Hawk

The Bond villain always reveals his dastardly plan, and is destroyed, not so much by his hubris (altho that's part of it), but by his self-loathing, and his subconscious need to be punished.

The Leak

Yes, it's a big deal that there was a meeting in the White House Situation Room to talk about keeping the lid on the Epstein Files.

And yes, it's just as big a deal that reporters were able to get details of that very secret discussion.

Nobody likes the secrecy - though governments do have to do some things out of sight of public scrutiny. 

But we have the right to know what our government is up to in most cases, and when the government is actually plotting to go on breaking the law by not releasing the files, that's a big fuckin' deal.

I want answers, and I want heads on pikes at the city gate.

Top White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, "Regime Change."

Why it matters:

Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth. Independent recording devices in the Situation Room are forbidden.

• "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," an administration source told us. "And we have no idea which ones."

Verbatim accounts of several Situation Room meetings were included in excerpts about the Iran war and the Epstein files that The Times posted ahead of the book's June 23 publication.

The authors conducted more than 1,000 interviews for "Regime Change," which covers Trump's second term.

• Tellingly, White House officials haven't disputed verbatim dialogue from the top-secret Sit Room talks, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying about Bibi's regime-change scenarios for Iran: "In other words, it's bullshit."

We hear President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.

• Haberman and Swan refused to comment.

Reality check:

Haberman and Swan didn't need audio recordings. Bob Woodward pioneered contemporary historical political journalism by including dialogue in his books that was reconstructed from the memories of people in the rooms where things happened.

The big picture:

Audio recordings or not, the speculation about them, and the extensive coverage of the book's juicy excerpts, mean more buzz, more book sales ... and the making of a classic.

Katie Phang

It doesn't apply to everybody in all circumstances. But it always applies to public servants who are not engaged in actual secret government stuff.

If you've done nothing wrong - if you're doing nothing wrong - stop trying to hide what you're doing.

Aaron Parnas

Robert Arnold

Sometimes, you have to stop and consider a full blown purge.

There Most Certainly Is Evidence

Pam Bondi lied under oath.

I think we've all known that, but this is the first time I've heard anybody state it so clearly, putting it directly into the Congressional Record.

Dan Goldman may be a rich legacy puke, but he's doing the lord's work right now.

New Mexico Steps Up

First off, what the fuck is it with Deutsche Bank? They've been cited in connection with practically every shady/shitty deal since forever.

Rick tells the Deutsche Bank guy to fuck off:

New Mexico lawmakers issue first subpoenas in Epstein investigation

A bipartisan special committee of New Mexico lawmakers, which was created to probe the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe, announced Monday that it will send out its first round of subpoenas.

The New Mexico Truth Commission is slated to send subpoenas to 14 entities, including agencies that have investigated Epstein in the past, such as the FBI and the New Mexico Department of Justice.

Subpoenas will also be issued to several entities that have been affiliated with Epstein, including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase, as well as the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research institute that Epstein supported.

JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank declined comment. Santa Fe Institute did not immediately respond to The Hill’s requests for comment.

Any evidence showing someone committed a crime will be sent to the appropriate law enforcement agency, either in New Mexico or elsewhere, according to the commission.

Commission members said they are aiming to build “a complete documented record” examining allegations of sex trafficking and other misconduct connected to Epstein’s operations in New Mexico, as well as any institutional failures that allowed him to continue any misconduct in the state for years.

“We will name what happened, we will name who was responsible and we will do so with the evidentiary regard that survivors deserve and that the law requires,” state Rep. Andrea Reeb (R) said at a meeting at the New Mexico State Capitol. She is one of four lawmakers on the commission.

Earlier this year, authorities in New Mexico reopened their probe into alleged illegal activity that took place at the ranch previously owned by Epstein, located 30 miles from Santa Fe. Law enforcement also investigated allegations that two bodies were buried in the hills near the ranch.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) has encouraged victims of Epstein to come forward as part of his office’s investigation into the ranch.

Stansbury Brings The Fire

The system has not, and is not failing. It's working exactly the way is was designed to work.

Her Name Was Virginia

Aaron and Katie

Letting Katie Phang get away showed me just how venal and outright chickenshit MSNBC had become.

If you want the truth, ask people whose integrity isn't tied to a paycheck.

Unconfirmed

... but what is there that says this is not the way it is?

Say What Now?

Interesting that shortly after Melania made her public statement about Epstein and Maxwell, Trump posted a video of a woman being murdered.

Make of that what you will.

Rich Man's War

... poor man's fight.

