u/John3262005

One easy-to-resolve mystery of the Jeffrey Epstein case remains unanswered: Why was Ghislaine Maxwell transferred last year to a minimum-security prison camp in Bryan, Texas, that houses mainly nonviolent offenders and white-collar crooks?

This puzzling relocation occurred after Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general (and formerly Donald Trump’s personal attorney), traveled to Tallahassee, Florida, to interview Maxwell for hours, during which she praised Trump and said she had never witnessed him engaging in sexual misconduct.

At the time of her chat with Blanche, Maxwell—who is serving a 20-year sentence for procuring minors for Epstein to sexually abuse—was locked up in a medium-security, co-ed facility. The Bryan facility is a cushier, women-only prison that offers yoga classes and a puppy program for inmates. The government has never provided an explanation of why Epstein’s chief collaborator was moved to Bryan, which at the time was home to disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star and fraudster Jen Shah.

Looking for answers, last summer I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request with the Bureau of Prisons asking for information related to this transfer. Specifically:

all records mentioning or referencing Maxwell’s transfer to Federal Prison Camp Byran. This includes emails, memoranda, transfer orders, phone messages, texts, electronic chats, and any other communications, whether internal to BOP or between BOP personnel and any other governmental or nongovernmental personnel

The BOP did not rush to provide the information. After months of delay, the agency noted it would take up to nine months to fulfill this request.

So we sued.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, a nonprofit that provides pro bono legal assistance to journalists, filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington, DC, on behalf of the Center for Investigative Reporting (which publishes Mother Jones), to compel the BOP to provide the relevant records. The filing notes that the BOP violated the Freedom of Information Act by initially failing to respond in a timely manner.

Now the matter is before a judge in federal district court in Washington, DC. In a filing submitted in the case earlier this month, the BOP provided both an eye-popping disclosure and some disturbing news.

The BOP reported that in response to this FOIA request it “has completed its initial search and identified 15.8 GB of potentially responsive records, which has crashed BOP’s system during the download process several times due to the large number of records. This is an extremely large amount of information and BOP is currently downloading the records.” The agency estimates that there may be “approximately 120,000 pages of material to review.”

Possibly 120,000 pages related to this one transfer? So many documents the system crashed? That seems a rather large pile. Far beyond what might be expected. The final number of responsive documents could be much smaller. But why might there be a mountain of material?

The BOP said that once it downloads the material, it will “conduct a responsiveness and deduplication review” and that it hopes to complete that process by June 19. This is just the first step. The bureau states that given the “large volume or records” and “the large number of records that must be reviewed,” it cannot “at this time to propose a schedule for processing of records.” Which means there’s no telling when the BOP will actually review and then (possibly) release documents related to Maxwell’s transfer.

A quick review is not likely, especially since the BOP filing also notes that its FOIA office is a mess:

On February 28, 2025, four senior staff members of the BOP FOIA Office, including the former Supervisory Attorney, left the agency. BOP currently has only two attorneys covering FOIA litigation across the country. One of these attorneys is still in training and in their probationary period. BOP FOIA Staff, including attorneys and processors, are currently handling, or assisting with, over 50 active cases in multiple federal districts. Additionally, BOP currently has a backlog of over 7,400 FOIA requests pending.

What’s happened in the BOP FOIA office is representative of the collapse of FOIA throughout the federal government under the second Trump administration. Cutbacks in staff and likely an increase in antipathy toward openness have led to sharp increases in backlogged FOIA requests.

In 2025, the backlog of FOIA requests at the Defense Department increased by 42 percent to 27,000 requests. One reason is clear: Across all its components, the Pentagon experienced a 37-percent loss or turnover in FOIA officers. At the State Department, according to a recent report from its chief FOIA officer, “staff attrition and contract downsizing left several key FOIA leadership and staff positions vacant,” and its backlogged cases went up by 6,000 to nearly 28,000 requests.

In March, the Department of Health and Human Services shut down FOIA units at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health. Last month, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. insisted he would be restoring all the FOIA offices. Still, that’s unlikely to do enough to address the department’s dreadfully slow response time to FOIA requests that averages 490 days and its own huge backlog, which increased by 12 percent last year.

In November, Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting filed a lawsuit to compel HHS to process its FOIA requests. “FOIA guarantees the public and the press access to information about what our government is actually doing—information that’s crucial for democracy to work,” says Peter Bibring, a civil rights attorney who prepared the lawsuit. “The government can’t use cost-cutting and efficiency as excuses to violate the law and keep the public in the dark.”

News about Maxwell keeps emerging. Inmates at the minimum security prison camp where she now lives recently told CNN that she receives “special treatment” and that those who speak out about this are “punished.” The favoritism showed Maxwell has included allowing her to hold private meetings with visitors in the prison chapel—a privilege not afforded other inmates.

Meanwhile, House Republicans have been discussing whether Trump should offer Maxwell a pardon in exchange for her then cooperating with the House Government Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the Epstein case. (The US government has previously assailed Maxwell for her “willingness to lie brazenly under oath about her conduct”.) Committee Democrats, who oppose such a deal, have called for investigating Maxwell’s prison transfer.

Partly as a result of Trump’s war on the federal government, the FOIA system—always creaky and prone to infuriating and excessive delays—has become much worse, belying Trump’s claims of increasing transparency and accountability. But here’s the thing: The public and the press shouldn’t need to rely on FOIA to obtain an explanation of Maxwell’s transfer. The BOP, which is part of the Justice Department, could just say why this happened.

The bureau’s reluctance to do so suggests there’s a good reason to file a FOIA request—and to fight in court for those thousands of pages.

Trump administration is fighting for the right to keep some social media moderation advocates out of the US.

On Wednesday, US District Court Judge James Boasberg heard arguments in a lawsuit between the nonprofit Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump administration officials. The suit concerns a policy that allows restricting visas to foreign officials who “demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies.” The CITR is arguing for a preliminary injunction blocking the policy, which the State Department has already referenced when it sanctioned five people who work on online disinformation issues, including the former European official who spearheaded enforcement of its digital services rules. It says allowing the policy to continue will silence people researching topics like content moderation and misinformation online.

The policy in question was announced in May last year, and the State Department issued the sanctions in December, saying its targets “advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states.” The group included the former EU official Thierry Breton, and executives from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and Global Disinformation Index (GDI), both of which are members of CITR. CCDH’s CEO Imran Ahmed, who was a target of the sanctions, is a lawful permanent US resident, according to CITR.

The CITR argues the policy harms scholars’ ability to speak and publish freely. In declarations to the court, researchers described holding back from publicly discussing work they feared could threaten their visa status, or delay publishing certain research ahead of international travel. “One of the worst parts about a chilling effect is all of the research that won’t happen,” CITR executive director Brandi Geurkink said at a press conference after the hearing.

The government’s defense largely relies on reading the policy in a very narrow manner. Attorney Zack Lindsey argued it targets only the conduct of people who work for foreign governments, so independent researchers have nothing to fear. Carrie DeCell, senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute arguing on behalf of CITR, asserted there’s no evidence figures like Ahmed were coordinating with a foreign government. If the policy is being applied outside its supposed criteria, Boasberg asked Lindsey, “doesn’t that explode your argument?” Lindsey insisted Ahmed wasn’t actually targeted under the policy, despite Rubio referencing it in a memo where he advised that Ahmed was deportable — and argued the details of any particular target don’t undermine the State Department’s larger authority.

Overall, Lindsey left exactly what constitutes working with a foreign government ambiguous — an ambiguity that, DeCell said, “seems to be part of the point.” The State Department is seeking to preserve an expansive right to restrict visas, regardless of the specifics of a given policy.

The injunction could hinge partially on technical questions like whether the CITR has grounds to sue. But Boasberg questioned another of the government’s major claims: that a court can only decide if a policy is constitutional in the context of a legal challenge for an individual visa-holder who’s facing deportation. “No matter how preposterous a policy that was promulgated, there could be no constitutional challenge?” he asked as a hypothetical. He’ll soon decide whether the policy must be stopped to prevent irreparable harm. “I will do my best to get it all figured out,” Boasberg said.

President Donald Trump lost his temper at a reporter on the White House lawn Tuesday while discussing his beloved ballroom project.

“We have a ballroom that’s under budget. It’s going up right here. I’ve doubled the size of it because we obviously need that. And we’re right now on budget, under budget, and ahead of schedule,” declared Trump on Tuesday afternoon as a number of reporters shouted inquiries at him. One could be heard yelling, “[INAUDIBLE] doubled! [INAUDIBLE] doubled!”

That’s when Trump exploded.

“I doubled the size of it, you dumb person!” replied the president with no shortage of venom. “Doubled the size!”

After his interlocutor attempted to follow up, Trump interjected to observe, “You are not a smart person.”

He continued on the subject a few moments later:

Based on a lot of things that have happened over the last year, we doubled the size of the ballroom. So we’re going to have a ballroom that’s appropriate for the White House. We doubled the size. The ballroom now is ahead of schedule, and it’s a little bit under budget, depending on the finishes that we use.

