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  • Bill and Hillary Clinton face House showdown over Epstein ties

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    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein filesDuring his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.“It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.“Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”Bill Clinton’s ties to EpsteinBy last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercelyAs each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.“We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.Conservative attacks on the ClintonsThe Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.“Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.Still, some dynamics have changed.The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.“It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

    WASHINGTON —

    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.

    For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.

    The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.

    Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein files

    During his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

    For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.

    “It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.

    There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

    But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.

    “Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”

    Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein

    By last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.

    Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.

    The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.

    The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

    Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.

    Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”

    The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercely

    As each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.

    Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.

    Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.

    That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.

    “We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.

    Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.

    One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.

    Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”

    Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.

    Conservative attacks on the Clintons

    The Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.

    “Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.

    Still, some dynamics have changed.

    The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.

    He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”

    Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.

    “It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

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  • Bill and Hillary Clinton face House showdown over Epstein ties

    [ad_1]

    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein filesDuring his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.“It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.“Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”Bill Clinton’s ties to EpsteinBy last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercelyAs each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.“We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.Conservative attacks on the ClintonsThe Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.“Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.Still, some dynamics have changed.The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.“It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

    WASHINGTON —

    For some of their conservative critics, this is the scandal that could finally topple them. Their resistance to testifying proved futile. And now, staring down another epic fight, they’re harnessing their considerable political skills to try to turn the tables on their accusers.

    For Bill and Hillary Clinton, the 1990s are back.

    The Clintons are slated to testify Thursday and Friday in a House investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, part of a deal with Republicans after it became clear that Congress — with the help of some Democrats — was on track to hold them in contempt if they refused to cooperate. For the battle-hardened couple, it amounts to one more Washington brawl. And like so many of the battles that came before, this one is another mix of questionable judgment, sexual impropriety, money and power.

    Video above: Justice Department releases more than 3 million items in final batch of Epstein files

    During his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton pitched his candidacy as “two for the price of one,” previewing a presidential marriage like none that had come before, with a spouse whose professional credentials rivaled his. In the years since, that partnership helped the Clintons weather repeated scandals, including those so personal that many other relationships would have shattered. When his political career was ending, hers was ascending when she was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York, then served as secretary of state before becoming the Democratic nominee for president in 2016.

    For those who have long watched the Clintons, this moment is a reminder that the couple — weaned on the politics of the Vietnam War and Watergate — has never been far from the heat of a cultural fight. And with the Epstein case unfolding unpredictably around the world, the Clintons are once again ensnared in the scandal of the moment.

    “It’s kind of a sad but fitting coda to extraordinary political lives,” said David Maraniss, who has written two biographies of Bill Clinton.

    There’s no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of either Clinton when it comes to Epstein, a convicted sex offender who committed suicide in 2019 while he was in jail awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

    But Epstein had ties to Bill Clinton for years, visiting the White House multiple times in the 1990s, according to visitor logs. After Clinton left office, Epstein was involved in his philanthropy and the former president flew multiple times on his private jet.

    “Traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward,” Bill Clinton wrote in his 2024 memoir. “I wish I had never met him.”

    Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein

    By last summer, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for the Clintons. For months, Bill Clinton, 79, and Hillary Clinton, 78, largely ignored the matter in public, but that became harder to sustain in December when the former president was featured prominently in the first batch of Epstein files.

    Among thousands of documents made public, some photos showed him on a private plane, including one with a woman, whose face is redacted, seated alongside him with her arm around him. Another showed Bill Clinton in a pool with Epstein’s longtime confidant, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, and a person whose face was redacted. Yet another photo portrayed Bill Clinton in a hot tub with a woman whose face was redacted.

    The oversight panel’s chairman, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, threatened to hold the Clintons in contempt if they didn’t comply with the subpoenas, a historic move considering a former president has never been compelled to appear before Congress. Between his first and second terms, Donald Trump invoked that precedent to fend off a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

    While there was no context surrounding the photos of Bill Clinton, they underscored how his political promise has always been tempered by personal indiscretions.

    The 1992 campaign that represented the emerging preeminence of the Baby Boom generation was the same one dogged by rumors of an affair with Gennifer Flowers. A presidency largely defined by economic prosperity was nearly derailed when Clinton was impeached in 1998 for lying under oath and obstructing justice when he denied engaging in a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

    Each time, many Republicans thought they finally found leverage over the Clintons. But each time, the Clintons found a way out of the vise.

    Asa Hutchinson, the former Republican congressman from Arkansas who was a House manager during Clinton’s impeachment trial, described the couple as “a smart lawyer and brilliant communicator.”

    The Clinton playbook: fight back fiercely

    As each crisis surfaced, a pattern emerged: the Clintons fiercely denied the allegations and often dismissed women who came forward with claims. They villainized the GOP and re-centered the public’s attention on more favorable themes like the booming economy of the era.

    Bill Clinton, who famously told voters “I feel your pain,” always managed to stay connected with the public. Indeed, he enjoyed some of the highest approval numbers of his presidency during his impeachment inquiry and trial, when about 7 in 10 U.S. adults approved of the way he was handling his job.

    Hillary Clinton similarly dispatched Republicans who sensed an opening in her handling of a 2012 attack on a compound in Libya that killed four Americans. She came out of an 11-hour televised congressional hearing in 2015 appearing poised. Even the Republican chair of the committee probing the attack said he wasn’t sure she revealed anything new about an issue many in his party considered a scandal.

    That experience has informed how the Clintons are approaching this week’s testimony. Hillary Clinton has been especially vocal in calling for the proceedings to happen in public, rather than in private as Comer currently plans.

    “We have nothing to hide,” she told the BBC earlier this month.

    Bill Clinton’s communication operation has taken a sharper tone, recalling the political “war room” popularized during the 1992 campaign to respond to negative storylines.

    One release accused Comer of “lying in every appearance he’s made this week.” Another mocked GOP Reps. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona with a “hypocrisy award of the day,” noting how the Oversight Committee members defied subpoenas from the Jan. 6 panel.

    Meanwhile, the Clintons released a four-page letter to Comer on social media defiantly belittling a process they said was “literally designed to result in our imprisonment.”

    Much as they tried to refocus attention during the 1990s, the letter hit the White House for dismantling institutions, imposing a harsh immigration crackdown and pardoning those involved in the Capitol riot.

    Conservative attacks on the Clintons

    The Clintons’ rise to power paralleled the explosion of talk radio as a political force, with Rush Limbaugh using his daily show as a platform to constantly berate the White House. Today, conservative podcasters like Benny Johnson have filled Limbaugh’s space and were gleeful after the House panel moved last month to hold the couple in contempt.

    “Do you understand Donald Trump made good on his oldest promise arguably which is he told all of us 10 years ago that Hillary Clinton would be going to jail?” Johnson said last month.

    Still, some dynamics have changed.

    The lockstep support the Clintons enjoyed among congressional Democrats has eroded as a new generation of lawmakers has taken office — nine Democrats joined with Republicans on the House committee to advance the contempt resolution. Trump, who has faced scrutiny over his own ties to Epstein and may be uncomfortable with the precedent of forcing a former president to testify, has expressed rare concern for the Clintons.

    He told NBC News that it “bothers me that somebody is going after Bill Clinton.” He has described Hillary Clinton as a “very capable woman.”

    Even Hutchinson, who helped make the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, expressed sympathy for the couple.

    “It’s frustrating and disappointing that President Clinton and Secretary Clinton are having to go through this fact-finding ordeal,” he said. “That’s difficult for them.”

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  • As ICE scales up hiring, whistleblower documents reveal deep cuts to training program

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    WASHINGTON — New whistleblower documents detail substantial cuts by the Trump administration to the training requirements for new immigration officers.

    Among the cuts are the elimination of practical exams, use of force and legal training courses, and an overall reduction in training time, contrary to an official’s testimony to Congress earlier this month.

    The documents, provided to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) by whistleblowers from the Department of Homeland Security, were publicly revealed ahead of a forum Monday with congressional Democrats — the third in recent weeks probing what the members view as abusive and illegal tactics used by federal agents.

    Lauren Bis, deputy assistant public affairs secretary at Homeland Security, said no training hours have been cut.

    “Our officers receive extensive firearm training, are taught de-escalation tactics, and receive 4th and 5th Amendment comprehensive instruction,” she said. “The training does not stop after graduation from the academy. Recruits are put on a rigorous on-the-job training program that is tracked and monitored.”

    Earlier this month, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons testified to Congress that while the agency had reduced the number of training days to 42 from 75, “We went from five days a week to six days a week. Five days a week was five eight-hour days and we’ve gone to six 12-hour days.”

    But the documents appear to contradict Lyons’ testimony.

    “The schedules reflected on these documents indicate that current ICE recruits receive nearly 250 fewer hours of training than previous cohorts of recruits,” according to a 90-page memorandum from minority staff of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Blumenthal is the top Democrat on that committee.

    Blumenthal’s office also disclosed the identity of one whistleblower: Ryan Schwank, an attorney who most recently served as an instructor for new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits at the ICE Academy within the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia.

    Schwank, who resigned Feb. 13, is one of two whistleblowers who made a confidential disclosure to Blumenthal’s office last month regarding an ICE policy allowing agents to forcefully enter people’s homes without a judicial warrant.

    In his testimony Monday, Schwank said that for the last five months, he watched ICE leadership dismantle its training program. What remains, he said, is a “dangerous husk.”

    Schwank said the assertion by Homeland Security leaders that cadets receive the same training in a shorter time frame “is a lie.”

    “This means that cadets are not taught what it means to be objectively reasonable, the very standard which the law requires them to meet when deciding whether or not to use deadly force,” he said. “Our jobs as instructors are to teach them so well they can make split-second decisions about what they can and cannot do in life-or-death situations. Yet in the name of churning out an endless stream of officers, DHS leadership has dismantled the academic and practical tests that we need to know if cadets can safely and lawfully perform their job.”

    Schwank said he was shown the secret memo authorizing forceful home entry on his first day as a training instructor. He was told to teach its contents but not to take notes on it or discuss its existence.

    “Never in my career had I ever received such a blatant unlawful order, nor one conveyed in such a troubling manner,” he said. “Incredibly, I was being shown this memo in secret by my supervisor, who made sure that I understood that disobedience would cost me my job.”

    “So in effect, you were told, as an instructor on the law, that you were to train ICE agents how to break the law,” Blumenthal told Schwank.

    Schwank told Blumenthal that the reason he received the training position was because the lawyer in the position before him had been forced to resign on their refusal to teach the contents of the memo.

    Another witness at the forum was Teyana Gibson Brown, whose husband, Garrison Gibson, was arrested in Minneapolis last month after agents burst through their door with guns drawn. She said she and her husband repeatedly asked to see a warrant but were ignored.

    “I heard the door pop and I realized we were no longer protected,” she said. “Ten officers that were all armed were standing in front of me and my family. Words can never be sufficient for me to portray what sorts of horror we felt in this moment.”

    Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Long Beach) said the notion that “ICE wants to write its own permission slip, without a judge, to break down your door and to violate your rights” should terrify all Americans. Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, led the forum with Blumenthal.

    Blumenthal’s office did not confirm whether Schwank or the other whistleblower, who is still anonymous, provided the documents that were released Monday and included in the 90-page memo.

    The documents show ICE has eliminated more than a dozen practical exams that ICE officers previously needed to graduate. In July 2021, a cadet needed to pass 25 practical exams to graduate. Now, nine are required.

    Eliminated exams include “Judgment pistol shooting,” “Criminal encounters,” and “Determine removability.”

    “All of these are now instead evaluated, if at all, mainly by open-book, multiple-choice written exams and without any graded practical examinations,” the memo states.

    During the hearing, Blumenthal raised a poster showing the two lists of exam topics. The longer list, Schwank told him, was a vital lesson on things like “how to use their firearms safely, how to encounter an individual they intended to detain, much like Mrs. Gibson Brown’s husband.”

    Tests that used to be closed-book became open-book, he said. As a result, he watched cadets graduate despite using excessive force in practical exercises.

    Comparisons between the program’s syllabus table of contents and general information sections from July 2025 — before the surge in hiring — and this month show that ICE appears to have cut whole courses, such as use of force simulation training, U.S. government structure, criminal versus removal proceedings, and use of force.

