GOP House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer said he plans to commence contempt of Congress proceedings against Bill and Hillary Clinton for ignoring the committee’s subpoenas related to its ongoing probe into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Earlier this summer, in July, a bipartisan House Oversight Subcommittee approved motions to subpoena Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as a slew of other high-profile political figures, to aid its investigation looking into how the federal government handled Epstein’s sex trafficking case. The subpoenas were then sent out in early August, with the Clinton’s scheduled to testify on Dec. 17 and 18.
“It has been more than four months since Bill and Hillary Clinton were subpoenaed to sit for depositions related to our investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s horrific crimes. Throughout that time, the former President and former Secretary of State have delayed, obstructed, and largely ignored the Committee staff’s efforts to schedule their testimony,” Comer said in a press release put out Friday evening.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her husband, former U.S. president Bill Clinton. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“If the Clintons fail to appear for their depositions next week or schedule a date for early January, the Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings to hold them accountable.”
Comer’s threats come as Democrats from the House Oversight Committee released a new batch of photos obtained from Epstein’s estate, which included further images of the disgraced financier with powerful figures like President Donald Trump and former President Clinton. Thousands of images were reportedly released, with potentially more to come.
Other high-profile figures subpoenaed by the Oversight Committee include James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller, William Barr, Jeff Sessions, and Alberto Gonzales.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is leading a probe into how the federal government handled the case against disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images; Neil Rasmus/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
In addition to testimony from these individuals, Comer and the Oversight Committee also issued subpoenas to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for all documents and communications pertaining to the case against Epstein.
In September, the committee released tens-of-thousands of pages of Epstein-related records in compliance with the subpoena, and the Oversight Committee indicated that the DOJ would continue producing even more records as it works through needed redactions and other measures that must occur before they are released.
From Left to Right: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump.(Getty Images)
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight panel, told reporters that the tranche of photos the committee received from Epstein’s estate includes images of “powerful men,” women and the late disgraced financier’s properties. He emphasized that Democrats are committed to transparency and vowed to release all the information they receive.
Garcia said the committee received the photos “just last night” and had so far gone through roughly 25,000 of the 95,000 images that Epstein’s estate turned over. Some of the photos were sent to Epstein, while others he took himself, the California Democrat said. He called some of the yet-to-be-released photos “incredibly disturbing.”
“The thing right now that’s the most important is there is one man who has the power to release the files and get to the truth and bring justice to the survivors, and that’s Donald Trump. And Donald Trump right now needs to release the files to the American public so that the truth can come out and actually get some sense of justice for the survivors,” he told reporters.
Garcia said the committee needs to issue subpoenas to get the emails tied to the photos, as well as records from several banks that did business with Epstein. When asked about the redactions in the images, he said, “Our commitment from day one has been to redact any photo, any information that could lead to any sort of harm to any of the victims, and we’ve been committed to that, and we’ll continue to do that.”
Garcia accused the White House of engaging in a “cover-up.”
“That needs to end,” he said. “There are women who were now, who were raped when they were children, who just want justice. Let’s release the files immediately.”
In recent weeks, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released tens of thousands of documents from the Jeffrey Epstein estate, reams of emails and photographs that have provided additional details about the private life of the sex-trafficking financier and the prominent people in his orbit. The committee says it received 95,000 new images from the estate on Thursday and has now released 19 photos that depict Epstein with several high-profile figures, including Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. However, the panel did not include captions describing who or what is depicted in the photos, or when or where they were taken. “These disturbing images raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world,” the committee Democrats wrote on social media. Here, what’s included in the new tranche of photos, and what we’ve been able to discern about them.
In one photo, Trump is smiling surrounded by six women whose faces have been redacted. In another, Trump is seated aboard a plan next to a blonde woman whose face has also been obscured.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
One image depicts a younger Trump standing beside Epstein and a laughing blonde woman at what appears to be a public event. CBS News notes that Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria’s Secret “Angel’s Party” in New York, which the estate-released photo appears to resemble.
The estate released an image of a photo signed by Clinton. In the photo, Clinton can seen standing next to Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell as well as Epstein himself.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
In one photo, Gates is pictured next to Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the son of Queen Elizabeth II whose association with Epstein and resulting allegations resulted in the loss of his royal titles. In another, Gates is seen standing in front of a plane beside an unknown pilot. In another image, a framed photo of Gates, apparently aboard a plane, can be seen on the wall above a dresser.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Again, the Committee provided no context for these images.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Trump adviser Steve Bannon is included in multiple photos. In one, Bannon is seated across from Epstein, who is behind a desk in what appears to be his office. In the other image, Bannon and Epstein can be seen taking a mirror selfie together. Bannon is also pictured talking with Woody Allen in a separate image.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
One photo shows Epstein speaking with the director, who is sitting in a directors chair, on an unknown set. Another shows Epstein, Allen, and a woman whose face is redacted sitting around a dinner table.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
One photo depicts Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, his wife, Harvard professor Elisa New, and Woody Allen on what appears to be a private plane.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
In one image, Epstein is seen in an apparent outdoor tropical location with British billionaire Richard Branson, who is holding up a notebook with unidentifiable writing on it.
Photo: U.S. House Oversight Committee
In one photo, Epstein is seen wearing a Harvard University sweatshirt standing next to attorney Alan Dershowitz.
Karine Silva, who says she was abused by Jeffrey Epstein at 17, with her attorney Jordan Merson at City Hall Park prior to the vote on legislation reopening civil-claims windows for survivors.
Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
A woman who says she was abused by convicted sex offender and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein at 17 is preparing to file a lawsuit against the dead financier’s estate after the New York City Council on Tuesday passed legislation reopening a one-year window for survivors of gender-motivated violence to bring civil claims.
Karine Silva, who publicly disclosed for the first time last month that she was abused by Epstein, told amNewYork on Tuesday that she was introduced to Epstein by a friend at age 17 with the promise of a job as a masseuse at his Upper East Side townhouse. Instead, she said, sexual abuse occurred.
Silva did not provide details of the alleged abuse, only that it took place around 2000, the same time one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, Virginia Giuffre, then 16, was introduced to him.
Giuffre later sued Epstein in 2009 and his convicted accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, in 2015, claiming she was drawn into a sex-trafficking operation in which Epstein and Maxwell exploited her and introduced her to influential associates. Giuffre, 41, died by suicide earlier this year at her home in Australia.
Epstein survivor sees second chance for justice
Silva, now 42 and a mother of two, said she was not ready for years to come forward about the abuse she suffered at Epstein’s hands. She said she did not understand the legal deadlines that would later be used to block her from pursuing a case.
“I wasn’t ready to come out, and I wasn’t aware that the statute of limitations was something that was going to stop me from seeking justice,” she said.
Her attorney, Jordan Merson, who represents several victims of Epstein, said Silva reached out to his office after encountering the legal barrier of the statute of limitations.
“When she called the firm, we wanted to help,” Merson said, noting that the call came as momentum was building for the new amendment, Intro. 1297. “When I first proposed that she could become a powerful voice in this fight because of what was done to her, she decided to take it.”
Merson said he intends to file Silva’s suit as soon as the window opens.
