FBI Director Kash Patel portrays James Comey’s indictment as a response to “the Russiagate hoax.” Yet on their face, the charges against Comey have nothing to do with the investigation that earned the former FBI director a prominent spot on President Donald Trump’s enemies list.
The Justice Department reportedly is contemplating charges against two other Trump nemeses, Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James, that likewise are legally unrelated to the president’s beefs with them. That disconnect reinforces the impression that Trump is perverting the law in pursuit of his personal vendettas.
Trump fired Comey in 2017 out of anger at the FBI investigation of alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government. In the years since, Trump has made no secret of his desire to punish Comey for that “witch hunt,” which Patel cited as a justification for the charges against Comey.
Those charges, however, seem to stem from an entirely different investigation: the FBI’s 2016 probe of the Clinton Foundation. Although the skimpy indictment is hazy on this point, it implicitly alleges that Comey authorized the disclosure of information about that investigation and then falsely denied doing so during a 2020 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.
That claim is highly doubtful for several reasons, as former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy notes in a National Review essay that describes the indictment as “so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted” that Comey “should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss.” McCarthy’s take is especially notable because he wrote a book-length critique of the Russia probe that concurs with Trump’s chief complaints about it.
In other words, even if you think that investigation epitomized the “politicization of law enforcement” (as Patel puts it), that does not necessarily mean the charges against Comey are factually or legally sound. In fact, the case is so shaky that neither career prosecutors nor Erik Siebert, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, thought it was worth pursuing.
Lindsey Halligan, Siebert’s Trump-appointed replacement, had no such qualms. She obtained the indictment three days after taking office, which was five days before the statutory deadline and five days after Trump publicly told Attorney General Pam Bondi that “we can’t delay any longer.”
That Truth Social missive to Bondi also mentioned Schiff and James as prime targets for federal prosecution. “Nothing is going to be done,” Trump wrote, paraphrasing the complaints of his supporters, even though “they’re all guilty as hell.”
Guilty of what? Schiff, a longtime thorn in Trump’s side, spearheaded his first impeachment and served on the House select committee that investigated the 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. James sued Trump for business fraud in New York, obtaining a jaw-dropping “disgorgement” order that was later overturned by a state appeals court, which nevertheless thought she had proven her claims.
Although Trump has averred that Schiff’s conduct as a legislator amounted to “treason,” it plainly does not fit the statutory definition of that crime. And whatever you think about the merits of James’ lawsuit, the fact that both a judge and an appeals court agreed Trump had committed fraud by overvaluing his assets suggests her claims were at least colorable.
Casting about for a legal pretext to prosecute Schiff and James, the Justice Department is mulling allegations that both committed mortgage fraud by claiming more than one home as a primary residence. Although it’s not clear there is enough evidence to convict either of them, that is beside the point as far as Trump is concerned.
As the president sees it, Schiff and James, like Comey, deserve to suffer because they wronged him. “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he told Bondi.
Judging from the Comey case, Bondi probably will follow the president’s marching orders, to the cheers of his most enthusiastic supporters. But the rest of us have ample cause to conclude that Trump has conflated justice with revenge.
Lindsey Halligan’s debut as a federal prosecutor has drawn close scrutiny after a series of early errors surfaced in court filings related to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
Halligan, previously known as a private attorney and one of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers, assumed the role of U.S. Attorney only recently and has never prosecuted a case before.
Newsweek contacted the DOJ for comment via email outside of normal office hours on Monday.
Why It Matters
The missteps go beyond clerical slips: they test the strength and fairness of the government’s case and the credibility of the Justice Department itself.
Procedural errors can delay or weaken a prosecution, giving defense lawyers leverage to argue overreach. They also risk reinforcing criticism that this politically charged indictment—announced soon after Donald Trump publicly urged charges against political opponents—is more about pressure than law.
How Halligan recovers from these mistakes could shape not just the outcome of the Comey case but public trust in the department’s independence and competence.
What To Know
Problems in Halligan’s initial filings, including duplicate case numbers and clerical errors such as misspellings in official documents have been flagged.
A widely shared social media post on X noted she “doesn’t know the difference between a bedrock principle and a bedrock ‘principal’.”
The difference between the two is about word meaning—and in legal writing, it’s important:
Principle (with “le” at the end) means a fundamental truth, rule, or concept. Example: “Due process is a bedrock principle of American law.”
Principal (with “al” at the end) means a leader or main person (like a school principal) or can mean “main” or “primary.” Example: “The principal reason for dismissal was lack of evidence.”
So “bedrock principle” is correct when you mean a foundational idea or standard. “Bedrock principal” would incorrectly suggest a foundational person or primary figure, which doesn’t make sense in legal filings.
While U.S. Magistrate Judge Vaala was also described on X September 28, 2025, as “trying to untangle Lindsey Halligan’s first adventure in indicting someone.”
Some social media commentary veered into personal territory—mentioning Halligan’s past role as Donald Trump’s lawyer—but the concerns raised publicly are framed around prosecutorial competence and case management.
Questions about Halligan’s preparedness intensified when The Washington Postreported she “presented the Comey indictment all by herself to the grand jury,” citing people familiar with the matter.
Legal Debate Over The Charges
The case accuses Comey of misleading investigators about authorizing leaks during his tenure at the FBI.
The prosecution’s path will not be straightforward. To convict under 18 U.S.C. §1001(a) (2), prosecutors must prove the statements were false, that Comey knew they were false when made, and that they were material to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s inquiry. Proving intent—showing deliberate deception rather than mistake or faulty memory—has historically been difficult with senior officials and complex testimony.
And the legal theory behind the indictment is contested, including by some who have criticized Comey previously.
Fox News legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said on Maria Bartiromo’s Wall Street that the charges appear weak. “Well, I don’t think there’s a case,” McCarthy told Bartiromo on September 26.
He said the indictment seems “premised on something that’s not true, which is that [Andrew] McCabe said that Comey authorized him to leak to the Wall Street Journal. … McCabe said that he directed the leak, and he told Comey about it after the fact. So, it’s true that Comey never authorized it in the sense of OK’ing it before it happened. So, I don’t see how they can make that case.”
McCarthy also noted: “If you were talking about the information that was provided to the FISA court … that’s not what this case is about,” underscoring that the indictment focuses narrowly on a single disclosure.
Not The First DOJ Misstep — But Unusual At This Level
Filing mistakes are not unheard of in federal litigation, but they rarely surface repeatedly in a high-profile case led by a U.S. Attorney.
In 2017, the Justice Department briefly misspelled then–acting Attorney General Sally Yates’s name in a filing, and in 2020 a DOJ motion in the Michael Flynn case cited the wrong date for a judge’s order; both were corrected quickly and drew little attention.
Halligan, 36, the newly installed U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia—one of the most consequential federal prosecutorial offices in the country—spent most of her career in Florida insurance litigation before joining Trump’s legal team during the Mar-a-Lago documents investigation.
Court records indicate she has participated in only three federal cases prior to this appointment.
What stands out with Halligan’s early work is the combination of multiple procedural errors—including duplicate case numbers and the “principle/principal” slip — and her lack of prior prosecutorial experience while serving in one of the department’s most senior roles.
What People Are Saying
Carol Leonnig and Vaughn Hillyard added September 26, on X that “Lindsey Halligan, the newly installed U.S. Attorney who has never prosecuted a case, presented the Comey indictment all by herself to the grand jury … She may have a problem finding a prosecutor in office to work on the case.”
What Happens Next
The case now moves into pretrial motions, where Comey’s lawyers will challenge the charges and cite early filing errors. Halligan can correct those mistakes and may add experienced prosecutors, though support is uncertain.
If the case survives, discovery will test the evidence that Comey authorized leaks as political scrutiny grows. Judges often allow technical fixes, but repeated missteps could damage the prosecution’s credibility and shape views of Halligan’s leadership.
Lindsey Halligan seemed out of her depth on Thursday evening, when she presented a two-count indictment of former FBI Director James Comey to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia. U.S. Magistrate Judge Lindsey Vaala was puzzled because she had received two versions of the indictment, both signed by the grand jury’s foreperson, that seemed inconsistent with each other.
Halligan, a defense lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whom President Donald Trump had appointed as the interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia just a few days earlier, said she had “only reviewed” one of the indictments, “did not see the other one,” and didn’t “know where that came from.” When Vaala pointed out that the document Halligan claimed she never saw “has your signature on it,” the neophyte prosecutor was nonplussed. “OK,” she said. “Well.”
That embarrassing episode reinforced the impression that Trump, in his eagerness to pursue a personal vendetta against Comey, had settled on an agent who was manifestly unqualified to run one of the country’s most prominent U.S. attorney’s offices. Trump’s desperate thirst for revenge, which was also evident in his public comments about the case, supports an argument that Comey’s lawyers are apt to make in seeking dismissal of the charges against him: that he is a victim of selective or vindictive prosecution.
