Trump says he has directed attorney general to seek release of Epstein grand jury testimony
Minutes after announcing that he intends to sue the Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, for reporting that the unreleased justice department files on Jeffrey Epstein include a bawdy letter to the late sex offender from Donald Trump, the president said that he has asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release a different set of documents from the investigation into Epstein.
“Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval.”
Despite the fact that the grand jury testimony is a different set of documents, and could include information on Epstein’s victims, Trump suggested that doing so would end the controversy over his administration going back on its word to release all of the files.
“This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!” Trump wrote.
Two minutes after Trump’s post was published, the attorney general replied to it on X with the comment: “President Trump – we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.”
Key events
As reported, Donald Trump has directed attorney general Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case as he seeks to tamp down controversy over a story that he allegedly contributed a sketch of a naked woman to Epstein’s 50th birthday album.
The president said on Truth Social he had authorised the justice department to seek the public release of the materials, which are under seal, citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
As detailed in our new full report from Hugo Lowell and Edward Helmore, Bondi – who has weathered days of accusations by Trump’s far-right supporters that she had mismanaged and failed to deliver on promises to release previously secret documents about the Epstein case – responded to Trump’s post with a post of her own that vowed to comply with the directive.
The flurry of activity followed a story in the Wall Street Journal that reported Trump had contributed a letter, described as “bawdy” and featuring a drawing of a naked woman’s silhouette around a typewritten personal message to Epstein, to the birthday album compiled by Ghislane Maxwell.
Trump denied to the Journal that he was the author of the birthday tribute and, hours after the story was published, announced he intended to file a lawsuit in a lengthy post on Truth Social, decrying the reporting as fake and condemning it as what he called “the Epstein Hoax”.
You can read the full story here:
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JD Vance calls report on Trump Epstein letter ‘complete and utter bullshit’ but quotes long passage from it
The vice-president, and one of the nation’s most dedicated posters, JD Vance, responded to the Wall Street Journal’s report that the unreleased Epstein files include a letter Donald Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein on his birthday in 2003 in a peculiar way.
In a post on X, Vance sounded like a loyal servant of the president, by attacking the report as “complete and utter bullshit” but the fact that he chose to do so by posting a long excerpt from the letter, which had been shared by another user, also helped to amplify the content of the letter to his 4.4 million followers on the platform.
While the Guardian generally avoids displaying posts from Elon Musk’s platform, it is worth seeing Vance’s post to understand how he might have both criticized the report and helped spread one of its most damning passages.
Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bullshit. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it.
Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump? https://t.co/KHsTFOSl34
— JD Vance (@JDVance) July 17, 2025
White House press secretary compares Epstein ‘birthday letter’ to Steele dossier
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, wrote in a social media post on Thursday that the bawdy birthday letter the Wall Street Journal reports Donald Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 is fake and “is like the Steele Dossier”, the collection of unverified rumors about Trump, and the Russian government’s effort to elect him in 2016.
“The WSJ refused to show us the letter and conceded they don’t even have it in their possession when we asked them to verify the alleged document they’re basing their ENTIRE fake story on,” Leavitt wrote on X, the platform owned by Trump’s former booster Elon Musk. “When has President Trump ever spoken like the conversation alleged in the fake WSJ story? That’s not at all how he speaks or writes.”
However, the Journal’s reporters never claimed to have the letter, supposedly sent to the late sex offender by Trump on 2003, in their possession; just that they had reviewed it, transcribed some of the text and were able to describe the lewd drawing, in thick marker, around the typewritten text.
Rachel Leingang
The Target boycott is animating the crowd in downtown Minneapolis, where the Good Trouble march has stopped in front of a Target.
Organizers of protests have been trying to get more people involved in the resistance beyond street protests. One way they’ve pointed to: economic boycotts.
Since Target is headquartered in Minnesota, and the company had committed to supporting diversity initiatives and Black small businesses, the company’s decision to pull back on these measures has angered local activists here.
“They can no longer exploit our power”, one speaker said. “We are boycotting Target until Target gets it right. And if Target don’t get it right, then we ain’t going back to Target.”
Trump says he has directed attorney general to seek release of Epstein grand jury testimony
Minutes after announcing that he intends to sue the Wall Street Journal, and Rupert Murdoch, for reporting that the unreleased justice department files on Jeffrey Epstein include a bawdy letter to the late sex offender from Donald Trump, the president said that he has asked the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release a different set of documents from the investigation into Epstein.
“Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, “I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval.”
Despite the fact that the grand jury testimony is a different set of documents, and could include information on Epstein’s victims, Trump suggested that doing so would end the controversy over his administration going back on its word to release all of the files.
“This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!” Trump wrote.
Two minutes after Trump’s post was published, the attorney general replied to it on X with the comment: “President Trump – we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.”
Trump says he is suing WSJ and Rupert Murdoch for reporting ‘fake’ letter to Epstein
Donald Trump announced that he “will be suing” the Wall Street Journal, its parent company News Corp and the company’s chairman emeritus, Rupert Murdoch, for reporting that one of the documents in the justice department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein is a bawdy letter Trump sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.
Trump wrote in a social media post shared by the White House press secretary that he had warned the newspaper and Murdoch that the letter was a fake and they would be sued if they printed it.
“Mr Murdoch stated that he would take care of it,” Trump added, “but, obviously, did not have the power to do so.”
