Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with a firm once run by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick may date back 11 years further than previously known, according to a newly unearthed document flagged by independent journalist Kaitlyn Pierce, who writes under the name Kait Justice.Lutnick told The New York Post last year that he had cut off all ties with Epstein in 2005, but the Justice Department's release of Epstein-related files quickly contradicted that claim. The files showed Lutnick visited Epstein's private island in 2012 and that the two maintained contact through at least 2018.Lutnick and Epstein were also discovered to have been “in business together as recently as 2014,” per CBS News, with the two of them both signing onto a deal to acquire stakes in a now-defunct technology company called Adfin. Lutnick was explicitly asked by the House Oversight Committee in May whether he was aware of any other business dealings between Epstein and Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm he once ran before handing off control to his sons after joining the Trump administration. Lutnick said, “to the best of my recollection,” there were no other business dealings between Epstein and Cantor.Justice, while searching through millions of Epstein-related files, stumbled upon a telling FedEx invoice that she suggested may undercut that claim.“I did not expect to find Epstein in Cantor’s records,” Justice wrote in a report published Monday on her Substack.The invoice is dated July 27, 2001, and reveals that Darren Indyke – once Epstein’s personal lawyer – had sent an overnight envelope from Epstein’s office in New York City, New York, to a Robert F. Mace at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities, located on the 104th floor of the One World Trade Center. Mace was Cantor’s employment lawyer, and would be killed in the 9/11 attacks just 53 days after being sent the envelope from Epstein.“The invoice clearly doesn’t tell us what the envelope contained, but it does place Epstein’s office in direct contact with Lutnick’s firm 11 years before the relationship Lutnick described to Congress supposedly began,” Justice wrote. “Cantor’s customer and trading records could show whether Epstein or any of his companies had an account there, what they bought or sold through the firm and when the relationship actually began.”Justice uncovered another Epstein-related correspondence when sifting through Cantor’s history: a 2009 email to Epstein with a message attributed to a Rich Barnett.“HOward [sic] Lutnick would like to speak to you...one of his employees asked me if Howard could have your number so he may call you,” the emailed message reads. “Would you like me to give him your number? They did not give me Howard's number....”Justice could not verify the identity of Barnett, though his identity appeared to cause confusion during the House Oversight Committee’s interview of Lutnick.“Barnett makes the story stranger because no one can seem to agree about whom he worked for. When congressional investigators showed Lutnick the 2009 message, he said Barnett worked for him at Cantor, was ‘on my staff’ and handled construction matters,” Justice wrote. “Committee counsel later described Barnett as an Epstein employee. Epstein’s records establish Barnett’s employment on that side, but the public transcript does not show investigators producing Cantor payroll, contracts or payment records that could determine whether Barnett also worked for Lutnick or Cantor.”
President Donald Trump remained adamant that he has not considered replacing Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) as the pair clash over the president’s demands that the Senate pass the SAVE America Act. “I haven’t even thought of it,” Trump told reporters Monday when asked if he wants to see Thune replaced. Earlier Monday, Trump […]
Over the course of his war with Iran, President Donald Trump has made inflammatory remarks that many have suggested implied his intention to use nuclear weapons. Now a whistleblower from his first term warns that he “watched Donald Trump talk about nuclear weapons like they were presidential toys,” and that “he may be closer to playing with them than you think.”This is according to Miles Taylor, who served as deputy chief of staff at the Department of National Security during Trump’s first administration, at the time famously penning an anonymous article revealing the existence of a resistance movement working within the White House. On Monday, he published a new piece explaining why Trump has a “fixation” with using nuclear weapons. “Last week,” writes Taylor, “the president told Axios he was ‘close’ to ordering a ‘massive attack’ on Iran … The threat had the same ominous feel of his April comments that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight.’ It was an insinuation that he possessed super powers — and might break the world’s nuclear taboo to end the stalemate.” The pause didn’t mean the war was off, however, and Trump told Axios why he thought the war had to continue: “They haven’t received enough pain yet.” “Not enough pain,” notes Taylor. “I’ve heard rhetoric like that from him before. And it wasn’t about Iran.”“Back in 2017,” Taylor explains, “Trump judged that the only way to bring North Korea to heel was to make it suffer. He tweeted furiously at ‘Rocketman’ Kim Jong-un and promised ‘fire, fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before’ if the hermit kingdom didn’t meet his demands. That was Trump’s first wink-nod to the fact that he possessed an arsenal of nuclear bombs and was ready to use them. Kim answered by threatening to fire missiles at Guam and testing a nuclear-capable missile that could strike the U.S. mainland.”Taylor says the situation escalated so rapidly that Defense Secretary James Mattis began preparing DHS officials for an all-out nuclear war. “For the first time in the Department of Homeland Security’s history, we ran exercises for a potential real-life nuclear strike on American soil, because frankly, we couldn’t rule out that our own president might take us into such an apocalyptic situation.”According to Taylor, the president’s motivation was simple: “Trump wanted to see something blow up, and the rest of us built contingency plans around that desire. Thankfully, he didn’t launch nukes at North Korea. But General Mattis also isn’t at the Pentagon anymore. ‘Pistol Pete’ Hegseth is.”Taylor asserts that “Trump’s nuclear fantasies go way back. When he was a candidate in 2016, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said a foreign policy adviser had come away from a briefing with Trump rattled, because Trump asked, three separate times, some version of the question: ‘If we have nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?’ Candidate Trump also told The New York Times he wasn’t sure it ‘would be a bad thing for us’ if Japan built its own nuclear deterrent against North Korea, and he told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Saudi Arabia should have nukes, too, ‘absolutely.’” And “since then, Trump has toyed with nuclear weapons more openly and more recklessly than any American president ever entrusted with the stewardship of the bomb.”Now, amid an “unresolved war with Iran,” warns Taylor, “you get the picture of a president who’s just one mood swing away from putting his finger on the proverbial red button.”Taylor says that Trump’s motivation is not difficult to grasp, writing, “Donald Trump has spent his entire presidency on a power quest, always hunting for the next most powerful thing he can do. And nuclear weapons are at the top of that list. To say that he’s ‘toying’ with extreme powers is probably the wrong phraseology. He’s addicted to power. Very much like it’s an intoxicant. When his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, told The Atlantic that her boss had an ‘alcoholic’s personality,’ it wasn’t a mere slip of the tongue. That’s how everyone who’s served the man has come to see him … He has an uncontrollable, pathological, junkie-like urge to power.”“If deploying troops to seize foreign leaders and raining missiles on other nations isn’t cutting it anymore,” Taylor concludes. “I worry about where the quest leads next. I’ve written before about how close Trump got to using the bomb the first time. Let’s not forget what Trump reportedly absconded with after he left the presidency: U.S. nuclear secrets. Back in office, the fixation has returned.”
