Bill Clinton just flipped the script on Trump

 

Bill Clinton just flipped the script on Trump over the DOJ's failure to release all the Epstein files

As the DOJ drips out Epstein material and shields key details, Clinton’s team dares the administration to stop hinting and start being transparent.

UnPresidented Dec 22

Bill Clinton’s team is done playing defense, and they’re calling the Justice Department’s bluff.

On Monday, a spokesperson for the former president issued a rare and pointed demand: if the Department of Justice has documents related to Clinton in its ongoing Jeffrey Epstein file release, it should stop hinting and start publishing. The message was unmistakable — either put everything on the table, or admit that the current drip-feed is designed to protect someone else.

The statement, delivered by Clinton spokesperson Angel Ureña, lands amid a weeks-long spectacle in which the Trump administration has tried to reframe Clinton as the GOP’s preferred villain in the Epstein saga, even as the White House itself absorbs mounting criticism over how the files have been handled.

“What the Department of Justice has released so far, and the manner in which it did so, makes one thing clear: someone or something is being protected,” Ureña said. “We do not know whom, what or why. But we do know this: We need no such protection.”

The full statement from Clinton’s spokesperson.

The DOJ released the first batch of Epstein-related records on Friday but conspicuously failed to publish the full trove required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law last month by President Trump. The statute mandates the release of all federal documents related to Epstein investigations, with limited redactions allowed, chiefly to protect victims.

Instead, the department produced a partial release riddled with redactions and omissions.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has insisted the DOJ is merely proceeding out of caution. He said last week the department is reviewing material to protect victims’ identities and will release “potentially hundreds of thousands” of additional files in the coming weeks. Blanche also made a point of denying the obvious suspicion.

“There’s no effort to hold anything back because there’s the name Donald J. Trump or anybody else’s name,” he said.

That assurance has done little to calm critics, especially after the DOJ released multiple photographs of Clinton alongside Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, while simultaneously redacting faces of other individuals in the same images. The law permits redactions tied to active investigations and material that “contain personally identifiable information of victims,” but it does not authorize selective implication by omission.

Ureña warned that if the DOJ refuses to fully comply, it will confirm what many already suspect: that the administration is “using selective releases to imply wrongdoing about individuals who have already been repeatedly cleared by the very same Department of Justice, over many years, under Presidents and Attorneys General of both parties.”

Clinton’s name has been associated with Epstein since the early 1990s, and the two were photographed together several times. As previously reported, Clinton flew on Epstein’s plane in the 1990s to several international destinations. Clinton has said he was unaware of Epstein’s crimes and has never been accused of wrongdoing in connection with him. His spokesperson has also stated that Clinton’s Secret Service detail accompanied him on those trips.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is grilled on Meet the Press over the DOJ’s decision to delete some documents from the Epstein files release, including on that featured photos of Trump.

None of that nuance has stopped the administration from leaning into implication by imagery.

Blanche, the second-highest-ranking official at the DOJ, has continued to insist the Trump administration is complying with the law, even as bipartisan lawmakers accuse it of “flouting” the statute’s requirements. The problem, critics note, is that the law contains no clear enforcement mechanism if the DOJ simply ignores the 30-day deadline.

And then there’s the disappearing evidence.

Blanche defended the DOJ’s decision to temporarily remove several documents from the initial release — including one featuring a photograph of Trump — during an appearance Sunday on Meet the Press. Speaking to Kristen Welker on NBC, Blanche said the image was taken down after concerns were raised by victims and would be reinstated following a review.

In other words: trust us, again.

Clinton’s team is signaling it won’t. If the DOJ believes selective disclosure is a political weapon, Ureña’s message makes clear it cuts both ways. Release everything or stop pretending this is about transparency at all.

