tRump is desperate not to have anymore files or information released. His personal lawyer / attack dog is now the person in charge of the DOJ. He will do or say anything to protect tRump and the wealthy abusers. I fear that this was very close to saying to the court “go fuck yourself, we are not going to obey the court”. Hugs
The Department of Justice on Thursday declined to turn over additional information from the Epstein files as ordered by a judge, arguing the materials include sensitive victim information or were appropriately redacted as required by law.
Hours ahead of the deadline to turn over the materials or explain why they were properly withheld, Associate U.S. Attorney General Stanley Woodward asked the judge to delay the deadline by 60 days or disregard it entirely by accepting the DOJ’s reasons for withholding the materials.
“Although the Government strongly disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the [Epstein Files Transparency Act] is enforceable by private parties through the Administrative Procedure Act, the Government welcomes this opportunity to resolve any confusion regarding the records at issue in this case,” Woodward wrote.
Close up image of a tablet screen displaying a portrait of Jeffrey Epstein beside the official U.S. Department of Justice website page titled Epstein Library in Washington District of Columbia United States on February 11, 2026.
Veronique Tournier/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images
According to Woodward, some emails in question — which had their senders and recipients concealed — were redacted to protect the names of victims. For one of the emails, Woodward claimed that some of the information was withheld because “many communications written by victims, without context, can appear disturbing on their face.”
Woodward also claimed that the redactions to a draft 2007 indictment from the Southern District of Florida were present in the original file obtained by the Department of Justice and that they have been unable “to locate an unredacted version of this specific photocopy.”
Regarding the interview notes from a woman who made unsubstantiated assault claims about President Donald Trump, Woodward claimed that the materials were “deemed duplicative of the typewritten reports memorializing the interviews.”
“Their handwritten nature further complicates the redaction process and increases the risk of inadvertent disclosure of victim [personal identifiable information] — including because of technical limitations on the Department’s ability to run meaningful quality control checks for victim PII across handwritten materials,” he wrote.
The claims made by the woman were uncorroborated, and Trump has denied the allegations. The DOJ has released the interview reports from some of those interviews, but not the underlying notes.
The U.S. Department of Justice logo is seen on a podium before a news conference, Monday, May 4, 2026, in Washington.
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Woodward also pushed back on the U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan’s conclusion that the Department of Justice effectively conceded that they violated the law passed by Congress to force the release of the Epstein files.
“Indeed, the Department has not knowingly violated, nor has it ever acknowledged violating, the EFTA as it continues working to comply with statutory requirements,” he wrote.
In his order last week, Sullivan rejected the DOJ’s arguments against releasing the materials and concluded that the Public Integrity Project, a public interest law firm, demonstrated that independent journalist Katie Phang was harmed by the materials being withheld.
The DOJ began releasing thousands of pages of documents related to Epstein late last year, following the release of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
However, the department faced criticism from some lawmakers who questioned whether the department violated the act by withholding some materials and missing the deadline to release the files.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has stated repeatedly that the DOJ has complied with the law.
For far too long Ukraine has been restrained and forced to fight under different rules than Russia. While Russia constantly attacks civilians, apartments, schools, and hospitals, Ukraine was forbidden todo so inorder to get arms to defend itself. Ukraine was forbidden to hurt the Russians in similar ways. Leaving Ukraine to feel all the pain of the war while Russia doesn’t. Recently that has changed. Maybe if Ukraine is allowed to make the Russian public feel as afraid as the Ukrainians, they will tell their government enough. Hugs
Residents of a damaged Kyiv apartment building recovered what remained of their belongings as rescuers sifted through rubble for survivors, a day after a Russian attack killed at least 30 people in the deadliest strike on the city this year.
House Democratic subcommittee report outlines web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes
The interim report, “From Vanity to Insanity: How the White House Cheated the American People Out of Their 250th Birthday”, outlines a web of alleged corruption, wire fraud and pay-to-play schemes orchestrated through a shadow corporation embedded within the National Park Foundation (NPF).
The document was produced by Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee. It has not been officially adopted by the committee.
‘A sanitized view of America’: inside Trump’s campaign to erase US history from national parks
Read more
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“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” it states, contending that the machinery built for a national commemoration was converted “into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the President’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects”.
How Trump is making the US’s 250th anniversary about himself – video
In 2016 Congress established the US semiquincentennial commission, operating as the non-profit America250 Foundation, to plan the nation’s 2026 celebrations on a non-partisan basis. However, under Trump, the White House launched a sustained pressure campaign to subsume the commission.
