Oath Keepers Founder Pardoned by Trump Warns Him Over Epstein Files

Stewart Rhodes is as dyed-in-the-wool MAGA as it gets.

The Yale-educated founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group embraced Donald Trump in 2016—sharing his animus toward the supposed “deep state” cabal controlling Washington—then, naturally, took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. (“We should have brought rifles.… I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost,” he told fellow militia members days later.) Trump, in turn, commuted his 18-year sentence.

Now, Rhodes has joined the ranks of MAGA faithful urging the seemingly reluctant president to provide full transparency on the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Justice Department and FBI earlier this month roiled his base with a memo dismissing conspiracy theories alleging that Epstein had kept a client list and did not commit suicide in prison. The president has, in recent days, taken to calling what was once a cause célèbre in Trumpworld a Democratic “hoax.”

At a meeting of the anti-government True Texas Project last week, per video obtained by The Daily Beast, Rhodes expressed his disappointment that Trump was, by his reckoning, being led astray by the deep state.

“I believe 90 percent of his own base understands that Epstein was up to something, and we know that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rhodes said.

“It’s really disheartening to see President Trump just declare that to be a hoax. I don’t think it is. And I think it’s going to cause him trouble in his own base. It already is,” he continued, per the Beast. “Someone in his circle has convinced him that, ‘Oh this is like Hunter Biden’s laptop story.’ It’s not. This is the deep state’s dirty laundry in the deep state’s greatest Achilles’ heel.

“Their job now is to distract him, run the clock out until he’s gone without him actually going after the root of the deep state, the heart and soul of it,” Rhodes went on. “And I do believe the heart and soul of the deep state is all the dirty laundry that’s held in all those files in the FBI, CIA, NSA against all these political elites.”

Rhodes evidently maintains his faith in Trump as a noble crusader for the truth. In the comments reported by the Beast, he ignores the prospect that Trump’s foot-dragging on Epstein could, possibly, owe to the so-called Epstein files’ inclusion of embarrassing disclosures about the president—who, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased financier that new reporting is bringing more clearly into view.

Attributing Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt to divine intervention, Rhodes remarked, “God saved him for a purpose, and that purpose is to defeat the deep state. It’s not to make great trade deals. It’s not to have a great economy. It’s not any of that stuff. The real heart and soul of it is to defeat the deep state, because if he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be exponentially worse for all of us.”

He urged those in attendance to “keep pushing.”

Nearly three weeks of distraction and denial from President Trump have only raised more questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Epstein’s own brother Mark took to CNN to confirm what Trump wants everyone to forget: He and the pedophile financier were quite close.

“From what you know, from what you saw, how close was your brother to Donald Trump?” CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Mark Epstein on Tuesday. 

“They were very close. They were good friends,” Mark replied. “Jeffrey used to sometimes tell me things that Donald said that were funny. I know Donald was in Jeff’s office a lot back in the ’90s.… It’s documented that Jeff—Donald flew on Jeff’s plane a number of times. I don’t know if they ever checked, but I know Jeff flew in Donald’s plane also, I don’t know if they’ve ever looked at his flight logs. They were good friends.” 

This comes right as CNN released previously unseen images of Trump and Epstein from Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, a connection that was not previously public knowledge. 

Mark Epstein went on to tell Burnett that he had actually taken a flight with his brother and Trump. 

“A couple weeks or a week before that flight I was talkin’ to Jeffrey, and he told me that he was talkin’ to Donald and that he asked Donald, ‘How can you sleep with so many married women?’ And Donald’s answer was ‘because it’s so wrong.’ Now amongst guys that was a funny line, and then when we were on the plane … Jeffrey asked Donald the same question … so that I could hear Donald say it.… For Jeffrey to ask him that question, number one: He would have to know that Donald slept with a lot of married women, and he probably got that information from Donald.” 

“It implies a confidence,” Burnett interjected. 

“That’s not the kind of question you ask a casual acquaintance.… That’s a question that you ask a good friend that you can get away with asking those kinds of questions.”

Mark later said Epstein went on to say that the president is just “trying to cover his butt.”

Just two weeks ago, Trump was acting like he’d only heard of Jeffrey Epstein in passing. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey … Epstein?” he said, pausing as if the name was unfamiliar to him. Now it’s all but obvious that Trump was a confidant of the man responsible for victimizing over a thousand women and girls for years. Feigning ignorance and throwing your base unrelated bones doesn’t work as well when the evidence saying otherwise grows more damning by the day.  

The president’s reportedly close history with Jeffrey Epstein is becoming harder to refute.

CNN published videos and little-known photographs Tuesday of Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, proving that the pedophilic sex trafficker was in attendance at Trump’s ceremony at the Plaza Hotel. It was previously not widely known that Epstein was a guest at the wedding.

The network also found video footage of the two men laughing and chatting together ahead of a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event.