A claim of selective prosecution alleges that the defendant was singled out for punishment when “similarly situated individuals” were not charged. Vindictive prosecution entails punishing a defendant for exercising his procedural rights. If Halligan files additional charges against Comey, for example, he could argue that she was retaliating against him for challenging the original indictment.
Such claims are rarely successful because they require evidence that a prosecutorial decision was influenced by improper motives. But in this case, there is no shortage of evidence that the decision to accuse Comey of lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020 was driven by presidential pique.
Trump fired Comey in 2017 out of anger at the FBI investigation of alleged ties between his 2016 campaign and the Russian government. In the years since, Trump has made no secret of his desire to punish Comey for that “witch hunt,” which FBI Director Kash Patel cited in defending the indictment even though the charges are legally unrelated to the Russia probe.
Those charges, which include one count of “willfully and knowingly” making “a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” to Congress and one count of obstructing a congressional proceeding, were filed just five days before they would have been barred by the five-year statute of limitations. The Justice Department nearly missed that deadline because neither career prosecutors nor Halligan’s predecessor, Erik Seibert, thought there was sufficient evidence to justify the charges announced on Thursday.
According to news reports citing unnamed sources, top Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, were also skeptical. But the president was clear about what he wanted to happen.
“We can’t delay any longer,” Trump declared in a September 20 Truth Social post that directly addressed Bondi. “It’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Who were “they”? Trump specifically mentioned Comey, along with two other nemeses: Sen. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.) and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
By that point, Trump had already fired Seibert and picked Halligan, who was sworn in two days later, to replace him. Trump described Halligan, who had served on his personal defense team, as “a really good lawyer.”
Judging from Halligan’s encounter with Vaala, that may have been an overstatement. “This has never happened before,” Vaala remarked. “I’ve been handed two documents [in the Comey case] that are inconsistent with one another. There seems to be a discrepancy. They’re both signed by the [grand jury] foreperson.”
One indictment listed the two charges approved by the grand jury, while the other mentioned a third count that the grand jury rejected, involving allegedly false statements during the same Senate hearing. The latter document, Vaala noted, described “a failure to concur in an indictment” but did not specify which count was rejected, so “it looks like they failed to concur across all three counts.” The judge said she was “a little confused as to why I was handed two things with the same case number that are inconsistent.”
The fact that the grand jury rejected any of the charges against Comey was itself remarkable. Because such proceedings entail a one-sided presentation of allegations that the government claims establish probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, grand juries almost never decline to indict. In fiscal year 2016, according to a Justice Department report, U.S. attorneys opened about 152,000 cases, just six of which ended in “no bill” from a grand jury.
It was even more striking that a U.S. attorney, confronted by such a rare situation, would accidentally submit two seemingly contradictory grand jury reports. Halligan’s confusion reflects both her inexperience and the unseemly haste with which she rushed to obtain the indictment demanded by the president before it was too late. Tellingly, that indictment was signed by Halligan alone, without the signatures of any underlings who agreed that the charges were legally justified.
After the indictment was announced, Trump publicly gloated. That evening, he described Comey as “one of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to,” adding that “he has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation.”
The next morning, Trump called Comey “A DIRTY COP.” That evening, he thanked Patel and “the outstanding members of the FBI” for “their brilliant work on the recent Indictment of the Worst FBI Director in the History of our Country, James ‘Dirty Cop’ Comey.” He said “the level of enthusiasm by the FBI was incredible” but understandable because “they knew Comey for what he is, and was”—i.e., “a total SLIMEBALL!”
Trump added an even worse insult while speaking to reporters on Friday. “James Comey essentially was a Democrat,” the president said. “He was worse than a Democrat.”
Although Trump suggested that Comey was getting what he deserved for being a terrible person, a “SLIMEBALL,” and “worse than a Democrat,” none of those is actually a crime. The accusation that Comey was “A DIRTY COP” came closer to conduct that might justify a criminal charge. But the indictment does not allege corruption or abuse of power. And despite Patel’s framing, it is not even legally related to “Russiagate.”
Rather, the indictment involves Comey’s reaffirmation of his earlier testimony that he never authorized anyone at the FBI to be “an anonymous source in news stories about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation”—i.e., the FBI probe that examined Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material as secretary of state, including her use of a private email server. That denial was a lie, the indictment says, because Comey “then and there knew” that “he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an FBI investigation concerning PERSON 1.”
The rejected count indicates that “PERSON 1” is Clinton, and the exchange with Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) cited in the indictment suggests that “PERSON 3” is former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who in 2016 authorized the disclosure of information about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation to The Wall Street Journal. The day after the Journal‘s story ran, McCabe claimed, he informed Comey of what he had done, and his boss expressed approval.
When the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigated the leak, Comey contradicted that account, and the OIG credited his version of events. The resulting OIG report concluded that “McCabe did not tell Comey on or around October 31 (or at any other time) that he (McCabe) had authorized the disclosure of information about the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation to the WSJ.” It added that “had McCabe done so, we believe that Comey would have objected to the disclosure.”
In addition to that assessment, the case against Comey is complicated by doubts as to exactly what Comey was denying when he told Cruz that he stood by his earlier testimony, which involved the email investigation rather than the Clinton Foundation probe. It is not hard to see why Seibert and the prosecutors working for him did not think the case was worth pursuing.
None of that mattered to Trump, who was determined to get Comey one way or another. “The whole thing is just bizarro,” former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, a legal analyst at National Review, toldPolitico. “This is the kind of thing that should never ever happen.…This case should never go to trial because it’s obvious from the four corners of the indictment that there’s no case.”
McCarthy elaborates on that point in a National Review essay. “The vindictive indictment the Trump Justice Department barely managed to get a grand jury to approve on Thursday is so ill-conceived and incompetently drafted, he should be able to get it thrown out on a pretrial motion to dismiss,” McCarthy writes, noting that the skimpy two-page indictment lacks “any description of the incident involving McCabe, Clinton, and Comey out of which the perjury charge supposedly arises.”
In any case, McCarthy says, McCabe “is not a credible witness, particularly on this subject.” The OIG, he notes, “found that Comey’s account that he did not approve the leak was overwhelmingly corroborated while McCabe’s account was full of holes.” And even if Halligan believes (or claims to believe) McCabe rather than Comey, McCabe did not claim that Comey “authorized” the Wall Street Journal leak—only that he expressed approval after the fact.
Halligan overlooked these problems in her eagerness to do what Trump wanted. The case against Comey is “the very definition of selective and vindictive prosecution,” says Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “By demanding the prosecutions, Trump may have undercut any possibility of success by providing the people on his ‘enemies list’ with a built-in defense.”
Duke University law professor Samuel W. Buell was skeptical of that argument in an interview with The New York Times. “Trump’s being really crass and blatant about the ways he is talking about all that stuff,” Buell said. “But I don’t know that that’s going to give rise to a motion that would invalidate a whole prosecution.”
Jessica Roth, a professor at Cardozo School of Law, likewise noted that the case against Comey is “not like other cases where we typically see such claims.” But “that doesn’t mean it can’t fall within the concerns and the legal standards for vindictive and selection prosecution,” she added.
At the very least, Trump has given Comey’s lawyers ammunition they would not otherwise have. A former Eastern District of Virginia prosecutor, who “was granted anonymity because he fears retaliation for speaking about the case,” thinks Trump’s statements pose a serious problem for Halligan. “If I’m defending Comey, that Trump order to Pam Bondi to prosecute him, that’s a big problem,” he toldPolitico. “That’s going to bite them in a big way.…Comey could become the poster child for selective prosecution.”
Let’s start with the indictment itself, and whatever little can be discerned from it. We’ve got two counts — the grand jury reportedly rejected a third — both based on Comey’s testimony to the Senate in September 2020. Count one alleges that Comey testified falsely and count two charges that, by giving that false testimony, he obstructed a congressional proceeding. According to the indictment, Comey testified that he had not authorized anyone else at the FBI to leak information to the media, when in fact he had done so.
And that … is it. The whole charging document runs less than two full pages, and the core allegations take up just a couple dozen words. The very purpose of an indictment is to notify a defendant of the charges against him, with reasonable specificity. So much for that quaint notion.
While he doesn’t think this payback prosecution has much chance of success, it nonetheless “marks a dark turn”:
Watch for Comey’s team to move quickly to dismiss the indictment based on a claim of selective prosecution. They’ll argue, in essence, that he was singled out for prosecution for political or other improper purposes. Defendants often raise this claim but rarely win. The problem is that it’s typically difficult or impossible to prove that the government had some impermissible motive; conversations about targeting tend to happen in hushed tones behind closed doors, if at all.
