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Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is claiming that, somehow, the Justice Department has no knowledge on the men who used convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s network to abuse dozens of young women—and it certainly won’t be found in the millions of new documents released on Friday.“Just to clarify, is the public going to learn the identities of the men who abused the girls with the information you’re releasing?” a reporter asked Blanche at a Friday press conference. “And if not, why not?” “I mean, you just baked in an assumption into your question that I have never said, and I don’t know to be true,” Blanche replied. “Is the public going to learn about men that abused these girls? What does that mean? I don’t understand what it means.” Blanche: "I do not whether there are men out there that abused these women. If we learn about information and evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But I don't think the public is going to undercover men within the Epstein files that abused women.… pic.twitter.com/fvDGs72m3k— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 30, 2026“We said in July … if we had information—we, meaning the Department of Justice—about men who abused women, we would prosecute them,” Blanche continued. “There’s a built-in assumption that somehow there’s this hidden tranche of information of men that we know about, that we’re covering up, or we’re choosing not to prosecute. That is not the case. I don’t know whether there are men out there that abused these women.“I don’t think that the public [is going to] uncover men within the Epstein files that abused women,” he concluded. It was ridiculous to see a top Justice Department official feign confusion at the most pertinent question that anyone could have asked him at that moment. The department released three million files related to Epstein, who was facing federal charges of sex trafficking of minors when he died. Many of his victims have come forward over the years to talk about how they were abused by Epstein and his friends.Just this week, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell claimed that 29 friends of the late sex trafficker were “protected” by the Justice Department by way of “secret settlements.”“So Todd Blanche is claiming: They have 6 MILLION *files* (and have released <5% of it in 3M *pages*), [and proved] that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked. But CAN’T prove who they trafficked to,” professor Adam Cochran wrote on X. “How stupid do you need to be, to believe that? Even if you somehow don’t think its Trump, then at the very least Trump’s DoJ is protecting wealthy abusers!”Representative Ro Khanna, who co-sponsored a bill mandating the release of all unclassified Epstein files, noted that even as millions more documents dropped Friday, the right documents weren’t being released—specifically the “302” files, in which the victims identify their abusers, a convenient group of files to leave unreleased. “If Blanche believes that there is no coverup, then he should release the 302 files. The 302 files are where the survivors name who these rich and powerful men are,” Khanna responded. “I’ve talked to the survivors. They say that they have named those people in the FBI witness interviews. So if those witness interviews are released, the American people can see for themselves who the survivors named … but if Blanche continues to not release the 302 statements, to not release the prosecution memos—then it’s a cover-up.” The survivors want a transparent release. If there's no coverup this release should have the 302 statements and prosecution memos to show who these rich and powerful men were. pic.twitter.com/ZgjrHEKO3z— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) January 30, 2026

In the latest part of its Epstein files rollout, the Justice Department released a long list of sexual abuse allegations against Donald Trump. Then it temporarily retracted it.The DOJ published three million pages of the Epstein files Friday, more than a month past its congressionally mandated deadline. The trove included one particularly shocking document: an FBI tip line record that included previously unreported sex abuse allegations against the president, some of which involved minors.The tip line includes unsubstantiated and potentially uninvestigated claims of abuse, sometimes by way of secondhand information.In one such undated line, a self-described friend of one of Trump’s alleged victims submitted a tip.“[Redacted] reported an unidentified female friend who was forced to perform oral sex on President Trump approximately 35 years ago in NJ,” the top entry of the tip sheet reads. “The friend told Alexis that she was approximately 13-14 years old when this occurred, and the friend allegedly bit President Trump while performing oral sex. The friend was allegedly hit in the face after she laughed about biting President Trump. The friend said she was also abused by [Jeffrey] Epstein.”The page notes that the friend “was sent to the Washington Office to conduct an interview.”But just a couple of hours after the DOJ published the tip sheet, the document was removed from the larger document cache.“Page not found,” read the page that replaced by the original document link. “We are sorry, the page you’re looking for can’t be found on the Department of Justice website.”The altered webpage is incorrectly dated, as well, suggesting that it was last updated May 30, 2025.Then, inexplicably, the document was accessible again.Email messages and signatures attached to the document signal that it was partially censored and transferred between FBI agents in August, when a journalist filed an information request in relation to New York property brothers turned child predators Tal, Oren, and Alon Alexander.