But when the network rang to inquire about the images, Trump exploded.

“We were not on the phone very long,” reporter Andrew Kaczynski told CNN host Erin Burnett. “I think our call was about 30 seconds or so. But when I asked him about the wedding photo, he said he sort of paused for a second and then said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’ before calling CNN ‘fake news’ and then hanging up on me.”

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, ferociously spit back at the network, decrying the images as “nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events.” He accused CNN of leveraging the images in its reporting to “disgustingly infer something nefarious.”

“The fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media,” Cheung told CNN.

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, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he knew Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

Donald Trump won’t stop lying about his dangerous plan to decrease drug prices in the stupidest way possible.

“This is something that nobody else can do,” Trump said during a reception with members of Congress Tuesday night. “We’re gonna get the drug prices down. Not 30 or 40 percent, which would be great, not 50 or 60, no. We’re gonna get ’em down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.”

He bragged that he could use a “certain talent” to reach “numbers not even thought to be achievable.” If anything, the president’s certain talent is to offer hyperbole in place of actual policy.

Trump’s phony math didn’t stop there. “We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000 percent, by 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 700, 600; not 30 or 40 or 50 percent but numbers the likes of which you’ve never even dreamed of before,” he added later.

Is it all of those numbers? Is it any of them? In reality, the president’s disastrous tariff policies have threatened to send drug prices skyrocketing. A report commissioned in April by a group of pharmaceutical companies found that even a 25 percent tariff on pharmaceutical imports would raise drug costs by $51 billion annually. Trump’s latest proposal involves a 200 percent tariff on pharmaceuticals, with little concern for the Americans who need regular access to prescription medications.

On Tuesday, Trump also said that he would use import restrictions to force foreign drug suppliers to cut prices, which seems at odds with his own designs to boost domestic drug manufacturing.

The issue of prescription drug prices being nearly three times higher for Americans than consumers in the rest of the world is gravely serious, but the president has chosen to meet the moment with made-up statistics.

Trump has a penchant for inventing numbers to oversell his economic policies. He previously claimed that he’d already struck 200 trade deals—but he’s signed fewer than 10. And he won’t stop claiming that gas prices across the country have dipped under $2, when in reality, the lowest state average is $2.71 and the national average is over $3.

Columbia University just jeopardized the academic careers of dozens of its own students for protesting against Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

On Monday, more than 70 Columbia students were notified that they would be suspended, placed on probation, expelled, or even have their degrees revoked for taking part in an occupation of Butler Library in May. The students entered the library’s main room in protest, chanting slogans and occupying it for a teach-in in honor of Bassel al-Araj, a Palestinian activist assassinated by Israeli soldiers in 2017. Unidentified police officers physically clashed with the students until they started making mass arrests. 

“Columbia responded to the teach-in by illegally kettling and body slamming protesters who asked to leave, resulting in hospitalization of four students with concussions,” the Columbia University Apartheid and Divest group, or CUAD, wrote in a statement on Tuesday. 

This move comes as the university is completely bending the knee to Trump in order to restore $400 million in federal grants that the administration is withholding. It also comes just days after the university already ceded a major deal with the Trump administration to crack down on what the administration perceives as antisemitic activity on campus. The president spent months calling out the university, baselessly accusing student protesters of collaborating with Hamas, among other allegations. 

The university’s sanctions this week demand that students apologize for protesting if they want their punishment to be lightened. 

“The sanctions are believed to be part of a federal deal Columbia is about to announce that includes a formal partnership with the zionist Anti-Defamation League and an agreement to use the [International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s]  definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Israel with discrimination against Jews,” CUAD wrote in the same statement. “In collaboration with the Trump administration, Columbia’s Acting President and Board of Trustees Co-Chair, Claire Shipman, illegally restructured the University Judicial Board (UJB) and removed student members and faculty oversight to pursue exceptionally harsh sanctions against its own students. The UJB’s Rules Administrator, akin to a prosecutor, filed charges after protestors flooded Columbia’s largest library to share a syllabus and readings about al-Araj and demand Columbia divest from the Israeli war machine.” 

This is the same university that sold Mahmoud Khalil, one of its own graduates, out to ICE for simply being a politically active pro-Palestinain voice on campus. While devastating for these students, it’s unsurprising that the Ivy League institution would rather sacrifice students who are peacefully protesting to please the Trump administration. This was a heavily coordinated attack not only on free speech but on any criticism of Israel and the current destruction it’s leveled against Gaza for nearly three years now. And aside from caving to the Trump administration, the university has worked with Columbia Alumni for Israel, which is believed to rely on the shadowy blacklist Canary Mission to identify students to punish.

“Every university in Gaza has been destroyed. Hundreds of academics have been killed. Books and archives have been incinerated. Entire families have been erased from the civil registry. This is not a war. It is a campaign of erasure,” CUAD’s statement read. “We will not be deterred. We are committed to the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”