CROOKED MAGAt SCUM

 

SLEEPY SLOB

 

Why Trump Doesn't Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

 

Why Trump Doesn't Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story

Tina Brown

Nov 17, 2025

Jeffrey Epstein is the slug who will not die. His trail of slime sticks to everyone who ever crossed his path. The copious accretions have even buried Trump’s futile efforts to browbeat MAGA Congress members to vote against the full release of the Epstein files. In a total backflip to avoid the humiliation of a clear loss to his own base, Trump now supports the files pouring forth into the world, and said he would sign the bill if it passes. Trump, the product of legendary reality TV, should have known that he could not kill the Epstein obsession loop. First, because pedophilia is a core MAGA agitant. And secondly, all those videos and photos of Trump and Epstein make for an enduring TV story. That clip of the two of them leering at cheerleaders and models at a louche 1992 Mar-a-Lago party, with Ghislaine Maxwell standing right behind them, looks more like the Zapruder film every day.

Partners in slime (Credit: NBC News)

Michael Wolff, the sour savant of American media who has written multiple bestsellers excoriating Trump, has been caught himself in the river of ooze. Just when he is the ubiquitous go-to source for everyone looking for dark insights into Trump’s hide-and-seek with Epstein malfeasance, last week’s email cache shows Wolff to be another pond eel swimming in the Epstein access estuary. (Cf. the consigliere tone of Wolff’s “You can hang [Trump] in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you.”) Today, Wolff defends his tactic as an attempt to ingratiate himself with Epstein for the eventual blistering story Wolff was sure to write. Perhaps, there, we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He certainly conned Rupert Murdoch’s experienced comms team at News Corporation into giving him an all-access pass to the most powerful man in media, only to violate every agreed-upon ground rule and sell sources down the river. (After Wolff first made nice, then trashed me in New York magazine, I retaliated in the pages of Talk by describing his “baleful masturbatory glare,” which gave me a modicum of satisfaction.)

Epstein consigliere Michael Wolff

 

One of the biggest hazards of releasing private emails is how much they expose the multiple faces people in high places present to the world. Money, not sex, is often the embarrassing Achilles’ heel. How much was former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers’ sustained digital banter with Epstein really about the world of ideas or just foreplay to secure a handsome grant to his wife’s Poetry in America initiative? (Summers to Epstein: “My life will be better if I raise $1m for Lisa…Ideas?”) Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson used Epstein as a gushing human ATM to cover her mountainous debts for years. But after publicly disavowing Epstein with an “I abhor pedophilia” aria, a leaked 2011 email shows she almost immediately sent him a suck-up mea culpa: “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me. You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family.” Exit stage left the erstwhile Duchess of York.

Even Epstein himself, a prolific, typo-strewn e-correspondent, pondered to Summers in 2017: “Interesting argument whether using WhatsApp is obstruction of justice. Deletes after sending?” You wish, Larry. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren called on Harvard to cut all ties with Summers, given that the new emails reveal his “monumentally bad judgment.”

Threat Level

Just as piquant as the emails in the latest dump is an Epstein profile draft in there by Michael Wolff that was never published. At this point, Epstein has been so demonized, if one can use such a word for someone so personally depraved, it’s hard to understand why esteemed figures like Bill Gates, Oliver Sacks, and Stephen Jay Gould did not recoil from Epstein’s advances. Wolff’s piece gives us a glimpse of the other Epstein in action—doing Big Thinks as the philosopher of wealth creation. “It used to be,” Epstein mused to Wolff “that the rich, reaching a certain point of philanthropy, merely hoped to help make the world a better place, now they want to change the world. Rockefeller and Carnegie were, as examples of social-engineering philanthropy, unique….Now you have legions of people who have to give away vastly larger fortunes than Rockefeller or Carnegie had at their disposal, or might even have imagined. In the past, only governments had this kind of money, money of a reality-altering scale.” Epstein did not see that his own wealth had created a personal distortion field that normalized his horrific predations.

