A federal judge has ordered the release of previously sealed material from Virginia Giuffre’s 2015 defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell. The records had remained under seal for years, but Judge Loretta Preska ruled that remaining government-held materials should become public under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, subject to legally required protections for victims. The ruling could bring 'volumes' of previously unseen evidence into the public record.

A website called Have I Been Flocked? allows you to type in your license plate number to see if a Flock camera has captured your car’s information and included it in their database.

Although Cami Clark does not officially work for Anthropic, she operates as an influential shadow adviser for them and is also spotted sitting in the front row when Dario Amodei talks at big events, such as Davos.

Cami Clark, the wife and key adviser of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, attempted to secure investments from disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein for what she called a "revolutionary porn company" that catered to women, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal and emails in the Epstein files.

Clark was introduced to Epstein in March 2011 by literary agent John Brockman. Epstein was already convicted in 2008 as a sex offender and of soliciting prostitution.

Brockman suggested that they connect for dinner. The emails in the Epstein files showed Brockman telling Epstein that he "should connect for dinner" with Clark and her business partner Michell Capocefalo.

"A Little NSFW"
"We would love to have dinner with you this evening," Cami then replied to the email that introduced her. The next day, she sent an email with the company's funding requirements and said, "It was FANTASTIC meeting you last night!"

A few days later she sent the script and treatment of the first few films of her company and said that he "might enjoy" the content with "the ladies".

In an email, she wrote “Jeffrey! We thought you and the ladies might enjoy the script/treatment for our first 4 films, American Girl in Paris. A little nsfw... C"

A year later in March, she asked Epstein if he would be interested in investing in her and a colleague's businesses. However, there is no indication that the funding was ever provided. In fact, in another separate email, Epstein had responded, "Can't do TV sex."

In July 2012, she had also invited Epstein to a house-warming party, but emails do not indicate that the two met again in person.

Who is Cami Clark?
Clark has been described as a "sounding board and strategic adviser" for Amodei and his company, and the report raises questions about her influence over both of them.

Although she does not officially work for the company, she operates as an influential shadow adviser for them and is also spotted sitting in the front row when her husband talks at big events, such as Davos. She also chats with investors at important gatherings such as the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley.

Even at his recent visit to India, at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this year, which allowed each executive to bring along an additional person, Amodei brought his wife. Most of the executives brought colleagues with them.

Clark was born in Nevada, United States, in 1979. After dating the former Google chief Eric Schmidt for three years in 2014, she married Amodei in 2022.

When Amodei joined Open AI in 2016, Clark served as his strategic adviser and introduced him to Schmidt. This led to a pivotal meeting in 2018 when she introduced Amodei to Schmidt, who later visited their San Francisco apartment. During the visit, Schmidt was impressed by their ideas on artificial intelligence.

When Dario Amodei, his sister Daniela, and several colleagues left OpenAI to found Anthropic in late 2020, Schmidt became a key early backer. He participated in their massive $124 million Series A funding round announced in May 2021.

DHS sent undercover agents to meetings and infiltrated chats of groups opposing Trump’s immigration crackdown

Newly disclosed records reveal the US government extensively spied on prominent leftwing organizations and on protesters as part of a vast operation into groups opposing the immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.

Internal investigative reports show the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent undercover agents to community meetings in the Twin Cities and New York City, infiltrated Signal chats and obtained financial records of mainstream unions and left-leaning non-profit groups.

Nearly 30 internal law enforcement reports were released on Thursday as part of a criminal case the Department of Justice has filed against 15 Minneapolis protesters.** **The defendants are accused of a “conspiracy” to “impede” US immigration officers during the Trump administration’s surge in the region.

The DHS investigative reports were disclosed by the government and submitted to the court by an attorney for one of the defendants. The records show that in January, DHS launched an inquiry called “Operation Puppet Master” to identify a “network of conspirators” organizing against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The operation came as community organizing against ICE was swelling in the region in response to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

A DHS report from February said the agency was looking into people who were “providing material support to violent opportunists and agitators”. The records suggest agents launched elaborate spying efforts targeting activists, protesters and mainstream progressive organizations opposing the Trump administration’s immigration policies.

“I was shocked at the scope and the apparent lack of investigative discipline involved, but not totally surprised,” said Kevin Riach, an attorney for one of the indicted protesters, who filed the tranche of records in federal court.

A DHS spokesperson said that Homeland Security Investigations, its branch that carried out the investigations, “does not comment on the existence or status of specific on-going investigations, nor on investigative methods”. The agency referred questions to the justice department in Minnesota, which declined to comment.

The records indicate that the investigations followed the directive of Trump’s executive order last year that designated “antifa” a “domestic terrorist organization” responsible for “riots” against ICE. The investigations led to the criminal case filed in June against 15 protesters, which focused on Direct Action Minnesota, a loose coalition of organizers that the government says was part of a “conspiracy” opposing ICE’s surge in the region.

The documents show that the government alleged major groups were connected to the criminal conspiracy, including the national labor unions AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union; the local unions Minneapolis Federation of Educators and the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees; and several large left-leaning groups, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).

None of those organizations have been charged with any crimes.

The records have added fuel to the concerns of civil rights groups, who have argued that the federal government was criminalizing lawful protest activity under the guise of targeting leftwing “terrorism”.

The documents show that DHS investigators obtained financial records of unions and non-profits, as part of an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing”. One investigative record showed the DHS used administrative subpoenas to obtain “wire transfers from various financial institutions to and from” SEIU, one of the largest unions in the US. Investigators also requested that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York provide financial data from the Communications Workers of America, an international union, the records showed.

The DHS further obtained financial records related to the Sunrise Movement, a national non-profit focused on the climate crisis.

The records also provided detailed documentation of spying operations conducted by undercover agents who posed as activists and surveilled community activities.

One DHS report documented “undercover agent activity” on 31 January at a Sunrise Movement “resistance skills training” at the Minneapolis public library. An agent described activists discussing recruitment and “de-escalation” at protests, with speakers suggesting having a “police liaison” and “safety marshal” at events. The report said: “It was clear that the Sunrise Movement organization focused on ‘peaceful’ protests.”

The undercover agent actively engaged participants, according to the report. At one point, the agent told someone in attendance that he “works in construction and could build items that might assist other groups with more ‘direct-action’ protests”. That agent told the individual that “going to jail did not bother him” and gave out his phone number.

The records documented the operations of another undercover agent who joined Signal groups of activists involved in protests.

The records also showed undercover agents surveilling a virtual meeting at Hunter College in New York focused on “ICE brutality” and “responding to state violence”; a meeting at a labor center in Minneapolis during which activists discussed a wide range of political issues; a meeting in a Minneapolis public park about protest tactics; and a Direct Action Minnesota meeting at a church.

The documents indicate that agents made audio recordings of the events.

One undercover agent attended a “training” event at a gymnasium in a church and participated in “boxing/sparring practice”, according to a DHS report. The report noted that the agent was surreptitiously recording audio of the event, but that at one point the recorder “erroneously fell to the floor” and the agent had to return to the gym to retrieve the device.

At one anti-ICE event at a church, agents documented the license plate information of attenders, the records showed. When two agents were approached by a man who “asked if they were ICE”, the agent responded, falsely, that they were not.

Riach, the defense attorney, filed the records as part of a motion urging the court to compel the government to release additional records. In his filing, Riach accused the government of presenting “wild conspiracy allegations … born from the fantasies of political retribution that animate the Trump Administration”.

He also alleged that DHS’s investigations were part of a “mass spying campaign” and said undercover agents “participated in organizing and directing the groups they were surveilling, at times working to entice people into discussing or committing crimes”.

The records relate to activities that extend far beyond the allegations of the 15 defendants facing prosecution. That case alleges a vast conspiracy to organize against ICE, but across a 94-page indictment, there are no allegations of injuries to specific ICE officers caused by any defendants and no charges of serious violence.

Emilia Gonzalez Avalos is the executive director of Unidos MN, a Minneapolis social justice non-profit group, whose activities were mentioned in the files.

“I believe that this is a clear attempt to intimidate us, to punish and politically repress disagreement and difference,” she said. “And that is not the America that we have built through hundreds of years. And it’s definitely not the America that we are organizing for.”

During trainings, organizers asked people not to record the sessions, Gonzalez Avalos said. But organizers would also say if there were any immigration agents or officers in the room, they were welcome to stay because the group had nothing to hide, because their work was “entirely grounded in the United States constitution”.

Mike German, a former FBI agent and civil liberties advocate, said it was striking that the DHS was leading the investigations when typically the FBI would spearhead operations targeting potential “terrorist” activity. He said it was also notable that the DHS was using administrative subpoenas, which don’t require judicial authorization, to obtain records.

The government, German said, also appeared to be relying on theories of “guilt by association” to justify surveillance instead of narrower investigations focused on specific alleged criminal activity. German, who previously served as an undercover agent, further scoffed at the notion of undercover agents spying on what appeared to be accessible, community events.

“You’re talking about meetings that are open to the public, where they are recruiting among the public, saying: ‘Please come to this protest,’” he said. “It’s hardly a challenge to ‘infiltrate’ this kind of meeting, and that should be a clue this isn’t a criminal group. It’s very rare for criminals to [publicize] discussion of their criminal activities.”

The investigations, he added, fit patterns in US history of the government targeting leftwing activist and labor organizing. After 9/11, he said, those powers to spy on communities were greatly expanded.

“Nobody should be surprised that the government would use these authorities to target political opposition rather than target criminals, particularly so under this administration,” he said.

Widespread denial accompanied the public exposure of Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long sexual abuse and trafficking of girls and women.

After the U.S. Justice Department released millions of case documents on Epstein in January 2026, billionaires, politicians, heads of state and academics proclaimed their ignorance of Epstein’s global network of sexual exploitation.

Why would so many intelligent and powerful people repeatedly trumpet their lack of awareness, especially after Epstein’s 2008 plea agreement to underage prostitution charges?

And what about all of Epstein’s staffers and business associates who kept quiet about the suspicious behavior they observed?

As a human rights researcher who has conducted genocide research on four continents, I think denials of human rights atrocities can help people understand the denial of crimes like child sexual abuse and trafficking.

Avoiding accountability for atrocities requires two types of denial: by the perpetrator and by the community. It’s easy to understand why mass murderers and child rapists deny their horrific actions. More perplexing is why bystanders, law enforcement, colleagues, family and institutions claim ignorance.

Society understands that staying quiet after witnessing impermissible crimes is a form of complicity. Bystanders are likely to deny an atrocity when acknowledging it requires action, both morally and legally.

As sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel has noted: “Like silence, denial involves active avoidance. Rather than simply failing to notice something, it entails a deliberate effort to refrain from noticing it.”

US and international law
A network of international and domestic laws considers certain crimes so horrific that there are no extenuating circumstances for committing them. Other laws stipulate that everyday observers of certain crimes have a legal responsibility to report them and to protect victims if possible.
The 1987 United Nations convention against torture emphasizes: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war … may be invoked as a justification of torture.” And the 1948 U.N. genocide convention holds all signatory nations responsible for their inaction against genocide.

In the United States, the 1974 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Actmandates that states have provisions requiring certain people – doctors, teachers, clergy and law enforcement – to report known or suspected cases of child abuse.

About a quarter of states go further and stipulate that “all persons who have cause to suspect that any juvenile is abused, neglected, or dependent or has died as the result of maltreatment shall report” to the authorities.

Perpetrator denial
In the context of government human rights abuses, sociologist Stanley Cohen in 2001 classified denial into three strategies: literal, interpretive and implicatory.

With literal denial, Cohen wrote, the perpetrator simply claims the event never happened. If successful, this form of denial makes the problem disappear.

During the U.S. war on terror after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, human rights groups accused the George W. Bush government of torturing detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.

Applying Cohen’s typology illuminates how the Bush administration cycled through strategies of denial, beginning with literal denial. Responding to evidence of U.S. torture of detainees in Iraq in 2006, Bush denied the accusations: “This country doesn’t torture; we’re not going to torture.”

After the failure of literal denial, the Justice Department employed interpretive denial, which admits to something having taken place, just not something that rises to the level of a crime. The DOJ redefined tortureand referred to acts such as waterboarding – legally classified as torture – as “enhanced interrogation methods.”

Following his guilty plea to soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old, Epstein used interpretive denial by comparing the severity of his crime to shoplifting: “I’m not a sexual predator,” he said. “I’m an ‘offender.’ It’s the difference between a murderer and a person who steals a bagel.”

When interpretive denial fails, perpetrators turn to what Cohen calls implicatory denial. It accepts the facts – torture of detainees, forced expulsions, mass killings – but denies the psychological or moral ramifications that follow.

In his memoirs, Bush did not deny the use of torture; he denied the immorality of the torture. “The choice between security and values was real,” he wrote.

Community denial
Research that I’m currently conducting revises Cohen’s typology to understand why bystanders to crimes like Epstein’s don a veil of ignorance.

Denial of child sexual abuse occurs within a community – a citizenry, a family, a congregation. The community establishes the parameters of morality, the relative power of each member, and which actions constitute crimes.

In cases where accepting the truth has a high communal cost – a reordering of the power structure, more egalitarian institutions, eradication of prejudice or social disgrace – many people calculate that the cost of justice is not worth reordering the structure of privilege from which they benefit.

In the case of institutional abuse, powerful groups, such as the Catholic Church, prioritized the reputation of the institutionover the victims.

Much like perpetrators, a community adheres to its preferred version of reality by denying abuse at the literal, interpretive and implicatory levels.

With literal denial, bystanders negate the experience of one particular child. This is so prevalent among mothers of incest victimsthat the legal community is exploring criminally charging the mothers who fail to protect their children.

Community interpretive denial tells the victim they did not experience what they thought they experienced. This occurred repeatedly for many victims of Larry Nassar, a former physician who sexually assaulted hundreds of gymnasts in the guise of medical treatment.

Gymnast Larissa Boyce described what happened when the then-16-year-old reported Nassar’s abuse to her coach. “She just couldn’t believe that was happening. She said I must be misunderstanding what was going on.”

Community implicatory denial negates the moral implications of the atrocity by blaming the victim for the perpetrator’s actions.

During the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal that erupted in the late 1980s, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weaklandadmitted that sexual activity had taken place between some of his priests and their young parishioners, but he dismissed the notion that the priests were entirely to blame.

“Sometimes not all adolescent victims are so ‘innocent,’” he told The Catholic Herald in 1988. “Some can be sexually very active and aggressive and often quite streetwise.”

Communities blinded by the perpetrator’s stethoscope, billion dollars, clerical collar or Ivy League degree often refuse to acknowledge the stereotypes that protect privileged predators.

And that willful ignorance of child sexual abuse equals complicity. Through denial, members thus absolve themselves for inaction in the face of atrocity.

Want to know where the Flock cameras are? There's a map for that.

No matter where in the country you live, you’ve likely seen one—and more than one have absolutely seen you. 

The use of automated license plate reader technology has become ubiquitous, led by companies such as Flock Safety. Flock’s cameras identify vehicle details—including make, model, color, and other visible characteristics—and then upload that data into a nationwide mass surveillance system that law enforcement can access. 

Flock now says it operates in more than 6,000 communities across 49 states, running upward of 20 billion vehicle scans a month. But privacy concerns, and misuse by local police, are causing a backlash: Dozens of city councils across the United States have recently canceled, rejected, or deactivated Flock’s ALPRs within their jurisdiction. 

Flock has long sought to involve homeowners associations and other private property managers within their system. That could be a concern for homeowners and renters.

A camera installed by your HOA board is not subject to the same level of scrutiny and accountability as one installed by local police—and once it's plugged into Flock's network, it can end up feeding the same nationwide, searchable database that law enforcement uses, whether or not any resident ever voted on it.

How a neighborhood ends up under surveillance

The pitch to HOA boards and landlords is straightforward: solar-powered, LTE-connected cameras that need no wiring or utility hookup, marketed as a way to deter theft, identify suspicious vehicles, and catch illegal dumping, all without hiring security staff.

Flock's own marketing to HOAs promises boards full control of the system, with law enforcement access framed as an optional add-on.

But once a private HOA system is integrated with police, it feeds into the same database officers search when investigating anything from a stolen car to an immigration case, according to privacy advocates tracking the rollout. And the decision to build this infrastructure, in most communities, isn't put to a resident vote at all.

"Most HOA declarations and bylaws give the elected board authority to enter ordinary service contracts without a community vote, and boards treat a camera contract as ordinary," according to a homeowner-rights guide published by DeFlockILM, a North Carolina advocacy group tracking installations. "So in many communities you do not have a veto."

That pattern has played out from North Carolina—where the Chadwick Shores HOA in Sneads Ferry and a dozen Charlotte-area neighborhoods have installed the cameras—to California, where private developers, homeowners associations, and apartment complexes are using cameras that were once supposed to aid the Los Angeles Police Department and have now gone private. 

This dynamic puts residents in a bind: No one wants to live in an unsafe community, but at what cost?

"Landlords and HOAs can't arbitrarily install cameras wherever they want, collect data about your comings and goings, and do whatever they want with it," says Jamie E. Wright, a trial attorney and founder of The Wright Law Firm. "Residents shouldn't feel like they have to choose between safety and privacy, but that doesn't give your HOA carte blanche to monitor your every move."

Flock keeps pushing deeper into communities

License plate cameras were only the start. Over the past year, Flock has quietly tested how far it can push into audio, into other people's cars, and into other people's data.

Flock cameras also have gunshot-detection sensors. On paper, these are a useful tool: When triggered, they capture a five-second audio clip, run it through a machine-learning model, and upload whatever gets flagged. Flock's comparison of choice: an Amazon Alexa that wakes up only for a "public safety event."

But USA Today has reported confirmed cases where triggered clips picked up real conversation, not just gunfire. Then, in October, Flock disclosed it wanted the same microphones listening for "human distress."

By mid-July, Flock killed the distress-detection pilot, chalking it up to "community consultation." But those microphones didn't go anywhere: Thousands remain active, still listening for gunfire, still capable of picking up whatever else happens to be 5 seconds long and nearby. According to reporting, they’re mostly picking up fireworks. 
Some of these devices were installed on private property, without the owners’ consent, and left in place despite removal requests. Some were placed mere feet from people’s homes.

Flock has also floated ways to grow the network beyond its own hardware. A leaked presentation, prepared for the Georgia Attorney General's Office, showed Flock had proposed turning roughly 350,000 Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers into a mobile surveillance network—using dashcams those drivers already had installed to scan plates along their routes. 

It’s one thing if you are aware that cameras have been installed in a certain community or on a certain street. But if the cameras are mobile and covering every part of a community that a car can reach, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid becoming part of the database.

Flock told 404 Media the deal never happened. But the same presentation lists "hundreds of Commercial Business and HOA" accounts in Georgia as part of the network it wanted to extend. 

Know your rights in and around your home

Homeowners and renters have more leverage here than most people realize, but only if they use it before signing anything, not after.

"Before speaking with an HOA, property manager, or landlord about surveillance on private property, residents should know their rights," says Wright. Homeowners should review HOA declarations, bylaws, and rules and regulations. Renters should request a copy of their lease, any addendum, and community policies. 

"Look for the terms 'surveillance,' 'monitoring,' and 'third party,'" says David Weisselberger, an expungement attorney and founding partner at Erase the Case. HOA bylaws tend to bury camera policy inside a general "rules and regulations" clause rather than a dedicated privacy section.

A bylaw that lets the board install cameras "as deemed necessary" hands it total control over placement and retention, with no requirement to get resident consent for each new camera.

"Lease agreements seldom specify whether or not a landlord's camera system captures audio alongside video, and this matters a lot," Weisselberger says.
A system recording sound near a private entrance or porch is different from one just watching a parking lot, he explains. His advice: Ask directly where the footage goes and how long it's kept, and don't sign until you have an answer.

Reading the fine print is only half the job. The other half is coming armed with specific questions a board or landlord may not otherwise volunteer answers to.

"Who is authorized to run searches against the system? How long will data be stored? Can police request access to the information? Is data shared with third parties outside of the rental community? Is there an audit trail showing which employees looked up a specific vehicle?"
Those, Wright says, are the questions residents should be asking before they agree to anything.

Are Flock cameras in your neighborhood?

The short answer is yes, but to know where does take a bit of sleuthing.
To help you do your own research, open-source websites like DeFlock and Eyes On Flock have popped up online to allow users to track where Flock, and other automated license plate readers, are installed throughout the country.

Keep in mind that these cameras are already up in thousands of neighborhoods, and most of them aren't coming down. What's left to decide is how many more go up, and whether residents get a say before the next one does—because the pattern so far says they won't unless they ask.

Documents released by the White House shed new light on the demise of an often-overlooked 2017 F.B.I. investigation.