Trump initially said the ballroom would cost $200 million, but that estimate has since grown to $400 million. Additionally, congressional Republicans are also seeking to appropriate $1 billion for security for it.

President Donald Trump was triggered when a reporter asked him about rising inflation, calling her a “stupid person” when she asked if his policies were not working.

The Iran War has contributed to months of bad inflation numbers, including a Consumer Price Index report that was released Tuesday morning and showed an increase of 3.8 percent year-over-year. That report comes at the same time as a new CNN poll that shows 77 percent of Americans blame his policies for increasing the cost of living.

Trump spoke to reporters as he departed the White House for a high-stakes trip to Beijing, China, on Tuesday afternoon. When he was confronted about the new CPI numbers and the effects of his policies, Trump flew off the handle:

REPORTER: Mr. President, you promised to bring inflation–. Mr. President, you promised to bring inflation down. It’s now at its highest level in three years. Are your policies not working? What’s happening?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Been working incredibly. If you go back to just before the war, for the last three months, inflation was at 1.7 percent.

Now, we had a choice. Let these lunatics have a nuclear weapon. If you want to do that, then you’re a stupid person! And you happen to be! I mean, I know you very well.

Anybody that wants them to have a nuclear weapon is a stupid person!

So we said we’re going to take the greatest stock market in history and we’re gonna go down a little bit and actually that turned out to be incorrect because our stock market is now at the highest point in history which frankly surprised a lot of people.

It’s a very simple message. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and they won’t have a nu- c- weah (SIC). And that’s 100 percent.

Their Navy is gone. Their Air Force is gone, their anti-aircraft is gone their radar is gone their leaders are gone. They’re all gone. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.

A federal judge in Florida smacked down President Donald Trump’s discovery request, which he filed in an attempt to salvage his defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal, but did grant him additional time to file an amended complaint.

In 2025, Trump sued the Journal, the Journal’s publishing firm Dow Jones, parent company News Corp, owner Rupert Murdoch, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, and two Journal reporters, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, for defamation. The complaint alleged that a July 17, 2025 Journal article by Safdar and Palazzolo that reported Trump had contributed a letter and a lewd drawing to a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein, compiled by the convicted sex predator’s accomplice and former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump vociferously denied the report, threatened to sue, and then did so a day later.

Legal experts were highly skeptical of the lawsuit’s merit from the beginning. Because the president is a public figure, he has to prove the newspaper acted with “actual malice” in order to sustain a defamation claim; it’s a very high bar that political figures often fail to meet when attempting to sue journalists who have criticized them or published unflattering stories.

In September, the House Oversight Committee metaphorically nuked Trump’s case from orbit when it released a trove of materials provided by Epstein’s estate, including the birthday book. Inside the book was a page that said it was contributed by Trump, along with his signature, message, and drawing of a nude female figure — exactly as the Journal’s reporting had described it.

Last month, Judge Darrin P. Gayles of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, an Obama appointee, dismissed Trump’s complaint, finding that it had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.”

Gayles granted Trump leave to file an amended complaint, and the president responded by filing a motion for additional time and a request for limited discovery on “[h]ow each Defendant acted with actual malice,” “[h]ow Defendants purposefully avoided the truth of the statements at issue,” and “[h]ow Defendants allegedly obtained the letter and supposedly verified its contents, including Plaintiff’s signature.”

Generally in civil litigation, a plaintiff has to have the basic elements of their claims ready in their complaint. The courts are fully aware that litigation can be expensive and burdensome, especially complying with discovery (subpoenas for documents, testifying in depositions, etc.); they will not allow a “fishing expedition” by a plaintiff who says he’s been wronged but can’t spell out how or who is at fault.

In a three-page order, Gayles applied this reasoning to reject Trump’s arguments for discovery. The president was currently “without an operative complaint,” since it had been dismissed in April, and now “seeks discovery to help him properly plead his claims,” the judge wrote. “But this is improper.”

Allowing Trump to engage in discovery before showing he could properly plead his claims in an amended complaint “contravenes the purpose behind the actual malice standard,” Gayles wrote, quoting from his order dismissing Trump’s complaint on why a higher standard is applied to public figures:

[T]here is a powerful interest in ensuring that free speech is not unduly burdened by the necessity of defending expensive yet groundless litigation. Indeed, the actual malice standard was designed to allow publishers the “breathing space” needed to ensure robust reporting on public figures and events. Forcing publishers to defend inappropriate suits through expensive discovery proceedings in all cases would constrict that breathing space in exactly the manner the actual malice standard was intended to prevent. The costs and efforts required to defend a lawsuit through that stage of litigation could chill free speech nearly as effectively as the absence of the actual malice standard altogether.

“Thus, allowing President Trump to conduct discovery on actual malice, where his initial attempt at pleading a defamation claim fell short, is exactly the type of ‘expensive yet groundless litigation’ the Eleventh Circuit has cautioned against,” the judge concluded.

Gayles denied Trump’s request for discovery and granted a short extension of time to file an amended complaint, with the new deadline set for May 27.

President Donald Trump heaped praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping on Wednesday, telling him at their first official meeting of the U.S. China summit, “It’s an honor to be your friend.”

Trump traveled to China on Wednesday to meet with Jinping, greeting the Chinese leader at an extravagant welcome ceremony outside the Great Hall of the People. Xi opened the meeting between the two presidents by expressing his desire to find and discuss ways for their countries to work together.

He then gave the floor to Trump, who first shared his admiration for the welcome ceremony. He then lauded Xi as a “great leader,” touting the “long relationship” the two shared and noting the many U.S. business leaders who joined the trip to “pay respects” to Xi.

“You and I have known each other now for a long time,” he said. “In fact, the longest relationship of our two countries that any president and president has had, and that’s, to me, an honor.”

He continued:

We’ve had a fantastic relationship. We’ve gotten along. When there were difficulties, we worked it out. I would call you, and you would call me. And whenever we had a problem, people don’t know, whenever we had a problem, we worked it out very quickly. And we’re going to have a fantastic future together. Such respect for China, the job you’ve done.

You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody. You’re a great leader. Sometimes people don’t like me saying it, but I say it anyway because it’s true. I only say the truth. And I just want to say, on behalf of all of the great delegation that we have, we have the greatest businessmen, the biggest, and I guess the best in the world. We have amazing people, and they’re all with me. They, every single one of them– we asked the top thirty in the world, every single one of them said yes.

And I didn’t want the second or the third in the company. I wanted only the top. And they’re here today to pay respects to you and to China. And they look forward to trade and doing business. And it’s going to be totally reciprocal on our behalf.

So I really look very much forward to our discussion. It’s a big discussion. There are those that say this is maybe the biggest summit ever. They can never remember anything like it. It’s, I can say in the United States, it’s– people aren’t talking about anything else. But it’s an honor to be with you. It’s an honor to be your friend. And the relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before. Thank you very much. Thank you.

President Donald Trump’s Senior Director for Counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, name-dropped former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and controversial commentator Nick Fuentes during an interview after being asked whether the Trump administration was monitoring “right-wing extremism.”

“Let’s come back to right-wing extremism. Do you regard it as a threat at all?” asked Breitbart editor-in-chief Alex Marlow during an interview with Gorka on Friday. “I mean, is there any? I guess that’s the question. I’m assuming there’s a little bit because it’s a big country, there’s a little bit of everything, but is there really anything?”

Gorka responded, “Right now, we are not seeing comparable trend lines to violence on the right as we see on the left,” before adding:

It’s up to people like you. I’m not a political analyst anymore, I’m a counterterrorism government employee, but we have to have an effective, accurate snapshot on who are part of the conservative movement today, because I would say to you I’m not sure that Nick Fuentes or Tucker Carlson are conservatives. If you are lauding a Sharia law, if you are saying that there are Muslim states that seem to be better qualitatively than America in terms of freedom and prosperity, I’m not sure that means you’re part of the conservative movement. So if you remove those individuals and you understand that they’re not conservatives, what’s left? Who are the people in the mainstream of the conservative movement, Alex, who are saying violence is okay? Hard to find people who aren’t fringe figures.

Gorka’s remarks were criticized by left-wing journalist Ken Klippenstein, who – despite being no fan of Carlson or Fuentes – ridiculed the Trump official’s assertion that Carlson was “lauding a Sharia law” and accused Gorka of targeting freedom of speech.

“I’m an absolutist when it comes to free speech, for the right and the left (and anyone inside or outside that spectrum). Gorka as a government official has no business sticking his nose into whether people define America in the same way he does,” reacted Klippenstein. “And let’s be real: none of this is actually about extremism. It’s about the fact that Carlson, like Fuentes, recently broke with Trump — bitterly — over the Iran War. That’s the real offense.”

Several hospitals have received federal grand jury subpoenas regarding the provision of gender-affirming care to minors, according to a statement from NYU Langone, a step that suggests the Department of Justice has begun a criminal investigation.