Penis Envy

Tuesday morning on Capitol Hill, bipartisan members of Congress, including Reps. Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, are hosting a cluster of Epstein survivors for a press conference to “discuss next steps.” I talked with one of them yesterday: Rina Oh, a 46-year-old Korean-American artist, who was groomed by Epstein through a pretend interest in her art. Just as Wolff shows us the intellectual manqué side of Epstein, Rina, now the serene-faced mother of two sons, offers unsettling details about the competitive atmosphere inside Epstein’s sexual ménage. When the pedophile magus made clear to the girls that Maxwell was too old to attract him, Ghislaine’s own jealousy became a toxic force. By 2001, Rina believes, Epstein and Maxwell hated each other. “Their relationship was very awful, very strange,” she told me. “I actually didn’t ever suspect that the two of them were having any type of a romantic relationship. I thought she was an associate of his, especially when I saw them fighting. Ghislaine was snickering at him in that British accent and they were throwing insults at each other.” She recalls, “He took me and another girl to the tennis court at Mar-a-Lago, where Ghislaine was playing. He got her attention…and stood behind me and started humping me through my clothes.…He was shrieking and laughing, making fun of Ghislaine.” She believes Epstein bought Ghislaine the Manhattan townhouse, which sold this year for $18 million, to get rid of her, and that Ghislaine ramped up her role as Epstein’s procuress in the 2000s as the only way she could hang on.

Epstein survivor Rina Oh (Credit: Jackie Molloy/The Sunday Times)

 

Rina is also convinced that Epstein’s core issue was that “he had an extremely deformed penis.…Some people have described it as the shape of an egg. I think it was more of the shape of a lemon, and it was really small when it was fully erect. It was probably like two inches.” She does not believe he was capable of penetrative sex. Strangely, I had this conversation with Rina right after reading on the Drudge Report about new DNA research on blood taken from fabric from the sofa on which Hitler shot himself, suggesting that the Führer had the genetic marker for Kallman syndrome, which can result in the misfortune of a micropenis.

See what I mean? The angles are endless. Yet Trump still believes he can quash this story.

DAVID PAKMAN

 

Trump’s worst nightmare is HAPPENING NOW A story built on abuse, control, and secrecy is now exposing the limits of Trump’s intimidation. Nov 29 Donald Trump is starting to lose control of the very people who were supposed to fear him most. For a guy whose entire identity is built on dominance and revenge, that is the nightmare scenario. The strongman only works as long as everyone believes he can still hurt them. Once that spell breaks, it gets interesting very quickly. This particular unraveling is happening through the Epstein story, which is both dark and grotesque and, in hindsight, almost inevitable. Trump personally tried to stop MAGA-aligned lawmakers from voting to release the full Epstein documents. He leaned on them, begged them, told them not to do it. And they ignored him. People like Lauren Boebert understood that their own political survival now depends more on satisfying a base obsessed with Epstein than on shielding Trump from whatever might be in those files. When Trump realized he was going to lose the vote, he did what he always does: he flipped. Suddenly he supported releasing the files, claimed he was all for transparency and had never opposed it. It is a mental gymnastics routine, not a display of strength. Everyone can see that he spent months trying to stop something, lost, and then pretended it was his idea. I recently read a Substack article by Journalist Tina Brown which inspired this deep dive. Check out Why Trump Doesn’t Stand a Chance of Killing the Epstein Story. Why the Epstein Story Was Never Going Away Trump’s attempt to smother the Epstein story runs into three basic realities: First, this is core MAGA content. The modern right has marinated its audience in fantasies about secret pedophile rings, satanic child abusers, and shadowy elites preying on children. Epstein is not a side quest for that ecosystem. It is the main plot. Telling the MAGA base, “Stop obsessing over Epstein” is like telling them, “Stop being online.” It is not going to happen. They live on this stuff. They mainline it. Second, the Trump–Epstein receipts already exist. There are photos, footage, Christmas cards, notes, emails, and that infamous video of Trump and Epstein together, appearing to appraise young women at a party. People freeze-frame that video like it is the Zapruder film. They analyze who is looking at whom, who is pointing, who is laughing. They are not going to unsee it because Trump decides he would rather talk about “rigged” electric stoves this week. There is no way to put that toothpaste back in the tube. Third, the slime is splashing in every direction. As the documents and leaks continue to come out, it is not just Trump. You have Michael Wolff, who built a career describing how twisted Trump World is, now revealed to have been emailing Epstein himself. You have Larry Summers emailing Epstein about raising money for his wife’s project. You have Sarah Ferguson doing the public “I abhor pedophilia” statement, then sending Epstein a private groveling apology. It is endless, and every new name makes the scandal bigger, not smaller. No one looks good. The political cost of trying to suppress this, on behalf of one man, keeps going up. Trump wanted the fire put out. Instead, it spread. The Survivors Step Forward For years, one of the most disturbing aspects of this story has been how little space the actual survivors have taken up in the public conversation. There has been much more energy around the “who knew whom” gossip than around what Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly did to real people. That is starting to change. Some survivors are now speaking in more detail, and what they describe is horrifying. The abuse itself is horrific, but so is the dynamic they describe between Epstein and Maxwell: humiliation, jealousy, manipulation, and control. It is not something you can airbrush with PR or bury with a few news cycles. You cannot sanitize this. You cannot rebrand it. And then something genuinely remarkable happened: members of Congress held a press conference with survivors. This was not a neat partisan picture. It was bipartisan. Among the Republicans standing there was Thomas Massie, and, crucially, Marjorie Taylor Greene. When Even Marjorie Taylor Greene Stops Being Afraid Marjorie Taylor Greene has spent years as one of Trump’s loudest boosters. She has echoed his talking points and styled herself as a loyal soldier for MAGA. So when she stands in front of cameras with survivors, supporting the very story Trump wanted contained, that is not Trump executing a smart strategy. That is his base moving without him. To do that, Greene has to believe something very simple: Trump cannot punish her the way he once could. And now she has announced she is resigning from Congress, which only reinforces that she is operating on her own path, not as a background character in Trump’s show. That is how fear erodes. One of your most visible allies takes a step you do not want, looks around, and realizes the sky did not fall. Others watch and start to wonder what would happen if they said no too. How Demagogues Actually Lose Power In fiction, the strongman falls in a dramatic moment when the palace burns and the crowd storms the gates. In reality, it is usually a slower process. People defy the leader in small ways. They expect retribution. It does not come, or it is weaker than they imagined. The myth of invincibility starts to fade. Trump tried to stop Republicans from releasing the Epstein files. They did it anyway. He flipped his position afterward and pretended he had been on board the whole time, which convinced nobody. The base wants the Epstein story. The party wants the Epstein story. The cameras want the Epstein story. Survivors are speaking. Leaks keep coming. Trump is not directing events. He is reacting to them. You can already see what that means. There will be more names, more documents, more embarrassments for powerful people. There will be more incentive for Republicans to stand with “the truth” and with survivors rather than act as human shields for Donald Trump. Some will keep spinning for him. Others will quietly step away and decide his ability to hurt them is not what it used to be. Trump’s Aura Is Cracking Trump will still rant and rage about Epstein. He will still insist that he wants everything released, that he has nothing to hide, that this is really bad for Bill Clinton, or Prince Andrew, or anyone else he can name. But the critical thing is not what he says now. It is what has already happened. He tried to stop the story and failed. He tried to keep his people in line and they walked away. He tried to flip his position and look strong, and instead revealed how weak he has become inside his own movement. That is what an erosion of control looks like from the inside. The base is not loyal to Trump’s survival instinct. They are loyal to the narratives they have been fed for years: that secret files will expose the “real” villains, that there is a hidden story about elites and children and power. Epstein sits at the center of that mythology. Trump is no longer the one operating that train. He is riding it, hanging on, and hoping the wreckage does not land directly on him.