    In a statement, Homeland Security said no training requirements have been removed and that new recruits get 56 days of training and an average of 28 days of on-the-job training. The agency said training was streamlined to cut redundancy and incorporate technological advancements without cutting subject matter content.

    Candidates still learn the same elements always required, the agency said, including multiple classes on use-of-force policy, as well as safe arrest techniques and de-escalation.

    The training reductions come as ICE plans to bring up more than 4,000 new Enforcement and Removal Operations officers this fiscal year, which ends in September. One of the documents notes that ICE had graduated 803 new officers in 2026 as of Jan. 29 and projected 3,204 more graduates by the end of the fiscal year.

    In its statement, Homeland Security said the agency is prepared to train 12,000 new hires this year, and that the majority of new hires are experienced law enforcement officers who have already gone through a police academy.

    Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada) asked Schwank about the new officers ICE has hired.

    “Are they police officers that already have this training, so they don’t have to worry about it?” she asked. “Is it individuals that don’t have any law enforcement background?”

    Schwank said the cadets he met genuinely wanted to learn and to do their jobs correctly but didn’t arrive with a law enforcement background.

    “I’ve had cadets who are 18 years old,” he said. “I had a cadet who celebrated her 19th birthday in her classes. We have cadets who don’t have college degrees. We have cadets for whom English is not their primary language.”

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    Andrea Castillo

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  • Blake Lively Had Her Chauffeur Bring WHAT To Court In The Middle Of Justin Baldoni Legal Flap?? – Perez Hilton

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    Is this real life or the most extra episode of courtroom couture we’ve ever witnessed?!

    Blake Lively apparently decided that if she was going to spend her morning in mediation over her explosive legal battle with Justin Baldoni, she was going to do it her way. And by her way, we mean with a luxury mahjong set delivered straight to the courthouse door. Seriously. You cannot make this stuff up.

    Related: No Deal For Blake Lively…!

    According to Page Six, the former Gossip Girl star arrived bright and early around 8:30 a.m. for a mediation session tied to her sexual harassment lawsuit against Baldoni. The talks reportedly kicked off around 10 a.m., with both sides attempting to hammer out a pre-trial settlement. Tense? Surely. Dramatic? Obviously. Slow-moving? Uh, apparently so.

    By around 11 a.m., as the legal back-and-forth dragged on, Lively allegedly decided she needed a little distraction. Enter: her chauffeur. According to insiders speaking to the news outlet on Thursday, her driver pulled up to the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse carrying a full mahjong set for the actress. Yes, a centuries-old Chinese tile game became the unexpected star of this already headline-grabbing showdown.

    Lively has been open about her love for mahjong in the past. In fact, she previously gushed to Vogue about teaching her friends how to play. And apparently she doesn’t just dabble. She invests! Word is she favors sets from Oh My Mahjong, which can cost up to $500. That’s not exactly drugstore board game pricing. And now that set (or another one) is in court, apparently!

    Meanwhile, the stakes in this case are anything but playful. Lively has accused Baldoni not only of sexual harassment but also of attempting to damage her reputation during their time filming It Ends With Us. Meanwhile, he has denied any wrongdoing.

    Still, the image of a Hollywood A-lister passing time with ornate tiles while lawyers work is almost too on-brand. It’s giving bored board queen energy! LOLz!

    And TBH, we’ll be watching every tile that falls from here on out. How about U??

    [Image via Variety/YouTube/MEGA/WENN]

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    Perez Hilton

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  • Bill & Hillary Clinton Agree To Testify Before Congress Over Epstein Files! What Will They Reveal?? – Perez Hilton

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    Former President Bill Clinton and his wife, former Secretary of State and one-time presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have now agreed to testify before Congress in the ongoing investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.

    The agreement comes just in time. The House of Representatives had been preparing to vote on holding the Clintons in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear before the House Oversight Committee. That vote is now off the table after their legal team agreed to the committee’s terms, avoiding a confrontation that would have been unprecedented and explosive.

    Related: Prince William & Princess Catherine Heckled HARD Over Andrew’s Jeffrey Epstein Link!

    Bill is scheduled to sit for a filmed and transcribed deposition on February 27, per BBC News and others on Tuesday, with Hillary set to appear the day before that on February 26. There will be no time limit to either of their interviews.

    This marks the first time a former US president has testified before a congressional panel since Gerald Ford in 1983, underscoring just how serious and unusual this moment is.

    Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer did not mince words when addressing the reversal in a statement sent out to the media:

    “Once it became clear that we would hold them in contempt, the Clintons completely caved. Republicans and Democrats on the Oversight Committee have been clear: no one is above the law — and that includes the Clintons.”

    Until recently, the Clintons had taken a defiant stance, arguing they had already submitted sworn statements outlining what they described as their supposedly limited knowledge of Epstein. Which, uh, Bill, are ya REALLY sure about that?

    Anyway… they had also previously dismissed the House Oversight Committee’s legal summonses as:

    “Nothing more than a ploy to attempt to embarrass political rivals, as President Trump has directed.”

    The pressure only intensified as bipartisan support grew for holding them in contempt. A last-minute offer from the Clintons’ lawyers proposing limited testimony was rejected over concerns that Bill would run out the clock.

    Confirmation of their appearance came Monday night from Bill Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Angel Ureña, who fired back publicly at the committee in a post on X (Twitter) that said this:

    “They negotiated in good faith. You did not. They told you under oath what they know, but you don’t care. But the former President and former Secretary of State will be there. They look forward to setting a precedent that applies to everyone.”

    It’s important to note that neither Bill nor Hillary have been accused of wrongdoing by survivors of Epstein’s abuse.

    Both deny any knowledge of his crimes, to boot. Hillary has said she never met or spoke to Epstein. Bill has acknowledged a past acquaintance, including flights on Epstein’s private jet in the early 2000s, but his team claims those trips were tied to Clinton Foundation work and ended long before Epstein’s crimes became public.

    Related: Wow! Blake Lively Hires Jeffrey Epstein’s Victims’ Attorney For Justin Baldoni Trial!

    Still, photographs, flight logs, and unanswered questions have kept this story alive. As for the Clintons themselves, they have accused Comer of politicizing the investigation and stalling meaningful progress.

    Now, under oath and on camera, they will have to answer. And the whole world will be watching to see what they say…

    Reactions, y’all? Share ’em (below).

    [Image via New York Sex Offender Registry/MEGA/WENN]

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    Perez Hilton

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  • DEA promoted L.A. agent who pointed gun at colleague despite history of issues

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    David Doherty was standing at his desk inside the Los Angeles headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration when a supervisor from another office stormed in hurling profanities.

    Doherty testified at a preliminary hearing in a San Fernando courtroom earlier this year that a fellow agent, James Young, got “face to face” with Doherty and challenged him to a fight without provocation.

    Doherty said he tried to deescalate by hugging Young and saying it was “all good brother,” according to his testimony. But then, Doherty said, he felt Young’s DEA-issued handgun jammed against his midsection.

    “I got you motherf—,” Doherty recalled Young saying.

    Young then aimed the weapon at Doherty’s face, according to the agent’s testimony.

    James Young allegedly pointed a gun at a fellow federal agent during a 2022 incident at the Drug Enforcement Agency office in Los Angeles.

    (Al Seib / For The Times)

    Staring down the barrel of a gun wielded by an official who, at that time in 2022, oversaw roughly 30 officers in the DEA’s Ventura County office, Doherty told the court, he wrestled Young to the ground and disarmed him.

    More than two years later, Los Angeles County prosecutors charged Young, 54, with assault over the incident.

    It was one of several bizarre moments that led Young to exit the DEA — but only after the agency promoted him twice despite documented concerns about his behavior and mental health.

    The Times reviewed a Los Angeles police report Doherty filed about the alleged attack along with DEA disciplinary records and internal e-mails.

    The records show DEA officials were well aware of Young’s concerning behavior, yet still gave him increased responsibilities. One high-ranking DEA official even tried to dissuade Doherty from reporting the attack to police, according to the agent’s testimony and the LAPD report.

    After Doherty’s preliminary hearing testimony, Young was held to answer on on multiple charges for crimes he allegedly committed between 2022 and 2024, including a road rage incident, domestic violence and illegal possession of a stockpile of guns, ammo and grenades.

    Young, who remains free on bond, has pleaded not guilty to all charges. He declined to comment. His defense attorney, Jeff Voll, said he plans to ask a judge to grant Young entry into a diversion program due to mental health issues, but offered no further details about his client or the case.

    A DEA spokeswoman said she could not respond to media inquiries because of the federal government shutdown, though the agency has previously declined to comment on The Times reporting about Young.

    Young’s first issues at the DEA arose in 2012, while he was on assignment in Tokyo. That year, he was sent home after a “medical evaluation” that determined he had issues that were “preventing or impeding his ability to perform the requisite tasks and duties of his position,” according to a treatment agreement between Young and the DEA reviewed by The Times.

    Young was required to attend therapy for “mental health issues” and “alcohol abuse,” the document shows.

    Young was also suspended for two days due to “improper operation of a government vehicle and poor judgment” while in Tokyo, according to a DEA disciplinary notice.

    Young was reassigned to Los Angeles in 2013 and eventually put in charge of the DEA’s satellite office in Ventura County, according to Doherty’s testimony.

    In 2021, an agent filed a complaint against Young accusing him of making “volatile, unprofessional phone calls” and “inappropriate comments” toward subordinates, according to an e-mail reviewed by The Times. It was not clear what, if anything, the DEA did about the complaint.

    Two federal law enforcement officials who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly told The Times that many agents sensed something was “off” with Young, with both recounting stories of colleagues concerned about how he handled firearms.

    Doherty testified that after the gun incident at the DEA’s L.A. office in 2022, he felt like higher-ups at the agency tried to protect Young.

    “I didn’t feel like it was being handled appropriately, and I kind of saw the writing on the wall, that it was something DEA was trying to brush under the rug,” Doherty said in court.

    Doherty made a report at LAPD’s Central Division station shortly after the shooting. In it, he said another DEA official in L.A., Assistant Special Agent in Charge Brian Clark, tried to discourage him from going to police. Clark warned Doherty that Young could actually seek to press assault charges against him, according to the report, which did not explain Clark’s rationale.

    Clark, who is now the special agent in charge of the Los Angeles field office, did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

    The LAPD investigation stopped when the head of the DEA’s Los Angeles field office, Bill Bodner, called then-LAPD Deputy Chief Al Labrada and claimed jurisdiction over the incident, according to the police report.

    Bodner left the DEA in 2023, according to his LinkedIn profile. He and Labrada did not respond to questions from The Times. A spokesperson for the LAPD did not respond to an inquiry about the case.

    The U.S. Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General eventually presented a criminal case to local prosecutors in December 2022, according to a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office. But the assault charges related to the attack at the field office weren’t filed until June 2025. The spokeswoman declined to explain the delay.

    Young retired from the DEA in 2024, but was allowed to collect a paycheck on administrative leave for roughly 18 months after the alleged attack on Doherty, according to two federal law enforcement officials.

    In September 2024, Young allegedly got into an argument with a driver on the 405 Freeway, bumped the other vehicle with his car and then brandished a handgun at the victim, according to a criminal complaint.

    The day after the road rage incident, Young allegedly attacked his wife and placed her in a wrestling hold, applying pressure to her head and neck, authorities said. A subsequent search of Young’s Saugus home by L.A. County sheriff’s deputies turned up 30,000 rounds of ammunition, several grenades, a sawed-off shotgun and modified credentials to make it appear that Young was still an active DEA agent.

    Investigators also found what was described in court filings as a video of a “gang-style execution” being played on a loop on a large screen.

    If convicted as charged, Young faces up to 29 years in state prison.

    In the Doherty incident, text messages displayed in court show Young claimed he didn’t realize why pulling his gun was wrong until after it happened.

    “Brother I love you. I would die for you. I’m sorry for not reading things right. I thought we were playing, but I know I f— up and misread the situation,” Young wrote to Doherty. “Pls forgive me … I’ll never do anything to hurt you. Please forgive me for pulling my gun. You can file against me. I concede that.”

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    James Queally

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  • Shahzia Sikander’s “Witness” Inspires Aerial Dance and Visual Art in Testimony

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    When choreographer Toni Valle, the artistic director of 6 Degrees Dance, first heard that Shahzia Sikander’s sculpture “Witness” would be installed at the University of Houston, it didn’t strike her as anything out of the ordinary.