By Medea Benjamin When Senator Tim Kaine told Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a recent Senate hearing on Venezuela that the administration’s announcement of a new Monroe Doctrine “does not land well in the Americas,” he was putting it mildly. I just returned from an emergency gathering in Bogotá on January 24-25 with about […]

Students at the University of Minnesota, united with hundreds of groups across the country, are imploring people, young and old, to join a general strike on Friday. No school, no work, no economic participation, all toward the goal of ceasing funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  The strike comes after weeks of the Department of […]

After a magistrate judge left Attorney General Pam Bondi furious by rejecting a criminal complaint against journalist Don Lemon on January 18, she tried to get her revenge Friday morning. The Department of Justice arrested Lemon in Los Angeles on charges related to his involvement in an ICE protest at a Minnesotan church.But only a few hours after the fact, the DOJ’s case is falling apart again. MS NOW reported that various DOJ prosecutors in both Minnesota and Los Angeles have refused to be involved in indicting Lemon. Authorities continue to be vague about why exactly Lemon is being prosecuted. Bondi wrote on X that Lemon—alongside journalist Georgia Fort and two activists, Trahern Jeen Crews and Jamael Lydell Lundy—had been detained “in connection with [a] coordinated attack” on the St. Paul church, but has not said what the charges are. FBI spokeswoman Lourdes Arocho said Lemon was arrested in Beverly Hills “on a federal warrant issued in another district.”Lemon covered the church protest as a member of the media, a fact he made quite obvious at the time. He interviewed both protesters and the pastor of the church at the event. An appeals judge said of Lemon and his producer’s conduct: “There is no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”Trump’s idea in prosecuting Lemon, perhaps, is not that he’ll be found guilty but that the DOJ can discourage journalists from reporting on things the president doesn’t like by getting them to waste time and money in legal battles.“They probably don’t have any expectation that this prosecution will stick,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar at Stanford Law School, told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent. “But they do know they will put Don Lemon through the grinder in the meantime.”

Donald Trump has sued the IRS and the Treasury Department after an agency contractor leaked his tax returns, revealing that he hadn’t paid income tax for a decade—but his lawsuit isn’t likely to stand up to scrutiny.In court documents filed late Thursday, Trump demanded that the agencies cough up a minimum of $10 billion in damages that would be paid out on the taxpayer’s dime. But there are several issues with the suit itself that raise questions about whether the case can be litigated at all.First, Trump, in a personal capacity, is suing the IRS and the Treasury for a breach that occurred between May 2019 and September 2020. The problem: The breach occurred during the first Trump administration, when Trump himself was in charge of governing those institutions.Further still, the bulk of the 27-page complaint appears to have passed the statute of limitations. As Ed Whelan, the former deputy assistant attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, noted online, the first claim in Trump’s complaint must be brought “within two years after the date of discovery” by the offended party.“Trump knew of the leaks back in 2020. The complaint feebly tries to get around this problem by contending that Trump and his fellow plaintiffs ‘were not able to bring an action against an unknowable, indeterminate defendant to vindicate their rights’ until they were notified of criminal charges against Littlejohn,” Whelan wrote, referring to Charles Littlejohn, the accused contractor.Littlejohn is currently serving five years in prison for the breach, which he pleaded guilty to in 2023.“But Littlejohn isn’t the defendant. Treasury and IRS are,” Whelan observed. “And Trump knew back in 2020 that they had allowed the allegedly unlawful leaks. So that claim is time-barred.”Trump is suing the government in conjunction with his two sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as the Trump Organization.“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” the lawsuit states. The second claim listed in the lawsuit, which relates to the privacy clause, similarly expired, according to Whelan. “Seems to me that it wasn’t long ago that conservatives decried vexatious litigants and those who tried to fleece American taxpayers,” Whelan snarked.

Don Lemon, the prominent journalist and former CNN anchor, was arrested by federal agents Thursday in Los Angeles on charges that he violated a law while reporting on a protest at a church in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month.  The saga represents a startling, if not new, turn in the Trump administration’s attacks on […]

