Showing posts with label KASH PATEL LIED. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KASH PATEL LIED. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Trump DOJ Panics as 30K New Files Are Released - 12/23/25 Afternoon Updates

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Trump DOJ Panics as 30K New Files Are Released - 12/23/25 Afternoon Updates


By Ben Meiselas

The MeidasTouch research team and I spent hours reviewing what the Department of Justice released as “Data Set Eight” of the Epstein files, and the picture that emerges is deeply troubling, not only for what appears in the records, but for what remains missing, redacted, or contradicted by official statements. As president, Donald Trump now presides over a Justice Department that is asking the public to accept its assurances while simultaneously producing documents that undermine those very claims.

The DOJ’s posture has been unusually defensive. In a public statement announcing the release of nearly 30,000 additional pages, the department took an unusually defensive tone, insisting that some materials contained “untrue and sensational claims” about Donald Trump, asserting that if any allegation had “a shred of credibility,” it would have been weaponized years ago. The department framed the disclosure as a commitment to transparency, while emphasizing legal protections for victims of Jeffrey Epstein.

Among the disturbing materials is a letter that is alleged — and I emphasize alleged — to have been postmarked shortly after Epstein’s death to Larry Nassar, the former USA Gymnastics physician convicted of serial sexual abuse. The letter, returned to sender and submitted for handwriting analysis by the FBI, contains grotesque language referencing sexual exploitation and includes a line invoking “our president.” The existence of such a letter was widely reported on in 2023, though its contents at the time were unknown. Until now. Investigators have not publicly confirmed the letter’s authorship, and the results of the handwriting analysis have yet to be discovered in the files or presented to the public by the FBI. We are calling on the DOJ and FBI to provide the official conclusions made regarding this document.

Perhaps even more significant are internal DOJ communications from 2019 documenting the existence of ten Epstein co-conspirators. Prosecutors and investigators discussed locating, interviewing, and serving grand jury subpoenas on these individuals across multiple states, including New York, Florida, and Massachusetts. One email describes teams traveling to interview approximately twenty-five victims and notes dozens of calls to the FBI tip line. Yet in sworn testimony years later, FBI Director Kash Patel stated unequivocally that there was “no credible information” that Epstein trafficked victims to anyone else. Why would Trump’s FBI director claim there were no co-conspirators, when the files clearly show that to be false?

Those two realities cannot both be true. Either federal investigators pursued co-conspirators because evidence warranted it, or senior officials later misrepresented the contents of their own files. The newly released emails suggest the former.

The documents also show that a grand jury subpoena was issued to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in October 2021 in connection with the investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell. A representative of the club was compelled to appear before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. This is not speculation; it is a matter of record.

Another set of records involves a separate investigation into the “We Build the Wall” scheme, in which Steve Bannon was later pardoned by Trump at the federal level before pleading guilty in a state case. During forensic review of Bannon’s phone, investigators flagged a photograph of Trump and Maxwell.

Perhaps most consequential is a January 2020 email between federal prosecutors summarizing flight records obtained during the Maxwell investigation. According to that email, Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet “many more times than previously had been reported,” including at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, several of which included Maxwell. On two flights, Trump was present with a potential witness in the Maxwell case, the prosecutor wrote. The message notes that Trump sometimes traveled with family members and, in one instance, was listed as the only passenger with Epstein. The prosecutors emphasized that they were flagging this information so it would not “be a surprise down the road.”

That email, too, appears in the files.

This in-depth reporting takes a lot of manpower and resources, so please let me take a quick pause while you are here to highlight one of our favorite sponsors who has gone above and beyond to help this network grow—and has allowed us to bring you this video report ad-free. Wildgrain has generously sponsored this post. In case you haven’t heard of them, Wildgrain is a great company that delivers artisanal breads, fresh pasta & seasonal pastries directly to your door. And if you’re looking for a last minute gift this week, Wildgrain’s e-gift cards couldn’t be any easier. You can send an e-gift card to your loved one that instantly arrives in their inbox and they can fully customize their own box. For a limited-time, our readers can get $30 off your first box + free croissants for life when you use code MEIDASTOUCH at checkout. Visit http://wildgrain.com/MEIDASTOUCH to take advantage of this limited-time sale today!

The release also includes FBI intake reports from 2020 documenting tips from private citizens. These reports explicitly caution that the statements are not verified and should not be construed as fact. Still, they describe why the FBI deemed the information worthy of preservation. One report recounts a former limousine driver describing a 1995 encounter with Trump and remarks he claimed to have overheard. Another references secondhand accounts of a party at Mar-a-Lago described as involving prostitution. None of these allegations have been adjudicated, and responsible reporting requires that distinction. But responsible governance requires honesty about what the government possesses and how it has handled it.

What troubles me most is not that allegations appear in an FBI file (law enforcement records often contain unproven claims), but that the administration appears determined to minimize, redact, or dismiss their existence while castigating anyone who reports on them. Hundreds of thousands of Epstein-related documents remain unreleased. Names of alleged co-conspirators are blacked out (a violation of the law, by the way). Victim interviews referenced in internal emails have not been produced. And sworn testimony from senior officials now stands in stark contrast with their own agency’s records.

