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Citizens for Ethics @CREWcrew
Eviction notices have been sent to farmers in northern Vietnam to make way for a $1.5 billion Trump Organization-branded luxury golf resort project.
Trump never divested from the Trump Org, so this project is one of his countless conflicts of interest.
NON-POLITICAL FUN FACT:
In Greek mythology, the arrogant Narcissus
is brought down by a reflecting pool.
The Republican party is dead. They gave up their party’s beliefs and values to become the party of Trump and Trumpism…lie, cheat, steal, no morals, values, integrity and absolutely NO humanity.
Graham Platner for Senate
Last week alone, Susan Collins voted to advance four more Trump judges who will serve lifetime appointments on the federal bench.
When I’m in the Senate, that number will be zero.
“Elon Musk has now become the world’s first trillionaire, a year and a half after sentencing many of the globe’s poorest to certain death or abject suffering by his ketamine-fueled dismantling of USAID.
Don’t believe inclimate change?
Your insurance company does.
@SenWhitehouse
When Moody’s is posting trillion-dollar flood loss warnings, might it be time to start paying attention?
Insurance markets are already staggering. Mortgage and real estate markets follow. The warnings are real and many.
We don’t need no stinking flood insurance.
Or better health care. Or lower consumer prices.
What Americans need is a very expensive White House #ballroom.
ESSAY Anonymous @YourAnonCentral
US District Judge Emmet Sullivan, named to the bench by President Bill Clinton, granted the order on 25 June 2026 in a lawsuit brought by the lawyer and independent journalist Katie Phang against the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche. In a 48-page opinion, Judge Sullivan found that Phang was likely to win her claim that the Justice Department had broken the law Congress passed to force the files into public view, and he refused the department’s request to pause the order while it weighed an appeal.
The records the government is still hiding include the names of men its own files once called Epstein’s co-conspirators, a 2019 email in which Epstein wrote that he loved a “torture video” and FBI interview notes on a woman who accused President Donald Trump of abusing her as a child. The order forces the question the department has spent half a year dodging, whether it is shielding those men the same way the government shielded Epstein himself, from the 2008 deal that spared him to the redactions that have outlived him.
A blacked-out name is not proof that the person behind it did anything wrong. The order makes the department account for every redaction it kept. It can defend the lawful ones by citing the exemption the law allows, and the rest were due to come off in December.
The order and the deadline
Phang sued in April 2026 under the Administrative Procedure Act, the statute that lets courts overturn agency action that breaks the law. She had asked the court to compel release of several unredacted files she said were covered by the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The department’s answer was that she had no right to sue at all, and that her only route was a Freedom of Information Act request. Phang’s lawyers pointed the court to FOIA requests for the same material that had already been denied.
Judge Sullivan rejected the Justice Department’s position. He directed it to respond by early afternoon on 25 June, and after it missed that deadline he ordered it to produce the documents Phang had sought or show cause why it could not. He gave it until 2 July. He also denied the department’s request for a seven-day pause, writing that compliance with a statute does no harm to the attorney general.
“The Attorney General has conceded that he is in violation of the Act,” Judge Sullivan wrote.
Phang’s lawyer, Brendan Ballou, a former Justice Department prosecutor, said the department had ignored its own law and a judge’s order “all for the sake of protecting the very powerful and the very rich”.
The Justice Department rejected the ruling. A spokesperson said Blanche “has not conceded anything”, called Judge Sullivan’s reading of the law perverse and said the department had produced every responsive document and would appeal. The names the judge wants released, the spokesperson said, belong to victims who became co-conspirators, so unredacting them would expose victims.
The department has said it will appeal to the District of Columbia Circuit, where it can ask for a stay. Unless that court freezes the order, the 2 July deadline stands, and a department that neither complies nor justifies each redaction by then risks a contempt finding.
What remains blacked out
The order reaches eight email exchanges with the correspondents’ names hidden, including one in which Epstein wrote that he loved a “torture video” and others about sexual activity with minors. It covers a draft indictment with the names of Epstein’s co-defendants obscured, the identities of potential co-conspirators and the names of the Justice Department officials who exchanged messages about them. It covers a separate 2019 email that names several more co-conspirators, and foreign-language material the department said its reviewers could not translate or assess for redaction.
