Politics

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A political crisis has erupted within the Trump administration over an alleged list naming powerful men who participated in Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious underworld of sex trafficking and pedophilia.

The controversy has exposed deep fissures within the administration, ignited a wave of recriminations and fueled public suspicion about the government’s participation in a further cover-up of the crimes of the billionaire Epstein and his associates.

President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again movement is looking for a scapegoat as its members rage about the Trump administration's Sunday announcement that there are no bombshell files about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

It appears they have landed on Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Axios reported that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—who spread Epstein conspiracy theories as a podcaster before Trump appointed him to the role he’s unqualified to hold—"took a day off from work" on Friday because he was so mad at Bondi.

CNN reported that Bongino is considering resigning, while one source told Axios they believe Bongino may have already quit.

“He ain't coming back,” a “source close to Bongino” told Axios.

Bongino is reportedly mad that Bondi publicly overhyped the supposed Epstein client list, which Trump’s Department of Justice now says doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, right-wing influencer and noted bigot Laura Loomer—who has Trump’s ear—also claimed on X that FBI Director Kash Patel is "LIVID" with Bondi "over her DOJ Memo and the lack of transparency from her office regarding the Jeffery Epstein files."

"Pam Blondi has brought total embarrassment to President Trump, @JDVance, @dbongino and @Kash_Patel. She has also LIED to the American people,” Loomer wrote in her post, using a pejorative name for the attorney general, and adding that Bondi “needs to be fired for this.”

Bondi did appear to lie to the American people when she said in February that she had Epstein's client list "sitting on my desk right now to review,” only to admit on Sunday that no such list exists.

This is not the first time Bondi has found herself in hot water over the so-called Epstein files.

Bondi came under fire in February after she staged an embarrassing stunt at the White House in which she gave MAGA influencers binders whose covers were labeled "The Epstein Files, Phase 1,” only for those binders to hold virtually no new information.

But the latest Epstein files debacle is sending MAGA into a tailspin as they try to come to terms with the fact that the Trump administration is telling them that the conspiracy theories they’ve pushed for years are false.

“The Trump admin's handling of the Epstein files has been a massive unforced error,” CNN’s Harry Enten said Friday. “Trump may wish it goes away, but Google searches for Epstein are up 1,200% this week. It's the top topic searched with Trump today. More have Googled Epstein this week than Grok or tariffs.”

Trump, for his part, has tried to downplay the entire matter around Epstein and his supposed files. At a Cabinet meeting earlier this week, Trump snapped at a reporter who tried to ask about the Epstein files, "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years.”

“At a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas, it just seems like a desecration,” he added.

YouTube Video.

But since MAGA can never turn on its Dear Leader, it now looks like they’ve landed on Bondi as their scapegoat.

We'll see how long she lasts in the administration.

Republished from DailyKos under their terms.

Homelessness is increasingly caused by soaring rents and low wages, not laziness or personal failures. The solution is strong government intervention to house everyone and to end landlords’ control over our lives.

Senator Ted Cruz is many things: a constitutional originalist, a spineless coward, and most recently, a podcaster. His weekly show Verdict with Ted Cruz has raised some uncomfortable questions—not just about how many hours a sitting U.S. Senator should be allowed to whine about cancel-culture into a Shure mic, but about the ethics of monetizing a podcast while in office.

In 2023, watchdog groups filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging Cruz was illegally soliciting donations via the podcast. Although Cruz apparently receives no salary from the show, the iHeartRadio network has contributed nearly $1 million in ad revenue to a super PAC supporting Cruz’s reelection bid. The FEC, in its infinite wisdom, dismissed the complaint in early 2025. And while that may clear him legally, it raises a deeper, more philosophical question: Should politicians have podcasts at all?

In an effort to answer that question, I stumbled across something nearly as horrifying as Cruz’s beard: a page on the official House GOP website titled “Member Podcasts.” It turns out Ted Cruz is just the tip of a much darker iceberg. Republicans in Congress are podcasting in numbers that feel unsafe for democracy.

So I did the only heroic thing one can do in such a moment. I listened to at least three episodes of each available podcast and wrote a review of every single one, so that you, dear reader, never have to. The results were often incomprehensible and almost universally boring. Please enjoy the fruits of my labor, because I know I didn’t.

Deportations will eliminate millions of jobs held by immigrant and U.S.-born workers according to research on increased immigration enforcement.