But that’s not how Donald Trump operates. For this president, everything is broadcast to the world, live and unfiltered, over social media. Accordingly, Trump already has given Comey exhibit A in his forthcoming motion to dismiss: a September 20 Truth Social post in which the president openly exhorted his attorney general (“Pam;,” the missive opens) to indict Comey and other favorite targets for political retribution. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia???” the president wrote. “They’re all guilty as hell, but nothing is going to be done.” After some stream-of-consciousness rambling, Trump ended his diatribe with an instruction to his Justice Department: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!! President DJT.” It’s difficult to imagine a more straightforward case of selective prosecution. Don’t be surprised if a judge throws this mess out before it ever reaches a jury.
This prosecution marks a dark turn. During his first term, Trump was full of public bluster, openly pining for criminal prosecutions of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and, yes, Jim Comey. But it was all chatter, back then; DoJ and other leaders mostly ignored the president’s rants and waited for the tempest to pass.
But now the fanciful talk has become action, and Comey — once a revered federal prosecutor who took down international terrorists and New York gangsters — will find himself sitting at a defendant’s table and facing the prospect of his own imprisonment. Unlikely as it seems that Comey gets convicted and sentenced to prison, nobody can afford to be nonchalant about a federal indictment filed by prosecutors representing the United States of America.
Thursday’s indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey bore a single, telling signature: that of Lindsey Halligan, installed by President Donald Trump just three days earlier to serve as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan is an insurance lawyer turned Trump attorney and White House aide; in March, Trump appointed her to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian. She has scant experience in federal courts and none as a prosecutor. Her predecessor in the position, a seasoned prosecutor nominated by Trump, was forced out last Friday, according to numerous news reports, after balking at demands to concoct cases against Comey, in addition to New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and others.
The next day, Trump addressed a post on his Truth Social platform to Attorney General Pam Bondi: “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” Prosecutors in Halligan’s office reportedly submitted a memorandum to Halligan outlining the weakness of the Comey case. None of those concerns mattered, apparently. Trump finally secured the indictment he had long been calling for. At this point, a prudent President would have stayed silent. Not this one. He posted, “JUSTICE IN AMERICA! One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to is James Comey, the former Corrupt Head of the FBI. . . . He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation.” The Department of Justice’s own news release contained the usual boilerplate about an indictment being merely an allegation and the presumption of innocence that all defendants enjoy—legal niceties that struck a particularly disingenuous note in light of Trump’s triumphalism. The President went on to suggest that more of his enemies may face charges: “It’s not a list, but I think there will be others,” he said on Friday morning, en route to watch the Ryder Cup.
Grand-jury proceedings are well known to favor the prosecutor—a state-court judge famously remarked that “any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich”—but there is not much meat in the Comey indictment. One meagre count alleges false statements to Congress; the other alleges obstruction of a congressional proceeding arising from the same testimony. (Notably, the grand jurors refused to approve a third count, which reportedly pertained to another allegedly false statement.) Both charges stem from Comey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 30, 2020—specifically, the indictment cites an exchange Comey had with the Republican senator Ted Cruz about whether Comey had authorized leaks to the media about the F.B.I.’s 2016 investigations involving Trump and Hillary Clinton. Cruz referenced a 2017 hearing, during which the Republican senator Chuck Grassley asked Comey whether he had “ever been an anonymous source” or “authorized someone else at the F.B.I. to be an anonymous source” in news reports about matters concerning the Trump or Clinton investigations. When Comey denied both, Cruz pressed him about a contrary account provided by his former deputy director, Andrew McCabe.
CRUZ: “Now, what Mr. McCabe is saying and what you testified to this committee cannot both be true. One or the other is false. Who’s telling the truth?”
COMEY: “I can only speak to my testimony. I stand by the testimony you summarized that I gave in May of 2017.”
The indictment alleges that “that statement was false,” because, as Comey “then and there knew, he in fact had authorized PERSON 3 to serve as an anonymous source in news reports regarding an F.B.I. investigation concerning PERSON 1.” This was presumably Hillary Clinton, because the leak at issue related to the F.B.I.’s investigation into Clinton’s e-mails and the Clinton Foundation.
That’s it? That’s the crime? It’s hard to imagine that any responsible or ethical prosecutor would bring this case. In order for a false statement to be criminal, it must be made “knowingly and willfully.” Obstruction of Congress requires the defendant to have acted “corruptly.” The evidence that Comey did either appears sorely lacking. According to a 2018 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, McCabe authorized F.B.I. officials to speak with the reporter Devlin Barrett, who was with the Wall Street Journal at the time, about the F.B.I. investigation of the Clinton Foundation in October, 2016. But Comey did not join in that authorization, the inspector general found. Indeed, according to the inspector general, the evidence suggested that, after the article was published, McCabe misled Comey about McCabe’s role in the leak. While the two men remembered their conversation differently, the inspector general found that “the overwhelming weight of that evidence supported Comey’s version of the conversation.” (McCabe disputed the inspector general’s conclusions.)
In other words, there’s no evidence that Comey pre-approved the leak of information; the evidence that he blessed such action after the fact is contested at best. Who is Halligan’s chief witness going to be? McCabe, a man whom Trump repeatedly attacked for being biased against him? Among other inconvenient facts, the Justice Department unsuccessfully set out during Trump’s first term to prosecute McCabe over his alleged misstatements to investigators. As Benjamin Wittes and Anna Bower wrote for Lawfare before the Comey indictment was issued, “It would be quite rich, having sought and failed to charge one party to a memory dispute to turn around and try to charge the other.” (It’s unlikely but conceivable that the indictment references a different episode: Comey’s use of the Columbia Law School professor Daniel Richman to funnel information to the New York Times about Trump’s demands, in 2017, that Comey pledge loyalty to him. Prosecutors reportedly interviewed Richman recently, but Richman’s role did not come up during Comey’s Senate testimony.)
In his 2023 book Government Gangsters, Kash Patel, now the director of the FBI, described a “deep state” conspiracy against Donald Trump that he equated with a conspiracy to subvert democracy and the Constitution. An appendix to the book listed 60 “Members of the Executive Branch Deep State,” whom Patel described as “corrupt actors of the first order.” The list included former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired in 2017 out of anger over the FBI’s investigation of alleged ties between his presidential campaign and the Russian government.
After Trump picked Patel to run the FBI, the nominee assured the Senate Judiciary Committee that, despite his vow to “come after” the “conspirators,” there would be “no politicization at the FBI” and “no retributive actions” against the president’s enemies. Thursday’s indictment of Comey, which charges him with two felonies based on allegedly false congressional testimony in September 2020, epitomizes the emptiness of that promise.
As Patel tells it, the indictment, which was filed just a few days before the charges would have been barred by the five-year statute of limitations, is not a “retributive action.” Rather, it is “another step” in keeping the FBI’s “promise of full accountability.” It just so happens that accountability in this case coincides with pursuing one of the president’s many personal vendettas.
“For far too long, previous corrupt leadership and their enablers weaponized federal law enforcement, damaging once proud institutions and severely eroding public trust,” Patel said in a press release. “Every day, we continue the fight to earn that trust back, and under my leadership, this FBI will confront the problem head-on. Nowhere was this politicization of law enforcement more blatant than during the Russiagate hoax, a disgraceful chapter in history we continue to investigate and expose. Everyone, especially those in positions of power, will be held to account—no matter their perch. No one is above the law.”
Despite that framing, the Comey indictment, on its face, has nothing to do with “the Russiagate hoax.” It alleges that Comey lied during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on September 30, 2020, when he reaffirmed his earlier testimony that he had not authorized anyone at the FBI to “be an anonymous source in news stories about matters relating to the Trump investigation or the Clinton investigation”—i.e., the FBI probe that examined Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified material as secretary of state, including her use of a private email server.
As Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) noted at the 2020 hearing, Comey’s testimony contradicted what Andrew McCabe, Comey’s former deputy, had told the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). McCabe claimed Comey had approved the disclosure of information about an FBI probe of the Clinton Foundation to The Wall Street Journal, which mentioned that new wrinkle in a story about the email investigation published on October 30, 2016. But the OIG report on the leak credited Comey’s version of events and portrayed McCabe as persistently dishonest.
“McCabe lacked candor when he told Comey, or made statements that led Comey to believe, that McCabe had not authorized the disclosure and did not know who did,” the report said. “McCabe lacked candor when he told [FBI] agents that he had not authorized the disclosure to the WSJ and did not know who did….McCabe lacked candor when he stated that he told Comey on October 31, 2016, that he [McCabe] had authorized the disclosure to the WSJ” and that “Comey agreed it was a ‘good’ idea.”