A DRUNK AND AN IDIOT IN CHARGE

 

TRUMP IS A DEMENTED FOOL, A CONVICTED CRIMINAL, AND A PUTIN PUPPET

 

NEIL STEINBERG

 

'The worst of the worst'

This is the Golden Age of Stupidity. Or is it the Renaissance of Ruthlessness? The Heyday of Hypocrisy? No reason it can't be all three, with an unhinged, jabbering dupe of a president, served by a growing army of craven underlings, hand-picked for their servility. Unfettered by the counterbalances and restraints the Founders intended to keep a president in check. Having himself fomented the worst act of rebellion since the Civil War, he dares fling out the word "treason" like spittle off the lips of someone having a seizure. Just one drop of venality in a continual downpour.

No matter. It's still good to say it, loudly and clearly, from time to time. Not because doing so represents anything new. Or does any good, except remind ourselves that, no matter how accepted it has become to many, despite the silent chorus of shrugs, this is all still unacceptable. Still very wrong. This is a continuing, grotesque abuse and departure from cherished American norms. Not just another Tuesday.

Particularly the ICE kidnappings — less prominent in Chicago the past few weeks, true, but still growing, as more masked thugs are hired, more detention camps built. Lives are being upended, parents torn from children, hard-working immigrants exiled even as they try to follow the law. 

 Yes, as the months grind on, it becomes difficult — first because one has to wonder, "What is the point?" — to find new ways to convey the venality, the gaslighting, the cruelty, the hypocrisy, the lies, the incompetence, the self-dealing, the corruption.

 Not that I am alone here. I'm blessed with smart, well-spoken readers, in the main. Yes, there are the denizens of the spam folder, vomiting back whatever Fox News told them last night — they care very much about the letter of the law, when it comes to immigrants, but when you wonder why that love of legality doesn't translate to their beloved leader's constant, blatant criminality, they flutter away. I spend little time reading their outpouring, less reacting to it, though occasionally I'll toss out a canned, "The scorn of traitors is praise to a patriot" or "It might come as a shock, but the low opinion of a dupe in thrall to a traitor doesn't carry the sting you seem to imagine it might."