President Trump Monday voiced support for Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh while insisting that the U.S. should have the lowest interest rates in the world.
Hardcore supporters of President Donald Trump who are enamored with his anti-immigrant policies are less in love with the numbers coming out of the Department of Homeland Security.When they can get them.Trump's base is turning on the administration over what they view as deliberately inflated deportation claims and a failure to deliver on campaign promises. The crack in the MAGA coalition is widening as immigration hardliners realize they've been played, The Dispatch is reporting.The problem is transparency. According to the report, DHS has stopped releasing the underlying data that would back up its press release deportation claims."Since January 2025, the Trump administration has stopped releasing data tables from the DHS statistics office that break down how many people have been removed from the country, under what circumstances, and by which enforcement agency. Other agency-specific data sources have also not been updated since Trump took office, including the ICE statistics portal, which was previously updated quarterly," Grayson Logue of The Dispatch reported. The silence has fueled suspicions.Mark Morgan, a former CBP and ICE official from Trump's first term, is now openly accusing the administration of deception. "I'm confused, I'm frustrated, and quite frankly, I'm angry because I believe we're being intentionally misled," Morgan said this week. He's part of the Oversight Project, an activist group that recently sued the administration to force release of enforcement data.DHS touts deportation figures like 356,000 or 400,000, but immigration researchers "struggle to verify these numbers using available data." When activists break down the figures, they discover the numbers include exits, returns, and other removals that don't constitute interior deportations—the mass deportation campaign Trump promised.MAGA media personalities are now expressing buyer's remorse. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren dedicated a recent podcast to attacking DHS for "fudging the numbers" and delivering underwhelming results.Rosemary Jenks, co-founder of the Immigration Accountability Project, articulated MAGA's feelings during an appearance on Steve Bannon's podcast: "I think the numbers aren't as good as they want them to be. That's really the only conclusion we can get to.""We just gave billions and billions of dollars to ICE, and we're happy for that, we supported that, and we want to cheerlead for ICE and for the Trump administration, but we need the numbers in order to do that," she complained.
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Monday that he will miss the annual picnic in Fancy Farm, Ky., the state’s premier political event that he has attended for more than 40 years, as he recovers from a serious fall at his Washington home last month. McConnell has been discharged from hospital care but continues to recover…
President Donald Trump is traveling to Michigan on Monday to promote his economic agenda ahead of the state's Aug. 4 primary, as Republican strategists privately worry that rising prices could weigh heavily on this fall's elections.The trip lands in one of the toughest possible settings for that message, reported the Washington Post. Michigan's economy is deeply tied to the automotive industry, which has been rattled by the administration's tariffs, including a newly announced 50 percent tariff on Canadian goods — a major blow given the tens of billions of dollars in trade between the state and Canada.“We are going to have to navigate a difficult time in terms of oil prices and the impact on the economy,” said Michigan-based GOP strategist Jason Cabel Roe. “But removing one of the most hostile actors towards the United States of the last 50 years from the board is a pretty significant accomplishment.”Roe, who is working on a competitive House race, said he expects cost-of-living concerns to weigh heavily on voters, even as he argues Republicans can frame short-term price pain as the cost of confronting a hostile foreign adversary. Still, he admitted feeling uneasy about the political terrain with the election roughly 100 days away.“I’m a little nervous right now,” Roe said.That unease is shared elsewhere in the party. Longtime GOP operative Doug Heye warned that any policy fueling inflation is a liability for Republican candidates broadly, even as other Michigan strategists argue the tariffs can be sold as protecting American workers and supply chains from exploitation.Compounding the challenge, Trump himself has periodically undercut his party's economic message, dismissing affordability concerns as a "hoax" and saying he likes inflation — comments strategists worry blunt the GOP's own talking points on tax cuts and manufacturing investment.Some Republican strategists see the party's best path forward not in defending the economy directly, but in pivoting to a contrast with Democrats, particularly by highlighting a contentious Michigan Senate primary featuring a further-left candidate. But even that approach carries risk, Heye said, cautioning that leaning too hard into attacking Democrats could look like changing the subject from voters' financial pain.Meanwhile, Democrats are moving to capitalize, with the state party chair framing Republicans as having enabled Trump's cost-raising agenda heading into November.“The economy? I got two words: It sucks,” said Armetris Hare, a caterer set up outside a Detroit courthouse. “The war made everything higher. Why are we even in this war?”“I want Trump to make America great again — but not the way he did it,” she added.