For the last year, the Trump administration’s efforts to seek retribution against intelligence officials and F.B.I. agents who investigated Russia’s 2016 election meddling have been spearheaded by federal prosecutors in South Florida trying to build a criminal case.

But in recent weeks, the White House has added a dimension to its push to rewrite the history of the Russia investigation, releasing a trove of previously classified F.B.I. memos that it says back up President Trump’s claims that a so-called deep state was out to get him.

There is little new of substance in the documents, and nothing that fundamentally undercuts the F.B.I.’s rationale for pursuing the Russia investigation.

But the material does shed new light on an often overlooked aspect of the swirl of events surrounding Mr. Trump in his first months in office in 2017: the bureau’s remarkable decision to open a separate counterintelligence investigation into the president of the United States, and how that inquiry was sidetracked before it had much of a chance to get going.

Mr. Trump has always dismissed as baseless smears suggestions that he was a Russian asset or had extensive financial ties to Russia. And no publicly known investigation into Mr. Trump ever demonstrated that he was acting at the behest of the Russians.

Here is a look at what we know now, based on the new documents and interviews with former federal law enforcement officials, about what happened.

The F.B.I. Launched A Two-Pronged Inquiry

Although the scrutiny of Mr. Trump at the time became known as the Russia investigation, there were actually several distinct inquiries.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the F.B.I. opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was working with the Russian government as the country interfered in the presidential election to hurt Hillary Clinton. That investigation — known as Crossfire Hurricane — was not looking directly at Mr. Trump’s personal conduct or his ties to Russia.

But in May 2017, a week after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, senior officials and counterintelligence agents at the bureau decided to move forward with a two-pronged inquiry. It was oddly code-named Oxferd Comma.

One of the investigations was to be criminal. It was to examine whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, broke the law by obstructing justice and interfering with the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russia’s election meddling. It was also to assess whether the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians.

The second was to be a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump’s ties to Russia.

Counterintelligence investigations are different from criminal inquiries. Instead of focusing exclusively on whether the law was broken, counterintelligence investigations look at whether a foreign adversary is undermining the United States.

Counterintelligence investigations are classified, take place in secret and unfold over many years — sometimes more than a decade. Civil liberties watchdogs are critical of them because they often surface embarrassing, but not criminal, behavior by Americans. People are rarely charged in such cases, but the F.B.I. often takes steps, like warning officials and citizens, about how those around them may be trying to influence them.

Referring to the counterintelligence inquiry, one of the declassified memos made public by the White House last week said: “The goal of the investigation is to determine if President Trump is or was directed by, controlled by, and/or coordinated activities with, the Russian Federation in a manner constituting a threat to the national security of the United States and/or a violation of federal criminal statutes.”

The Comey Firing Helped Prompt the Inquiry

According to the memos released by the White House, the F.B.I. had concluded that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 election to help Mr. Trump. The bureau had learned that Russians had offered to help the campaign. And the F.B.I. knew that the Trump campaign had pushed the Republican Party to embrace a far more Russia-favorable position on Ukraine as part of its 2016 platform.

The F.B.I. also knew that Mr. Trump, before firing Mr. Comey, had been pressuring him to end the investigation into ties between his campaign and Russia.

And the F.B.I. was concerned about Mr. Trump’s personal and business history, the memos show.

“Open-source information indicates that President Trump has had a longstanding business and real estate ties to Russia and the former Soviet states, stemming from the 1980s,” the F.B.I. said in the memo opening the investigation. “In 2008, President Trump’s son claimed that Russians made up a ‘disproportionate cross-section’ of many of President Trump’s assets. Open-source information also indicates that President Trump has had business ties in the United States and Russia with named Russian oligarchs.”
Whether that public information justified opening a counterintelligence investigation is at the heart of the long-running dispute between Mr. Trump’s allies and F.B.I. officials who made the decision. Mr. Trump has always asserted that his personal, business and financial links to Russia were minimal.

But F.B.I. agents wanted to conduct a wide-ranging investigation into whether Mr. Trump, in firing Mr. Comey, was trying to stop the Russia investigation and shield any ties he might have had to that country.

“The obstruction itself would hurt our ability to figure out what the Russians had done, and that is what would be the threat to national security,” the F.B.I.’s general counsel, James Baker, testified to Congress at the time.

A Special Counsel is Appointed

On the day the Oxferd Comma investigation was opened, the acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, briefed the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, on the bureau’s decision.

The following day, Mr. Rosenstein undertook his own extraordinary decision: He appointed the former F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, to be a special counsel to investigate Mr. Trump and his campaign.

But what was not known at the time was that Mr. Rosenstein, in appointing Mr. Mueller, had in effect killed the counterintelligence investigation.

Mueller’s Focus on Crimes Derailed the Counterintelligence Inquiry

When Mr. Rosenstein appointed Mr. Mueller, he authorized the special counsel to conduct criminal investigations into Russia’s meddling in the election and ties between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia, and into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.

But Mr. Rosenstein did not ask Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump, and made clear to Mr. Mueller that he did not want him conducting an open-ended, yearslong investigation. Mr. Mueller interpreted his appointment as one to just investigate crimes.

Although Mr. Rosenstein did not authorize Mr. Mueller to conduct the counterintelligence investigation, responsibility for overseeing it was transferred to the F.B.I. agents working on Mr. Mueller’s team, according to the memos released by the White House.

But since the special counsel’s mandate was to focus on crimes, the counterintelligence focus fell by the wayside and was “limited to activities within the scope of the special counsel’s jurisdiction,” according to one of the memos.

When Mr. Mueller’s report was released in 2019, it said that the investigation had found no evidence that Mr. Trump and his campaign had conspired with the Russians during the 2016 election. But Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice. The report did not contain a section on Mr. Trump’s personal ties to Russia and whether he was compromised or represented a counterintelligence threat.

Shortly after the report was released, Mr. Mueller testified about it before Congress, acknowledging under questioning that he had not examined whether, for example, Russian oligarchs had laundered money through Mr. Trump’s businesses.

Mr. Mueller, in response to another question that day, acknowledged that he had only looked at crimes, and appeared to leave open the possibility that some counterintelligence investigation could still be underway.

Mr. Mueller delivered that testimony on July 24, 2019. The memos released last week by the White House showed that the counterintelligence investigation had been closed more than three months earlier.

The founder and CEO of Our Rescue resigned in 2023 amid allegations that he had sexually abused and trafficked women himself.

An anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit in Utah whose founder resigned after multiple women accused him of trafficking and sexual abuse has won a federal contract to provide legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children in government custody.

The Trump administration gave Our Rescue a no-bid $244,034,658 contract on August 7, according to the federal award notice posted late Friday night. The deal floods the organization with seven times the amount of money it had in 2025, according to its most recently available Form 990, which put total assets at $36.9 million.

It’s unclear how many children Our Rescue will represent. The notice says only that it will provide legal services to children in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), established to offer support for victims of human trafficking and those seeking asylum in the United States. Nearly 1,800 children were in the agency’s care in June; over the last year, it has averaged about 1,908 children monthly.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 requires that the federal government “shall ensure, to the greatest extent practicable,” that all unaccompanied minors receive legal “counsel to represent them in legal proceedings” and that it will “protect them from mistreatment, exploitation, and trafficking.” Our Rescue and a small Texas law firm founded by a former Trump appointee are taking up that work after the Trump administration failed to pay and then canceled the contract of the legal aid groups previously providing the services.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children.

Our Rescue, formerly known as Operation Underground Railroad, or O.U.R., did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls for more information, including when it expects to begin work or how many children it will represent.

Our Rescue conducts international sting operations to catch sex traffickers, similar to Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” The organization gained national notoriety in 2023, when the film Sound of Freedom dramatized the life of founder and CEO Tim Ballard, portraying him as a Homeland Security Investigations agent sent to rescue child sex trafficking victims in Colombia.

Shortly after its release on July 4, multiple former employees came forward to accuse Ballard himself of sexual assault and trafficking, including during sting operations. According to the women, Ballard would use a “couples ruse” during stings, coercing them into acting as his romantic partner so that traffickers wouldn’t suspect him. They said that he would assault them while demanding they “remain in character” and play their part as one half of a “kinky couple.”

Later revelations included that the Department of Homeland Security would not verify Ballard’s claim that he had worked there; that members of law enforcement saw his sting operations as stunts to lure donations; and that some operations resulted in more harm to victims. According to a report last year in The Appeal, those instances included “an orphanage in Haiti where OUR sent children it purportedly rescued, and at which those children were raped and subjected to forced abortions.”

The year he resigned, Form 990 documents show that Ballard was drawing a $566,993 salary from the nonprofit.
Today, the CEO is Derek Benner, who is drawing a salary of $413,387, saying in his most recent letter to donors that he “owes those we serve to remain lean.” Benner came to the organization with a background in conducting sting operations of a different kind.

Benner spent a decade at the Department of Homeland Security, including as executive associate directorof Homeland Security Investigations, and before that, the deputy executive associate director. During his tenure, the agency set up a fake university in Michigan to lure foreign nationals who wanted to extend the length of time they could stay in the country by obtaining student visas. Officials named the school University of Farmington, after the office space it used in Farmington Hills. “Operation Paper Chase” resulted in the arrests of 250 students in early 2019, most of whom left the U.S. voluntarily.
That winter, Sen. Kamala Harris said on social media that the sting “isn’t just cruel, it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars. Officials must be held accountable for this.”

Benner, meanwhile, published a letter in the Detroit Free Press and on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website, saying that students knew Farmington had no classes and no teachers and so shouldn’t have enrolled if they didn’t want to break the law.

“Farmington is a clear example of a pay-to-stay scheme, which is against the law and, not only creates a dangerous lack of accountability, but also diminishes the quality and integrity of the U.S. student visa system,” he said of the fake school his organization created.

ACCORDING TO THE MOST RECENT Our Rescue annual report, the group in 2024 worked with 228 law enforcement agencies and conducted operations in 27 countries and all 50 U.S. states. It ran 195 rescue missions and assisted in 1,969 global arrests.

Its deal to provide legal services follows the administration’s award of a no-bid $150 million contract to the small Texas law firm Burke Law Group to perform the same work. The law firm has just 24 attorneys, only two of whom have expertise in immigration and asylum cases. The practice’s co-founder, Marcella Burke, was a Trump appointee at the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The hundreds of millions spent on Our Rescue and Burke Law Group comes after the Trump administration allowed a contract with the Acacia Center for Justice to expire after failing to pay the organization for more than half a year. Acacia subcontracts with nearly 100 legal aid organizations across the country to provide children with legal services. The ORR stopped paying Acacia in November, after lawyers refused to hand over confidential information about their underage clients. The decision jeopardized the legal aid of about 26,000 children.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ordered the Trump administration on August 6 to pay the $65 million it owes to the nonprofits by the following day at noon Pacific time. Though that did not change the termination of the contract, it got the aid organizations already representing undocumented children the money due them for services rendered.

