What happened

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee on Wednesday voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department’s handling of its Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who introduced the motion, and four other Republicans joined all of the committee’s Democrats in the 24-19 vote to compel Bondi to testify under oath.

Who said what

The five GOP defections “amounted to a sharp rebuke of Bondi,” The Associated Press said, and underscored the “continued frustration among conservatives” about her compliance with a bipartisan law compelling the release of all DOJ files on Epstein. Being deposed could force Bondi to “contend more seriously with lawmakers’ questions” than at congressional hearings, where she might “perform for live television cameras and fall back on prepared talking points,” The New York Times said.

Bondi “has been instrumental in orchestrating the White House’s cover-up of the Epstein files” for months, said California Rep. Robert Garcia, the committee’s top Democrat. Bondi “claims the DOJ has released all of the Epstein files,” Mace said on social media, but “the record is clear: they have not.” The Justice Department said Wednesday that 47,635 Epstein files “were offline for further review,” and those missing documents include FBI notes on interviews with a woman who alleged that both Epstein and President Donald Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was a minor, according to The Wall Street Journal.

What next?

Complying with congressional subpoenas “is not optional,” but “several past attorneys general” have refused, The Washington Post said. And it’s up to the DOJ to “prosecute any contempt charges recommended by Congress” for rejecting subpoenas.

Though the alleged sex trafficking on Jeffrey Epstein’s Caribbean island, Little Saint James, has dominated the national discourse recently, another Epstein property has largely stayed out of the news — but perhaps not for long. A ranch outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, that belonged to the disgraced financier has been the subject of on-and-off investigations, and many are now reexamining what role the ranch may have played in Epstein’s crimes.

What is the ranch in question?

The compound, named Zorro Ranch, includes a 30,000-square-foot mansion that “sits on a ridge overlooking thousands of acres of southwestern land,” said The New York Times. The ranch is in the middle of the desert, an area with low population density where the “nearest neighbors are miles away and most everyone minds their own business.”

Epstein first purchased the ranch in 1993, and it made his seven-story Manhattan penthouse “look like a shack,” he said to Vanity Fair in 2003. Recently released photos by the Department of Justice “provide a look inside the tightly guarded gates” of the compound, said the Santa Fe New Mexican, including images that “show Epstein and others posing” throughout the ranch. In addition to the main house, Zorro Ranch also had a “three-bedroom lodge and off-the-grid log cabin as well as a 4,400-foot airstrip with an aircraft hangar and helipad.”

Why is the ranch being investigated?

Given the isolated nature of Zorro Ranch, there are numerous allegations about “what role the secluded spot played in sexual abuse or sex trafficking of underage girls and young women,” said The Associated Press. Several of Epstein’s public victims have claimed they were trafficked at the ranch, but “New Mexico leaders say there has never been a thorough investigation of the criminal activity that may have occurred” on the property, said the Times.

There was previously a minimal investigation into the ranch, which was “taken over by federal prosecutors in 2019, and then apparently fizzled, according to New Mexico officials and recently unsealed records,” said the Times. However, unlike Epstein’s other properties, federal agents “did not appear to have ever searched Zorro Ranch,” according to a report from The Guardian. Officials were “paying attention to Paris, Little Saint James, New York and Miami, but they didn’t pay attention to Zorro Ranch,” Eddy Aragon, an Albuquerque radio D.J. and Epstein researcher, told the Times.

Following public pressure related to Epstein, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez recently “ordered that the criminal investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch be reopened,” the New Mexico Department of Justice said in a press release. But since Epstein’s 2019 death, the ranch has come under new ownership, meaning an investigation may not be simple.

After the most recent batch of Epstein documents was released, the “claims in the documents have proved impossible to ignore,” said the Times. Most notable is a 2019 email alleging that in the “hills outside the Zorro, two foreign girls were buried on orders of Jeffrey and Madam G,” the latter apparently referencing Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. “Both died by strangulation during rough, fetish sex.” The sender of the email was “redacted by the DOJ,” said CNN. It is “not clear that those allegations have been investigated by law enforcement.”

In February 2010, Prince Andrew celebrated his 50th birthday with a glittering reception at St James’s Palace. Jeffrey Epstein, recently released from jail for soliciting sex with a 14-year-old girl, declined an invitation. But hundreds attended, including the model Naomi Campbell and the banker Evelyn de Rothschild, said Alexi Mostrous in The Observer.

Sixteen years on, the man now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor marked his 66th birthday in radically altered circumstances. At around 8am last Thursday, a fleet of unmarked police cars arrived at the former duke’s temporary residence on the Sandringham Estate, and arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office. While Andrew was detained in custody, officers searched his homes. Eleven hours later, as he was driven away from Aylsham police station, a photographer snapped him sitting slumped, ashen-faced, in the back of a Range Rover. The next morning, this image was splashed on front pages across the world; two days after that, anti-super-rich activists hung a copy in the Louvre in Paris, above a card reading: “He’s sweating now”.

Ruined man

Even before his arrest, Andrew – who denies any wrongdoing – was a “ruined man”, said Adam Boulton in The i Paper, stripped of his titles, and his Windsor mansion, as the Epstein files confirmed that much of what he’d told Emily Maitlis in his “Newsnight” interview in 2019 had been untrue. The files suggest that he had met Virginia Giuffre – the Epstein survivor who accused him of having sex with her when she was 17 – though he said he had no memory of her; and that, far from cutting ties with Epstein in late 2010, he was in close touch with the paedophile for years afterwards (with their discussions about complex business deals often conducted via an intermediary, Andrew’s adviser David Stern).

Andrew’s arrest was prompted by evidence that, both before and after that date, he’d passed Epstein confidential information he had gleaned as a UK trade envoy. The offence of which he’s suspected carries a possible life term; and the bad news for Andrew is that his brother seems prepared to let them throw the book at him. As the King put it coldly last week, the “law must run its course”.

The King had reportedly objected to Andrew ever being appointed a trade envoy, said Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph. When the idea was mooted in around 2000, he argued that his brother was not suited to the job; but the Queen overruled him – with the support of Peter Mandelson, the former trade secretary.

Red flags ignored

I suppose it seemed a good idea at the time, said Hilary Rose in The Times. Having just left the Navy after 22 years, Andrew had no discernible income, and needed something to do. Why not send him abroad, to drum up business for Britain? And yet, nothing in the personality of this most spoiled and entitled of men made him fit for it.

Four years ago, a former maid at his home reported that he would shout at her if she failed to arrange his 72 teddies as he liked them. But even as a toddler, Andrew had a reputation for being “difficult”, prone to kicking dogs and taunting staff. In his teens, he behaved so badly a footman is said to have punched him – and been kept on, because the Queen felt Andrew had deserved it. He had a brief golden period, after his service in the Falklands War, but it didn’t last. On a trip to the US in 1984, he sprayed a press pack with paint – a “prank” that overshadowed the tour. Visiting Lockerbie after the Pan Am disaster of 1988, he shocked grieving residents by telling them that the Americans had had it “much worse”.

During his decade as a trade envoy, ambassadors fed back that he was a liability – rude and visibly bored at engagements, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. According to his biographer, Andrew Lownie, his staff often asked for attractive women to be invited to events. He insisted on travelling with a large entourage of valets and equerries, who were put up in luxury hotels; he even reportedly put massages on the taxpayers’ tab. Yet these red flags were ignored; and nor were other warning signs heeded – though there were clear questions to be asked about how Andrew and his immediate family were funding their famously extravagant lifestyle. Both he and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson regularly claimed to be broke – but it never dented their lavish spending.

Given all we know about the man, it is hard to muster sympathy for Andrew, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. He is “the author of his own misfortunes”, and the police may still dig up more damning evidence against him. And yet, however deserved, his “descent into disgrace must be hard to bear”, and his future must seem very bleak. We “can vilify him all we like”; but his brother, and the authorities, owe Andrew “the moral duty of care” that he seems to have “failed to show to others”.

What happened

The House Oversight Committee Thursday interviewed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for more than six hours as part of its Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Clinton told the Republican-led committee she had never met Epstein, had no knowledge of his crimes and was being used as a prop in “partisan political theater” aimed at protecting “one political party and one public official.”

Who said what

“I don’t know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein,” Clinton told reporters after her deposition at a performing arts center near her home in Chappaqua, New York. “I never went to his island. I never went to his homes. I never went to his offices.”

The closed-door deposition was a “rancorous, partisan affair” from the start, CNN said. It “briefly went off the rails,” The New York Times said, after Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) violated committee rules by sending a photo of Clinton testifying to MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, who posted it on social media. Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.) said the breach showed that Republicans were using this “incredibly unserious clown show of a deposition” to get “their photo op” of Clinton, not hold anyone accountable for Epstein’s crimes.

What next?

Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said he “learned a lot” from Clinton but “we have a lot of questions for her husband,” former President Bill Clinton, at his deposition today. Republicans are “eager to make Bill Clinton their bogeyman,” Politico said, but the committee’s “focus on the Clintons” is “fueling accusations from Democrats that the GOP is deflecting from President Donald Trump’s own ties” to Epstein. Forcing Bill Clinton to testify “set a new precedent about talking to presidents and former presidents,” said the committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), and his party plans to use that precedent to depose Trump if they win control of the House.

President Donald Trump’s long association with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is a well-documented matter of public record. Less publicly acknowledged, however, are uncorroborated allegations that Trump sexually abused a minor while in Epstein’s orbit, particularly after “more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations,” with a woman who accused Trump of assault “decades ago when she was a minor” were found missing from the Justice Department’s legally mandated Epstein files release, said NPR. As lawmakers work to identify what was redacted and why, the furor over Trump’s Epstein associations seems unlikely to die down anytime soon.

‘Covering up direct evidence’

At the center of the growing scandal are allegations from an unidentified woman who claimed she was forced into a sexual encounter with Trump by Epstein “around 1983, when she was around 13 years old,” said NPR. Congressional investigators determined the tranche of missing documents by “matching public files with case files listed in the evidence manifest” made available to Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s legal team, said Politico.

The focus on the missing documents is “misleading the public,” said the Justice Department on X. Democrats are merely “manufacturing outrage” culled from their “radical anti-Trump base,” even though “NOTHING has been deleted.” Just one day later, however, the DOJ said on X that “as with all documents that have been flagged by the public,” it is “currently reviewing files” alleged to have been withheld, and items deemed improperly redacted “will of course” be published.

While it’s “unclear” why the materials were missing in the first place, their absence “deepens questions” about how the Justice Department has “handled” the legally mandated Epstein file releases, said The New York Times. The law directing the publication of Epstein documents allows redactions to protect victims, as well as for depictions of physical and sexual violence, and in instances where it could affect active investigations, but “expressly prohibited” officials from blocking publication “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity to public figures.”

Democrats plan to “open a parallel investigation” into the allegations against Trump and any DOJ redactions thereof, said House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) in a statement. The Justice Department appears to be “covering up direct evidence of a potential assault by the president of the United States.”

Garcia’s Republican counterpart, Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), signaled openness to pursue the matter further. “We know what the administration says,” said Comer to reporters on Thursday. “We are still looking to get a definitive answer on that.”

‘Gaslighting the entire country’

“So far,” Trump has personally “evaded the crosshairs of credible allegations in the Epstein files” in part thanks to “false statements, misdirection, public confusion and excessive redactions from his own DOJ,” said journalist Roger Sollenberger, one of the first reporters to identify the missing material, on Substack. But the allegations allegedly described in the absent documents “contradict the narrative” that Trump has “not been credibly accused of wrongdoing in the Epstein saga.”

While “many documents” have been removed and then re-added to the DOJ’s Epstein trove since their initial release, some Epstein victims say they’ve “scoured the DOJ’s website” for their own interview documents, “only to come up empty-handed,” said CNN. Given the heavy redactions and missing documentation from the government, the implication, said Epstein victim Jess Michaels to the network, is that “this Department of Justice is actually gaslighting the entire country.”

What happened

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers is stepping down as a professor at Harvard over his close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, he and the university said Wednesday. Summers has been on leave from Harvard, where he once served as president, since the depth of his friendship with Epstein was revealed in emails released by Congress in November.

Who said what

The resignation “marks an extraordinary unraveling for Summers, long one of the most influential figures in American economics,” The Harvard Crimson said. His “standing began to collapse” after the cache of released emails showed he “regularly exchanged messages with Epstein about women, politics” and other topics after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, and up to “the day before Epstein’s final arrest” in 2019 on sex-trafficking charges.

Summers’ “stunning fall from grace” was the “latest fallout among high-profile academics over Epstein associations,” The Wall Street Journal said. Harvard Wednesday said mathematics professor Martin Nowak was on paid administrative leave “pending further investigation” of his Epstein ties, and Nobel laureate Richard Axel resigned Tuesday as co-director of Columbia’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute. Former Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who later served as university president at the New School, told The New York Times Wednesday he had quit the board of clean-energy startup Monolith over concerns that emails showing he had met with Epstein in 2013 would “make it difficult for them to succeed.”

What next?