    “We get notifications about everything,” says Valle, a professor in UH’s Kathrine G. McGovern College for the Arts, School of Theatre & Dance. “I didn’t think it was a big deal, one piece of public art that was going to be put on the campus.”


    Soon, however, the statue – a towering 18-foot female figure, golden and floating above the ground, with root-like arms and legs, a hoop skirt, lace collar, and braids shaped into ram horns – caught the attention of right-to-life protestors, who saw the horns as demonic and the jabot at her neck, a nod to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as a symbol of abortion rights.


    As a human rights activist herself, Valle says she had to see the sculpture, one-half of the Pakistani-American visual artist’s exhibition “Havah…to breathe, air, life,” with her own eyes.  


    “I saw it, and it’s beautiful. It is such a testament to women taking up space, because it’s so big,” says Valle. “At that point, I emailed the dean and said, ‘If it ever comes up that you want some art done about this piece…I would love to do something.’”

    The university did commission Valle to create a work inspired by “Witness.” Then, on July 8, 2024, with Valle and longtime collaborator/composer George Heathco deep in the creative process and Hurricane Beryl looming on the horizon, a man with a hammer beheaded the statue.

    “It was too close to our performance for us to incorporate that new material,” says Valle. “We made, at that point, a decision that we were going to do this again as a full evening length with that new information.”

    click to enlarge

    6 Degrees company members Shelby Craze and Mia Pham with steel sculptures by Craze.

    Photo by Adri Richey Photography

    This week, Valle, Heathco, and singer-composer Misha Penton will premiere that full-length evening work, Testimony, an aerial dance and visual art installation, from visual artist Shelby Craze, that draws inspiration from Sikander’s work, the subsequent controversy, and eventual vandalism.

    “Though the sculpture was our point of reference, Testimony is also about the much larger picture of how women in general have been silenced,” says Valle. “Personally, what affected me was that this woman made something so amazing. It said, ‘I am here, and you cannot stop me from existing.’ And then someone violently beheaded it. It’s such a metaphor for how violence is often used to silence artists, to silence women, to silence people.”

    Penton, who joined the project after Valle and Heathco had begun work on Testimony, notes that “when voices are suppressed, the only antidote is vocal autonomy.” As such, she recalls telling her collaborators after seeing the first incarnation of Testimony from the audience, “I really feel like the sculpture needs to come to life and wail.”

    For the upcoming performance, Penton will play the character of the sculpture with embodied vocality.

    “I’m interpreting this as an archetypal feminine energy,” explains Penton, who is composing and singing the live voice work in the show. “Everyone in the performance is a facet of the sculpture, and my character serves as a way to focus the energy and also refract it into a prism of a zillion possibilities in a diverse spectrum.”

    Though Penton will embody the statue, Valle says she also wanted Penton’s character to have a human element.

    “My goal always is to bring humanity into a situation,” says Valle. “I want people to see this as the personification of oppressed people, and to be able to see it as human.”

    Penton’s vocalizations will wind in and out and intertwine with Heathco’s original score, which features saxophones, guitars, percussion, and the interplay of lots of voices because, as Heathco notes, “this whole thing started with voices of people having some sort of descent and not wanting to see the statue on campus.”

    click to enlarge

    6 Degrees company members Emily Aven and Michelle Reyes.

    Photo by Adri Richey Photography

    Heathco says he decided to bike to the school to visit the statue and take notes, with the ambient sounds he heard inspiring his score in unexpected ways.

    “Sitting in front of the statue this one particular evening, hearing the marching band, hearing the light rail, hearing the mechanical noises, hearing the wind through the trees, the rustling of leaves and students walking by… All these things started to really produce a sound in my head,” says Heathco. “Once I got home that night from the bike ride, the instrumentation was set.”

    Like Heathco, Valle says she also visited the sculpture to take notes and pictures to begin developing the choreography, believing that she could not do justice to Sikander’s detailed work without spending as much time creating movement based on it.

    “All the movement is based on the movement in the sculpture itself,” says Valle. “Rather than trying to put content in the pieces, like this is what Sikander meant, I took what she gave me in movement and size and statuesque breathing – everything about this sculpture almost feels alive to me – and tried to reiterate that in different moments, with a collage that speaks to tiny fragments of the sculpture that then makes this entire whole.”

    Elements of Sikander’s sculpture will appear in the way the dancers will swirl and braid around each other like the roots, and in a bungee piece, where Penton will be lifted off the floor, supported by the other dancers, as the sculpture is supported by its hoop skirt.

    Despite its embedded, heavy themes, all three collaborators agree that anyone can see and enjoy Testimony.

    “My tester is always someone asking, ‘Can I bring my 12-year-old daughter?’ And yes, I think it’s fairly accessible and exciting to watch,” says Valle. “Even if they know nothing about this statue, even if they don’t get anything about this statue, there’s so much embedded in the work that I’m very proud to say I think anybody can come see this show, not get it at all and still like it.”

    That said, Penton does hope that audiences will find Testimony “hopeful and liberating.”

    “We’re not being didactic,” says Penton. “We’re not telling people what to think about anything. I feel like the statue and the character that I’m embodying is hopeful, grounded, powerful, and future-looking in a positive way.”

    Testimony will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, September 25, through Saturday, September 27, and 5 p.m. Sunday, September 28, at the MATCH, 3400 Main. For more information, visit 6degreesdance.org. $20-$35, with a pay-what-you-can option on September 26.

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    Natalie de la Garza

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  • OMG! An Epstein List Name REVEALED! Plus MAJOR CLUES About Others In Congressional Hearing! – Perez Hilton

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    Are these the biggest clues yet about who exactly is in the Epstein files?!? Plus an actual name?! HOW IS THIS NOT THE BIGGEST STORY RIGHT NOW???

    Donald Trump and his loyal DOJ and FBI leaders shocked some of the MAGA faithful with their about-face on Jeffrey Epstein. They went from teasing a big reveal to actually having teams of agents spend hundreds of hours reading the files… and suddenly deciding it all needed to be swept under the rug.

    Well, a small handful of Republicans have stood up to Trump on the Epstein issue, and their leader, Representative Thomas Massie from Kentucky, finally got one of those rug-sweepers in the hot seat this week.

    Kash Patel has been testifying to Congress the past couple days, being grilled on numerous scandals and mistakes, by Democrats and Republicans alike. But on Wednesday, Massie got to ask the biggest question we think America has right now: WTF?!?

    Kash In Pocket

    OK, Massie didn’t say that. But he did confront the seemingly confused FBI director about his inane claim to the Senate on Tuesday that Epstein didn’t traffic the girls to anyone. If you missed that claim, Patel maintained to Senator John Kennedy:

    “There is no credible information, none… that he trafficked to other individuals.”

    So Jeffrey Epstein trafficked underage girls to NO ONE? Despite the victims saying very clearly they were trafficked to powerful men? Well, Massie made his big play here. When Epstein’s victims got together and said they’d make their own list, Massie said he and Marjorie Taylor Greene might be able to reveal it even if the girls couldn’t themselves. And on Wednesday he gave us the first name! He defied Patel, saying:

    “According to victims who cooperated with the FBI in that investigation, these documents in FBI possession — in your possession — detail at least 20 men, including Mr. Jes Staley, CEO of Barclays Bank, who Jeffrey Epstein trafficked victims to.”

    Whoa, what?!?

    HE ACTUALLY NAMED SOMEONE! HE DROPPED A NAME FROM THE EPSTEIN LIST! HOW IS THIS NOT THE BIGGEST STORY OF THE DAY?!

    The First Name

    Who the heck is James Edward “Jes” Staley? A few months after Epstein’s death, the CEO of Barclays was investigated for mischaracterizing his relationship with him. Ultimately he resigned from his position.

    (c) Bloomberg/YouTube

    He was later named in a lawsuit against JP Morgan. An Epstein victim accused the bank of enabling Epstein financially — and Staley specifically of knowing exactly what he was doing. According to The New York Times, Staley was Epstein’s “chief defender” at JP Morgan, helping him keep his huge accounts despite suspicions he was up to no good. The lawsuit, revealed in January 2023, alleged Staley personally witnessed Epstein’s abuse of an underage girl.

    Related: Staley Was On This List With Trump…

    Why would he look the other way, so to speak? Well, it sounds like Massie says one of the victims told the government she’d been trafficked TO HIM!

    Currently he’s only facing civil and financial consequences.

    Major Effing Clues!

    Massie was far from finished. He may have only given one actual name, but he made very clear there’s a list of men accused of wrongdoing, and it’s in the government’s hands. He spoke about the men who were named by Epstein’s victims — and gave some major clues on who they are! He said:

    “That list also includes at least 19 other individuals: One Hollywood producer worth a few hundred million dollars. One royal prince. One high profile individual in the music industry. One very prominent banker. One high profile government official. One high profile former politician. One owner of a car company in Italy. One rock star. One magician. At least six billionaires, including a billionaire from Canada. We know these people exist in the FBI files, the files you control. I don’t know exactly who they are, but the FBI does. Have you launched investigations into any of these individuals?”

    YOWZA! That is a lot of clues all at once!

    Well, look, the Royal prince one is easy. Prince Andrew is one of the only men who have been accused publicly. Virginia Roberts Giuffre claimed she was trafficked to him by Epstein multiple times, including when she was just 17 years old. Here they are together in a photo with Epstein’s convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

    Prince Andrew Virginia Roberts scandal
    (c) BBC/WENN

    As for the “high profile government official” and “high profile former politician”? Pretty horrific to know our taxes have supported people like this, isn’t it?

    And then there’s “magician” — what a wild profession to throw out, right? But probably the most intriguing to us? A rich Hollywood producer?? A “rock star”? A “high profile individual in the music industry”?? Our minds are racing with ideas, though we’ve never, to our recollection, heard of any connection between Epstein and any specific people who fit these bills. Do YOU know who he’s talking about??

    Anyway, let’s check back in on what Patel has to say for himself…

    Kash Tries To Pass The Buck

    When Patel tried to reiterate that he hadn’t seen credible evidence yet, Massie pressed, remind him VICTIM TESTIMONY is evidence! He straight up asked the FBI head:

    “Is it your assertion that these victims aren’t credible? That the 302s maybe didn’t produce credible statements that rise to probable cause?”

    Patel said it was the decision of US attorneys, noting some were in past administrations. Totally passing the buck. Massie didn’t let him get away with it. He

    “Have you viewed the 302 documents where they victims name the people who victimized them?”

    Patel admitted he has not “personally” viewed the documents in question. So Massie hit him with:

    “So how can you sit here, and in front of the Senate, and say there are no names? I named one today.”

    He sure as hell did.

    Patel squirmed again, saying the FBI won’t release “victim names” or “in-credible evidence.” So let’s see if we’ve got this right… Despite the fact he was such a vocal crusader for the Epstein list before this job, Patel hasn’t made it a priority to personally look at any of this evidence, any of the victim testimony, in the nearly SEVEN MONTHS he’s been on the job. Instead, he’s totally satisfied being told there’s nothing to see, and he’s accepted that without looking for himself??

    Yeah, it didn’t sound like Massie bought any of that. You can see his full interrogation (below):

    Out Of The Frying Pan…

    Look, so far we’ve only been speaking about Kash Patel getting grilled by Republicans. But when it came to Dems, it was pretty bad, too. Though it did lean a little worse for Trump, as you might imagine…

    Eric Swalwell asked Patel did he ever “tell Donald Trump his name is in the files?” The FBI director said he’d never spoken to Trump about Epstein files. (Wow, but OK.) So Swalwell asked next:  

    “Did you ever tell the the Attorney General that Trump’s name is in the Epstein files?”

    This should have been a simple NO, right? Instead Patel gave a non-answer, saying:

    “The attorney general and I have had numerous discussions about the entirety of the Epstein files and the reviews conducted by our team.”

    Yeah, definitely didn’t answer that one. So Swalwell pressed him on it, asking again if he’d ever told the AG that Trump’s name was in the Epstein files. Patel again tried to skate around the answer, saying:

    “During many conversations that the Attorney General and I have had on the matter of Epstein, we have reviewed…”

    Swalwell wasn’t having it. He said, “The question is simple,” asking again sarcastically slowly. Patel refused to answer and started attacking Swalwell and his home state of California instead. Eventually the Congressman had to give up and said simply:

    “We’ll take your evasiveness as consciousness of guilt.”