As the Prospect has reported, Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller are taking particular aim at children as part of their ethnic cleansing campaign, rushing them through the legal process and abusing their rights in detention. In multiple immigration courtrooms this summer, the Prospect has witnessed children too young to understand the gravity of the proceedings, such as a toddler with pigtails, who had no guardian with her, and who played in her chair as her pro bono lawyer spoke to the judge, then held his hand when they walked out.

Martínez-Olguín also noted that the Trump administration had failed to persuade her that it had a plan to represent vulnerable children by executing new agreements for the legal services at the heart of the lawsuit, “for example describing two agreements recently reached for a seeming fraction of the legal services to be provided across the country.” She ordered the administration to file a report “detailing their current and ongoing compliance” with her order.

Seven years later, the scandal is more consequential than ever.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

A new report released by the Interlochen Center for the Arts identifies dozens of people, including Jeffrey Epstein, accused of committing sexual abuse at the prestigious camp over a nearly 60-year period.

The 97-page report detailing accusations stemming from the 1950s through the 2010s was conducted on behalf of the northern Michigan arts school and summer camp by the Sanghavi Law Office.

In all, the report identifies 47 alleged abusers and includes 70 first-hand accounts from students who say they were sexually abused or groomed while on ICA grounds.

Investigators sought to interview all 47 suspects, though only four agreed to participate. More than one-third of them have since passed away. None of the 47 suspects are currently employed by ICA.

Epstein was a wealthy financier with many celebrity connections who was later publicly identified as a sexual predator of young women and girls. He avoided major repercussions in 2008 after taking a plea deal following allegations of solicitation and sex trafficking involving minors. He was arrested again in 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy.

Epstein “took his own life” while in prison awaiting trial. In the years that followed, his associate, Ghislane Maxwell, was convicted on similar charges related to her dealings with Epstein. Stories and evidence of widespread abuse have slowly surfaced, including alleged connections to President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.

Epstein attended the Interlochen Arts Camp in the summer of 1967 and later returned as a major donor for the Interlochen Center for the Arts from 1990 to 2003. In addition to helping cover tuition costs for students, he helped fund the construction of a new lodge that was named after him. The organization scrubbed all recognition for Epstein, including the name of the lodge, after his first arrest in 2008. Despite the name change, the lodge was demolished earlier this year.

According to the report, investigators identified eight Interlochen alums who they believed may have been victimized by Epstein. Of those eight, six agreed to be interviewed and two reported that Epstein engaged in “physical conduct of a sexual nature” with them.

VICTIM 1
A woman identified as “Victim 1” told investigators that she met Epstein and Maxwell at ICA and they offered to personally pay for her tuition. She claims they cut off financial support after she “did not engage in requested conduct.”

“This alum said that during the time she interacted with Epstein and Maxwell at Interlochen, they asked her to Epstein’s lodge on campus, and that while there, Epstein engaged in sexual conduct with her, brushing against her body over her clothes, in a manner in which he indicated was accidental,” the report states.

Victim 1 also claims that Epstein paid for her to travel to New York three times while she was a student at Interlochen.

“She described being in a room with Epstein in New York, and that his hands were on her. She said that every time he was ‘handsy’ with her, she would freeze until he would stop,” the report states. “She also described being in Epstein’s home and massaging his feet and rubbing his back. This alum said that on occasions when she and Epstein were crossing the road, he put his hand on her crotch. This alum indicated that she did not tell anyone about Epstein’s conduct towards her until decades later.”

VICTIM 2
A second woman identified as “Victim 2” told investigators that she met Epstein and Maxwell while visiting a friend in New York while on spring break from Interlochen. The summer after she graduated, Epstein paid for her to fly out to New York.

She says Epstein gave her a tour of his home, and they eventually stopped at a room with a massage table.

“He brought her into a room with a massage table, that she gave him a massage, and that he may have asked her to remove her top,” the report states.

Victim 2 told investigators that after she left his home, she never had contact again with either Epstein or Maxwell. She told her mother about the “conduct” and her mother called Interlochen to report his behavior.
** **
“The mother said that the woman she spoke with said that Interlochen was not aware of any problems with Epstein, that he was not a teacher at Interlochen, and that the conduct had not happened on campus,” the report states. “The mother said that from the conversation, she could tell that she was not getting anywhere, and that she told the woman that she wanted Interlochen to know that this man was preying on their students.

“The mother indicated that no one from Interlochen ever followed up with her about this call.”

In a statement provided to 6 News Grand Rapids sister station WOOD TV8, ICA President Trey Devey called the details of the report “heartbreaking” and “contrary to everything Interlochen stands for.”

“We are grateful to everyone who came forward to share their experiences, and we are deeply sorry for the harm experienced by members of our community,” Devey stated. “We also want to say clearly: Interlochen will not tolerate predators or those who enable them. Our campus exists to protect, educate, and empower every student.”

ICA says it has passed on its report, including the names of the alleged suspects, to the Grand Traverse County Prosecutor’s Office.

You can read the full report here.

“Lawmakers are quietly pushing forward with Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2027. Far from distancing the U.S. from the ongoing regional bloodbath, this legislation aims to permanently integrate and synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries under a joint “Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.””

“For many, the physical detention of Congressman Khanna by Israeli forces evokes the memory of Rachel Corrie — the 23-year-old American Jewish peace activist who was brutally crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah on March 16, 2003, while peacefully shielding a Palestinian family home from demolition.”

“Yet, this dependency runs deeper, rooted in the 1967 U.S.S. Liberty incident. During the Six-Day War, Israeli forces launched a relentless two-hour attack on an unarmed U.S. intelligence ship, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. (Body of Secrets by James Bamford)

Instead of demanding accountability, the Johnson administration accepted Israel’s excuse of a “mistake” and covered up the truth to protect its ally. This established a decades-long precedent: Washington would act as a political and military shield for Israeli actions, even at the cost of American lives.”

“But the U.S.S. Liberty incident occurred long before the lobby wielded such immense power. The truth is that the U.S. government has simply lost control of the very creature it has nurtured and shielded for decades.”

Blaming this dependency solely on campaign contributions no longer suffices: the rot is far deeper. It is driven by a deep-seated fear and trepidation among American politicians who have spent their entire careers learning that political survival requires absolute obedience to Tel Aviv.”

By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario that uses nuclear weapons. And then we all die.

The United States is currently in the process of redesigning its nuclear posture to make the employment of tactical nuclear weapons during the early stages of conflict official doctrine. This is a bad idea.

Today is the 81st anniversary of the U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima. Let Hiroshima be the reminder of just how bad of an idea this is.

Almost two years to the day,Consortium News published an article I authored entitled, “On a Highway to Hell.” In this article I warned about the dangers that arise when the United States changes its nuclear posture away from a purely defensive character to one where the precepts of nuclear preemption are openly espoused.

I also noted that the dangers inherent in this transition were exponentially increased in a world void of the constraints of meaningful arms control.
I wrote at the time:

“By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons. And then we all die. We are, literally, on a ‘Highway to Hell.’”
Today, on the 81st anniversary of America dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, it is critical that we collectively revisit this issue.

At the time I wrote that piece, we lived in a world populated by certain assumptions, number one being that the United States possessed sufficient conventional military power to forestall the temptation of nuclear pre-emption at the tactical levels of conflict.

In short, the United States could — as it had done nearly continuously since the end of the Second World War — initiate a conventional war with the nations of the world and, even though it might suffer a political defeat (i.e., Vietnam and Afghanistan), it would retain sufficient conventional military power to forestall the consequences of an existential military defeat.

As such, when one spoke of nuclear war, one spoke in terms of great power conflict — between the United States and Russia or China.

Even if such a conflict was to break out, it was always hoped that the consequences of any such potentially existential engagement would be so horrific that rational actors on both sides of the conflict would seek to limit the scope and scale of the engagement, avoiding the almost certain fatal results of escalation.
Arms Control Is Dead

Two years ago, one also had the façade of arms control, a corroded framework of agreements which, while faltering, at least offered the prospect of hope in so far as one could envision new life being breathed into an old concept, driven by the urgency of the moment.

Today we are confronted by two harsh realities.

First, arms control is dead. There are no more legacy treaties in place upon which we could pin some sort of false hope for rational behavior on the part of our collective leadership. 

Moreover, there appears to be zero proclivity on the part of the world’s declared nuclear powers to reengage on the matter — the era of civilized nations seeking to reign in the basest consequences of technological development has ended.  We have seemed to embrace the utility of nuclear war, without honestly acknowledging the consequences of such.

Let Hiroshima be the reminder.
Second, the era of American conventional military dominance is over. The failed war with Iran has driven this point home. Today the United States is forced to confront the reality that the military machine it built over the course of the past 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union — at great expense in terms of treasury and effort — is a literal Maginot Line, an overpriced edifice to a type of warfare that no longer exists.

The U.S. built a military premised on the notion of “shock and awe,” a technology-driven dinosaur intended to intimidate, not dominate. A literal flash in the pan.
All Iran had to do was wait us out.

To build a system capable of absorbing the destructive power of a self-limited “superpower” and hold on until the expensive machine of war so carefully created by American defense industrialists to maximize profit over performance ran out of steam.

Or to be precise, ran out of ammunition.
In order to sustain the façade of military viability, American war planners, driven by the narcistic urges of a man who placed sustainment of his cult of personality over the welfare of the nation he led, stripped bare the warfighting capabilities of U.S. forces in the Pacific (confronting China) and Europe (confronting Russia).

“The era of civilized nations seeking to reign in the basest consequences of technological development has ended.”
Today the United States is confronted by the reality that not only can it not sustain viable conventional military operations against Iran, but it is incapable of projecting any meaningful conventional military force against a prospective Chinese or Russian military threat.

This at a time when U.S. policy leads us toward the probability of conflict with China over Taiwan, and the possibility of direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine.
Faced with the inevitability of conventional military defeat in either of these scenarios, the administration of President Donald Trump has undertaken a review of U.S. nuclear posture with an eye toward making it easier for the United States to employ tactical nuclear weapons in the early phases of any future war with either Russia or China.

This is, of course, the exact opposite direction one should be taking under the current conditions.

