Tag: law enforcement
'Liars And Deceivers!': MAGA Furious Over Trump's Fake 'Epstein Files' Release

'Liars And Deceivers!': MAGA Furious Over Trump's Fake 'Epstein Files' Release

After years of promising to release the information the federal government had on now-deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the Trump administration allegedly did so on Thursday by giving documents to a group of untrustworthy right-wing influencers who are famous for spreading disinformation and hate.

Trump-loving social media personalities Rogan O'Handley, Chaya Raichik, Liz Wheeler, Chad Prather, and Mike Cernovich were seen leaving the White House holding binders that said "The Epstein Files" on the cover. Some of them even posed for smiling, jubilant photos with the binders in hand.

No actual trustworthy sources were given access to the documents, which Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed in a Wednesday night appearance on Fox News would include flight logs with "a lot of names."

Meanwhile, the New York Post reported that the files that were released included information already publicly known.

From the Post’s report:

A source who has reviewed the files said the release spans more than 100 pages, including a list of contacts without further context.

The person said the unveiling was likely to be a “disappointment” to sleuths eager for bombshell new evidence about the billionaire pedophile’s connection to prominent political and business leaders.

Josh Gerstein, a respected legal reporter at Politico who broke the news that the Supreme Court was overturning Roe v. Wade, wrote that the binders given to the right-wing influencers were “theater.”

“These files are not classified. Never were. That's also not a proper declassification marking,” Gerstein wrote in a post on X.

Now, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel are trying to shift blame for the lack of information onto the FBI.

"Attorney General Pam Bondi REVEALS in a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel that the FBI is WITHHOLDING Epstein documents from her," right-wing personality and Russian propagandist Benny Johnson wrote in a post on X.

“We got the binder at noon. SDNY and FBI held back the real information and AG Bondi directed Kash Patel to start kicking ass. AG Bondi handed what she had. There was nothing martial. There was an embargo until after the UK ‘prime minster’ visit,” Cernovich wrote in a post on X.

The way the Trump administration handled the document release led to criticism even from MAGA personalities.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida, the Republican who chairs a supposed “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets,” expressed her anger in a post on X.

"I nor the task force were given or reviewed the Epstein documents being released today… A NY Post story just revealed that the documents will simply be Epstein's phonebook. THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR,” Luna raged. “GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR instead of leaking old info to press."

Meanwhile Laura Loomer, an unabashed bigot and Trump superfan who made news during the 2024 campaign when she was seen traveling with Trump, was skeptical in a post on X.

"I love President Trump. But, how embarrassing for the Trump admin that the release of the Epstein files has been FUMBLED by giving files regarding a landmark pedophile scandal to a group of 'influencers' instead of having an official agency release them,” she said. “Not a good look.”

Loomer also railed on the Trump administration.

She wrote in an all-caps screed on X:

THERE ARE NO EPSTEIN FILES!!!THE BINDERS ARE PROPS.
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE RIGHT WING PAID INFLUENCERS LIED TO ALL OF YOU TODAY!
THEY ENGAGED IN DECEPTION TO RUN COVER FOR PEDOPHILES!!!
THEY POSTED SELFIES WITH PROP BINDERS!
LIARS AND DECEIVERS

MAGA loyalists have been claiming for years that Trump would reveal the Epstein client list.

But they conveniently forget that Trump himself was buddies with the very wealthy financier/human trafficker, as evidenced by multiple photos of Trump and Epstein together.

And Trump even called Epstein a "terrific guy."

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in a 2002 interview with New York magazine. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Trump himself was even listed in publicly released documents from a 2015 defamation lawsuit filed by Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre.

According to documents unsealed from that lawsuit, Guiffre said in a deposition that she was “lured into working as a masseuse for Epstein when she was 17 and working as a spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida,” the New York Post reported.

It’s possible Trump doesn’t want the files released for that very reason.

In January, after he was unfortunately sworn in, Trump signed an executive order promising to release FBI files on John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., but conveniently left Epstein off the list.

Other high-profile Trump administration officials have also been linked to Epstein, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who flew on Epstein’s private jet twice.

