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Humiliated Bill Gates reveals 'painful' marriage secret Epstein held over him in bombshell congressional grilling
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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 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.
Inflation, as measured by the producer price index, soared eight-tenths of a percentage point to 6.5% for the year ending in May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday, driven by higher energy costs from the war in Iran. The inflation rate was the highest since November 2022, when inflation spiked under President Joe Biden […]
A group of 10 Democratic senators and the party's top election lawyers quietly convened to game out responses to what they fear could be an unprecedented attempt to disrupt or overturn the results of this fall's midterm elections.The closed-door session, first reported by Politico, brought together a roster of high-profile legal and political strategists, including former Attorney General Eric Holder and prominent Democratic election attorney Marc Elias, to walk senators through a series of extreme yet increasingly plausible scenarios. Among them: armed federal agents stationed at polling locations, the Justice Department seizing ballots in competitive races and a foreign-backed disinformation campaign powered by AI-generated deepfakes."Trump has talked about stealing the election, violating the election, perverting the election, over and over again," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who convened last week's meeting. "We are going to be prepared for anything that he throws at us."The tabletop exercises, the first major effort from an election-protection task force Schumer launched earlier this year, produced concrete legal playbooks. Participants mapped out injunctions to block armed agents or citizens from appearing at voting sites, and drafted lawsuit strategies to compel the Trump administration to return ballots if confiscated in key battleground contests. They also coordinated messaging plans to counter disinformation in real time across campaigns, elected officials and advocacy groups.Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) were among those who participated, and a second exercise is already being scheduled for July.The urgency behind the effort stems from a string of actions the Trump administration has already taken. It has seized 2020 ballots from swing counties in Georgia and Arizona, sought confidential voter files from nearly every state, and pushed executive orders aimed at restricting mail-in voting and federalizing parts of the election process. When asked last month whether he would send troops or immigration agents to polling sites, Trump said he would do "anything necessary" to ensure honest elections.Democrats are careful to acknowledge the limits of their power as the minority party — they cannot force hearings, and most legal battles are expected to be fought by state attorneys general and outside groups rather than Congress. Some in the party have also privately warned against catastrophizing the issue, noting it could suppress Democratic turnout as much as Republican tactics.“This administration is one that wants people to feel alone, they want people to be afraid," said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, who took part in the war games. “This exercise is actually an exercise in confidence and trustbuilding."But Schumer signaled the preparations will continue regardless."We know that the threats are broad," Schumer said. "They evolve, and we're preparing for them."
This fall's midterm election is a referendum on President Donald Trump, according to a veteran journalist, and he's not making things easy for Republicans trying to hold onto their congressional majorities.Polling has made clear that affordability remains the top voter concern, and Punchbowl News co-founder John Bresnahan told "CNN News Central" that Republicans on Capitol Hill, whom he's covered for decades, were aghast when Trump declared "I love inflation" during an Oval Office event."Oh yeah, Trump is the issue of the election," Bresnahan said. "I mean, he is the biggest issue. His conduct, the war, his handling the economy, his conduct in office. I've got to tell you, I was on the Hill yesterday when he made those comments and they went through the Capitol pretty quickly, and it was just, you know, every Republican just winced. They're upset."Trump was re-elected to a second term on a promise to fix the economy on Day One, but a year and a half later, voters have soured on his handling of the affordability crisis."The messaging they're hearing out of the White House is not about inflation," the well-connected reporter said. "It's not about the economy. It's not about Americans' financial status, their overdue credit card payments. They're struggling to pay for school, and every day that Trump is out talking about Iran, he's talking talking about other issues, he's talking about the 2020 elections is a disaster for Hill Republicans. They're just – it's a big problem for them.""Speaker Mike Johnson can talk, you know, say Trump's labors are focused on inflation, but the American public doesn't think so, Congress doesn't think so – even the Republicans in Congress, I'll tell you that," Bresnhan added. "So this is a big problem for them." - YouTube youtu.be
A new book claims Vice President JD Vance pushed to enlist Tucker Carlson in an effort to clear President Donald Trump of any ties to Jeffrey Epstein. […]
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.
