Bondi assigns prosecutor to lead investigation into Trump adversaries over Epstein ties – live updates | Trump administration
Bondi assigns prosecutor to lead investigation into Trump adversaries over Epstein ties
Attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation into Donald Trump’s political adversaries and their ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Earlier, Trump called the latest release of emails that renewed focus on the president’s relationship with the late sex-offender a “hoax”, and directed the justice department to launch a probe into former president Bill Clinton, Democratic donor and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, and former treasury secretary Larry Summers (who served under Clinton). “This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” the president wrote on Truth Social earlier.
Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”. She added: “As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”
Key events
Marjorie Taylor Greene refuses to relent on criticism of Trump – report
Speaking to NBC News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Maga congresswoman from Georgia who has been critical of Donald Trump’s focus on foreign policy, and his effort to block the release of the Epstein files, said that she is not swayed by the president’s recent claim that she has “lost her way”.
“I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” Trump said on Monday after he welcomed Syria’s new president, the former al-Qaida militant Ahmad al-Sharaa, to the Oval Office. “I guess she’s got some kind of an act going,” he added.
Asked about Trump’s criticism of her, Greene told the broadcaster: “I’m America First, America Only. Hardcore.”
She also said that she had not spoken with the president recently. “No, I haven’t talked to him. 100% haven’t changed”, Greene said.
The break in communications between Trump and Greene comes amid reports that his White House has been applying pressure on two other Republican congresswomen, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, who, like Greene, signed a petition to force a vote on the release of files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade. All three Trump loyalists have publicly refused to withdraw their signatures.
While Trump has angled for a Nobel Peace Prize, when not ordering the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites and suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers, Greene is not impressed.
“No one cares about the foreign countries. No one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week,” Greene told NBC News.
“We didn’t elect the president to go out there and travel the world and end the foreign wars,” Greene said. “We elected the president to stop sending tax dollars and weapons for the foreign wars — to completely not engage anymore. Watching the foreign leaders come to the White House through a revolving door is not helping Americans.”
Trump pulls pick for top IRS lawyer 24 hours after racist podcaster Laura Loomer attacked nominee
Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is “withdrawing the nomination of Donald Korb” to be the Internal Revenue Service’s top lawyer, days before Korb was expected to be confirmed by the Senate.
The president cited no reason for suddenly abandoning Korb in a brief post on his social media platform, but the reversal came just 24 hours after Laura Loomer, a far-right podcaster who holds unusual sway over Trump’s personnel decisions, posted a thread on X attacking Korb for supposedly “supporting Democrats and anti-Trump RINOs” and demanded that his nomination “should immediately be revoked”.
Loomer, a racist conspiracy theorist whose closeness to Trump alarmed some of his allies in the run-up to the 2024 election, immediately took credit, telling her 1.8 million followers on X (a website she was banned from before it was bought by Elon Musk) that Korb was “Loomered”.
As the author and double Pulitzer winner James Risen wrote in an assessment of Loomer’s informal role earlier this year, after she met with Trump in the Oval Office and handed him a list of people on the staff of the national security council that she believed were not loyal enough to Trump, leading to six of them being fired:
Loomer’s power in the Trump administration is ill-defined. Her many critics say she has just been taking credit for moves that Trump was already planning. But Trump himself has said he takes her seriously, so it may be more accurate to describe her as Trump’s de facto national security adviser.
My colleague, Lucy Campbell, notes that today’s decision to investigate several of the president’s political adversaries represents an apparent departure from a July memo issued by the justice department and the FBI, which stated officials had found nothing in the Epstein files that warranted the opening of further inquiries.
Investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”, the memo said.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Donald Trump directed the justice department to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with several prominent Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Larry Summers, and donor and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman. The president’s move, to focus on his rivals’ affiliations and relationships with Epstein, is seemingly his latest effort to distance himself from the renewed focus on his own relationship with the disgraced financier following the latest tranche of documents released by the House oversight committee. Trump went on to claim, baselessly, that the release of emails where Epstein said that the president “spent hours” at the late sex-offenders house, and that he “knew about the girls” was just “another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats”.