The OIG report concluded that “McCabe did not tell Comey on or around October 31 (or at any other time) that he (McCabe) had authorized the disclosure of information about the [Clinton Foundation] Investigation to the WSJ.” It added that “had McCabe done so, we believe that Comey would have objected to the disclosure.”
Based on the contrary assumption that McCabe was telling the truth, the indictment charges Comey with “willfully and knowingly” making “a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement” to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Under 18 USC 1001(a)(2), that’s a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. The indictment also alleges a related felony, subject to the same maximum penalty, under 18 USC 1505, which applies to someone who “corruptly” attempts to “influence, obstruct, or impede” a congressional proceeding.
To successfully defend Comey against those charges, National Review‘s Jim Geraghty notes, his lawyers “will have to convince at least one juror that former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is a duplicitous SOB who lied when he claimed Comey had given permission to leak the information when Comey did not. That does not exactly sound like Mission: Impossible.”
Given the weakness of the case against Comey, it is not surprising that career prosecutors did not think it was worth pursuing. That resistance explains why the indictment is signed only by Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump lawyer with no prosecutorial experience whom the president appointed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia this month after her predecessor, Erik Seibert, proved insufficiently receptive to pursuing charges against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, another Trump nemesis. Even Attorney General Pam Bondi, who on Thursday claimed Comey’s indictment reflected the Justice Department’s “commitment to holding those who abuse positions of power accountable for misleading the American people,” reportedly was skeptical of the case in private.
It is telling that Patel explicitly tied Comey’s indictment to “the Russiagate hoax” even though the charges are legally unrelated to that investigation. In a December 2023 podcast interview, Patel made it clear that he was determined to punish the “corrupt actors” who had wronged Trump even if it required some legal creativity. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out,” he said. “But yeah, we’re putting all of you on notice.”
“Today, your FBI took another step in its promise of full accountability,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “For far too long, previous corrupt leadership and their enablers weaponized federal law enforcement, damaging once proud institutions and severely eroding public trust.”
““Every day, we continue the fight to earn that trust back, and under my leadership, this FBI will confront the problem head-on,” he added. “Nowhere was this politicization of law enforcement more blatant than during the Russiagate hoax, a disgraceful chapter in history we continue to investigate and expose. Everyone, especially those in positions of power, will be held to account—no matter their perch. No one is above the law.”
The DOJ alleges Comey lied in testimony to Congress, a charge that carries a sentence of up to five years in prison.
He faces charges of a false statement and obstruction of a congressional investigation.
The DOJ’s complaint concerns testimony Comey delivered in September 2020 on his handling of the investigation into Russian involvement in the 2016 election.
In that testimony, Comey asserted that he had not authorized the leak of information on the investigation to the media.
Comey headed up the Russia investigation briefly during his tenure as FBI director before President Donald Trump fired him in May 2017.
The charges against Comey come just days before the five-year statute of limitations for perjury was set to take effect on Sept. 30.
Comey’s case will be heard in the Eastern District of Virginia. That office is headed by U.S.Attorney Lindsey Halligan, a former White House aide who was appointed recently following the resignation of Erik Siebert, the previous attorney for the district.
The Department of Justice is suing six additional states to compel them to share their statewide voter registration lists with the federal government, an unusual request that has drawn pushback from election officials in both parties in the past.
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division filed federal lawsuits Thursday against election officials in California, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and New Hampshire claiming the states violated federal law by refusing to share voter rolls with the Trump administration.
Access to voting rolls varies state by state, but the rolls are generally released to the public and government agencies with voters’ private data — like driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers — redacted.
The DOJ’s lawsuits demand the rolls with that data included. Similar requests have been rebuffed by election officials across the country, both recently and in past years, out of privacy concerns and opposition to federal encroachment in state elections. Some officials have also tied the effort to President Donald Trump’s long history of spreading election misinformation, including falsely accusing states of allowing noncitizen immigrants to vote en masse.
Last week, the DOJ filed similar lawsuits against election officials in Maine and Oregon, prompting sharp rebukes from each state’s top elections official.
“This is not normal,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said in a statement last week. “Trump’s DOJ is using its immense federal power to try to intimidate us into turning over protected voter data and changing our voting processes to fit President Trump’s whims.”
Michigan, Minnesota and California have Democrats as their secretaries of state, while New Hampshire and Pennsylvania have Republican chief election officials. New York has a state board of elections. Spokespeople for all six election authorities did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuits.
The lawsuits demand states to share highly sensitive information on voters, including Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers, as part of the administration’s effort to create “clean voter rolls.”
“Clean voter rolls are the foundation of free and fair elections,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “Every state has a responsibility to ensure that voter registration records are accurate, accessible, and secure — states that don’t fulfill that obligation will see this Department of Justice in court.”
The Trump administration appears to be prioritizing access to the private information of voters. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sanctioned the release of some voter roll data to DOJ after multiple requests but did not include any personally identifying information on voters.
In March, Trump signed an executive order directing DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to take measures preventing noncitizens from voting in elections — a baseless claim that Trump has touted for years, including ahead of the 2024 election and in his attempts to delegitimize the results of the 2020 election.
Trump explored a similar measure during his first term. He established the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in 2017 to examine cases of voter fraud.
The Justice Department is weighing whether to charge former FBI Director James Comey with lying to Congress, two DOJ officials and a person familiar with the matter told NBC News Wednesday.
“There are still internal matters being sorted out,” one of the officials said.
A DOJ spokesperson declined to comment on any matters relating to Comey.
The internal debatecomes just days after President Donald Trump posted on social media that Attorney General Pam Bondi should take action against Comey and two of the president’s other political foes: Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he said in the Truth Social post on Saturday.
He told reporters later that day: “If they’re not guilty, that’s fine. If they are guilty, or if they should be judged, they should be judged. And we have to do it now.”
Any charges against Comey could come from the Eastern District of Virginia, where deliberations over how to handle the Comey case are active, the second Justice Department official told NBC News.
The charge in question would involve testimony Comey delivered to Congress on Sept. 30, 2020, in response to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, about the authorization of an information leak.
If the Justice Department decides to charge Comey, it could happen in the coming days. A five-year statute of limitations is set to expire early next week.
A representative for Comey declined to comment Wednesday.
Trump’s call for action from the DOJcame a day after he forced out Erik S. Siebert as acting U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia.
Senior Justice Department sources recently said that Siebert had decided to resign rather than seek an indictment of Comey due to the lack of evidence in the case.
Trump later posted on X that he had fired Siebert, rather than him resigning. He was replaced Monday by Lindsey Halligan, one of Trump’s former personal lawyers.
The Justice Department acknowledged in July that it was investigating Comey, but did not release any information about the probe.
Trump has long been critical of Comey, who started an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible ties to the Trump campaign. Trump fired Comey in May 2017, a move that led to former FBI Director Robert Mueller being named special counsel of the Russia investigation.
Mueller’s probe spanned almost two years and led to 34 people and three companies being criminally charged. His report found that the Russian government “interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” but said investigators did not establish that Trump or his team “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” despite numerous contacts.
Trump has long derided the investigation as a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”
Siebert had also been investigating mortgage fraud allegations against James, whose office successfully sued Trump and his company for fraud.
Two senior law enforcement officials told NBC News last week that the investigation stalled over concerns from federal agents and prosecutors who felt they lacked the evidence to obtain a conviction if the case were to go to trial.
James has denied any wrongdoing.
Dareh Gregorian contributed.
[ad_2]
Kelly O'Donnell, Tom Winter, Michael Kosnar and Laura Jarrett | NBC News
A Georgia man has been sentenced to 80 years in federal prison for mailing bombs to federal buildings.
David Dwayne Cassady, 57, pleaded guilty to two counts of attempted malicious use of explosive materials after constructing and sending explosive devices to the U.S. Courthouse in Anchorage, Alaska, and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.
“This defendant’s devices were not only a threat to the recipients, but to every individual that unknowingly transported and delivered them,” said U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling for the District of South Carolina.
United States District Judge J. Randal Hall imposed the sentence, which consists of two consecutive 480-month terms, followed by a five-year term of court-ordered supervision.
According to a federal indictment, Cassady built bombs while incarcerated at the now-shuttered state prison in Reidsville. The indictment said Cassady then mailed those bombs from the prison in Georgia to a federal courthouse in Anchorage, Alaska, and a Justice Department building in the state’s capital.
Channel 2’s Audrey Washington contacted the Georgia Department of Corrections and asked how Cassady was able to both build and mail bombs from prison.
The agency released a statement, saying:
“Cassady was able to manipulate primarily items he was authorized to possess into makeshift explosive devices. We appreciate the support of our federal partners in ensuring that justice will be served on this individual for his role in jeopardizing the safe operations of our facilities, and most importantly, the safety of the public.”
Rodney M. Hopkins, Inspector in Charge of the Atlanta Division, stated, “Cassady has been sentenced to a significant amount of time in prison as he intended to incite fear to his targets and amongst the general public.”