The rule of law depends on equal application, not selective transparency calibrated to protect the powerful. If the Department of Justice wants the public to trust its conclusions, it must first earn that trust by releasing the full record, explaining discrepancies, and allowing independent scrutiny to do its work. And frankly, it needs to stop acting like Donald Trump’s personal public relations crisis management firm.

Anything less is simple damage control masquerading as transparency.

I’ll continue to keep you updated. Keep a lookout on the MeidasTouch YouTube channel and podcast feed for new reports all day, including some great new interviews. By the way, have you listened to today’s show with me and my brothers, Brett and Jordy? I hope you have a chance to check it out now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you already follow and listen to the podcast, consider leaving a 5-star review while you are there.

OK, back to my next report. Talk to you soon.

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Thursday, February 13, 2025

A Big Fire Hose

 

A Big Fire Hose

Just to give you some idea of how vast the diameter of the firehose that Trump is spewing stuff through is right now, I decided to go back through social media to give you a sense of all of the legal issues I was tracking on Tuesday. Just Tuesday and just the mainstream legal issues. This is the opposite approach from the one I have schooled myself to stick with here, trying to take it all in and distill it down to just a few key items each evening. That’s the approach I’m committed to here and with The Democracy Index.

But this little zoom out is important to get a sense of just how much Trump 2.0 is doing and how fast they are doing it. It serves to underscore what we all know, that none of this is normal.


If a new president was really looking for evidence of waste and fraud in agency spending, he’d send in forensic accountants, investigators, and prosecutors—not coders and hackers. If he really wanted to reform government, he wouldn’t do it by breaking laws, like the ones about how to go about lawfully replacing inspectors general. The lack of commitment to good government—and by extension, to us, the citizens of this country—is apparent everywhere.

Right now, there is so much going on that it’s virtually impossible to track everything. At least we know why there is so much happening—Trump is trying to flood the zone with distraction in hopes we will be unable to figure out what’s most important, let alone focus on it. It’s become relatively clear that his goal is accumulating power, using non-government agency DOGE to do the dirty work of disrupting democracy to get there.

That basic idea, that Trump is engaging in a major disruption and transformation of government, properly called an internal coup, continues to remain front and center for me. This morning, in the pre-caffeine haze that is becoming so familiar, I had an idea and dictated a start on my column for tonight on that theme. That’s the column you may have seen this morning (complete with the name misspelling of Allen Charles Raul, whose excellent column in The Washington Post I discussed). Instead of saving the column to work on later after I got my first draft down on paper, I hit send. This is my life in the time of Trump; even as you try to maintain some sanity in the face of everything that’s going on, the crazy can still get to you.

I share this both out of embarrassment and apology, but more importantly, because it feels so emblematic to me of what happens now that we’re constantly drinking from the gushing firehose. The next four years are not going to be easy for any of us, but they’re going to be important. We may have to tolerate a little mess to get the job done.

If you didn’t get a chance to read “Call it What It Is” this morning, since it landed in your mailbox at an odd mid-morning time, I hope you’ll take a look tonight. The central idea feels very important to me right now.

As for the big picture on Tuesday, by the end of the night I had so many tabs open on my computer—half a dozen court decisions and even more news reports—that it was groaning about lack of memory. Here are some of the crazy in bullet points:

  • In a clear, and also an extremely petty, violation of the First Amendment, the Associated Press reported that they “were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office.” Later in the day, they were refused access.

    A Google map now showing the Gulf of America.
    We have serious problems. This is ridiculous.
  • The New York Times is trying to get DOJ to release Volume 2 of Jack Smith’s report, the one about the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. So far, DOJ has refused. The Times is appealing the decision administratively, inside of DOJ, but they’ve filed a lawsuit as well, in the likely event DOJ refuses to release Volume 2.

  • The head of DOJ’s tax division, a veteran of 40 years, resigned instead of agreeing to be moved to a different position. Some commentators saw it as a sign the White House is preparing to use tax as a political tool.

  • Elon Musk acknowledged during his Oval Office jag that he isn’t always truthful. A reporter confronted him with his claim that $50 million in condoms were sent to Gaza, when in fact it was a program in Mozambique meant to prevent the spread of HIV. Musk responded, “First of all, some of the things I say will be incorrect.” That didn’t come as a surprise to FEMA employees who were fired after he made claims that weren’t true about the use of disaster relief funds.

  • Trump also went on the attack against FEMA

  • Doctors for America filed a lawsuit because the administration has taken down CDC, NIH, and FDA websites doctors use regularly when treating and diagnosing patients. A federal judge entered a temporary injunction ordering the government to restore the public health web pages by midnight Tuesday. Perhaps suspicious of whether the government would comply, the judge ordered them to update him by 5:00 p.m. on Thursday.

  • Christian and Jewish groups filed a lawsuit together, arguing that ICE's new policy of making arrests at their places of worship violates the First Amendment. They asked the courts for an injunction to stop the intrusions.