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In response, attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation at the behest of the president. Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”.
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Donald Trump has agreed to slash US tariffs on Switzerland to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters. The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms. In return, Switzerland will reduce tariffs “on a range of US products”, the statement said. “In addition to all industrial products, fish and seafood, this includes agricultural products from the US that Switzerland considers non-sensitive.”
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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a rare condemnation of president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and advocated for “meaningful immigration reform”. In a special message, the first of its kind in 12 years, the bishops said that “we are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools.” In response, White House border czar, Tom Homan, hit back. “The Catholic church is wrong, I’m sorry. I’m a lifelong Catholic,” he said. “I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic church in my opinion.”
Bondi assigns prosecutor to lead investigation into Trump adversaries over Epstein ties
Attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation into Donald Trump’s political adversaries and their ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Earlier, Trump called the latest release of emails that renewed focus on the president’s relationship with the late sex-offender a “hoax”, and directed the justice department to launch a probe into former president Bill Clinton, Democratic donor and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, and former treasury secretary Larry Summers (who served under Clinton). “This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” the president wrote on Truth Social earlier.
Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”. She added: “As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”
Oversight investigation has Trump ‘panicked’ and ‘desperate’ says top committee Democrat
Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, has responded to Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the ongoing Epstein investigation – which included the release of three emails this week where Epstein said that the president “knew about the girls” and “spent hours” at his home – is a “hoax” and “Russia scam”.
“Our Oversight investigation has Donald Trump panicked and desperate,” Garcia said. “He is trying to deflect from serious new questions we have about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.”
He added:
The President has not explained why he won’t release the files to the American people. Or why sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a cushy low-security prison after her interview with Trump’s former personal lawyer.
NIH employee says she was put on leave for criticizing Trump administration during the shutdown
Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that she was put on non-disciplinary administrative leave for “speaking up in my personal capacity” about the “harms that I have been witnessing” inside the agency. In a video posted to TikTok on Thursday, Norton said that being put on leave was “designed to scare and silence me. It was designed to scare and silence my colleagues, and it was designed to scare and silence everyone.”
According to Stat News, Norton was also one of the organizers of the “Bethesda Declaration” letter signed by hundreds of NIH staffers, calling on director Jay Bhattacharya to listen to their concerns about the direction of the agency.
Given that the president has no public events or meetings scheduled today, a White House official tells the press pool that Donald Trump “held calls with Thailand and Cambodia in an effort to mediate the most recent conflict” and “engaged with Malaysia as well to help end the violence”.
North Carolina sheriff confirms that Charlotte immigration operation is set to take place
Federal immigration agents will conduct their next major operation in Charlotte, according to the county’s sheriff.
In a statement on Thursday, Garry McFadden confirmed that his office was “contacted by two separate federal officials confirming that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel will be arriving in the Charlotte area as early as this Saturday or the beginning of next week”.
The sheriff added: “At this time, specific details regarding the federal operation have not been disclosed and the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has not been requested to assist with or participate in any enforcement actions.”
In an interview with NPR this week, McFadden said “we cannot control what is going to go on. We just have to better understand it and be prepared to respond and react.”
Border czar hits back at Catholic bishops condemnation of Trump immigration agenda
Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, has hit back against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after they issued a rare condemnation of the administration’s immigration agenda.
“Secure borders save lives, and I wish the Catholic church would understand that,” Homan said, speaking to reporters outside the White House today. “So the Catholic church is wrong, I’m sorry. I’m a lifelong Catholic … I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic church in my opinion.”
The border czar declined to comment on whether options for land strikes in Venezuela had been presented to Trump, or whether ICE agents would soon be conducting their next major operation in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Further to my last post on the announcement of a framework agreement, the White House has said in a statement that the US, Switzerland and Liechtenstein aim to conclude negotiations to finalize their trade deal by the first quarter of 2026.