When America250 leadership resisted its demands to shift focus toward partisan, campaign-style spectacles, the Trump administration created Freedom 250 as a wholly owned subsidiary of the congressionally chartered NPF.
The interim report finds that, by taking control of the NPF board and installing key campaign operatives such as Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita, the White House secured an opaque vehicle that enjoyed the NPF’s non-partisan credibility and tax-exempt status while operating outside standard government transparency laws.
Jared Huffman, a California congressman who is the top Democrat on the natural resources committee, said: “I can’t, in my time here in Congress, remember anything even remotely like this: watching this trusted, venerable charity organisation, the National Parks Foundation, literally be hijacked for a craven political agenda that tries to steal the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and turn it into something that’s all about Trump, advancing this very divisive agenda and even enriching Trump and those around him.”
The interim report alleges that Freedom 250 surreptitiously diverted resources intended for America250 for its own benefit, leaving America250 scrambling for funds.
Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said fundraisers including O’Rourke misled prospective America250 donors by providing them with Freedom 250’s banking and routing numbers instead. The report finds this could constitute wire fraud and charitable solicitation fraud under federal and District of Columbia law.
This deceit extended to the entertainment industry. Artists recruited for the kickoff of the Great American State Fair – including Martina McBride and Young MC – were assured the event was non-partisan, only to face social media backlash when the event was revealed to be a Trump-backed rally. In the words of Young MC, the booking was a “bait and switch”.
The investigation also outlines how Freedom 250 effectively put a price tag on presidential access, circulating sponsorship packages starting at $500,000 and climbing above $10m for tiered recognition, culminating in a “historic photo opportunity” with Trump.
The report also points to perhaps the most clear example on 14 June when the White House hosted a huge Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event on the South Lawn to celebrate the president’s 80th birthday. The event was heavily sponsored by corporations facing impending federal regulation and used vast government resources for “Super Bowl-level security” marshalled by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Fighters received bonuses in “USD1”, a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by the president’s children, and Trump personally bought up to $50,000 in stock in the UFC’s parent company weeks before the event.
Freedom 250 has also functioned as a conduit for steering federal funds to Trump campaign loyalists. Event Strategies – the same firm that planned the January 6 rally that preceded the US Capitol attack – was awarded 18 federal contracts totalling roughly $40m, along with an indefinite delivery master contract worth up to $100m.
Beyond lucrative contracts, the administration is accused of building a partisan political database disguised as a government domain. Freedom 250’s website, initially managed by former “Department of Government Efficiency” (Doge) employees known for past data leaks, extensively logs user data.
Event registration is powered by Campaign Nucleus, a firm founded by Brad Parscale, a veteran of Trump election campaigns. Campaign Nucleus openly boasts about using artificial intelligence to analyse personal data and target “persuadable” voters. Unsuspecting visitors, such as attenders of a free Fifa World Cup Fan Zone on the National Mall, unwittingly fed their personal information directly into this Republican campaign apparatus.
The report also focuses on the ideological overhaul of the semiquincentennial. Freedom 250 replaced America250’s civic engagement focus with overt Christian nationalist programming, operating in tandem with the Religious Liberty Commission, which recently recommended repealing the Johnson amendment to allow churches to engage in partisan politics.
A central feature of this effort was “Freedom Trucks” – a federally funded fleet of mobile museums dispatched to schoolchildren across the nation. Supplied with content from the conservative PragerU [the Prager University Foundation] and Hillsdale College, these exhibits recast the founding of the US as an exclusively Christian project, embracing demonstrable falsehoods.
Exhibits include an AI-generated George Washington claiming that “our rights are a gift from God”, a statement the first president is not documented as having made, alongside antisemitic tropes suggesting that Jewish merchants financed the revolutionary cause while omitting they also fought and died for it.
Concurrently, the administration aggressively moved to erase historical realities, removing national park signage detailing slavery, forced removal of Indigenous peoples and climate change. Huffman said it amounted to an attempt to reshape American identity to fit a narrow rightwing agenda.
“It’s a fantasy that airbrushes out the more complicated parts of our history – slavery, the Native American genocide, the actual secular ideals on which our government was founded. It wasn’t the opening of the clouds and some revealed covenant with God as they would have you believe.”
As Washington barrels towards Fourth of July, with another Trump speech and a big fireworks display planned for the national mall, Huffman acknowledges that Freedom 250 is unstoppable. But his goal now is exposure.