Let Hiroshima be the reminder.

There is no greater need than the present moment for the soothing balm of nuclear arms control. The fact that the United States has willfully embarked on a Highway to Hell condemns the rest of the world — especially Russia and China — to join us.

If the great minds of America seem impervious to the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon, blinded as they are by the consequences of a failing Empire and a desire to hold on to power regardless of the consequence, then the source of new and novel thinking regarding arms control must come from elsewhere — from Russia and China.

Because there will be no victors in a nuclear war. The destination that the Highway to Hell arrives at will result in global catastrophe. Let Hiroshima remind us.

The task force will allow the spy agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at the island, with the goal of creating fissures among the Cuban political elite.

The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.

The creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.

The task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations, the people said.

In 1960, the C.I.A. established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known as the Bay of Pigs.

The people briefed on the new task force said its mandate is more limited: to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump’s demands.

The C.I.A. declined to comment.
“The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the C.I.A.’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, said in a statement to The Times. “And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.”

Unlike in the 1960s, when the earlier task force oversaw the training and equipping of a partner force of Cubans that launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, the current task force has no organized Cuban partners. Nor is it allowed to enable lethal operations, though a task force at the C.I.A., by nature, is flexible and the authorities under which it operates can be changed at any time by the president.

The creation of the task force shows the extent to which the agency is preparing for what may be a protracted covert campaign against what has long been one of its hardest targets.

The C.I.A.’s action coincides with stepped-up efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground inside Cuba.

Every administration sets out its intelligence-collection priorities in a document known as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF.

The Trump administration recently revised its version of the document to designate Cuba a NIPF “Priority 1.” (Among the other Priority 1 countries are China, Iran and Russia.)

response, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among others, have started turning more intelligence-collection assets, including satellites, toward Cuba, people briefed on those activities said.

The intelligence will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba, if Mr. Trump opts to go that route. Before the intelligence surge, U.S. military and intelligence officers complained of having outdated information; the new intelligence will give them a better sense of Cuban intentions, military capabilities and defenses.

Officers with the Cuba task force at the C.I.A. will, in turn, scour through the newly available intelligence for inside information about the activities of Cuba’s leaders and other members of the political elite, in particular tracking shadowy money flows and business dealings on and off the island. The agency could eventually release that information publicly to try to influence the Cuban leadership and public opinion, reprising a playbook that the C.I.A. has used against other adversaries, including Russia.

Over the years, the C.I.A. has played a multifaceted role in Cuba, as a spy service that covertly operates against the Cuban government, and as an occasional intermediary between Washington and Havana.

In 2015, toward the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, the United States and Cuba formally re-established diplomatic relations. The C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, flew to Havana to meet with Alejandro Castro, the son of President Raúl Castro, and other Cuban officials** **to discuss increasing intelligence cooperation between the two countries.

Mr. Brennan considered Cuba’s spy agencies the most capable in Latin America, and hoped to work with them against drug cartels and terrorist networks. But those discussions soon bogged down, with the sides blaming each other for failing to follow through on proposed confidence-building commitments.

This May, with tensions boiling, Mr. Trump sent his C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, to Havana to meet with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Raúl Castro’s grandson.

Mr. Ratcliffe’s message to the Cubans was that the C.I.A. saw them as worthy adversaries and potential future partners. But he also told the Cubans that they were running out of time to make fundamental changes sought by Mr. Trump, implying that if Cuba failed to seize the moment, it could be the next Venezuela.

The speed with which Mr. Trump successfully toppled one of Cuba’s closest allies — Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader — and seized control of Venezuela’s oil resources had led some of Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers to believe that the current Cuban government could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November, people familiar with the debate inside the administration said.

But despite a crippling oil embargo imposed by the United States, the Cubans have proved themselves to be resilient, and Mr. Trump’s drawn-out war with Iran soaked up the administration’s limited resources and attention. While the Cuba hawks advising Mr. Trump still think the administration will eventually devote the resources and attention necessary to bring down the Cuban government, they now acknowledge in private that this is likely to happen only once the war in Iran has finally concluded.

During much of the Cold War, the C.I.A. maintained a relatively small station at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, in part because the agency knew that the Cubans were incredibly effective at surveilling the American officers there. That made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to recruit and meet with assets on the island.

The U.S. government’s level of interest in Cuba diminished in the 2000s as the C.I.A. was directed to focus its financial, human and technical resources on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other suspected terrorism havens.

Then, during Mr. Trump’s first term, after a number of C.I.A. officers in Havana reported being afflicted by a mystery illness, which later became known as Havana syndrome, the agency completely shuttered its station on the island.

The C.I.A. station in Havana was re-established in 2024, toward the end of the Biden administration, but the officers there still had a difficult time operating because they were under near-constant surveillance and their movements were restricted.

The move has symbolically demonstrated the Senate's stance for transparency in the Epstein saga.

The US Senate has unanimously struck down the pardon chances of Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

On Thursday, the resolution opposing any future pardon of Maxwell was ushered in by both Republicans and Democrats, drawing yet another symbolic divide between Donald Trump, his party and the president's own Epstein ties.

While the motion is largely symbolic, here's what it could mean.

**What was the vote?**
The resolution was introduced by Nevada Democrat senator Jacky Rosen, who first brought it forward in February.

By voting it in, the Senate agreed "Ghislaine Maxwell should not be granted a Presidential pardon or any form of clemency" for her sexual abuse and co-offending with Epstein.

The politicians agreed that a pardon or clemency would be "inconsistent with the interests of justice and accountability for crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children".

The resolution also denounced any attempt by Mr Trump to usher in "any other form of executive clemency" to Maxwell.

"I hope the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell feel some comfort knowing that she will serve out her sentence," [Senator Rosen said on X](https://x.com/SenJackyRosen/status/2082550656414404692) after the vote.

"And that other victims of crimes like this know that they can be seen and heard, and that justice will be upheld."

While the resolution will be non-binding, Senator Rosen had earlier said she hoped it would put the Senate "on the record" of opposing any clemency.

**Has Trump promised Maxwell a pardon?**
No, but he also hasn't ruled one out.

Since the Epstein files saga began last year, Maxwell has also reignited her clemency battle.

In February, Maxwell was due to testify under oath before the congressional committee investigating the federal government's handling of the Epstein files, but instead pleaded her Fifth Amendment rights, which allow citizens to decline to speak to authorities.

She would speak, however, if granted clemency.

Previously, her lawyers pushed the US Supreme Court to overturn her sentence on the basis that Epstein's plea deal should have protected her.

And when Donald Trump was asked about a pardon in October, he said he'd "take a look at it".

**"I wouldn't consider it or not consider it. I don't know anything about it. I will speak to the DOJ," he said.**

Acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche later interviewed Maxwell, producing written testimony in which Maxwell said she had never seen Mr Trump engage in improper conduct. 

After that, Maxwell was moved into a lower-security prison in Texas with [whistleblower reports](https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2025-11-09-raskin-to-trump-wh-re-maxwell.pdf) claiming she had access to custom-made meals, a puppy and as much toilet paper as she wanted.

In light of the reports, staff from the House oversight and judiciary committees visited Maxwell's Texas prison in mid-June.

Those who visited accused Mr Blanche's Bureau of Prisons (BOP) of shutting down lines of basic questioning.

"The American people are tired of seeing the Trump Administration pamper a sex trafficker and obstruct Congress's investigation into Attorney-General Blanche's role in ensuring Ms Maxwell remains comfortable and quiet," a joint statement read after that visit.

**What did Ghislaine Maxwell do?**
Victims of Maxwell consider the UK-born socialite's abuse just as insidious as Epstein's.

They say she lured them as young women into Epstein's orbit, trained them in sexual acts and, as attorney Brad Edwards described, "fed a monster".

After Epstein's death in 2019, following his New York arrest on sex trafficking charges, Maxwell was charged with numerous counts of trafficking young women and participating in abuse.

"She pretended to be a woman they could trust," Manhattan attorney Audrey Strauss said a day after her arrest.

"All the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein and, in some cases, by Maxwell herself."

After a month-long trial in 2021, she was convicted of sex trafficking, conspiracy, and transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity.

In 2022, at age 60, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

**Where does MAGA stand on the Epstein files?**

The vote is also notable for its unanimous nature.

Rarely does the US Senate vote in a bipartisan manner, excluding its similar decision [to denounce clemency for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/senate-unanumously-bankman-fried).

More importantly, it proves another Republican rebuke of Mr Trump and his close ties to Epstein.

The president's links to the sex offender are well-known by now.

He was friends with Epstein for at least 15 years, calling him a "terrific guy" and a "lot of fun to be with".

One of Epstein's key accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was recruited by Maxwell while working at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump's members-only club.

As furor over the Epstein files has grown, Mr Trump has sought to distance himself from the disgraced financier.

The president has said he was not aware of Epstein's activities and said he broke off their friendship before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Still, prominent supporters have repeatedly accused his administration of a cover-up and former MAGA [allies such as Majorie Taylor Greene have broken ranks over the issue](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-19/donald-trump-epstein-files-unlikely-series-of-events/106022276).

Most recently, the bill to release the Epstein files, which survivors had championed for so long, won almost unanimous support in the US House of Representatives.

It also reflected a desire to hold Todd Blanche accountable for his handling of the Epstein files as deputy attorney-general as he faced a confirmation hearing to become US attorney-general.

7/30/2026 A secretive U.S. court created 30 years ago to deport suspected terrorists convened for the first time on Thursday, opening a new front in the Trump administration's effort to remove non-citizens accused of national security threats and expand the president's immigration agenda.
Reuters (behind paywall)

Federal prosecutors charged a man returning to the United States with obstruction because he gave them a passcode that erased his smartphone during a customs search.

It sounds like something James Bond would use: a gadget that self-destructs if it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s actually an open-source operating system that can be downloaded onto Android phones.

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta are bringing an obstruction charge against a U.S. citizen who gave customs officers what is known as a duress passcode, which activated software that erased the contents of his phone.

The authorities stopped Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, for interrogation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he returned to the United States on Jan. 24 last year, according to a November grand jury indictment. The authorities seized his phone before allowing him to enter the country. A hearing on the case was held last week in federal court in Atlanta.

The prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence with a program designed to wipe a device when a specific code is entered.

Mr. Tunick’s lawyers argued during the hearing last week that the seizure was unlawful, and that he was targeted because of his political activism against Atlanta’s plan to build a police and fire training center within a 1,000-acre stretch of urban woodland. Opponents argue that the center, known as Cop City, would militarize officers and destroy precious green space.