Of the $200bn pledged Swiss investments in the United States, at least $67bn will come in 2026, it said, adding that the investments will target a range of sectors including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, aerospace and gold manufacturing.
US tariffs on Swiss goods cut to 15% in deal struck with Trump administration
Callum Jones
Earlier we reported that US trade representative Jamieson Greer said that the US has “essentially reached a deal with Switzerland”, after the country was hit with a 39% tariff on Swiss exports to the US.
My colleague Callum Jones reports that Donald Trump has agreed to slash US tariffs on Switzerland to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters.
The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms.
The Trump administration agreed to limit US tariffs on Switzerland and Liechtenstein “to a maximum of 15%” under the deal, according to a statement from the Swiss government.
This brings US tariffs on Switzerland in line with those on the European Union – allowing Swiss exporters the same treatment as rivals in neighboring countries.
In return, Switzerland will reduce tariffs “on a range of US products”, the statement said. “In addition to all industrial products, fish and seafood, this includes agricultural products from the US that Switzerland considers non-sensitive.”
Swiss officials also committed to granting a series of quotas for US goods that can be exported to Switzerland on a duty-free basis, including 500 tonnes of beef, 1,000 tonnes of bison meat and 1,500 tonnes of poultry.
“The date for implementing these market access concessions will be coordinated with the US to ensure that customs duties are reduced at the same time,” the statement said.
Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers’s exchanges depict relationship as confidants, emails reveal
George Chidi
A series of exchanges between child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, showing a relationship as confidantes emerged among the emails released by Republican legislators this week.
The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed the two men sharing personal – and sometimes unseemly – views about politics and relationships.
“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”
At the time, Harvard was wrestling with an admissions debate after a formerly incarcerated woman’s admission to a PhD program. Summers, a former president of the university who lost his position in a scandal after making sexist comments about female academics, went on to say in the email to Epstein: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
After the Wall Street Journal revealed a previous tranche of emails between Epstein and Summers in a 2023 piece, a spokesperson for Summers told the paper that he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his conviction”.
In the massive trove of 20,000 emails from the Epstein estate released by Republican lawmakers this week are documents that show that Summers maintained congenial contact with the convicted child sex trafficker well into 2019, with the last email exchange occurring only months before Epstein’s arrest.
Trump wrote on Truth Social today that he would be asking the DOJ and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Summers, among other prominent Democrats and business leaders.
In the emails, Summers and Epstein discuss politics – particularly Summers’ contempt for Trump – as well as the details of philanthropic social networking – and women. Summers, 70, confided in Epstein in a 2019 exchange about his romantic gestures toward an unnamed woman, and being rebuffed.
“shes smart. making you pay for past errors,” Epstein wrote in an exchange on 16 March. “ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”
Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson on Wednesday. “I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”
George Chidi
The only remaining criminal case against Donald Trump has been revived after the head of Georgia’s prosecutor’s council appointed himself to replace Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, who was removed from the election interference case in September.
Pete Skandalakis, a Republican and the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, the state body that provides legal training and is often charged to mitigate prosecutorial conflicts, wrote in a statement on Friday that he would be taking over for Willis.
A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to help find enough votes to beat Biden.
The case remains the only criminal prosecution of Trump remaining, but it has been on life support after Willis was disqualified by the Georgia supreme court, which ruled that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, revealed in dramatic court filings in January 2024, created an impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest.
Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. While president, Trump is protected from state-level prosecutions, but the other 14 remaining defendants are still subject to prosecution.
“The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case,” Skandalakis said. “Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment.”
Trump’s move, to focus on his rivals’ affiliations and relationships with Epstein, is seemingly his latest effort to distance himself from the renewed focus on his own relationship with the disgraced financier, who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019, and the extent to which he was aware of his conduct.
Trump says he will direct attorney general to investigate Epstein’s involvement with Bill Clinton, Democratic donors and banks
The president continued to post on Truth Social today, notably saying that he will direct attorney general Pam Bondi and the FBI to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s “involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JPMorganChase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him”.