 

Stockholm Syndrome With a Press Pass How Appeasing Trump Cost 60 Minutes Its Spine JoJoFromJerz Dec 22 Oh, CBS News. Oh, 60 Minutes. Once upon a time, you were the media’s apex predator—the saber-toothed, steel-balled, Nixon-mauling beast that made corporate titans and crooked politicians soil their designer slacks at the mere tick-tick-tick of your stopwatch. Back then, Mike Wallace didn’t just interview you—he carved your soul into lunch meat and served it with a side of righteous indignation. That relentless ticking wasn’t just a countdown; it was a death knell for liars everywhere. You could practically hear boardroom sphincters clenching coast to coast. Now? That infamous stopwatch is just the metronome for a symphony of silence—counting down the seconds until you swap your spine for access, your legacy for applause, and your soul for a seat at the bullies’ table. Fast forward to last night, and what do we get? Not fearless journalism, but the sound of journalistic balls shriveling up and receding back into the corporate torso. And for what? For who? For Donald Trump—a man whose ego is matched only by his capacity for self-pity, stockpiling slights and vendettas like a doomsday prepper hoards canned beans—and his new bestie, Bari “I’m not a journalist, but I play one on Twitter” Weiss. Let’s not bury the lede here: CBS, the Tiffany Network, the house that Murrow built, just killed—no, let’s say it correctly, murdered—a 60 Minutes exposé on Trump’s illegal, human-rights-violating, brown-people-shredding deportations to El Salvador. The story was vetted, checked, lawyered to hell and back, ready to go. But then, like a man angrily shaking a snow globe because the fantasy inside stopped responding, Trump threw a fit—still furious that 60 Minutes interviewed Marjorie Taylor Greene without first kneeling for permission, because his ego is a raw nerve wrapped in barbed wire—and suddenly, poof, the story was gone. Vanished. Yanked hours before airtime like the Epstein prison camera that mysteriously malfunctioned at the exact, exquisitely convenient moment it was most needed. And since then, there’s been a lot of polite throat-clearing. A lot of process talk. A lot of vague hand-waving about how these things “just happen” in newsrooms. Which is rich, coming from the same network that spent the previous week running that Erika Kirk town hall on a permanent IV drip — a slack-jawed exercise in empty airtime that played everywhere, all the time, like a screensaver for a dying cable-news brain. You couldn’t escape it. Cable, streaming, social clips, airport TVs. Apparently that required no additional reporting. No soul-searching. No journalistic hesitation. Just endless, frictionless saturation. And that was a choice. Bari Weiss, the self-appointed Joan of Arc of Cancel Culture, made it—not to fix the system, but to kneel before it, like a museum guide assigned to the world’s saddest exhibit—hovering, fussing, white-gloving something small, limp, and deeply unimpressive. This is the same Bari Weiss who made her bones whining about “woke mobs” at the New York Times, who couldn’t hack it when people disagreed with her, who ran off to Substack to play the world’s smallest violin for herself and her billionaire backers. Now she’s in the big chair at CBS News, and her first real legacy move is to hand Trump a kill switch for journalism. Those were the correspondent’s words. Direct quote. No varnish. Sharyn Alfonsi, the reporter who worked the story, told colleagues that pulling the segment “is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.” She warned that if an administration’s refusal to cooperate is allowed to kill a story, CBS has effectively handed the White House a kill switch — a veto over any reporting it doesn’t like. Refuse comment. Threaten consequences. Stomp your feet. Watch the story die. And what did Weiss offer instead? Among her helpful little “suggestions” was adding an interview with Stephen fucking Miller. Stephen Miller—the human pencil sketch of a hate crime. A whiny little weirdo who didn’t just drift toward cruelty; he wined and dined it, sent it a bouquet of black roses, and probably wrote it bad poetry in his high school notebook. He’s the guy who would’ve rewritten “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” so the Whos end up in cages. This is the co-architect of child separation, the dead-eyed policy gremlin who turned suffering into a spreadsheet. The man whose legacy is ICE agents kneeling on pregnant women, prying toddlers from their parents’ arms, dragging sobbing children across linoleum like lost luggage at LaGuardia Weiss even supplied Miller’s contact information, inviting the arsonist to approve the fire report. CBS’s official statement, repeated like a laminated excuse slid across conference tables, was: “We determined it needed additional reporting.” Which is corporate for we panicked and folded. A very well-placed source said flatly that the segment did not need additional reporting. It had gone through every layer of fact-checking. Every legal review. Every standard. There was nothing missing—except Trump’s blessing. And since when does 60 Minutes need approval from the subject of an investigation to tell the truth? It’s like Judge Judy stopping mid-verdict to ask the deadbeat if he needs a minute, a hug, and a snack before continuing. Like The Great British Bake Off refusing to judge a cake because the baker cried, blamed the oven, and threatened to write a Medium post. Like To Catch a Predator offering the predator a branding consultant and a gentle opportunity to explain that accountability felt “too aggressive.” That’s not caution. That’s rolling over, belly-up, and begging the bully to scratch. It’s not journalism—it’s Stockholm Syndrome with a press pass. If this were just about television, it would be pathetic. But this isn’t an abstraction — there are human lives on the other side of this decision. The story she killed was about people—real, breathing, suffering people—being thrown into the meat grinder of El Salvador’s CECOT prison, a place so notorious it makes Rikers look like a Sandals resort. These are people deported by the United States into a regime that treats human rights like a piñata at a narco birthday party. CBS had the receipts. They had the footage. They had the interviews. They had a chance to force the country to look directly at what’s being done in its name. But Bari Weiss decided Trump’s feelings mattered more. She decided the comfort of the powerful outweighed the suffering of the powerless. She decided CBS News should function less like journalism and more like customer service for authoritarians. This is how democracies rot. Not with a bang, but with a memo. Not with censorship laws, but with “editorial judgment.” Not with jackboots, but with a story quietly spiked because a cable-news-dependent rage blob experienced unsupervised journalism as a hate crime. History may not repeat, but it sure as shit does rhyme. The Pentagon Papers. Watergate. Abu Ghraib. Every time, it took journalists willing to say fuck it, the truth matters more than access. Now access is everything, and truth is optional. This is one of the biggest scandals in the history of broadcast media. A fully vetted 60 Minutes investigation was pulled hours before airtime because a sitting president objected. That has no modern precedent. And everyone inside journalism knows it. This wasn’t caution. It was obedience. Bari Weiss didn’t defend journalism—she handed power the blueprint to suffocate it. She didn’t just blink in the face of pressure; she showed every future administration exactly how effortless it is to muzzle the press: stonewall, menace, and watch the newsroom fold. She didn’t protect the Fourth Estate—she taught those in power how to bulldoze it, one cowardly retreat at a time. And if this stands—if journalists shrug, if executives hide behind statements, if reporters convince themselves this was a one-off—then the stopwatch might as well stop ticking altogether. Because it won’t be counting down to accountability anymore. It’ll just be keeping time while democracy quietly bleeds out off-camera. And by the time the camera cuts back, the country it was meant to protect will already be gone.