  • The American Bar Association issued a statement condemning Trump’s violations of the rule of law, including this, “No American can be proud of a govt that carries out change in this way. Neither can these actions be rationalized by discussion of past grievances or appeals to efficiency. Everything can be more efficient, but adherence to the rule of law is paramount.”

  • Reporting surfaced that Kash Patel, who told the Senate under oath that he was leaving his revenge lists behind, wasn’t candid.

  • Fox News ran this headline: “GOP lawmakers set sights on PBS, NPR amid Trump's DOGE crackdown.” The piece goes explains, “Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., is leading a bill in the House of Representatives that would halt taxpayer dollars from going to either media broadcaster and reroute existing federal funds to reducing the national debt, according to legislative text previewed by Fox News Digital.” If they wanted to reduce the national debt, the should have just kept Democrats in charge. Instead, they’re killing the news.

  • Russ Vought, folks. He’s one of the architects of Project 2025, which calls for NIH to be gutted. Now, as the head of OMB he’ll be involved in the plan to devastate research sponsored by the agency, even though his own kid, who has cystic fibrosis, benefits from one of the “miracle drugs” its research has made possible.

That's a lot, but it’s also still just a slice of everything that’s going on. And that’s the point: who could pay attention to everything?

It’s important that we understand that and recognize the effort to overwhelm us. They want us to give up. They want us to resign ourselves to the inevitability of whatever Trump is going to do for the next four years. That, of course, is what we can’t do. This is the time to summon our moral outrage, call it the coup that it is, and make sure we don’t let up on our senators, representatives, or even the White House; we have to continue to express our concerns and our outrage.

Lest you think it doesn’t work, following the public outcry over the weekend after the vice president seemed to suggest that the administration should flout judges’ orders if they lost in court, three Republican Senators went to bat for the rule of law. Josh Hawley said the president doesn’t have the power to defy the courts. That might seem like civics 101, but in today’s context, it was critical for him to say it. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley chimed in to say that he had “learned in eighth grade civics about checks and balances, and I just expect the process to work its way out.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune expressed his belief that the courts play an important role in the balance of power between the branches of government. These aren’t folks who tend to make statements like this—ones that cut against the leader of their party—just for fun. It was a response to the alarm bells we raised. So, let’s keep going. Don’t let the crazy overwhelm you.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

Thursday, February 6, 2025

WATCH LIVE: Senate Democrats hold news briefing on their opposition to Trump FBI nominee Kash Patel

 

DEFEAT KASH PATEL! 

JAN 6 CHOIR - CALLED CAPITOL RIOTERS 'POLITICAL PRISONERS'

WAS ASKED ABOUT STEW PETERS, A NAZI CONSPIRACY THEORRIST, 

DENIED KNOWING HIM, APPEARED ON HIS PODCAST 8 DIFFERENT TIMES! 

KASH PATEL LIED! 

TRUMP WHITEWASHING THE CRIMES & INSURRECTION OF JAN 6! 

SENATOR SHELDON WHITEHOUSE (D-RI):  JUDGMENT  CANDOR

SOMEONE POSTED A VIDEO OF CHAINSAWING THE HEADS OF PEOPLE 

ON HIS ENEMIES LIST....KASH PATEL RE-POSTED THAT VIDEO! 

REFUSED TO INDICATE WHAT HE TESTIFIED TO IN GRAND JURY....FALSELY 

CLAIMED IT WAS "UNDER SEAL" - NOT TRUE!


KASH PATEL PLEADED THE FIFTH DURING HIS CONFIRMATION HEARING!


SENATOR AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MINNESOTA): GREAT COMMENTS! 

"THE MEN & WOMEN OF THE FBI DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS NOMINEE!"

INVITED REPUBLICAN COLLEAGUES TO STAND UP & SAY IT AS WELL! 

SENATOR CHRISTOPHER COONS (D-DE): SEE HIS COMMENTS! 

KASH PATEL BELIEVES THE FBI WORKS FOR THE WHITE HOUSE! 


THIS IS A 10 YEAR APPOINTMENT THAT AMERICA CANNOT SUPPORT!

  

SENATOR MAZIE HIRONO (D-HAWAII):  HER COMMENTS ARE WORTH WATCHING! 

WE NEED AN FBI DIRECTOR THAT PROTECTS AMERICANS!  

SENATOR ALEX PADILLA (D-CA): WORTH WATCHING! 

KASH PATEL PROVIDED FALSE INFORMATION DURING A HOSTAGE RESCUE 

SITUATION

KASH PATEL TO ADDRESS QUESTIONS REGARDING GUNS & WEAPONS 

SENATOR PETER WELCH (D-VT): KASH PATEL HAS A GOAL IT IS TO WRECK 

THE FBI  WE ARE DETERMINED TO DO EVERYTHING WE CAN TO SAVE IT 


SEE QUESTIONS AT THE END...AS SENATOR DURBIN POINTED OUT, THERE 

IS A GREAT DEAL OF INFORMATION  REGARDING KASH PATEL BOTH FROM 

HIS BOOK & PUBLIC STATEMENTS THAT IS TROUBLESOME



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