During the 2024 campaign, Kennedy tried to defend his ties to Epstein by saying that he’s actually friends with lots of sexual predators—as if that was a defense.

“I mean, I knew Harvey Weinstein. I knew Roger Ailes. I knew—OJ Simpson came to my house. Bill Cosby came to my house,” Kennedy said.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Dan Bongino

Putting Dan Bongino In Top FBI Post Signals Trump's Real Agenda

The selection of right-wing podcaster Dan Bongino for a senior FBI role hammers home that President Donald Trump is eliminating the guardrails that prevented right-wing conspiracy theories becoming criminal prosecutions during his first term. It also shovels more dirt on the farcical idea that Trump and his allies want depoliticized law enforcement.

A regular pattern played out over Trump’s first term as the president sought to wield federal law enforcement as an extension of his will. Right-wing conspiracy theorists, typically led by Trump adviser and Fox News host Sean Hannity, would offer bogus claims that Trump’s foes had committed crimes. Then Trump, an inveterate Fox viewer, would publicly or privately demand investigations and often get them. But the probes would ultimately fall apart without significant charges after Trump’s own appointees — Republicans who nonetheless evinced some semblance of independence and professionalism — figured out there was nothing to them.

Trump’s second-term selections are intended to eliminate the disruptions caused by appointees with a higher priority than carrying out the president’s whims. They are sycophants who are zealously loyal to the president and some either previously worked as his personal lawyers or have long public records of calling for criminal investigations of his foes.

Trump said on Sunday that Bongino, who embarked on a career as a right-wing media commentator after serving in the New York Police Department and U.S. Secret Service and losing several congressional campaigns, will serve as deputy director of the FBI. Bongino worked as a Fox contributor and host before leaving in 2023 to focus on his eponymous podcast, which streams on Rumble and airs on Westwood One radio stations.

In announcing Bongino’s new role, Trump said the podcaster would help restore “Fairness” to the justice system. But Bongino is one of the last people you’d select for such a role if your intention was really to run a nonpartisan bureau: He is an inflammatory partisan who has declared that “owning the libs” is “my entire life right now” because they are “pure unadulterated evil" and has fawned over Trump as “an apex predator” and “the lion king.”

Bongino gained influence and an audience during Trump’s first term specifically because of his willingness to issue florid denunciations of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. On his NRATV show and in frequent guest appearances on Fox (particularly on Trump’s belovedFox & Friends and on Hannity’s show), Bongino described Mueller’s probe as “an obvious frame job and set-up” that is “designed to cover up for the misdeeds of the Obama administration” and called for the special counsel’s firing.

That left him well-positioned to jump to a Fox job in early 2019 amid NRATV’s collapse.

Bongino’s’s views of law enforcement weaponization seem entirely based on who is doing the weaponizing.

“The FBI is lost, it’s broken, irredeemably corrupt at this point,” Bongino said in 2022 after bureau agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home. “It’s way past time to clean this FBI house up. They have burned every last shred of faith and trust freedom-loving Americans had in it.”

“It's clear now we're living in the police state,” Bongino said after a federal grand jury handed down an indictment of Trump over his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. “The republic is now officially dead.”

But at the same time, Bongino said there should be “an FBI raid at the White House" to target then-President Joe Biden, whom he described as “the real criminal” based on fictitious right-wing corruption claims.

An inveterate conspiracy theorist, Bongino has also pontificated about the Democrats planning a coup in the lead-up to the 2020 election; said that election was marred by “unbelievably suspect behavior”; and suggested that pipe bombs planted near the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee on January 5, 2021, were an “inside job” and the FBI is withholding the perpetrator because the information would “blow up the entire January 6 insurrection narrative.”

After Trump returned to office in January, Bongino called for an investigation into “special tyrant” Jack Smith and urged the president to “set up a courtroom” in the White House and “start making judicial decisions.” Now he’ll be one of seniormost figures in federal law enforcement with a mandate to carry out such deranged ideas.

It’s unlikely Bongino will be hindered by the higher-ups Trump has installed.

Kash Patel, the Trump-appointed FBI director, said in a 2023 interview that a second Trump term would target “the conspirators, not just in government but in the media” who had “lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” The appendix of Patel’s 2023 book “names more than 50 current or former US officials that he claims are ‘members of the Executive Branch deep state,’ which he describes as a ‘dangerous threat to democracy,’” in what has been frequently referred to as an “enemies list.”