The investigation was conducted by several agencies, including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI Anchorage Office, Homeland Security Investigations Federal Protective Service, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and the Georgia Department of Corrections Office of Professional Standards.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Benjamin N. Garner and Elizabeth Major prosecuted the case in the Southern District of Georgia.
Cassady will spend the rest of his life in prison, as there is no parole in the federal system.
America’s electoral system has always been subject to—by design—a shifting balance of local control, state authority, and federal oversight. That balance is once again under strain, this time in the form of a pair of federal lawsuits that could redefine who ultimately controls access to voters’ personal data. Last week, the Justice Department filed twin lawsuits against Maine and Oregon, arguing that the states violated federal election laws and the Civil Rights Act by refusing to give the agency full access to the states’ voter data.
Since May, the Justice Department has sent letters to at least 32 states requesting access to their voter registration databases, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In early August, the agency followed up with a more specific demand for full electronic copies of those files—including names, addresses, dates of birth, and sensitive identifiers such as driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers—along with documentation of how states identify and remove ineligible voters.
While the Justice Department has requested information from states about election administration in the past—including during the first Trump administration—the scope of the request is unprecedented, per the Brennan Center. Most states have not complied, and those that have appear to have provided only the publicly available portions of their voter files, which vary by state but may include information such as voter names, addresses, party affiliation, and voting history.
The Justice Department’s requests have raised privacy concerns from state officials, including Washington Democratic Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, who “fears the information would be shared with the Department of Homeland Security to fuel the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown,” reports the Washington State Standard. The Brennan Center notes that the Justice Department’s demands could conflict with the Privacy Act, which restricts how federal agencies collect and share personally identifiable information, especially when such data are not explicitly authorized for disclosure.
Despite the broad lack of participation from the states, only Maine and Oregon have been sued so far. “States simply cannot pick and choose which federal laws they will comply with, including our voting laws, which ensure that all American citizens have equal access to the ballot in federal elections,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, in a press release.
Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has called the Justice Department’s actions “absurd” and a “federal abuse of power,” according to CNN. Oregon Democratic Secretary of State Tobias Read criticized President Donald Trump in a statement, saying, “If the President wants to use the [Justice Department] to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections, I look forward to seeing them in court.” Read also maintains that the federal government lacks the constitutional authority to pursue legal action on these grounds, according to the Oregon Capital Chronicle.
In the U.S., elections—and the voter data that underpin them—are managed primarily by state and local governments, not federal agencies. However, since being reelected, Trump has sought to increase the federal government’s role in national elections. In March, the president signed an executive order directing federal agencies to enforce stricter eligibility verification, tighten mail‑in voting rules, and enhance data sharing between federal and state authorities regarding voter registration and citizenship status.
In August, Trump pledged to end mail-in voting throughout the country, save for extenuating circumstances, stating that the practice can lead to dishonest elections. Many experts argue that concerns about widespread fraud are overstated, and Oregon Public Broadcasting notes that there were just 38 criminal convictions of voter fraud out of 61 million ballots cast statewide from 2000 to 2019.
The cases could set a precedent for how far federal authorities can reach into state election systems. If the Justice Department prevails, more states may be forced to share complete voter data—including sensitive identifiers—to federal agencies, giving the government even more access to citizens’ private information. If the courts side with Oregon and Maine, it may affirm states’ ability to limit access in defense of voter privacy.
Maryland’s Jamie Raskin is taking the Trump administration to task over a social media post that called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to go after his political enemies.
This page contains a video which is being blocked by your ad blocker. In order to view the video you must disable your ad blocker.
Maryland congressman blasts Trump for using DOJ for personal vendettas
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin is taking President Donald Trump’s administration to task over a social media post Trump sent over the weekend that called on his attorney general to go after those he considers his political enemies.
In the post, Trump seemingly directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue legal action against New York Attorney General Letitia James, California U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and former FBI Director James Comey.
“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he said. Noting that he was impeached and criminally charged, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Shortly after the post was published, it was removed but then reposted some time later, which sparked speculation that Trump meant to send it as a direct message to Bondi but mistakenly posted it publicly.
Trump later wrote in a follow-up post that Bondi was “doing a GREAT job.”
Raskin, who represents the state’s 8th District, said it’s no surprise Trump would try to use the Justice Department to carry out personal vendettas.
“He is castigating U.S. attorneys and federal prosecutors all over the country, forcing them to do his will, to indict people even if there isn’t probable cause to believe that they’ve engaged in a crime,” Raskin told WTOP in an interview.
Raskin, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee and part of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, said the administration is dismantling institutions and taking rights away from Americans.
“We have a president who is now trampling every constitutional principle and rule we’ve got,” Raskin said. “America knows that there is something profoundly wrong with what’s going on.”
And Raskin said judges across the country agree with him.
“Here’s the great news,” he said. “There have been more than 400 cases now brought against Trump for violating the Constitution and the rule of law. And in the district courts, we are winning more than 96% of the time with also overwhelming numbers in the appeals court.”
Raskin was issued a pardon in the final days of former President Joe Biden’s administration for his role on the House Select Committee and in impeachment proceedings against Trump.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here.
Washington — The Department of Homeland Security has escalated its clash with so-called sanctuary states this week, warning California, New York, and Illinois in letters obtained by CBS News that refusal to honor immigration detainers could trigger federal legal action.
In letters dated Sept. 10, Acting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons ordered the attorneys general of the three states to declare within two days whether they would comply with “thousands of ICE detainers” lodged against individuals in state custody, according to DHS. Immigration detainers are formal requests by ICE asking local jails and prisons to notify the agency before releasing an individual, and to hold them briefly so federal agents can take undocumented migrants into federal custody.
According to DHS, Illinois and New York formally declined to cooperate. California did not respond. On Sept. 18, Lyons sent follow-up letters obtained by CBS News accusing each state of obstructing immigration enforcement and vowing to enlist the Department of Justice in response. Senior DHS officials tell CBS News the department will tap the DOJ to sue states, blocking future federal funding.
In his follow-up letter to Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, Lyons wrote that the state’s refusal “will result in thousands of criminal aliens being released into Illinois communities,” adding that “ICE will engage with the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal partners to pursue all appropriate measures against you.”
Lyons wrote in his letter to California Attorney General Rob Bonta, “I take this lack of response to mean that you will continue refusing to honor ICE detainers, resulting in thousands of criminal aliens being released into California communities.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James received a similar warning after two aides to Gov. Kathy Hochul confirmed the state would not expand cooperation, according to DHS.
The Illinois attorney general’s office referred CBS News to a letter it sent to Lyons on Sept. 12, which argued ICE detainers are “requests” and state and local authorities cannot be forced to comply with them. The office also noted that it doesn’t oversee pre-trial detention in Illinois, so the office “rarely, if ever, receives ICE detainers,” and it can’t “unilaterally override state law” by forcing local police departments to honor ICE’s requests.
“Responding to an ICE detainer based on erroneous information could subject Illinois law enforcement agencies to liability for ICE’s mistakes,” the letter read. “And unfortunately, the number of erroneous detentions by ICE continues to grow at an alarming pace.”
CBS News has reached out to the California and New York attorney general’s offices for comment.
In a statement to CBS News, Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin wrote, “These dangerous sanctuary policies, often combined with cashless bail for serious crimes, allow criminal illegal aliens to be released back into American communities — threatening the American people’s lives and wellbeing.”
A DHS spokesperson tells CBS News that the agency has arrested roughly 400,000 undocumented immigrants since the start of the Trump administration, and 70% of those arrested by ICE have criminal charges or convictions.
Among those released by state authorities include undocumented migrants charged with sex crimes on minors, multiple assaults on police officers with a dangerous weapon, indecent assault and battery, as well as those with drug trafficking and weapons charges, a DHS spokesperson said.
Federal regulation dictates that immigration detainers instruct local jails and prisons to hold someone for up to 48 hours after their scheduled release so ICE can take custody. Historically, federal courts have ruled that these detainers are requests, with some local and state authorities outlawing compliance. Some courts have also found that holding people without a judge’s warrant can raise constitutional challenges, citing the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unlawful detention.
California, New York, and Illinois have each passed laws limiting compliance with ICE detainers.
California law bars local police from honoring detainers, except for individuals convicted of select serious crimes, while New York law restricts cooperation, requiring judicial warrants rather than administrative detainers to detain undocumented migrants. The New York attorney general’s office advises local police departments not to honor ICE detainers unless they are accompanied by warrants issued by judges. Illinois’ TRUST Act also prohibits state and local law enforcement from detaining individuals without a judicial warrant.
Supporters of city- and state-level “sanctuary” laws typically argue the policies lead to greater trust between local police and residents whose immigration status may make them reluctant to cooperate with law enforcement or report crimes.