“The one thing we can do is make sure the American people know what they’re doing in our name and with our tax dollars,” the congressman said. “We should do that because what they have pulled off here is a potential template for other betrayals of public trust that they and maybe future generations will attempt if we don’t challenge them.”
This is a kids summer camp and the kids seen are very young. The claim is this is an evangelical church in Kentucky doing a mock execution of an illegal immigrant. The kids are chanting “Take him out and blow him up”. The screen says praise the lord and pass the ammo. My question is when did jesus preach hate? I know the bible does, but Christians are to be followers of Jesus and aside from the money changers event Jesus preached love and acceptance of the stranger. Bible traditions said to welcome the stranger. Sodom and Gomorrah is about god being angry the town was not hospitable to the strangers and wanted to dominate them rather than feed / house them.
I googled when did Jesus preach hate and I got this summary. Jesus did not preach hate; rather, He taught love and forgiveness. In Matthew 5:43-44, He instructs, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,” emphasizing the importance of loving others, even those who may oppose us. Below was a list of biblical hate passages including two in John. Guess what I read the chapters. The passages were not direct sayings from or attributed to Jesus. So what god are these “Christians” following? As to the YouTuber showing this he is not trans, he is a VTuber and uses an avatar his fans make and like. As all things on the internet it can get weird and he thought that as people kept sending him stuff as a female and a furry he would b=play along with the bit. I skip the fan art stuff at the beginning as that stuff bores me and it is only a few minutes. Hugs
This church performed a mock execution in front of CHILDREN at a BIBLE CAMP. And somehow these people are the ones saying that the left is indoctrinating their kids, meanwhile they normalize public executions to children.
Wow. There is a lot of historic information in this video. The author / presenter has quick cuts to other personality characters she plays to highlight the absurdity of some positions held by the hierarchy. She delvesdeeply into the idea of what is proper femininity, who steps outside it, and who thinks they are responsible for judging or enforcing it. She delves into how many fights against change and equality are about fears by men of emasculation. The lowering of men’s status. When she elaborates on suffrage, all the fears seem to be that allowing women to vote would give women the right to be men and force men to be women. Seem familure? She goes into detail on how each repressive opressive responce to equal rights comes down to the same phrases such as save the children, save the family, or the claims that society it self will end. The clips she intersperses go by far too quickly so I had to stop the video to read them but she does describe what is on them. The begining was choppy and it took me a bit to get her style of presentation but once I did I found it very informative fillwed with facts, history, and fun to watch. Hugs
The transgender bathroom ‘debate’ isn’t new (but it is stupid). I’m looking at you TERF’s…
Looking back through history, gender politics is consistently entangled with race, class, misogyny, and disability. Minority groups existing outside the ‘norm’ are attacked as ‘radicals’ or menaces to society…
But what prevails each time we face oppression AND causes real change in our society?
On the first day of the Great American State Fair on the National Mall, there were no butter sculptures, blue-ribbon livestock or prizewinning rutabaga pies to admire. But visitors could take in a gleaming portrait of President Trump, pick up a handbill promoting Turning Point USA and hear a speaker read a poem declaring every teen to be “a conscript in a spiritual world war.”
Volunteers with the River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida approached people asking if they knew that “Jesus loves you and has a plan for you.” Literature was distributed proclaiming that Mr. Trump was leading the “Great American Comeback.” Exhibitors included Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian institution, and the Museum of the Bible. On the edge of the grounds, performers sang hymns in a worship tent.
Under a sweltering sun, attendance was sparse, and power failures did not help — by Thursday night, the Ferris wheel had been out of commission for hours. Across from that ride, visitors could look at a smaller-scale model of Mr. Trump’s proposed 250-foot triumphal arch. Its vinyl covering — stapled over a wood frame and emblazoned with the words “One Nation Under God” — had already started buckling.
Nobody who has been paying attention to the Trump administration’s handling of America’s 250th anniversary should be surprised that a Confederate flag turned up at the Great American State Fair on the National Mall. It was discovered at the North Carolina booth and in its own small way tells you everything you need to know about this whole production.
The controversy erupted after footage circulated showing the North Carolina exhibit featuring altered versions of the state flag with the Confederate battle emblem superimposed over the design. Governor Josh Stein’s office condemned the display, calling it a misrepresentation of North Carolina and demanding that organizers remove it.
North Carolina’s official state flag has never included the Confederate battle symbol in any version of its design. Not in 1861, not in 1885, not ever. Whoever put together that video display didn’t just stumble into Lost Cause territory by accident. They had to go out of their way to attach a symbol that the state itself had never chosen to fly.