    It went on like that with some others. At no time, speaking to either side of the aisle, did Patel look like he had any interest in getting to the truth about Epstein and his co-conspirators. Shame.

    Do you want Congress to demand release of the full Epstein files? Learn how to peacefully contact your reps to demand action at https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials.

    [Image via DOJ/MEGA/WENN/CBS News/Bloomberg/YouTube.]

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    Perez Hilton

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  • Cardi B defense gets boost in civil trial as receptionist describes fracas outside doctor’s office

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    Cardi B returned to the witness stand on Wednesday in a civil suit brought by a security guard who alleged that the rapper assaulted her — even scratching her with one of her nail extensions — in a 2018 incident in the hallway outside a Beverly Hills obstetrician’s office.

    On Wednesday, the performer blasted the plaintiff, saying she is looking for a payout. Emani Ellis is seeking $24 million. Cardi B said the pair went chest-to-chest and exchanged heated words but nothing more.

    The defense rested at the end of Wednesday’s session, and the jury in the Alhambra courtroom will hear closing arguments on Thursday.

    Cardi B, whose real name is Belcalis Marlenis Almánzar, reiterated in her testimony that she never touched, scratched or spat at the security guard, who she believed was taking video of her with her cellphone.

    Her defense got a boost Wednesday with the testimony of the obstetrician with whom the then-4-months-pregnant rapper had an appointment on the day of the incident — Feb. 24, 2018 — as well as from his receptionist.

    Receptionist Tierra Malcolm told jurors that she saw Ellis corner Cardi B — and then, when the receptionist got between them, the guard reached for the rapper. The receptionist said she ended up with a cut on her own forehead.

    Dr. David Finke testified that he saw the guard cause that injury and also hit the receptionist’s shoulder. He further said that Ellis had no injuries to her face. Both testified they never saw Cardi B hit Ellis.

    But the rapper testified that when a doctor’s staffer asked Ellis that day what had occurred, Ellis said, “The b— just hit me.’ … And I’m, like, so confused because … I didn’t hit you.”

    Under cross-examination by Ellis’ attorney, the rapper acknowledged she and Ellis were chest-to-chest as expletives were traded.

    Ellis filed suit in 2020, alleging assault, battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress as well as negligence and false imprisonment.

    She worked as a security guard at the building where Cardi B had her medical appointment and said during testimony on Monday that she was doing her rounds when she saw the celebrity get off the elevator. She testified that she was overcome with excitement and declared, “Wow, it’s Cardi B.”

    Ellis alleged that the performer then turned to her and said, “Why the f— are you telling people you’ve seen me?” Cardi B then accused her of trying to spread news about her being at the doctor’s office, she testified.

    Cardi B cursed at her, used the N-word and other slurs, called her names, threatened her job, body-shamed her and mocked her career, Ellis said. She alleged Cardi B spat on her, took a swing at her and scratched her left cheek with a 2- to 3-inch fingernail.

    The rapper said during Wednesday’s court proceedings that she’s 5 foot 3 and was 130 pounds and pregnant at the time. She wouldn’t have tried to fight the guard, who was far larger, she said.

    Asked if she was “disabled” during the incident, Cardi B’s comments drew laughter in the courtroom: “At that moment, when you’re pregnant, I’m very disabled,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “You want me to tell you the things I can’t do?”

    Malcolm said that Cardi B was the lone patient visiting the office that day as it had been closed for her privacy.

    When the incident occurred, the receptionist said, “I really just saw Ms. Ellis in front of her and that’s what made me rush and get in between.” Malcolm acknowledged that she did not see the entire interaction between the pair.

    When she got between them, Malcolm testified she was facing Ellis, who was reaching with her arms. Malcolm said she suffered a cut to her forehead during the incident.

    “Cardi B was behind me. The only assumption I had was that it was from Ms. Ellis as she was facing me,” she testified. “I see her hands trying to reach over me.”

    Asked if Cardi B could have caused the injury with one of her nails, she replied, “But she was behind me.” She said it was a nurse who noticed the cut to her forehead.

    The doctor said he was “just flabbergasted with the allegations that don’t seem congruent with what i saw that day.”

    Following the incident, he said he eventually persuaded Ellis to get on the elevator and leave the floor.

    Cardi B testified Wednesday that her social media followers alerted her that the guard had gone online about the incident, where she responded, calling the accusations lies.

    For the third day of the trial, the rapper, known for her daring style choices, donned a long black wig. The first day of the trial, she sported short black hair, followed the next day by a blond showgirl hairstyle.

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    Richard Winton

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  • Attorneys question Nathan Wade in Georgia DA Fani Willis misconduct hearing | LIVE

    Attorneys question Nathan Wade in Georgia DA Fani Willis misconduct hearing | LIVE

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    ATLANTA — Attorneys are questioning special prosecutor Nathan Wade in a misconduct hearing in Georgia.

    This is a developing story. Below is previous Associated Press coverage.

    A friend of District Attorney Fani Willis testified Thursday that Willis’ personal relationship with a special prosecutor began before he was hired in the election interference case against Donald Trump.

    Fulton County special prosecutor Nathan Wade listens during a hearing on the Georgia election interference case, Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2024, in Atlanta.

    Alyssa Pointer/Pool Photo via AP

    Robin Yeartie’s testimony directly contradicts Willis’ statement that the relationship with Nathan Wade didn’t begin until after Wade was hired. Yeartie was called to testify in a hearing to determine whether Willis should be removed from the case accusing Trump and others of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in the state.

    Willis’ removal would be a stunning development in the most sprawling of the four criminal cases against Trump. An additional delay would likely lessen the chance that a trial would be held before the November election, when he is expected to be the Republican nominee for president. At a separate hearing in New York on Thursday, a judge is expected to confirm whether Trump’s hush-money criminal case will go to trial next month, as scheduled.

    The Georgia hearing, broadcast live, has the potential to dig into uncomfortable details of Willis and Wade’s relationship. Throughout the case, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has made a serious effort to minimize drama in his courtroom and to keep lawyers focused on legal arguments.

    He suggested during a hearing Monday that he would continue that trend, saying that if there’s anything that amounts to “harassment or undue embarrassment,” he is “not going to feel inhibited from stepping in, even without an objection from counsel, to move this along and keep it focused on the issues at hand.”

    Since the allegations of an inappropriate relationship surfaced last month in a motion filed by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman, the former president has used them to try to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Willis’ case. Other Republicans have cited them in calling for investigations into Willis, a Democrat who’s up for reelection this year.

    One of former President Trump’s co-defendants in his Georgia election interference case is seeking to dismiss the indictment against him and disqualify DA Willis.

    Roman, a former Trump campaign staffer and onetime White House aide, alleged that Willis and Wade had been involved in an improper romantic relationship that began before Wade was hired. The motion says Willis paid Wade large sums for his work and then benefited personally when he paid for vacations for the two of them, creating a conflict of interest.

    Roman, who has since been joined by Trump and several other co-defendants, is asking McAfee to toss out the indictment and to prevent Willis, Wade and their offices from continuing to be involved in the case.

    Earlier this month, Willis and Wade filed a response acknowledging a “personal relationship” but said it has not resulted in any direct or indirect financial benefit to the district attorney. In a sworn statement attached to the filing, Wade said the relationship began in 2022, after he was hired as special prosecutor, and that he and Willis shared travel expenses and never lived together.

    Willis argued she has no financial or personal conflict of interest that justifies removing her or her office from the case. Her filing called the allegations “salacious” and said they were designed to generate headlines.

    McAfee said during a hearing Monday that Willis could be disqualified “if evidence is produced demonstrating an actual conflict or the appearance of one.”

    He said the issues he wants to explore at the hearing are “whether a relationship existed, whether that relationship was romantic or nonromantic in nature, when it formed and whether it continues.” Those questions are only relevant, he said, “in combination with the question of the existence and extent of any personal benefit conveyed as a result of the relationship.”

    Roman’s lawyer, Ashleigh Merchant, has subpoenaed Willis, Wade, seven other employees of the district attorney’s office and others, including Wade’s former business partner, Terrence Bradley. Merchant has said Bradley will testify that Willis and Wade’s relationship began prior to his hiring as special prosecutor.

    McAfee on Monday declined Willis’ request to quash those subpoenas, but agreed to revisit that after Bradley testifies.

    Copyright © 2024 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

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    AP

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  • Castleton-on-Hudson hopeful for safe access to land

    Castleton-on-Hudson hopeful for safe access to land

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    CASTLETON-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. (NEWS10) – For 30 years Castleton-on-Hudson residents have fought to be able to safely access their land. A railroad track separates the village from the land and on Tuesday a judge heard testimony from Amtrak and the public on how they believe residents can safely cross the tracks. 

    Residents want to be able to safely access the land on the other side of the railroad track. And their requests are in line with a 1994 New York State Department of Transportation administrative judge, who ordered the crossing close but it was contingent on the land near the river being made into a park that was supposed to be accessible to the public by tunnel….”until that work is completed it is necessary to maintain access to the crossing.”

    On Tuesday, NYSDOT Administrative Law Judge Dustin Howard heard testimony from local residents who described the land as the beating heart of the community and they desperately want to reconnect it. 

    However, Amtrak officials say closing the crossing, entirely, is the safest option. Justin Meko is the VP of Operational Safety for Amtrak.

    “Elimination is the, from a hierarchy of control standpoint, is the safest thing that you could do to protect human beings, and we have introduced elimination at that crossing in 1994. And even with that elimination there’s still been a fatality at that railroad crossing,” said Meko.

    Mayor Joe Keegan said they are just as concerned about safety. “Lots of devastating testimony about safety, accidents, and things. And we hear what they’re saying. Safety is paramount for us, too. Their testimony is very compelling, but obviously our petition was compelling enough for a judge from New York State DOT to hear our case,” said Keegan.

    Initially the NYSDOT recommended a tunnel and that was later found to not be feasible, due to the water table. The department then recommended a bridge to the village. However, the town prefers a ground-level crossing with safety gates. Keegan said it’s more financially feasible. 

    “This is our preferred option for so many reasons. We’ve actually asked DOT to provide us maintenance costs, input on to how a bridge would look, and it was always a one-way conversation. We would ask and they wouldn’t respond,” said Keegan. “It’s the village reaching out to DOT, asking to come to the table to discuss this and they would nod their heads and say, ‘Absolutely,’ and then they would never get back to us and they really just want us to go away and we’re not gonna go away.”

    During Tueday’s testimony representatives from Amtrak insisted there are safer alternatives, but ultimately were requesting to close the crossing altogether. 

    “By eliminating that crossing, and not reopening it, I could prevent – I can limit the access. To reopen it, you open yourself up to the behaviors that were exhibited in 2018,” said Meko.

    That 2018 accident was brought up throughout testimony. Thomas Brust was 27 years old when he was struck and killed by an Amtrak passenger train, along the crossing. Eric Rager was fishing there when it happened.

    “It was a big loss, nobody ever wants to see that,” said Rager. He’s confident that if they had this type of ground-level crossing with safety gates in place at that time it would have saved Brust’s life in 2018.

    “Because he wouldn’t have been able to go, that gate would’ve blocked him when the train goes by and he would not have been able to go,” said Rager. “Whenever I see somebody new down there, the first thing I say is this train goes very fast, be very careful.”

    Keegan understands that many residents wish to access the land safely. Many are already doing so under dangerous conditions, climbing fences or going over a nearby crossing and walking along the tracks.

    “And that is not safe and we’re trying to provide at least some safety measures that have been proven in other cities to work and reduce crossing fatalities,” said Keegan.

    Public comments can be submitted until February 12.