Summers’ resignation from all faculty and academic positions takes effect at the end of the academic year, but he stepped down Wednesday as co-director of a Harvard Kennedy School business-government center. Once “free of formal responsibility,” Summers said, “I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis and commentary on a range of global economic issues.”

The arrests of Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have shone a spotlight on the centuries-old common-law offence of misconduct in public office. Neither man has yet been charged, and both deny wrongdoing, but should police investigations proceed to prosecution, this vague and complex offence could be challenging for lawyers to prove.

“Securing a conviction for misconduct in public office is a notoriously difficult task,” said The Telegraph. There are fewer than 50 convictions a year and none of those have involved “high-profile individuals”.

What is it?

The offence of misconduct in public office has been dated back to 1599. It’s a common-law offence, which means it was established by judicial precedent, rather than a specific Act of Parliament. It had fallen into disuse but was revived in recent times to catch corrupt police officers whose misconduct didn’t fall easily into other well-established offences. It carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

The offence has four main elements, all of which must be proved:

· The individual is a public officer acting as such.

· The individual wilfully neglects to perform his or her duty and/or wilfully misconducts himself or herself.

· The conduct is to such a degree that it amounts to an abuse of the public’s trust in the office holder.

· The conduct is without reasonable excuse or justification.

The widely acknowledged problem with these elements is their vagueness. What constitutes a public duty is not defined and “the meaning of public trust is fairly elastic”, said The New Statesman. “Few would say it’s a satisfactory area of law.”

The Law Commission “has proposed that the offence be abolished”, and the government has included “some replacement offences” in the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, also known as the Hillsborough Law. But that bill is currently “stalled” in Parliament and “is not yet law (and may never be)”.

Who has been convicted for it?

The offence is clearly intended for charging those in trusted public office who have betrayed that trust. It was described by legal scholar Sir William Blackstone, way back in 1765, as “a crime of deep malignity”. In its modern incarnation, it has mainly been used to punish misconduct by junior and mid-ranking public officials, with police and prison officers accounting for 92% of convictions between 2014 and 2024, according to the Institute For Government.

In 2009, former MP Damian Green was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office but he was not charged. In 2016, former MEP Nikki Sinclaire was charged and tried but acquitted. Last year, independent MP Dan Norris was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, as well as sexual assault and rape, and investigations are still ongoing.

In 2019, former prime minister Boris Johnson was summoned to face a private prosecution for misconduct in a public office – over allegations that he has misled the British public about the cost of European Union membership in the run-up to Brexit. The High Court dismissed the case and the summons was overturned.

What could happen now?

As the law around the offence that both Mandelson and Mountbatten-Windsor are being investigated for is “famously vague”, it “complicates the task”, said Robert Hazell, a professor of politics and government at University College London, on The Conversation. If any charges are brought, lawyers “will have to devote more time and effort to understanding the elements of the offence, and then ensuring that they can prove each element.”

There are allegations that both men shared confidential government information with Jeffrey Epstein. Under this law, “if sensitive government material was shared without proper authority, the question would be whether that amounted to a deliberate breach of official duty”, said Simarjot Singh Judge, a managing partner at Judge Law. “Prosecutors would need to establish intent, seriousness, and whether the conduct crossed the threshold into criminal wrongdoing.”

Given the seriousness of this offence, convictions “typically result in an immediate custodial sentence”, said law firm K&L Gates in a briefing paper. Although the maximum sentence is life imprisonment, “sentences imposed to date have generally been lower”.

What happened

Longevity influencer Dr. Peter Attia said Monday he has stepped down from his new position as a CBS News contributor, weeks after his name appeared more than 1,700 times in Jeffrey Epstein emails released by the Justice Department. CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss announced Attia’s hire last month as part of her slate of new contributors.

Who said what

Attia apologized earlier this month for his “embarrassing, tasteless and indefensible” emails with Epstein between 2015 and 2018, after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex with a minor but before his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges. Attia said he was not involved in any of Epstein’s criminal activity or “sexual abuse or exploitation.” A spokesperson said Monday that Attia “stepped back to ensure his involvement didn’t become a distraction” for the network while his contributor role “had not yet meaningfully begun.”

The controversy is the “latest setback” for CBS News since Weiss took over last year, The New York Times said. After the Epstein emails were released, the network “went silent on the matter, with representatives not responding to multiple requests for comment” on Attia’s status. He “had been expected to remain a contributor,” given that Weiss is a prominent “critic of so-called ‘cancel culture,’” The Hollywood Reporter said.

What next?

Several other companies “said they had parted ways with Attia” in recent weeks, including supplement company AG1, Virta Health and protein-bar maker David, The Wall Street Journal said. His popular weekly show “hasn’t released a new podcast episode since late last month.”

What happened

Britain’s Thames Valley Police Thursday arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles III, on suspicion of misconduct in public office tied to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The former prince was “released under investigation,” meaning he has not yet been charged nor exonerated, after almost 12 hours of questioning.

Who said what

Mountbatten-Windsor was detained early Thursday, his 66th birthday, after unmarked police cars arrived at his new home on the king’s Sandringham Estate. The Thames Valley Police is “accustomed to playing a different role for Britain’s royal family — as protectors,” said The New York Times, but confirmed earlier this month that it was investigating whether Mountbatten-Windsor improperly shared confidential government documents with Epstein while serving as a U.K. trade envoy from 2001 to 2011.

The “arrest of the senior royal, eighth in line to the throne, is unprecedented in modern times,” Reuters said. It was a “catch your breath moment” made “even more dramatic by the unprecedented statement” from Charles, “offering no hiding place or protection” for his brother, said BBC royal correspondent Sean Coughlan. “Let me state clearly,” the king said: “The law must take its course.”

The last senior member of Britain’s royal family to be arrested in connection with a serious crime was King Charles I, who was beheaded for treason in 1649 following his defeat in the English Civil War. Misconduct in public office, the potential charge for Mountbatten-Windsor, carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

What next?

“This is the most spectacular fall from grace for a member of the royal family in modern times,” Craig Prescott, a legal expert at the University of London, told The Associated Press. “And it may not be over yet.” Police said earlier this month they were also looking into another report from the Epstein files, that a woman was taken to an address in Windsor in 2010 “for sexual purposes.” Even if no other revelations emerge, The Wall Street Journal said, a “lengthy police investigation — and a possible criminal trial — could see the shadow of the Epstein scandal hanging over the British royal family for months to come.”

What happened

Thomas Pritzker Monday stepped down as executive chair of the Hyatt Hotels Corporation, citing his “terrible judgment in maintaining contact” with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune, is one of the most prominent Americans felled by an association with the late sex offender in the wake of the Justice Department’s release of millions of documents from its Epstein investigations.

Who said what

The “latest round of the Epstein files has effectively ended the careers of some of the world’s most powerful figures, from captains of industry to prominent attorneys,” Axios said. The fallout has been swifter overseas, including police investigations of former French Culture Minister Jack Lang, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjorn Jagland and former British U.S. Ambassador Peter Mandelson, and potentially of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles III. Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem of Dubai was ousted as chair and CEO of logistics firm DP World.

Pritzker, 75, joins a growing list of Americans also losing their jobs due to revelations in the Epstein files. In the last two weeks, Brad Karp stepped down as longtime head of the law firm Paul Weiss, Kathryn Ruemmler said she will resign as Goldman Sachs general counsel in June, and Casey Wasserman is selling his prominent Hollywood talent agency. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass told CNN Monday she thought Wasserman “should step down” as chair of the L.A. 2028 Olympics committee, too.

Still, some “prominent Americans” with documented ties to Epstein, including President Donald Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, “have so far largely kept their positions of power,” NPR said. Stephen Bannon maintained daily contact with Epstein “when many of his friends were abandoning him,” offering advice on “how to handle resurrected allegations that he was a serial pedophile” up until Epstein’s arrest, The New York Times said.

What next?

“The revelations aren’t stopping,” Axios said, “with new names — and new recriminations — coming to light every day.” New Mexico lawmakers Monday passed legislation to open a bipartisan “truth commission” into Epstein’s Zorro Ranch outside Santa Fe, where he is “accused of trafficking and sexually assaulting girls and women,” Reuters said. The investigation, which begins today and will deliver interim findings in July, “could pose risks” to any politicians, scientists, investors and “other high-profile individuals who visited the ranch.”

To enter the “Epstein Library”, as it is grandly called, you just have to go to the website of the US Department of Justice, and click Yes on a pop-up that asks if you are 18 or over. That is all it takes to become immersed in a deeply disturbing world, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times.

‘Grand facade’

The more than three million documents and photographs related to the late paedophile are in a “careless jumble”; and the FBI warns that they may contain forgeries and false allegations. But after days poring through the Epstein files, I started to see these papers as a “Rosetta Stone through which women might understand male power”. They take us behind the “grand facade” presented by men who run the world, in government, academia, law and business; and they reveal how these figures speak to one another when “pussy” – in their parlance – is “out of the room where it happens”.

In this world, the men hold the cards, said Amelia Gentleman in The Guardian. The women are powerless or peripheral. While Epstein and his male associates joke, network, trade information, swap favours and engage in “light displays of one-upmanship”, women appear mainly only as staff, or providers of sex. Trawling the files, you find yourself eavesdropping on the many female assistants who organise the diaries of these busy men and ensure their lives run seamlessly as they move from Paris to New York, Dubai to Davos.

More often, you hear the men. The word “pussy” comes up hundreds of times. In 2016, a contact promises Epstein “abundant young pussy flesh”; another routinely signs off business emails wishing him “lots of P”. The men speak unguardedly. In 2012, the ex-chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjørn Jagland, tells Epstein about the “extraordinary girls” in Albania. An Emirati businessman complains that when the “Moldavian arrived”, she was a “big disappointment” – “not as attractive as the picture”. In 2019, the left-wing scholar Noam Chomsky laments the “horrible” press Epstein is getting, and bemoans the “hysteria” surrounding the abuse of women.

Meanwhile, in the background of all this, Epstein is constantly managing the women he has imported into his life. “Take a selfie of your pussy and send,” he tells one. It’s your “whore moans”, he suggests to another.

Clever conman

All the people who appear in the files insist they knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes, yet his homes were full of young women – “young girls with no last names”, as the Hollywood publicist Peggy Siegal refers to them in an email. These girls were groomed and abused on an industrial scale, said Janice Turner in The Times: hundreds passed through his doors. Some were from poor families, offered $300 to give Epstein a massage that turned sexual; others were students or artists, lured to his homes by promises of grants or patronage. Still more were young models, flown in from eastern Europe. The pimp-in-chief was Ghislaine Maxwell, but the files suggest there were others, from the model agency boss Jean-Luc Brunel, who killed himself in jail, to the late socialite Annabelle Neilson.

Epstein’s friends seem to have accepted his taste for girls as though it were a hobby, like collecting fine wine. Take Woody Allen’s wife Soon-Yi Previn, who messages Epstein about a pal with a jewellery business. “I know you have a lot of... young girls, women friends,” she says. “All women, and girls in your case, like jewellery.”

One of Epstein’s strategies was to pay his victims to recruit their friends, said Memphis Barker in The Daily Telegraph. And he pulled a similar trick in his parallel, sometimes overlapping, world of wealth and power – always leveraging his contacts, and the information they gave him, “to gain another, bigger prize”. There are all sorts of theories about how this working-class college dropout joined the elites, but the reality is simply that he was a clever conman.

In the 1970s, he blagged a lucrative Wall Street job, which he used to make contacts and engage in dodgy deals. Once a millionaire, he used his expertise in tax-avoidance and takeovers to gain access to the super-rich, whose fortunes he raided while acting as their adviser. He reportedly made some $200 million by advising the retail billionaire Les Wexner, and stole up to $100 million. With this sort of money, he could use donations to good causes, lavish hospitality and so on, to cultivate powerful people from all over the world, from senior Kremlin officials to Virgin boss Richard Branson to Ehud Barak, the former Israeli PM.

Although there are hints in the files that some of his contacts were drawn into his crimes – leaving them too exposed to turn on him – there is no clear evidence of a criminal conspiracy, said J. Oliver Conroy in The Guardian. What the files do seem to confirm, though, is the conspiracy theorist’s view of an elite stratosphere, where normal rules don’t apply, everyone knows each other, and ideological differences are subsumed to self-interested motives.

What happened

Attorney General Pam Bondi Wednesday sparred with Democrats and praised President Donald Trump in a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing that focused largely on the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Bondi pointedly refused to apologize to Epstein victims sitting behind her and deflected most questions from Democrats and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) with insults drawn from a binder she brought to the hearing. The contentious five-hour hearing also touched on Trump’s immigration actions and Bondi’s efforts to prosecute the president’s perceived enemies.

Who said what

Throughout the “bitter back-and-forth” with Democrats, The New York Times said, Bondi largely imitated Trump’s “tactic of going on the attack when facing tough questions,” offering “few detailed answers” and “no admissions of fault.” Bondi offered a “passionate defense” of Trump but struggled to “turn the page from relentless criticism” of her department’s mishandling of the Epstein files, The Associated Press said.