The inquiry for NYU records, sent last week by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas, directs the hospital to turn over information on minors who received care between 2020 and 2026, the clinicians who saw them, and anyone else involved.

“What we’re seeing out of NYU and any other institution that got a similar subpoena is quite different than the DOJ subpoenas that institutions received over the last year,” said Lindsey Dawson, director of LGBTQ health policy at KFF. Previous inquiries DOJ sent to hospitals were administrative subpoenas, which don’t require advance judicial review or authorization. If a grand jury has now been convened, that “likely means [the subpoena is] related to a criminal investigation and thus could carry more significant penalties,” she said.

So far, NYU is the only hospital to publicly announce the receipt of a grand jury subpoena, but the statement claims that it is “one of several institutions” that the DOJ is looking into. Last year, administrative subpoenas were sent to around 20 hospitals that offer pediatric gender care, requesting extensive, identifiable patient records. Many were quashed at the district court level before the Trump administration began pursuing appeals.

The details of the federal investigation have not been made public, so the focus of the investigation, including its possible targets, and whether the new subpoena is related to an ongoing investigation or an entirely new one, is unknown. The Trump administration over the last year has asserted the possibility of fraud in relation to the off-label promotion of gender-affirming hormones and puberty blockers. Administration officials and DOJ lawyers have repeatedly said that, despite the legality of off-label prescribing, clinician conversations about the drugs or materials provided to patients could be potentially fraudulent.

Some advocates of gender-affirming care, including Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic instructor Alejandra Caraballo, have said that sending a subpoena to New York from a court based in Texas is an instance of “judge shopping,” suggesting that the government is choosing a jurisdiction to bring a potential case where it thinks it can win favorable rulings. For years, the Northern District of Texas has been favored by conservative litigants. In late April, the DOJ filed a motion in the same district to enforce an administrative subpoena of a Rhode Island hospital, which a judge approved within hours. The hospital has appealed that decision and questioned whether the Texas district is the correct jurisdiction for the case.

The subpoena to NYU could serve as a major test of New York’s shield law, which requires that institutions attempt to notify patients at least 30 days before providing information in response to judicial requests for information. The law is meant to stop investigations from other states or federal entities into the basic provision of politicized care. In its statement, NYU said it was weighing its next moves.

Over the last year, patients and providers of gender-affirming care have largely found success when challenging the Trump administration in court. The biggest win for proponents of the care came this spring, when a federal judge in Seattle decided to vacate health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s declaration that pediatric gender-affirming care does not meet medical standards of care.

Many supporters believe the decision, which also applied to “any materially similar policy” superseding states’ standards of care, could also be used to stop serious penalties for providers of gender-affirming care for minors included in proposed rules from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But Trump’s DOJ has repeatedly signaled that it will push forward with its campaign despite judicial rulings.

In an April hearing in a federal court in Boston, DOJ attorney John Bailey said that even if the judge vacates federal guidance including an executive order and ensuing directive from former U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, “it is not going to have an effect on ongoing DOJ investigations.”

To Carmel Shachar, director of the Health Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School, the statement signals that, even if courts rule against the legitimacy of the Trump administration’s overarching directives on gender-affirming care, officials will attempt to execute restrictive policies.

“This sounds like somebody who still thinks there’s a leg to stand on somewhere,” Shachar said. “They’re trying not to concede the proposed regulations that are out there.”

As the Trump administration targets gender-affirming care for youth, dozens of hospitals around the country have paused or ended transgender services, citing legal pressures. Caraballo believes headlines about a potential criminal investigation may be more important to the Trump administration than any actual results, as the move alone could intimidate doctors into stopping the provision of care.

“All of this is mounting pressure that creates enormous stress on providers,” KFF’s Dawson said.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright warned on Wednesday that Iran is “frighteningly close” to obtaining a nuclear weapon, nearly three months after the United States launched a war to irrevocably halt the Islamic Republic from crossing that ominous Rubicon.

Wright, referring to Iran’s current stock of nuclear material, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “They are weeks — a small number of weeks — away to enrich that to weapons-grade uranium." But the energy secretary added that a months-long weaponization process would still be required beyond that point.

Iranian nuclear activity steadily increased in the years since President Donald Trump abrogated the Obama-era accord in his first term. Nuclear analysts contend this decision removed key guardrails and freed the regime to enrich uranium at higher levels, expand production, and develop more advanced centrifuges.

Tehran is estimated to have amassed approximately 12 tons of uranium at varying degrees of purity.

Uranium is generally said to be of “weapons-grade” when it is enriched to 90% purity or higher. At present, Iran is believed to have come close to this threshold but not reached it.

The Islamic Republic’s leadership has long insisted it does not intend to develop a nuclear weapon and instead wants to keep enhancing its fissile technology for peaceful purposes. These protestations are widely dismissed by the nation’s many adversaries, including the U.S.

Wright, in an exchange with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said that roughly a ton of Iran’s 60% uranium is “only weeks away” from weapons-grade level, with the remaining 11 tons of 20% material just a few weeks behind.

“Unenriched uranium, it’s a long process to get it to weapons-grade,” he explained. “But when you’re at 60%, although the numbers don’t sound that way, you’re way more than 90% of the way there for the enrichment necessary for weapons-grade uranium. Very close. Twenty percent uranium, which they also have a lot of, is far along as well.”

Wright concluded: “It’s very concerning.”

Much of the material is believed to be entombed within fortified tunnels near the Isfahan nuclear facility, which survived last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer. The U.S.-led raid involved more than 125 U.S. military aircraft, including seven B-2 stealth bombers that dropped 14 GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators on deeply buried targets.

Trump repeatedly claimed the relatively brief air campaign “obliterated” the sites, but intelligence assessments concluded that while Midnight Hammer severely set back Iran’s capabilities, it did not destroy them.

The Trump administration has since invoked Iran’s purportedly imminent nuclear threat as the premise for the military action that began at the end of February, dubbed Operation Epic Fury.

Matthew Bunn, professor of the practice of energy, national security, and foreign policy at Harvard University, told Military Times that Iran still retains enough highly enriched uranium to proceed swiftly toward making more than a dozen nuclear bombs.

“They could move fairly quickly to build nuclear weapons should they choose to do so,” he said. “The reason they haven’t done so, in part, is because they feared exactly what happened: if their facilities were detected, they would get blasted before they could finish.”

Senior Trump administration officials have publicly weighed deploying forces deep inside Iran to seize the Iranian stockpiles by force.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in March, “People are going to have to go and get it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters the following month, “They will either give it to us, or we’ll take it out.” The president, on Sunday, said that Iran’s nuclear enrichment site was under close surveillance by the Space Force – and that “we’ll get at that at some point, whenever we want.”

Bunn argued against such a high-risk military operation, warning it could result in significant American casualties. He insisted that it wouldn’t “solve the problem” and diplomacy is the only viable long-term solution.

“You just can’t bomb knowledge away,” he said, pointing to the thousands of scientists and engineers working within Iran’s nuclear apparatus. “If I’m the Iranians, I take my knowledge that I now have of advanced centrifuges and how to make them and how to operate them, and my other deep underground facilities, and start enriching some more uranium and set up my facilities using that material.”

Absent a durable agreement and rigorous monitoring, Bunn said, nothing would prevent the Iranians from picking up where they left off.

White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales, in a statement to Military Times, asserted, “The Iranian regime knows their current reality is not sustainable. President Trump holds all the cards and keeps all options on the table as negotiators work to make a deal.”

The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, will this weekend headline a faith rally on the National Mall in Washington DC hosted by a private foundation operating in partnership with the White House, which includes some speakers that experts have characterized as Christian nationalist or extremist.

Rededicate 250, billed as the faith-based component of America’s semiquincentennial, features speakers including a Detroit pastor who has called the Democratic platform “demonic” and launched his own memecoin after praying at Trump’s second inauguration; a rabbi who has defended the use of torture and authored an essay titled The Virtue of Hate; and a Christian author and radio host who said in 2020 he would die in the fight to keep Joe Biden out of the White House and was later named in a defamation suit over 2020 election fraud claims.

Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and House speaker, Mike Johnson, are also scheduled to appear. The lineup includes no Muslims, no representatives of historically Black churches, no Indigenous faith leaders and no mainline Protestants.

Hegseth’s own writings foreground anti-Muslim rhetoric and envisage the US military “taking sides” in a coming American civil war, as previously reported in the Guardian. His 2020 book American Crusade depicts Islam as a historic enemy of the west, calls for an “American crusade” against “domestic enemies” as well as the enemies of Israel, and idolises medieval crusaders. Hegseth has “deus vult”, the Latin slogan of Pope Urban II at the launch of the first crusade, tattooed on his arm.

Hegseth is a member of Pilgrim Hill Reformed Fellowship in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, a congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) and a regular worshipper at the CREC’s Christ Kirk DC plant on Pennsylvania Avenue. The CREC founder Douglas Wilson told the Guardian in April 2026 he was a Christian nationalist, and that Hegseth’s “worldview is broadly the same as ours”.