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    Carina Dominguez

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  • “We Wanted to Keep Chasing It”: How Student Journalists at Harvard and Penn Are Beating Big-Time Reporters to the Punch

    “We Wanted to Keep Chasing It”: How Student Journalists at Harvard and Penn Are Beating Big-Time Reporters to the Punch

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    Inside a Harvard library late Monday evening, Miles Herszenhorn and Claire Yuan were trying to focus on their studies. That is, until the students, both juniors and reporters for The Harvard Crimson, the school’s newspaper, got a tip: University president Claudine Gay, despite calls to resign following her controversial congressional testimony about antisemitism on college campuses, would remain in office. “We made several trips between The Crimson’s office and the library that night,” said Herszenhorn. “We kept trying to just call it a night and spend the rest of the night at the library”—they are, after all, in the middle of finals—but “we wanted to keep chasing it.” That they did: Around 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Crimson reporters, beating every national newspaper, scooped that Gay would stay on as president with the support of the Harvard Corporation, the university’s governing board, which had remained silent since the hearing. A New York Times push alert with the news came a few hours later, by which time the Corporation had issued a statement making their decision official.

    Gay wasn’t the only university president under fire for her congressional testimony last week on the topic. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill and MIT president Sally Kornbluth were also grilled—most aggressively by Representative Elise Stefanik—on their respective responses to antisemitism on campus and free expression. While all condemned antisemitism, they also all seemed to dodge the question of whether students should be disciplined if they call for the genocide of Jews, saying, in one way or another, that it depended on the “context.” The hearing—titled “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism”—followed “countless examples of antisemitic demonstrators on college campuses,” House Education Committee Chair Virginia Foxx said in a statement announcing the gathering. University administrators, Foxx said, “have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow.”

    The backlash—from donors, prominent alumni, members of Congress, and even the White House—was swift. While MIT’s board announced its “full and unreserved support” for Kornbluth the same day the House Committee on Education and the Workforce—the same committee that held the hearing—announced that it would open a formal investigation into the three universities, Magill and Gay’s future seemed increasingly imperiled. Both Magill and Gay issued statements apologizing for their remarks, Magill in a video message and Gay in an interview with The Crimson. SNL offered its own version of events. Over the weekend, four days after her appearance before Congress and under pressure that began long before her trip to the Capitol, Magill resigned. Minutes later, Scott Bok, the chair of the University Board of Trustees, also resigned. Stefanik, a staunch Donald Trump supporter and Harvard alum whose attempt to overturn the 2020 election put her at odds with her alma mater in the past, has been taking something of a victory lap, posting on X: “One down. Two to go.”

    Chronicling the saga was The Daily Pennsylvanian, aka The DP, Penn’s student newspaper. Jared Mitovich and Molly Cohen, juniors at Penn who serve as co–news editors of The DP, broke the news of Magill and Bok’s resignations before any national outlet. “Ever since the testimony we’ve kind of gone into a true live-updates scenario,” said Mitovich, who next semester will be The DP’s editor in chief. “We don’t typically do live updates just because our staff is typically in and out of class, [have] other commitments,” he said. “But we were really committed to providing our readers with a blow-by-blow of what was happening.” Even, like their counterparts at The Crimson, when in the midst of finals. “We’ve learned a lot about journalism and the inner workings of our university throughout this,” said Cohen, The DP’s incoming president.

    The intrepid student reporters at Harvard and Penn had an encounter last week on The Hill, where both The Crimson and DP sent reporters to cover the testimony live. They sat nearby each other—along with other national media outlets like The Boston Globe and The New York Times—as the hearing unfolded. “It wasn’t a surprise to see the Penn reporters there,” said Herszenhorn, calling The DP “a great publication.” According to Cohen, they “discussed how it was very interesting that both our universities had been led to this moment.” Watching the testimony, she said, “We definitely knew that this was a turning point, in terms of the entire storyline that’s been developing this whole semester.” They are committed, she said, both to the investigative work of this story as well as “trying to explore what this moment means and what the implications are for the students and faculty who call this campus home.”

    The Israel-Hamas war has prompted heated debate on college and university campuses nationwide about Israel’s security and Palestinians’ rights, along with calls for a ceasefire in Gaza amid mass death and destruction. Amid these tensions, 73% of Jewish college students said in a survey conducted last month that they “have experienced or witnessed antisemitic incidents on their campuses” since the start of the fall semester. The Biden administration recently opened investigations into several universities and colleges “to address the alarming nationwide rise in reports of antisemitism, anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and other forms of discrimination.”

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    Charlotte Klein

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  • UPDATE: Taxi Driver Testifies About Jonathan Majors' Alleged Assault Of Grace Jabbari

    UPDATE: Taxi Driver Testifies About Jonathan Majors' Alleged Assault Of Grace Jabbari

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    The only eyewitness present during Jonathan Majors’ alleged assault on his ex-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, has shared their testimony in court. As The Shade Room previously reported, the 34-year-old actor was charged with strangulation, assault, and harassment after the alleged incident in March.

    Since then, Majors has filed a cross-complaint accusing Jabbari of unreported domestic abuse.

    Additionally, the actor’s trial kicked off in Manhattan on Monday, December 4.

    RELATED: Oop! Social Media Reacts After Texts Revealed In Jonathan Majors’ Trial Appear To Acknowledge Physical Altercation With His Ex

    More Details Regarding The Taxi Driver’s Testimony

    As The Shade Room previously reported, the former couple’s domestic abuse trial was prompted by the actor allegedly attacking Jabbari in a taxi after they left dinner one evening in March.

    Jabbari testified that she saw a text on Majors’s phone that read, “I wish I was kissing you right now.” Then, when they entered their car, she grabbed the phone from him before feeling his “weight” on top of her.

    The actor allegedly struck “a really hard blow” to Jabbari’s head.

    According to PEOPLE, Naveed Sarwar, the former couple’s taxi driver, took the stand on Monday, December 11. Speaking with a translator, Sarwar alleged that Majors “was not doing anything.”

    Instead, Sarwar added that Jabbari “was doing everything.”

    “Many things were happening, I had the feeling the girl had hit the boy,” the taxi driver explained, per PEOPLE.

    Prosecutors urged the Sarwar to “only testify” what happened, “not what you think happened.” However, as he continued, Sarwar alleged that Majors was “trying to get rid” of Jabbari by exiting the taxi.

    Then, prosecutors reportedly reminded Sarwar to keep his “opinions” to himself.

    “He was trying to get rid of her,” Sarwar reportedly insisted, as a row of Majors’ supporters laughed, per PEOPLE. “He was saying, ‘Leave me alone, I have to go…’ He was not doing anything. She was doing everything.”

    According to PEOPLE, Sarwar’s testimony contrasted his previous statement alleging Majors threw Jabbari around the taxi “like a football.”

    TMZ reports that Sarwar also testified that he did not find blood in his taxi car following the incident.

    A Recap Of The Trial’s Opening Statements

    As The Shade Room previously reported, Majors was accompanied by his mother, sister, girlfriend Meagan Good, and her mother on day one of his trial.

    During opening arguments, prosecutors explained that his former romance with Jabbari blossomed “fast.” The pair reportedly met on a movie set and swooned one another with love letters and poetry.

    Jabbari alleged that Majors told her he loved her “early on,” and although it felt “overwhelming,” she felt “cared for” and “seen.”

    However, prosecutors alleged that within a few months, the “defendant’s true self began to emerge.” Jabbari was ultimately met by a man prone to “rage and aggression.”

    Jonathan Majors’ Demands & Texts Exchanged With Grace Jabbari

    Jabbari’s testimony began the following day, and prosecutors played recordings of heated exchanges between the former couple. One recording, reportedly taken in September 2022, showed Majors referring to himself as a “great man” as he ordered Jabbari to behave like Coretta Scott King or Michelle Obama.

    “I’m a great man. A great man. I do great things for my culture and for the world,” Majors said during the recording, per Variety. “The woman that supports me needs to be a great woman.”

    RELATED: Say What? Jonathan Majors’ Ex Grace Jabbari Alleges The Actor Demanded Her To Behave Like Coretta Scott King & Michelle Obama

    Then, on December 8, text messages surfaced from that same period where the pair seemed to discuss a head injury suffered by Jabbari.

    “I fear you have no perspective of what could happen if you go to the hospital,” Majors reportedly texted to Jabbari. “They will ask you questions, and as I don’t think you actually protect us, it could lead to an investigation even if you do lie, and they suspect something.”

    Jabbari responded by telling Majors that she’d only inform the doctor that she “bumped her head.” Additionally, she informed Majors that she needed to acquire “stronger” painkillers.

    “I will tell the doctor I bumped my head,” Jabbari said, reading the text message to jurors before succumbing to her tears. Assistant District Attorney Kelli Galaway continued, “I will tell the doctor I bumped my head if I go. I’m going to give it one more day, but I can’t sleep and I need some stronger painkillers. That’s all: why would I tell them what really happened when it’s clear I want to be with you?”

    As the exchange continued, Majors explained that he “considered” committing suicide before Jabbari affirmed that she would not go to see a doctor.

    “I will not go to the doctor if you don’t feel safe with me doing so, or don’t trust me to. I promise you I would never mention you but understand your fear,” Jabbari responded.

    Majors reportedly kept his head down as the texts were read in court. After they were completed, he briefly glanced at the jurors.

    RELATED: UPDATE: Kysre Gondrezick Denies She Was Assaulted By Kevin Porter Jr. Amid His Trade From The Houston Rockets

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    Jadriena Solomon

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  • Major donor calls on UPenn president to resign for disastrous testimony on antisemitism, threatening $100 million gift

    Major donor calls on UPenn president to resign for disastrous testimony on antisemitism, threatening $100 million gift

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    The walls appear to be caving in on the University of Pennsylvania’s president, Liz Magill, who faces scathing criticism over her performance at a House hearing earlier this week.

    Prominent donor Ross Stevens threatened to claw back a $100 million donation. The university’s board of trustees held an emergency meeting Thursday. And the powerful Wharton Board of Advisors that leads the university’s prominent business school called for a leadership change at the university.

    Magill remained president after the hastily arranged board gathering concluded Thursday, a source familiar with the proceedings told CNN. But Magill faced a rebellion from Wharton’s Board of Advisors, and a growing coalition of donors, politicians and business leaders who denounced her testimony.

    During Tuesday’s House hearing, Magill, along with the presidents of Harvard and MIT, did not explicitly say that calling for the genocide of Jews would necessarily violate their code of conduct on bullying or harassment. Instead, they explained it would depend on the circumstances and conduct.

    Magill had already been under fire from prominent donors, faculty, students and alumni prior to Tuesday’s hearing after multiple incidents of antisemitism on campus in recent months – and what critics have said was a tepid response to those incidents.

    Mega-donor threatens to pull funds

    A major donor called on Magill to resign and threatened to rescind stock, costing the university $100 million if she doesn’t.

    Wall Street CEO Ross Stevens sent a letter on Thursday to Penn threatening to take steps that would cost the Ivy League school approximately $100 million if Magill stays on as president, CNN has learned.

    Stevens, a Penn alum and CEO of Stone Ridge Holdings, argues he has clear grounds to rescind $100 million worth of shares in his company that are currently held by Penn. He specifically cites Magill’s disastrous testimony before Congress earlier this week.

    “Absent a change in leadership and values at Penn in the very near future, I plan to rescind Penn’s Stone Ridge shares to help prevent any further reputational and other damage to Stone Ridge as a result of our relationship with Penn and Liz Magill,” Stevens said in a note to his employees on Thursday obtained by CNN.

    Lawyers at Davis Polk, representing Stone Ridge, wrote a letter to Penn that cites an agreement between the school and the firm. That agreement, according to Stone Ridge, gives the firm the ability to retire the shares for cause, including potential damage to Stone Ridge’s “reputation, character, or standing.”

    Wharton calls for a leadership change

    The Wharton Board of Advisors, comprised of a who’s who group of business leaders, has joined the growing chorus of voices calling for Magill’s immediate ouster.

    “As a result of the University leadership’s stated beliefs and collective failure to act, our Board respectfully suggests to you and the Board of Trustees that the University requires new leadership with immediate effect,” the Wharton Board of Advisors wrote in a letter sent directly to Magill.

    The letter, which appears to have been sent Wednesday, specifically cites Magill’s disastrous testimony.

    “In light of your testimony yesterday before Congress, we demand the University clarify its position regarding any call for harm to any group of people immediately, change any policies that allow such conduct with immediate effect, and discipline any offenders expeditiously,” the letter reads.

    The strong criticism comes from an influential group of Penn alumni. Its members include billionaire NFL owner Josh Harris, former Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, Related Companies CEO Jeff Blau, Blackstone exec David Blitzer and BET CEO Scott Mills, according to the Wharton Board of Advisors website.