Going into Wednesday’s hearing, Democrats were expecting Bondi “to be nonresponsive and combative,” Politico said. “They walked out with what they believe to be a more compelling argument for winning back the majority.” Facing “an American public that really does want answers,” CNN said, Bondi instead performed for an “audience of one,” which may end up being “politically unwise.”

What next?

Bondi “hinted of further investigations of Trump critics in the works,” The Washington Post said. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told reporters that if Democrats won control of the House in November, “we would subpoena her, and we would require her to answer our questions.” Massie said his fellow Republicans went easy on Bondi because “nobody wants to get on the bad side of Trump,” but “that’ll change once we get past our primaries.”

The UK has sunk to its lowest ever score in the global corruption index, which ranks 182 countries by perceived levels of corruption in the public sector.

Having dropped more than 10 places over the past decade, this is more than “a temporary blip” for the UK, said Daniel Bruce, chief executive of Transparency International UK. “It risks becoming a defining feature of our political culture.”

How has the UK’s ranking changed?

The Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), published by Transparency International, is an annual list compiled by experts and business people. Nations are ranked on a scale of 0 (completely corrupt) to 100 (completely uncorrupt). In last year’s index, the UK scored 71; this year, it has shed another point, with a score of 70.

The drop did not affect the UK’s overall ranking of 20th out of 182, making it one of the least corrupt countries in the index. However, there has been a significant long-term decline from 2016, when the UK scored 81 and was ranked the joint-tenth most transparent nation globally.

What are the major concerns?

In the UK, “the past decade has seen major domestic scandals, the awarding of favours and honours to political donors, and MPs working as lobbyists for paying clients and corrupt regimes”, said Transparency International.

That has ramped up over the past year, said Bruce, including “some of the highest spending political campaigning on record, alongside troubling reports of access-for-cash arrangements and questionable appointment processes”.

It comes as the government finds itself “mired in scandal” over the Peter Mandelson-Jeffrey Epstein relationship, which has done “huge damage to public trust and increases concerns around corruption”, the charity said.

Despite recent talk by Keir Starmer about restoring integrity in politics, the latest score “shows that business as usual is not enough to turn the corner, with corruption concerns risking becoming embedded as the ‘new normal’”.

How did other countries do?

For the eighth year in a row Denmark topped the list, with 89 points out of 100 for transparency, closely followed by Finland (88) and Singapore (84). Venezuela (10), Somalia (9) and South Sudan (9) were at the bottom of the index. The US scored 64, its lowest ever ranking.

Globally, the CPI average score has dropped to 42, its lowest level in more than a decade, with the majority of countries analysed – 122 – scoring below 50. Only five countries scored more than 80 – “once a benchmark for clean governance” – down from 12 a decade ago, said DW. Around 50 countries have “recorded significant drops in the rankings since 2012, notably Turkey, Hungary and Nicaragua, due to democratic backsliding, weak institutions and rule of law” and “cronyism”.

With the global order “under strain”, many leaders have cited “security, economic or geopolitical issues as reasons to centralise power, sideline checks and balances and roll back commitments to internationally agreed standards – including anti-corruption measures”, said Transparency International.

‘Jimmy Lai, a symbol of the end of freedom in Hong Kong’

Le Monde editorial board

The “final nail was hammered into the coffin of the freedom that for so long had made Hong Kong a unique territory in the Chinese world,” as “judges appointed by authorities loyal to Beijing imposed an exceptionally harsh sentence of 20 years in prison for pro-democracy activist and former media mogul Jimmy Lai,” said the Le Monde editorial board. This “fate mirrors that of several dissidents in mainland China, evidence, if any were needed, of the flattening of political differences inherited from history.”

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‘Toxic stress: The long-term harms ICE’s tactics are doing to our children’

Dana Suskind at The Hill

ICE’s “approach to immigration reform is deeply detrimental to public health, in both the present and long term,” says Dana Suskind. Adverse “childhood events and toxic stress disrupt children’s brain development; it is hard to think of a more traumatic or stressful event for children than being forcibly separated from their families.” Immigration enforcement “should not come at the expense of children’s wellbeing, parents’ and caregivers’ dignity, or our nation’s moral compass.” Children “need access to loving, nurturing caregivers.”

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‘I study moral panics. The Epstein files are not one.’

Marcella Szablewicz at MS NOW

As the “world recoiled from the revelations in the U.S. government’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” some op-eds “labeled it a ‘moral panic,’” says Marcella Szablewicz. As a “communication and media studies professor who studies moral panics, I want to be clear: The Epstein scandal is not one.” By “definition, moral panics are short-lived. The fervor dies down, and the once-threatening change is eventually accepted by society.” Let’s “not pretend that demanding more answers constitutes a moral panic.”

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‘What Super Bowl commercials teach us about capitalism’

Eben Shapiro at Time

The “Super Bowl is the only thing Google cannot replicate,” says Eben Shapiro. In a “fragmented world, it is one of the only times 120 million people look at the same screen simultaneously,” and the “Super Bowl ad is no longer just a commercial; it is a vanity metric.” It is the “only place where a brand can guarantee that its ad will be watched by a group of people at the same time, in one place, together.”

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What happened

Lawmakers who viewed the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files at the Justice Department Monday said the Trump department blacked out the names of several people who should have been identified under the Epstein Transparency Act. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), a driving force behind the law, said he and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) had so far uncovered “at least six men that have been redacted that are likely incriminated by their inclusion in these files.”

Who said what

“It wasn’t just Epstein” and Ghislaine Maxwell involved in sexually abusing underage girls, said Khanna. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, agreed. “There’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes,” he said. The Justice Department “has been in a cover-up mode for many months and has been trying to sweep the entire thing under the rug.”

Members of Congress can make appointments to view the unredacted Epstein files through Friday, with no aides or phones present. A few hours doing so Monday revealed “lots of people” who “were redacted for mysterious or baffling or inscrutable reasons,” Raskin told reporters, per The Guardian. Meanwhile, the DOJ’s failure to shield the survivors is “either spectacular incompetence and sloppiness” or a “deliberate threat to other survivors who are thinking about coming forward.”

What next?

Lawmakers did not name new names, but Massie told reporters that one of the six men was “pretty high up in a foreign government” and Khanna said another was a “pretty prominent individual.” Massie said he would “give the DOJ a chance to say they made a mistake” and “let them un-redact those men’s names,” but if they did not, he might name all six in a speech on the House floor, where speakers are protected from criminal or civil liability.

What happened

Ghislaine Maxwell, the former Jeffrey Epstein girlfriend and associate serving 20 years for sex trafficking, repeatedly invoked her “Fifth Amendment right to silence” Monday during a virtual deposition with the House Oversight Committee. Maxwell, appearing via video from her minimum-security prison camp in Texas, offered to talk only if she first received a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Who said what

Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), who first subpoenaed Maxwell in July, said it was “very disappointing” she refused to answer their “many questions” about “the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators.” Maxwell “answered no questions and provided no information about the men who raped and trafficked women and girls,” said Rep. Robert Garcia (Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat. “Who is she protecting?”

“Maxwell alone can explain why” Trump and former President Bill Clinton “are innocent of any wrongdoing,” her lawyer David Oscar Markus said during the hearing, and she is “prepared to speak fully and honestly if granted clemency by President Trump.” Maxwell is “campaigning over and over again to get that pardon,” and Trump “has not ruled it out,” said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.). “That is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.”

What next?

Maxwell, who is “seeking to have her conviction overturned” in federal court, had “consistently told the committee that she wouldn’t answer questions,” The Associated Press said. But Comer “came under pressure to hold the deposition as he pressed for the committee to enforce subpoenas on Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.” The Clintons are scheduled to be deposed later this month, and Comer reiterated Monday that he would not honor their request for a public hearing.

What happened

Repercussions from the Justice Department’s recent dump of millions of Jeffrey Epstein files continue to mount outside the U.S., and on Wednesday they also prompted the ouster of Brad Karp as chair of Paul Weiss, one of America’s top corporate law firms. In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced challenges to his leadership from both his Labour Party and the opposition Conservatives over his decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the U.S. last year. London’s Metropolitan Police earlier this week opened a criminal inquiry into files suggesting Mandelson accepted money from Epstein and passed him confidential financial information while serving as a government minister 15 years ago.

Who said what

Karp said he was stepping down as chair, though not leaving Paul Weiss, after “recent reporting” had “placed a focus on me that is not in the best interests of the firm.” In one newly released email, Karp asked Epstein to help get his son a job on a Woody Allen film. After a July 2015 dinner at Epstein’s New York mansion, Karp thanked his “extraordinary host” for “an evening I’ll never forget,” adding, “You’re amazing.” In 2019, Epstein asked Steve Bannon to help him secure Karp a membership at the exclusive Augusta National Golf Club.

Even before these “series of embarrassing emails” came out, Karp “faced intense scrutiny” for making Paul Weiss the first law firm to reach a deal with President Donald Trump to avoid sanctions, said The New York Times. The deal was “widely seen” as “capitulation” to extortive demands, and “criticism of his decision only grew” after the “handful of law firms” that challenged Trump’s executive order “easily prevailed in court.”

What next?

Trump, who appears more than 6,000 times in the Epstein files, absolved himself on Tuesday and told reporters it was “time now for the country to maybe get on to something else.”

What happened

Millions of files on Jeffrey Epstein released over the weekend show he maintained cordial relationships with numerous wealthy and powerful people — including Elon Musk and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — between his 2008-09 jail term for soliciting sex with a minor and his final arrest and suicide in 2019. Several of them previously denied ever spending time with Epstein.

Outside the U.S., “the fallout from the release of the files has been swift,” The Associated Press said. Slovakia’s national security adviser Miroslav Lajcak resigned over his Epstein links, former British cabinet secretary Peter Mandelson quit the ruling Labour Party to spare it “further embarrassment,” and Prime Minister Kier Starmer urged former Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to testify before the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

Who said what

Musk and Epstein corresponded in 2012 and 2013, trying to meet up in Florida or the Caribbean. After Epstein asked about flying Musk and his partner out to his infamous private island, Musk replied, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?” Last September, Musk said on social media that “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED.” Lutnick did apparently visit Epstein’s island with his wife and children in 2012, and had drinks with him in New York in 2011, despite saying last year that he cut off contact with “gross” Epstein in 2005.

Director Brett Ratner, who made the newly released Melania Trump documentary “Melania,” appears in several undated photos with Epstein and redacted women at Epstein’s New York townhouse. Ratner told The Wall Street Journal in 2023 that he had never met Epstein. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson told Epstein in a 2013 email he “would love to see” him again ”as long as you bring your harem!”

The “who’s who of powerful men” who make appearances in the Epstein trove “all have denied having anything to do with his sexual abuse of girls and young women,” the AP said. There are “a lot of emails” and “a lot of horrible photographs,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “But that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody.”

What next?

The tranche of new files identified at least 43 of Epstein’s victims by name, in violation of the law compelling their release, according to the Journal. It also contained “dozens of unredacted nude images” of “young women or possibly teenagers,” The New York Times said. The Justice Department said it was working to fix or redact the flagged files.

Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor are coming under renewed pressure to testify before US Congress over their links to Jeffrey Epstein.

Mandelson resigned his membership of the Labour party last night to avoid causing any “further embarrassment”. On Friday, newly released documents revealed a picture of the Labour grandee in his underwear, payments from Epstein to Mandelson, and email exchanges between the pair that appear to show Mandelson leaking confidential Downing Street documents to Epstein. The new batch of Epstein files also implicated Andrew, including a series of photos of the former prince kneeling on all fours over an unidentified woman lying on the floor.

Both men’s association with Epstein has wrecked their public reputation but, as the furore over the last few days has shown, they will find it hard to remain out of the spotlight.

What did the commentators say?

Keir Starmer has called on Andrew to cooperate with US authorities who are investigating Epstein. It is “rare for a prime minister to intervene on matters relating to the royal family”, said The Times’ editorial board, but “such is the anger and outcry” that – in an unusually “deft reading of the public mood” – Starmer hopes to pressure Andrew “into finally doing what he should have done" a long time ago. Unless he “fully explains his past actions and what he knew about Epstein’s lifestyle”, this will remain “a running sore for the royal family”.

A lawyer representing some of Epstein’s victims told ITV News that Andrew should be extradited and forced to testify. But US investigators “face a succession of legal obstacles which make” that “unlikely”, said Cahal Milmo in The i Paper.

US investigators may not have more luck with Mandelson. Congress is “poised to issue the peer with a demand to testify in Washington”, said Connor Stringer in The Telegraph, but it “cannot compel testimony from foreigners”, so “he is under no legal obligation to respond”. Of course, “he could be subpoenaed if he sets foot on US soil” and “if he were to ignore that request, he would be liable to arrest”.

What next?

“There will be a lot of Democrats on Capitol Hill who want to exert as much pressure on this as possible,” The Spectator’s deputy political editor James Heale told Sky News. Some would like the US to invoke the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Britain, under which each country can request cooperation to secure testimony, via court order if necessary, from witnesses abroad. But, given the Trump administration’s proximity to the scandal, few expect this to happen.