CREC pastors who rotate through the Christ Kirk DC pulpit have publicly called for restricting the vote to heads of households, the overturning of Obergefell v Hodges, the restoration of state sodomy laws, the outlawing of mosques, and the application of biblical law through the courts, as previously reported in the Guardian.

Hegseth has hosted a monthly Christian prayer service at the Pentagon since May 2025 and the 17 February 2026 service was presided over by Wilson personally, 11 days before US forces joined Israel in the first attacks on Iran. At a 25 March 2026 service, as previously reported in the Guardian, Hegseth prayed that God would “break the teeth” of US enemies.

Rededicate 250 is one of a string of events organised by Freedom 250, a private non-profit launched by the White House in December 2025 as a partner to the bipartisan US semiquincentennial commission Congress established in 2016. Freedom 250 is now under congressional investigation over the redirection of federal funds and the sale of access to Trump.

Matthew D Taylor, the author of several books on Christian nationalism, including the upcoming Defying Tyrants, said of the Rededicate 250 lineup of speakers that they “are some of the most active Christian nationalist leaders that you can find in the country”.

Many of the planned speakers at the event have emerged as Christian leaders in tandem with Trump’s ascendancy.

Jentezen Franklin is a televangelist, author and pastor of the nondenominational multi-site Free Chapel in Gainesville, Georgia, and since May 2025 a member of the religious leaders advisory board of Trump’s religious liberty commission.

Franklin attributes much of what he sees as America’s ills to diabolical forces. In his 2013 book Spirit of Python, he wrote: “There are concentrations of demonic atmospheres across America where cities have become drug strongholds, sex-trafficking strongholds, homosexual strongholds, crime strongholds, abortion strongholds, and so on.”

In his 2008 book Fasting, he wrote that homosexuality was a “demonic sexual addiction”. He also wrote that fasting can cure those “diseased and suffering with Aids, leukemia, heart disease”.

Taylor said: “When you talk about charismatic or Pentecostal Christianity, one of the fundamental commitments of that style of Christianity is to a supernatural worldview, a vision that says that there are a lot of forces at work in the world that are not simply human or material, that there are angels, there are demons.”

In Spirit of Python Franklin grouped “Scientology, Buddhism, Islam, New Age, Kabbalah” together as “false religions” and wrote that the teaching of evolution “leads many to sink into wasted, unproductive lives, and it leads others into rejecting the existence of the God of the universe”.

The Guardian emailed questions for Franklin to his church, Free Chapel, but received no response.

Like Franklin, several other billed speakers are concurrently members of or advisers to Trump’s religious liberty commission, established on 1 May 2025 by executive order.

Of the 13 commissioners, 12 are Christians and one is Jewish. The religious leaders advisory board added in mid-May 2025 comprises seven Christian leaders and four Orthodox rabbis, with no Muslim, Hindu, Sikh or Buddhist representation.

In February 2026 a multifaith coalition led by the Interfaith Alliance sued the administration, arguing that the commission’s overwhelming Christian skew breaches the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s requirement of balanced membership.

Both the commission and the speaking stage at Rededicate 250 are dominated by faith leaders who, like Franklin, are vociferous in their support for Israel. Taylor said this revealed something about the balance of power inside the Christian right, in relation to a Trump administration currently fighting a war in Iran alongside Israel.

“There’s this very sharp tension going on right now, I’d even call it a low-grade civil war, between the more Christian Zionist factions that are very pro-Israel, very pro-war in Iran … versus this kind of rising tide of antisemites in the far-right coalition,” Taylor said.

“When I look at that list, I don’t see the antisemitic faction really represented at all. I think it signals that this is pretty closely aligned more with the kind of old religious right establishment and this kind of new guard of independent charismatic leaders. It’s a Christian Zionist version of Christian nationalism.”

The only non-Christian speaker is also an uncompromising supporter of Israel.

Meir Soloveichik is a writer; a podcast host; the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Congregation Shearith Israel; the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University; one of 13 commissioners of Trump’s religious liberty commission; and since February 2025 vice-chair of the bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Soloveichik gave the invocation at the opening session of the 2012 Republican national convention in Tampa. In December 2017 he led the prayer at Trump’s first White House Hanukah celebration. In 2019 Mike Pompeo appointed him to the state department’s commission on unalienable rights.

Soloveichik has argued in print since at least 2003 that hatred of his enemies is a religious duty. In his February 2003 First Things essay The Virtue of Hate, he wrote: “There is, in fact, no minimizing the difference between Judaism and Christianity on whether hate can be virtuous … God, Jesus argues, loves the wicked, and so must we. In disagreeing, Judaism does not deny the importance of imitating God; Jews hate the wicked because they believe that God despises the wicked as well.”

Some time between 2005 and 2008, Soloveichik returned to the University of Scranton’s Judaic studies program to deliver a follow-up lecture titled Torture: Is It Always Immoral?

In the lecture Soloveichik said: “My presentation will argue that torture can be an appropriate action because, by every just standard, those who attempt to murder millions of people actually deserve to be tortured. Terrorists do not have a right not to be tortured. Indeed, they deserve to be tormented for what they have done.”

He cited Israel’s 1994 torture of a Palestinian driver during the Nachshon Wachsman kidnapping as a positive precedent for US policy. Faced with a similar choice, he said, “an American president would have a similar obligation”.

Soloveichik attacked Pope John Paul II’s classification of torture as an intrinsic evil. The current Catholic approach, he said, “embodies not the wisdom of the ages but the moral equivalence of secular Europe”.

In his January 2024 First Things essay The Undying People, written after the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, Soloveichik framed Hamas as a contemporary instance of the biblical Amalekites, a people the Hebrew Bible commands Israel to “blot out from under heaven”.

Of US college students protesting against the Gaza war, he wrote: “On college campuses across America, little Nuremberg rallies have convened, at which ‘diversity’ is embraced so long as it does not entail the well-being of Jews or the Jewish state.”

The Guardian emailed Soloveichik for comment but received no response.

There are no representatives from established denominations that have historically served Black communities. Not all the speakers are white, however, those who are not have benefited from their adoption of charismatic Pentecostal practice and their alliances with Trump.

Lorenzo Sewell is the senior pastor of 180 Church in Detroit, a non-denominational charismatic congregation. Trump’s campaign held a “Blacks for Trump” roundtable at the church in June 2024; Sewell told Fox News later that year that “we do not believe that every Democrat is a demon, but we do believe that the Democratic platform is demonic.”

Sewell stood by this claim in a telephone conversation with the Guardian, saying: “You can’t honor God and be a Democrat. It’s impossible. Because how can you tell me you’re honoring God, but you believe in babies being aborted? How can you tell me you honor God and believe that your sexuality can be changed?”

He spoke on the fourth night of the 2024 Republican national convention, opened the 103rd Michigan house of representatives on 8 January 2025 with an invocation, and delivered one of three benedictions at Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January 2025.

Hours after his inauguration prayer, Sewell launched a memecoin bearing his name and asked his followers to “go buy the official Lorenzo Sewell coin”. Within 24 hours Lorenzo had spiked from a fraction of a penny and then collapsed roughly 93% from a peak market value of about $4.5m.

On the memecoin, Lorenzo told the Guardian that: “It wasn’t something that I did proactively. I wasn’t looking to start a coin. It wasn’t premeditated. It wasn’t started by me. It was started by someone who has the freedom in this society to make money. And that’s what they did.”

He said that while he did make money from the coin, it went into his church and its charitable work, “And we were able to help young men coming out of foster care. We made $30,000 that day.”

In March 2025 Sewell testified to the Michigan house election integrity committee, alleging “systemic voter fraud” in Detroit. Democratic members of the committee called the hearing a “circus”. In April 2025, Sewell told the Detroit News that he was considering a 2026 run for the US Senate seat being vacated by Gary Peters.

Sewell also held to this claim, saying that he had seen evidence of “people that had their votes switched. People that were registered without their knowledge”, and he was involved in legal action related to the claimed fraud.

“I’m actually the self-proclaimed, and I believe I deserve the title, as the election integrity evangelist,” Sewell added.

Frederick Clarkson is a senior research analyst at Political Research Associates who has written extensively on the New Apostolic Reformation. Clarkson said the NAR’s appeal across racial lines was central to its political reach.

“NAR has never been all white. They’re authentically multiracial and multiethnic. They’ve got the people and they’ve got the leaders and they’re using them,” Clarkson said.

Some of the speakers were fixtures in an older version of the Christian right before going all in on Trump.

Eric Metaxas is an author, Salem Media radio host, a commissioner in the religious liberty commission and the author of a 2010 biography of the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was master of ceremonies of the 12 December 2020 Jericho March on the National Mall, a “Stop the Steal” prayer rally three weeks before the storming of the US Capitol. The march featured Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes warning of a “much more bloody war” if Trump did not retain power.