“The New York City Council has shown by action that it stands with sexual abuse survivors and not the sex traffickers like Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. “Anyone who at this point tries to undo or defeat this bill will be telling the whole world that they want to protect Jeffrey Epstein and other sex traffickers and not help sexual abuse victims.”
Merson asked Silva to share her story with the council, believing she could become a powerful voice in the effort to secure the passage of the legislation reopening civil-claims windows for survivors.Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
If signed into law by Mayor Eric Adams, the legislation, sponsored by Queens Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers and supported by more than 40 co-sponsors, will reopen the Gender-Motivated Violence Act (GMVA) “lookback” period. It also clarifies that survivors may sue not only alleged perpetrators but also institutions that enabled abuse, regardless of when it occurred.
When Silva first publicly identified herself during an October Council hearing, she testified that she struggles daily with how she was abused, but that she cannot afford mental health treatments.
On Tuesday, Silva said the passage of Intro. 1297 restores her ability to move forward.
“Today, thanks to the New York City Council, I get my voice back as a survivor,” she said at a press conference outside City Hall. “Now I can try to seek justice for all the harm I suffered.”
The bill now heads to Mayor Adams. If enacted, the window, slated to open in 2026, will allow Silva and other survivors whose cases were dismissed earlier this year to seek civil accountability from Epstein’s estate and institutions they say allowed the abuse to occur.
Silva’s potential legal action follows Congress passing and President Donald Trump signing legislation requiring the Justice Department to release all Epstein records before Christmas.
In July 2025, the FBI reported that its review of the files revealed Epstein had more than 1,000 victims.
Epstein was first investigated in 2005 in Florida for paying a 14-year-old for sex and later avoided federal charges through a secret plea deal, serving 13 months in a work-release program. In 2019, he was charged with sex trafficking in Manhattan and died by suicide a month later. In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking and is serving 20 years in prison.
Imagine, for a moment, that you first heard the name Larry Summers last week, when he showed up on what I’ve called Planet Epstein. That planet is an information ecosystem where all major global events are connected to the sex-trafficking conspiracy that supposedly rules the world. This is a metaphorical place, but not an imaginary one—you can find it on YouTube and in certain corners of TikTok and other social-media platforms. As a moderately informed citizen of Planet Epstein, you have recently learned that Summers set much of the economic policy for three Presidents, including Bill Clinton, whom you already suspected had his own list of mentions in the Epstein files, which you are impatiently, if not optimistically, waiting for the government to fully disclose. You have also learned that Summers, who corresponded with Epstein as late as July, 2019, was previously the president of Harvard University and used his considerable influence not only to bring in money for pet projects—including a poetry initiative spearheaded by his wife—but to help shape the direction of higher education in this country more generally. You learned that this lifelong liberal appeared to be seeking a romantic relationship with a mentee and was asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice about it. You learned that the woman he seemed to be chasing is the daughter of China’s former vice-minister of finance. You even heard that Summers and Epstein had a code name for this Asian woman, Peril—possibly in reference to “Yellow Peril.” (After the exchange between Summers and Epstein was made public, Summers released a statement saying that he was “deeply ashamed” of his relationship with Epstein.) And what have you learned about Summers’s more recent activities? Well, until last week, he was on the board of OpenAI, the company that you believe will shape the entire future of America. And, above all, you learned that the most powerful men in this country are more pathetic, predatory, and corrupt than you or any of your friends.
What conclusions do you draw from your quick introduction to Summers, which, presumably, you stitched together from YouTube Shorts, Wikipedia, and ChatGPT? More to the point, if you believe yourself to be a rational person who draws inferences based on the evidence in front of you, what should you believe?
In the past few months, I have been trying to gauge how much of the American public is now convinced that a cabal of pedophiles runs the world. Polls have shown that a significant majority of the country believes that the government has been hiding information about Epstein’s clients and about his death. But there is a difference between suspecting a coverup and going full Pizzagate-conspiracy mode, drawing connections among Summers, Epstein, Trump, Bill Clinton, Mossad, and the sudden rise of the A.I. industry, which now seems to be propping up a large part of the world economy—and then concluding that some shadowy group of oligarchs rules us all.
There are some indicators, however, that Planet Epstein has begun to eclipse our previous home. Congress, for example, voted 427–1 to mandate that the Department of Justice publish “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” linked to its investigation and prosecution of Epstein. That result owed a good deal to Marjorie Taylor Greene, who used to garner national attention primarily as the butt of jokes, but who, prior to her surprise announcement on Friday that she will resign from office in January, had become one of the most visible—and, yes, increasingly respected—politicians in the country. And the fall of powerful figures such as Summers, who escaped scrutiny in the earlier flareups of the Epstein story, suggests that there is a capitulation taking place. Anecdotally, I do not know a single person in my life who truly thinks that this is the end of the story or that every guilty party has been revealed. More crucially, Trump, who can usually count on a third of the country to accept whatever version of the truth he offers, found almost zero audience for his claim of an “Epstein Hoax”—the narrative that continued attention to Epstein is a Democratic plot to embroil his great Administration in scandal and distract from the “greatness” that Republicans are accomplishing. At the very least, elected officials—including those, such as Greene, who have spent the past decade serving as faithful Trump acolytes—have begun to fear the public’s wrath on this issue.
I believe we are in the middle of a quietly revolutionary moment in this country, which began with the pandemic and the protests stemming from the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. (I suppose that this column is, more than anything, an attempt to chronicle that revolution.) The precipitating factors can be traced back as far as you like, but the shift became evident during the lockdowns, with the sight of millions of people taking to the streets and the displays of supposed capitulation from members of Congress kneeling at the Capitol and major corporations meekly putting out “social-justice” messages on social media—which, of course, occurred alongside red-state fights about quarantines and, later, vaccine mandates. That moment did not lead to a change in the world order, but it decimated whatever authority “the establishment” had left in this country. The subsequent unrest has taken on a variety of forms, including a continued and drastic decline in trust of the traditional news media and attacks on universities from both the left and the right. It was also channelled into Trump’s 2024 campaign, which was less about any one issue than it was about a renewed and utterly hollow promise to drain the swamp all over again.
What that insurrectionary energy sought was a single theory of the world, ideally one that did not rely on partisan leanings—or, really, on politics at all. Epstein has provided that. Lest we forget, Epstein died more than six years ago now, and although the story certainly had not been forgotten by the public, it had at least been moved to a low-heat back burner when Greene; Thomas Massie, a U.S. representative from Kentucky; and a handful of other politicians began to talk about the Epstein files again. The ham-fisted response from the Trump Administration certainly didn’t quiet things. The fact that an increasing number of Americans, spurred on by the war in Gaza and by new-media commentators across the political spectrum, were starting to question the influence that Israel had on Washington, D.C., has also played a role.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department renewed its request Monday to unseal Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking grand jury materials, saying Congress made clear in approving the release of investigative materials related to the prosecution of the late financier that documents such as the court records should be released.
U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton signed the submission in Manhattan federal court asking that the judge issue an expedited ruling allowing the materials to be released now that President Donald Trump signed the action requiring the release of documents related to Epstein within 30 days.