PATEL IS A LIAR AND SHOULD BE IMPEACHED FOR LYING TO CONGRESS AND OTHER CROOKED ACTIONS

 

Kash Patel said there's ‘no credible’ child sex trafficking evidence in the Epstein files — analysis of the release shows he lied

The DOJ’s heavily redacted document dump tells a very different story than the one Patel wants the public to believe.

UnPresidented Dec 22

The Epstein files were supposed to land Friday like a reckoning. Instead, they arrived as a masterclass in how to allow just enough disclosure to pretend compliance, and just enough redaction to guarantee the truth stays buried.

By multiple estimates cited by critics, the Justice Department released roughly 1 percent of the total Epstein archive. Of that, 80 to 90 percent of the documents and images were either heavily redacted or already publicly available. In practical terms, the public may have seen less than one-tenth of one percent of what the government actually has. And yet even that sliver was disturbing enough to raise an obvious question: If this is what they’re willing to show us, what are they so desperate to hide?

The answer, critics argue, is written all over the documents themselves — evidence that federal authorities knew about Jeffrey Epstein decades earlier than they ever admitted, and chose to do nothing.

One newly surfaced document confirms that one of Epstein’s earliest victims reported him to both the FBI and the NYPD in 1996, after Epstein allegedly sold nude photographs of her 12- and 16-year-old sisters to friends and then threatened to burn down her house if she told anyone. Authorities were alerted. Nothing happened. Epstein continued trafficking underage girls for years.

According to material referenced in the release, Epstein would allegedly check girls’ IDs to ensure they were underage, a detail that obliterates any attempt to frame his crimes as misunderstandings or age confusion.

The images included in the release only deepen the horror. Among them are photographs Epstein reportedly kept framed in his home showing him with children aboard his private jet, infamously dubbed the “Lolita Express,” a name itself lifted from a novel Epstein was reportedly obsessed with about a man sexually fixated on a 12-year-old girl. Victims say Epstein wrote quotes from the book on them and kept scrapbooks filled with photos and commentary about how “little” they looked.