It also reaches FBI interview notes behind several bureau documents that summarise uncorroborated allegations against Trump. Judge Sullivan ordered the Justice Department to release those notes or explain why it could not. And it orders the department to publish a log listing every redaction it has made across the released files, a record the law required it to produce months ago and which it has never disclosed.
Prosecutors drafted an indictment against Epstein and never filed it. According to the released records, it accused him and three of his employees of conspiring between 2001 and 2005 to procure girls under 18 for paid sex. The three employees’ names are blacked out.
The law and its limits
Congress passed the , in November 2025 after a bipartisan revolt forced it past the objections of the president and House leadership. The House carried it 427 to 1, and Trump signed it on 19 November 2025.
The law directed the attorney general to make public, in a searchable and downloadable form, essentially everything the department and the FBI held on Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and people connected to them, within 30 days. The deadline fell on 19 December 2025. The grounds on which material could be withheld were narrow. They covered victim privacy, child sexual abuse material, images of physical harm, national security and active investigations, but only where withholding was narrowly tailored and temporary. The statute expressly barred withholding records because they were politically sensitive or because their release might embarrass an official or a public figure. It also required a log explaining each redaction.
The first release, on 19 December 2025, ran to fewer than 4,000 files, with more than 500 pages entirely blacked out. Within a day, 16 files vanished from the public site. Faulty redaction let members of the public recover material the department had meant to hide. A far larger tranche followed on 30 January 2026, more than 3 million pages, 180,000 images and 2,000 videos. The department has said about half of the roughly 6 million pages it gathered will stay unreleased as duplicative, unrelated or privileged. The redaction log the law demanded has still not appeared.
Co-conspirators and what the label does not carry
In February 2026 the Justice Department let Phang’s allies in Congress view unredacted files on a secure terminal. Representatives Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, the two who wrote the transparency law, said they found at least six men whose names had been blacked out for no lawful reason. Khanna read the names on the House floor. “They have been protecting some of these men,” he said.
Under pressure, the department unredacted three names from a 2019 FBI document that had listed them as co-conspirators. They were the billionaire Les Wexner, the former owner of the company that owned Victoria’s Secret and a longtime Epstein client; Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff; and the French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found dead in a Paris cell in 2022 while facing rape charges he denied.
Being named a co-conspirator in an internal bureau document is not a charge, still less a conviction. A legal representative for Wexner said the prosecutor who ran the Epstein investigation had recorded that “Mr. Wexner was neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect”. An attorney for Groff said she was never told she was treated as one, and “that she was not being prosecuted”. None of the three was charged in connection with Epstein.
The department leans on that distinction to keep the blackouts up. The lawmakers who wrote the statute say it does not save the redactions. Under the law only victims’ identities qualify to be hidden, and the men in these files are not victims. Massie said the files were held back because their contents would prove “embarrassing to some of the billionaires, some of the donors”.
Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who read the unredacted set, said “there’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring” with two people alone.
The torture-video email
In one email Epstein wrote that he loved a “torture video”. The Justice Department blacked out the recipient’s name, and that redaction drew more congressional scrutiny than any other. Massie and Khanna pressed the department to explain it.
Blanche later pointed on social media to a file in which the name appears unredacted, an Emirati businessman, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the chief executive of the Dubai logistics company DP World. Blanche said the redaction had covered an email address, not a person, and that the law required hiding personally identifying information.
“The Sultan’s name is available unredacted in the files,” he wrote.
Bin Sulayem has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, and DP World did not respond to requests for comment on the correspondence. The released records do not establish what the phrase “torture video” refers to. Unredacting the ends of a message like that, where the law allows, would let the public judge the department’s choices instead of taking them on trust. The businessman also has an old commercial tie to the president. His company was reported in 2005 to be involved in building two Trump-branded properties.