But the Trump administration argues “sanctuary” policies make it harder for ICE to apprehend undocumented migrants, prompting the federal agency to send more law enforcement agents into American communities to conduct arrests on the streets. Those operations have drawn protests in major cities like New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles in recent months, leading to some clashes with ICE and several arrests.
In recent months, the Justice Department and other agencies have sought to cut off grants to cities and states that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities, drawinglawsuits.
In his warnings to state attorneys general, Lyons underscored that ICE prefers cooperation but will not allow what he calls “inadvisable and irresponsible obstruction” to continue, though he fell short of specifying exactly how the Justice Department will pursue lawsuits or other federal action in the coming weeks.
Exonerees are calling for a “full federal investigation” of destroyed case files and the harsh actions of a homicide detective.
A civil rights complaint is urging the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Detroit’s wrongful convictions and Wayne County’s illegal record purge that advocates say landed numerous innocent people in prison and blocked exonerations.
In a letter sent to the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Freedom Ain’t Free, a Detroit-based nonprofit led by two exonerees, is asking for a “full federal investigation” under the Justice Department’s police misconduct authority.
“The people of Detroit deserve transparency and justice,” the complaint says, adding that years of “unchecked prosecutorial misconduct” and “abusive practices” have disproportionately harmed Black defendants.
Central to the complaint is retired Detroit Police Homicide Detective Barbara Simon, whose deceptive and coercive interrogation tactics were the subject of a two-part Metro Times series in July 2024. Simon’s techniques led to at least four exonerations and five lawsuits, which so far have cost taxpayers about $25 million. All of the men were charged with murder, and some of them falsely confessed after they say Simon illegally isolated suspects without access to attorneys or phones, fabricated evidence, and threatened life prison sentences unless they signed statements she drafted.
The letter cites 11 inmates who have reached out to Freedom Ain’t Free, saying they were also victimized by Simon’s tactics.
“This list demonstrates that Simon’s misconduct is not a matter of history alone, but an ongoing crisis impacting numerous individuals and families who remain trapped by wrongful convictions,” the letter, written by exoneree Lamarr Monson, states.
In October 2024, Monson reached an $8.5 million settlement with the city after he alleged Simon tricked him into falsely confessing. Based solely on that false confession, Monson was convicted of second-degree murder in the death of a 12-year-old at a drug house in Detroit. He was 24 years old at the time and was sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison.
According to the letter, Simon has been sued at least 18 times in federal court. Michigan courts, including the state Supreme Court, “have already found statements obtained by Simon to be unreliable and her credibility deeply compromised.”
The complaint spotlights the case of Mark Craighead, who was convicted in 2002 and later won relief after new evidence showed a “common scheme of coercion and falsification.” Craighead alleged Simon told him he would “spend the rest of his life in prison if he did not sign” a confession written by the detective.
Under duress, Craighead signed the confession and was convicted of manslaughter in 2002. He was freed from prison in 2009 and exonerated in 2022.
The letter also calls for an investigation into the illegal destruction of felony and misdemeanor case files when Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan was the elected county prosecutor. Between 2001 and 2004, while Duggan was prosecutor, most if not all records from 1995 and earlier were allegedly destroyed in violation of state law.
The records contained a wealth of vital information, including police and forensic reports, lab results, transcripts, video recordings, and witness statements, all of which are essential for mounting a defense against wrongful convictions. What makes the file purge especially concerning is that it involved records from a deeply troubling era in Detroit’s Homicide Division, a time plagued by rampant misconduct, false confessions, constitutional abuses of witnesses and suspects, and a widespread federal investigation. In the 1980s and 1990s, the misconduct among police, especially homicide detectives, was so pervasive and egregious that the DOJ demanded reforms to avoid a costly lawsuit while Duggan was the county prosecutor.
Duggan has repeatedly denied that his office was behind the destruction of records.
Freedom Ain’t Free says the missing files have impeded innocence claims and post-conviction reviews, including work by the Wayne County Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), which was created in 2018 and has secured at least 15 exonerations since then.
The complaint points to incarcerated people like Carl Hubbard, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1992 without any physical evidence and “cannot prove his innocence after his case file vanished.” It also argues that the wholesale destruction of records undermines due-process rights under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and constitutes obstruction of justice.
As Metro Times previously reported, Wayne County officials have acknowledged that large swaths of older prosecutor files cannot be found. Current Prosecutor Kym Worthy’s office has said the purge occurred before she took office in 2004 and has hampered appeals and CIU work.
The complaint alleges that Detroit murder cases in the 1980s and ’90s were rife with coerced confessions, witness intimidation, and Brady violations, or when prosecutors fail to disclose evidence. It cites more than 30 wrongful convictions from that era and notes that “no officers, prosecutors, or officials have faced discipline, demotion, or termination.”
The filing highlights three recurring problems:
Reliance on jailhouse informants and scripted statements later recanted or disproved.
Detectives “concealed” leads and evidence in separate files that were not turned over to the defense.
About 88% of exonerees from these cases are Black men.
The Detroit Police Department operated under a federal consent decree beginning in 2003 after the DOJ found unconstitutional arrests, detentions, and interrogation practices. Freedom Ain’t Free argues the civil rights abuses of those years kept innocent people in prison, particularly those with missing case files.
The complaint requests subpoenas for records tied to the record purge, a review of convictions linked to discredited officers and jailhouse informants, and a top-to-bottom audit of cases that involved Simon.
“The people of Detroit deserve transparency and justice,” the letter states. “The destruction of evidence, unchecked prosecutorial misconduct, and the abusive practices by detectives such as Barbra Simon have perpetuated a cycle of harm, disproportionately impacting Black communities. We implore the DOJ to act swiftly to restore faith in the rule of law.”
More than a year after a Metro Times investigation revealed the widespread misconduct of Simon and the destruction of prosecutor files, families of men still imprisoned because of her tainted cases are growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of accountability and action.
Worthy has pledged that her office would investigate Simon cases, but despite public promises, protests, and mounting evidence of wrongdoing, Worthy has yet to meet with victims’ families or launch a transparent investigation into their loved ones’ convictions.
“To this day, men whose convictions were tied to Simon remain incarcerated, unable to secure justice due to lost files, missing evidence, and institutional resistance,” the complaint states. “Simon’s history is not an anomaly — it is symptomatic of a department that rewarded abusive tactics while ignoring accountability.”
Whether the complaint gets any traction is another question. Under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has pledged to halt oversight of police misconduct cases.
“The DOJ under Biden found police were wantonly assaulting people and that it wasn’t a problem of ‘bad apples’ but of avoidable, department-wide failures,” Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, deputy project director on policing at the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement. “By turning its back on police abuse, Trump’s DOJ is putting communities at risk, and the ACLU is stepping in because people are not safe when police can ignore their civil rights.”
What is the Jeffrey Epstein story, and what does it mean? Just asking questions. Today’s conversation is with journalist Michael Tracey, who has been picking apart what he calls the “Epstein mythology” for the past several weeks over at his Substack. In short, he thinks 90 percent of what most people believe about this case is false, and that this is mostly the fault of credulous establishment journalists who chose to uncritically publish alleged victims’ narratives and ignore inconvenient facts, as well as opportunistic alternative media figures who spun the story into a sprawling conspiracy for political and personal gain.
Tracey has been attacked and on the attack, and you’ll hear him air his many grievances with other journalists, lawyers, and politicians in this conversation, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.), whom he calls out as his “enemy” because she instructed police to remove him from an Epstein-related press conference after he asked a question about an accusers’ credibility in Washington D.C. this week.
The goal of this episode was to move beyond the personality clashes and egos and wild speculation and drill down into what it is we actually know and don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein. But as we talked, it became clear that this kind of detached analysis just wasn’t going to be possible, that the egos and the clashes and the agendas remain intricately tied up with how this story has unfolded. The incentives faced by establishment journalists, podcasters, accusers, and politicians have shaped this story and our understanding of it, mostly for the worse.
But in the marketplace of ideas, there is also a countervailing incentive to move against the herd and correct the record. And maybe a turbulent and confrontational personality like Michael Tracey–who admits in this interview that he’s “wired differently”–was exactly what was needed to break taboos, ask uncomfortable questions, and push for real disclosure about the nature of the story that has loomed over American politics for at least a decade.
Regardless of how one feels about Tracey’s tone or the soundness of his analysis, anyone who purports to care about this story should at least engage with the questions he’s asking and start asking their own questions about what the Epstein story really means.
This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.
The Trump administration’s reported proposal to ban transgender people from owning guns has drawn condemnation from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and every other notable gun-rights group in the country.
The Daily Wirefirst reported Thursday, based on anonymous Justice Department sources, that senior officials in the department are considering using their rulemaking authority to declare that trans people are mentally ill, stripping them of their Second Amendment rights. Other major news outlets rereported the story.
