Donald, the Call Is Coming From Inside the House
“Senior administration officials” are leaking to the press. The polls on the Epstein saga are terrible. The coverup is unraveling.
U.S. chipmaker Nvidia really wants to be able to sell AI components in China; U.S. foreign policy hawks are keen to stop that from happening. President Biden formerly placed strict export controls on the chips. Earlier this year, President Trump strengthened and updated those controls—but walked that move back after meeting with Nvidia chief Jensen Huang.
Huang, it appears, is Trump’s kind of guy—the kind, that is, that has no problem shamelessly buttering him up. Last night, the president posted a recent comment from Huang to Truth Social: “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.” Happy Thursday.
How a Coverup Falls Apart
by Bill Kristol
Yesterday, Fox News published a new poll of American voters. Most of the results were fairly predictable. But buried near the bottom was the most lopsided and interesting result from the survey:
Only 13% think the government has been open and transparent about the Jeffrey Epstein case, while more than five times as many, 67%, disagree – including 60% of Republicans and 56% of MAGA supporters. One voter in five says they haven’t been following the case.
The 67–13 percent split on whether the government has been open about the Epstein case is of course interesting. But I was also struck by the fact that “one voter in five says they haven’t been following the case.” The fact that 80 percent of American voters say they have been following the case is remarkable. There aren’t many issues that 80 percent of Americans follow.
As for the poll’s cross-tabs (provided by Fox in a PDF), what’s striking is the relative uniformity of voters’ judgments as to whether the federal government has been open and transparent. Democrats are predictably the most disappointed, by 74 percent to 9 percent. Independents break 64 percent to 10 percent. But even among Republicans the split is 60 percent to 18 percent.
It turns out everyone is interested in the Epstein files. Which is why the White House is panicking.
Keep in mind, this survey was conducted before yesterday’s Wall Street Journal story revealing that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, told Trump in May that his name appears “multiple times” in the Epstein files. Trump claimed to reporters just a week ago that he hadn’t been told that very thing.
“Specifically, did she [Bondi] tell you that your name appeared in the files?” a reporter asked. Trump replied: “No, no.”
Trump was not telling the truth.
The Journal also reports that the Justice Department officials informed Trump “that the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein.” The fact that the “senior administration officials” recounting this meeting to the Journal wanted to emphasize that some of these references were “unverified hearsay” is an attempt to minimize the significance of the report. But it of course raises the question of why the Justice Department apparently didn’t try to verify or falsify some of this hearsay.
Of course, Trump’s own knowledge of his interactions with Epstein doesn’t depend on unverified hearsay. He knows about what he did and didn’t do with Epstein. One has to assume this report set off alarm bells. We do know that after this meeting, all talk from the administration about making the Epstein files available ended. It was in interviews in mid-May that FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, started publicly walking back their earlier promises to reveal new facts about the Epstein matter.
The Journal report also claims that Justice Department officials told Trump in their meeting that they “didn’t plan to release any documents related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender because the material contained child pornography and victims’ personal information.” But this doesn’t pass the smell test. Justice and the FBI could easily withhold all the child pornography. Justice and the FBI could redact victims’ personal information. And then they could release the Epstein documents.
One last point about the Journal piece. Here are its final two paragraphs:
On July 9, after ABC News reached out to the White House about Bondi’s briefing to the president, Bongino and Bondi clashed in a meeting in which Bondi alleged that Bongino secretly provided information to the media to damage her reputation, people familiar with the meeting said.
Bongino in turn exploded about Bondi, his face red, and called her a liar, a senior administration official said.
So the attorney general and the deputy director of the FBI are screaming at each other. A “senior administration official” is telling the Wall Street Journal all about it. And the president is personally involved in decisions not to release information containing reports about his own behavior.
Meanwhile, the public is paying attention.
This is how coverups unravel.
It’s Bad on Purpose to Make You Click
by Andrew Egger
Close observers of the White House’s spasmodic attempts to get out from under the Epstein-files controversy will by now have noticed a basic symmetry: The worse the Epstein revelations, the wilder the distractions issued to try to get the MAGA faithful to look literally anywhere else.
Take yesterday afternoon. With the latest Wall Street Journal Epstein-Trump story about to drop, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was summoned to the White House briefing room to give the press corps a po-faced presentation on the supposed low-down dirty 2016 chicanery of Barack Obama and company, which—although Gabbard noted she’s not a lawyer—surely wasn’t not treason, right?
Gabbard and the White House have been beating this drum all week, making chronic use of the rhetoric about “a years-long coup to try to undermine President Trump’s presidency.” The basic gist of the charge is that Obama and his intelligence chiefs knew that their late-2016 intelligence assessment that Vladimir Putin had wanted Donald Trump to win that year was inaccurate. And that Obama understood that the assessment, in Gabbard’s words, “would and could then be used for all of the actions that came after.” In the White House’s logical ordering of things, that makes Obama responsible for every headache Trump suffered in his first term, including—somehow—both his impeachments. (Maybe Trump wouldn’t have tried to steal the 2020 election if they’d let his first term be more fun?)
All this is particularly funny once you realize how fine the hair is that the White House is trying to split. It is simply false, the administration insists, that U.S. intelligence assessed in 2016 that Putin was trying to help Donald Trump’s candidacy. All we know for sure is that he was trying to hurt Hillary Clinton’s.
Even current intelligence analysts have quietly acknowledged that hurting one candidate in a two-person race is tantamount to helping the other. “Most analysts judged that denigrating Clinton equaled supporting Trump,” reads the CIA after-action report on the 2016 intelligence assessment, which was released earlier this month. The report—which, again, was written by analysts this year working under direction of the Trump administration—called that logic train “plausible and sensible,” but argues the assessment should have considered it a strong inference rather than a fact.