    “Our board has been, and remains, deeply concerned about the dangerous and toxic culture on our campus that has been led by a select group of students and faculty and has been permitted by University leadership,” the Wharton board letter said.

    Board holds an emergency meeting

    The University of Pennsylvania’s board of trustees held an emergency meeting Thursday.

    One source familiar with the board’s proceedings told CNN Scott Bok, the chair of Penn’s Board of Trustees, was expected Thursday or Friday to talk to Magill about possibly stepping down. But another source with close knowledge of the board’s activity denied that meeting was taking place and said the board was not close to holding discussions with Magill about a leadership change.

    A spokesperson for Penn said there is no immediate plan for the board to replace Magill.

    “There is no board plan for imminent leadership change,” the spokesperson said.

    Penn currently does not have an interim president lined up if Magill were to step down, a source said.

    Damage control

    After the fallout from Tuesday’s hearing, Magill attempted to clarify her message on Wednesday, posting a video on X where the Penn leader said she should have focused on the “irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetrate.”

    Magill said that Penn’s policies “need to be clarified and evaluated,” adding that in her view: “It would be harassment or intimidation.”

    Harvard President Claudine Gay similarly issued a statement Wednesday clarifying her comments.

    “There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students,” Gay said in the new statement posted on X. “Let me be clear: Calls for violence or genocide against the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to account.”

    In a Thursday statement to CNN, MIT’s deputy director of media relations, Sarah McDonnell, said the university “rejects antisemitism in all its forms.” Harvard on Wednesday clarified its president’s testimony, echoing Magill and MIT.

    However, the executive committee of MIT said in a statement it is standing by its president, Sally Kornbluth.

    “The MIT Corporation chose Sally to be our president for her outstanding academic leadership, her judgment, her integrity, her moral compass, and her ability to unite our community around MIT’s core values. She has done excellent work in leading our community, including in addressing antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate, which we reject utterly at MIT. She has our full and unreserved support,” the statement said.

    Still, the hearing on Tuesday drew strong and widespread criticism.

    House committee is investigating

    Magill’s future hangs in the balance as a House committee is investigating Penn’s actions.

    Following the board’s virtual meeting, the House Education and Workforce Committee launched an investigation with full subpoena power into Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik announced Thursday afternoon.

    “We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage,” Stefanik said in a statement. “After this week’s pathetic and morally bankrupt testimony by university presidents when answering my questions, the Education and Workforce Committee is launching an official Congressional investigation.”

    Republican Rep. Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the committee, called the testimony “absolutely unacceptable.”

    “Committee members have deep concerns with their leadership and their failure to take steps to provide Jewish students the safe learning environment they are due under law,” Foxx said in a statement.

    Growing calls to resign

    A growing number of politicians and business leaders are also calling on Magill to step aide.

    A university spokesperson told CNN the board of trustees organized Thursday’s virtual gathering at approximately 2 pm ET Wednesday. That came just hours after Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro condemned Magill’s testimony as “shameful” and urged the board of trustees to meet and decide whether that testimony lives up to the school’s values. Despite its name, Penn is a private school and is not run by the state.

    Former US Ambassador Jon Huntsman Thursday night called on the board of trustees to remove Magill.

    “Let’s make this great institution shine once again,” Huntsman said in a statement shared exclusively with CNN on Thursday evening. “We are anchored to the past until the trustees step up and completely cut ties with current leadership. Full stop.”

    Huntsman, the former governor of Utah, was a 1987 graduate and former UPenn trustee. In October, he blasted Penn’s response to antisemitism on campus and promised to halt his family’s donations to the university. Now, Huntsman is going further, calling for a complete leadership change.

    “At this point it’s not even debatable,” Huntsman said. “Just a simple IQ test.”

    Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, called the testimony “catastrophic and clarifying” and said Magill’s attempt to clean-up her testimony “looked like a hostage video, like she was speaking under duress.”

    “I understand why the governor of Pennsylvania and so many of the trustees don’t have confidence in her. I don’t have confidence anymore that Penn is capable, under this leadership, of getting it right,” Greenblatt told CNN’s Kate Bolduan, adding that he has spoken with Magill.

    The ADL CEO said his organization did not have a position on whether or not the university presidents should step down – until Tuesday’s hearing.

    “But when I watched these presidents flail and feebly, with legal-ish answers respond to a simple line of questioning, we have lost confidence with them,” he said.

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren told CNBC on Thursday that “advocating for genocide is fundamentally wrong, full-stop. We just can’t have this.”

    The Massachusetts Democrat said she’s worried that Americans can’t disagree with each other. “We have unleashed hate in this country – and that is wrong,” Warren said.

    Asked if the college presidents should step down, Warren said: “If you can’t lead, if you can’t stand up and say what’s right and wrong – very much in the extreme cases, and these are the extreme cases – then you’ve got a problem.”

    Billionaire Elon Musk, who graduated from Penn, added to the criticism.

    “I am a Penn alum and this is indeed shameful,” Musk said on X on Wednesday.

    Of course, Musk himself faced condemnation last month after agreeing with an antisemitic post. Musk later apologized for what he called his “dumbest” ever social media post.

    Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand on Thursday said she agrees with calls for the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania to resign, arguing they are “failing in the worst way.”

    “Their statements were abhorrent,” Gillibrand told Fox News, referring to Tuesday’s hearing in the House. “Trying to contextualize what constitutes harassment? Jewish students are terrified on these campuses.”

    The New York Democrat said that in some cases, students have been told to stay in their dorm rooms because their safety couldn’t be guaranteed.

    “That is the definition of harassment: To instill fear and to not have a climate where kids can thrive and go to school and feel protected. They are failing in the worst way as college presidents,” Gillibrand said. “You cannot call for the genocide of Jews, the genocide of any group of people, and not say that that’s harassment.”

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

    CNN’s Mikayla Bouchard contributed to this report.

    For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com

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  • Sam Bankman-Fried Often Didn’t Recall in His Testimony. But the Prosecution Did.

    Sam Bankman-Fried Often Didn’t Recall in His Testimony. But the Prosecution Did.

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    Of all the deliciously tedious courtroom conversations that have happened between federal prosecutors and failed crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried—who is standing trial on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering related to the loss of $8 billion of customer funds at his crypto exchange, FTX—one on Tuesday really had it all. Pedantic dissembling! Experienced persistence! The Bahamas! FPOTUS Bill Clinton! It began when assistant U.S. attorney Danielle Sassoon asked Bankman-Fried what ought to have been a straightforward question on cross-examination, and things quickly snowballed into the absurd:

    Sassoon: In April 2022, you invited the Bahamian prime minister to a private dinner hosted by FTX, right?
    Bankman-Fried: When was that? Sorry?
    Sassoon: Around April of 2022.
    Bankman-Fried: It’s possible. I don’t remember what that’s referring to.
    Sassoon: Well, do you recall inviting him to a private dinner in 2022 with former president Bill Clinton and former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair?
    Bankman-Fried: No, but it doesn’t surprise me.
    Sassoon: Did you in fact attend a dinner with the Bahamian prime minister, Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair?
    Bankman-Fried: During the conference, the FTX conference, there was a—something like a dinner with them, yeah.
    Sassoon: When you say “something like a dinner,” was it a dinner?
    Bankman-Fried: It may—I don’t remember whether there was food. It may have been.
    Sassoon: And you were there, right?
    Bankman-Fried: Yup.

    Perhaps out of deference for his may-have-been-dinner-mate Clinton, Bankman-Fried thankfully avoided bickering over the meaning of the word “is.” Still, he argued about plenty of other terms during his three-ish days on the stand. For example, less than a minute into Sassoon’s cross, which began Monday afternoon, Bankman-Fried said the phrase: “Depends on how you define ‘trading.’” The next day, he haggled with Sassoon over the meaning of “transact with.”

    At one point, after being asked whether he remembered making various positive statements about the company he founded, SBF responded, “No, but I may have,” to five consecutive questions. More than once, he called something “effectively correct” instead of just saying yes. And he responded, “I’m not sure what you’re referring to,” to Sassoon’s inquiries often enough that Judge Lewis Kaplan finally broke in.

    “The issue is not what she is referring to,” Kaplan admonished, as a few jury members smirked. “Please answer the question.” The question in question: “Generally, do you recall in substance making statements that FTX was a safe platform?” Bankman-Fried’s eventual answer: “I remember things around specific parts of the FTX platform that were related to that. I don’t remember a general statement to that effect. I am not sure there wasn’t one.” Got it!

    While Bankman-Fried continued in this manner, a filmmaker sitting next to me in the gallery murmured that the defendant ought to be lifting his face up more, that maybe he might appear more sympathetic if he found better light. When your defense revolves around keeping everything shrouded, however, it turns out there really isn’t much you can illuminate.

    United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried commenced in early October and could conclude as soon as the end of this week. In its closing argument on Wednesday, the government stated that Bankman-Fried had said some version of “I can’t recall” over 140 times in his cross-examination and that, as attorney Nicolas Roos put it, “A pyramid of deceit was built by the defendant. That ultimately collapsed.”

    As I watched Bankman-Fried testify in his own defense over the past week, I thought a lot about chaotic spreadsheets. This was, at least in part, because throughout the trial, a lot of .xls files have been entered into evidence, each more tenuous than the last.

    There are spreadsheets with line items labeled “Oops this seems like not a thing we should be counting,” like one that Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Bankman-Fried’s trading firm, Alameda Research, said she prepared. There are spreadsheets where the accounting is rounded not to the nearest decimal, but to the nearest billion. There are spreadsheets where the accounting is labeled with euphemisms, like “exchange borrows,” that mean illicitly wormholed FTX customer funds. There are spreadsheets showing Alameda’s $65 billion line of credit on FTX’s systems, an allowance that was $64,850,000,000 more than that of the next-highest customer. So many spreadsheets, all crowded with tabs, each one lousy with alarming valuations and bad news.

    But it wasn’t just the spreadsheets themselves that stood out to me. It was the fact that Bankman-Fried, up on the witness stand, often resembled a spreadsheet himself. Sometimes this was because of the way he processed, added up, divided, and extrapolated his thoughts and testimony in real time, stacking and rearranging his words in linked columns and rows. More often, it was because he said, again and again, that he didn’t know what Sassoon was referring to—a living embodiment of the dreaded #REF! error. Number-loving and load-bearing, Bankman-Fried was, for years, the guy whose base values provided the enterprise value to an entire apparatus of people and industry. Now, his cell contains only his own errors. When he went bust, everything linked to him went broke.

    “I trusted Sam,” testified Adam Yedidia, Bankman-Fried’s former MIT classmate who also worked at FTX, in early October. A few days later, Ellison, one of three trial witnesses who were a part of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle and have already pleaded guilty to fraud and conspiracy charges as part of a cooperation deal with the government, described Bankman-Fried as so ambitious that he felt he had a 5 percent chance of becoming president of the United States. Former FTX employee Nishad Singh—whose own bottom line went from “billionaire” to “#REF!” with the collapse of FTX just about a year ago—also recently testified for the prosecution. He was asked how he would describe his relationship with the defendant. “I have always been intimidated by Sam,” Singh began, to the overruled objection of the defense. Singh continued: “Sam is a formidable character, brilliant. So I had a lot of admiration and respect for him. Over time, I think a lot of that eroded, and I grew distrustful.”

    When Bankman-Fried took the stand, a will-he-or-won’t-he decision that had been hotly speculated about for weeks, the full arc of all of these descriptions of him was on display. For a time, courtroom observers did get a sense of the once-formidable iteration of Bankman-Fried. And then we also saw that same erosion, right before our eyes.

    While most white-collar defense attorneys typically don’t like to have their clients testify—the risks of perjuring oneself, irritating the sentencing judge, or getting pinned down on cross-examination all frequently outweigh the potential upside of, say, charming a juror—Bankman-Fried’s counsel almost certainly had little choice in the matter. Their client has a famously idiosyncratic risk tolerance. And the case was not going well for the defense otherwise: Their cross-examinations, particularly of Ellison, hadn’t drawn much blood, and the judge denied a number of their proposed expert witnesses. So why not swing big?