The Justice Department hasn’t issued any such rule yet, or attached a name to any of the statements leaking out to the press, so this all amounts to more of a trial balloon. But as Reason‘s Jacob Sullum wrote, the idea is “legally loony.” There is no statutory authority for such a categorical decree. Even if Congress did pass such a law, it would be unconstitutional based on current Supreme Court precedent and prevailing circuit court opinions.
If the Trump administration was hoping to get a pass from gun-rights groups over these small details, it will be disappointed. Categorical bans—issued by executive fiat no less—have been a red line for pro-Second Amendment groups and lawmakers for decades.
“The NRA supports the Second Amendment rights of all law-abiding Americans to purchase, possess and use firearms,” the organization posted Friday on X. “The NRA does not, and will not, support any policy proposals that implement sweeping gun bans that arbitrarily strip law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights without due process.”
Stephen Gutowski, an independent journalist covering gun rights and the gun industry, reported that the NRA wasn’t alone: “Every major gun-rights group has now spoken against the idea of the DOJ trying to strip trans people of their gun rights en masse,” he posted on X Friday.
Gutowski’s tally included Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, the Firearms Policy Coalition, the National Association for Gun Rights, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
“Disarming trans individuals based purely on their self-identification flies in the face of the Constitution and the current administration’s purported support for the Second Amendment,” the Second Amendment Foundation said in a statement to Newsweek. “Beyond the bad policy and constitutional infirmities of such ‘considerations’ the Department of Justice has no authority to unilaterally identify groups of people that it would like to strip of their constitutional rights. SAF sincerely hopes that the reports of such considerations by the DOJ are inaccurate, as the policy reportedly being contemplated is worthy of the strongest possible condemnation and legal action.”
Second Amendment groups often remind gun-control advocates that, historically, things don’t tend to go well for minority groups after they’re disarmed by the government, so it’s good to see them presenting a united front against just such a proposal.
If the Trump Administration has any ability to read the room, it will quietly forget about its idea to illegally strip a group of Americans of their constitutional right to bear arms.
On a Friday in March 2021, Brian Moore, an aspiring rap artist, was about to catch a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, where he planned to produce a video that he hoped would promote his musical career. To pay for the video, he was carrying $8,500 in cash, money he had inherited from his late grandfather.
Federal drug agents put an end to Moore’s plan by taking his money, which they vaguely alleged was connected in some way to illegal drug activity. What happened next illustrates the importance of legal safeguards against the dangers posed by civil forfeiture, a system of legalized larceny that authorizes law enforcement agencies to pad their budgets by seizing supposedly crime-tainted assets without filing criminal charges, let alone obtaining a conviction.
While profit-motivated law enforcement agencies tend to portray it as inherently suspicious, there is nothing illegal about traveling with large sums of cash. And although the government claimed a drug-detecting dog “alerted” to Moore’s money, that is less incriminating than it sounds, since research has found that most U.S. currency contains traces of cocaine.
The government’s evidence was so weak that it decided to drop the case after Moore challenged the seizure in federal court. Moore got his money back, but he was still out thousands of dollars in legal fees until last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit ruled that he was entitled to compensation for those expenses.
Unlike criminal defendants, civil forfeiture targets have no right to court-appointed counsel, which helps explain why they usually give up without a fight. According to one estimate, more than nine out of 10 federal civil forfeiture cases are resolved without judicial involvement.
Challenging a forfeiture is a complicated and daunting process that is very difficult to navigate without a lawyer. But the cost of hiring one typically exceeds the value of the seized property, meaning forfeiture targets can lose even when they win.
Congress tried to address that problem by passing the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA), a 2000 law that says “the United States shall be liable for reasonable attorney fees” whenever a property owner “substantially prevails” in a federal forfeiture case. But when Moore got his money back and sought $15,000 to pay his lawyers, U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. ruled that he was not entitled to compensation under CAFRA because he had not met that standard.
Under Moore’s contingency fee agreement with his lawyers, that decision left him on the hook for one-third of the money he had recovered. But with pro bono help from the Institute for Justice, Moore appealed Thrash’s ruling, and a three-judge 11th Circuit panel unanimously concluded that the judge had misapplied CAFRA.
The government’s prospects of winning at trial were so iffy that the Justice Department asked Thrash to dismiss the case with prejudice, precluding any future attempt to confiscate his money. According to the 11th Circuit, that judicially endorsed outcome was enough to conclude that Moore had “substantially prevail[ed].”
“We’re pleased to see Brian made whole after years of litigation, but his case highlights the abusive civil forfeiture tactics used by the federal government, which will litigate a case against a property owner for years and then voluntarily dismiss the case on the eve of the government’s defeat,” says Institute for Justice Senior Attorney Dan Alban. “Without the ability to recover their attorneys’ fees after victory, most property owners cannot afford to defend their property from forfeiture”—a reality that motivated the “critical protections for property rights” that Congress approved in 2000.
“It’s a huge relief to have the court agree that I should get all my money back,” Moore says. “Even though the government couldn’t say what I did wrong and dropped the case, I was going to lose thousands of dollars. I hope that my victory can pave the way for others to get justice without paying a price.”
President Donald Trump announced that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will pursue a lawsuit against California over its new congressional map.
Trump declared in the Oval Office that the DOJ would file the lawsuit to challenge the California map, which would add five Democratic seats to the U.S. House if approved by voters in a special November election.
“I think I’m going to be filing a lawsuit pretty soon, and I think we’re going to be very successful in it,” said the President, per CNBC.
“We’re going to be filing it through the Department of Justice. That’s going to happen.”
Trump did not specify the grounds under which the DOJ would file the lawsuit.
Newsom quickly responded to the potential lawsuit on social media, stating that California is prepared to take on the challenges.
This redistricting effort in California follows numerous warnings from Gov. Gavin Newsom that the state would take action if Texas creates a new map, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Under California law, an independent commission generally handles redistricting. Still, Newsom and the California legislature passed a bill to put a new measure on the November ballot, according to the National Review. The measure asks voters whether to temporarily suspend that commission until after the 2030 Census, allowing Democrats to redraw districts for the 2026, 2028, and 2030 election cycles.
The ballot initiative has split public opinion, with a recent UC Berkeley poll showing 48% in favor, 36% opposed, and 20% undecided, per the National Review.
This new map also directly counters Texas Republicans’ mid-decade gerrymandering efforts by enabling Democrats to try to regain an electoral edge in congressional representation.
These changes in California come just days after the Texas legislature announced that a new congressional map had been approved by both the Texas Senate and House of Representatives, with the responsibility now falling upon Gov. Greg Abbott to approve the changes, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The updated Texas map would give Republicans five additional U.S. House seats, which would be offset by the five seats gained by Democrats in the new California congressional map.
On Monday, President Donald Trump, who has called cashless bail a “government-backed crime spree,” signed an executive order to end the policy nationwide. The order restricts the allocation of “Federal policies and resources” to jurisdictions and states with cashless bail policies for “crimes that pose a clear threat to public safety and order.” It tasks Attorney General Pam Bondi with creating a list of such jurisdictions within 30 days, at which point the federal funds of these jurisdictions may be suspended or terminated.
While the Eighth Amendment prevents excessive bail, defendants are not guaranteed an absolute right to bail. The Bail Reform Act of 1984 allows for the denial of bail for defendants who pose a flight risk, including those charged with violent crimes, offenses carrying life imprisonment or death, certain drug offenses, repeat felony offenders, and those posing a danger to society.
When a defendant is arraigned, a judge may release them on their own recognizance (a promise to appear), detain them, or release them on bail. With bail, a cash guarantee is provided and returned upon the conclusion of the case. Bail is determined by the jurisdiction where the crime is prosecuted, meaning in some jurisdictions, bail isn’t required for lesser charges.
With cashless bail, defendants who are not deemed a flight risk or threat to public safety are released on a promise to return, without monetary collateral. Proponents argue that cash bail disproportionately impacts black and Latino populations, and ending this practice would reduce recidivism rates, since data suggest that longer pretrial detention is linked to quicker new arrests.
Multiple jurisdictions and states have experimented with cashless bail to varying degrees of success. In 2023, Illinois became the first state to abolish cash bail. Under the Pretrial Fairness Act, judges must instead hold detention hearings to determine whether a defendant is a flight risk or a public safety threat. “Not too different from how we release people now. It’s just that money will no longer be a condition of release,” NPR reported at the time.
It’s unclear if these reforms had any impact on crime, although a study by Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Criminal Justice notes that violent crimes and property crimes declined a year after cashless bail was enacted. That same report found that the percentage of people who missed a required court date declined from 25.1 percent to 22.8 percent.