Photos from the latest batch of documents appears to show Epstein being affectionate with very young girls.

The photos showing Epstein with young kids were framed and displayed on a wooden bookshelf at his Little St. James mansion in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

There is also an image, released with minimal redaction, appearing to show Epstein delivering a young girl to meet an older, shirtless man. Another document, released by the House Oversight Committee, includes text messages discussing “sending over girls,” their prices, and their physical measurements, including height and weight. The language, critics argue, unmistakably resembles trafficking.

And yet, despite all of this, Kash Patel, now director of the FBI, has insisted there is “no credible evidence” Epstein trafficked girls to others:

“There’s no credible information. None. If there were, I would bring the case yesterday that he trafficked to other individuals.”

That statement stands in jarring contrast to Patel’s own past rhetoric when he was outside the FBI living life as a MAGA podcaster, loudly demanding the full release of the Epstein files and prosecution of Epstein’s clients. Once inside the institution, critics say, that fire mysteriously went out.

The same credibility collapse has followed much of the administration’s response. After a DOJ memo concluded there were effectively “no files,” and after Donald Trump publicly dismissed the Epstein story as a “hoax,” outrage intensified. The administration reportedly pivoted to damage control, allegedly reaching out to high-profile influencers to slow the conversation.

Patel is grilled by Louisiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy back in September. During the hearing, Patel said there’s “no credible information” that Epstein trafficked young girls.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones publicly claimed Trump’s team contacted him asking what it would take to get him to stop talking about the files. Comedian Tim Dillon reportedly received not just a call, but a private dinner with Vice President JD Vance.

Dillon later recounted the message he was given:

“I had dinner last week with the vice president. He told me they do not have videos of any powerful person in a compromising position.”

The release also included photographs of Bill Clinton, which many observers view as strategic — a calculated attempt to placate Trump’s base and shift outrage toward Democrats. Even the deputy press secretary amplified one such image, reacting online with “Oh my,” despite the photo having circulated publicly for years.

The move backfired. Rather than quieting demands, it fueled accusations that the DOJ was releasing breadcrumbs to avoid disclosing what remains sealed.

Other celebrities appearing in the files include Michael Jackson, David Copperfield, David Blaine, Chris Tucker, Mick Jagger, and Kevin Spacey. Spacey has previously acknowledged being on Epstein’s jet and described concerns about young girls on board:

“There were young girls on those flights.”

Critics are careful to note that appearing in a photograph with Epstein does not itself prove criminal wrongdoing. But they also argue that the entertainment industry’s history of shielding abusers makes skepticism warranted. Figures like Roman Polanski, convicted of drugging and raping a 13-year-old, continued to receive industry support for decades. Harvey Weinstein, another Epstein associate, was embraced long after his conduct was an open secret.

One resurfaced example that continues to horrify critics is Quentin Tarantino defending Polanski on Howard Stern’s show:

“I don’t believe it’s rape… Not for these 13-year-old party girls,” Tarantino said.

At the time, Tarantino faced little backlash. Today, that clip plays less like controversy and more like evidence of how normalized predation once was among the powerful.

Which brings the story back to the present. After files quietly disappeared from the DOJ website, some reportedly featuring Trump, calls for the impeachment of Attorney General Pam Bondi intensified, including from Trump supporters.

When pressed on why the statutory deadline was missed, DOJ officials claimed they were protecting victims:

“We are going through a very methodical process… making sure that victim’s names and any of their information from victims is protected and redacted,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said Sunday.

But here’s the problem with that claim: the people being protected don’t look like victims.

The more the DOJ delays, deletes, and deflects, the worse it looks. Each partial release raises pressure rather than relieving it. And each attempt to move the public on only underscores the fear that the full truth, if ever released, would be politically catastrophic.

The Epstein files were supposed to close this chapter. Instead, they’ve exposed something far more corrosive: a system that still believes it can outwait accountability.

SCUMBAG SCROOGE

 

TRUMP FLUNKY BARI WEISS ALREADY DESTROYING 60 MINUTES

 

 

There are no wallflowers in Trump’s White House

	By Frank Bruni

Vice President JD Vance is “a conspiracy theorist.” Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, isn’t merely a zealot; he’s a “right-wing absolute zealot.” And President Trump governs with an “alcoholic’s personality.”