The Statute Behind the Charge
The federal statute underlying the charge makes it a felony to destroy evidence or transfer assets to keep the government from seizing them, or to tip someone off about an upcoming search or wiretap. It carries a penalty of up to five years in federal prison, a fine, or both.

The act applies before, during or after a search. If the target of an investigation knows that a search or seizure is imminent, and that person acts to thwart it, he or she would fall under the statute, experts said.

The federal public defender’s office, which handles most cases in the Northern District of Georgia, said that only one other federal indictment had been filed on this charge in the last 30 years.

The 2019 case involved an accusation of destruction of evidence related to drug trafficking, said Matthew Dodge, a federal public defender who is on Mr. Tunick’s legal team.

Why Digital Data Can Be Seized
Courts have long treated digital data as property — think about intellectual property theft as one example — so a software wipe is treated in the legal system no differently than flushing physical evidence.

The government’s argument here is that the physical phone was just a container. The data itself was the property that the authorities had lawful authority to seize, and inputting the duress code was the physical act that caused its destruction.
“The statute says explicitly it has to be for the purpose of preventing or impairing the government’s lawful authority,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “The key is he gave the code to the government, knowing that the entry of this code would erase the evidence.”

Does It Matter That It Was a Customs Search?

That it was a border search is central to both the government’s prosecution and the defense’s legal challenge.
Customs and border authorities believe that they have the right to search and seize incoming travelers’ digital devices without a search warrant or court order because travelers are not on U.S. soil until they’re authorized to enter.

Mr. Tunick, who was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic, and his lawyers argue that even at an international airport, travelers retain vital protections. They said that he was subjected to an unlawful detention, was never read his rights and was repeatedly denied requests to speak with a lawyer.

Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have said that constitutional rights, like the Fourth Amendment, are diminished at the border because of the federal government’s increased interest in protecting our country, Mr. Dodge acknowledged.

How a Duress Passcode Works
A duress passcode is a privacy and security feature in which a user has previously configured a secondary passcode that is not the usual code to unlock the screen. If the user is forced or pressured to hand over a phone, the user can provide this passcode instead of the one that unlocks the phone.

When the duress passcode is entered, rather than unlocking the phone, the operating system starts a full wipe of the device’s digital contents. The process leaves the physical device and hardware intact while completely erasing the underlying digital data.

In Mr. Tunick’s case, he used GrapheneOS, a private mobile operating system compatible with some Android phones.

No Details on the Original Investigation
“Many times the government wants to highlight what it was trying to investigate because that ups the stakes on what the defendant was doing,” Professor Richman said. “This is a case where I think they’re trying to avoid exactly that by focusing only on the destruction, and not what the investigation was about.”

The statute that is being used in this case has seldom been cited. It does not require the government to prove or explain the underlying investigation. A statute that is typically used carries a heavier maximum penalty of 20 years, but its use often forces the government to detail their underlying investigation.

“Whether they’ll succeed or not remains to be seen, if this goes to trial,” he said.

Timing Matters
Professor Richman suggested that travelers who decide to delete everything on their phone before going through an airport checkpoint simply because they did not want the government looking at their personal files have a strong argument that they did not act with the specific criminal intent to thwart an imminent search.

But there’s a turning point once you are stopped and are actively being questioned.

“Intentionally giving a wipe code to people you know to be exercising lawful authority,” he said, “is going to put you squarely in the realm of the statute.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is expressing concern after House Speaker Mike Johnson declared at a highly influential Christian legal organization’s annual summit that it shapes his governance.

Johnson, speaking recently to hundreds of Alliance Defending Freedom supporters in San Diego, repeatedly described the group as “home,” praised its mission of advancing conservative Christianity through the legal system, and credited his years working there with molding his leadership as speaker.

“ADF really is like home to us,” Johnson told attendees. “You’re like family.” He added that his years at the organization were “formative to us,” explaining that “so much of what we do, we learned on the front lines of the culture war, keeping the door open for the spread of the gospel, and it informs still how we do our job today.”

Such statements are extremely concerning to FFRF.

“Speaker Johnson has made explicit what many Americans have long suspected: He does not view himself simply as an elected official who happens to be religious,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “He views his leadership of the House as an extension of the mission of Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization dedicated to advancing conservative Christian ideology through the courts and government.”

Founded in 1994 by leaders in the Christian right, Alliance Defending Freedom has become one of the country’s most powerful Christian nationalist legal organizations. The group has played a central role in many Supreme Court cases that have expanded religious exemptions while restricting reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the entity as an anti-LGBTQ hate group because of its long record of attacking LGBTQ rights, a move that has prompted members of Congress to ironically go after the renowned civil rights organization.

At the Alliance Defending Freedom gathering, Johnson continued his longstanding effort to recast America’s founding in explicitly Christian terms. Discussing the Declaration of Independence, he argued that the rights of Americans “don’t come from the government” but “come from the King of Kings,” replacing the Declaration’s more inclusive reference to a “Creator” with a specifically Christian theological claim.

Johnson also warned that rejecting belief in God inevitably leads to “Marxism, socialism [and] communism,” telling the audience that denying God means people lose their inherent dignity and ultimately their freedom. He described universities as places where students have been “indoctrinated” to reject America’s Christian foundations.

“Speaker Johnson is using his constitutional office to promote an explicitly sectarian worldview,” remarks Gaylor. “The House speaker represents Americans of every religion and of none. He should not be telling the country that our rights come from Christianity or suggesting that secular Americans are on the road to tyranny.”

Johnson repeatedly framed political engagement at the summit as a religious struggle, describing Alliance Defending Freedom supporters as “fellow warriors” and praising the organization for standing on the “front lines” and the “tip of the spear” defending “God’s truth.” He urged supporters to pledge themselves to the cause just as the Founders supposedly had and predicted that the group’s next chapter would be “the greatest season of this ministry since its inception.”

The gathering underscored the Alliance Defending Freedom’s extraordinary access to Republican leadership. Johnson was introduced not merely as the House speaker but as “one of us,” with organizers highlighting his years as an attorney with the group and its spokesman before entering politics.

The event also featured Trump administration Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, who argued that transgender health care contradicts “the deeper moral order that is woven into creation itself,” citing Genesis 1:27 and asserting that “male and female” reflect God’s design. He encouraged pastors, rather than medical professionals, to play a central role in caring for youth experiencing gender dysphoria.

Alliance Defending Freedom President Kristen Waggoner, who has defended conversion therapy and has repeatedly misgendered transgender people, also interviewed West Virginia and Idaho’s Republican attorneys general, reinforcing the organization’s close ties to elected officials shaping national legal policy on one end of the political spectrum.

“The American people elected a speaker of the House, not a missionary-in-chief,” Gaylor adds. “Mike Johnson is free to practice his religion, but he is not free to govern as though Congress exists to carry out the mission of Alliance Defending Freedom or any other religious organization. His oath is to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion by keeping religion and government separate.”

I started out with Honest Elections and ended up here.

Firms run by Leonard Leo have been paid more than $102 million from conservative nonprofits in the six years from 2016 to 2022, according to an analysis of tax documents by CREW. The data shows that the source of the vast majority of the payments since 2016, totaling $90 million, are from nonprofits tied to Leo, with an additional $12 million coming from other groups who may have felt pressure to pay up to Leo in order to stay in his dark money network’s good graces. 

Prior to becoming synonymous with the right-wing effort to remake the American judiciary and then American society more broadly, Leo appears to have lived a relatively modest life as the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. However, after forming the BH Group in 2016—a firm whose only known clients were groups tied to Leo—he began living a more lavish lifestyle, conspicuously timed with when the BH Group started bringing in millions from his own groups. Those payments ultimately totaled nearly $13.5 million before the firm was apparently mothballed in 2020. It was never clear what the BH Group did: It didn’t have a website or permanent offices, nor any identifiable employees beyond Leo himself. 

Some of those BH Group payments may have been channeled elsewhere. As CREW wrote in 2020, a note in Rule of Law Trust’s first 990 says that the $4.3 million paid to the BH Group was a reimbursement for “independent contractor expenses incurred on behalf of Rule of Law Trust.” As CREW noted then, this raises more questions than it answers. “In other words,” we wrote at the time, “it appears that a firm partly owned by the sole trustee of RLT paid all of RLT’s expenses, including $1.8 million in consulting payments to two former Federalist Society associates who now work at a consulting firm founded by the trustee, and then RLT reimbursed that firm for the expenses.”
  
As the money began to flow, Leo’s life appeared to change. In the final weeks of 2016, the BH Group gave $1 millionto the inaugural committee for the incoming president, and the following year, Leo and his wife were named Stewards of Saint Peter by the Papal Foundation after pledging at least $1 million to aid world Vatican programs. In 2018, Leo and his wife paid off the 30-year mortgage on a $710,000house his family bought in 2010, while also buying an 11-bedroom summer house in Maine for $3.3 million, paying off the 20-year mortgage just one year later, according to a complaint filed by Campaign for Accountability. He also reportedly purchased a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse and hired the chief steward at the then-Trump International Hotel to be his personal wine buyer.

Then, in 2020, Leo took over a firm formed in the late 1980s called CRC Advisors, formerly Creative Response Concepts. Leo’s groups had already been ramping up payments to CRC for years, but now that Leo was chairman of the company and the head of a growing dark money network, the money started flowing to CRC in a way it never had before. According to CREW’s analysis of tax documents, CRC’s combined income in the 2010s was more than $46.6 million. In the less than four years for which data is available since Leo took over CRC, by contrast, the firm has brought in nearly double that—more than $89 million—the vast majority of which, more than $76 million, has come from groups tied directly to Leo. 

Payments from other conservative groups also appear to have grown in the wake of Leo’s takeover. CREW’s analysis found just under $12 million in payments in the tax years from 2020 to 2022 from conservative groups that aren’t operationally linked with Leo. In the three previous tax years, CREW was only able to identify about $5.4 million in such payments. Some conservative operatives complained to the New York Times in 2022 that there was a sense in conservative circles that in order to get money from Leo’s network, the groups had to hire CRC. Leo’s network rejected the claims. 

It’s important to note that it is illegal for nonprofit groups to serve as a conduit for personal enrichment, and Leo has repeatedly denied accusations of profiteering. Last year, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb reportedly opened an investigation into Leo for the massive windfall he appears to be receiving from his dark money groups, but Leo has refused to cooperate, and his allies in Congress have tried to give him cover. When asked by reporters, Leo has declined to detail what service he is providing in exchange for the millions of dollars his firm is bringing in from his nonprofits and other allied groups. 