In Andrew’s case, what might eventually force his hand is not threats of legal action but rather “internal pressure from within the royal household”, royal historian and constitutional expert Ed Owens told The i Paper. “Prime ministers do not generally speak on these sorts of things without checking with the Palace first” so “I’m wondering whether, behind the scenes, there has been a changing of the wind”.

‘Why every parent should worry about human trafficking’

Lauren Book at Newsweek

Human trafficking is “not relegated to Epstein’s island or infamous parties hosted by disgraced rap stars,” says Lauren Book. It “happens in every ZIP code in the United States — in homes, schools, malls, and increasingly, on phones and laptops — hidden in plain sight.” It’s “important that every parent in America hear this message: If we keep looking for trafficking only in extreme or sensational cases, we will keep missing what may be happening right in front of us.”

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‘To reimagine Holocaust education, look to Elie Wiesel’

Mike Igel at the Miami Herald

The “lessons of the Holocaust are often distorted, universalized into vague morality tales or, worse, inverted to attack the Jewish people and the state of Israel,” says Mike Igel. Holocaust “museums, educators and Holocaust survivors and their descendants have inspired and informed millions to fight antisemitism.” But Holocaust education “isn’t the self-executing strategy we thought it would be. The current antisemitism crisis should drive us to examine how Holocaust education can best achieve its goals today.”

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‘Gaza is not a real estate fantasy’

Sultan Barakat at Al Jazeera

Gaza’s “devastation demands urgent and serious reconstruction. Homes, hospitals, schools, farms, cultural heritage, and basic infrastructure lie in ruins,” says Sultan Barakat. But “urgency should never become an excuse for illusion, spectacle, or political shortcuts.” The contrast between rhetoric and reality could not be sharper.” While Trump and a “group of world leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to sign the charter of the so-called Board of Peace and unveil glossy reconstruction plans, the killing in Gaza continued.”

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‘No, AI isn’t inevitable. We should stop it while we can.’

David Krueger at USA Today

Americans “believe that the rise of artificial intelligence is inevitable, and that we all just have to bear the consequences,” says David Krueger. Do we “need to let AI sweep through society?” AI “acolytes are building ever more powerful systems without knowing how to control them.” We “can stop the reckless race to replace humanity – if we have the political will. AI development is not a law of nature, but rather an immense project that only proceeds through deliberate effort.”

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What happened

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday they have no intention to testify in the House Oversight Committee’s investigation of Jeffrey Epstein. In a letter to committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), the Clintons said they had already given the panel what “little information we have” on Epstein’s “horrific” crimes, and subpoenas for them to appear for closed-door depositions were “legally invalid” and clearly driven by “partisan politics.” Comer said he would move to hold both Clintons in contempt of Congress.

Who said what

Comer’s “relentless efforts” to force the Clintons to testify “reflect his overall approach to his panel’s Epstein inquiry,” The New York Times said. He has sought to “deflect focus” from President Donald Trump’s own “ties to the convicted sex offender” and his administration’s mishandling of the Epstein case, and to “shift the spotlight onto prominent Democrats.” Bill Clinton, like Trump, “had a well-documented friendship” with Epstein “throughout the 1990s and early 2000s,” The Associated Press, but neither president has been accused of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein’s crimes.

The Clintons’ lawyers sent Comer a letter Monday night laying out their case for why the subpoenas are “invalid and legally unenforceable,” citing the same decades of legal precedent Trump used in 2022 to thwart a Democratic subpoena to testify about the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Comer said his committee would not try to compel testimony from Trump.

What next?

If Comer’s committee declares the Clintons in contempt next week, “the full House would next vote on whether to refer the matter to the Justice Department for possible prosecution,” The Washington Post said. The “seldom-used congressional power” can result in anything from a “symbolic” rebuke to a year in jail, Politico said, but “there’s reason to believe” the Clintons may face “dramatic consequences,” given the Trump DOJ’s willingness to target his “perceived enemies.”

The following quiz is adapted from the Dec. 26/Jan. 2 print issue of The Week Magazine. We've set the timer to nine minutes for you to complete the 31 multiple-choice questions. The topics include American politics, strange-but-true events, international news, arts and leisure, and notable quotes.

Try our festive year-in-review and general knowledge quiz here

What happened

The Justice Department yesterday released its second large batch of files related to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and unlike the tranche released over the weekend, President Donald Trump is mentioned multiple times. The latest 30,000 pages also reference “10 co-conspirators” the FBI wanted to interview in July 2019, days after Epstein’s arrest and before his death in custody. The only Epstein co-conspirator charged was Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving 20 years in federal prison. 

Who said what

In a January 2020 email, an unidentified federal prosecutor in New York said Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, “many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware).” Two flights carried just Trump, Epstein and two “women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case,” the email said. Last year, Trump claimed on social media he “was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island.” 

The newly released files also “include several tips that were collected by the FBI about Trump’s involvement with Epstein,” The Washington Post said, though it’s not clear “whether any of the tips were corroborated.” A limousine driver in Dallas reported that during one ride, “Trump continuously stated the name ‘Jeffrey’ while on the phone, and made references to ‘abusing some girl,’” the FBI said. The driver also claimed that a woman told him Trump and Epstein raped her. The Justice Department said on social media yesterday that some of the documents contain “untrue and sensationalist claims” about Trump that, if credible, would have already been “weaponized” against him.

What next?

The Epstein files release has been “marred by DOJ mishandling, and that’s continuing,” CNN said. The Justice Department sounds like Trump’s “personal lawyer,” and the documents contain “curious and heavy-handed redactions that go beyond the limits of the law.” The files “involving Epstein’s 2007 sweetheart plea deal” are so “heavily redacted,” it’s “almost impossible to understand” how he escaped federal prosecution, the Miami Herald said. 

What happened

The Justice Department released a small portion of its files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein over the weekend, missing a legal deadline to post its entire collection by Friday. Sixteen of the documents, including a photograph with President Donald Trump, disappeared Saturday without explanation, though the Justice Department later reposted the photo along with some new documents. Many of the files were heavily redacted.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche Sunday defended the slow pace of release, saying government lawyers were working diligently to redact “victim information” from the “million or so pages of documents.” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of the sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” the administration was “flouting the spirit and letter of the law.”

Who said what

“Despite mounting expectations, the released files” were “something of an anticlimax,” The New York Times said. They “added little to the public’s understanding” of Epstein’s conduct or “his connections to wealthy and powerful businessmen and politicians who associated with him.” There were “some photos of celebrities and politicians,” including “never-before-seen photos of former President Bill Clinton,” The Associated Press said, “but fleetingly few of Trump.”

The “temporarily deleted digital image” showed “Trump before he became president posing with bikini-clad women,” The Washington Post said. The “minimal” mentions of Trump included a claim in a lawsuit that he and Epstein “both chuckled” over sexual innuendo about a 14-year-old girl in the 1990s, the BBC said. The Justice Department is “covering up things that, for whatever reason, Donald Trump doesn’t want to go public,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” The “short answer is we are not redacting information around President Trump,” Blanche told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

What next?

Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) told “Face the Nation” they were considering filing “inherent contempt” charges against Attorney General Pam Bondi for failing to comply with the Epstein law. Khanna said he was worried more about the “selective concealment” of records than the “timeline” of their release. “Our goal is not to take down Bondi,” he said, but to find out “who raped these young girls, who covered it up and why are they getting away with it?”

There is a political storm brewing in the US over the disclosure of the Epstein files and their link to President Donald Trump.

At least 13 files, including a photo containing Trump, were removed by the Department of Justice from the latest release of documents, only to be republished after a review following concerns over victim identification.

The evidence was reinstated without any “alteration or redaction”, said the DoJ, with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche explicitly stating on NBC News that “it has nothing to do with President Trump”.

What did the commentators say?

“The documents produced no major revelations,” said The New York Times. The photos in particular underlined how Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, “attracted a remarkably broad spectrum of famous people into his orbit”, with Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Walter Cronkite appearing in the latest batch.

The redactions have caused the most controversy, said The Guardian. Blanche argued that the government “did not have time to review all the files to make redactions needed to protect victims”, with at least one victim claiming that she had been identified in the DoJ dump.

Conversely, in some areas, the redactions were “too aggressive”. For instance, a picture of Clinton, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross was also mistakenly redacted to obscure a child’s face. The child was Jackson’s son, with images “readily available” from commercial photo archives.

There is only one “unequivocal takeaway” from this latest episode, said CNN. The Trump administration’s efforts to “quell the storm have whipped up a new vortex of political energy” that could potentially harm the president.

The most recent release has exposed the “stunning revelation that there are 1,200 people identified as victims or their relatives”, with “materials from dozens of hard drives, old CDs and computers”. Though there is nothing to suggest any direct wrongdoing on Trump’s part, it fuels the “ever-deepening political storm” surrounding him.

There are “several possibilities” explaining the administration’s actions. The “sheer size” of the data could be posing “genuine issues” for officials. The department “may lack the competence” to do such a vast job “comprehensively and quickly”, following “purges of career officials by Trump’s aides”. Lastly, critics of the president “would not be surprised” if the DoJ was trying to brazenly “protect” Trump. Whatever the reason, this will cause a significant “headache” for him.

If Trump has tried to “deflect attention” away from himself, he “may have succeeded”, as the latest tranche of documents “shifted the spotlight” on to former Democrat president Bill Clinton, said the Financial Times. After eventually signing the legislation to release the files, Trump has recognised the “political benefit” of using the files to “tarnish the reputation of a prominent Democrat” and “one of his great ideological foes”.

This speaks to how the files have become a “weapon in America’s escalating ideological war”. On the left, politicians are employing the new information to “discredit” Trump, while the president and his administration are using them to “attack his adversaries”. The conflict continues, as the battles over the files “underscore the claims of Democrats and others that Trump is using the DoJ to pursue his political opponents”: a charge that Trump has “repeatedly levelled at the Biden administration”.

What next?

Representatives Ro Khanna (Democrat) and Thomas Massie (Republican) are seeking to find Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, for not releasing more documents related to Epstein. Both were involved in the original drafting of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and Khanna now wants to see the “60-count federal indictment of Epstein from 2007 and the accompanying prosecution memo”, said The Washington Post.

In a statement, the justice department said that materials “will continue being reviewed and redacted” in line with legal requirements, exercising an “abundance of caution as we receive additional information”.

What happened

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer Tuesday cleared the way for the release of potentially hundreds of thousands of documents from the sex trafficking case against Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

The recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act “unambiguously applies” to the Maxwell grand jury testimony and “voluminous” other records from the case, Engelmayer ruled, including evidence not used in the 2021 trial that resulted in Maxwell’s 20-year prison sentence.

Who said what

Engelmayer said he was approving the Justice Department’s request to unseal the files, but “cautioned that people shouldn’t expect to learn much new information from them,” The Associated Press said. They “do not identify any person other than Epstein and Maxwell as having had sexual contact with a minor,” he wrote, nor do they “discuss or identify any client of Epstein’s or Maxwell’s.”

The Justice Department also has a “pending” request before a second federal judge in New York to “unseal records from the grand jury that indicted Epstein on sex-trafficking charges in 2019,” before his suicide in jail, The Washington Post said. “A third federal judge, in Miami, last week ordered the release of transcripts from the grand jury that investigated Epstein from 2005 to 2007.”

What next?

Before the government releases any of the material, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton must “personally certify, in a sworn declaration,” that the records have been “vigorously reviewed” and “found to be in compliance” with the law’s requirements on protecting victims’ identities, Engelmayer wrote in his ruling. Previously, “although paying lip service to Maxwell’s and Epstein’s victims,” the Justice Department “has not treated them with the solicitude they deserve.”

Much has been made of convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged ties to Donald Trump, but the president is only one of numerous people with connections to the disgraced financier. The latest revelations, courtesy of a massive batch of Epstein’s emails released by the House Oversight Committee, show that many famous public figures had significant ties to Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019.

While these communications do not necessarily prove guilt, they have raised more questions as the Epstein scandal continues to brew. Notably, all of these email exchanges “took place years after Epstein became a registered sex offender in 2008,” said USA Today.

Lawrence ‘Larry’ Summers

Summers, a former Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration who was also once president of Harvard University, was shown to have corresponded with Epstein over at least seven years. While it was previously reported that the men knew each other, the emails “indicate the two met for dinner frequently, with Epstein often trying to connect Summers to prominent global figures,” said BBC News.

Summers, a Democrat, largely used the email communications to criticize Trump’s agenda but also talked to Epstein about nonpolitical issues. On one occasion, he “appeared to seek advice from Epstein about a romantic relationship he was interested in initiating with a female economist,” said USA Today. After the emails were made public, Summers announced he was stepping back from most of his public positions, including resigning from the board of OpenAI and his professorship at Harvard. “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” Summers said to The Harvard Crimson.