Eleven states declined to participate and Freedom 250 chose local groups from each state to fill the booths. Videos on social media show baptisms being performed in a tent.
Of Course a Confederate Flag Showed Up at the Great American State Fair #CivilWarMemory #America250open.substack.com/pub/kevinmle…
Trump's "Great American State Fair" is turning into exactly the kind of disaster you'd expect…empty crowds, melting ice cream, Ferris wheel breakdowns, sky-high prices, and even a public indecency arrest.That and a whole lot more in today's bulletin:
In this video Dan hits back on the myth that in the bible / god will any sex outside of marriage is a sin. He shows how many different sexual acts and groupings were included as Ok for the morality of the time. I am listening to Separation of church and hate by John Fugelsang. In the book he explains that the bible is a collection of writings written for the people of that time, the culture of that time, and about the morality accepted at that time. He shares examples where different authors flat out disagree with each other, but they were separated by ceneriesin time. Dan mentions something like that here and how each author had their own view of sex and what was moral. He explains sexual agency and how in the bible for it to be considered sex a penis needed to be involved going into an orifice of some person with lesser status than the man with the active penis. I like at the end where he talks of the dangers and torments of telling developing children going through puberty that simply touching themselves is a sin, makes them an abomination to god, and will condemn them to hell. Hugs
The former transportation secretary described it as “the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”
Pete Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation, during the National Action Network 35th Anniversary Convention on April 10, 2026, in New York City.Adam Gray / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said his family has been targeted in a “politically motivated hoax” after someone made what police characterized as a false report to Child Protective Services alleging he committed crimes against his children.
In a Substack post Friday, Buttigieg wrote that an anonymous caller reported to CPS that his 4-year-old twins he shares with his husband, Chasten, were “at risk.”
“The caller said that he had spoken to a woman who claimed to have met me at a conference several years ago in Alabama, where she said I told her that I had committed unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk,” Buttigieg wrote.
Buttigieg, a prominent Democrat and potential 2028 presidential contender, likened the incident to “swatting” — when someone calls 911 to falsely report an immediate threat, often at a public figure’s home — “but with Child Protective Services instead of a SWAT team.”
As a result of the allegation, Buttigieg said a CPS worker told him he could not be around his children unsupervised for 24 hours while the allegation was investigated. He and his husband dropped the children off with their grandparents for the night, beginning what Buttigieg described as “among the darkest hours of my life.”
He said the children were also interviewed by CPS the following day.
The CPS worker assigned to the case did not find anything to substantiate the allegation, Buttigieg said, adding that he doesn’t know the identity of the person who made the accusation.
The police officer on the case “made clear that he believed this was politically motivated, and said it would not be referred to a prosecutor,” Buttigieg wrote. “Nothing in the forensic interview with the children, which was conducted by trained personnel, had led to concerns.”
In a statement provided to MS NOW on Friday afternoon, the Michigan State Police confirmed receiving an “anonymous report” in the case, adding that police and CPS workers determined it was false.
“False reports are dangerous and divert law enforcement officers and Child Protective Services workers from responding to legitimate emergencies and protecting vulnerable children and families,” the state police said.
In his Substack, Buttigieg characterized the incident as part of broader rise in political violence that leaders on both sides of the aisle face. He called it the worst thing he experienced in politics to date.
“Many times over the years, I have been denounced, yelled at, protested, threatened, and heckled,” Buttigieg wrote. “I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war. But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began.”
“For twenty-four deeply distressing hours,” he continued, “we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime.”
He also suggested homophobia may have motivated the incident, noting that it occurred during Pride month, which conservatives have long attacked , soon after he posted a photo of his family on Instagram to celebrate Father’s Day. Buttigieg has been subject to homophobic remarks from high-profile officials during his time in the public eye, including from former Vice President Mike Pence, who mocked his decision to take parental leave while serving as transportation secretary, and former co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, Meshawn Maddock, who called him “a weak little girl” in 2022.
As Buttigieg noted on Substack, making a false report of felony child abuse is a crime under Michigan state law, punishable by a fine of up to four years in prison or a fine of up to $2,000, or both.
Buttigieg was slated to campaign in Tucson this Sunday for JoAnna Mendoza, a Democratic candidate for the state’s 6th Congressional District, but he has canceled the trip, Tucson.com reported.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the local prosecutor’s office representing the county where Buttigieg lives did not immediately respond to questions from MS NOW on Friday afternoon. The Michigan Attorney General’s Office declined to comment.
Illustration: Guardian Design
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