The Justice Department said the Congressional action overrode existing law in a way that permits the unsealing of the grand jury records.
Judge Richard Berman previously denied a Trump administration request to make the Epstein grand jury transcripts public.
Berman, who presided over Epstein’s 2019 case, ruled in August that a “significant and compelling reason” to deny the request and keep the transcripts sealed was that information contained in the transcripts “pales in comparison” to investigative information and materials already in the Justice Department’s possession.
Berman wrote that the government’s 100,000 pages of Epstein files and materials “dwarf the 70 odd pages of Epstein grand jury materials” and that the grand jury testimony “is merely a hearsay snippet of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged conduct.”
Two other judges have also denied the public release of material from investigations into Epstein’s decades-long sexual abuse of young women and girls.
The Justice Department has said that the only witness to testify before the Epstein grand jury was an FBI agent who, the judge noted, “had no direct knowledge of the facts of the case and whose testimony was mostly hearsay.”
The agent testified on June 18, 2019, and July 2, 2019. The rest of the grand jury presentation consisted of a PowerPoint slideshow and a call log. The July 2 session ended with grand jurors voting to indict Epstein.
Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019. He was found dead in his cell at a Manhattan federal jail on Aug. 10, 2019 in what authorities have ruled a suicide.
The video in the player above is from an earlier report.
Trumpworld schism: On Friday night, MAGA Queen Marjorie Taylor Greene announced her resignation from Congress. “I’ve always represented the common American man and woman as a member of the House of Representatives, which is why I’ve always been despised in Washington, D.C. and just never fit in. Americans are used by the political industrial complex of both political parties, election cycle after election cycle, in order to elect whichever side can convince Americans to hate the other side more,” the Georgia Republican said in her resignation video:
Greene struck predictably populist America First notes (“Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars always fund foreign wars, foreign aid, and foreign interests”) and mapped her disagreements with the president (“H1Bs replacing American jobs, AI state moratoriums, debt for life 50 year mortgage scams, standing strongly against all involvement in foreign wars, and demanding the release of the Epstein files”) while touting her loyalty. Read her full statement here.
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Until recently, Greene and President Donald Trump seemed to be thick as thieves. But the Epstein files tore them asunder, with Greene positioning herself as an ardent advocate for full transparency while Trump (until recently) refused to go along. The president, pissed off by Greene’s adamance, disavowed her and started publicly musing about how someone should mount a primary challenge, calling his once-loyal acolyte a “ranting lunatic.”
The Epstein issue wedged the door open for Greene to raise more grievances with Trump, especially the idea that he’s been getting distracted from his domestic agenda and hasn’t delivered much financial relief to the American people. The conflict came to a head during the recent government shutdown. “I don’t see political party lines,” said Greene, discussing health care and the many Americans who could soon see premiums spiking. Greene criticized her own side for having no workable plan in place to prevent these higher costs.
“I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” said Trump recently. “Nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”
Many of her constituents are still behind her. “I feel like she has stood her ground,” Meredith Rosson, a 43-year-old paralegal and the chairwoman of the Republican Party in Chattooga County, toldThe New York Times. The Republican Party in Floyd County, also in Greene’s district, issued a statement of “unwavering support” for Greene as soon as she announced her resignation. “She’s realized, ‘I need to do what’s right for my community and for people who are mostly in the middle ground,’” cocktail bar/gun store owner Brandon Pledger told the Times.
Scenes from New York: “Violent crime is overwhelmingly the work of a small group of repeat offenders—that is, it is highly concentrated. The remedy, as [James Q.] Wilson argued half a century ago in his classic book Thinking About Crime, is not social engineering but incapacitation: keeping the violent few from striking again,” argues Tal Fortgang in City Journal. “In 2022, the New York Times reported that ‘nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City…involved just 327 people,’ or 0.004 percent of the population, who had been ‘arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times.’”
QUICK HITS
“We had some interesting conversation, and some of his ideas really are the same ideas I have,” President Donald Trump said of his Friday meeting with incoming New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. “The new word is affordability.” They appeared to be rather fond of each other, and Trump was in peak form:
Q: Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?
“It’s not as though [Tucker] Carlson’s decision to platform [Nick] Fuentes—a Gen Z livestreamer with a history of making Holocaust jokes, who predictably used his appearance on Carlson’s show to rail against ‘organized Jewry in America’—came out of nowhere. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the former Fox News star left the world of responsible politics behind long ago,” writesReason‘s Stephanie Slade. “Not that [Heritage President Kevin] Roberts seemed to care….Once you crawl into bed with the likes of Tucker Carlson, you’re stuck. What you told yourself was a strategic play for relevance can turn out to be a deal with the devil instead.”
“Exchange-traded funds investing in Bitcoin are heading for their worst month of outflows since launching nearly two years ago, piling yet more pressure on a jaded crypto market,” reportsBloomberg. “Investors have pulled $3.5 billion from the US-listed Bitcoin ETFs so far in November, almost equaling the previous monthly record for outflows of $3.6 billion set in February, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. BlackRock Inc.’s Bitcoin fund IBIT, which accounts for about 60% of the cohort’s assets, has registered $2.2 billion in redemptions in November, meaning it will slump to its worst month barring a sharp reversal.”
North Carolina’s Republicans aren’t so sure about the federal immigration raids in their districts.
London — Pressure is increasing on the former Prince Andrew to give evidence to a U.S. congressional committee investigating convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Britain’s prime minister suggested he should testify.
Keir Starmer declined to comment directly about King Charles III’s disgraced younger brother but told reporters traveling with him for the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg that as a “general principle,” people should provide evidence to investigators.
“I don’t comment on his particular case,” Starmer said. “But as a general principle I’ve held for a very long time is that anybody who has got relevant information in relation to these kind of cases should give that evidence to those that need it.”
Starmer’s comments came after Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat from Virginia, said Andrew “continues to hide” from serious questions.
“Our work will move forward with or without him, and we will hold anyone who was involved in these crimes accountable, no matter their wealth, status or political party,” they said in a statement released on Friday. “We will get justice for the survivors.”
The situation around Venezuela has Americans asking to know more.
Across party lines, big majorities say the administration needs to explain what the U.S. intends regarding any action, and that it has not done so clearly yet.
Meanwhile, what Americans hear from the White House about inflation is, they say, not what they’re actually feeling at home: rising prices and worsening economic views.
In the meantime, Americans do not think of Venezuela as a major threat to the US. Instead, more see a minor one, and they are largely opposed to potential military action.
So, the idea of potential U.S. military action in Venezuela meets with widespread disapproval. It doesn’t get overwhelming backing from Republicans either.
Three in four Americans also say Trump would need congressional approval before taking military action in Venezuela, including just over half of Republicans.
Just one in five Americans have heard a lot about the U.S. military buildup in the first place. That may be another expression of that sense of limited information about the purpose.
The current military attacks on boats suspected of bringing drugs find division — just over half approve, driven by nearly universal support among Republicans — though Americans overall overwhelmingly say they should see the evidence that there are drugs.
However, most Americans don’t think U.S. military action in Venezuela would change the amount of drugs coming into the U.S.
Looking more closely within the president’s GOP base: MAGA Republicans are actually more supportive of potential military action than non-MAGA ones.