The newspaper quoted from the letter, which they said came from a leather-bound collection of birthday wishes presented to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently in federal prison after being found guilty of child sex trafficking in 2021.
Trump also wrote that he had “already beaten” both ABC and CBS, which agreed to settle lawsuits brought by the president rather than go to trial, “and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal”.
“If there were any truth at all on the Epstein Hoax, as it pertains to President Trump, this information would have been revealed by Comey, Brennan, Crooked Hillary and other Radical Left Lunatics years ago,” Trump argued in the post on his Truth Social platform. “It would certainly not have been left in a file waiting for ‘TRUMP’ to have won three Elections.”
Rachel Leingang
Many hundreds of people are listening to speakers and performers in downtown Minneapolis at the city’s Good Trouble demonstration this evening.
Signs call out immigration enforcement and Trump and denounce fascism. Some are carrying signs with quotes from John Lewis and photos of him.
The theme of “good trouble” punctuates the speeches, with speakers imploring the crowd to follow Lewis’ example and take a stand, even if it gets them in trouble.
“Stand up and get in the way,” said Nakima Levy Armstrong, a lawyer and social justice advocate who also called on the crowd to continue the boycott against Target, the retailer based in Minnesota.
CBS takes ‘purely a financial decision’ to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s Late Show
CBS announced on Thursday that it has decided to cancel the popular Late Show with Stephen Colbert at the end of the 2025-2026 broadcast season.
Colbert is a harsh critic of Donald Trump, but the network’s parent company Paramount, which recently agreed to pay the president $16m to settle his lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, insisted that ending the shows was “purely a financial decision” and was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount”.
Colbert, who shot to fame playing a satirical version of a rightwing news anchor, initially avoided politics when he took over as host of the Late Show. But he found his footing during Trump’s first term when he relentlessly mocked Trump and thrilled his partisan audience.
As Variety reports: “There has been growing speculation that both Colbert and Jon Stewart, who hosts one broadcast of Comedy Central’s ‘Daily Show’ each week could be under growing scrutiny from executives at Skydance Media, which is slated to acquire Paramount Global, the parent of both CBS and Comedy Central. David Ellison, who leads Skydance, has projected an image of being intrigued by the politics espoused by President Donald Trump.”
Earlier this week, Colbert called Paramount’s payment to Trump a “big fat bribe”.
“CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump – a deal that looks like bribery”, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote on social media in response to the news. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” Warren also shared the video of Colbert’s accusation that the settlement was a bribe in her post. “Watch and share his message”, she added.
Colbert announced the news to his audience during the taping of the show on Thursday, and shared the video on Instagram.
Colbert mentioned that he had just taped an interview with Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California who led the first impeachment of Trump and has recently been targeted by the president.
“If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know”, Schiff wrote on social media after the news broke. “And deserves better.”
One night earlier, Colbert had devoted his opening monologue on Wednesday to Trump’s flailing effort to keep his supporters from talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
Stewart was openly critical of Paramount for settling with Trump, and invited a former 60 Minutes anchor on to his show to discuss how baseless Trump’s accusations about its editing really were.
Unreleased Epstein files include bawdy letter from Trump – report
The Wall Street Journal reports that one of the documents in the justice department files on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is a bawdy letter Donald Trump sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday, in 2003.
According to the newspaper, which is owned by Trump supporter Rupert Murdoch, Trump had been asked to write a birthday letter to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell, who asked dozens of his friends and associates to contribute pages for a leather-bound album to mark his birthday.
Pages from the album – assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006 – were examined by justice department officials who later investigated Epstein and Maxwell, the Journal says.
The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal’s reporters, “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”
The Journal reports that letter concludes: “A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”
On Tuesday evening, Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture in an interview with the Journal. “This is not me. This is a fake thing. It’s a fake Wall Street Journal story,” he said.
The newspaper also reports that “after the Journal sought comment from the president about the letter, Trump told reporters at the White House that he believed some Epstein files were ‘made up’ by former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden and former FBI Director James Comey”.
Trump then told a friendly interviewer on Wednesday that the FBI should investigate what he called “the Jeffrey Epstein hoax” as part of a criminal conspiracy against him. He went on to suggest that Democrats might have fabricated information in the files on Epstein during the Biden administration. “I can imagine what they put into files,” he said.
Kira Lerner
Hundreds of protesters are gathered in Franklin Park in downtown Washington, many holding signs with John Lewis’s picture and the words “Good Trouble Lives On”.
It’s over 90F and many are huddled in the shade below trees. One protester from northern Virginia named Michael, who didn’t want to share his last name, stood proudly in the sun holding two large signs. One read “No More Ice” and the other compared Ice agents to masked kidnappers and criminals (“Spot the difference. Hint: There isn’t one.”)
Michael said he wants more people to refer to the Trump administration as what it is: “A fascist authoritarian takeover.”
Mary Baird traveled to Washington from North Carolina this morning and spent the earlier part of the day going door to door on Capitol Hill asking lawmakers why they haven’t voted to impeach Trump.
“Fascism will fall and when it falls, if you were complicit, you will be held accountable,” she said she told members of Congress. “And we didn’t have a great response. One Democrat had voted yes for the articles of impeachment Al Green brought to Congress. It was super disappointing.”