Steve Bannon

Presidential adviser-turned-MAGA-influencer Steve Bannon was found to have been “workshopping legal and media strategies to protect Epstein from the legal and publicity quagmire that enveloped him in the last year of his life,” said The Guardian. Bannon, who served in Trump’s administration during his first term, was “devising responses to the gathering storm of public outrage about Epstein’s criminal history” in an effort to help Epstein craft a defense. Both of the men were also “strategizing how best to promote Bannon’s right-wing populist agenda and the political fortunes of its standard bearer, Donald Trump.”

There was also evidence that Bannon used Epstein to strengthen his ties with global figures. In one notable exchange from 2018, Epstein emailed Bannon to let him know “‘there are many leaders of countries we can organize for you to have one-on-ones’ with if Bannon agreed to spend eight to 10 days in Europe,” said Politico. In at least one email, Bannon, who has declined to comment on the relationship, also refers to Epstein as an “amazing assistant.”

Noam Chomsky

Like Summers, famed linguistics professor Noam Chomsky was known to have had a relationship with Epstein. When asked about the pair’s relationship in 2023, Chomsky told The Wall Street Journal his “first response is that it is none of your business. Or anyone’s. Second is that I knew him, and we met occasionally.” However, the new emails reveal that the pair’s relationship may have been more involved than previously thought. This is part of a new light that is being cast on Epstein’s “deep involvement with prominent scientists and scholars,” said Scientific American.

This includes allegations that the association between Chomsky and Epstein “went deeper than the occasional political and academic discussions the former had previously claimed to have with the latter,” said The Guardian. This includes being close enough to discuss potential vacation plans. Chomsky also “reportedly acknowledged receiving about $270,000 from an account linked to Epstein while sorting the disbursement of common funds,” though the 96-year-old has maintained that none of the money came directly from Epstein himself.

Kathryn Ruemmler

Another politically adjacent name who moved to the private sector, Kathryn Ruemmler was White House general counsel during the Obama administration before taking a job as the top lawyer for investment bank Goldman Sachs. When Ruemmler “needed to vent about Donald Trump’s rise in politics, she turned to their mutual acquaintance Jeffrey Epstein,” said Business Insider.

As with other Epstein associates, the new emails “suggest a deeper relationship between Ruemmler and Epstein than was previously known,” said Business Insider. Ruemmler “confided in Epstein when a rival law firm tried to poach her, when looking for a New York City apartment and when she was being vetted for consideration as attorney general.” Goldman Sachs has stood by Ruemmler as this information has come out. These emails “were private correspondence well before Kathy Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs,” a spokesperson for the bank told CNBC. Ruemmler herself told The Wall Street Journal in 2023, “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein.”

Peter Thiel

While Peter Thiel is best known as the cofounder of PayPal and technology company Palantir, the billionaire has found himself ingrained in conservative politics through his association with figures like Vice President JD Vance. But the new emails show that Thiel may have had a close relationship with Epstein as well. In at least one instance, Epstein appeared to invite Thiel to his private Caribbean island, writing, “Dec visit me Caribbean.”

This island “near St. Thomas in the Caribbean has long been the subject of speculation about which possible conspirators may have visited the island, which Epstein allegedly used to conceal his criminal behavior,” said Politico. Epstein also previously “put $40 million into two funds managed by Valar Ventures, a New York firm that was cofounded by Mr. Thiel,” said The New York Times. Thiel has said he never visited Epstein’s island and has denied any wrongdoing.

Peggy Siegal

Peggy Siegal is one of the most recognizable entertainment publicists and has spent decades crafting a media empire. But she has also generated a fair share of controversy due to her “longtime association with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” said The Hollywood Reporter in 2019. Siegal reportedly “helped facilitate Epstein’s return to elite social circles after his conviction through private gatherings she organized at his Upper East Side home.”

But the recent tranche of emails reveals that Siegal and Epstein may have had a closer relationship than many previously believed. In at least one newly revealed email, Epstein wrote to Siegal “with an ask: Could she reach out to media mogul Arianna Huffington to enlist her help in clearing his name?” said Politico. Epstein also asked Siegal if Huffington, the cofounder of HuffPost, could send reporters to investigate one of his most notable accusers, Virginia Giuffre. Siegal “offered to send the message to Huffington on her own behalf if Epstein fixed the grammar,” but both Siegal and Huffington have said nothing ever came of the request.

Of all the scandals that have plagued Donald Trump throughout his lifetime in the public eye, his extensive and well-documented relationship with disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein presents the most clear and immediate danger to the president. While Trump has long denied any wrongdoing, the public contours of his association with Epstein paint a compelling — if frustratingly incomplete — picture of two men with years of shared history. Despite the president’s repeated claims that he and Epstein were mere social acquaintances who suffered a falling out of sorts over a young woman in Trump’s former employ, the steady drip of Epstein-related material from Congress, coupled with Trump’s conspicuously ardent reactions thereof, suggest a much more robust bond.

As the president fends off a growing bipartisan push for full governmental transparency on a scandal that shows little sign of abating, here is what we know about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s long, complicated friendship.

1980s

While it’s unclear exactly when and where Trump and Epstein first met , Trump in a 2002 New York magazine interview said he’d known “terrific guy” Epstein “for fifteen years,” placing their initial point of contact in the mid-to-late 1980s. This was “around the time” of Trump’s 1985 purchase of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where Epstein “was also living,” said Forbes. “In my mind,” Epstein was Trump’s “best friend, you know,” former Trump Plaza Hotel and Casinos COO Jack O’Donnell said to CNN in 2025.

1992

Trump and Epstein are filmed together during a party for a segment of Faith Daniels’ talk show, “A Closer Look,” about Trump’s life post-divorce from first wife Ivana. This “most widely circulated footage” of the pair shows the two men “evidently assessing” the women at the event, which included NFL cheerleaders in town for a game, Rolling Stone said. At one point, Trump is “seen gesturing to a woman” and tells Epstein, “Look at her, back there .… She’s hot,” NBC News said. Trump later “said something else into Epstein’s ear,” prompting the financier to “double over with laughter.”

That same year, Florida-based businessman George Houraney flew 28 women to Trump’s estate for a “Calendar Girl” competition. Aside from the women, The New York Times said, the “only guests were Mr. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.” Describing the incident to the Times, Houraney claims he said, “Donald, this is supposed to be a party with VIPs. You’re telling me it’s you and Epstein?’”

1993-2000

Trump and Epstein’s relationship continued through the ’90s, with the pair appearing in a photograph with Trump’s children Eric and Ivanka at a Harley Davidson Cafe opening in 1993. That same year, Epstein was photographed attending Trump’s second wedding to model Marla Maples. “I wish now I took more of him with Trump,” photographer Dafydd Jones said to CNN.“I had the job of photographing the Trump wedding, so I stood with the press and photographed him.”

In the subsequent four years, Trump would fly seven times on Epstein’s infamous aircraft, according to flight logs released during the trial of accomplice sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

1997 also saw Trump photographed alongside Epstein at a Victoria's Secret party in New York City. In 2000, Trump, Epstein, Maxwell and soon-to-be Trump spouse Melania Knauss posed for a series of pictures together at a party at Mar-a-Lago also attended by Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince of England, who was stripped of his royal titles this year for sexual abuse and his relationship with Epstein.

2000-2006

At the dawn of the new millennium, Trump and Epstein’s apparent friendship appeared to be going strong. In 2000, though, the seeds of discontent between the two patricians were planted when Virginia Giuffre, then a teenager working as a Mar-a-Lago spa attendant, was hired away from Trump by Maxwell and Epstein as a masseuse. Giuffre, one of Epstein and Maxwell’s “most well-known sex trafficking accusers,” took her own life in early 2025, The Associated Press said. While her allegations were not part of Epstein’s criminal prosecutions, she has become “central to conspiracy theories about the case.”

By 2002, however, Trump was still singing Epstein’s public praises, describing him as a person who was a “lot of fun to be with” and who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” to New York magazine.

The next year, the pair connected again for Epstein’s 50th birthday, for which Trump penned a poem written out and formatted to look like the body of a naked woman. Trump, who initially denied The Wall Street Journal’s report on the card’s existence, signed the message “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

In 2004, whatever friendship existed between Trump and Epstein seems to have suffered a fatal blow when both men competed to purchase the enormous Maison de l’Amitie, an exclusive Palm Beach property that ultimately sold to Trump for more than $41 million. Two weeks after Trump obtained the property, Palm Beach police “fielded a tip that young women were seen coming and going from Epstein’s home,” said The Washington Post. Several months later, the local police received another complaint about Epstein, and by 2006 a grand jury had indicted him for solicitation.

2007

Trump finally “severed ties” entirely with Epstein in 2007, allegedly after the then-indicted financier “hit on the teenage daughter of a Mar-a-Lago member,” thereby damaging the “Trump brand of glitz and glamour,” The Miami Herald said. In 2025, Trump insisted that he’d made Epstein a persona non grata for “taking our people” from Mar-a-Lago, and has “long maintained” that his relationship with Epstein ended before the latter’s 2006 indictment, NPR said. But journalists who viewed Mar-a-Lago’s membership log said Epstein’s account at the club wasn’t closed until October 2007, “more than a year after he was indicted and released on bail,” said The Daily Beast.

2010

During a filmed deposition, Epstein is questioned about his relationship with Trump, and asked whether the pair had “socialized in the presence of females under the age of 18?” Epstein demurred from answering the question, citing his constitutional rights.

2015-2019

Now-shuttered media publication Gawker obtained and published Epstein’s infamous “black book” of contacts, as well as the passenger logs for Epstein’s private aircraft, in 2015. Mentioned alongside international notables like Mick Jagger and Prince Andrew, Trump’s name, among others, appeared circled in the book by Epstein’s (since-deceased) housekeeper, “supposedly to identify them as potential ‘material witnesses,’” Vanity Fair said.

The following year, an unidentified plaintiff using the name “Katie Johnson” sued both Trump and Epstein multiple times, alleging the pair raped her in 1994 when she was a 13-year-old aspiring model. The suits were all eventually withdrawn or dismissed, and to date, it is “still not clear who Katie Johnson was, or if she ever existed,” said the San Francisco Chronicle.

In 2019, Epstein was arrested and held on federal sex trafficking charges. In response to questions about their relationship, Trump said he “was not a fan of his” in an effort to “further distance himself from his former friend,” said Rolling Stone. One month later, Epstein would be dead from an apparent jail cell suicide that has provided fresh fuel for Epstein-associated conspiracy theories in the years since.

2019-2024

Trump was reportedly “shocked” at Epstein’s jailhouse death, and “believed conspiracy theories would inevitably follow,” said The Daily Beast. Trump had the “same reaction I did,” former Attorney General Bill Barr said to congressional investigators during a deposition in the summer of 2025. “How the hell did that happen, he’s in Federal custody?”

The following year, Trump surprised observers with an “unusual detour” to offer “warm words” for Maxwell, who had been arrested that past July, the Times said. Asked whether he thought Maxwell might publicly name names connected with Epstein, Trump said, “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly.” The remarks “renewed attention” on the Trump-Epstein relationship, the Times said, particularly after the president had “sought to distance himself from the disgraced financier.”

In 2024, just days before Trump was to win reelection, model Stacey Williams alleged that Trump had inappropriately groped and fondled her during a visit to Trump tower with Epstein, whom she was casually dating at the time. “I had this horrible pit in my stomach that it was somehow orchestrated,” Williams said in an interview with The Guardian. “I felt like a piece of meat.”

Now

Since returning to the White House for the second time, Trump has gone out of his way to portray himself as maximally transparent regarding Epstein, even as his efforts highlight the degree to which his administration seems unwilling to act accordingly. Schisms within the Justice Department over the White House's handling of the case quickly threatened to overshadow the administration’s attempts to rerelease tranches of largely-public Epstein-related material to select right-wing influencers. At the same time, the White House’s conspicuous efforts to court a now-imprisoned Maxwell, and her congruent efforts to secure favorable treatment, have only accentuated Trump’s associations with her and Epstein.

In early November of 2025, after weeks of congressional wrangling and dueling public statements, lawmakers on the House Oversight Committee released huge swaths of Epstein-related items, including evidence that the disgraced sex trafficker remained in close contact with many in Trump’s orbit long after he and the president had fallen out. In the aftermath of those revelations, both the House and Senate passed a bill to release the extent of the government’s Epstein documents, with key exceptions for protecting witnesses, issues of national security and other sensitive matters. In a post on Truth Social, Trump confirmed he’d signed the bill into law, but stressed that “Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue, which affects them far more than the Republican Party, in order to try and distract from our AMAZING Victories.”

What happened

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers on Wednesday took leave from his teaching and directorial duties at Harvard University and also stepped down from the board of OpenAI, amid new allegations about his cozy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The university on Tuesday told The Harvard Crimson it was reopening an investigation into “individuals at Harvard included in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents,” a group that included Summers.

Who said what

Summers, who served as Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 and Harvard’s president from 2001 to 2006, is “among the highest-level U.S. personalities to pay a price for his relationship to Epstein,” Reuters said. Emails released by the House last week showed the two men communicating up until 2019 — long after Epstein’s 2008 conviction on soliciting sex from a minor and shortly before he was arrested and died of suicide in prison. In 2018, Summers, who is married, sought his advice on pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman who viewed him as a mentor, leading Epstein to call himself Summers’ “wingman.”