Let the Epstein Class fight the Epstein War.

Distraction

Half of Americans believe Trump bombed Iran because of Epstein files

Speculation US president started conflict as a distraction spreads across political spectrum

Another sign shows a picture of an American serviceman killed in the conflict, standing in front of the Stars and Stripes. “Cody Khork did not have to die fighting Iran for the Epstein class”, it reads.

Four days before the bombing of Iran on Feb 28, a report revealed that the Department of Justice (DoJ) removed more than 50 pages of interviews about Mr Trump from the files, including one victim who claimed the now president abused her when she was a child decades ago.

Was it a coincidence that Mr Trump decided to bomb Iran when the Epstein files threatened to expose him?

It sounds like pure conspiracy theory, but the idea that Mr Trump began the war — hitting Tehran from the skies — to distract from Epstein has also circulated among respected pillars of American society: from Republicans to Democrats, and influential podcasters.

“PSA: bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will,” wrote Thomas Massie, a Republican who has clashed repeatedly with Mr Trump over his demands to release the documents.

He is not alone.

“For years we demanded to release the Epstein files... not a single person has been arrested and likely won’t be: no accountability, no justice,” Marjorie Taylor Greene, a former Trump ally and House representative, said on the day the bombing started. She added: “Instead, we get a war with Iran on behalf of Israel that will succeed in regime change in Iran”.

Graham Platner, a Maine Democrat, felt much the same, telling a crowd in Brewer the day after the strikes that “this war is also being pushed because Donald Trump is in the Epstein files, and other people in the White House, and other people connected with the Epstein class,” he said, “they are terrified that we have noticed what they are doing”.

In June 2025, Joe Rogan, the American podcaster with 11 million monthly listeners, voiced similar thoughts after Mr Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites. “Just bomb Iran and everybody forgets. Everybody forgets about it,” he said.

It is not just politicians who think there may be a link.

A recent poll for Zeteo, a Left-wing website, and other outlets found that 52 per cent of people in the US believe the president attacked Iran because of the headlines about Epstein.

It found that 81 per cent of Democrats thought the war was a deliberate distraction, compared with 52 per cent of independent voters and 26 per cent of Republicans.

Chris Edelson, a lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said it was “certainly possible” that the war could have been to distract from Epstein. “What we have seen in the files is shocking stuff related to Trump,” he said.

“They passed a law to make the Epstein files public and they didn’t and kept back some of the most damning stuff,” he added. “If that was the calculation then it’s trademark Trump but it’s been a disaster... what’s followed isn’t better, it’s just a different kind of terrible situation.”

On March 6, six days after the war began, the US justice department released more files pertaining to the president’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, including interviews with the alleged child victim.

The anonymous accuser said that she met Mr Trump through Epstein around 1983, when she was between 13 and 15 years old.

The Trump administration dismissed the woman’s claims as “baseless allegations”, and they have failed to have significantly affected public consciousness, or newspaper headlines, since the beginning of the war.

In a statement, the White House said the idea that Mr Trump began the war to stop the Epstein headlines was “such a ridiculous take that it could only be concocted by true morons, such as Thomas Massie and the Democrats”.

But the “Operation Epstein Fury” posters remain, as does the public speculation.

“When confronted with a faltering economy and the persistent political radiation of the Epstein matter, a war with Iran looked like a perfect narrative reset,” said Rick Wilson, a veteran Republican strategist.

“For Trump, war is the ultimate political reset, no matter its cost.”

Erika Jordan

Pointing out the cynical use of something like the "non-apology apology" is not cynicism. It's truth.

Epstein In New Mexico

Melanie Stansbury is a champion.

About That QAnon Thing

I may have said this before, but I can't shake the shitty feeling I get every time I stop and contemplate the very real (to me) probability that Epstein's whole kid-fucking thing was in service to gaining leverage over people with big money &/or big power in order to exert pressure to achieve political ends.

And the really shitty part of the feeling is that some people are going to start thinking that the end game actually makes trafficking kids a secondary concern.

I hate this fuckin' shit, but at least we're starting to sift out some of the bigger chunks of shit.

How the Epstein Files Reveal the Final Failure of QAnon

The most enduring conspiracy theories often contain kernels of truth, though it is debatable whether any popularly theorized conspiracy has later been proven as real by unassailable facts. But if one popular conspiracy theory seems to have been promoted from “theory” to fact, it would appear to be QAnon. What started as a far-right prophecy scam using codes and ciphers on 4chan to “reveal” the horrors of a pedophile cabal ruling the world has taken on a distinct tinge of truth thanks to millions of newly-released files involving fixer and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

It’s easy to look at Epstein’s communications with billionaires and royals, famous directors and scions of old money, and see the dealings of a cabal. In those countless emails, we seem to have a notorious sex offender and lover of “young women” exchanging messages with some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people. Some of them appear innocuous, and some of them are deeply weird and extremely disturbing.