    In his direct examination, which began for the jury on Friday, Bankman-Fried got off to a steady start. When asked what his early vision was for FTX, SBF said that he had hoped to “move the [crypto] ecosystem forward,” but “it turned out basically the opposite of that.” (Shades of his “same, except exactly the opposite” quip to Ellison, which will live in ex-boyfriend infamy.) Bit by bit, he and his lawyers chipped away at some of the prior witnesses’ testimonies, trying to establish that mistakes were made and money was lost, but crimes were not intentionally committed.

    To that point in the trial, the government had repeatedly offered evidence that Bankman-Fried is well-attuned to the best PR angles for him and his companies. As he sat on the stand, we in the courtroom could see the defendant strive to be perceived as forthright—and maybe also a little bit funny? Speaking about FTX’s decision to enter a 19-year, $135 million arena-naming deal with the city of Miami and the NBA’s Miami Heat, for example, Bankman-Fried unexpectedly and amiably roasted both Dak Prescott’s Sleep Number bed ad campaign (too unmemorable, per his analysis) and the Kansas City Royals (“With no offense to the Royals,” he said, talking about having considered working with the team on a possible stadium-naming deal, “I didn’t want to be known as the Kansas City Royals of crypto exchanges, so we passed on that one”). Honestly, some of it was solid material. A number of jurors grinned, maybe even chuckled a little, and so did I. And that was before he had this exchange with his lawyer, Mark Cohen:

    Cohen: Can we turn to the second page, please? Pull up the paragraph entitled: “Things Sam Is Freaking Out About.” First entry is hedging. Do you recall discussing this with Ms. Ellison?
    Bankman-Fried: Yes.
    Cohen: Were you freaking out?
    Bankman-Fried: I don’t tend to show a lot of freak-out-ness, but relative to my standard, yes.

    Unlike the jurors, though, I was getting a kick out of this mainly because I had a good idea of what would be coming down the pike. Last Thursday, due to a dispute between lawyers about the admissibility of certain topics of inquiry, the jury was sent home early so that Bankman-Fried could offer limited testimony in a special “hearing” in front of Judge Kaplan (and the rest of the gallery). The direct questioning in that period had gone smoothly, much like it did in front of the jury—Sam’s father even gave him a big thumbs-up during a courtroom break.

    But during a truncated cross-examination by Sassoon that afternoon, Bankman-Fried wilted. Simple questions like when …? or where …? or with whom …? gave him (and his mother, scoffing in the gallery) fits. The jury wasn’t there, so it was in some ways a dress rehearsal for both sides, but it went so resoundingly badly for the defense that I spent the night fretting that we’d come into court the next morning to find out that Bankman-Fried had run the numbers and would no longer testify at all. Luckily, that wasn’t the case.

    When it came time for the real cross-examination, Bankman-Fried’s whole presence on the stand shifted. Gone was the strenuous (approaching affable) nerd who had described his college living situation as “coed, nerdy, and dry” and had explained to the jury why he’d been photographed carrying a deck of playing cards: not because he was a gambling man who wanted to be ready in case a poker game broke out, but rather to give his fidgety hands something to do. (It wasn’t a sustainable solution, he said: He shuffled the cards so often that he shredded through a pack of them a week at one point, and he had to switch to a fidget spinner.) Gone were the chatty asides about how most people strive for Inbox Zero, but his goal is Inbox 60,000. Bankman-Fried was now on the hot seat, and while he’d clearly learned since Thursday to keep his answers as close to “yep” and “nope” as possible, he still couldn’t help but veer into his own way.

    In his direct testimony, Bankman-Fried had displayed a precise, expansive memory, but on cross, he had a much tougher time recollecting even the recent past:

    Sassoon: You testified that you stumbled your way into Michael Kives’s Super Bowl party. Do you recall that?
    Bankman-Fried: The seats at the actual, physical Super Bowl, yes.
    Sassoon: And you flew to the Super Bowl in a private jet, didn’t you?
    Bankman-Fried: I don’t remember.
    Sassoon: You don’t recall flying to the Super Bowl in a private plane?
    Bankman-Fried: I don’t recall how I got there.
    Sassoon: Is that because you traveled on private planes so frequently?

    Again and again, Sassoon asked him about specific statements he made, and he said he didn’t recall or didn’t know what she was referring to. Again and again, she came calmly with the receipts, posting Google Docs or old articles or video links or Signal messages. “Does that refresh your memory?” she would ask. “No,” he’d reply.

    Sassoon [calling up a photo of SBF on a plane]: Mr. Bankman-Fried, is that you in shorts and a T-shirt on a private plane?
    Bankman-Fried: Chartered plane, at least, yes.

    Sassoon established that Bankman-Fried had bragged about being wholly separate from his trading firm, Alameda, but that he had also been directing trading activity—a big blow to his attempted defense that Ellison, the Alameda CEO, should have hedged better. She made Bankman-Fried read aloud a DM of his that said “fuck regulators” and had him admit that he had called some of the folks on crypto Twitter “dumb motherfuckers.” (Well, kind of admit: Bankman-Fried would agree that he had said that about only “a specific subset of them.”) She pulled up stock transfer agreements and wryly observed: “And this says, ‘Unanimous Consent of Board of Directors.’ Looking at the bottom, you were the only member of the board, correct?”

    Once, cornered, Bankman-Fried piped up plaintively: “I can explain …” Sassoon wasn’t interested in that. “That’s all right,” she said, with the exact singsong cadence Miranda Priestly uses when dismissing an underling, as the exhibit monitor displayed all the explanatory proof she needed.

    During the defense’s redirect on Tuesday morning, Bankman-Fried reverted to being a more eager talker and reminiscer. His memory became clearer when he was asked about past conversations and states of mind. He joked to the court about the photo of him on a private jet that the government had posted: “very flattering one.” Ha ha, I guess. But the whiplash in tone mostly served to make his reticent responses to the prosecutor’s earlier questions seem even more shady and petulant.

    In Bankman-Fried’s time on the stand, the wide scope of his personality became clearer and clearer: how convincing and, in his way, winsome he could be; how cold and harsh he could become. Business in front; coed, nerdy, and dry in back. Still, while a lot of his chatter seemed designed to fill the air and distract the jury from the painful caesuras he’d endured from Sassoon, one thing he said came almost certainly from the heart.

    Asked by Cohen why he had told Sassoon “no” under oath when asked if he had spent the missing $8 billion of FTX customer funds, Bankman-Fried had a couple of answers. One was, “Money is fungible anyway.” In other words: Hey, who’s to say?! But the other seemed to speak to one of Sam’s broader, odder points of view. “The other part of it, I mean, I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but for better or for worse, it has been a part of me that, like: I wasn’t particularly interested in trying to dole out blame for it. That wasn’t my priority. It generally wasn’t my priority. It was generally something I de-prioritized.”

    This tracked with something his mother, a law school professor and ethicist, had written for the Boston Review a decade ago: a polemic against “blame mongering.” It also tracked with what Bankman-Fried had told Michael Lewis in the course of being interviewed for his book Going Infinite: that at his first job out of MIT, “Jane Street [Capital] really didn’t like blaming people. … They sort of asked, ‘Did anyone do anything contrary to what they were being told?’ When the answer was no, they said it could just as easily have been the CEO who did it.”

    Later in Going Infinite, Bankman-Fried is quoted as saying, “Fault is just a construct of human society. It serves different purposes for different people. … I guess maybe the most important definition—to me, at least—is how did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior?” In Bankman-Fried’s case, the record seems clear: His actions made him more likely, in the future, to behave as though there would be no consequences for them. His actions made him more likely, in the future, to repeat said actions. And his actions made him more likely, in the future, to arrive at a scenario where he would want to testify in federal court in his own defense in a multibillion-dollar fraud case.

    On Thursday, a different construct of human society—the jury—will begin its deliberations on the seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering leveled against Bankman-Fried. And they will ultimately be the ones to determine whether the fault lies with Bankman-Fried or if he’s not guilty of the charges against him. “He took the money. He knew it was wrong. He did it anyway,” Roos said in the government’s closing argument. “Because he thought he was smarter. … [He thought he could] talk his way out of it.” Cohen, speaking for the defense, told the jury, “The government has sought to turn Sam into some sort of villain, some sort of monster. … It’s both wrong and unfair.” Regardless of whom the jury believes, both sides are referring to the same missing billions, the same broken spreadsheets, the same defendant who sat up on the witness stand and made one thing really clear: that he’s forgotten so much more about all of this than we’ll ever be able to know.

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  • FBI agent contests whistleblower claims in Hunter Biden case, transcript shows | CNN Politics

    FBI agent contests whistleblower claims in Hunter Biden case, transcript shows | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The FBI agent managing the team on the Hunter Biden criminal case testified to the House Judiciary Committee that US Attorney David Weiss had ultimate authority over the case, contesting testimony brought forward by whistleblowers.

    Thomas Sobocinski, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore field office, told committee investigators in a closed-door interview last week that from his perspective, Weiss had the authority to bring forward whatever charges he wanted in whatever venue he preferred.

    “It was my understanding that David Weiss had the authority, and at no point did I ever differ from that,” Sobociniski said, according to a copy of his interview transcript obtained by CNN. “There’s never been anything in my view that changed that.”

    Sobocinski’s transcript, which was first reported by The Washington Post, comes as House Republicans continue to investigate allegations that the criminal case of President Joe Biden’s son was mishandled. It’s all part of the House GOP impeachment inquiry into the president, even though Republicans have yet to find evidence that the president did anything illegal.

    Sobocinski’s testimony disputes a number of claims from an Internal Revenue Service whistleblower about a key October 2022 meeting including FBI and IRS agents, Weiss, and other Justice Department prosecutors that occurred at a critical point in the criminal probe. IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley, who was in the meeting and worked on this case, said Weiss revealed in that meeting that he is not the deciding person on whether charges are filed. Shapley provided his notes on that meeting and email exchanges about it to Congress to support his claim. The notes say, “Weiss stated – He is not the deciding person.”

    But Sobocinski was also in that October 2022 meeting and said Weiss never said that.

    “I went into that meeting believing he had the authority, and I have left that meeting believing he had the authority to bring charges,” Sobocinski testified.

    Reflecting on Shapley’s accusation of Weiss, Sobocinski said, “In my recollection, if he would have said that, I would have remembered it.”

    In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee responding to Sobocinski’s testimony, Shapley’s legal team contested Sobocinski’s testimony, noting that Shapley took notes of the October 2022 meeting while Sobocinski did not.

    “Mr. Sobocinski apparently acknowledged that he took no notes in the meeting, nor did he document it in any contemporaneous fashion afterwards,” wrote Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt and attorney Mark Lytle, according to the letter obtained by CNN. “By contrast, SSA Shapley took notes during the meeting. These notes, combined with his fresh memory of the meeting, formed the basis for the email he sent later that day and corroborate his current recollection.”

    House Republicans responded to the comments saying that the whistleblowers, Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, a 13-year IRS special agent with the Criminal Investigation Division, were “wholly consistent.”

    “Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler have been wholly consistent throughout their disclosures to Congress, and the only people who haven’t are people like David Weiss, Merrick Garland, and their liberal cronies,” said Russell Dye, a spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican.

    Sobocinski also disputed Shapley’s claim that Weiss said in the October 2022 meeting he was denied special counsel status and denied venues to bring forward charges.

    Sobocinski told the House Judiciary panel he was informed of Weiss’ special counsel status the day Attorney General Merrick Garland announced it last month, and that Weiss was not previously denied special counsel status as Shapley has claimed.

    “I don’t have a recollection with him saying that there or at any point in my communication with Mr. Weiss,” Sobocinski said. “That would have been a total 180 from all our previous conversations about authorities.”

    When asked if anybody at FBI headquarters ever prevented Weiss from taking any steps or accessing any necessary resources, Sobocinski replied, “Not that I’m aware of.”

    Sobocinski told congressional investigators that he did raise concerns repeatedly about the pace of the investigation into Hunter Biden.

    “I would have liked for it to move faster,” he said.

    Republicans on the committee raised the question of why Weiss was eventually given special counsel status if Weiss had the ultimate authority as Sobocinski has argued. Sobocinski acknowledged that Weiss would be the best person to answer these questions, and more specifics about how special counsel status was granted.

    On whether Weiss was denied venues to bring forward charges against the president’s son, Sobocinski said he only had “high-level conversations” about the specific charges, but from his understanding “there was a process” within the Justice Department for US attorneys to bring forward charges outside of their district that involved a lot of “bureaucracy” but was “not a permission issue.”