On a 9 December 2020 episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast, Metaxas said of efforts to overturn the election: “What’s right is right … We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” Nine days earlier, on a 30 November 2020 broadcast of his own radio show, Metaxas told Trump live on air: “I’d be happy to die in this fight.”

Three months earlier, on the night of Trump’s 27 August 2020 Republican national convention speech at the White House, Metaxas punched an anti-Trump protester biking past him on a Washington street. Video of the incident went viral within hours; Metaxas later confirmed the punch in an email to Religion Unplugged, saying, “It just happened.”

The Guardian emailed Metaxas for comment but received no response.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen issued a public callout to FBI Director Kash Patel on Wednesday, filling his end of a bargain the pair had made during a tense Senate hearing a day prior to both release their results on an alcohol abuse test.

“Yesterday, @FBIDirectorKash told me he’d take the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test if I did. Well, here’s mine. Given all the lies he told yesterday, I imagine he’ll fudge the numbers here, but let’s see yours, Director Patel,” Van Hollen wrote in a post on X.

The test, known as AUDIT, asks 10 questions about alcohol consumption, such as how often people drink or if they have experienced various negative consequences from drinking. Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, chose the lowest-level on nine of the questions — only checking a higher box for having a drink containing alcohol “2-3 times a week.”

A spokesperson for Van Hollen said because of his public agreement with Patel, “the Senator expects him to follow through.”

Patel denied that he has a drinking problem in fiery testimony in front of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday. When Van Hollen asked Patel was willing to take the AUDIT assessment, the FBI director said he would — as long as the senator did as well.

“Let’s go. Side by side,” Patel responded.

The animosity between Patel and Van Hollen didn’t stop after the hearing, with Patel posting what he called a “Fact Check” on his comments about a $7,000 bar tab Van Hollen incurred at Lobby Bar, a popular spot near Capitol Hill. Van Hollen hit back, saying the Federal Election Commission filing detailed a holiday reception for his staff that was not funded by taxpayer dollars.

The embattled bureau head faced pointed questions from Democrats on the committee over recent allegations reported by The Atlantic in April that he drinks excessively, to the point that it has interfered with his role as FBI director. According to the report, based on multiple current and former officials speaking anonymously, Patel’s security detail has had difficulty rousing Patel from sleep and meetings have had to be scheduled later in the day because Patel had been drinking the night before.

Patel strongly denied The Atlantic’s report and filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against the magazine.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee quickly launched an investigation into Patel’s behavior and demanded that he complete the AUDIT test.

The Democratic lawmakers called on the committee’s chair, Rep. Jim Jordan, to tell the FBI director that the “committee will be requiring him to appear at a hearing in person and under oath to address Members’ well-founded concerns” — though there are no official plans to compel Patel’s testimony at this point.

The Trump administration is suing the D.C. Bar Association over its recommendation to disbar Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who was found to have violated legal ethics in his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in D.C. on Wednesday evening, accuses the D.C. Bar of unlawfully punishing federal government attorneys, impinging on the powers of the executive branch.

The lawsuit is the latest example of the Trump administration asserting its authority to try to redeem Trump allies and supporters who were charged or accused of wrongdoing for their actions around attempts to thwart the 2020 election results.

It also marks an escalation in the administration’s battle with state bar associations, which are regulatory groups for the legal profession that ensure practicing attorneys meet educational requirements and ethical standards.

Trump and his allies have denounced state and local bar associations as politically motivated, pushing back on scrutiny the bodies have directed at Trump administration attorneys as they pursue unusual cases and investigatory paths to carry out the president’s political goals.

During Trump’s second term, the Justice Department has blocked its attorneys from participating in some high-profile events put on by local bar associations — a sharp departure from long-standing department norms. And in March, the Justice Department proposed new regulations that would allow the attorney general to suspend state and local bar investigations into the department’s attorneys.

“As our complaint and history make clear, the DC Bar has long acted as a blatantly partisan arm of leftist causes. No more,” acting attorney general Todd Blanche said in a statement on Wednesday’s lawsuit.

Hamilton P. Fox, the D.C. Bar’s disciplinary counsel, who is named as a defendant in the suit, declined to comment. Others involved in attorney disciplinary proceedings and also listed as defendants, including the D.C. Board of Professional Responsibility and Anna Blackburne-Rigsby, chief judge of the D.C. Court of Appeals, did not immediately return requests for comment Wednesday.

Clark was a former senior Justice Department appointee during the first Trump administration. The D.C. Bar found that Clark violated ethics rules when he drafted a letter for the Justice Department to send to Georgia officials, demanding that the state legislature call a special session to examine votes in the presidential election. Trump has long promoted baseless claims that his loss to Joe Biden was due to election fraud.

Multiple former Justice Department officials testified at Clark’s disciplinary hearing that he went against department findings that there was no significant fraud in the election when he drafted the letter.

Clark’s attorney’s argued that he should not be punished because he never sent the letter — and that he should be protected from discipline because of attorney-client privilege.

But the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility recommended that Clark be disbarred for his actions.

That recommendation then goes to the D.C. Court of Appeals to make a final determination. The appeals court has not yet ruled on the matter and Clark’s law license is suspending pending that ruling.

“The D.C. Court of Appeals’ disciplinary authorities are punishing a former Department of Justice official for preparing a deliberative and pre-decisional draft letter that was never issued,” the lawsuit states. “Weaponizing state bar discipline against Executive Branch attorneys in this way chills them from giving candid legal advice to others in the Executive Branch, including the President and Attorney General. To permit these proceedings is to allow state bar authorities to control the Executive Branch. That is not the law.”

The lawsuit was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the third most powerful person in the department who oversees the civil division.

It asks for a judge to order the D.C. Bar findings against Clark void and to prevent any future investigations into Clark around his work as a government attorney. In a post on social media, Clark thanked the Justice Department and called the lawsuit “an important step to vindicate the separation of powers.”

Several other attorneys in Trump’s orbit have faced disciplinary proceedings from state and local bar associations in recent years.

Actions by the bar associations in D.C. and New York led to the permanent disbarment of Rudy Giuliani, who represented the president during in his legal fight to overturn the results of the 2020 election, in those jurisdictions.

Attorney disciplinary panels found he pressed baseless legal claims unsupported by facts.

The California Supreme Court stripped John Eastman, another attorney involved in those efforts, of his law license earlier this year after a lengthy battle initiated by that state’s bar.

Earlier this year, the D.C. Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel also opened proceedings against Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s’ current pardon attorney. Martin has petitioned to remove the disciplinary proceedings to federal court, raising arguments about political bias similar to those made in Wednesday’s suit.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday devoted a section to Martin’s case, arguing that it highlights that the D.C. Bar is targeting conservative prosecutors.

The proceedings against Martin center on his unusual communications with then-Georgetown law school dean William M. Treanor. In a letter to Treanor, Martin questioned whether Georgetown was using Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices and, if so, demanded the school change its curriculum. The complaint alleges that Martin was vague over what DEI practices he was referring to and told Treanor that he would punish the school by not hiring its students and graduates — even before the dean had an opportunity to respond.

“Defendants are unlawfully attempting to regulate the Federal Government by leveraging the disciplinary process against Federal Government attorneys vis-à-vis other Federal Government attorneys differentially based on factors other than the disinterested administration of justice, like viewpoint and political affiliation,” the lawsuit states.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s sanctions against a United Nations official who has faced accusations of antisemitism over her calls for war crimes charges against Israeli officials over their actions in Gaza.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio imposed the sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for Palestinian human rights, last July under an executive order President Donald Trump signed authorizing such actions against people “directly engaged” in the International Criminal Court’s investigations related to alleged atrocities in Gaza.

However, in a ruling Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the administration’s sanctions against Albanese violate the First Amendment because they’re based solely on her encouraging the ICC to investigate and prosecute.

“Albanese has done nothing more than speak!” Leon wrote in a 26-page decision salted with his trademark exclamation points. “It is undisputed that her recommendations have no binding effect on the ICC’s actions — they are nothing more than her opinion.”

Justice Department lawyers argued that Albanese, an Italian citizen currently living with her family in Tunisia, has no First Amendment claim because she isn’t an American and she issued her statements from abroad. However, Leon said her “extensive connections” to the U.S., including a daughter born while the family lived in Washington and a home the family owns in Washington, gave Albanese a claim to free-speech protections.

Albanese and her husband have complained that the U.S. sanctions designation essentially froze them out of the international banking network, made it impossible for them to travel to the U.S. and even led the family’s health insurer to deny payment for services received by Albanese.

The Trump administration argued that licenses it issued allowing some transactions related to the family’s Washington property, as well as to provide “necessary” support for their U.S. citizen daughter, mitigated the impact of the sanctions.

“Please!” the judge responded, calling the scope of those licenses too murky to give the U.S. government legal cover against the lawsuit filed in February by Albanese’s husband, World Bank economist Massimiliano Cali, and their daughter.

Leon also found that the “parental license” the U.S. government issued interferes with Albanese’s “constitutionally protected” relationship with her daughter. “It is not clear from the record before me how plaintiffs would distinguish between necessary and unnecessary transactions in the context of their family relationships,” the judge wrote.

