💣 EPSTEIN CASTS SHADOW FROM THE GRAVE
It’s official: the Department of Justice has completed its transformation into the Department of Jeffrey. Trump named Todd Blanche — his own former defense lawyer — as nominee for permanent Attorney General, and within hours House Oversight released Pam Bondi’s closed-door transcript, where the former AG tossed every aspect of the Epstein cover-up directly into the lap of the Acting AG. Instead of owning the process — or revealing what Donald Trump told her — Bondi blamed Blanche for “the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.”
Bondi is likely doing what she was told: by heaping the blame on the acting AG, she shields Donald Trump from being suspect #1 in the cover-up of the Epstein files — but it also forever labels Blanche as Donald Trump’s Epstein fixer. By nominating him to the permanent Attorney General position, Trump is fundamentally remaking the Department of Justice into something else — one that caters to launderers rather than imprisoning them, buys politicians instead of convicting them, and puts profit over service.
The Department Of Justice is no more. The Department of Jeffrey is what replaced it.
🚔 ONE IN SIXTEEN
Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 rioters with one signature on his first day back. Lawfare finished counting Thursday: at least 97 of them have since been arrested, charged, or convicted of unrelated crimes — child molestation, reckless homicide, grand larceny, sex offenses against minors — nearly one in sixteen. Earlier tallies by the New York Times and CREW found 33 to 39; the true number is more than double. Five committed their new crimes only because the pardon freed them early; one, Andrew Paul Johnson, drew a life sentence for child molestation in February. And Todd Blanche, testifying in May, wouldn’t rule out paying some of these men from the $1.776 billion fund — the one the Senate refused to ban in a pre-dawn vote Friday.
⚖️ KELLEN NAMES TWO MORE
Sarah Kellen kept Epstein’s calendar for more than a decade. Last month she sat with House Oversight and named names the committee didn’t expect: Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell abused her, she testified, and so did Philip Levine, the former Miami Beach mayor and Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and Frédéric Fekkai, the celebrity hairstylist. Thursday, Comer’s Republicans asked the Justice Department to investigate both men — the department Blanche is about to run.
💵 THE NUMBER AND THE SHADOW
The economy added 172,000 jobs in May, more than double the 80,000 economists expected, and unemployment held at 4.3 percent — a third straight month of growth since spring 2025. Look past the headline and it thins: leisure, hospitality, and government did the lifting while manufacturing, construction, and retail went flat and finance shed another 22,000. Wages rose 3.4 percent, but inflation runs faster and a gas-price shock still hasn’t landed — Americans are earning more and buying less.
🦞 MAINE PICKS ITS FIGHTER
The Democratic Senate primary in Maine is Monday, and Graham Platner — the oyster-farming Marine who cleared the field when Governor Mills quit in April — is still the frontrunner. He’s there despite a New York Times story this week in which former girlfriends describe him sexting while married, one calling the behavior “unsettling.” Platner blames a dark stretch of undiagnosed PTSD and drinking, says he’s staying in, and the polls say Maine Democrats are staying with him.
🎯 THE PATTERN
Trump is transforming Washington, DC, in his own image. His 250-foot triumphal arch won design approval even as planners flagged the flight path overhead; he announced a promenade to the Potomac he wouldn't mind calling the Trump Promenade; he ordered the Reflecting Pool coated blue for the July 4 party — a reflecting pool that no longer reflects. The monuments are the easy part. The harder remake is the government itself, and when your nominee for Attorney General was your own defense attorney, there's very little chance you'll ever be held to account for anything,
The fact that at least 97 of the approximately 1500 January 6 people who stormed Capitol Hill at the behest of Donald Trump have been, since that day in 2021, arrested, charged, or convicted of unrelated crimes — child molestation, reckless homicide, grand larceny, sex offenses against minors, tells us more about the kind of people whom Trump likes than it says about the US president himself. Trump is, after all, the king of white t***h. It does say a lot, also, about the garbage who support him, even to this day.
I'm glad you referenced the _ Platner crime of sexting while married_ and you can add _the crime of acquiring a bad tatoo while serving as a young Marine_.
Did you see the 'interview' that MS Now ran, hosted by Chris Hays (more like a congressional hearing)? As usual (but it's bad journalism) Hays scowled, pouted, looked down, asked 'what happens if you're the candidate and someone puts out a compromising picture of you?' He then ran a clip of Elissa Slotkin, MI, who says 'I've heard about this scandal, but I haven't read the accusations. Basically, I'm tired of hearing [about these men in the Party].' Which is certainly proof positive.
Hays did not inform his viewers of what Wiki offers on Slotkin:
"Slotkin was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency _after graduate school_ [my emphasis]. Fluent in Arabic and Swahili, she served three tours in Iraq alongside the military as a CIA analyst. During the George W. Bush administration, she worked on the Iraq portfolio for the National Security Council."
She did switch parties to be a Democrat, and supported an Israeli feminist movement.
The Hays grilling went on, over a remarkable 30 min. of prime-time; Platner just said he was running in Maine for governor and for real change. What he also did was dismantle his interviewer, from beginning to end.
Mandami with no ethnic baggage! He's already been attacked by Cory Booker!
In my view Platner is 5 times Bernie Sanders: poise, language skills, information skills, no canned political buzzwords, and class credentials.