Everybody is ‘scrambling’ to distance themselves from Epstein: Hugo Gurdon
Source: Washington Examiner · Bias: Center Right
Summary
Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon said “wrongdoers” and people who were associated with Jeffrey Epstein are “scrambling” to distance themselves from the late convicted sex offender. “There were names of people [in the files] who had associations, whether that was [The View co-host] Whoopi Goldberg, or whoever, who claim they just had some contact with […]
Everybody is ‘scrambling’ to distance themselves from Epstein: Hugo Gurdon
Center Right
Washington Examiner Editor-in-Chief Hugo Gurdon said “wrongdoers” and people who were associated with Jeffrey Epstein are “scrambling” to distance themselves from the late convicted sex offender. “There were names of people [in the files] who had associations, whether that was [The View co-host] Whoopi Goldberg, or whoever, who claim they just had some contact with […]
The Justice Department (DOJ) declined on Thursday to release additional unredacted records from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling a federal judge that it has already adequately complied with the law. The DOJ’s response came in the final hours of a court-ordered deadline to remove redactions in at least a dozen documents…
Reporter Katie Phang recently nabbed a huge win against interim AG Todd Blanche and his crusade to keep the Epstein files under wraps. After months of stalling by the administration of President Donald Trump and ignoring the letter of a new law demanding the release of the sex-trafficker’s files, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan opened the floodgates on Trump’s longtime friend. Sullivan sided with former MS NOW show host Katie Phang in her lawsuit demanding the Trump administration adhere to the Epstein Transparency Act.Now, fresh off her big win, Phang tells “Left Hook” podcaster Wajahat Ali that Blanche, Trump and his entire crew appeared to be a bunch of idiots who had no real plan to protect Trump from being implicated in the Epstein files.“They're damned if they do and damned if they don't,” howled Phang. “You either produce it and now we have information that I and others can track down and do more reporting on, or you don't … it means they're trying to hide s——.”“If I were them I'd comply,” Phang told Ali. “I'd say ‘here are the names of the co-conspirators. Here are the names of the bad people that sent these terrible f—— emails. Here are the names of possible perpetrators. Have a nice day.’ But they are so dumb the way that they play this game. They had no f—— strategy and p—— off a federal judge like Emmett Sullivan … [who] told [Trump conspiracist] Michael Flynn to his face ‘you are a traitor to this country.’”Sullivan’s ruling means Blanche now must explain to a court why he shouldn't be forced to release names redacted from emails and documents that reference potentially damning videos and allegations of abuse of minors. Also included in redacted info includes the potential names of Epstein’s co-conspirators, as well as potentially damaging FBI interview notes from a victim who claimed Epstein introduced her to President Donald Trump when she was only 13.Phang told Ali that she had no doubt Sullivan put Trump administration in terrible danger.“Starting last year right … in the spring of 2025 they convene in the situation room about the Epstein files and it's not just the vice president of the United States, JD Vance there,” said Phang. “It was also then-attorney general Pam Bondi. It was FBI director Kash Patel. It's the deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino. It was then-deputy attorney general Todd Blanche. … It's the White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. It's the White House council … and a slew of other people. If something [fatal] had happened to that situation room pretty much … the entirety of the trump administration upper echelon would be f—— exterminated.”“The fact that you convene all those people repeatedly in the Situation Room you don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out that there is something politically toxically horribly bad for the President of the United States [in those files],” she said.Phang added that she deliberately targeted Blanche in the suit to make him the prime target.“Unlike in other lawsuits when the DOJ is being sued and they parade in some junior federal prosecutor who has to go hat-in-hand to sit there and explain what happened or why they didn't do it, I only sued one person,” Phang said gleefully. “So, Todd Blanche … is gonna have to show up. You can't just send in some lackey.”
As midterms approach, advocates of election reform warn Congress could soon become more polarized. John Opdycke, Founder and President of Open Primaries, joins Meet the Press NOW to discuss how closed, single-party primaries exclude independent voters and could feed polarization in U.S. politics.
An FBI supervisor scrambled to retract her praise for a departing Chicago agent after the bureau branded him disloyal to President Donald Trump, a move a former agent warned could cost her career.FBI Detroit Special Agent in Charge Jennifer Runyan accidentally forwarded the resignation email of Chicago Special Agent in Charge Douglas DePodesta to her entire Detroit division, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. In it, she called DePodesta someone who "will always be a part of the FBI Detroit family."The FBI's official Rapid Response account on X had already weighed in on his departure:"It's simple: Anyone who is not on board with THIS FBI under the leadership of President Trump — which has achieved the lowest murder rate ever — is free to leave," the FBI statement said.Kyle Seraphin, a former FBI agent once touted by Republicans as a whistleblower after his security clearance was suspended under former President Joe Biden, called out the FBI statement on X.Seraphin had asked the bureau about DePodesta's departure. The Chicago Field Office told him in writing that it was FBI policy not to comment on personnel matters — then the bureau's own social media account did exactly that."The FBI does not comment on personnel matters," Seraphin wrote on X. "Except when they do."The next morning, Runyan walked back her praise. "Yesterday, I forwarded out SAC DePodesta's email without reading it fully and understanding the full context. It was a mistake on my part, and I should have demonstrated better discretion on what I communicate," Runyan wrote, as posted by Seraphin.DePodesta's last day is Monday, July 6.Seraphin warned that under FBI Director Kash Patel, such mistakes have had "career ending consequences."
