Trump Finds Another Way to Take Revenge on Murdoch for Epstein Letter

In retaliation for reporting on Donald Trump’s relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, the White House is ousting The Wall Street Journal from the press pool for the president’s upcoming trip to Scotland.

Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement Monday that no publication is “guaranteed special access to cover President Trump in the Oval Office, aboard Air Force One, and in his private workspaces,” according to Politico. “Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board. Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”

Leavitt is, of course, referring to the Journal’s recent bombshell report that, in 2003, Trump sent a lewd 50th birthday card to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump denies the veracity of the letter and is meritlessly suing the paper over its report—further stoking the ongoing firestorm over the administration’s perceived lack of transparency surrounding the case of the late financier and sex criminal.

Politico reports that the White House declined to comment on whether the Journal’s removal from the press pool would be permanent. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time Trump punished a publication by restricting its ability to cover his administration. After all, his ban on the Associated Press for failing to change its style guide to ratify his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America” remains in effect.

Be it in retaliating against publications deemed insufficiently friendly, seizing control of the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association, or altering the makeup of the press room such that administration officials receive more questions from unctuous right-wing media groups, Trump’s White House appears as hell-bent as ever on defanging the press of its ability to function as a watchdog of the government.

Donald Trump is letting his underlings take the fall for the administration’s seismic Epstein scandal.

Facing enormous pressure from his base last week, Trump ordered the Justice Department to release additional documents pertaining to its investigation into Epstein. The White House did not specify at the time 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.”

But by Monday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was deflecting questions to the subordinate agencies for updates on the case.

“Why doesn’t the president just order the FBI to release the full Epstein files and just get it all out there?” a reporter asked Leavitt in a gaggle outside the White House.

“The president has said if the Department of Justice and the FBI want to move forward with releasing any credible evidence, they should do so. As to why they have not, you should ask the FBI about that,” Leavitt said, directing journalists to FBI Director Kash Patel.

Trump is, apparently, happy to let his Justice Department chief, Attorney General Pam Bondi, take the blame, suddenly reversing course on his fervent defense of Bondi in the weeks since her own agency issued a memo contradicting her on the existence of the pedophilic sex trafficker’s so-called “client list.”

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

But 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.”

And more details are emerging: Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin challenged the administration last week regarding its “chaotic” review of tens of thousands of documents related to the Epstein investigation, accusing Bondi of pressuring FBI staff to flag and then cover up mentions of Trump in the records.

Minnesota state Senator Nicole Mitchell announced Monday that she plans to resign, just days after she was convicted of felony burglary. 

Mitchell’s resignation will leave the Senate tied between Republicans and Democrats until Governor Tim Walz  calls a special election, putting the state Democratic Party’s majority in jeopardy unless they win it. Mitchell said she plans to step down by August 4. 

Mitchell was found guilty on Friday for first-degree burglary and possession of burglary tools for breaking into her stepmother’s home last April. The situation surrounding her arrest is bleak. While she initially maintained her innocence, she later admitted that she broke into her stepmother’s home to retrieve some of the belongings of her late father, like a flannel shirt. Mitchell told officers that her stepmother, who has Alzheimer’s, cut off communication with her after her father’s death.  

“I have never done anything like this,” she said while being arrested.  “I just wanted to get a couple of my dad’s mementos.” 

“I know I did something bad,” she said later. She faces up to 20 years in prison. Mitchell’s sentencing has not been scheduled yet. 

The Congressional Budget Office released its final cost estimate for Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill Monday, finding that the law will add a whopping $3.4 trillion to the national deficit over the next decade and knock millions of Americans off of Medicaid.

“That increase in the deficit is estimated to result from a decrease in direct spending of $1.1 trillion and a decrease in revenues of $4.5 trillion,” according to the CBO’s report. This was a marked increase from the CBO’s January estimate that the national budget would increase the deficit by only $2.7 trillion by 2035.

The CBO also predicted that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” now signed into law, will leave an estimated 10 million more people without health insurance in 2034.

Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the American Center for Progress, wrote in a post on X that the budget would strip away roughly $900 billion in Medicaid funding over the next decade, the largest cuts ever to that program.

Trump had repeatedly vowed that he wouldn’t touch Medicaid funding, and one Republican lawmaker was forced to alert the president that the health insurance program was indeed the target of massive cuts contained in his own bill to fund tax breaks for the rich.

Trump’s budget has also set in motion $187 billion in cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the CBO found that the provision requiring states to match SNAP funds would “impose the largest intergovernmental mandates.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s dynamic estimate suggests that, with interest, the bill will add a whopping $4 trillion to the debt. CRFB president Maya MacGuineas released a statement following the CBO’s final tally.*

“Yes, we should expect a shorter-term economic sugar high as stimulus makes its way through the economy. But modelers from across the ideological spectrum universally agree that any sustained economic benefits are likely to be modest, or negative, and not one serious estimate claims this bill will improve our fiscal situation,” she said. “Rather, positive growth effects are likely to be swamped by the effects of higher debt and interest rates.”

* This story previously misstated the impact of the bill on the national debt.

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.”