    “Without going into specifics, there were discussion about taxes and venue,” Sobocinski said. “And, once again, Mr. Weiss had the authority to bring it.”

    Shapley’s notes on the October 2022 meeting included that an FBI agent asked the group if they were concerned about the investigation being politicized. Sobocinski noted that part of why the meeting was called was in response to a media leak about the status of the criminal investigation. He told congressional investigators that he wanted to ask anyone in the room if they felt the investigation into the president’s son had been politicized, and he said no one in the room, not even Shapley, raised any concerns.

    “I wanted to go on record in the room of the leaders who were involved in this investigation,” Sobocinski said. “Thought that it was no, and nobody in that room raised their voice to say anything other.”

    Sobocinski also addressed broader claims made about how the Hunter Biden criminal investigation has been handled. To discredit GOP claims that prosecutors colluded with Hunter Biden’s Secret Service by informing them they wanted to interview Hunter, Sobocinski said that as a former Secret Service agent, he said it was “expected” for an investigative entity to speak with him ahead of interviewing a protectee of his. Sobocinski also said he is not aware of any evidence that the Department of Justice has retaliated against the IRS whistleblowers who have come forward.

    The Department of Justice sent Sobocinski a letter the day before his interview giving him permission to discuss the details of the October 7, 2022, meeting and Weiss’ authority on the case. But Sobocinski was not permitted to discuss the ongoing criminal investigation.

    This story has been updated with additional developments.

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  • Elon Musk should be forced to testify on X’s ‘chaotic environment,’ US regulator tells court | CNN Business

    Elon Musk should be forced to testify on X’s ‘chaotic environment,’ US regulator tells court | CNN Business

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Elon Musk should be forced to testify in an expansive US government probe of X, the company formerly known as Twitter, the US government said.

    The government said mass layoffs and other decisions Musk made raised questions about X’s ability to comply with the law and to protect users’ privacy.

    The US government’s attempt to compel Musk’s testimony is the latest turn in an investigation that predates Musk’s acquisition of X that has intensified due to Musk’s own actions, according to a court filing by the Justice Department on behalf of the Federal Trade Commission.

    The court filing dated Monday cites depositions with multiple former X executives, including its former chief information security officer and former chief privacy officer, who testified that a barrage of layoffs and resignations following Musk’s $44 billion takeover may have hindered X from meeting its security obligations under a 2011 FTC consent agreement.

    Twitter and its outside attorney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

    According to testimony cited in the filing, there were so few employees left after the departures that anywhere from 37% to 50% of the company’s security program lacked effective management and oversight, with no one available to take responsibility for those controls. Other planned upgrades to the company’s security program were “impaired,” the filing said, citing a deposition by the former chief information security officer, Lea Kissner.

    In another example, Musk personally tried to rush the rollout of Twitter Blue, the company’s paid subscription service, the filing said. That forced the company’s security team to bypass the required security and privacy checks that were a part of Twitter’s own policies and that had been mandated in the FTC order, according to the testimony of Damien Kieran, the former chief privacy officer.

    The filing also alleges that Musk’s move to grant several journalists access to internal company records — access that would culminate in the so-called Twitter Files claiming to show evidence of politically motivated censorship — initially involved a plan that could potentially have led to the exposure of private user data in violation of the FTC order.

    According to the filing, Musk’s plan originally called for providing access through a dedicated company laptop with “elevated privileges beyond just what a[n] average employee might have.”

    “Longtime information security employees intervened and implemented safeguards to mitigate the risks,” the filing said, but even then, the former employees testified, the process raised doubts about Musk’s commitment to privacy and security.

    X has moved to block Musk from being forced to testify and has asked a federal court to invalidate the entire FTC order requiring it to safeguard user privacy, accusing the FTC of asking too many questions in its probe.

    But in its filing, the US government said its interest in Musk’s testimony is well-justified based on the appearance of a “chaotic environment” at X driven by “sudden, radical changes at the company” following Musk’s acquisition.

    “The FTC had every reason to seek information about whether these developments signaled a lapse in X Corp.’s compliance” with the 2011 order, the filing said. Confirmed violations of the FTC order could lead to billions of dollars in fines for X, as well as potential legal ramifications for individual executives such as Musk if they are deemed personally responsible for them.

    The FTC investigation traces back to bombshell allegations — raised by Twitter’s former security chief Peiter “Mudge” Zatko and predating Musk’s acquisition — that for years Twitter has failed to live up to its legally binding commitments to the FTC to protect user privacy and security. Those allegations were first reported last year by CNN and The Washington Post.

    The investigation has proven politically charged as Musk — and his allies including Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee — have responded to the probe by publicly accusing the FTC of harassment and overreach.

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  • Cassidy Hutchinson defends herself in first post-testimony TV interview | CNN Politics

    Cassidy Hutchinson defends herself in first post-testimony TV interview | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who delivered bombshell testimony to the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, defended the anecdotes she recounted under oath in her first TV interview since her Capitol Hill testimony.

    “What would I have to gain by coming forward? It would have been easier for me to continue being complicit and to stay in the comfortable zone,” Hutchinson said in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning.”

    CBS also reported that Hutchinson had testified to grand juries in Fulton County, Georgia, and Washington, DC, about the 2020 election aftermath, but noted it’s unclear how substantial that testimony was in forming the criminal cases now filed against former President Donald Trump.

    Hutchinson recounted that an attorney she initially worked with, who had been provided through Trump’s political connections and money, had made clear to her the less she recalled to House investigators, the better. She answered several questions in her initial interviews – before switching attorneys – with “I don’t know” or “I don’t recall,” but it “was information I very clearly recalled.”

    Her testimony last year revealed that Trump was aware of the potential for violence on January 6, 2021, but forged ahead with his attempts to rile up his supporters.

    Hutchinson also testified that she had heard a secondhand account that Trump was so enraged at his Secret Service detail for blocking him from going to the Capitol on January 6 that he lunged to the front of his presidential limo and tried to turn the wheel.

    Secret Service agent Bobby Engel, whom Hutchinson said witnessed the incident, and then-White House deputy chief of staff Tony Ornato, whom she said she heard the story from, have both said they don’t remember it.

    But Hutchinson told CBS, “I know what I recall. … I stand by what I testified to,” while noting it is possible that Engel and Ornato don’t remember the incident.

    CNN’s Jake Tapper will sit down with Hutchinson for an interview that will air Tuesday at 4 p.m. ET on “The Lead.” Hutchinson’s public appearances come ahead of the release of her upcoming book “Enough.”

    In an excerpt from the book that was first reported by The Guardian and confirmed by CNN, Hutchinson claims that Rudy Giuliani groped her on January 6, 2021, as they stood backstage during a rally that preceded the US Capitol attack.

    Hutchinson writes that Giuliani put his hands “under my blazer, then my skirt” at the January 6 rally. Giuliani’s political adviser has slammed the claim as a “disgusting lie.” CBS reported that Hutchinson and her publisher stand by the story.

    Hutchinson said on Sunday that she has been “coming out of hiding” and going out in “limited capacities” partly for security reasons since coming forward as a witness against Trump.

    The former White House aide revealed that she sought guidance from the story of Alexander Butterfield, who testified during the Watergate hearings, and has thanked him in person. Bob Woodward’s book on Butterfield, she said, showed her “not only that I could do this, but that there was life on the other side of it.”

    Since her nearly two-hour testimony, Hutchinson has defended what she said in front of the committee and in recorded depositions amid pushback from Trump allies.

    Hutchinson has also cooperated with Georgia prosecutors investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the state. It is one of the four cases in which the former president has been indicted.

    As for 2024, Hutchinson said she wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump. “He is dangerous for the country,” she told CBS.

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  • Donald Trump and his adult children are listed as potential witnesses in NY fraud case | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump and his adult children are listed as potential witnesses in NY fraud case | CNN Politics

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump, his adult children, and his closest business advisers could be called to testify during the civil fraud trial expected to begin next week in New York.

    The former president is listed on the witness lists submitted by the New York attorney general and Trump’s legal team.

    Placing someone on a potential witness list does not mean that person will be called to testify. Attorneys for both sides need to be inclusive on their witness lists of any potential person they might want to call, or the judge could exclude the testimony.

    Trump previously sat for a deposition in the case and said he had little “if any” role in preparing the financial statements that a New York judge ruled earlier this week were fraudulent.

    Also on both lists are Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who are both defendants in the case, and numerous current and former Trump Organization employees, including former chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg. Most of the witnesses have also testified in videotaped depositions.

    In civil cases, defendants can be called to testify and if they refuse, the jury, or in this case Judge Arthur Engoron, can use that against them in weighing the evidence.

    The New York attorney general’s office identified 28 witnesses they could call in the case, including Michael Cohen and Ivanka Trump. Ivanka Trump was initially a defendant in the case, but a New York appeals court struck her from the lawsuit saying the claims brought against her were too old.

    Trump’s attorneys identified 127 possible witnesses that they would call, including some of the lenders behind the loans at issue in the lawsuit.

    The case is scheduled to start Monday. Engoron will decide how much money the Trumps would pay the state after finding the former president and his business engaged in a persistent fraud by using inflated financial statements for nearly a decade.

    The state is also seeking to prove the Trumps engaged in insurance fraud and falsified business records. Engoron has set aside nearly three months for the trial.

    An appeals court ruling is expected as soon as Thursday that could potentially impact the trial start date.

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  • US regulator seeks court order to compel Elon Musk to testify about his Twitter acquisition | CNN Business

    US regulator seeks court order to compel Elon Musk to testify about his Twitter acquisition | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The US Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday applied for a court order to force Elon Musk to testify in an ongoing probe related to his acquisition of Twitter and public disclosures he made in connection with the deal, according to court filings.

    The filing Thursday in San Francisco federal court seeks a judge’s order requiring Musk to testify, alleging “blatant refusal to comply” with an earlier SEC subpoena.

    X, the company formerly known as Twitter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The SEC action is the latest turn in a long-running inquiry into whether Musk fully complied with his disclosure obligations when he began acquiring large amounts of Twitter stock, prior to his deal to buy the company. And it underscores years of friction between Musk and the agency over his public comments on numerous matters involving his companies.

    Musk began buying up large amounts of Twitter stock in early 2022, and he revealed on April 4 of that year that he had become the company’s largest shareholder. Later that month, Musk inked a deal to buy the platform for $44 billion and — after a monthslong legal battle attempting to exit the deal — officially closed the acquisition in October of last year. Musk has faced a number of legal challenges related to his Twitter acquisition in the months since his takeover.

    Musk testified twice as part of the SEC’s investigation in July 2022, according to the agency.

    Starting that same month, Musk produced “hundreds of documents” to federal investigators working on the probe, “including documents Musk authored,” according to a declaration by an SEC attorney filed alongside the agency’s court request.

    The SEC served Musk with a subpoena to testify again in the matter in May 2023, according to the court filing. The current subpoena at issue seeks evidence and testimony from Musk that the SEC does not yet possess, the agency said.

    Despite previously agreeing to testify on September 15 and rescheduling the testimony once, Musk “abruptly notified the SEC” two days before his scheduled appearance to say he would not be showing up, the filing states.

    The SEC attempted to negotiate with Musk to find alternative dates later this fall, according to court documents.

    “These good faith efforts were met with Musk’s blanket refusal to appear for testimony,” it adds.

    “The subpoena with which Musk failed to comply relates to an ongoing nonpublic investigation by the SEC,” the filing continued, “regarding whether, among other things, Musk violated various provisions of the federal securities laws in connection with (1) his 2022 purchases of Twitter, Inc (“Twitter”) stock, and (2) his 2022 statements and SEC filings relating to Twitter.”

    When Musk informed the SEC he would not be appearing to testify, his lawyer, Alex Spiro, wrote to the agency on September 13, saying Musk had “already sat for testimony twice in this matter” and that “enough is enough.”

    Spiro’s letter, which was included as an exhibit in the SEC’s court filings, accused regulators of seeking Musk’s testimony in bad faith and attempting to waste Musk’s time.

    In addition, Spiro claimed that the recent release of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Musk would interfere because it contained “new information potentially relevant to this matter” that would take time for both sides to digest.

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