At the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi previously parlayed frequent Fox appearances defending Trump into a post on his first impeachment legal defense team. Her acting deputy, Emil Bove, previously represented Trump in state and federal prosecutions.

Meanwhile, Ed Martin, who will oversee major cases in the District of Columbia as its acting U.S. attorney, “was an organizer in the ‘Stop The Steal’ movement that falsely claimed the 2020 presidential election was rigged against Trump” and then “worked as a defense attorney for some people charged in the January 6 riot.”

Over the first month of the Trump administration, this new team has proved grim for the rule of law, with January 6 perpetrators pardoned en masse, top prosecutors and FBI leaders purged, and Justice Department lawyers resigning after receiving what they viewed as unacceptably partisan orders to dismiss charges or launch an investigation.

On Sunday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation Agents Association told its members that Patel had committed to selecting as his deputy “an on-board, active Special Agent as has been the case for 117 years” in order to preserve “operational expertise and experience, as well as the trust of our Special Agent population.” But Trump doesn’t care about any of that, and he announced hours later that Patel had picked Bongino, someone who lacks that experience but shares the president’s desire to punish his political enemies. And that means the months ahead will be worse.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Why Is Trump Pressing Romania To Release Accused Trafficker Andrew Tate?

Why Is Trump Pressing Romania To Release Accused Trafficker Andrew Tate?

Despite his repeated claims that he is in favor of “law and order,” Donald Trump’s administration is pressuring the Romanian government to roll back travel restrictions on right-wing influencer Andrew Tate, who has been accused of rape and human trafficking.

Tate is currently under house arrest following his 2023 arrest. Tate and his brother, Tristan, along with two other figures, have been accused of luring women to their home, forcing the women into debt, and pressuring them into filming pornographic scenes that were then shared online. They deny the charges.

The men are also facing similar charges in the United Kingdom.

The women who have made the allegations against Tate have spoken out against Trump’s efforts. Matthew Jury, the lawyer representing the four alleged victims, told the BBC they are “absolutely bewildered why the Trump administration has decided to interfere in this way.”

Tate is a self-described misogynist who sells instructional videos instructing men how to pick up women and has advised men to physically assault women who cheat and to force them into sex. He is one of the most prominent figures in the right-wing “manosphere” of content producers popular among conservative audiences.

He is also a Trump supporter. After the 2024 election, Tate praised Trump as a “hero” who “single handedly kept two evil war mongering she witches out of office [sic],” referring to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Kamala Harris.

Following his arrest, Tate has become a right-wing cause célèbre. Donald Trump Jr. has described Romania’s legal action against Tate as “absolute insanity,” while Trump financier Elon Musk has praised Tate for his long-shot campaign to run for British prime minister.

During his 2024 campaign, Trump pandered to the misogynist manosphere with multiple interviews and appearances on the podcasts and other streaming shows that make up that world. Those appearances were seen as key to Trump’s improved performance with young men in the election compared to the results in 2016 and 2020.

Trump and figures in his administration like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have also extolled the virtues of misogynist, right-wing faux masculinity for years—a sentiment embodied by Tate.

Advocating for Tate, even with the distasteful rhetoric the influencer has used and the seriousness of the charges against him, is a way for Trump to show the manosphere and its audience that he is on their side and advocating for them. Many of these men share the world view that decades of fights for sexual equality are suppressing their rights and are yearning for a return to a misogynist system where women’s views and roles are minimized.

Furthermore, Trump himself is an admitted serial assaulter of women. He has bragged about groping women, been accused of sexual assault, and has surrounded himself with other men that have been the subject of similar accusations.

In Trump’s view, Tate is a fellow traveler. Advocating for the misogynist also feeds into the false narratives promoted by Trump, Musk, and other conservative figures that international governments are in on a conspiracy to suppress “traditional” (misogynist) values.

When Trump rails against “woke” mindsets and pushes to purge it from the U.S. government by rolling back civil rights protections, that also applies to global governments. In their distorted view, Romania’s government is being too “woke” by restricting the movement of an accused sex trafficker.

