The 47th President and the Post-Biden World

First thing this morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X a statement from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche saying that under Bondi’s direction, he had talked to the lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche wrote that he anticipated meeting with Maxwell in the coming days.

“President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence,” he wrote. “If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” This offering appeared designed to show that the White House wants to release information that might be in the Epstein files, but as observers note, the president could just release the files themselves if he wanted to.

In fact, yesterday, the administration did just that. Over the objections of his family, the Trump administration released records compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The files contain more than 240,000 pages of records and have been sealed since 1977, when the FBI turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The acting archivist of the United States is Marco Rubio (who is also secretary of state, interim national security advisor, and acting administrator of what’s left of the U.S. Agency for International Development).

While this document dump appears to have been announced in order to distract from the Epstein files, it seems unlikely to do so. MAGA and other Americans are interested in the Epstein files because they expect the files will show that the government has been covering up for powerful men who have been able to rape children without facing legal accountability. In contrast, the King files will likely show the government harassing a citizen to pin illegal activity on him, a different side of the same coin that suggests the government is working for rich and powerful white men.

The King files were compiled by the FBI in projects associated with its COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program, that operated between 1956 and 1971. These projects illegally surveilled and worked to discredit Americans that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover thought were a danger to American society. Hoover singled out King as a target, bugging his home and hotel rooms and urging him to take his own life.

Attorney General Bondi also announced that the Department of Justice has released additional documents from the FBI’s investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s email server. In 2016, after then-candidate Donald Trump insisted that her use of a private server had been criminal and made “Lock her up!” a chant at his rallies, the FBI concluded that while Clinton had been “extremely careless,” she did not act with criminal intent. She was never charged.

Last night, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent members of the House of Representatives home early for their summer break rather than take a vote on whether to release the Epstein files. The House will not reconvene until September 2.

Last night at 9:03 p.m., the White House account posted on X an image of Trump in front of American flags, eagles, and fireworks with the caption: “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER. President Donald J. Trump.”

Things seem a little unstable at the White House.

That panic continued today. When a reporter asked about Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell, Trump exploded, attacking former president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump claimed they "tried to rig the [2016] election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that.”

Trump was referring to the allegations Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made on Friday, when she called for the prosecution of former president Barack Obama and former senior national security officials for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump that indicated Russian operatives had worked on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.

Gabbard told Congress last March that the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon, putting her at odds with Trump, who justified his attack on Iran with the insistence that the country was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. Her defense of Trump now seems likely to help her restore her favor with the White House.

“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They're the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it's the most unbelievable thing I think I've ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn't have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”

Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody's ever even imagined, even in other countries.”

Trump appears to be touching all his greatest hits in an attempt to regain control of the narrative. But the more he protests that he is not connected to the Epstein files, the more he reinforces the idea that he is. That nervousness showed in the attempt this weekend, uncovered by Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley, to reassure major media outlets that the White House had neutralized the Epstein story. Mathis-Lilley noted that the stories making that argument in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all had the same source: Trump ally Steve Bannon.

After Trump’s outburst today, President Obama’s spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush issued a statement saying: “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.

“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”

Today CNN published more newly discovered photos of Trump and Epstein together.

And as of yesterday, there is a billboard in New York City’s Times Square asking: “TRUMP, WHY WON’T YOU RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES?”

This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that's not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.

Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.

What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.

Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary's ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.

Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.

This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.

In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.

Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”

The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, “specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?” and he responded, “No, no, she's—she's given us just a very quick briefing.” Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats.

House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters today that the House didn’t need to do anything to release the Epstein files because the administration was “already doing everything within their power to release them,” and indeed, the Trump administration made a show of saying it would ask the courts to unseal the transcripts of the Epstein grand jury. But legal analysts say those records would cover only Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for Epstein. In any case, a federal judge denied that request today after the government attorneys did not submit an argument that met the requirements for unsealing the evidence.

Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.

The Democrats on a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, supported by three Republicans, also voted to subpoena the Justice Department for its files on Epstein, although writing the subpoena will take negotiation. “If the Republican Party, if our colleagues on this committee don’t join us in this vote, then what they’re essentially doing is joining President Donald Trump in complicity,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), who introduced the subpoena motion, told reporters.

It does not seem likely the Epstein story is going away anytime soon.

When Trump visits Scotland tomorrow, he'll find out how popular he really is.

Protest organisers anticipate a wave of resistance to Donald Trump from Ayrshire to Aberdeenshire this weekend as Scots take to the streets to express “widespread anger” at what they termed the US president’s increasingly extreme policies.

The US president is expected to arrive in Scotland on Friday for a five-day private visit to his luxury golf resorts at Turnberry in Ayrshire and Menie in Aberdeenshire.

While it is not a formal trip, Keir Starmer will hold talks in Scotland with Trump on Monday. No press conference is scheduled, but the media are expected to attend the start of the discussions – opening the possibility for another freewheeling question and answer session by the president.

There is no expectation the protests will bring disorder or disruption, the assistant chief constable Emma Bond, Police Scotland’s gold command for the operation, insisted at a pre-visit briefing on Tuesday.

But the Scottish Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers, said the scale of the policing operation would stretch resources and could double the time taken for a police officer to attend an incident elsewhere.

The Stop Trump Coalition is organising events in Aberdeen in the city centre and outside the US consulate in Edinburgh on Saturday at midday – similar gatherings during Trump’s visit to Scotland in 2018 attracted thousands of protesters.

Along with the two main city gatherings, protests are expected around Turnberry and Menie, where Trump is expected to open a new 18-hole golf course named in honour of his mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump, who was born on the Isle of Lewis.

Starmer is likely to travel to Scotland on Monday morning or late on Sunday, after attending the women’s Euro final in Switzerland, in which England are playing, although if the White House dinner on Sunday night goes ahead, he might have to change his plans.

Downing Street has given little information about the trip and Starmer’s role in it, saying that normal protocols do not apply because it is officially a private visit.

The White House has already said that a pool of 12 US journalists will be present at the talks with Starmer, and the expectation is that the UK media will aim to be represented as well.

While most initial greetings between world leaders are brief and uneventful, Trump has a habit of answering a number of questions shouted out to him, often creating news.

Before the last time Trump and Starmer met, at the G7 summit in Alberta, the US president answered questions on subjects including the possibility of tariffs on UK steel, Ukraine, and his stated affection for the prime minister.

Connor Dylan, the organiser of the anti-Trump protests in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, said: “The vast majority of people in Scotland were already opposed to everything Trump stood for when he first visited as president. As we’ve learned more and more about him and the way he governs, that attitude has only hardened.

“His politics – and those of the people around him – have only become more extreme since then, with once fringe ideas like mass deportations now part of mainstream American politics and being effectively exported to the UK and other European countries by far-right allies.”

A fellow organiser, Alena Ivanova, said she had heard from people across the country who planned to protest: “There’s a widespread anger and determination to come out from people across Scotland and calling on our elected leaders not to give Trump the acknowledgement and welcome he wants.”

While Police Scotland has pledged a “positive and engaged approach” to lawful protests, Ch Supt Rob Hay, president of the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents said the visit would require a “significant operation across the country over many days” which would “undoubtedly stretch all our resources from local policing divisions to specialist and support functions such as contact, command and control”.

He is particularly loathed in Scotland.

It's a different country.