Washington, D.C. — This week, new reporting reveals Trump’s team spent months in secret Situation Room meetings trying to bury his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill held another sham hearing to prop up a prosecution that is falling apart in court. Trump’s FBI director is running a pressure campaign to criminalize his political opponents. And the OMB is moving to punish nonprofits that won’t bow to Trump’s agenda.
Trump’s White House Held Secret Meetings to Cover Up His Ties to Epstein
A bombshell New York Times investigation reveals that Trump’s top officials, including then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, spent months holding secret Situation Room meetings to manage the fallout from his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. While Trump publicly claimed he barely knew Epstein, flight records in the Epstein files showed he flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times. His team’s top priority wasn’t transparency or justice for Epstein’s victims. It was keeping damaging information about Trump buried. They slow-walked the files, released previously public documents to MAGA influencers to feign transparency, sidelined officials who pushed back, and quietly moved Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison after interviewing her. Congress eventually forced Trump’s hand, passing the Epstein Files Transparency Act in spite of Trump’s whole-of-government lobbying effort to stop it.
Jim Jordan Holds Another Sham Hearing on the SPLC
Days after Trump’s DOJ rushed a superseding indictment that legal experts say still omits the intent element required to prove fraud, Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee held its second hearing targeting the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC has moved to dismiss the case as a “top-down, retributive campaign” directed personally by Trump, and asked a judge to sanction DOJ for leaking the indictment to allies in the press before it was unsealed.
Jordan’s witness slate told the story. He invited Ryan Bangert of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which the SPLC designated a hate group for its decades-long campaign against LGBTQ+ civil rights, and Alveda King, a Trump administration appointee who has used her platform to oppose same-sex marriage and LGBTQ+ equality. The SPLC spent fifty-five years bankrupting the KKK, integrating the Alabama State Troopers, and sharing counterterrorism intelligence with the FBI. Jordan’s hearing was political cover for a prosecution that is falling apart in court.
Trump’s Cronies Weaponized DOJ Around a “Grand Conspiracy” Theory
A detailed New York Times investigation reveals how Kash Patel drove the Justice Department into crisis around a “grand conspiracy” theory linking every investigation of Trump, from the Russia probe through the 2024 prosecutions, into a single “Deep State” plot. Patel announced the investigation on Joe Rogan’s podcast, then personally called a newly sworn-in U.S. Attorney on his first day in office to assign the case, bypassing normal DOJ channels entirely.
When career prosecutors in Virginia concluded the evidence didn’t support charges, they were fired. When their replacements in Alexandria reached the same conclusion on the Comey case, they were fired too. Trump eventually installed a White House aide with no prosecutorial experience, who secured indictments that a judge threw out as unlawful. Patel and Todd Blanche are firing prosecutors who follow the evidence and rewarding ones who file bogus charges, all in service of criminalizing Trump’s opponents.
OMB Moves to Punish Nonprofits That Won’t Bow to Trump
Trump’s OMB has published a 412-page plan to hand political loyalists veto power over every federal grant in America. Under the proposal, scientists and independent experts would lose their say over which research gets funded. Any group that supports DEI, immigrants, or transgender people would be cut off from federal money altogether. More than 100,000 nonprofits are at risk, and Trump’s OMB is putting them on notice: get in line with the President’s agenda, or lose your funding.
Before the proposal was made public, the Trump administration had already targeted forty-nine nonprofits with requests for financial information, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Urban League. OMB Director Russ Vought, one of the lead architects of Project 2025, is using this rule to replace merit with loyalty across billions in annual federal funding. The rule is set to take effect on October 1.
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