Key findings

• The number of deportations will skyrocket once the Trump administration fully rolls out its agenda. This will curtail business operations and reduce employer demand for immigrant and U.S.-born labor.
• If the administration follows through on its goals of deporting 4 million people over four years:

1. There will be 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers at the end of that period.
2. Employment in the construction sector will drop sharply: U.S.-born construction employment will fall by 861,000, and immigrant employment will fall by 1.4 million.
3. The deportations will eliminate half a million child care jobs.

• California, Florida, New York, and Texas will have the highest number of job losses due to larger immigrant populations in these states.

Why this matters

Deporting vast numbers of immigrants from the United States is a major goal of the Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. However, immigrants are an integral part of the U.S. labor market, and an increase in deportations will result in fewer jobs for both immigrant and U.S.-born workers.

How to fix it

To limit damage to the labor market, policymakers should stop the tactics that are vastly increasing immigration enforcement like the arrest, detention, and deportation of immigrants, and reinstate temporary immigration protections like parole and Temporary Protected Status. Instead of providing additional funds for an increase in aggressive and indiscriminate immigration enforcement, Congress should focus on policies that will improve wages and working conditions like providing work permits and green cards to those who lack a regular immigration status, as well as providing adequate resources for the enforcement of labor standards.

Deportations will lead to job losses

Nineteen White House officials own between $875,000 and $2.35 million in the crypto assets President Trump proposed holding in a national reserve, according to CREW’s analysis of nearly 120 executive branch financial disclosures.

While cryptocurrencies can be extremely volatile, the government holding these assets in reserve could legitimize what is currently viewed as a risky asset class. In a scenario where increased institutional buy-in results in rising values, White House officials who own the assets in question could profit from the impacts of the reserve plan.

In March 2025, President Trump issued an executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and United States Digital Asset Stockpile. Days before issuing the order, President Trump described his plans for the digital asset stockpile in a series of posts on Truth Social, announcing his intention to create a “U.S. Crypto Reserve” that includes Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), XRP (the native cryptocurrency on the Ripple blockchain) and Cardano (ADA). The final order created two separate reserve bodies, one that holds Bitcoin and a second for other tokens.

Notably, Trump himself has a business relationship with Solana, having launched the $TRUMP memecoin on the Solana blockchain prior to his inauguration in January 2025. According to data from blockchain analysis firm Arkham Intelligence, he also holds a small amount of Ethereum valued at about $15,000, though that is not included in this analysis. Overall, Trump’s crypto projects are thought to have brought in hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family since election day in 2024.

Nineteen White House employees reported holding at least one of the crypto assets proposed by President Trump to be included in the government’s digital asset holdings. Sixteen staffers held Bitcoin, making it the most popular crypto asset among those found in CREW’s analysis. Three staffers also disclosed ownership of shares in Bitcoin ETFs, which allow investors to gain exposure to fluctuations in the value of Bitcoin without holding the token itself. Bitcoin and Bitcoin ETFs make up between $818,019 and $2,020,000, the bulk of the total holdings. Other tokens, including Ethereum, account for an additional $578,0156 to $33045,000 in assets held by White House staff. One staffer, Special Assistant to the President for Communications Ian Kelley, owned each of the assets named by President Trump in his Truth Social posts.

The Self-Proclaimed “Most Transparent” Administration in History is Withholding Information From the Public on Trump’s Corrupt Actions

The Trump Administration is attacking federal support for thousands of community libraries, museums, and other nonprofits that support the arts, humanities, and learning, diminishing programs and services provided daily to families across every U.S. state and territory.

The Administration has targeted federal agencies directly responsible for supporting local libraries, museums, arts, and humanities for wholesale dismantlement, while canceling existing support previously committed to communities and, at least in some cases, illegally impounding funds. While court orders have paused some of these actions, harm is being felt nationwide.

The long-standing federal role in community arts, humanities, and afterschool and informal learning provides essential support for library and museum programming, digital resources for families, librarian and museum-professional training, and local opportunities in the arts and humanities that many communities cannot otherwise access from state, local, or philanthropic sources. If the Trump Administration succeeds in eliminating or even just destabilizing that support, families across the country, particularly in small, rural, and low-income communities, will experience the resulting harm for years to come.

BREAKING: Documents filed in court today assert that officials from El Salvador told the United Nations that it "facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure" by the U.S. but that "the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the" U.S.

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What distinguishes Zohran Mamdani’s socialism is not its aims. It’s his willingness to take seriously the problem of how to get there.

They rejected kings and were sincerely concerned about the possibility of a dictatorship. But we need to move past founder-worship and focus on justice.

The lawmakers argue that only Congress has authority to create, restructure, and abolish federal departments and agencies by constitutional mandate and through a long-established legal precedent.

The Department of Education is statutorily mandated and cannot be unilaterally abolished by the President.