Like QAnon’s accusations, at least some of these messages are written in what many researchers have theorized is a code for truly unspeakable things, such as powerful people trafficking their own children, or hunting and eating human beings. And just like with QAnon, it’s fallen to “citizen researchers” to dig through the “drops” from the Department of Justice, as unpaid truth crusaders churn through millions of messages full of noise to find the bits of signal that “they” were hiding from us.

Naturally, the Epstein revelations have resulted in some QAnon believers claiming that the Epstein releases validate their years of hard work and research into the “pedo elite” running the west. It’s also resulted in a number of stories, podcasts, and social media threads essentially saying that QAnon was right this whole time. Essentially, we all thought these Q people were crazy, but there really was a pedophile cabal running things, and the Q believers knew the whole time.

Except QAnon has not been “proven true,” and it was not right. This is not because of anything to do with Epstein, but because that’s not really what QAnon was about. The idea of a dark cabal running world events and doing horrible things in the shadows is only part of QAnon — and it’s the least original part, at that.

A secret government or society of insiders using the masses for their Satanic purposes has been a rich source of lore for countless cranks and conspiracists generations before Q emerged on 4chan. Its 20th century form began with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the aftermath of the First World War, was later adapted by bestselling tomes of Cold War paranoia like None Dare Call it Conspiracy and Secrets of the Federal Reserve, and would form the core of the lurid post-9/11 globalist fantasies of “Reptoid Elite” theorist David Icke and Infowars’ Alex Jones. The name of this group shifts, but its members are always a hopelessly complicated tangle of bankers, think tanks, political figures, universities, cultural luminaries, and wealthy families. Unsurprisingly, this is almost the same exact motley crew found in the Epstein emails.

Yes, this one happens to be real. But there has always been an upper tier of society walled off from the rest of us through money, influence, and power. It’s a group that is impenetrable and exists in a world of wealth and privilege that most of us only see in movies and tabloids. And many of its charter members have been credibly accused of unspeakably awful things over the last two thousand years. And for that long, they have gotten away with it.

Where QAnon was different, and where it failed spectacularly, was in promising that justice would finally be delivered to these untouchable insiders. It offered believers not nihilistic scapegoating, but a utopia that was just a few executions away. The basis of Q, and why it was so compelling to so many people, was that the monsters were finally going to be brought down by Donald Trump, a figure of outsider wealth beholden to nobody except those who elected him. Only someone with no connection to the powerbrokers and their ancient bloodlines could deliver justice. It would be done swiftly, correctly, and publicly. And nothing would ever be the same.

It’s not hard to understand why this bloody fantasy caught on with people struggling to understand why Trump wasn’t fulfilling the promises of his first presidential campaign. He ran on bringing down the deep state, giving power back to the people, and locking up Hillary Clinton and her goons. Why wasn’t it happening? QAnon gave you an answer: that it was, but it was happening in secret. Q was revealing that secret, and making its believers part of the world it was creating.

Past foundational works of conspiracism were all about what the “insiders” or “superstate of the elite” were doing to you. World domination was inevitable, total enslavement could not be stopped, and freedom was doomed. All one could do was research, prepare, and buy as much food and ammo as your credit card could take.

In contrast, Q believers were shown that victory was possible, if you prayed hard enough and spread the gospel of Q. The anonymous poster encouraged followers to be part of the operation by making memes, doing their own research, and waking up the people they loved. It made the humble “anon” the worst nightmare of the elite machine. While much of the media saw Q as an apocalyptic cult obsessed with violence and race, Q saw itself as the savior of humanity. To quote the title of one popular Q video, it was “the plan to save the world.”

QAnon was a play-by-play of the good guys finally winning, starting with the very first Q drop on Oct. 28, 2017, promising that Hillary Clinton would be arrested in a few days trying to leave the U.S., and that the president would deploy federal forces to put down riots ginned up by her allies.

By decoding the Q drops on 4chan and later 8chan, Q believers were positioned to know before anyone when the long-promised “storm” was coming, and with it, justice.