Rubio’s designation of Albanese alleged she’d “spewed unabashed antisemitism.” She’s denied that and contends that some in Israel are using claims of antisemitism to justify war crimes. The Israeli government denies committing war crimes in Gaza and has denounced the International Criminal Court process as hopelessly biased.

The White House referred a request for comment to the State Department, which did not immediately respond. The Justice Department also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Albanese said in a statement that Leon’s ruling had vindicated her trust in the American justice system.

The ruling “that the sanctions appear to infringe on U.S. constitutional rights proves me right,” she said. “I am so grateful to my little daughter, L.C. and her amazing dad for taking the risk, and everyone who has come forward to help.”

The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, told lawmakers in a closed-door interview earlier this month that he met Jeffrey Epstein only three times and had no “personal or professional relationship” with the disgraced financier, according to a newly released transcript of the meeting.

“I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities,” Lutnick said in his opening statement before the House oversight and reform committee.

The comments came during a closed-door interview before the House oversight and reform committee earlier this month, during which lawmakers questioned Lutnick for several hours about his previous ties to Epstein and his past statements about their interactions.

According to the transcript, released on Wednesday afternoon, Lutnick said he met Epstein, whom he said lived “adjacent to my New York City home”, on only three occasions. Lutnick said that the first meeting occurred in 2005, when he and his wife were invited for coffee at Epstein’s home. The second was in 2011, when he said he briefly visited Epstein’s home to discuss “scaffolding”, and the third, Lutnick said, was in 2012, when Epstein invited him, his family and friends to lunch on his private island.

“To the best of my recollection, those were the only three occasions in which I interacted with Epstein in person,” Lutnick said. “Each and every one was meaningless and inconsequential.”

“I had no personal or professional relationship with this individual, despite the proximity of our addresses,” he added. “Further, at no time during these limited interactions did I witness any conduct, let alone the type of illegal conduct of which we have since become aware.”

Lutnick agreed to sit for the transcribed interview with the committee in March, after the justice department released millions of documents related to Epstein, including documents showing that Lutnick continued correspondence with Epstein after the disgraced financier’s 2008 conviction of soliciting prostitution from a minor. The revelation also contradicted a previous claim Lutnick made on a podcast last year that he and his wife had severed ties with Epstein in 2005 after visiting his home.

Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019, while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.

Much of the questioning in front of the House panel centered around Lutnick’s podcast interview from last year.

Lutnick recounted the 2005 visit to Epstein’s home to the lawmakers, and said that Epstein showed him and his wife around his townhouse, and that at one point he opened a door and there was a massage table.

Lutnick said he asked Epstein why he had a “massage table in the middle of his house” and how often he received massages, to which he said that Epstein responded “every day and the right kind of massage”.

“He said it to me, and my wife is standing next to me, and we looked at each other, and we left,” Lutnick told lawmakers, adding that he interpreted the “right kind of massage” to be “in some form sexual in nature”.

Afterward, he said, he and his wife left Epstein’s home and “discussed that I would not establish a personal nor professional relationship with that individual”. He added that “on a podcast in October 2025, I informally recounted that conversation”.

Democratic lawmakers challenged his statements, noting that Lutnick had said on the podcast that he was “never in the room with him socially, for business, or even philanthropy” after 2005.

Lutnick defended his statements, arguing that “it is accurate as to what I meant, which is I, Howard Lutnick, as a man, would not be in a situation with him because I felt him gross and inappropriate and not having boundaries; that I would not put myself in a room with him socially, which I did not, professionally, in business, which I did not, and philanthropically, which I did not”.

He also described the 2012 lunch on Epstein’s island and said that Epstein’s staff had become aware that he and his family were going to be near his island over the holidays, and reached out to them and invited them for lunch.

Lutnick said he went, with his wife, their four children and his friends, who were a couple, along with their four children and staff , and had a “brief, meaningless, and inconsequential lunch and then left”.

“So it was probably 15, 16 people went for lunch,” Lutnick said. “We sat outside, had lunch. It was boring. We left.”

He said he didn’t see any young women or girls on the island.

When asked whether he had ever heard any rumors about the island, Lutnick said, “No, of course not,” adding: “In 2019, we all learned lots of information, but nothing before then,” referring to when Epstein was charged.

Discussing the 2011 interaction, Lutnick said that Epstein’s staff had contacted his office, saying that Epstein had wanted to get in touch with him.

“Our offices attempted to connect us by phone over the course of several weeks but were unable to do so,” he said. So he said he went to Epstein’s home, “sat in his foyer with my dog, waited for him to come down, heard what he had to say, and left”.

“As far as I recall, it was about scaffolding,” he said. “It was meaningless and inconsequential.”

Throughout the interview last week, Lutnick said that he never witnessed Epstein engage in sexual contact of any kind with any young woman or girl, or receive massages from young women, and said he never saw or met any young women or girls at Epstein’s residence or island.

Following the interview with Lutnick last week, Democrats on the committee lambasted Lutnick’s performance.

“Now we know why that interview was not videotaped. If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would’ve fired Howard Lutnick,” said Ro Khanna, a Democratic congressman of California, who has helped lead efforts in Congress to force the release of the justice department’s files related to Epstein. “It was just contortions and lies … He made a farce of the English language.”

By contrast, James Comer, the Republican who chairs the House committee, said that he felt that Lutnick had been “very transparent” and “came here voluntarily”, and said that Lutnick corrected previous statements in his interview on Wednesday.

Since the release of the Epstein files, Lutnick has faced calls from some lawmakers to resign over his former ties to Epstein.

Lutnick is the first current Trump administration official to testify before the panel. The committee also issued a subpoena to Pam Bondi before Trump fired her as attorney general last month. She is scheduled to appear before the committee on 29 May.

On May 1, Sean P. Duffy was in New Orleans, touring its container terminals in his official capacity as the secretary of transportation.

Then, he climbed behind the wheel of a car with his family on the final, all-expenses paid stop for “The Great American Road Trip,” a slickly produced YouTube series that has raised questions about self-promotion and gifts his family may have accepted as he conducted official business as a prominent member of the Trump administration.

The series, filmed across 10 states and Washington, D.C., over the course of seven months, is part of the department’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States this year. But it doubled as a set of family excursions for Mr. Duffy, his wife and his children, who traveled to national parks and major landmarks paid for by Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit that names among its sponsors Toyota, United Airlines and Boeing.

Mr. Duffy has said that ethics and budget officials in the department cleared the project. But the corporate ties — and the show’s timing, with gas prices rising — drew immediate blowback on social media when the trailer was released, announcing that it will air beginning in June. The average price of gas has gone up more than 40 percent since the war with Iran started in February.

“Accepting travel from companies with business before D.O.T. potentially implicates even more significant corruption and misconduct concerns,” Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a left-leaning government watchdog group, wrote in a letter this week to Mitch Behm, the acting inspector general for the Transportation Department. In it, Mr. Sherman asked Mr. Behm to investigate “whether the secretary violated the standards of ethical conduct or other federal ethics laws by his participation in the privately sponsored promotional road trip with his family.”

The concept of a great American road trip is a throwback to the U.S. bicentennial, when families were encouraged to pack up their cars and tour the country.

Mr. Duffy and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Fox News anchor, are no strangers to the format of a filmed road trip, having met as cast members of the reality television show “Road Rules: All Stars.” But despite the branding, the Duffys’ “Great American Road Trip” isn’t a classic cross-country journey.

According to Mr. Duffy, the project was taped mostly in one- and two-day stints during weekends and school holidays, often alongside his official travel duties. The Duffys were not paid for the series, but he continued to collect his government paycheck during filming, and gas, lodging, car rentals and other production costs were covered by Great American Road Trip Inc., according to department officials.

The nonprofit does not disclose its donors, and declined to do so upon request. But it publicly lists major project sponsors including the U.S. Travel Association, which lobbies the department on behalf of the tourism industry.

Tori Barnes, a former lobbyist for General Motors and the U.S. Travel Association, who has run the nonprofit since its inception last summer, brushed off allegations of impropriety, stressing that the partnership between the nonprofit and the department is governed by a memorandum of agreement.

The memorandum, which was signed in December, says the nonprofit will not receive “any favorable consideration for any future federal financial assistance, action, contract, or other financial award.” But there is no indication in the contract that the limitation extends to the corporate donors, which are not signatories.

Nathaniel Sizemore, a Transportation Department spokesman, said in an interview that the memorandum would in fact cover the companies donating to the nonprofit, but did not elaborate.

In a statement, Ms. Barnes said that “our partners would never expect, nor have they asked for, special treatment.”

The memorandum also says that the nonprofit’s financial backing of the YouTube series counts as an acceptable gift under a federal statute allowing the transportation secretary to “accept and use conditional or unconditional gifts of property for the Department of Transportation.”