For context, that is similar to what we’ve seen over time on many issues, including foreign policy, in which that part of the base is largely deferential to the president. (As one example, MAGA was also supportive of the bombing in Iran months ago.) Most of them say the president has explained things, and in turn, are more apt to see any action in Venezuela as decreasing the amount of drugs entering the U.S.
But many who are opposed to military action, including those within the GOP ranks, may also be seeing this in terms of issue priorities. They’re a little more likely to judge the administration on what it does about the economy than those in favor. And most who judge him on the economy think he isn’t spending enough time on it.
Here’s what Americans say about the economy
There’s a disconnect between how Americans hear the White House describing the economy, and what they’re feeling themselves.
Most Americans say Trump describes things with prices and inflation as better than they really are.
(This includes four in 10 Republicans who say this about Trump. They are also among those more likely to say prices are going up.)
This comes as ratings for the overall economy continue to be low — as they’ve been for years — ticking down this week to their lowest mark in 2025.
Prices, more generally, are still seen by most as going up.
As we head into the holiday season, that economic dissatisfaction includes the majority of Americans who feel President Trump’s policies are making the cost of food and groceries, specifically, go up.
So, that disconnect appears to continue to weigh on the president’s ratings.
There are many ways Americans judge a president. For those who say they judge Mr. Trump most on what he does about the economy and inflation, they overwhelmingly say he isn’t spending enough time on that.
That, in turn, has continued to push his approval on handling the economy and inflation down over the course of several months. That trend continues this week, with assessments of the overall economy, and his ratings for handling the economy and inflation, hitting lows for the year.
More than two-thirds disapprove of his handling of inflation.
He does especially poorly on handling the economy among people who mainly judge him on that.
Among independents, his ratings for handling the economy, and his ratings overall, have also hit lows for the year. That has continued to push his approval rating overall lower over time too, now down to their low point for his second term after a steady decline over recent months.
The president does a little better on his handling of immigration, backed by continued large support from the GOP base, as has been the case for months.
The decline in the president’s overall approval ratings connects to people’s economic priorities in this way: even among those who voted for him in 2024, disapproval today is more likely to come when people are judging him mostly on the economy.
Deportation
The administration’s deportation program continues to split the country, but support is underpinned by strong approval from Republicans.
Most — particularly those outside the GOP base — continue to feel that ICE is detaining more people than necessary.
But the deportation program is seen by many as more undermining than strengthening the economy.
One possible reason: a third of the country (who tend to live in cities and suburbs) say it is impacting their community for the worse, and they feel people in their area are staying home more as a result of the program.
Epstein files
Americans across party lines think it is important to see the Epstein files released.
Americans overwhelmingly believe they will contain damaging information about powerful people. Most say it’s too soon to know if what’s in them is true. On balance, though, more think that information will be true rather than false.
Republicans are more satisfied with how the Trump administration is handling the Epstein case than they were in the summer. (The survey was conducted just after Trump said Congress should vote to release the files, which they did shortly thereafter.) Today, most others are not satisfied.
However, the president’s Republican base says issues surrounding the files are not important to how they judge him. Nearly two-thirds of Republicans say this doesn’t affect how they evaluate Trump overall. (Independents and Democrats, though, give it comparably more importance in this regard.)
This CBS News/YouGov survey was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 2,489 U.S. adults interviewed between November 19-21, 2025. The sample was weighted to be representative of adults nationwide according to gender, age, race, and education, based on the U.S. Census American Community Survey and Current Population Survey, as well as 2024 presidential vote. The margin of error is ±2.4 points.
Britain’s Prince Andrew, *** prince no more, his brother King Charles officially starting the process of stripping Andrew of his remaining royal titles and evicting him from the royal estate in Windsor. It’s the royal family’s strongest response yet to the disgraced Prince’s links to. Late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It’s *** moment about justice, right? Epstein’s survivor Danielle Binsky responding to the news Thursday. I think it was incredibly hopeful for survivors, and it’s *** glimmer of hope that we haven’t seen, um, in *** really long time, if ever. The years-long controversy over Andrew’s friendship with Epstein intensified after the release of *** posthumous memoir by Virginia Giuffre, who alleged Andrew sexually assaulted her when she was *** teenager. Andrew has repeatedly denied all allegations against him. He claimed he never met Giuffre, who died by suicide in April at the age of 41. On Thursday, her family released *** statement reading in part, quote, Today, an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family brought down *** British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage. Giuffre’s brother also spoke out on Thursday. I think this is *** big sense of vindication for her from. Not just the general public, but from the king himself to say I stand by survivors. Buckingham Palace also released *** statement reading in part, quote, Their Majesties’ wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been and will remain with the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse. I’m Reid Benyon reporting.
UK leader suggests former Prince Andrew should testify in US investigation into Jeffrey Epstein
Pressure is increasing for the former Prince Andrew to give evidence to a U.S. congressional committee investigating the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Britain’s prime minister suggested he should testify.Keir Starmer declined to comment directly about King Charles III’s disgraced younger brother, but told reporters traveling with him for the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg that as a “general principle” people should provide evidence to investigators.”I don’t comment on his particular case,” Starmer said. “But as a general principle I’ve held for a very long time is that anybody who has got relevant information in relation to these kind of cases should give that evidence to those that need it.”The former prince, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has so far ignored a request from members of the House Oversight Committee for a “transcribed interview” about his “long-standing friendship” with Epstein. Andrew was stripped of his royal titles and honors last month as the royal family tried to insulate itself from criticism about his relationship with Epstein.Starmer’s comments came after Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat from Virginia, said Andrew “continues to hide” from serious questions.”Our work will move forward with or without him, and we will hold anyone who was involved in these crimes accountable, no matter their wealth, status or political party,” they said in a statement released on Friday. “We will get justice for the survivors.”
Pressure is increasing for the former Prince Andrew to give evidence to a U.S. congressional committee investigating the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein after Britain’s prime minister suggested he should testify.
Keir Starmer declined to comment directly about King Charles III’s disgraced younger brother, but told reporters traveling with him for the Group of 20 summit in Johannesburg that as a “general principle” people should provide evidence to investigators.
“I don’t comment on his particular case,” Starmer said. “But as a general principle I’ve held for a very long time is that anybody who has got relevant information in relation to these kind of cases should give that evidence to those that need it.”
The former prince, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, has so far ignored a request from members of the House Oversight Committee for a “transcribed interview” about his “long-standing friendship” with Epstein. Andrew was stripped of his royal titles and honors last month as the royal family tried to insulate itself from criticism about his relationship with Epstein.
Starmer’s comments came after Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, and Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat from Virginia, said Andrew “continues to hide” from serious questions.
“Our work will move forward with or without him, and we will hold anyone who was involved in these crimes accountable, no matter their wealth, status or political party,” they said in a statement released on Friday. “We will get justice for the survivors.”