Summers announced Monday that he was “stepping back” from his public commitments, and on Tuesday he told his economics class that despite his “regret” and “shame” over the Epstein emails, “I think it’s very important that I fulfill my teaching obligations” for “a time,” according to online footage posted by students. Along with reversing course on teaching, Summers has “shed a number of other positions this week,” The New York Times said, including affiliations with Santander bank and several prominent think tanks, and as a contributor to Bloomberg and the Times.

What next?

President Donald Trump on Wednesday signed a law that compels the Justice Department to release its cache of Epstein investigation files within 30 days. It’s “unlikely” we will see “potent new evidence of criminal misconduct” in those files, said Politico’s Ankush Khardori, “but I expect a whole lot of embarrassing stuff to come out. And we got a preview this week with the stuff on Larry Summers.”

‘This scam is why even Lincoln would have wanted to ditch the penny’

Joel Burgess at USA Today

One of our “greatest presidents is being decoupled from one of the most annoying American scams,” says Joel Burgess. It’s “ironic” that it was “Abraham ‘Honest Abe’ Lincoln whose image was tied to a sleazy marketing ploy, and also that it was President Donald Trump, a serial grifter, who gave Abe relief.” Stamping the “coins cost nearly four times their value, and — let’s face it — pennies aren’t really worth the space they take up in our car cupholders.”

Read more

‘Corporate human rights policies still matter’

Phil Bloomer and Bennett Freeman at Newsweek

The “most influential U.S. companies across five high-risk sectors have, by and large, held steady on their core human rights commitments this year,” say Phil Bloomer and Bennett Freeman. It’s a “trend worth acknowledging, even applauding.” It “reflects a deep recognition among companies that investors and consumers expect respect for human rights, that companies’ long-term sustainability, competitiveness and license to operate on the global stage depends on it and that it’s the right thing to do.”

Read more

‘True climate justice demands a reckoning with colonialism’

Nciko wa Nciko and Samrawit Getaneh at Al Jazeera

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights has an “opportunity to issue a landmark opinion affirming the link between colonialism and the harms of climate change to people(s) across the continent,” say Nciko wa Nciko and Samrawit Getaneh. This “would mark a major step forward from the International Court of Justice and in Africa’s fight for reparative justice.” Effective “climate action needs more than science; it also requires political backing for states.”

Read more

‘The Epstein fight shows Trump inching closer to lame duck status’

Jim Geraghty at the National Review

If Trump “didn’t want people to expect the federal government to release all information related to Epstein when he was president, he should not have said he would ‘declassify the Epstein files’ or ‘do the Epstein’ in campaign trail interviews,” says Jim Geraghty. Don’t “get mad at the people who remember Trump saying it, get mad at Trump for making that promise.” Americans “can’t relate to being friends with one of the most notorious sex traffickers.”

Read more

What happened

The House Tuesday passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in a 427-1 vote, overwhelmingly endorsing the long-shot effort to force the Justice Department to release all files from its Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking investigation. Shortly after the vote, the Senate agreed by unanimous consent to automatically pass the bill as soon as the House sent it over.

President Donald Trump, who spent months fighting “tooth and nail” to “kill” the bill, bowed to the “inevitable” earlier this week and said he would sign it, Politico said.

Who said what

“We fought the president, the attorney general, the FBI director, the speaker of the House and the vice president to get this win,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of the bill’s lead sponsors, said Tuesday. Trump “called me a traitor for standing with these women,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said at a pre-vote press conference with Epstein victims. Watching Trump fight the bill “has been one of the most destructive things to MAGA.”

Trump tried everything in his playbook to “distract” attention from the Epstein files, “which carry with them a constant reminder of the president’s friendship with a sex offender,” Luke Broadwater said in The New York Times. He “ordered Republicans to stop talking about them,” then “tried to bully House Republicans” pushing for their release, but Epstein is the “one story line” Trump “hasn’t been able to evade.”

The White House was “caught off-guard by how quickly the measure passed through Congress,” Reuters said, and Trump “remains angry about the attention paid to the Epstein matter,” which has “taken a toll” on his “public approval.” In a Reuters/Ipsos poll concluded Monday, just 20% of Americans — and 44% of Republicans — approved of his handling of the Epstein case, and 70% (including 60% of Republicans) said they believe the government is hiding information about Epstein’s clients.

What next?

After Trump signs the law, as soon as today, the Justice Department has 30 days to release all files related to Epstein and his 2019 death in federal prison. The legislation allows the administration to redact information about Epstein’s victims or ongoing federal investigations, but not due to “embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity.”

What happened

President Donald Trump Sunday night reversed course and said House Republicans should vote for an upcoming petition to force the release of the Justice Department’s Jeffrey Epstein files.

Trump’s monthslong battle to quash the petition had divided his MAGA base and contributed to his “increasingly nasty split” with his former ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), The Associated Press said. Greene was one of four Republicans who forced an upcoming vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and Trump’s surprise about-face was an “implicit acknowledgement” that the measure has enough support to pass in the House.

Who said what

“House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax,” Trump said on social media last night. “I DON’T CARE!” He “threw in the towel” after it became clear his “last-minute push” to dissuade House Republicans “wasn’t getting results,” The Wall Street Journal said, and “risked calling even more attention to the matter.”

The “internal GOP strife underscores how politically toxic Trump’s association with Epstein has become,” especially since last week’s release of emails in which the convicted sex offender alleged that Trump “knew about the girls,” Politico said. The president “normally enjoys an iron grip” over “subservient” House Republicans, but “he’s lost all control over the chamber when it comes to the Epstein matter, and Hill Republicans have grown increasingly wary of Trump’s fixation on the issue.”

Greene told CNN Sunday that Trump’s break with her — including calling her a “ranting lunatic” he no longer supported on Friday and a “traitor” on Saturday — “unfortunately, it has all come down to the Epstein files.” She said she did not think the files would show any wrongdoing by Trump. “I have no idea what’s in the files,” Greene added. “I can’t even guess. But that is the question everyone is asking, is why fight this so hard?”

What next?

One reason Trump had fought to “avoid a total GOP jailbreak”, Politico said, was that a big win “could increase pressure on the Senate to take up the bill,” potentially “forcing an embarrassing veto that would prolong the controversy.” Lead sponsor Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) told ABC News Sunday his Epstein petition “could have a deluge of Republicans” voting in favor tomorrow, “100 or more,” and he was “hoping to get a veto-proof majority.”

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) once lockstep adherence to the Trump administration is beginning to shift — in no small part due to the White House’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation that has become a major millstone around the administration’s neck. But does the growing daylight between the U.S. representative from Georgia and this White House signal a genuine political realignment for the MAGA mainstay? Or is the controversial congresswoman simply showing that she has learned how to play politics in Washington with the best of them?

‘More subtle than she first appeared’

The schism between Greene and President Donald Trump reached a crescendo last week, when Trump attacked “‘Wacky’ Marjorie” on Truth Social for her tendency to “COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” and for having “gone Far Left, even doing The View, with their Low IQ Republican hating Anchors.” The president’s opprobrium, including his withdrawal of political support for Greene, comes as the congresswoman tests “whether Republicans can openly defy Trump and survive” by “betting that standing with Epstein victims is a powerful enough shield to withstand the wrath” of this White House, said Axios.

While the fight over releasing the Epstein documents is the most proximal episode to Greene’s distancing herself from Trump, the “turn against the president” has been unfolding “over the last several months,” said Rolling Stone. Greene has “publicly questioned his foreign policy decision” and critiqued his “support of Israel” and “domestic political maneuvering” on health care, said Rolling Stone. Greene has “asserted that she remained committed to the MAGA movement,” but Trump’s criticisms were a “stunning rebuke” of one of his “fiercest defenders,” said The Washington Post.

In offering an apology for her role in “inflaming the country’s poisoned politics” during a CNN interview this weekend, Greene succeeded in “furthering her own intriguing political reinvention,” the network said. Greene’s “evolution” suggests a politician who is both “more subtle than she first appeared” and who is “increasingly adept at wielding her own power.”

‘Apostasies’ that do not negate a ‘lifetime of conspiracies’

Greene’s pivot may very well be an “honest evolution, which entails accountability,” or it might be mere “shallow opportunism, which offers none,” said The Atlantic. “Recent apostasies from her party” do not automatically negate Greene’s “lifetime of conspiracies.” Although she has said she “still supports Trump,” Greene now wants to “stop the toxic rhetoric” that “if we’re being honest, has been a staple” of her career, said Poynter.

Surprising as Greene’s political pivots may seem, there is reason to see the moves as less about a newfound sense of independence and more about a broader dynamic taking shape within the GOP at large. Trump’s attacks on the congresswoman come during a “politically fraught moment” for GOP lawmakers “feeling squeamish after a crushing off-season election cycle,” Politico said.

The Trump-Greene feud is “highlighting the cracks within MAGA world” in ways that are “increasingly apparent through MAGA-aligned media brands and commentators,” CNN’s Brian Stelter said on Bluesky. What’s notable is “not the number of the cracks but the sheer *variety* of them.”

Even “presidents-turned-cult leaders become lame ducks eventually,” said Gabe Fleisher in his “Wake Up To Politics” newsletter. And though there is likely “some personal element” to Greene’s decision to split from Trump, “at least publicly, it’s over policy divides.”

Greene frequently falls on the less popular side of whatever issues she’s broken with Trump over, but she is nevertheless often “on the side quickly gaining popularity in the GOP.” Greene’s outspoken critiques may then be “just the latest hint,” said CNN, that Republicans are “beginning to assess” the president’s behavior and how it “might weigh on their fortunes when he no longer controls the GOP.”

President Donald Trump’s long relationship with deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein roared back into the public eye this week, as Republicans and Democrats jockeyed to capitalize on the tranches of Epstein-related documents released on Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee. While the White House has swatted down the renewed scrutiny on the Trump-Epstein relationship as the Democrats try to deflect from their own intraparty frustrations, growing public furor over Epstein’s high society enablers and Trump’s connection shows no signs of being so easily dismissed. With Democrats and a growing number of Republicans hungry to pursue the case even further, why has this batch of Epstein-related content become so potently dangerous for the Trump administration?

What did the commentators say?

The Epstein saga has a “dastardly quality” wherein the “more anyone drawn into the morass tries to dig themselves out, the deeper they dig themselves in,” said CNN. It’s a feature proven “yet again” by the Trump administration, as questions about Trump's place in the Epstein case are “becoming impossible for the president to suppress.” The renewed focus on Epstein “couldn’t have come at a worse time for the president” and has prompted a “fresh wave of chaos” that has “knocked the administration on its heels,” said Politico. The Epstein case has been like a “bad case of herpes” that “lies dormant for weeks but doesn’t go away for a long time,” said Jonathan Alter at Washington Monthly.

While nothing in the documents offers “specific proof of anything,” their power to generate “endless new rounds of questions” stems in part from the fact that Trump’s “own party has chosen to release them,” said The New Yorker. The administration’s “attempts at damage control” have meanwhile only “fueled the story” for the public. In one notable example, the administration unsuccessfully pressured Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) to drop her support for releasing more documents during a surprise meeting in the White House Situation Room — a place typically used to “discuss urgent national-security matters,” not political sex scandals. “Yikes. Smoke, meet fire.”

The danger is not merely Trump’s alone. By framing the Epstein files as largely under the purview of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee, rather than requiring a full House vote, conservative hopes of “easing political pressure” on themselves and the White House “appear to have had the opposite effect,” said The New York Times. The committee has, “almost in spite of itself,” facilitated a release of material that has “intensified the drumbeat of demands for more transparency” while keeping attention on the Trump-Epstein relationship.

Some conservatives have taken notice. Releasing the full extent of the government’s Epstein material is the “easiest thing in the world,” Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of the president’s staunchest MAGA allies in Congress, said to Politico. Spending time and effort to block the materials’ release “just doesn’t make sense to me.” The issue is simply not going to let up for Trump “until it’s addressed and answered to the American people’s satisfaction,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) on CNN.

What next?

Despite the White House effort to scuttle any push for further document releases, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Wednesday announced that he will bring a bipartisan bill to do just that “on the floor for a full vote next week.” It’s a “totally pointless exercise,” he said, and “completely moot now. We might as well just do it.” The expedited push for a vote is a “reflection of the growing sense of agitation” among some in the GOP who are “sick of the months of growing pressure” to release the documents, lest they “risk being accused of protecting pedophiles,” said CNN.

The bill, which would force the Justice Department to release its full Epstein cache, “appears likely to pick up additional Republican votes — potentially dozens or more,” said PBS News. It will then face a “tougher test” in the GOP-controlled Senate, where it will need at least 60 votes to pass. Next week’s House vote is “going to be historic,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), one of the co-sponsors of the Epstein bill, to NPR. If the bill passes the Senate, “within the next six months, the files are released.”

What happened

House Democrats Wednesday released a small batch of emails that appear to suggest President Donald Trump knew more about Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage women than he has acknowledged. “Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff in a January 2019 email, six months before the convicted pedophile died by suicide in a Brooklyn prison cell.