But it was not clear how that clause applied to the travel expenses that the nonprofit covered for Mr. Duffy’s family members, who can be seen in the trailer cruising down interstates, riding snowmobiles in Montana, splashing around in a water park and eating at diners.

They are not employees of the department and were not contracted to D.O.T. for the purposes of the YouTube series, according to Mr. Sizemore.

“Gifts to the secretary’s family are absolutely not gifts to the department,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics.

“This is really gift laundering,” she said, adding: “This is an incredibly corrupt endeavor, and it’s dangerous, because it affects public safety.”

Mr. Sizemore said that when career ethics and budget officials reviewed and cleared Mr. Duffy’s participation in the venture, they also approved the involvement of his family.

In a social media post, Mr. Duffy decried his critics: “They’re upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America! ”

Some of the companies that donated to the nonprofit have recently been subjects of department investigations and punitive actions. Boeing, a featured sponsor, has been subject to multiple departmental inquiries into what the head of the Federal Aviation Administration in 2024 called its “broken safety culture.” Such complaints resulted in fines and settlements worth millions as recently as last year.

Since 2019, Toyota also has paid millions in penalties, over its handling of federal recalls and emissions violations. And earlier this year, the department’s inspector general found that the F.A.A. was not conducting sufficient oversight of United Airlines’ maintenance operations, despite a series of in-flight engine shutdowns and emergency landings.

The road trip is the latest example of Mr. Duffy’s closeness with companies subject to his department’s jurisdiction, particularly as the Trump administration seeks to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.

In recent months, Mr. Duffy filmed a 90-second video outside department headquarters promoting a limited-edition “Stars and Steel” Corvette, which is prominently featured on the department’s “Freedom 250” website. He rolled it out on the same day the department launched an app in conjunction with General Motors, called Explore250, which highlights national, state, and themed parks.

Last month, Mr. Duffy appeared with the chief executives of Southwest Airlines and American Airlines to unveil Southwest’s “Independence One,” a Boeing 737 Max 8 emblazoned with “1776” against a patriotic red, white and blue backdrop; and American Airlines’ America250, an Embraer jet emblazoned with the logo of the official semiquincentennial commission.

Department representatives have argued that these steps are in keeping with the legacy of major U.S. anniversary celebrations, pointing to corporate involvement in bicentennial projects like the Freedom Train, a traveling exhibition of American artifacts that spent over a year chugging through the contiguous 48 states.

The 200th anniversary celebration was indeed a commercial bonanza, with news articles from the time noting that some referred to the affair as the “buycentennial.” But according to historian Brian W. Martin, who scrutinized the bicentennial as a consultant for the congressional commission tasked with planning the 250th anniversary celebration, the federal government wasn’t as involved in 1976’s corporate-sponsored ventures as it is in today’s.

“There’s nothing that I can think of that was parallel, in the bicentennial,” he said, noting that most of the 200-year commemorations were state, local, or grass roots ventures, and not organized by the federal government. Even the higher-profile Freedom Train, he added, “was a private initiative and the government role was nearly nonexistent.”

“The rules of what’s an appropriate relationship between government officials and companies they regulate certainly were not suspended in some way for the bicentennial,” he said.

The administration’s all-in effort to mark the 250th anniversary with splashy, corporate-sponsored patriotic ventures has fueled some of the more serious ethical concerns regarding Mr. Duffy’s road trip venture.

While some gifts may be permissible for government officials to accept, officials are largely prohibited from soliciting gifts. The department officials and the nonprofit have presented competing narratives, however, about who originated the idea of the road trip and its production.

In emailed comments, Ms. Barnes said that after she created the nonprofit in June 2025, “our organization invited the secretary and his family to join us to increase visibility and to help inspire Americans to get out and see America.”

But Mr. Duffy had already publicly launched his Great American Road Trip initiative in May of that year. And during a recent Fox News interview to promote the YouTube series, Ms. Campos-Duffy strongly suggested that it had been the family’s idea.

“We thought we were going to do it on our iPhone and do little reels,” she said, adding that they ultimately decided: “Let’s go back to our roots, let’s do this one for free, we’ll put it on to YouTube, we’ll let the whole country see it.”

Corporations were reportedly asked to fork up as much as $1 million to sponsor Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s forthcoming America-themed road trip reality show, according to leaked documents.

The top $1 million package includes being featured on a stop of Duffy’s Great American Road Trip, plus “branded activations and product showcases at multiple destinations,” according to slides obtained by Politico.

The steep price tag doesn’t appear to have stopped sponsors from hitching their wagons to the show, which is set to be released this summer as part of the American 250th anniversary celebrations.

Top-tier corporations, including Toyota and Boeing, are listed as sponsors of The Great American Road Trip, Inc.m the non-profit of the same name producing the show.

“The Great American Road Trip Inc. is an independent non-profit with three key pillars: 1. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday; 2. To promote travel and tourism and; 3. To bring a focus the transportation, infrastructure and ingenuity that built America over the past 250 years and will build America over the next 250 years,” Tori Barnes, executive director of the group, told The Independent via email when asked about the reported sponsorship packages. “We are supported by partners who share these goals and believe in encouraging Americans to rediscover the people, places, and experiences that define our country.”

The Independent has contacted the Transportation Department, Toyota, and Boeing for comment.

Critics alleged that major corporations with potential business before transit regulators shouldn’t be sponsoring a media project involving the nation’s top transit official.

“One has to wonder whether the decision to prominently feature Toyota in this project is because Toyota paid for a sponsorship or because the secretary actually thinks that promoting Toyota is in the best interest of the American public, American automakers and the people that work for that industry," Donald Sherman, president of the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility, told NPR.

The group has filed a complaint with the DOT’s inspector general, asking for an investigation into whether Duffy violated federal gift and travel rules.

“Production costs were paid for by the Great American Road Trip Inc., not taxpayers,” Duffy wrote last week on X. “Zero taxpayer dollars were spent on my family...Neither myself nor my family received a salary or production royalties. The five part series will be freely accessible by the public on YouTube.”

Outside of ethics concerns, critics have alleged the sight of Duffy taking a made-for-TV road trip is insensitive, given the ongoing spike in oil prices because of the Trump administration's decision to wage war on Iran.

“The conflict of interest here is glaring,” The View panelist Ana Navarro said recently. “I don’t know how many Americans, how many average Americans, will be able to go on a road trip when I’m paying $5.99 for a gallon of gas. It just seems that the tone deafness has no limits.”

Trump himself brushed off such Iran-related affordability concerns on Tuesday.

"I don't think about American financial situation — I don't think about anybody,” he told reporters. “I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon."

High-priced corporate donations have flowed to other Trump-related entertainment projects, including the White House ballroom and the upcoming UFC fight at the White House.

President Donald Trump is scheduled to see doctors for a medical and dental checkup this month — his fourth publicized visit to medical experts since returning to office — in what the White House describes as an annual physical and regular preventive care.

Trump, who turns 80 next month and was the oldest person elected U.S. president, will see his doctors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on May 26, the White House said in a brief statement Monday evening.

The president's health has been the subject of tremendous scrutiny, so much so that Trump said he regretted getting imaging on his heart and abdomen last year because it raised public questions about his health.

Trump — who has been frequently critical of former President Joe Biden for age-related health and fitness issues — has recently remarked how good he feels despite his years. Earlier Monday, Trump that he feels the same as he did 50 years ago. “I feel literally the same,” he said at an Oval Office event. “I don’t know why. It’s not because I eat the best foods.”

Last week, he joked about his exercise regimen, saying that he works out “like about one minute a day, max.”

Presidents have wide discretion over what health information they choose to release to the public. Trump's doctor reported after an annual physical exam in April 2025 that the president was “fully fit” to serve as commander in chief.

His physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, said Trump was 20 pounds lighter since a 2020 checkup that showed him bordering on obesity.

Months after the visit reported last April, Trump had a checkup after noticing what the White House described as “mild swelling” in his lower legs. Tests by the White House medical unit found that Trump had chronic venous insufficiency, a condition common in older adults that causes blood to pool in his veins.

At the time, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also addressed bruising on the back of Trump's hands that has sometimes been covered by makeup. Leavitt said it was the result of irritation from frequent handshaking and aspirin use. Trump takes aspirin to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke.

Trump went on to have an October medical exam that the White House called a “semiannual physical,” where he also got his yearly flu shot and a COVID-19 booster vaccine. He later told The Wall Street Journal that he underwent advanced imaging on his heart and abdomen in October as preventive screening.

In his first term, Trump had at least four medical exams in office, aside from a stay at Walter Reed when he got COVID-19 in October 2020.

His upcoming dental evaluation follows two other recent visits to a local dentist near his estate in Florida, where Trump often spends his weekends.

The checkup is scheduled to take place about 10 days after Trump is expected to return from a summit in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Two doctors with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday that the risk to Americans from the deadly hantavirus outbreak remains low, saying the agency is “engaged at every step.”

In a media briefing, they described the agency’s response, which has been criticized by some infectious disease and public health experts as taking a back seat to the World Health Organization and other groups.

