The billionaire testified to Congress about his relationship with the late convicted sex offender.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) blasted Vice President JD Vance and former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi over an alleged cover-up of Epstein files. The Epstein files consist of more than 3.5 million pages of records, gathered by the FBI and the Department of Justice, as part of their investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey […]
The ranking Democratic member of the House Oversight Committee is calling for Vice President JD Vance to testify under oath about his involvement in the White House’s Jeffrey Epstein cover-up.Appearing on MS NOW with host Ana Cabrera, a fuming Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) cited an explosive report in the New York Times on Wednesday that Vance headed meetings held in the White House Situation Room to deal with fallout from the Epstein files. According to Garcia, Vance, along with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles — who has also been in attendance at the secretive meetings — both need to be hauled before the committee headed by Rep. James Comer (R-KY).“Well, look, obviously, [acting AG] Todd Blanche is near the top of the list [for testimony],” Garcia told Cabrera. “But there has been now new bombshell reporting where we have learned, as you know, that JD Vance, the vice president, has been holding meetings in the Situation Room, which is used for national security purpose just to discuss Epstein and looking at ways to exonerate President Donald Trump, coming up with a strategy on how they're going to use Ghislaine Maxwell to clear Trump's name.”“And the vice president, for the very first time, is now implicated in part of this cover-up,” he accused. “He's meeting with Susie Wiles, he's meeting with [FBI Director] Kash Patel, he's meeting with Todd Blanche, he's meeting with [former Attorney General] Pam Bondi. And so it is now important that we, at some point, this committee has to talk to the vice president. We have to talk to Susie Wiles.” “None of us, before this reporting yesterday, had any idea that the vice president of the United States is holding Situation Room meetings to talk about Epstein files strategy and is involved in this massive cover-up," he accused. “And so, look, Todd Blanche is important. He clearly caused major damage; he's not released all the files, but the vice president has a lot to answer for.”“Why is he trying to use Ghislaine Maxwell to exonerate the president?” he asked. - YouTube youtu.be
The House of Representatives has just voted down a bill that would have extended the intelligence community's warrantless surveillance powers by three weeks.
Trump's U.S. ambassador to Turkey is accused of helping Jeffrey Epstein find a personal assistant who became both a recruiter and a victim in his sex trafficking network, Raw Story has learned.Sarah Kellen told members of the House Oversight Committee last month that she was working as a host at the W Hotel in Honolulu in 2001 when she was recruited to work for Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. A woman working as an intern at the hotel’s front desk befriended her and told her about the opportunity.Kellen told the committee that Epstein had helped get the woman, whose name is redacted from an interview transcript, an internship at the W “because he was friends with Tom Barrack," who owned the hotel.Kellen said she didn’t realize at the time that Epstein and Maxwell were her prospective employers.“She never told me his name,” Kellen told members of the committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), during her May 21 interview. “She just told me there was a wealthy couple in New York that was looking for a new traveling assistant and if I would be interested. She had taken some risqué photos of me earlier, and I learned that she had sent them to Jeffrey, and then she started telling me about the job opportunity.”Barrack, a key diplomatic player for the Trump administration in the Middle East as ambassador to Turkey and special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, has not commented publicly about his well-documented, decades-long relationship with Epstein. His role in potentially connecting Kellen with Epstein has not been previously reported.The start of Kellen’s employment with Epstein and Maxwell overlaps with a period when the couple was friendly with the future president and first lady. Donald Trump told New York magazine in October 2002 that he had known Epstein for 15 years and that he was “a lot of fun to be with,” adding, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”The friendship between Epstein and Trump, along with Barrack, is detailed in the book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, which describes the three as “a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.”A billionaire real estate investor, Barrack reportedly introduced Trump to Paul Manafort, his first campaign chairman during the 2016 campaign. Manafort was later convicted of crimes related to his political consulting work for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine.A prolific fundraisier for the Trump campaign, Barrack spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and following Trump’s election, chaired the 2017 inauguration committee.Before that, Barrack reportedly leveraged his business connections in the Middle East to smooth over distrust among Gulf Arab leaders following Trump’s call early in the campaign for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the United States. The effort appeared to pay dividends when Trump made the first international trip of his first term, a visit to a summit in Saudi Arabia. The close relationship between Trump and the Gulf states has continued into the second administration, with the government of Qatar giving a plane to the president. Tom Barrack described Donald Trump as "one of my closest friends for forty years" during his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.Courtesy C-SpanIn 2022, Barrack was acquitted of charges that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates during the 2016 campaign. Now, as a U.S. diplomat stationed in Ankara, he praises the partnership between the two countries as being "of critical importance to the Middle East," and recently claimed credit for processing visas for the Iranian team so they could travel to the United States to compete in the World Cup.Epstein, who would be indicted for sex trafficking in July 2019, appeared to view himself as the odd-man-out during Trump’s ascent to power, while Barrack quietly assisted.Summarizing Wolff’s Fire and Fury in a January 2018 email, Landon Thomas Jr. — author of the 2002 New York profile — reported to Epstein: “There are a few paragraphs on you, TB, DJT partying around NYC in 90s etc. — and then MW says you are airbrushed out of DJT history while Barrack sticks around.”“I know,” Epstein replied.Raw Story was unable to reach Barrack for comment through the State Department or the U.S. Embassy in Ankara.In 2012, Epstein credited Barrack with connecting him to Kellen in an email to another employee to arrange for a visit by Barrack and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, then the ruling emir of Qatar who was interested in buying Epstein’s New York townhouse.Epstein had planned to be in Paris at the time of the visit. In an email, he instructed an unidentified employee to be ready to receive the guests “well dressed” and in “heels.”“It’s Tom Barrack coming, so you can tell him I thank him every day for Sarah,” Epstein added.
“I have been doing this a while,” Sen. Ron Wyden told The Intercept. “And I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.” The post Momentum Builds to Rein In Domestic Spying Law — Whether or Not Bill Pulte Survives as Intel Chief appeared first on The Intercept.
Republicans are struggling to extend a powerful surveillance authority set to lapse this weekend after President Trump alienated lawmakers with his choice of acting spy chief.
Gates struck up a friendship with Epstein in 2011 after the financier promised he could help raise billions of dollars for global public health initiatives.
The Trump administration is launching a "massive leak hunt" to find out who spilled details on a panicked conversation inside the White House.A new book by journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan has the Trump White House scrambling to find out who leaked details about the Trump administration's "freakout" over the release of the Epstein files, according to reporting by CNN. The New York Times published an excerpt of the book, "Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump," on Wednesday.The book's excerpt describes a meeting that Trump didn't attend or know about in the Situation Room. Included in the meeting were his senior aides, Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, last year to plan how to contain the fallout. Others present included then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel, according to reporting by The Daily Beast. According to an excerpt of Haberman and Swan's book, Vance "appeared panicked" about how the Epstein files would divide the president's base.CNN cited a person who "detected" the search for the leaker to confirm that the White House is now hunting them down.