In what appears to be a major escalation, President Trump’s federal agents arrested journalist Don Lemon on Thursday night, his lawyer confirmed in a statement. As of now, the details pertaining to the arrest are fuzzy, but the charge appears to be that he violated federal law while covering an anti-ICE protest.This saga began on January 18, when protesters interrupted a service in a St. Paul church by chanting against ICE. Lemon covered the event: Video shows him interviewing the pastor, who called the protests “shameful.” What’s odd about this is that a magistrate judge refused earlier this month to approve a criminal complaint against Lemon, and this was subsequently rejected by an appeals court, as well. But now the story is getting even darker. The Justice Department went to a grand jury to get an indictment, according to a source familiar with the situation. Lemon’s arrest was executed after 11 p.m. on Thursday night at his hotel in Los Angeles, where he was covering the Grammys, the source continues, adding: “This appears to be about maximum humiliation.”What’s more, Bondi herself just tweeted that this arrest was carried out “at my direction,” without explaining the charges. That, plus the odd, abrupt circumstances of the apprehension, strongly suggests that this is being carried out as a show arrest—the equivalent of a show trial—to excite and titillate Trump and MAGA.Remember, not long after the protest at the church, Trump raged at Lemon as a “loser and a lightweight” and absurdly claimed that heroic ICE agents are getting “abused by people like Don Lemon,” who is a critic of ICE. This disgusting Trump outburst, of course, greatly excited MAGA media. Bondi appears to be arresting a journalist for the express purpose of exciting them further.While it was overlooked at the time, the magistrate judge’s refusal to approve the criminal complaint against Lemon reportedly left Bondi “furious,” with the Justice Department privately vowing to find other ways to target the journalist. The case against Lemon looks extremely weak: MS NOW just posted footage of Lemon outside the church protest, saying explicitly, “I’m just chronicling. I’m not with the group.” Lemon’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, just said in a statement that Lemon was doing “constitutionally protected work” and slammed the arrest as an “unprecedented attack on the First Amendment.”On top of all that, as David Kurtz notes, the appeals court judge who ruled against the administration sharply dismissed the notion that anything criminal had taken place.Yet the failure to get an arrest greenlighted by the courts apparently drove the decision to go to a grand jury to secure an indictment—which is unusual. “It is highly irregular to seek an indictment from a grand jury after a magistrate judge—and an appellate court—denied an arrest warrant,” Matthew Seligman, a legal scholar at Stanford Law School, told me. “A prosecutor who was faithful to the law and the facts would adhere to the magistrate’s determination and not try to go around the court.”All this strongly suggests “a politically motivated prosecution,” Seligman said, adding that by ignoring the magistrate judge’s ruling, Trump and Bondi are demonstrating that they “don’t care about the law and don’t care about the facts. They care about prosecuting their enemies.”This saga underscores a few realities. First, it’s very likely that Trumpworld sees this as a way to extract pain from Lemon, in the form of money and time. “They probably don’t have any expectation that this prosecution will stick,” Seligman said. “But they do know they will put Don Lemon through the grinder in the meantime.”Second, the idea that Trump is “pivoting” or “de-escalating” his ICE crackdown is an utter farce. Trump’s brain trust surely knows that arresting a journalist—one who was covering ICE protests, no less—is only going to exacerbate matters in a big way.Indeed, one suspects that this is a key reason this arrest is happening right now. Someone around Trump wants to send the message—either to excite the MAGA base, which is upset about Trump’s supposed deescalation, or to chill protest and further journalistic activity, or both—that Trump isn’t backing down in the slightest.Finally, this is a clear example of Trump’s authoritarian tendencies being enabled by a supine Republican Congress. Ordinarily, this kind of apparent corruption would, in theory, be subject to the scrutiny of the judiciary committees in the House and Senate. Recall that Trump sent out a message on social media—which he may have thought was private—urging Bondi to prosecute more of his enemies. Did Trump similarly give a direct order to Bondi to carry out this prosecution of Lemon? Did Stephen Miller order it?Also note that MS NOW’s Carol Leonnig is reporting that career prosecutors in Minnesota and Los Angeles refused to be involved in the prosecution of Lemon. All this is crying out for oversight: Congress should determine who ordered this arrest to go forward, what the rationale was, why prosecutors objected, why their objections were ignored, and how all this fits into the administration’s broader use of state power to chill journalistic scrutiny of Trump’s authoritarian police state crackdown on American cities.“The federal government prosecuting journalists for their reporting is extremely concerning, made more so by its continued pursuit of these charges after a magistrate judge refused to sign off on the arrest warrant and over the reported objections of career prosecutors,” said ACLU attorney Esha Bhandari.The GOP Congress won’t do this work, of course. But guess what: A Democratic-controlled House can. And just like other of Trump’s ham-handed efforts to prosecute enemies, one suspects this one will backfire, and very spectacularly at that.