Lawrence H. Summers, the former Harvard president and one of the country’s most renowned economists, is facing the worst scandal of his career after newly released emails showed him seeking advice from Jeffrey Epstein on how to seduce a young economic mentee long after the notorious financier’s 2008 sex-crimes conviction. This isn’t Summers’s first time in the hot seat, as Richard Bradley knows all too well. The author detailed many of Summers’s past scandals, his subsequent comebacks, and his unlikely path to becoming Harvard’s leader in 2005’s Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University. That book, with its account of Summers routinely butting heads with faculty and staff, largely predicted his resignation as president a short time later after public outrage over remarks denigrating women scientists. I asked Bradley to break down what the latest Epstein revelations tell us about Summers’s ascent to the topof academia and politics, his public fall, and whether or not this is really the reckoning that many think it is.
By this point you’ve probably seen the video of Summers opening his economics class at Harvard this week by acknowledging his “shame” over his correspondence with Epstein. Which has brought us to this sort of viral moment where Harvard students are noting that their esteemed professor is standing before the class and admitting he is “in the Epstein files.” It feels like an unthinkable moment for the university — how damning is this, reputation-wise, for both Summers and Harvard? Well, that’s the $64,000 question, because the answer to it probably determines whether Larry Summers can retain his status as a university professor or even a tenured professor at Harvard.
And it sounds like he is planning on staying? Oh, it does. It certainly does. The fact that he obtained that position after he resigned as president of Harvard in 2006 was essential for him because it was a perfect position for him to rebuild his career and to rebuild his image. It’s not a position that requires a lot of work — Summers can teach a lecture course in his sleep. And I think the professional obligations of it, frankly, are not high.
It would stand to reason that it would also be the position from which he would try to launch a comeback again. The funny thing is that Larry Summers has been so damaging to the Harvard brand, not just in 2006 but earlier when he was criticizing the antisemitism that he saw on campus. It’s an unusual thing for a former university president to criticize the university, and typically not done, because implicitly it’s a criticism of the current president and it certainly makes the work of the current president trickier. And now again with his association with Jeffrey Epstein. And of course, it’s not the first time that association has gotten him in trouble, but it’s certainly on another level now.
The irony is that for someone who has always been so critical of Harvard, he needs Harvard. And so I think he will fight very hard not to lose that position. And it will be fascinating to see what Harvard does, because, you know, there are more emails to come. I expect that nobody knows. I imagine Summers doesn’t know what those emails might contain. Harvard certainly doesn’t.
I know he’s come back from so many scandals, from backlash during his time at the World Bank over a memo about dumping toxic waste in poor countries to apparently questioning women’s cognitive abilities while president of Harvard. There are critics out there kind of celebrating this and saying, “Yeah it’s about time.” Do you think this is overdue? I don’t know that I see this as some kind of karmic justice. Look, there are a lot of people who think that Summers is a jerk. And a lot of times he is a jerk. It’s true. In my Politico piece, I went out of my way to include that anecdote about the Winklevoss twins, at the Aspen Institute, saying he called them assholes. Because it has bothered me for years, the idea that a former president of Harvard would make a joke about former students and call them assholes in a public forum. It’s like Trump calling someone “Piggy.” It’s not right.
That was another thing you mentioned in your Politico column. There are some similarities between Trump and Summers. Barring any intellectual comparisons, they’ve both weathered all these scandals and managed somehow to come back. They both appeal to a certain type of American constituency that is tired of nuance, tired of negotiations, tired of ambiguity. People who want a certain masculine, gendered masculine approach to clarity and “boldness,” and “vision.” There are people who like this style.
The fact is Trump and Summers possibly have some overlap in terms of their criticism of both Harvard and universities in general. Summers hates “woke” faculty; he hates left-wing students. This is not new. Summers is, of course, much more intellectual and learned, and smarter in many ways.
I don’t think this started for Summers with Jeffrey Epstein. I think he has always had this kind of boorish, vulgar, and sometimes sexist side of him.
I don’t want to try and get inside his head too much, but why do you think he did turn to Epstein, of all people, for these personal matters in the first place? You got into it a little bit in your book, this idea that he’s attracted to power. It’s celebrity. It’s a weird word to use in this context, but there are celebrities in the kinds of worlds that Larry Summers inhabits, and he’s one of them. He probably likes that more than he likes being professor, although I think he does enjoy teaching, and I think he values the field of economics and takes it very seriously. But if he took it really seriously, he wouldn’t have had the career that he’s had.
To go back to your question, I do think I agree with you — his mind is a complicated place. So it is difficult to figure it out, but I think there’s a couple things. There is this side which does not want to be a geek. He wants to be cool. And he definitely wants to be seen that way, to be leading a life where he kind of gets to do these things that are taboo and get away with it. I also think that Summers might have seen in Epstein another individual who had broken the rules, violated social norms, offended women — I know Epstein did more than that to women — and being marginalized, to some degree, as a result. And I think there might have been some sense of solidarity there. And I don’t mean to suggest that Summers was engaging in the behaviors that Epstein was — there’s no sign of that.
I think the most alarming thing about what he was saying to Epstein is that he described this woman as a mentee. How could he keep teaching at Harvard after that? I think that is really kind of a hard stop. You have Summers clearly articulating a relationship in which he seems to have no moral qualms with violating a standard of behavior that professors really do take incredibly seriously, even though some of them do occasionally violate it. So I don’t see how he gets back. I think something that has not gotten enough attention was the fact that Summers and Epstein referred to her as “peril.” I don’t know how you get over that, either. It’s gross.
Years after that scandal with the World Bank memo, he said he didn’t want to be seen as weak by telling people it was a member of his staff who’d written it, so he sort of fell on his sword. I do wonder if we’ll see the same thing here: He won’t want to be seen as weak and therefore won’t give up without a fight? There’s not a chance that Larry Summers wants the first paragraph of his obituary to read that he was forced to resign from Harvard twice.
I think these two sides of Summers have always co-existed. I would say that there was always this quality of thinking that the rules didn’t really apply to him. He would try to comport with them when incumbent upon him.
I see some of his critics arguing that he was wrongly exalted and that he has been wrong on economic issues plenty of times that just never got as much attention. He was portrayed as uniquely brilliant, but is there a chance that wasn’t true? When people say he’s brilliant or how smart he is, they never qualify that with any sense of in what way he’s smart, in what way he’s brilliant. Which is to say, I’ve seen Summers achieve two things: to be absorbing huge amounts of information, process it, come up with insightful conclusions about it, almost sometimes on the spot — it’s pretty impressive. On the other hand, that perception of his being exceptional is heightened by the kind of oddness of his presentation and the certitude of his manner. Summers never says, “This could be true, but it might not be true.” He says, “This is true.” That mixture of an unquestionably formidable mind with these personality quirks that sometimes in popular culture are associated with genius, with an unflinching certitude of personal correctness, gets woven into this big ball of “good.”
If you step back and say, Where has he been right, where has he been wrong? What are his big ideas, how much has he changed the field of economics? In what ways is he smart, in what ways is he really not smart at all? In what ways would you look at things he’s done and say, “That was kind of stupid”? Then the question of Summers’s brilliance becomes much more nuanced.
It’s the kind of brilliance that in a certain sector of the population is awarded primacy over other kinds of intelligence. For example, in the financial world, in certain parts of the university world, in the tech world, someone whose mind works like Summers’s does, which is kind of like a computer, is really valued and admired and respected regardless of personal failings. But if people had said, “Well, what about emotional intelligence, what about diplomatic intelligence, what about intuition,” they would look at you and say, “Why do those things matter?”