But as they scramble to assemble a story compelling enough to distract from Epstein, Gabbard and Co. are increasingly jumping beyond even this rickety line of argument. At the briefing yesterday, Gabbard claimed Russia had tried to “sow discord in the election,” but “showed no preference for or against any singular candidate”—a claim flatly contradicted by the CIA report.
She also found time, amid her lectures about the importance of revealing only the highest-quality intelligence, to chum the waters with some bizarre allegations about Hillary Clinton. Russian intelligence, Gabbard said, had been preparing to release supposed DNC communications revealing Hillary Clinton’s “intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness,” and the supposed “daily regimen of ‘heavy tranquilizers’” she was taking to deal with all this. Did U.S. intelligence have any reason to believe any of that was true, one reporter wondered? “I think the underlying point there is that we understand from intelligence what Russia said that they had,” Gabbard replied. Airtight!
Other ridiculous claims and leaps of logic pile up from there. At the same briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt denounced the supposed intelligence narrative “that the president colluded with the Russians, that the president’s son was holding secret meetings with the Russians, all of these lies that were never true.” Maybe there were intelligence assessments that Don Jr. was holding secret meetings with Russians; if so, I don’t remember those assessments coming to light. What I do remember is the New York Times’s bombshell report in July 2017 that Don Jr. did, in fact, take a meeting with a Russian lawyer who had offered him dirt on the Clinton campaign. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Jr. replied by email, “especially later in the summer.” Jr. never denied that meeting had taken place. The elder Trump himself admitted the meeting took place. So much for “all of these lies that were never true.”
It’s all shoddy enough to make you wonder if they’re making it stupid on purpose. The more nonsense they spew, the more tempted guys like me are to spend our time debunking that nonsense instead of focusing on certain other stories in the news. I guess it’s working! Here I am writing about it! Then again, this item went second, after Bill’s.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Are Dems Gonna Wimp Out on Redistricting? Beneath the bravado are signs the party is skittish, reports LAUREN EGAN at The Opposition.
‘The Fantastic Four: First Steps’ Review… It’s fine, though there’s a spikier, more interesting movie below the surface, writes SONNY BUNCH.
The Trumpist Legacy of Ed Feulner and the Heritage Foundation… Ideological entrepreneur, architect of ruin. JOSHUA TAIT remembers Ed Feulner, the co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, who died last week.
How You Can Help LA Street Vendors Dealing With ICE Raids Fallout… ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO talks with Latina leader SINDY BENAVIDES about helping L.A. street vendors like Maribel, who faces eviction, and highlights grassroots groups across the U.S. aiding families, churches, and businesses during the mass deportation crackdown.
Quick Hits
BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP: Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by fiat suffered another legal loss yesterday, when a federal appeals court affirmed a lower court’s decision that the policy is unconstitutional. The court continued to block its enforcement nationwide. Here’s the AP:
The ruling from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes after Trump’s plan was also blocked by a federal judge in New Hampshire. It marks the first time an appeals court has weighed in and brings the issue one step closer to coming back quickly before the Supreme Court. . . .
“The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,” the majority wrote.
MORE LIKE CUCKLUMBIA, AM I RIGHT: As the year wears on, we’re slowly figuring out the price of one’s dignity under Trump 2.0. The cost to a media company of settling one of the president’s spurious lawsuits? ABC News and CBS News owner Paramount have agreed to pay $16 million each.
The check it will take for a university to get Trump off its back? That’s a bit higher. The New York Times reports:
Columbia University will pay a $200 million fine to settle allegations from the Trump administration that it failed to do enough to stop the harassment of Jewish students, part of a sweeping deal reached on Wednesday to restore the university’s federal research funding, according to a statement from the university. . . .
The deal is a significant milestone in the Trump administration’s quest to bring elite universities to heel. Columbia is the first university to reach a negotiated settlement over antisemitism claims. Harvard, which has sued the administration over funding cuts, is also negotiating for restoration of its federal money. The expectation is that the Columbia settlement will provide a template for future deals.
NOT SENDING OUR BEST: Trump likes to tell tall tales about how other countries are releasing their criminals into the United States. This week, though, there’s a criminal coming to America from a foreign country because the White House invited him back. The New York Times has the details:
When the State Department secured the release of 10 Americans and permanent legal residents from a Venezuela prison last week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hailed the action as part of an effort to safeguard the well-being of Americans unjustly held abroad.
But one of the men released from the prison, an American-Venezuelan dual national named Dahud Hanid Ortiz, had been convicted in Venezuela for the murder of three people in Spain in 2016, according to an official at the prosecutor’s office in Madrid and Venezuelan court records reviewed by the New York Times.
The father of one of the victims told the Times he was shocked by Hanid Ortiz’s release. “I don’t understand how it’s possible that this happens,” he said. “This guy is a delinquent. He’s an assassin.”
Strong consistency from the party of law and order.
Cheap Shots
I took a look at the Fox News website and their top story right now is about an investigation into Russia-gate. So it is clear that the rigth wing press is standing by their man.
There is simply no equivalent in the mainstream press.
Re: "So the attorney general and the deputy director of the FBI are screaming at each other. A “senior administration official” is telling the Wall Street Journal all about it. And the president is personally involved in decisions not to release information containing reports about his own behavior."
One would think the right wing fever swamp would be all over this. This is the kind of thing that would have sent Alex Jones into orbit a few years ago. Same thing with Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes. What about Rogan? And where, oh where, is National Review? Nothing to see here? And Fox News? At some point, doesn't Megan Kelly and Shannon Bream and the rest need to say something?
I did hear some things from Alex Jones and Fuentes a few days ago, but that's about it. There's a lot more that needs to happen here.