Q promised arrests and military tribunals for the worst evildoers in dozens of posts, the first of which would “shock the world.” As one Q catchphrase put it, “the hunters would become the hunted.” Another promised “power would be returned to the people,” and that “crimes against children” would be swiftly and brutally punished. Long-held secrets would be revealed, ancient cabals would fall, and those who had terrorized patriots for generations would be hauled away to Guantánamo Bay — or worse. It would all happen “soon” or in “two weeks” or in a “big week” ahead. And nothing could stop it.

Even with the antisemitism and conspiracism inherent to QAnon, some of these are admirable goals. It’s not wrong to want truth and justice, and for people who harm others to be stopped. This is what made QAnon so appealing to older people and religious believers. It wasn’t just anarchic meme-making, it was utopian.

But it was all a hoax. None of it happened, and the people Q promised would be taken down by Trump are still out there, presumably getting away with it. Hillary Clinton was never arrested. There were no mass arrests. It failed on every level.

Trump was supposed to destroy the elite traffickers and release all of the government’s files on their members. Instead, Trump has called the entire Epstein debacle a hoax created by Democrats, and held up the release of the Epstein files to the point where it took immense pressure from Congress for the DOJ to release what they had. Even then, they didn’t, as filings that involved Trump’s alleged assault on a 13 year old girl were only made public after NPR reported that dozens of pages had been withheld. This does not seem like the behavior of someone tirelessly working to bring down Epstein’s cabal of evildoers.

There was supposed to be a great purge of the worst people in society. There were supposed to be shocking arrests and a truth that would “put 99% of Americans in the hospital.” Not a single prominent American has faced legal accountability due to the Epstein fallout other than Epstein. And Epstein didn’t feel the rope of a military tribunal, instead taking his own life without ever facing his accusers.

QAnon wasn’t right. It was spectacularly wrong, stringing its believers along for years with promises of revenge and justice that all turned to dust. The enemy of the deep state turned out to be its most high-profile protector. And the people desperate for accountability are still vulnerable to conspiracy theories that prey on their very natural desires.

QAnon was supposed to be the plan to save the world. But the world is exactly the same as it’s always been.

Ask A.I.

Question:

What is the Trump administration doing to keep the Epstein files out of the news?

Answer:

In his second term, President Donald Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19, 2025, which legally mandates the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release all unclassified records related to Jeffrey Epstein. However, the administration has faced significant criticism from both parties for the following actions that some describe as attempts to limit or delay transparency: 

Delayed and Redacted Releases

• Missing Pages: An NPR investigation in early 2026 found that the DOJ had withheld dozens of pages specifically containing sexual abuse allegations against President Trump. While some were later published following media pressure, reports indicate roughly 37 pages remain missing from the public database as of March 2026.
• Heavy Redactions: Early releases in December 2025 were criticized for being "grossly" redacted, with hundreds of pages entirely blacked out, including the names of "politically exposed individuals".
• Staggered Rollout: Despite a 30-day legal deadline to release all files by December 19, 2025, the DOJ initially released only a small fraction, citing the need for "painstaking" reviews to protect victim privacy. 

Strategic Counter-Investigations

• Targeting Political Foes: In November 2025, Trump directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to launch new investigations into Epstein's ties to prominent Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Lawrence Summers.
• Withholding Evidence: Lawmakers, including Representative Thomas Massie, have raised concerns that these new probes serve as a "smokescreen" to justify withholding documents under the law's exemption for "active federal investigations". 

Administration Defenses

• "Exoneration" Claims: The White House maintains that President Trump has been "totally exonerated" by the releases and argues that the files contain "untrue and sensationalist claims" meant to damage him politically.
• Dismissal as a "Hoax": At various points in 2025, Trump dismissed the ongoing push for file releases as a "Democrat Hoax" before eventually pivoting to support the Transparency Act once it became clear it would pass with a veto-proof majority. 

In March 2026, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi to answer for the administration's handling of the files and the "disjointed" nature of the public disclosures.

And:

Start a few wars - didn't need AI to figure that one out

Goddammit

The increasingly probable fact (IMO) that the kid-fucking was actually "secondary" because it was being used as leverage to wrangle people into money laundering schemes, and black ops fuckery, is making wish that the perps will meet with the most gruesome, agonizing, and prolonged demise ever known. And I want it all on live TV.

Every one of these assholes has to burn. And every penny they own now - or ever hope to own in the future - has to be taken from them and awarded to the survivors, and to organizations working to provide support for victims and survivors of abuse and assault.

This shit has to end.

Trump Is The Golgotha Shit Monster

Is there anything more on-brand

than Trump killing over 100 school girls

in an attempt to cover his ass

for fucking school girls?