The records that mention Trump
In 2019 a woman told FBI agents that Epstein had abused her as a child and had introduced her to Trump in the 1980s, when she was about 13, and that Trump then assaulted her. Agents interviewed her four times and recorded the accounts in the bureau’s 302 memos, which sit among the records the Justice Department blacked out. The investigative journalist Julie K. Brown, who broke much of the original Epstein story, has reported that the agents who spoke with the woman found her credible.
The allegations against Trump are uncorroborated. The summaries carry no agents’ conclusions, and parts of the account sit awkwardly against the timeline, including a period when Epstein and Trump did not appear to be in contact. A second woman, in a separate record, said Epstein introduced her to Trump at his Florida club when she was 13.
Three of the memos were missing from the January release. The department initially withheld them as duplicative, then posted them in early March 2026 after NPR and CNN identified the gaps by tracing the documents’ serial numbers. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, rejected the woman’s account as “completely baseless accusations, backed by zero credible evidence” and pointed to the accuser’s criminal record. Trump has denied any wrongdoing in his relationship with Epstein, and no criminal charge has been brought against him in connection with Epstein.
None of this has been proven, and a redacted mention of the president is not evidence of a crime. The statute lets the department black out a victim’s name, not a record that happens to embarrass a powerful figure, and the order makes it show which rule it actually applied to these files. Raskin said an email in which Epstein wrote that Trump told him he had never been asked to leave the Florida club, contradicting the president’s own public account, had been redacted with no lawful basis.
Victim protection set against power
Some of the Justice Department’s reasons are real. The law protects a victim’s name, bars the publishing of child sexual abuse material and shields genuine attorney-client privilege, and each of those is a lawful reason to black out a name or a line. Blanche has said the redaction mistakes were inevitable given the tight schedule Congress set.
None of them justifies refusing to say which exemption applies where. The law required a log that states the ground for each blackout, so a victim’s name and a powerful man’s name would not look the same on the page. The department never filed it. It has already released the names of survivors who fought for decades to stay anonymous, while keeping hidden the names of men with no claim to victim protection. A group of Epstein survivors said the former attorney general “failed survivors”.
The political fracture
The fight has split Trump’s own coalition. The transparency law exists because four House Republicans, Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, joined every Democrat on a discharge petition in September 2025 to force a vote that leadership had buried. Trump spent months calling the matter a hoax before reversing in the final days and signing the bill he had fought.
He then turned on the members who crossed him. He branded Greene a traitor; she announced in November 2025 that she would resign her seat, left Congress on 5 January 2026 and has since called for him to be removed under the 25th Amendment. “He called me a traitor for standing with these women,” Greene said. Trump fired the attorney general, Pam Bondi, on 2 April 2026, with her handling of the Epstein files among the reasons, then installed Blanche, his former personal defence lawyer, as acting attorney general. In June 2026 he nominated Blanche for the job permanently, with confirmation hearings set for July.
The price was paid by the people who forced the law, not the Justice Department that broke it. Greene resigned under Trump’s attacks, the other Republicans lost his favour and the department has so far paid nothing.
Accountability
There is no proven master list of Epstein’s clients. A department memo in July 2025 said no such list was found and that no charges against uncharged third parties were warranted. The absence of one list settles nothing about who enabled him. The trail runs through emails, interview notes, the draft indictment, financial records, travel logs and the choices prosecutors made.
In 2007 the then US attorney Alexander Acosta signed a non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein avoid federal charges. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to a state prostitution charge and served about 13 months, much of it on work release. None of his employees was charged. Maxwell was convicted in 2021 of rape trafficking and is serving 20 years. Epstein died in his cell in 2019, ruled a suicide. A man accused of the rape trafficking of children for years left behind millions of pages and almost no accountability for the network around him.
A United Nations human rights panel has said the files point to a “global criminal enterprise”.
The Justice Department has said it will appeal, which moves the fight to the District of Columbia Circuit and could freeze the 2 July deadline if that court grants a stay. The appeal does not erase Judge Sullivan’s finding that the department conceded a violation. Absent a stay, the department must hand over the records or justify each redaction by the deadline, document by document rather than across the board. Congress is not finished either; the House Oversight Committee’s subpoenas reach further than the statute, to the full unredacted files. //
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