But the bulk reflects the unease, pain, despair, insight of intelligent people confronting a nation gone mad. One cogent blog reader left this comment, anonymously, and in case you missed it, I want to highlight it today, because it has truth and brevity.

I don’t really know the ‘crime’ business…but, I’m guessing that anyone who is good at it … you know, the worst of the worst … they’re probably not out mowing lawns or shoveling show. I don’t know…it’s just a guess.

That's it, right? No more need be said. Today anyway. As for tomorrow...

HEATHER - 11-28-25

 

November 28, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson Nov 29 As Trump’s popularity continues to drop, the MAGA coalition shows signs of cracking, and Trump’s mental acuity slips, there is a frantic feel to the administration, as if Trump’s people are trying to grab all they can, while they can. A source has told The Telegraph that Trump is sending special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Moscow to offer Russia’s president Vladimir Putin U.S. recognition of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and most of the other four eastern oblasts of Ukraine: Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. This is the territory covered in the “Mariupol Plan” in which Russian operatives told Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort, they would help Trump win the election in exchange for his looking the other way as Russia took control of the region. Ten days ago, Barak Ravid and Dave Lawler of Axios reported on a 28-point plan that the U.S. was allegedly working on to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. Quickly, though, it became clear that the plan was actually a Russian plan that offered Russia everything it wanted—including giving Crimea and most of the four oblasts to Russia while forbidding Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and limiting the size of its military—and offered Ukraine virtually nothing. Trump was demanding that Ukraine sign onto the plan by Thanksgiving. Then it turned out that the U.S. State Department had had nothing to do with the plan; it appeared to be the work of Witkoff, Kushner, and Kirill Dmitriev, an ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin who is under U.S. sanctions. Meanwhile, according to Dan De Luce, Courtney Kube, and Abigail Williams of NBC News, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll delivered the plan to Ukraine and warned Ukrainian leaders they were losing the war and must settle. Diplomatic negotiations are not a normal role for a U.S. Army secretary, who is the top civilian official within the U.S. Department of Defense, responsible for manpower, personnel, equipment, finances, and so on in the U.S. Army. Driscoll is a close ally of Vice President J.D. Vance and seems to be gaining power as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loses it. Neither Ukrainians nor Europeans had been consulted on the plan, and their leaders worked frantically to shift U.S. support back toward Ukraine, consistent with Washington’s formal position. Over the course of last week, Jeanna Smialek, Christopher F. Schuetze, and Lara Jakes of the New York Times reported, European and Ukrainian leaders persuaded Secretary of State Marco Rubio to include European nations and Ukraine in negotiations. Then, on Tuesday, November 25, 2025, Bloomberg published the transcript of an October 14 phone call between Witkoff and Russian foreign-policy advisor Yuri Ushakov, in which Witkoff acknowledged that a peace deal would involve Ukrainian land concessions and coached Ushakov on how to flatter Trump to get the peace deal the men wanted. It also published a transcript of an October 29 call between Ushakov and Dmitriev in which Dmitriev told Ushakov that a U.S. “peace” plan would be as close “as possible” to Russia’s demands. It is unclear who leaked the recordings to Bloomberg, but Shaun Walker of The Guardian reported speculation that the leak came from a source in U.S. intelligence who opposed the U.S. push to reward Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The Independent reports that Putin is refusing to give up any of his demands for an end to the war, although Russia’s central bank has begun to sell gold reserves to shore up its faltering economy. Putin told reporters in Kyrgyzstan that Russia will continue to attack Ukraine “until the last Ukrainian dies” in order to gain control of Ukraine’s industrial east. A source told The Telegraph that the Trump administration is ready to make its own deal to recognize Russia’s control of that region. “It’s increasingly clear the Americans don’t care about the European position,” a source told The Telegraph. “They say the Europeans can do whatever they want.” Russia said it assumes it is negotiating with the U.S. alone. Tonight, Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson of the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Witkoff, Kushner, and Dmitriev designed their plan to bypass U.S. national security officials and create opportunities for U.S. businessmen to win multibillion-dollar deals to develop energy and rare-earth minerals in Russia, Ukraine, and the Arctic. “By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals,” the journalists report, “Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.” Meanwhile, for the past day, Trump’s social media account has been posting screeds against immigrants, using the Wednesday shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard stationed in Washington, D.C., as justification. As Joyce White Vance noted, a court ruled on November 20 that the deployment of the National Guard in the District of Columbia was illegal but stayed the order ending it until December 11 to permit the government to appeal. On Wednesday a suspect identified as Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal shot Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who died from her injuries, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, who is critically injured, Lakanwal was also shot, but his injuries are reportedly not life threatening. Lakanwal worked for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, then came to the U.S. in 2021 as part of the evacuation and resettlement of Afghans after