Ever since the publication last week of a two-part article in Vanity Fair in which Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said all of that and more, political observers have been asking: Why did she do it? Why discard her usual discretion and speak so frankly, on the record, about her cracked compatriots in the Trump administration?

It’s a great question, but it’s not the most important one, which is this: Why does she do it? I’m referring not to the interview but to her job. If she can see the incoherence, immoderation and instability all around her, why abet it?

To both questions, the answer — or at least one of the answers — is surely the same. Wiles has been given a plum part in history (not to mention a history-making part, in that she’s the first woman in her role). She relishes that, enough to want recognition, enough to consent to 11 interviews with the journalist Chris Whipple, enough to position herself during those conversations as the even-keeled sage appraising everyone around her. How fitting that Whipple’s portrait of her appeared in a publication named Vanity Fair.

“I don’t ever seek attention,” she told Whipple at one point, a statement that’s a laugh line, though it’s unclear whether Whipple saw it that way and it’s obvious that Wiles didn’t. I repeat: 11 interviews. Over the course of nearly a year. She spoke to Whipple on Sundays, after going to church. She spoke to him while she was doing laundry. She left an Oval Office meeting early to go speak with him. The Garbo of the West Wing, she’s not.

The first year of Trump’s return to the White House has shown or reminded us of many things, including the fragility of democracy, the prevalence of cowardice and the intensity of tribalism. But it has been an especially stark and galling education in the intoxication of power.

And Wiles is a more illuminating entry on that syllabus than other senior administration officials, who wear their vainglory so conspicuously it might as well be a sandwich board spelling out their attachment to their entourages, to their letterheads, to the pomp and the perks. Many of them — Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel — lack the credentials to be given anything remotely resembling such high-ranking jobs by anyone other than a destructionist like Trump, and they’re surely too thrilled by their outrageous fortune to gaze skeptically at any uncomely aspect of it. Besides which, those three, along with other presidential aides and advisers, are as rapacious, reckless and altogether rotten as Trump.

But Wiles is different. She’s a seasoned political pro who has often, relative to others in her line of work, kept to the background. She doesn’t take to social media to advertise her every brain spasm as some eureka insight and raptly monitor the odometer of likes and shares. She had prominent political assignments before Trump and could have significant political roles independent of him. And she has never come across as an ardent ideologue, so dedicated to certain policy aims that all manner of compromise in their service would be OK.

But when Trump beckoned her to join him as he returned to the White House, she came. She came despite her awareness of how quickly he’d cycled through chiefs of staff and other senior aides during his previous term. She came despite knowing — as does any sensate creature even casually observing America over the past decade — how vicious and volatile he can be. She came with eyes open to his biases, having worked on all three of his presidential campaigns. Briefing Whipple on Trump’s tropisms, she observed: “He’s said it a million times — ‘I judge people by their genes.’” That nugget drew less notice than the digs at Vance and Vought. But it’s a doozy, especially given Trump’s frequent rants about immigration and I.Q.

Whipple’s portrait of her suggests that she is in many ways ideologically simpatico with Trump and genuinely believes that he has done good. She acknowledges excesses and sloppiness — regarding tariffs, deportations and more — but says that sometimes, to restore balance, you must yank things hard in the direction opposite from where they stand. She seems to hold some cabinet members in high regard; her favorites inexplicably include Kennedy, whom she refers to as “my Bobby.” The “my” fascinates. Like posing for glamour shots in a celebrity-centric magazine, it challenges her reputation for self-effacement.

But that sort of reputation can be as deliberate as any other. To be known as the humble deckhand who steadies an otherwise rocky ship is nonetheless to be known; to be seen as someone who doesn’t insist on getting credit is to get an especially flattering kind of credit. She described for Whipple how she sits far to the side during televised Oval Office gatherings, so she’s off camera. But isn’t she edging her way back into the shot by telling Whipple that?

Wiles is certainly no Hegseth, showily doing push-ups with the troops; no Patel, with his premature expectorations; no Kristi Noem, zipping down to El Salvador for a macabre photo op. But she’s also human, with an itch to make sure that her presence and her sway at the pinnacle of power don’t go unnoticed, unrecorded, underappreciated.

Even someone like Wiles savors the air up there. Even if it’s toxic with conspiracy theories and zealotry.