President Donald Trump’s corruption — from awarding no bid contracts to cronies to having his sons make tungsten mining deals with Kazakhstan — is so brazen that “he’s making everybody chumps,” according to a panel of experts.“I think it’s so unprecedented that our laws don't really contemplate a level of corruption at the presidential level like this,” Brendan Ballou, the former Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, told MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “So we really have to develop laws around unjust enrichment, civil RICO, and so forth, in order to be able to attack some of this stuff.”Ballou added that Trump’s corruption, in addition to occurring in plain sight, has had important consequences in terms of US policy.“You think about the picture of the new Qatari-gifted jet that he received — it's now Air Force One,” Ballou said. “Well, shortly after he received that gift, he made a unilateral security guarantee to Qatar. So it's entirely possible that American soldiers might fight and die in defense of a country that has gotten an enormous benefit shortly after giving a private jet to the President.”He added, “Similarly, you know, the UAE — so much of this money coming from crypto, they invested 500 million dollars in Trump's crypto business, a business that, as far as I can tell, provides no value whatsoever. But after investing half a billion dollars, Donald Trump approved the sale of 35,000 extremely rare, extremely expensive AI chips. So if you're wondering why the cost of technology, microchips, and computers in the United States is going up, in part you can potentially thank this investment from the UAE and what the President saw. So it's so unprecedented, to such an extent, that our legal infrastructure didn't even contemplate that this could occur.”Wallace then discussed a recent Wall Street Journal report that Trump earned $263 million connected to the sale of equity in his cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. After the deal was signed, the UAE was granted access to tightly guarded American AI chips.“The challenge you've got here is: Donald Trump is presumably going to pardon himself on his last day in office, and we have a Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous to this President,” Ballou told Wallace. “So we need to be figuring out — okay, how can we get justice, and how can we stop this stuff from happening while he's still in office? What we really need to be thinking about is: who are the people harmed by these extraordinary instances of corruption?”He continued, “If you are, for instance, an AI researcher who is now paying more for your chips because of the UAE's potential investment in World Liberty Financial, you need to be bringing a lawsuit to try to enjoin this, so that these people are not getting the fruits of their corrupt actions. And if we can stop people from getting the benefits of corruption, they're going to have fewer incentives to be corrupt in the first place — not Donald Trump, but the people trying to influence him.”Wallace then pointed out that, whereas Trump had scandals during his first term, during his second the scandals are bigger because they inflict economic pain on all Americans, including his own voters. She added that Trump’s indifference is evident by referring to a bipartisan affordable housing bill on Tuesday as a “yawn.”“The mechanisms of accountability — the Republican Party, the larger media apparatus, in this case Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber — his media apparatus, they're protection rackets,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog, told Wallace. “They've basically said, ‘We're not going to just turn a blind eye here — we're going to actively make sure you don't face any accountability for this.’ The Republicans who have spent years complaining about Hunter Biden have said nothing. They don't talk about this. We know what it looks like when they're making noise about things that even whiff of corruption when it's in their political interest. But in this case, he is doing something so brazen, so explicit, so transactional, so corrupt that we can't even really paint a picture — we can't even come up with an evocative response to it, because it's on such an industrial scale. It's like thinking about the universe — it's hard to imagine because of how big it is — so we can't even get the right response out of people. And part of the mechanisms of accountability said, ‘You know, we're going to be a protection racket.’”Carusone added, “He is making everybody chumps. He's not just doing the corruption — he's doing it in such a brazen and explicit way, and he's not even sharing the wealth. A lot of people who do this at least share it with a couple of people close to them — the people participating in it.
Lobbyists' phones are ringing off the hook as Independence Day nears and Donald Trump's administration reportedly considers handing out 250 pardons to celebrate the occasion.
President Donald Trump has had a hard time distancing himself from the Jeffrey Epstein saga, and a new development in the case might prove to be more of a headache than he wants, according to two legal experts. Earlier this month, convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein's assistant, Lesley Groff, testified before Congress about her relationship with the disgraced financier and his crimes. The transcripts of that interview were released late last week, and some of the details Groff shared with investigators raised red flags for attorneys Brian Kabateck and Shant Karnikian, who co-host the "Civil Action" podcast on the Legal AF Network. For instance, Kabateck pointed out in a new episode on Sunday that Groff testified she began working for Epstein in 2001 and that Epstein and Trump were in contact for at least a decade. That seems to contradict Trump's previous claim that he cut off communications with Epstein in 2004 or 2005, well before Trump became president, Kabateck noted. Another issue is that those dates extend beyond Epstein's 2008 felony conviction for soliciting a minor, which is another "problematic" aspect of the timeline, Kabateck said. Karnickian said the transcript showed that Trump "has something to hide" in the case. "Early on, we talked about Epstein, and we thought this is a sideshow, and maybe Trump's deliberately putting it out there," Karnikian said. "It's become a big problem for him, and it's clear that he has something to hide here."