So it’s not a well-rounded intelligence; it’s a very specific and kind of narrow sort of intelligence.
I think that we have overlooked personal challenges and some of his intellectual mistakes because he walks into a room and we constantly award him that presumption of intelligence without really considering the nature and the limits of his particular kind of intelligence. So we’re looking at an incomplete data set and concluding that it’s brilliant.
What does that say about the politics of power today? I don’t think emotional intelligence is a particularly valued quality. The funny thing about this is that the kind of intelligence that Summers has, and that people like about him, is very much — and this is not my perception — a stereotypically male kind of intelligence. Like, “He’s an asshole, but he’s really smart.” And so when Summers talks about women’s kind of intelligence, to me the statement he’s making is, “It’s not my kind of intelligence.” He really is a product of an incredibly competitive, masculine-dominated academic gladiatorial arena.
Two of his uncles were Nobel laureates, as you mention in your book, and I wonder if in some way he’s tried to defy that expectation of him. One of my arguments in the book was that he’s realized that he was not as fine-minded and of the same caliber as his uncles. And also that maybe this wasn’t the life that he wanted to lead. One of the things I think really shaped him that people don’t talk about is the fact that he’s a cancer survivor. It was pretty serious, and he could’ve died. And he was young. So I think there’s a sense that he’s escaped his fate more than once: cancer, losing his presidency, scandal at the World Bank. He’s played with fire multiple times in his life. But I don’t think this one gets extinguished quite so easily.
Can you see him fading for a couple years and then making a comeback? There are people who would hire him. I’ve heard people make the argument, “Well, he didn’t commit any crimes — maybe he didn’t know the extent of Epstein’s behavior.” People inclined to like that sort of personality will find ways to whitewash this. I think the question is not whether he’ll be able to come back; it’s what that comeback will look like, and whether it will be satisfying for him, and whether Harvard has to be, psychologically, a part of that comeback. Because it still matters to him. As much as he criticizes Harvard, his relationship with the university and the prestige that it accords him still matters.
The Justice Department on Friday asked a court to unseal grand jury transcripts in the sex trafficking cases of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
The motion, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida by Attorney General Pam Bondi, follows the congressional passage this week of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bill that compels the Justice Department to release all unclassified records related to Epstein within 30 days.
“In the light of the Act’s clear mandate, the Court should authorize the Department of Justice to release the grand jury transcripts and lift any preexisting protective orders that would otherwise prevent public disclosure,” the Justice Department wrote in its motion.
It stated that it would “make appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information.”
The motion, which was also signed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and U.S. Attorney Jason Quinones, asks the court to “lift any and all preexisting protective orders that would prevent the Department from complying with the Act.”
The Justice Department filed an expedited ruling given the Epstein Act’s 30-day deadline.
President Trump, who at one time had a friendship with Epstein and had been against the bill, dropped his opposition and signed it into law on Wednesday. Mr. Trump, who cut ties with Epstein years ago, has not been accused of wrongdoing.
In July 2019, a New York federal grand jury indicted Epstein on child sex trafficking charges, about five weeks before he was found dead in a Manhattan jail. His death was later ruled a suicide.
Then, in June 2020, a New York federal grand jury indicted Maxwell, Epstein’s former partner, of conspiring with Epstein and helping to facilitate and operate his sex trafficking ring. She was convicted in December 2021 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
This marks the latest attempt by the Justice Department to unseal Epstein and Maxwell’s grand jury records.
In August, a New York judge denied a similar Justice Department request to unseal grand jury material in the Maxwell case, arguing that anyone “who reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled. There is no ‘there’ there.”
Epstein, a wealthy financier known for his connections to political elites and high-profile people, was under federal probes for decades over allegations of sex trafficking. In 2008, he pleaded guilty in Florida to state charges of soliciting prostitution in exchange for having a federal case against him dropped. He served 13 months in county jail and had to register as a sex offender.
The Epstein case received renewed attention starting in July when the Justice Department released a two-page memo stating that a “systematic review” had “revealed” that Epstein had “incriminating ‘client list,’ and that “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”
The memo, which prompted an outcry from Epstein accusers, came after Bondi had said in a February interview that there was an Epstein client list “sitting on my desk right now.”
Several batches of Epstein-linked documents have been intermittently released throughout the years. The latest such release occurred earlier this month, when a tranche of tens of thousands of pages of documents were released by both House Democrats and the House Oversight Committee.
Are you curious about the recently released emails of Jeffrey Epstein but don’t feel like clicking through thousands of cumbersome files? There’s now a way to search Epstein’s inbox in a much easier way. And it’s both interesting and creepy at the same time.
It’s called Jmail.world and it’s a project by Riley Walz and Luke Igel. They’ve built a tool that might best be described as Jeffrey Epstein Inbox Simulator ’25. At least that’s how The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel puts it. And it feels like an apt description.
Basically it looks like Gmail and it has many of the same features. And while it’s a clever way to present the tens of thousands of documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, it’s a very odd feeling to essentially be placed in the late sex trafficker’s shoes.
“The problem was that the PDFs that the above pointed to were hard to read, so we felt putting it in a familiar form with shareable links and easy to screenshot views would be helpful for people. We also wanted to focus on just the emails in that drop,” Igel told Gizmodo over email.
Idel is the co-founder of Kino, an AI video assistant that allows users to index massive amounts of video. Idel says he previously worked at SpaceX, NASA, and was an undergrad at MIT. And he built this tool with Riley Walz, who has done a number of clever projects in the past.
“Riley and I knocked this out in a few hours Wednesday night using Cursor,” Igel told Gizmodo. “This is our first real coding project together! Riley has done so much amazing stuff like this in the past as you know.”
Igel tells Gizmodo it’s “pretty much all” of the emails from the latest batch released by Congress. So while it’s an interesting project, don’t necessarily assume it’s comprehensive. But it’s still an interesting way to browse the inbox of a truly heinous man.
These emails aren’t the “Epstein files” that everyone has been clamoring for over the past few years. Those are files still held by the Department of Justice, though Congress has passed a law requiring their release. The question is whether they’ll ever see the light of day. President Trump ordered a new investigation into Epstein’s ties to powerful Democrats so many people worry that DOJ will say they can’t release any files because there’s an ongoing investigation. But time will tell.
Here’s some light — and revolting! — reading while we wait for the Epstein Files to be released (or stonewalled). You can now peruse the Jeffrey Epstein emails, recently released by Congress, in a simulated Gmail account.
Jmail is about as faithful a recreation of Gmail as you could imagine. Just like a real inbox, the messages are sorted from the most recent, up to the eve of Epstein’s 2019 arrest for the sex trafficking of minors. It includes a working search feature.
Screenshot of the Jmail project. A simulated Gmail inbox of Jeffrey Epstein, using real emails released by Congress. (Luke Igel / Riley Walz)
The US House Oversight Committee released the emails on November 12. Their revelations put Donald Trump’s relationship with the sex trafficker back in the spotlight. The president’s name appears many times in the more than 20,000 documents. In one, the late sex offender claimed Trump “knew about the girls.”