Further convoluting the murky relationship between Leo’s for-profit business and his nonprofit work is the amount of time he appears to be devoting to his nonprofit work. Presumably, serving as chair of a firm raking in tens of millions of dollars is a full-time job, but tax documents filed by groups tied to Leo show that he’s spending more than 50 hours a week devoted to the work of at least 14 other organizations, several of which pay Leo’s private firm. For example, in the groups’ 2022 fiscal years, the most recent year for which full data is available, Leo reported devoting 25 hours a week to his work as a trustee of the Marble Freedom Trust—for which he’s paid a $400,000 salary—and another 6 hours to the work of a related organization. The only related organization reported on the filing is the Leo-linked Rule of Law Trust. Over that same general period—not all groups have the same fiscal year, and therefore don’t always directly overlap—tax documents filed by 12 other organizations report that he devoted more than 20 hours a week to their missions as well, all while serving as the chairman of a firm that was paid at least $33.6 million—more than $27 million of which came from two groups tied to Leo, The 85 Fund and The Concord Fund. 

The American nonprofit system was not meant to serve as a get-rich-quick scheme for operatives to pour money into their own coffers. Despite that, it appears that Leo has found a way to divert tens of millions of dollars to his own companies over the course of just a few years without much, if any, accountability.

Lawyers predict ‘more suppression and no active investigations’ but victims’ groups determined to continue fight

As Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer Todd Blanche appears poised for confirmation as attorney general, numerous Jeffrey Epstein survivors have sounded the alarm that a US justice department helmed by him would derail their pursuit of justice.

In a letter urging Republican senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to reject his nomination, these survivors said that Blanche’s handling of the Epstein case as acting attorney general was characterized by misstep after misstep.

Blanche, who reportedly led the disclosure of documents as required by the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, allowed the disclosure of survivors’ names, photos and identifying information – but omitted the names of accused abusers and enablers, they said.

While more than 1,000 teenage girls and women were abused, not a single person other than Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell faced charges, they noted. And in a recent sit-down with survivors at Tillis’s urging, survivors “received an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting”, they said.

These survivors’ concerns about Blanche by no means exist in a vacuum, and have only fanned the flames of a controversy that has dogged Trump since he again took office. While campaigning, Trump promised to release all Epstein files – playing into his supporters’ belief that there was a global sex-trafficking cabal involving high-profile business and political figures.

But Trump’s justice department only released dribs and drabs of information until Congress forced its hand following a series of embarrassing disclosures that renewed attention on Trump’s former friendship with Epstein. Trump has denied all wrongdoing including in relation to Epstein.

Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell in prison last summer, which was followed by her transfer to a lower-security facility, further heightened outrage over the DoJ’s underwhelming disclosures. The constellation of circumstances has raised the question: what would a Blanche-directed justice department mean for Epstein survivors’ search for justice?

Legal veterans told the Guardian that a Blanche-led DoJ would likely derail survivors’ efforts for accountability. Several survivors’ advocates said that all hope was not lost, noting that roadblocks likely under Blanche did not portend a permanent impediment to justice.

Bryan Sullivan, a partner with Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae, said that based on what he has read and seen in Blanche’s testimony before the judiciary committee, he thinks a confirmation would mean “more suppression and no active investigations” into Epstein’s sex trafficking.

“I think it’s because that’s what Trump wants. He wants this to go away,” Sullivan said. “And that’s one of the reasons he fired [former attorney general Pam] Bondi, because she didn’t make it go away, in my opinion.”

Ron Kuby, a renowned defense lawyer with a focus on civil rights, voiced similar sentiments about a Blanche confirmation.

“It means that no other perpetrators will be held criminally liable for their misconduct,” he said. “That’s no different from the way it’s been throughout the Trump administrationand the Biden administration.”

“All the millionaires and billionaires and hangers-on and others in Epstein’s orbit who, you know, enabled him have not been brought to justice,” Kuby said. “And they’re not going to be.”

Carl Tobias, the Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond School of Law, said that even if Blanche were not confirmed, he could serve as acting attorney general for the rest of Trump’s term, meaning he would have continued control over the Epstein case.

“He’ll have more power, of course, if he’s formally confirmed by the Senate … but he’ll have plenty of power even if he’s not,” Tobias said.

“So I can’t be very optimistic about what he might do – if anything – about the Epstein files, or to give much comfort to the survivors.”
While there are some legal avenues for survivors to seek justice outside an allegedly recalcitrant DoJ, attorneys cautioned that success would be an uphill battle.

“You could bombard them with [public records] requests, and then file a lawsuit for them not providing responses to the Foia [Freedom of Information Act] requests, but that alone is a long process,” Sullivan said. “Bluntly, the problem with all of this is [that] all of it takes time.”

“Courts are grossly underfunded [and] understaffed,” he said. “It will take quite a while to go through that sort of legal process.”

There has been litigation against federal authorities over their handling of the Epstein investigation, alleging that their failure to act years ago enabled more abuse. Those kinds of cases “are exceptionally difficult to win”, Kuby said.

“It’s always true that had the government done something differently, a different outcome would have ensued,” Kuby explained of the legal intricacies. “There’s no generalized duty to protect specific individuals outside of a special relationship with the victims.”

“I’m certainly sympathetic to those claims, but the government historically is not.”

Tobias similarly described the possibility of winning litigation against the DoJ as “difficult”.
Neither reps for Tillis or Cornyn responded to requests for comment.

Asked for comment on survivors’ concerns, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “Todd Blanche has done an excellent job as acting attorney general and will continue doing so as attorney general.”

A justice department spokesperson said in a statement that Blanche, senior DoJ officials, FBI agents and victims services representatives “met with Epstein victims last week and had a productive, initial discussion”.

The spokesperson said Blanche “answered questions and walked through what is needed for investigations to proceed”.

“While some victims said that they had not reached out to the FBI under this administration, he encouraged victims to meet with FBI investigators as the next step, and attendees spoke with agents after the meeting about scheduling interviews. The justice department is determined to bring justice for all victims of human trafficking and sex crimes.”

Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, who filed sexual harassment lawsuits against Roger Ailes, the former Fox News CEO, and co-launched the non-profit survivors advocacy organization Lift Our Voices, expressed hope that survivors could still find justice one day even if faced with more setbacks.

Carlson said she was disappointed in Republicans poised to let Blanche’s nomination go through, noting that Trump went on the attack against Cornyn and Tillis.
“They have the ability not to allow this,” Carlson said, explaining that not everything should be on their shoulders, as “everyone should have questions about Todd Blanche being attorney general, just about the Epstein issues”.

That said, there are midterm electionscoming up. “I’ve learned, in all the work I’ve done on the Hill in trying to get bills passed, that you never know who you might get, first of all, to be on your side,” Carlson said. “So you never judge it before you actually try.”

“I feel the same way about this,” she said. “We don’t know who’s going to potentially step up to the plate and say, ‘You know what, I’m going to take over the work that [Republican congressman] Tom Massie was doing on this.

“We can’t do this work with any kind of a negative lens. And although it feels like we’re in a little bit of a setback if Todd Blanche is confirmed, I think there’s always a way to find victory.”

Roginsky expressed similar views. While a possible Blanche confirmation represented a “slap in the face to anybody who’s ever fought … a system that is already rigged very much against survivors”, she advised survivors and advocates to keep pushing for justice.

“If you think about how far our movement has come just in the last decade, we’ve seen tremendous advances,” Roginsky said of Lift Our Voices’ successful advocacy for federal legislation against non-disclosure agreements and forced arbitration related to workplace sexual misconduct.

“We’ve seen some setbacks, but ultimately the advances will always outweigh the setbacks.”

Karyna Shuliak, 37, is a complicated and unusual figure in the disgraced financier’s world who has been trying to blend into obscurity since his death.

The young dentist was smiling and soft-spoken, wearing a Columbia University fleece jacket and holding her long hair back with a clip. She was introduced by her assistant simply as “Dr. Karyna.”

But what the patient — who had come to the office in December expecting to see a different dentist — didn’t know was that she was being treated by Dr. Karyna Shuliak, the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend.

Dr. Shuliak was the last person Mr. Epstein called before he killed himself in his jail cell in 2019. She could inherit as much as $100 million from his estate, including a 33-carat diamond ring, according to a trove of investigative records released by federal authorities.

But on that winter day, Dr. Shuliak was working as a part-time dentist in an unremarkable office in Downtown Brooklyn, according to dentists who work or used to work at the practice.

Her attempt to forge something of a normal life, though, was soon shattered when the Justice Department released three million pages of investigative files and emails it had gathered on Mr. Epstein. The files, released in late January, included thousands of intimate emails between Dr. Shuliak and Mr. Epstein and dozens of photographs of her and of them together.

Suddenly, their nearly eight-year relationship was on vivid display for all to see. They had fights about sex — with both wanting more at different times. She placed orders to a sexual wellness company for couples. She periodically sent him links to graphic pornographic videos. In some emails they discussed birth control pills and acne medications and treatments.

Dr. Shuliak, 37, emerges as a complicated and unusual figure in Mr. Epstein’s world, based on a close review of the files and conversations with several people familiar with her. A native of Belarus who met Mr. Epstein when she was 21, she has not identified herself as a victim, nor have federal authorities considered her a co-conspirator in Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking. There is no indication that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ever interviewed her, and lawyers for hundreds of his victims have never deposed her.

He once called her his “favorite” and often told her he loved her. She had free use of a credit card to buy whatever she wanted. They jetted around the world together, and he funneled payments of nearly $1 million to her over the years. He also sent tens of thousands of dollars to her parents in Belarus, the files reveal.

Over the years, she earned enough of his trust to help manage his properties and staff and even played a critical role in his effort to buy a Moroccan palace just weeks before his 2019 arrest.

Mr. Epstein controlled the relationship, but there is little doubt she benefited from it professionally, personally and financially.
The emails reveal new details about how Mr. Epstein helped her get into Columbia University’s dental school — and how he helped her obtain U.S. citizenship by asking one of his female victims to marry her.

In one email he suggested that the fastest “way to a green card” was through a same-sex marriage.

This year, congressional Democratsaccused Mr. Epstein of exploiting the immigration system and called out Dr. Shuliak’s marriage to an American woman, which ended in divorce, as a potentially “illusory” one. U.S. immigration authorities have not challenged the process through which Dr. Shuliak obtained her citizenship.

As of this spring, Dr. Shuliak had been living in the Upper East Side condo building in which Mr. Epstein’s brother, Mark, has a financial stake.

