First Amendment.

“The president is a master of speech and certainly brilliantly uses his right to free speech,” said Young. “Whether he recognizes or not whether other people have any right to free speech is questionable.”

Last week, Young heard testimony from four veteran officers from the Department of Homeland Security who recounted their superiors’ unusual requests to arrest green card holders and noncitizen academics who had committed no crime.

Republicans are still doing everything they can to help Trump avoid answering any more questions about Jeffrey Epstein.

The House GOP is delaying, perhaps indefinitely, its own nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents. The resolution would do nothing to actually force the DOJ to follow through on this request, but even that is apparently too much for House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has delayed the vote to give his party more time to control the narrative and weather the blowback it’s received from Democrats and MAGA loyalists alike.

Johnson will not bring the bill to a vote before August recess, if at all, according to Politico’s sources.

If Johnson and House Republican leadership really cared about transparency and truth on Epstein, they’d simply bring the bipartisan resolution led by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna to a vote. But they won’t, because they care more about protecting Trump than keeping promises. And the backlash continues.

“If you tell the base of people, who support you, of deep state treasonous crimes, election interference, blackmail, and rich powerful elite evil cabals, then you must take down every enemy of The People. If not. The base will turn and there’s no going back,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a hard-line MAGA conspiracy theorist, wrote on X Monday in reference to the GOP’s dawdling pace on the Epstein files. “Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.”

Federal immigration officials are looking for their own path away from the Trump administration.

Veronica Cardenas, a former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor, told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale.

“I have been contacted by people on the inside, stating, ‘How did you leave?’ and ‘What process did that take?’” Cardenas said.

“Even at the time that I left, people were, number one, surprised—because when you join the government, people believe that there’s this sort of trajectory to it. When you leave, it does catch people off guard,” she continued. “I think people are going through that struggle, and what I would say to them is that your voice has so much power. You don’t have to do things that are unjust or wrong. Believe in yourself, step out of that.”

Although President Donald Trump has heaped endless praise on the federal deportation agency, ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable, forced to primarily detain noncriminal immigrants in order to meet their quota of 3,000 arrests per day, in line with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s demands.

Speaking to her own experience exiting the agency, Cardenas said that taking the jump to leave boils down to a “moral conflict.”

“We all take oaths, right? When we step into that job, we are taking an oath to protect the Constitution and to follow the rule of law,” Cardenas told MSNBC. “And then when you get into that space, and you’re looking at these decisions that are being made, and the way that they’re being made: People are being harmed, people are dying in ICE detention, in custody.

“You have this conflict with yourself: ‘These laws cannot be right, and I don’t want to enforce it anymore,’” Cardenas told the network. The former assistant chief counsel then underscored that institutional change against America’s immigration is “not coming from the inside” but the outside.