Trump is not tough on crime, as the freed perpetrators of January 6 can attest. But now that also applies to alleged crime in other countries, as long as the cause of fake masculinity can be advanced.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Robert Garcia

Trump Justice Official Seeks To Intimidate Congressman Who Called Out Musk

A California congressman is finding out what happens when you dare to mock Elon Musk in Donald Trump's America.

Rep. Robert Garcia on Thursday posted a letter he received from the Department of Justice saying that billionaire co-President Musk and his minions in the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are concerned that the outspoken Democrat is threatening them.

“So if you criticize Elon Musk, Trump’s DOJ will send you this letter,” Garcia wrote on Bluesky. “Members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump Administration. I will not be silenced.”

So if you criticize Elon Musk, Trump’s DOJ will send you this letter. Members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump Administration. I will not be silenced.

[image or embed]

— Robert Garcia (@robertgarcia.bsky.social) February 20, 2025 at 7:56 PM

The letter addressed to Garcia and signed by interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia Edward R. Martin Jr. quotes the congressman’s February 12 appearance on CNN.

"What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight,” Garcia said when asked how Democrats can stop the unelected Musk’s takeover of the U.S. government. “This is an actual fight for democracy.”

The letter to Garcia appears to be an opening salvo in “Operation Whirlwind,” a new push to prosecute threats against public officials that Martin announced to DOJ prosecutors on Wednesday.

“This sounds to some like a threat to Mr. Musk,” the letter continues, “an appointed representative of President Donald Trump who you call a ‘dick’—and government staff who work for him. Their concerns have led to this inquiry.”

Martin appeared to be referring to the Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee’s first chaotic hearing, where Garcia chided chair Marjorie Taylor Greene’s previous antics.

“In the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed a dick pic in our Oversight congressional hearing. So, I thought I'd bring one as well,” Garcia said before proffering a picture of Musk.

During his CNN appearance, host Brianna Keilar asked Garcia a question: “Do you think that calling Elon Musk a ‘dick’ is effective messaging for confronting what is a potentially irreversible transformation of the U.S. government?”

The congressman pulled no punches in his response.

“Well, he is a dick, and I think he’s also harming the American public in an enormous way,” Garcia said. “What I think is really important and what the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy, for the future of this country, and it’s important to push back on the chairperson of this committee.”

Who is to say if Musk is indeed a “dick” or not? The fact of the matter is that calling the world’s richest man a “dick” isn’t a physical threat, and Garcia’s First Amendment rights allow him to use the descriptor.

So “dick” or not, self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Musk and the Department of Justice have no right to be threatening a congressman.

Martin previously sucked up to Musk by threatening legal action against people perceived to be harassing his anonymous and unvetted DOGE dorks as they gained access to Americans’ sensitive personal and financial information.

Garcia is one of six Democrats on the Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee. Under the leadership of infamous crackpot Greene, the committee’s first hearing went off the rails almost instantly.

The Southern California congressman has been vocal in demanding answers from Musk and Trump for their likely illegal efforts to dismantle government agencies. GOP Rep. Nancy Mace has also threatened to file a resolution to censure Garcia over his “bring actual weapons to a bar fight” figure of speech, which is a variation of “Never bring a knife to a gun fight.

Here is the full text of Martin’s letter to Garcia:

As United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, I receive requests for information and clarification. I take these requests seriously and act on them with letters like this one you are receiving.

At this time, I respectfully request that you clarify your comments from February 12, 2025. During a live interview with CNN, when asked how Democrats can stop Elon Musk, you spoke clearly: "What the American public wants is for us to bring actual weapons to this bar fight. This is an actual fight for democracy."

This sounds to some like a threat to Mr. Musk - an appointed representative of President Donald Trump who you call a "dick" - and government staff who work for him. Their concerns have led to this inquiry.

We take threats against public officials very seriously. I look forward to your cooperation with my letter of inquiry after request. Thank you in advance for your assistance. Please respond by February 24, 2025. Should you have further questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to call my office or schedule a time to meet in person.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Shop our Store

Headlines

Editor's Blog

Corona Virus

Trending

World