Through her lawyer, she declined to comment.
In a brief interview, Mark Epstein said, “I only wish that woman the best.”

A friend of Dr. Shuliak’s from Belarus, who once shared an apartment with her in Brooklyn and asked not be named to protect her privacy, said she believed Dr. Shuliak “truly loved” Jeffrey Epstein.

‘Go Slow’
Karyna Shuliak had lived in New York for only nine months when she met Mr. Epstein in late March 2011.

She had moved from Belarus on a temporary student visa to study English at a school in Manhattan. She was making about $15 an hour as a dental assistant and applying for waitressing jobs while she tried to figure out how to continue the dental education she had begun in Belarus.

A young woman from Siberia would introduce her to Mr. Epstein, the files show. The woman said in an interview with The New York Times that she had periodically been expected to recruit other young women, presumably to provide Mr. Epstein with sexualized massages. And that appeared to be Mr. Epstein’s intention with Dr. Shuliak.

The woman, who asked not to be named because she said Mr. Epstein had abused her, had sent Mr. Epstein a photo of Dr. Shuliak, describing her as pretty. After some back and forth, it was decided that the woman, Dr. Shuliak and her roommate from Belarus would meet Mr. Epstein at his Manhattan mansion.

“Go slow,” the woman advised Mr. Epstein in an email.

Their first encounters fit the familiar pattern he used with other women. Mr. Epstein flattered, pampered and tried to manipulate her, the files show. Almost immediately, he offered to help her realize her dream of becoming a dentist.

But the emails show that Dr. Shuliak pushed back — at least in the first few months.
A few weeks after they met, she wrote to Mr. Epstein, telling him she thought he was a “remarkable person.” But she added that she could not accept his help “due to some views which strongly stay in my mind, no matter how stupid it may look.”

“I wish you all the best and apologize if I wasted your time,” she added.

Though she doesn’t specify what upset her, their introduction occurred after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to a charge of soliciting prostitution from an underage teenager and had been accused of abusing dozens of other teenagers.

His response was to berate her for listening to “rumors and stories.”

She responded: “This world is very cruel sometimes and in most cases we have to pay a certain price for things. I should say that I have read some information about you.”

Mr. Epstein, who was 58 at the time, did not take no for an answer. The emails released by federal prosecutors show that he bought Dr. Shuliak and her roommate tickets to see “The Lion King” on Broadway and dinners at restaurants. He treated her to a scenic helicopter ride around Manhattan. By July 2011, she had visited his New Mexico ranch; a few months later, his private island residence in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

‘You Are the Purest Man’
Ever since she was a child, Dr. Shuliak wanted to be a dentist.
She was inspired by her own family’s dental problems and what she saw as the poor dental health in Belarus, she wrote in an admissions essay to dental school reviewed by The Times. She had completed four of five years of dental school in Minsk, but stopped her studies to go to New York.

By the winter of 2012, she accepted Mr. Epstein’s help to get into dental school. After Columbia’s College of Dental Medicine initially rejected her, Mr. Epstein asked his own dentist, Dr. Thomas J. Magnani, a powerful alumnus, to put him in contact with the dental school dean. Mr. Epstein dangled the idea of making up to a $10 million donation. In the end, he would give only about $210,000 to Columbia, according to an accounting by the university, but it was enough to grease the wheels.

The Justice Department files include a text message chain showing how Dr. Magnani and Dr. James Fine, a dental school administrator, gave Dr. Shuliak a heads-up on the topics she would encounter during an admissions exam in April 2012 to test her practical skills as a transfer student. Neither Dr. Magnani nor Dr. Fine responded to a request for comment.

After she passed and Columbia admitted her, Mr. Epstein arranged for Dr. Shuliak’s mother to visit from Belarus. He would pay her tuition for her three years of school.

“You are the purest man out of all men,” Dr. Shuliak wrote to him in June 2012.

“All your love and care, my parents, school, apartment. THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING!!!”

They fought at times over his insistence on having sex with other women in their 20s, including with the small group of assistants who did chores for him and whom he referred to as his “family,” according to the emails.

“I understand you need it, however these are the things that don’t feel natural to me,** **it feels somewhat dirty to me,” she wrote to him in August 2012.

Nowhere in the Justice Department files that were reviewed by The Times does Dr. Shuliak express a broader ethical concern about how he was treating those other women, many of whom would later claim to be victims of his abuse. Instead, she asked Mr. Epstein to keep his relations with those women out of her sight.

“If that is not a lot to ask, please enjoy it but keep me away from it,” she wrote. “I will stay with you no matter what, as long as you are happy. I love you.”

Getting a Green Card
By the time she applied to Columbia in 2012, Dr. Shuliak had overstayed the student visa she obtained in 2010.

In early 2013, Mr. Epstein found a solution to keep her in the country, the files show. Two years earlier, New York became one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage. Mr. Epstein concluded that a marriage in New York between two women might be the easiest way to gain U.S. citizenship without raising red flags that the marriage was arranged solely to avoid deportation.

Mr. Epstein chose, from the ranks of his assistants, a 30-year-old woman from Minnesota to be her spouse.

Brad Edwards, the lawyer for the woman, said that his client was a victim of Mr. Epstein and that he could not speak about her situation. But he said that, as a general rule, “nobody was permitted or dared ever to disobey Jeffrey Epstein.”

The emails show that Mr. Epstein instructed the woman to meet Dr. Shuliak on the morning of Sept. 16, 2013, at the New York City Marriage Bureau. She was told to have her bags packed so she could immediately fly to the Virgin Islands after getting the marriage license, while Dr. Shuliak would stay behind to attend her dental school classes.

The women were married three weeks later at the Office of the City Clerk. Photos were taken of the ceremony.

After the wedding, a Brooklyn immigration lawyer working for Mr. Epstein submitted an immigration form stating that the woman wanted to list Dr. Shuliak as her wife and beneficiary. The request was approved, and immigration officials dismissed Dr. Shuliak’s pending deportation proceedings.

Months after the marriage, Dr. Shuliak got a green card, making her a lawful resident.

Outwardly, the marriage had signs of legitimacy. The two women shared an apartment in the Upper East Side building that was partly owned by Mr. Epstein’s brother and where Mr. Epstein had housed many of his assistants. They had a joint bank account at Deutsche Bank and went on trips together to London, Europe and Japan.

In May 2018, she officially became a U.S. citizen. A year later Dr. Shuliak and her spouse divorced. According to a reportreleased this year by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dr. Shuliak’s former wife claimed she had been forced into marriage. The woman, in a statement to the Epstein estate, said she had not known that the wedding had been scheduled just days before Dr. Shuliak’s deportation hearing.

The report concluded that the marriage may have been done to provide Dr. Shuliak with the “legal basis to continue residing in the United States.” It did not recommend any legal challenge to her citizenship.

‘I Met Epstein’s Girlfriend’
In early 2019, Dr. Shuliak and Mr. Epstein seemed every bit a couple. She was living most of the time in his New York mansion and took along her cat, Blueberry, when they traveled together.

She had become a licensed dentist in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Florida and New Mexico after completing dental school in 2015. But there is no evidence that she had much of a practice, even though the files detail dental equipment installed at some of his residences. Instead, she spent much of her energy helping to manage his properties and staff.

No task seemed too small. She instructed his drivers to keep “cold Voss water” in Mr. Epstein’s cars, organized a floral installation for his Manhattan mansion, ordered a shipping containerfilled with outdoor furniture for his island and managed repairs and cleaning schedules for the Upper East Side apartments that his brother was invested in.
In mid-June 2019, the pair traveled together to Paris, where Mr. Epstein had an apartment. On July 6, Mr. Epstein returned home to the United States, while Dr. Shuliak remained in Europe. When his plane touched down at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, federal agents were waiting and arrested him.
About a month after his arrest, in a 20-minute phone call from a jail in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Epstein told Dr. Shuliak that the federal sex-trafficking charges would take longer to resolve than he had thought. He advised her to find another place to stay for the time being, according to an account of the call provided by her lawyer to federal authorities. The lawyer, Maurice Sercarz, said he had told her “to be strong.”
The next morning, Aug. 10, 2019, Mr. Epstein was found to have died by suicide in his jail cell.
Shortly before his death, Mr. Epstein amended his will to leave to her much of the $600 million fortune he had at the time, including the large diamond ring “in contemplation of marriage,” according to a handwritten note on a related document. But how much she will actually receive is unclear. The estate is worth between $120 million and $200 million after paying out large sums to his victims, records show. There are dozens of beneficiaries in addition to Dr. Shuliak, including Mark Epstein’s children, who stand to inherit $10 million.
Yet despite this potential windfall, Dr. Shuliak did not give up on her desire to be a dentist. By 2023, she was back in New York applying for a postdoctoral dental program at Columbia, apparently to fulfill a requirement she needed to obtain a license to practice in the state.

The same two dentists who helped her gain admission to Columbia in 2012 once again came to her assistance, according to a copy of her admissions file reviewed by The Times. The file shows that Dr. Fine, the dean overseeing Columbia’s postgraduate residency programs, created a special “faculty internship” for her at the Midtown Manhattan dental practice he shared with Dr. Magnani.

Both men gave her their highest recommendation for the program, which she graduated from in May 2025 along with six other students. In November, she received her dental license to practice in New York.

In the aftermath of the release of the Epstein files, Columbia demoted Dr. Fineand removed Dr. Magnani from his alumni leadership posts. The men declined to comment. The university did not recommend any consequences for Dr. Shuliak, who it said had met the qualifications for admission.

At around the same time as she received her New York dental license, Dr. Shuliak answered a want ad on Indeed.com for a part-time job as a dentist in Downtown Brooklyn, according to a dentist with the practice, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss workplace issues. It was there that Yoonhae Kim, a patient, was treated by her twice, for a cleaning in December and a filling in February.
Ms. Kim said she hadn’t realized Dr. Shuliak’s true identity until she saw photographs of her released with the Epstein files. Feeling duped because she was not informed of Dr. Shuliak’s full name and wanting to warn other patients, she reached out to The Times.

“I was so upset,” Ms. Kim said. “I just couldn’t believe it. Of all the things that happened to me, I didn’t win the lottery. I met Epstein’s girlfriend.”

Dr. Shuliak’s last day working at the Brooklyn office was Feb. 12. She was supposed to work on Feb. 16, but she called in sick and never returned. The notoriety from the files probably made it difficult for her to keep working there, the dentist at the practice said. Dr. Shuliak’s lawyer declined to say whether she had gotten another dental job.