“I want to start by saying hantavirus is a known pathogen,” said David Fitter, the CDC’s incident manager for the hantavirus response. “At this moment, I want to emphasize that the risk to the general public is low. Our top priority is with the passengers who are on the ship and American communities.”

Fitter went on to detail how CDC has reacted, saying that from the earliest stages of this outbreak, it has been working in close coordination with state and public health authorities, with federal partners as well as international health partners, including countries that have been affected.

“CDC activated our emergency response in Atlanta immediately and has more than 100 staff actively working on this response. Operationally, we’ve been engaged at every step,” he said.

Those steps included providing information to American passengers on board the ship traveling from Argentina toward Antarctica and deploying a CDC team to the Canary Islands whose members spoke with each U.S. citizen about potential exposure. Two team members flew back with passengers, some to the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit and Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

“So far, our response has followed our playbook for swift action across federal, state, and local public health. The systems and partnerships that we’ve built exist precisely for situations like this,” Fitter said. “The work isn’t always visible, sharing information with state and local health departments and coordinating guidance and monitoring. But it never stops. It’s deliberate, it’s coordinated. It’s essential to keep our community safe.”

In Nebraska, a CDC team has been conducting health assessments of each passenger, asking them about their exposure to the confirmed cases while also monitoring temperature, screening for symptoms, and evaluating general wellness. The virus has a long incubation period, so the monitoring is 42 days, having started Monday.

“Our team has been working around-the-clock to ensure the health and safety of everyone involved,” said Brendan Jackson, CDC’s team lead in Nebraska and a medical epidemiologist.

Results are still being awaited on the passenger who had tested mildly positive before arriving in Nebraska. The CDC team wanted to retest there.

Some other passengers who have not tested positive are being monitored in their homes. The doctors declined to say where they are or how many they are, citing privacy concerns.

“We’re putting into action all of the things that we have in place to ensure that American communities remain safe and healthy. And what we really want to do is ensure that we’re also communicating about this,” Fitter said. “And we’ll continue to update the U.S. about everything that we are doing in multiple ways through our websites and other endeavors like this.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Wednesday that the hantavirus remains a low public health risk and while the agency is “encouraging” American passengers of the infected cruise ship to isolate at home, the absence of a formal quarantine order means these individuals can go out in public if they choose.

“At this moment, I want to emphasize that the risk to the general public is low. Our top priority is both the passengers who are on the ship and American communities,” David Fitter, incident manager for the CDC’s hantavirus response said in a press briefing.

As of the most recent update, the hantavirus outbreak has grown to 11 cases.

Fitter said his agency has already held two briefings on Capitol Hill regarding the outbreak.

“Our role now is to continue our conversations with each passenger about their potential exposure and work with partners to ensure appropriate monitoring,” he added.

CDC officials further emphasized that the hantavirus is a “known virus” that has been found in the U.S. before. Given the virus’s incubation period, the CDC is maintaining a 42-day monitoring period, which they consider having begun on May 11 and set to end on June 22.

Hantavirus is generally considered to not be transmissible from person-to-person, apart from the Andes virus strain that spread on the MV Hondius. Even then, person-to-person transmission requires prolonged contact with an infected person, such as among members of the same household sharing a bed, intimate partners and medical providers.

When asked about individuals quarantining at home, Fitter said the CDC is currently taking a “conservative approach” that involves “encouraging” people to stay home during the monitoring period. The individuals who were taken to the University of Nebraska have also been “encouraged that they can stay in Nebraska.”

During the briefing, it was noted that adherence would be hard to guarantee, and Fitter was asked about concerns over the people who are monitoring for symptoms at home. They are currently only testing people who are symptomatic.

“Currently, there are no state or federal quarantine orders that have been drawn. We’re working really closely with all contacts to ensure that they understand what is expected for them to perfectly monitor themselves,” said Fitter. “We also want to make sure that they have the right information so that they can understand the situation as best as possible.”

“If they need to do it somewhere else, we will work with them,” Fitter said. When pressed on whether efforts were being made to keep exposed individuals at isolated facilities, he added, “Our goal is to continue to work with them to the best possible place for them.”

Citing individual privacy, CDC officials declined to say where the individuals isolating at home live or how many are currently not in a specialized facility.

JD Vance has threatened to “turn off” federal funding for government health insurance programs in states that refuse to comply with the Trump administration’s crackdown on suspected fraud.

States which fail to “get serious” about fraud would lose Medicaid and Medicare funding, the US vice-president announced on Wednesday, sparking fresh accusations that Trump officials are using unfounded allegations to punish political rivals.

Hospices and home health agencies are also halted from new Medicare enrollment for six months while the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) investigates potential fraud alongside Vance’s anti-fraud taskforce, the agency announced on Wednesday.

The administration will review anti-fraud funding for states that it deems to have failed to tackle fraud, Vance said. “And if we continue to find problems, we can turn off other resources within their state Medicaid programs as well.

“Our goal here is not to do that. We don’t want to turn off any money,” the vice-president claimed. “What we want to do is ensure that people are taking fraud seriously.

“We want to protect Medicaid. We want to protect Medicare. But we can’t do that if the states that are administering those programs are allowing those programs to be fleeced by fraudsters.”

The news follows a crackdown on Minnesota and three other Democratic states, as well as a freeze on new medical suppliers for Medicare. Donald Trump signed an executive order in March to create a taskforce on eliminating fraud.

The Vance investigation on Medicaid is set to include audits of the watchdog organizations tasked with guarding against fraud, known as Medicaid Fraud Control Units (MFCUs), which are funded federally. The audits seek to reveal whether the units are pursuing known abuse of Medicaid.

Attorneys general in all 50 states reportedly received a letter from Thomas Bell, inspector general at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “This means your failure to do your job,” Bell wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal, “has put all of your state’s Medicaid funds in jeopardy.”

More than $300m in funding was halted to Minnesota in recent months because federal officials believed the state was not in compliance with other requirements. CMS recently stayed that hold on funding.

“But as radical as the Minnesota withhold was, it did not involve ‘all of the state’s Medicaid funds’,” said Andy Schneider, research professor of the practice at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “There’s no statutory or regulatory basis for withholding all of a state’s federal Medicaid matching funds due to non-performance by a MFCU,” he said.

The HHS doesn’t have the authority to withhold all of a state’s federal Medicaid funds, and “CMS, which does have the authority, has never done so and is not going to do so”, Schneider said. He has cautioned that “it’s important to watch what CMS does (and doesn’t do), not what [CMS administrator] Dr [Mehmet] Oz or Vice-President Vance says.”

About 850 agents and brokers suspected of fraud were reinstated under the Trump administration, Lloyd Doggett, a Democratic representative from Texas, pointed out at a recent congressional hearing. “Your administration was the one that let them all go back to work,” he told the HHS secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr.

In response, Kennedy claimed that was “not a credible story”, and focused instead on alleged fraud by home health aides, including family members, whom he said may receive payment from CMS for taking care of elderly and disabled people. “These are family members getting paid to do things that they used to do as family members for free, and this is rife with fraud,” Kennedy said, claiming that the US was “paying for fraud now as much as for medicine”.

The allegation rippled through the disability community. Caregivers who receive federal payments are frequently not able to work other jobs or support their families otherwise.

“Waiting lists are already long, and the serious fraud – which does happen – isn’t coming from individuals who need help, but from bad companies and lax oversight,” said David Perry, a journalist, historian and parent of a disabled adult. He has recounted the ways increasingly complicated rules have made it difficult to apply for his son’s benefits.

“Republican anti-fraud programs are not about building the capacity to help people who need it while making sure funds are not stolen, but stripping away capacity in order to punish political rivals,” he said.

The HHS did not respond by press time to the Guardian’s questions about what fraud investigation non-compliance would entail, and how these moves would affect access to caregiving.

New providers of home health and hospices were “a key source of fraudulent activity”, CMS said in its statement, highlighting states that it deemed to have “elevated fraud risk”, including Arizona, California, Georgia, Ohio, Nevada and Texas.

It’s not new to scrutinize state-level fraud investigations, but this news “differs from prior approaches in its greater reliance on financial penalties for states”, said Alice Burns, associate director of the Medicaid and the uninsured program at KFF, a health policy non-profit.

“It’s still unknown how extensively CMS will apply financial penalties to other states or the shares of Medicaid funding that might be at risk,” Burns said. Such moves could force states to make difficult decisions on funding Medicaid, which could affect providers and enrollees who are not involved in fraud, waste or abuse, she added.

There have already been major restrictions on such coverage. Last year, Congress cut nearly $1tn in Medicaid spending – the largest decrease in history, taking away coverage from 7.5 million low-income people.

For now, the announcements are “very preliminary, and we don’t know for sure that any federal Medicaid funding will be withheld”, Burns said. “However, the deferrals of federal Medicaid funding in Minnesota are ‘historically unprecedented’, and if the scope of deferrals increases, there could be implications for access to Medicaid services in affected states.”