In a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein said Trump “spent hours at my house” with someone whose name was redacted. (The committee said it was a victim.) In a 2017 thread, Epstein described the current president as “worse in real life and upclose.” In 2018, the disgraced financier boasted he was “the one able to take [Trump] down.”
Another public figure who came out looking even worse than before was the Andrew formerly known as “Prince” (Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor). He told Epstein in 2011, “We’re in this together.” Then there’s former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. He stayed in touch with Epstein as recently as 2019, long after the latter’s 2008 arrest for soliciting underage sex. In the wake of the email dump, Summers was put on leave from Harvard and resigned from OpenAI’s board.
You can check out Jmail at the project’s website. Nobody will fault you if you need to shower afterward (and perhaps douse yourself in bleach).
Former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris waves to supporters as she walks on stage during her ‘107 Days’ book tour at the Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, Nov. 20, 2025, in downtown Miami, Fla.
Photo by Matias J. Ocner
mocner@miamiherald.com
Donning an all white suit and her signature silk press, former Vice President Kamala Harris walked on stage to Victoria Monet’s “On My Mama” and waved to the crowd that filled the Adrienne Arsht Center to see her on the final stop of her book tour promoting “107 Days,” detailing her historic campaign for presidency.
For an hour Thursday night at the Arsht Center’s Ziff Ballet Opera House, Harris sat across from moderator Ana Navarro, “The View” co-host and political analyst, and spoke candidly about her swift campaign for the presidency, detailing everything from the phone call from former President Joe Biden about his plans to drop out of the race and endorse her to her election night loss to Donald Trump, a chapter she called the hardest chapter to write.
“When you’ve gone through something that’s that traumatic, it takes a while before you can really talk about it,” she said. Still, Harris discussed difficult topics like whether she believed racism and sexism affected her ability to win the election with a frankness and surprisingly positive outlook.
“There is work that we have to do, but I believe that when we think about where the people are and what they want from a leader, I believe that they are embracing and accepting of the idea that there might be somebody in that position that has never looked or been like that before, but can be a leader,” she said. “And that’s why I always say I may be the first to do anything, but I will not be the last.”
Former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris discusses her book ‘107 Days’ at the Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. Nicaraguan-American strategist and commentator Ana Navarro moderated the conversation. Photo by Matias J. Ocner mocner@miamiherald.com
But the conversation shifted to the current tone in America: people’s worries about the future amid a tough economic climate and other topics dominating the national conversation, including the impending release of all case files involving Jeffrey Epstein. “Part of what we have to acknowledge is that we still have some work to do around bringing justice to vulnerable people,” Harris said, when asked about the files.
She also took aim at Trump’s use of the Department of Justice to pursue political enemies, calling it a “destruction of the rule of law.”
“It’s not a private law firm, and he’s using the [DOJ], with all of its power, to go after his political enemies,” Harris said. “There is nothing about this that is normal, and we cannot normalize it. We cannot be so overwhelmed that we just say there is nothing about this.”
Harris detailed in her book the delicate balancing act between being vice president and presidential candidate, writing candidly about being a sitting VP and navigating the responsibility of meeting with dignitaries from other countries while navigating the campaign trail in key swing states, most notably Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Harris did not make any campaign stops in Florida, where she garnered 43 percent of votes. She was not asked whether she had any regrets about skipping Florida on the campaign trail.
Former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during her ‘107 Days’ book tour in Miami. Photo by Matias J. Ocner mocner@miamiherald.com
She pushed back against those that say the United States isn’t ready for a woman president — something former First Lady Michelle Obama’s recently stated. “I’m not hearing that, and that’s not the message we should be sending to the American people, to our young people,” Harris said. “And I’m not speaking about what any particular person has said. I’m not reacting to anyone else’s comment. I’m telling you my lived experience.”
But Harris stopped short of saying whether she’d run again, even as a reveler shouted “2028.” She wanted Miamians in the room to know she’s noted that many people feel alone (one attendee noted that they felt helpless), but emphasized not to let people take your power.
“We cannot ever let our spirit be defeated. Don’t ever let your spirit be defeated, because then they’re winning,” she said. “The fight sometimes takes a while, but you don’t give up, because we can’t.”
Raisa Habersham is the race and culture reporter for the Miami Herald. She previously covered Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale for the Herald with a focus on housing and affordability. Habersham is a graduate of the University of Georgia. She joined the Herald in 2022.
The U.S. Virgin Island’s city is the place where visitors would grab a helicopter before heading off to Epstein’s island, the Crimson noted.
The honeymoon flight was confirmed by Summers’ spokesman Steven Goldberg, who claimed it was just a brief visit long before Epstein was ever arrested.
“Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John and Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time,” Goldberg told the paper. “As part of that trip, they made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein’s island.”
HuffPost reached out to Summers for comment on the vacation, but no one immediately responded.
Summers and New weren’t the only passengers on the flight. The logs also show Epstein’s partner-in-crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, was there as well as the financier’s longtime pilot, Larry Visoski.
The Crimson notes that Summers and New’s visit came months after Florida officials opened an investigation into Epstein and days after the convicted sex trafficker had started assembling a legal team that included Summers’ Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz.
The story about the honeymoon trip to Epstein’s island is just the latest revelation about Summers that has popped up since last week’s Epstein email dump, which showed their friendship went on longer and was deeper than previously known.
In addition, President Donald Trump ― who also appears in the Epstein files ―demanded that the Justice Department and FBI investigate Epstein’s ties to powerful Democrats like Summers and former president Bill Clinton.
Summers tried to deal with the fallout by announcing on Mondayhe would step back from all public commitments so he can “rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
For the last 15 years, the royal formerly known as Prince Andrew has faced scrutiny over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, but as new emails and documents emerge, the fallout has intensified. King Charles III made the decision to strip his brother of his titles, honors, and style late last month, renaming him Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Now the institutions Andrew worked with during his decades as a senior royal are trying to figure out how to remove his ceremonial plaques from their walls.
From the large to the small, these organizations are doing their best to erase any trace of the disgraced royal from their public spaces.
He Lost His Final Military Role
Despite losing most of his royal military titles in 2022, when he settled a lawsuit with accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre in which Andrew rejected any claim of wrongdoing and accepted no liability, news broke that Andrew still held on to one final role as honorary Vice Admiral in the Royal Navy. But on November 5, Secretary of Defence John Healey announced that the Royal Navy was trying to remove that title as well. “We’ve had Andrew surrender the honorary positions he’s had throughout the military, and—guided again by the king—we are working now to remove that last remaining title of Vice Admiral that he has,” Healey told the BBC. “This is a move that’s right, it’s a move the King has indicated we should take and we’re working on that at the moment.”
He Was Removed From Plaques on the Falkland Islands
Earlier this month, there was a reprieve when the Ministry of Defence announced that Andrew would be allowed to keep the medals he earned when he served in the Falklands War in 1982. But the Falkland Islands themselves are not so fond of the association. In the decades since he made his name as a military hero in the small territory off the coast of Argentina, he made multiple visits to celebrate the ties between the UK and the land it fought to defend. But in 2022, after Andrew settled out of court with Giuffre, his plaque was taken down from King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in Stanley, the islands’ capital city.