In a 2011 email to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked,” adding that trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre “spent hours at my house with him” and “he has never once been mentioned” by investigators. House Republicans accused the Democrats of cherry-picking documents, then released about 20,000 more Epstein emails subpoenaed from his estate.

Who said what

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the Epstein emails were a “distraction” from the government reopening and “prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.” Trump has repeatedly asserted he did not know about Epstein’s conduct, The Washington Post said, but that claim was “previously undercut” by statements he made when they were still friends and by a “sexually suggestive letter with a sketch of a woman’s body” that he allegedly contributed to a book for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

“Some of the biggest ‘Epstein files’ fire-breathers” from Trump’s MAGA coalition “were silent yesterday,” Axios said, as their “conspiracy-laden search for answers against the deep state has turned (for some) into a defensive posture to protect Trump.” But Epstein’s “typo-strewn emails and other messages” are “unlikely to quell the furor around the Trump-Epstein relationship,” The New York Times said. A “core part” of Trump’s base believes the “mother lode of documents, audio files and video” on Epstein is still in the hands of the FBI and Justice Department.

What next?

After being sworn in Wednesday, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) provided the final signature needed to force a vote in the House intended to compel the Justice Department to release its separate trove of Epstein-related documents. Trump had tried to fend off the bipartisan petition, saying on social media that “only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall” for the Democrats’ “Epstein Hoax” trap. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Wednesday night that he would schedule the vote for next week.

‘Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity’ by Paul Kingsnorth

“Paul Kingsnorth tends to think in the most sweeping terms imaginable,” said Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Times. In Against the Machine, his recent best seller, the British novelist, poet, and essayist urges us all to rediscover our humanity before “the Machine” fully exterminates it. And by “the Machine,” he means a belief system born during the Enlightenment that glorifies technological progress and has induced the people of the West to gradually cede power over their lives to government, corporations, and other large institutions. Kingsnorth has spread these ideas via his Substack, said Justin Ariel Bailey in Christianity Today, and he has now consolidated his missives into “a trenchant and terrifying account of what modern people have sacrificed in exchange for technology’s promise of power and autonomy.”

“Kingsnorth is a fascinating man,” said Corbin K. Barthold in City Journal. In his youth, he was an eco-activist who chained himself to bulldozers, and by his early 40s he was both an accomplished novelist and one of the U.K.’s leading environmentalists. But he lost faith in the green movement, and in 2014 he and his wife decamped to rural Ireland, where they homeschool their children and grow much of their food. Eventually, he joined the Eastern Orthodox Christian church. “Kingsnorth is a gifted stylist and a syncretic thinker,” and his ideas, at their best, are “sharp and layered.” In this “engrossing but often vexing” book, unfortunately, he “rests his boldest claims on little more than vibes.” He romanticizes the rural life of past centuries, ignoring its hardships, while his distrust of economic data “leaves his treatise fatally incomplete.”

Still, “the deeper provocations of Against the Machine are worth hearing, however gloomy,” said Cal Revely-Calder in The New Yorker. “Kingsnorth is surely right that public life has been overtaken by a narrow fixation on data and measurement” and that technologies of convenience are robbing us of skills, such as cooking, that were once foundational to the human experience. He tells us that the Machine has severed our ties to the four anchors of prior human cultures: people, place, prayer, and the past. But he has no concrete recommendations on how to fight the Machine beyond walking away from it—or at least limiting our participation in its growing omnipotence—while seeking to support small communities built upon older values. Even Kingsnorth, however, had to access the internet and work at a laptop to produce his book. In short, “we can’t walk away when there is no ‘away.’”

‘Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice’ by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

“Given its punishing nature, why read this book?” asked Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide at 41 earlier this year, went public years ago with her allegations of being raped as a 16-year-old by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and subsequently being trafficked by the pair to Britain’s Prince Andrew and other powerful men. (Andrew, for his part, denies any sexual contact with Giuffre.) “But while the book is relentlessly, shockingly hard, it is also a clear-eyed and necessary account of how sex offenders operate.” The deft narrative constructed by Giuffre and a co-­writer “does what deposition can’t by taking us into the room with her.” And though it adds only one figure to the list of men Epstein allegedly trafficked underage girls to—an unnamed former prime minister—it does make Maxwell, the deceased Epstein’s accomplice, look entirely undeserving of clemency.

It’s also “the saddest story I’ve read in years,” said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. Giuffre describes being sexually abused throughout her childhood, beginning at age 7, allegedly at the hands of her father and a friend of his, both of whom eventually raped her. (Her father denies her accusations against him.) Giuffre says she later was raped in a car by two teenagers and by a stranger who picked her up when she ran away from a juvenile detention center. She was thus a vulnerable target at 16 when she landed a job at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach, Fla., resort and was quickly lured by Maxwell into Epstein’s twisted world. While “it will take years to unfurl the tentacles Epstein wrapped around finance, law, and politics,” Nobody’s Girl “floats free, self-­assured and self-­­contained—a true American tragedy.”

Some of Giuffre’s testimony here “feels unsatisfyingly neat,” said Claire Allfree in The Telegraph (U.K.). She oddly claims, for example, that the famous snapshot showing Prince Andrew and her together on the night of their alleged first sexual encounter was taken because she wanted to share the moment with her mother. Still, “the story is deeper and darker than this book can say,” because even Giuffre feared naming all accomplices she knew of. For standing up to Epstein, she “doesn’t deserve our scrutiny so much as our admiration.”

What happened

The U.K.’s King Charles III on Thursday stripped his brother Andrew of all his remaining titles, including prince, and forced him to vacate his Royal Lodge mansion near Windsor Castle to “move to alternative private accommodation,” Buckingham Palace said. The demotion, as the king seeks to “distance the royals” from Andrew’s “links to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal,” was “one of the most dramatic moves against a member of the royal family in modern British history,” Reuters said.

Who said what

Andrew had survived “years of shameful scandals” and “decades of tawdry headlines about shady business deals, inappropriate behavior and controversial friendships,” The Associated Press said. But a “new round of public outrage” over his Epstein links — including emails showing they had kept in touch longer than admitted, and a newly published memoir in which late Epstein trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre said Andrew acted as if “having sex with me was his birthright” — proved the final straw.

The “censures” against Andrew “are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him,” Buckingham Palace said. “Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”

What next?

The former prince, now known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, was expected to move to a residence on the king’s Sandringham estate. The royal family hopes this “ripping off the bandage moment” will “finally draw a line under the endless oil slick of bad news stories about Andrew,” said BBC royal correspondent Sean Coughlan. But “it will take more than taking away his titles to dispel” the public anger over his perceived “unchecked privilege” and “ugly entitlement.”

The government is shut down and so, apparently, is the House of Representatives. Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House on an indefinite hiatus over the last month. That decision has halted the work of passing bills and doing oversight, while also blocking the swearing-in of a new Democratic representative.

Johnson’s decision has “diminished the role of Congress and shrunken the speakership” at a moment when President Donald Trump is claiming more power for himself, said Annie Karni at The New York Times. Johnson has “chosen to make himself subservient to Mr. Trump” instead of a “governing partner” as speakers before him have been. The president is taking notice. “I’m the speaker and the president,” Trump reportedly said to associates. That has created a “strange dynamic” in which Johnson seems to have used his “considerable power” to “render the House irrelevant.”

Shifting the balance of power

Johnson is “ostensibly” making the point that the House has “done its job and voted to fund the government,” said Leigh Ann Caldwell at Puck. It is Senate Democrats who are blocking the passage of a continuing resolution to end the government shutdown, after all. But his decision is also “inadvertently reducing the legislature’s own authority,” while Trump “seizes de facto spending and taxation powers” that constitutionally belong to Congress. Johnson’s deference to the president is accordingly “shifting the balance of power in a way that has not been seen since the Nixon administration.”

The House was “central” to the Founders’ vision of “what democracy looks like,” Will Bunch said at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Small districts and biennial elections were intended to “closely bond its members to the people” and be an “antidote to Western civilization’s monarchy problem.” Now the “absence of a functional Congress” is allowing Trump to “run the country by fiat.” Johnson may lead the House, but he is ceding “all of the job’s actual power to the president.”

House Republicans largely agree with Johnson’s tactics, said NOTUS. “What would we be doing?” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). The battle over the shutdown is being waged in the Senate. Most House members would say they should come back when “we’ve got something to vote on,” Cole said. At the moment “we really don’t.” But “cracks are growing” in the GOP caucus, said Axios. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Dan Crenshaw of Texas, among others, have “raised concerns about being on recess during the shutdown.”

Deepening suspicions

It is difficult for Johnson to argue that he is “serious about swiftly reopening the government” when he will not call the House into session, James Downie said at MSNBC. Another side effect: Johnson has used the House hiatus to delay the swearing-in of Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona. Grijalva has said she would be the 218th signature on a House discharge petition to force the release of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein. The delay in swearing in Grijalva “only deepens suspicions that the White House is hiding something” in the Epstein case.

It remains to be seen whether Prince Andrew will face further sanctions over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged sexual abuse of Virginia Giuffre. But what is clear as his accuser’s posthumous memoir hits the shelves is that Giuffre was “determined to share her story”, exposing the power and corruption that left “victims, like her, scarred after years of alleged abuse”, said The Independent.

In her 367-page book, co-authored with writer Amy Wallace, Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year aged 41, lays out her claims in “harrowing and sometimes explicit” detail. This is what we have learned.

Epstein and Maxwell’s horrific abuse

There were times Giuffre feared for her life, said London’s The Standard. During her two-year association with Epstein, she alleges he subjected her to sadomasochistic sex that caused her “so much pain that I prayed I would black out”. During this time she writes that she was passed around “scores of powerful, wealthy people” and repeatedly beaten and abused. “I believed that I might die as a sex slave,” she said.

Ghislaine Maxwell is described as a “molester with posh manners and an aristocratic pedigree” who played “den mother to Epstein’s family of dysfunctional girls”.

Giuffre also writes about her first meeting with the British socialite, who approached her while she was working as a teenager in a Mar-a-Lago spa. She describes being invited to Epstein’s house, where Maxwell allegedly instructed her to “do what I do”, before the pair sexually abused her. “The disappointment was excruciating. I blamed myself. ‘Is sex all anyone will ever want from me’,” she writes.

‘Brazen request’

Epstein and Maxwell “pleaded” with Giuffre to “have our baby”, said the New York Post. The proposal is said to have come with the promise of “round-the-clock nannies, a mansion and a $200,000 per month allowance”, but Giuffre would have to hand over all legal rights to the child.

Everything about the “brazen request felt wrong”, she writes. “There was no way I wanted to bring a child into the world for them to raise. What if the baby were female? Was the plan for Epstein and Maxwell to have me bring that little girl up until she reached puberty, then hand her over for them to abuse?”

An ‘orgy’ with Prince Andrew

Giuffre details her first meeting, aged 17, with Prince Andrew, then 41, at Maxwell’s London townhouse, said The Independent. “Just like Cinderella I was going to meet a handsome prince.”

At the house (the setting of the notorious photograph of the pair), she alleges Maxwell told her “you are to do for him what you do for Jeffrey”. They later had sex for the first time. Prince Andrew was, she said, “friendly enough, but still entitled – as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright”. Afterwards, he thanked her “in his clipped British accent”.

Around a month later, she alleges they had sex for a second time at Epstein’s home in Manhattan. The third and final time they had sex was during an “orgy” with Epstein involving “approximately eight other girls”, whom Giuffre describes as looking underage, on a private island in the Caribbean. Epstein “laughed about how they couldn’t really communicate, saying they are the easiest girls to get along with”.

Prince Andrew, who reached a financial settlement with Giuffre in 2022 with no acknowledgement of guilt, has consistently and strenuously denied any wrongdoing, and claims they “never had any sexual contact”.

Her reaction to the New York photos

Giuffre remembers seeing the photographs of Andrew with Epstein in New York’s Central Park that were “published in newspapers around the world in 2011”, said the BBC. Epstein had recently been released from prison for prostituting minors. “I was of course revolted to see two of my abusers together, out for a stroll,” she writes. “But mostly I was amazed that a member of the royal family would be stupid enough to appear in public with Epstein.”

She writes about feeling “disappointed” on learning of Epstein’s death, while he was awaiting trial for sex trafficking. “This wasn’t how justice was supposed to work out.” Later she adds that she hopes Prince Andrew will one day be “held to account”.

She has no regrets

In the final chapter of her memoir, Giuffre writes about her hopes of “preventing others suffering”, said The Independent. Dedicating the book to her “Survivor Sisters and anyone who has suffered sexual abuse”, she says the money she received in her settlement from Prince Andrew went towards setting up her foundation for preventing human trafficking.

While she doesn’t regret making her allegations public, she writes that the “constant telling and retelling has been extremely painful and exhausting. With this book, I seek to free myself from my past.”

The Duke of York has been marched down the honours hill, and persuaded to give up his royal titles after continued accusations about his association with the sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.