the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan. Lakanwal was granted asylum in the U.S. earlier this year. Last night—Thanksgiving—at 11:25 p.m., Trump’s social media account posted an image of an airplane packed with refugees from Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrew and the Afghan military collapsed in August 2021. The U.S. exit came from a February 29, 2020, agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban, but not the Afghan government, during the first Trump administration known as the Doha Agreement, or the “Agreement for bringing Peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. promised to secure the release of 5,000 of the Taliban’s fighters imprisoned by the Afghan government and to withdraw U.S. troops by May 2021 in exchange for the Taliban promising to stop killing U.S. soldiers. When he took office, President Joe Biden extended the deadline until August 31 but did not reverse Trump’s commitment. As the U.S. pulled out the final 2,500 troops Trump had left in the country, the Afghan army collapsed. Disregarding both Trump’s own part in the exit from Afghanistan and Trump’s own administration’s vetting of Lakanwal for asylum, Trump’s social media post blamed “Joe Biden and his Thugs” for “the horrendous airlift from Afghanistan.” It claimed that “[h]undreds of thousands of people poured into our Country totally unvetted and unchecked,” and said: “We will fix it.” Just one minute after linking the shooting to Biden’s policies, Trump’s social media account continued: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the World, for being ‘Politically Correct,’ and just plain STUPID, when it comes to Immigration.” What followed was a screed that sounded like it was written by white nationalist Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, who is on a crusade to expel immigrants from the U.S. It was divided into two posts, with what seemed designed to be the second post published a minute before what looked like it was supposed to be the first. In reverse order, then, the account claimed, falsely, that most immigrants are “from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels,” and that they are supported extravagantly by taxes paid by U.S. citizens. It blamed refugees for the nation’s “[f]ailed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits,” and used a slur to describe Minnesota governor Tim Walz, claiming he has done nothing to get rid of his state’s Somalian refugees. The next post blamed immigration policy for eroding the U.S. standard of living, and announced a dramatic purge of immigrants from the country: “I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.” The idea of stripping some of the country’s 24.5 million naturalized citizens of their citizenship changes the nature of what it means to be an American. As Faiza Patel and Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center noted last month, from 1990 to 2017 only about 11 people a year lost their citizenship, usually for having hidden serious criminal activity or human rights violations in applying for citizenship. In contrast, observers today note that when Hitler came to power in 1933, the German government began to strip Jews, as well as Roma and political opponents, of their German citizenship, paving the way for the confiscation of their property, their rights, and eventually their lives. Trump’s social media post went on: “These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!” On Tuesday, lawmakers said the counterterrorism division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened an investigation into the six lawmakers who made a video reminding service members that they must refuse unlawful orders and that the lawmakers would stand behind them as they did so. Trump loyalists have turned their statement on its head, insisting that since Trump has never given an unlawful order, their video encouraged service members to disregard lawful orders and thus was “sedition” punishable by death. Today, Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Hegseth told a Joint Special Operations commander overseeing an attack on a small vessel carrying 11 people on September 2 to “kill everybody.” A missile strike shattered the boat and set it afire, but two men survived. A second strike fulfilled Hegseth’s order. According to Horton and Nakashima, the commander, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, said “the survivors were still legitimate targets because they could theoretically call other traffickers to retrieve them and their cargo.” In a report, the Joint Special Operations Command said the second strike was not to kill survivors, but to remove a navigation hazard. Former military lawyer Todd Huntley, who advised special operations forces for seven years, told the Washington Post journalists that the strikes against civilians amount to murder because the U.S. is not at war, while even during wartime, killing those who cannot fight back is a war crime. Representative Seth Moulton (D-MA), a Marine Corps veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said: “Mark my words: It may take some time, but Americans will be prosecuted for this, either as a war crime or outright murder.” Hegseth dismissed the story as “fake news.” The administration justifies its strikes on the Venezuelan boats by claiming to fight “narcoterrorism,” but today Trump announced a full pardon for former president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernández, who was found guilty last year by an American jury of conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. He was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Trump announced the pardon on social media, writing “MAKE HONDURAS GREAT AGAIN!” Tonight, Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News reported that Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and the committee’s top Democrat, Jack Reed (D-RI), issued a statement saying: “The Committee is aware of recent news reports—and the Department of Defense’s initial response—regarding alleged follow-on strikes on suspected narcotics vessels in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. The Committee has directed inquiries to the Department, and we will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”