According to the Daily Express, all signs of Andrew’s name have now been erased from the islands following this year’s developments. A plaque with his name was removed from the Mount Pleasant Airport, which he opened in 2002, and another was taken down from a wildlife center run by his former patronage, the Falklands Conservation trust. “He was removed as patron and the plaque at the field centre has gone,” a staff member said, as reported by the Daily Mirror. His plaque at the center was also scrapped, and a spokesperson confirmed that Andrew is “no longer connected to our school.”
Town Councils Across the UK Regret Their One-Time Exuberance
When the king announced that Andrew would no longer be a prince, town councils across the UK had to weigh what to do with the streets named in his honor. The New York Times documented the debate in Heldeson, a village in eastern England that adopted the street name “Prince Andrew” when he was born in 1960. (He was the first child born to a sitting monarch in more than 100 years, which caused a fair degree of media excitement at the time.)
According to one town councillor who spoke to the newspaper, the change wouldn’t be an easy one to accomplish in the small town of 11,000 residents. “It would be very difficult to obtain a consensus of all residents,” Shelagh Gurney told the Times. “My emails clearly indicate that this would not be achieved.”
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers abruptly went on leave Wednesday from teaching at Harvard University, where he once served as president, over recently released emails showing he maintained a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Summers’ spokesperson said.
Summers had canceled his public commitments amid the fallout of the emails being made public and earlier Wednesday severed ties with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. Harvard had reopened an investigation into connections between him and Epstein, but Summers had said he would continue teaching economics classes at the school.
That changed Wednesday evening with the news that he will step away from teaching classes as well as his position as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government with the Harvard Kennedy School.
“Mr. Summers has decided it’s in the best interest of the Center for him to go on leave from his role as Director as Harvard undertakes its review,” Summers spokesperson Steven Goldberg said, adding that his co-teachers would finish the classes.
Summers has not been scheduled to teach next semester, according to Goldberg.
A Harvard spokesperson confirmed to The Associated Press that Summers had let the university know about his decision. Summers decision to go on leave was first reported by The Harvard Crimson.
Harvard did not mention Summers by name in its decision to restart an investigation, but the move follows the release of emails showing that he was friendly with Epstein long after the financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008.
By Wednesday, the once highly regarded economics expert had been facing increased scrutiny over choosing to stay in the teaching role. Some students even filmed his appearance in shock as he appeared before a class of undergraduates on Tuesday while stressing he thought it was important to continue teaching.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, said in a social media post on Wednesday night that Summers “cozied up to the rich and powerful — including a convicted sex offender. He cannot be trusted in positions of influence.”
Messages appear to seek advice about romantic relationship
The emails include messages in which Summers appeared to be getting advice from Epstein about pursuing a romantic relationship with someone who viewed him as an “economic mentor.”
“im a pretty good wing man , no?” Epstein wrote on Nov. 30, 2018.
The next day, Summers told Epstein he had texted the woman, telling her he “had something brief to say to her.”
“Am I thanking her or being sorry re my being married. I think the former,” he wrote.
Summers’ wife, Elisa New, also emailed Epstein multiple times, including a 2015 message in which she thanked him for arranging financial support for a poetry project she directs. The gift he arranged “changed everything for me,” she wrote.
“It really means a lot to me, all financial help aside, Jeffrey, that you are rooting for me and thinking about me,” she wrote.
New, an English professor emerita at Harvard, did not respond to an email seeking comment Wednesday.
An earlier review completed in 2020 found that Epstein visited Harvard’s campus more than 40 times after his 2008 sex-crimes conviction and was given his own office and unfettered access to a research center he helped establish. The professor who provided the office was later barred from starting new research or advising students for at least two years.
Summers appears before Harvard class
On Tuesday, Summers appeared before his class at Harvard, where he teaches “The Political Economy of Globalization” to undergraduates with Robert Lawrence, a professor with the Harvard Kennedy School.
“Some of you will have seen my statement of regret expressing my shame with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein and that I’ve said that I’m going to step back from public activities for a while. But I think it’s very important to fulfill my teaching obligations,” he said.
Summers’ remarks were captured on video by several students, but no one appeared to publicly respond to his comments.
Epstein, who authorities said died by suicide in 2019, was a convicted sex offender infamous for his connections to wealthy and powerful people, making him a fixture of outrage and conspiracy theories about wrongdoing among American elites.
Summers served as treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. He was Harvard’s president for five years from 2001 to 2006. When asked about the emails last week, Summers issued a statement saying he has “great regrets in my life” and that his association with Epstein was a “major error in judgement.”
Other organizations that confirmed the end of their affiliations with Summers included the Center for American Progress, the Center for Global Development and the Budget Lab at Yale University. Bloomberg TV said Summers’ withdrawal from public commitments included his role as a paid contributor, and the New York Times said it will not renew his contract as a contributing opinion writer.
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This story has been corrected to show that Summers is a former treasury secretary, not treasurer; to show that Summers’ statement about stepping back from public commitments was issued late Monday, not Tuesday; and to show that the school is known as the Harvard Kennedy School, not Kennedy Harvard School.
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Associated Press journalist Hallie Golden contributed to this report.
To paraphrase the poet Marshall Mathers, will the real Bubba please stand up?
The name “Bubba” has been on the lips of many political-watchers recently, thanks to last week’s release of a spicy 2018 email exchange between sex offender and human trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his brother, Mark Epstein, that referenced current president Donald Trump “blowing Bubba.” In an email, which Mark has since characterized as being part of “a humorous private exchange between two brothers,” saying the message was not meant “to be interpreted as serious remarks,” Mark told his brother to ask Trump adviser Steve Bannon if Russian president Vladimir Putin had “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.”
“You and your boy Donnie can make a remake of the movie Get Hard,” Mark wrote.
The public was quick to point out that former president Bill Clinton’s nickname is Bubba. In a statement to The Advocate, Mark said, “For the avoidance of doubt, the reference to ‘Bubba’ in this correspondence is not, in any way, a reference to former president Bill Clinton.”
Ali Clark, a spokesperson for Mark, also noted that the Bubba in question is “a private individual who is not a public figure.”
Who could this Bubba, of “joke” infamy, be? We don’t know, but there’s another interesting Bubba in our midst.
Even before that email surfaced on November 12, as part of the release of a tranche of 20,000-plus documentsrelated to the Epstein case, a politically connected Bubba was already making headlines: Meet C.R. “Bubba” Saulsbury Jr., whose family owns the luxury Texas hunting retreat Boondoggle Ranch, where guests can while away the hours “roughing it Texas style” with gigantic TVs and Golden Tee 2020 on demand, according to an archived snapshot featuring a description of the spot, whose website was recently wiped clean. The ranch drew attention when TheWall Street Journal reported that FBI director Kash Patel had recently visited, arriving by a taxpayer-subsidized government jet for a little R&R during the government shutdown. Bubba is known to be pals with Patel as well as Vice President JD Vance.
After the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform dropped the Epstein data dump, political gossip circles were abuzz about the true identity of Bubba.