It is a remarkable fall from grace for the late Queen’s favourite son, who was once second in line to the throne and widely feted as a Falklands War hero. Here’s how he went from popular prince to public pariah:

1999: first meets Epstein

Andrew is introduced to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell. The British socialite, daughter of press baron Robert Maxwell, was Epstein's girlfriend at the time and had met Andrew when she was at university.

The trio quickly develop a “close friendship”, according to The Independent. Andrew is said to have invited the couple to Balmoral, his mother’s Scottish residence, that same year. In June 2000, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are guests at a party hosted by Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle and, that December, Epstein joins Andrew at a shooting weekend at Sandringham, the royal family’s Norfolk estate.

2001: infamous Virginia Giuffre photo taken

According to Virginia Giuffre, then known as Virginia Roberts, this is when she first meets Andrew. In a lawsuit filed in 2019, she said that, after a sweaty night of dancing at London’s Tramp nightclub, Andrew had sex with her at Maxwell’s townhouse – where the now-infamous photo of the three of them was allegedly taken. On two other occasions – in Epstein’s New York flat and at an “orgy” on Epstein’s private Caribbean island – she is forced to have sex with Andrew, she alleged. At the time, she is 17, and a minor under US law.

2008: Epstein jailed for sex offences

Epstein is charged by Florida prosecutors with “soliciting prostitution” and “soliciting prostitution with a minor”. He pleads guilty, after making a controversial plea deal that gives him immunity from other federal sex abuse charges, and is sentenced to 18 months in prison.

2010: Epstein released

Shortly after Epstein’s release from prison, Andrew is photographed walking with him in New York’s Central Park. Andrew later claimed his sole purpose in meeting Epstein then was to end their friendship.

2015-2016: Andrew linked to Epstein in court documents

In 2015, Buckingham Palace denies “any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors” on the part of the prince, after he was named in US court papers related to an Epstein legal case.

A year later, Andrew is again named as part of a defamation suit brought by Giuffre against Maxwell, with Giuffre claiming she was paid $15,000 (£11,180) to have sex with the prince. But these court documents are sealed, and not released until 2019.

2019: Epstein dies; Newsnight interview

In August, the court documents from the Giuffre v Maxwell case are unsealed on public interest grounds. The next day, Epstein is found dead in the New York jail cell where he had been awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. He has apparently committed suicide.

In November, Andrew gives a wide-ranging interview with BBC Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis. He says he has "no recollection" of ever meeting Giuffre, and could not have sex with her in March 2001 because he was at Pizza Express with his daughter on the day in question. He also refutes Giuffre’s description of him sweating while dancing because, he said, he has been unable to sweat since serving in the Falklands War.

The interview is widely seen as disastrous. Four days later, Andrew announces that he will be stepping back from public duties,

2021-2022: Giuffre sues; royal status downgraded

In August 2021, Giuffre files a civil suit against Andrew in the US, alleging that she was forced to have sex with him in the early 2000s. Andrew’s status as a member of the royal family is downgraded in early 2022, after a US judge rules that the case can go ahead. Andrew is stripped of his military affiliations, his royal patronages and the use of his HRH title, after more than 150 veterans write to the Queen.

In February, Andrew settles the civil case brought against him by Giuffre with an out-of-court payment of £12 million but no apology and no admission of liability.

2025: Guiffre dies; Andrew gives up titles

In April, Giuffre dies by suicide, aged 41, at her farm in Western Australia. In a statement, her family say that “she lost her life to suicide, after being a lifelong victim of sexual abuse and sex trafficking”.

In October, the Mail on Sunday publishes a newly unearthed email proving that Andrew continued contact with Epstein after the 2010 New York meeting at which he’d claimed to end the friendship. The mail, dated 28 February 2011, says “we are in this together”. The BBC says the allegations are “intensely damaging” for the prince.

Just days later, after a “discussion” with the King and the Prince of Wales, Andrew gives up the use of his Duke of York title, as well as all his other remaining honours, including his membership of the Order of the Garter. It’s understood that he will not attend royal family events over Christmas. For the time being, he will continue living at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park.

In Giuffre’s memoir, published posthumously in late October, she claims that Andrew considered it “his birthright” to have sex with her. The release of the memoir adds to the “air of gloom at Buckingham Palace, which has tried to distance itself from Prince Andrew” and “heaps further pressure on the institution of monarchy”, said ITV News.

Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir is published today, and Buckingham Palace is braced for further allegations about Prince Andrew and his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.

Extracts from “Nobody’s Girl” by Giuffre, who claims she was coerced into sex with Andrew when she was 17, have already rocked the royal family. “I vigorously deny the accusations against me,” Andrew said on Friday. But he also announced that his Duke of York title and Order of the Garter knighthood would be “put into abeyance”, much like his HRH title was in 2019.

Only an act of Parliament can remove Andrew’s dukedom completely but, such is the heat around the scandal, there are already moves afoot in the House of Commons to try to do just that.

What did the commentators say?

There was “a sense of relief” at the Palace when Andrew agreed to stop using his titles, said Sky News’ royal correspondent Laura Bundock. But now, there is “a sense of dread over what else could emerge”. Andrew’s “disgrace and downfall” is far from over, and it could be that we are “reaching the endgame”.

The Palace has “failed to grasp the magnitude” of the scandal, Andrew Lownie, the Yorks’ biographer, told The Telegraph. They are putting “a little bit of a plaster on a huge problem”. Charles should have had Andrew’s titles removed, rather than simply ordering him not to use them, and he should have forced Andrew to cooperate with US authorities about the extent of his dealings with Epstein. “I think this is just window dressing,” Lownie said. The fact that Andrew will still “get to live as he always has done” will make people “feel he hasn’t really paid any penalty for what he’s done”.

Charles apparently believed that putting Andrew’s titles in abeyance was “sufficient”, said Caroline Davies in The Guardian. But Prince William is “prepared to take a more ruthless approach if required” when he takes the throne. He reportedly considers his uncle a “threat” and “a reputational risk to the monarchy”.

When William becomes king, Andrew’s “limited role in public life will disappear entirely – starting with the coronation”, said Alexander Larman in The Spectator. A recent “surprisingly revealing” interview with actor Eugene Levy suggested that “banishing Andrew to Siberia” would not cause William “too many sleepless nights”.

It seems that the “nuclear royal option – to strip Andrew of his princely title grows more inevitable by the day”. This “will not be an easy or fast process, and is likely to damage the very institution of the monarchy”. But “the embarrassment and headlines” may be “worth it in the longer term”.

The Palace is “walking a fine line between cutting loose a reprobate member” and infuriating Andrew to the point that he “vents criticism of the main figures in the monarchy”, said Anne McElvoy in The i Paper. The “aloof tone and huffiness” of his statement on Friday signals that he still perceives his treatment as unfair, and “as the royals discovered in the Diana era” that can turn a person into “a powder keg”. The point is not whether or not Andrew “has a leg to stand on”; it’s that “he feels he does”. The more aggressively the palace seeks to exclude him, “the greater the risk of him seeking his own retribution”.

What next?

MPs have now lodged a parliamentary motion to strip Andrew of his dukedom. The government has previously said that it would be “guided” by the royal family on any decision to remove Andrew’s titles.

Whatever happens, Andrew’s “stubbornness” is “not going to change”, said McElvoy. The monarchy now has an “involuntary hermit” on its Windsor estate – still a part of the institution he was born into, however “inconvenient that may be”. How “sustainable this stand-off will prove is questionable”.

And the latest allegations are “just the tip of the iceberg”, Lownie told The Telegraph. The palace is “worried about new allegations that will emerge Stateside. They know there is more damaging stuff to come.”

What happened

Attorney General Pam Bondi Tuesday made her first appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee since her confirmation hearing in January. During nearly five hours of testimony, she evaded questions from Democrats about her controversial tenure, responding with personal insults while denying their charges that she was destroying the Justice Department’s independence to serve President Donald Trump’s personal revenge agenda.

Who said what

Bondi “repeatedly dodged” questions on “pressing issues” like her department’s prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, closure of a bribery investigation of Trump’s border czar Tom Homan and her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case files, The Washington Post said. As she “lashed out” at her Democratic questioners, Bondi’s “personalized, non sequitur attacks” were “excerpted and shared on social media in real time by administration officials.” A Reuters photographer “captured some of Bondi’s preplanned attacks on the inside of a manila folder,” USA Today said.

Bondi’s stonewalling “meant little if any fresh insight was offered about her actions and decisions” in office, The Associated Press said. Republicans generally “did not press her to provide answers,” The New York Times said, and “largely seemed unconcerned” about Trump’s “efforts to erode the department’s independence,” claiming it was politicized under President Joe Biden.

Yet one of Bondi’s “most difficult moments,” the Times said, came when GOP Sen. John Kennedy (La.) “gently asked” about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s recent comments that Epstein, his former neighbor, was “the greatest blackmailer ever.” Top Trump administration officials are “apoplectic” that Lutnick “undermined the government’s entire story” that Trump’s former friend “did not run a secret sexual-blackmail operation targeting wealthy, powerful elites,” Asawin Suebsaeng said at Zeteo. Bondi told Kennedy that nobody from the DOJ or FBI had contacted Lutnick. When Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked if the FBI had found reputed Epstein photos showing “Trump with half-naked young women,” she declined to answer, instead accusing him of accepting campaign donations from an alleged Epstein associate.

What next?

Kennedy told Bondi the Senate might call Lutnick to testify about Epstein. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that his delay in seating incoming Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz.) had “nothing to do with” her promise to provide the final signature to force a House vote to compel the DOJ to release its Epstein files.

Tell me about a woman “behaving poorly”, and I am likely to take her side, said Rebecca Reid in The i Paper. Sarah Ferguson is a case in point. When I was growing up in the 1990s, adults would often make snide comments about Fergie – for having her toes sucked, or fronting Weight Watchers ads. Her antics were deemed vulgar and unregal, but they endeared her to me. Now, though, Fergie turns out to have done something that cannot be laughed off as an awkward blunder.

‘Only denounced him to protect her career’

In March 2011, with pressure mounting on her and her ex-husband, the Duke of York, about their relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, she gave an interview in which she said that she had made a “gigantic” mistake in accepting a £15,000 loan from the convicted child sex offender. She said that she “abhorred paedophilia”; and vowed never to have anything to do with him again. Yet last weekend, it emerged that only six weeks later, she’d sent Epstein a fawning email, in which she described him as a “supreme friend”.

The duchess told Epstein that he must feel “hellaciously let down” by her – and apologised “to you and your heart for that”. She promised that she’d not used “the P-word” [paedophile] about him, and said that she’d only denounced him to protect her career as a children’s author and philanthropist. This week, her spokesman insisted that she only wrote that email because Epstein was threatening to sue her for defamation, said Kate Mansey in The Times. “One wonders why she would have worried about such a lawsuit. But only she can answer that.”

‘She sold herself very cheap, did Fergie’

A patron of children’s charities gushing to a child sex offender? No wonder those charities were rapidly severing their links to her this week, said A.N. Wilson in the Daily Mail. Now the King, having recently readmitted Ferguson to some private events, may feel he has to banish her, to protect the royal family’s reputation, said Melanie McDonagh in The London Standard. Once again, Fergie finds herself in the gulag, brought down by her poor judgement and profligacy. After splitting up with Andrew, she lived so high on the hog, she ended up millions in debt; so in 2010, she accepted the £15,000 from the disgraced financier to stave off bankruptcy. “She sold herself very cheap, did Fergie.”

Maybe not, said royal biographer Andrew Lownie in the Daily Mail. I have heard that Epstein lent her more like £2m; she denies this, but it would explain why they stayed close. He wouldn’t have done this because he had a kind heart; he’d have expected some secret or favour or contact in return. So the question is, what did he want from her? And did she give it?

What happened

Democrat Adelita Grijalva won Tuesday's special election to replace her late father in Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, further narrowing Republicans’ thin House majority. Grijalva, a former Pima County supervisor, beat Republican businessman Daniel Butierez in the heavily Democratic district. Rep. Raúl Grijalva died from cancer in March.

Who said what

Once Grijalva is sworn in, Democrats will have 214 seats to the GOP’s 219. Democrats will be “glad to have another vote in the House,” The Washington Post said, but she might also be “greeted warmly by an unlikely figure,” Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.). Grijalva has said she will provide the decisive 218th signature on Massie’s bipartisan petition to force a House vote to require the Justice Department’s release of all unclassified files on Jeffrey Epstein.

Rep. James Walkinshaw (D), who won a special election in Virginia earlier this month, was the 217th signatory. And the three other Republicans who have kept their names on the discharge petition — Reps. Nancy Mace (S.C.), Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) — are “solid. They're not moving,” Massie told Axios. The looming vote is a “tough reminder” for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) about the “limits of his power,” Axios said, and a “rare case in which GOP lawmakers openly defy” President Donald Trump’s “sustained pressure.”

What next?

Grijalva will be sworn in once the House returns from recess, likely in early October. Special elections to replace the late Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-Texas) and retired Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.) are scheduled for Nov. 4 and Dec. 2, respectively.