New York’s bail reform law, enacted in 2019 and amended in 2023, limits cash bail and pretrial detention primarily to violent felonies. Defendants are typically released on recognizance unless there’s a flight risk, and New York law narrows the parameters for bail consideration to “the kind and degree of control or restriction necessary to reasonably assure the principal’s return to court.”
Following the passage of New York’s laws, a 2023 study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that the state’s bail reforms neither increased nor decreased recidivism rates.
New Jersey’s risk-based bail system, which was finalized in 2017, offers more judicial discretion than New York’s, but still eschews cash bail for low-risk defendants in favor of a public safety assessment. In 2023, New Jersey’s Joint Committee on Criminal Justice Reform attributed the state’s rearrest rate of less than 1 percent to the 2017 bail reform, noting that over 80 percent of defendants who completed pretrial services were not rearrested.
The president also signed an executive order on Monday aimed at cashless bail policies in Washington, D.C., which have been in place since 1992. The order mandates that federal law enforcement in the city hold arrestees in federal custody and pursue federal charges and pretrial detention to ensure they aren’t released from custody before trial.
It also authorizes Bondi to review the Metropolitan Police Department’s retrial release policies and direct Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser to align D.C. policies with the president’s methods for dealing with crime in the city. Under the order, federal agencies must also identify actions, including funding allocation and federal services, to coerce D.C. to abandon its cashless bail system.
Last year, the city released 87 percent of the people arrested in D.C. without bail. Of those, 89 percent remained arrest-free, and 86 percent of released defendants made all scheduled court appearances, according to data from D.C.’s Pretrial Services Agency.
The records show Maxwell repeatedly showering Trump with praise and denying under questioning from Blanche that she had observed Trump engaged in any form of sexual behavior. The administration was presumably eager to make such denials public at a time when the president has faced questions about a long-ago friendship with Epstein and as his administration has endured continued scrutiny over its handling of evidence from the case.
The transcript disclosure represents the latest Trump administration effort to repair self-inflicted political wounds after failing to deliver on expectations that its own officials had created through conspiracy theories and bold pronouncements that never came to pass. By making public two days worth of interviews, officials appear to be hoping to at least temporarily keep at bay sustained anger from Trump’s base even as they send Congress evidence that they had previously kept from view.
Blanche prefaced the interview by saying Maxwell — a onetime socialite who was convicted in 2021 of helping lure teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein — had been given limited immunity, allowing her to speak freely without fear of prosecution for anything she said. The only exceptions, he said, were if she lied or gave statements inconsistent with what she’d previously said.
“I actually never saw the President in any type of massage setting,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript. “I never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way. The President was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”
Maxwell told Blanche she believes she first met Trump in 1990 — before she met Epstein.
“I may have met Donald Trump at that time, because my father was friendly with him and liked him very much,” she said, referring to Robert Maxwell, who owned the New York Daily News at the time.
“President Trump was always very cordial and very kind to me. And I just want to say that I find — I — I admire his extraordinary achievement in becoming the president now. And I like him, and I’ve always liked him. So that is the sum and substance of my entire relationship with him,” she said.
Maxwell said Epstein and Trump were “friendly” but “I don’t think they were close friends.”
Maxwell told Blanche she never witnessed Trump or former President Bill Clinton doing anything inappropriate, according to the transcript.
Blanche asked Maxwell if Clinton had ever gone to Epstein’s private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
“He never, absolutely never went,” Maxwell responded. “And I can be sure of that because there’s no way he would’ve gone. I don’t believe there’s any way that he would’ve gone to the island, had I not been there. Because I don’t believe he had an independent friendship, if you will, with Epstein.”
Trump has said repeatedly — including earlier Friday — that Clinton had visited the island “28 times.” Clinton has previously denied ever going there.
In the interview, Blanche asked Maxwell if she knew whether Epstein maintained a “black book” or client list containing names of famous people that he knew.
“Yeah, there is no list. We’ll start with that,” Maxwell said.
The Justice Department released a transcript of an interview between a senior administration official and Ghislaine Maxwell, the imprisoned former associate of Jeffrey Epstein.
Prodded further about a client list, Maxwell said: “Absolutely no. There is no list. There is no, I’m not aware of any blackmail. I never heard I never heard that. I never saw it, and I never, I never imagined it,” Maxwell said.
Blanche asked Maxwell whether she remembered the names of people who had sent letters to contribute to a 50th birthday album for Epstein in 2003.
“It’s been so long. I want to tell you, but I don’t remember,” Maxwell said.
Asked if she remembered Trump submitting a letter, card or note, Maxwell responded: “I don’t.”
Maxwell was also asked whether she remembered seeing the book or any portion of the letters in her discovery in New York, and she said she did, but that “there was nothing from President Trump.”
Pressed again on whether Trump had submitted a letter for Epstein’s 50th birthday, Maxwell said, “I do not remember.” Maxwell also said she did not have a recollection of a letter containing a drawing of a naked woman.
Maxwell responded “no” when Blanche asked whether she knew Epstein to communicate with FBI agents as a source or otherwise.
Asked whether he would have been likely to tell her if he was an FBI source, Maxwell said that he would have bragged about it.
“I think if he was for real, I think he would’ve bragged about it to me as a show off, because he could be a showoff. And if he wasn’t, he might have dropped it like he was cool. And I don’t think — I don’t remember him doing either,” Maxwell said.
“Now, with, again, the caveat that in his — before I met him, finding money, I think he may have suggested that there was some people who helped him, but that’s the only context that I recall that in,” Maxwell added.
Asked what she meant by “finding money,” Maxwell recalled that Epstein had shown her “a photograph that he had with some African warlords or something,” and that was her sole memory “of something nefarious — not nefarious. I don’t even know if it was nefarious, but covert, I suppose, would be the word.”
Asked about other intelligence agencies, like the CIA or Defense Intelligence or any other law enforcement agency, Maxwell said, “Okay. I don’t think so. I think that — I don’t remember anything like that. I just don’t think he had the wherewithal,” and that it was “bulls—.”
David Markus, Maxwell’s lawyer, said his client is “innocent and never should have been tried, much less convicted, in this case.”
“She never committed or participated in sexual abuse against minors, or anyone else for that matter. In fact, the government has admitted that it did not even consider her a conspirator during the extensive investigation into Epstein in the Southern District of Florida. The only reason she was ever charged is that she served as a scapegoat after Jeffrey Epstein died in prison,” Markus said in a lengthy statement.
Markus went on to express gratitude to the Trump administration for publicizing the recordings of Maxwell’s interview with Blanche.
“We are thankful to the Department of Justice and to Todd Blanche for making these tapes and transcripts public so that people can judge for themselves. We are also grateful to the President for his continued commitment to the truth in this matter and for refusing to cave to the mob,” Markus said.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he had no prior knowledge that Jeffrey Epstein’s former associate, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, would be transferred from a Florida prison to a minimum security prison in Texas.
The Epstein case had long captured public attention in part because of the wealthy financer’s social connections over the years to prominent figures including Prince Andrew, Clinton and Trump, who has said his relationship with Epstein ended years before. Epstein was arrested in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges, accused of sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls, and was found dead a month later in a New York jail cell in what investigators described as a suicide.
In the interview, Maxwell did express skepticism about the medical examiner’s ruling that Epstein killed himself.
“I do not believe he died by suicide,” Maxwell said, according to the transcript.
The saga has consumed the Trump administration over the last month following an abrupt two-page announcement from the FBI and Justice Department that Epstein had killed himself despite conspiracy theories to the contrary, that a “client list” that Attorney General Pam Bondi had intimated was on her desk did not actually exist and that no additional documents from the high-profile investigation were suitable to be released.
The announcement produced outrage from conspiracy theorists, online sleuths and Trump supporters who had been hoping to see proof of a government coverup. That expectation was driven in part by comments from officials including FBI Director Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, who on podcasts before taking their current positions had repeatedly promoted the idea that damaging details about prominent people were being withheld.
Patel, for instance, said in at least one podcast interview before becoming director that Epstein’s “black book” was under the “direct control of the director of the FBI.”
The administration had an early stumble in February when far-right influencers were invited to the White House in February and provided by Bondi with binders marked “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “Declassified” that contained documents that had largely already been in the public domain.
After the first release fell flat, Bondi said officials were poring over a “truckload” of previously withheld evidence she said had been handed over by the FBI and raised expectations of forthcoming releases.
But after a weekslong review of evidence in the government’s possession, the Justice Department said last month that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” The department noted that much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
Faced with fury from the base, Trump sought to quickly turn the page, shutting down questioning of Bondi about Epstein at a White House Cabinet meeting and deriding as “weaklings” supporters who he said were falling for the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”
During a Cabinet meeting, President Trump interrupted as Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked about Jeffrey Epstein and criticized ongoing media focus on the case.