Trump went on to claim, baselessly, that this is “another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats”.
Flight logs state that former president Bill Clinton travelled on Epstein’s private jet several times. According to several emails from Epstein, released by the House oversight committee, Clinton never visited his private island. Meanwhile, Reid Hoffman – the longtime Democratic donor and venture capitalist – has said he engaged with Epstein in a fundraising capacity for the Massachussets Institute of Technology. Larry Summers, former treasury secretary under Clinton, was a friend of Epstein’s and several emails between the two appear in the committee’s most recent release.
In the tranche of documents published this week, Epstein said that Donald Trump “spent hours” at Epstein’s home with one of his victims in an email to co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The president has maintained the correspondence released by House Democrats was part of the ongoing “hoax” around Epstein, and simply a deflection from their performance during the government shutdown.
GOP senators disavow funding bill provision that allows them to sue government over phone records
Several Republican senators have expressed disapproval about a provision tucked into the stopgap spending bill passed this week, which would allow lawmakers to sue the federal government because their phone records were subpoenaed in 2023 by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“There needs to be accountability for the Biden DOJ’s outrageous abuse of the separation of powers, but the right way to do that is through public hearings, tough oversight, including of the complicit telecomm companies, and prosecution where warranted,” said senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the eight lawmakers whose phone data the FBI sought and obtained.
For his part, House speaker Mike Johnson has pledged to repeal the provision next week, and many House Republicans are incensed about the language in the bill.
“Interesting seeing my colleagues express outrage over this provision yet still vote for it when they could have been strong and not let the Senate jam the House,” said GOP member Greg Steube, who represents the Florida suncoast. “There was no reason this needed to be in the bill to reopen the government. The Senate used a crisis to pass an unethical provision and now the House is complicit.”
‘I have a country to run’: Trump lambasts Democrats and some ‘weak’ Republicans while repeating claim that Epstein emails are a ‘hoax’
Donald Trump has claimed on social media that Democratic lawmakers are doing “everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again”. This comes after emails released this week by the House oversight committee seem to suggest that the president may have known about Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct.
In his post on Truth Social a short while ago, Trump added that the latest batch of documents are being used to “deflect” from Democrats’ “bad policies and losses, specially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where there party is in total disarray and has no idea what to do”.
The president has yet to address the emails, or the wider record release, which included more than 20,000 pages. On Thursday, he took no questions from reporters at an executive order signing in the East Room. He has, however, been resolute about his stance online. White House officials have recapitulated his claims that the new information is merely a distraction.
“Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” Trump wrote on Friday. “Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem! Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”
Callum Jones
Americans should “raise hell” to protect US national parks through the “nightmare” of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a former National Park Service director, amid alarm over the impact of the federal government shutdown.
Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency is now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization.
Jarvis, who led the NPS from 2009 to 2017, faced intense scrutiny, a five-hour grilling in Congress and calls for his resignation after closing all 401 national park sites during a previous shutdown, in October 2013.
He was certain, despite the backlash, that it was the right thing to do: keeping them open with a skeleton staff would have put parks and their visitors at risk, his team concluded.
Over the past month, hundreds of NPS veterans including Jarvis, 72, have watched aghast as most of the agency’s workers were furloughed during the longest shutdown in US history – while the Trump administration kept all national parks open.
There have been consequences.
A fire at Joshua Tree national park burned through about 72 acres. Yosemite faced a wave of illegal Base jumping. Yellowstone grappled with bear jams.
Vandalism included graffiti in Arches national park. A stone wall at Gettysburg national military park was damaged. Trash started to gather at various sites.
Thousands of NPS workers are typically around to guide visitors safely through parks, point them in the right direction, swiftly rescue them from danger, keep traffic moving, monitor wildlife and protect the landscape.
“You take all of that away – all of those employees – you basically are, on one hand, creating unsafe conditions for the visitor,” Jarvis said, adding: “And you’re putting basically these irreplaceable resources at risk.”
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