Documents show Jeffrey Epstein texted with House member during 2019 testimony from Michael Cohen – report
Documents provided to Congress this week by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein include transcripts of text messages that appear to show the late sex offender was in direct contact with a member of the House during a 2019 congressional hearing with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, the Washington Post reports.
Although the identity of the person Epstein was texting with as the February 2019 hearing unfolded is not revealed in the transcripts, an analysis by the Post suggests that it was Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the US Virgin Islands as its nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives.
By matching time-stamps on the text messages with video of the hearing, the news outlet identified Plaskett as the lawmaker Epstein was messaging with during the hearing.
At 10.41am on the day of the hearing, for instance, Epstein texted to the person: “Are you chewing”. One minute before, a live television feed of the hearing had cut to Plaskett, as she appeared to be chewing.
“Not any more,” the person replied to Epstein. “Chewing interior of my mouth. Bad habit from middle school.”
Later, Epstein appeared to offer advice about questions Cohen could be asked. “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” Epstein texted at 12.25pm.
“Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets,” misspelling the first name of Trump’s former executive assistant Rhona Graff.
“RONA??” the person responded at 2.25pm. “Quick I’m up next is that an acronym.”
Three minutes later, when Plaskett began her questioning of Cohen, she asked who “Mr Weisenberg” and “Miss Rona” was and if there were “other people that we should be meeting with?”
“So Allen Weisselberg is the chief financial officer in The Trump Organization,” Cohen replied.
Plaskett jumped in to say: “You’ve got to quickly give us as many names as you can so we can get to them. Is Miss Rona, what is Miss Rona’s position?”
“Rhona Graff is the — Mr. Trump’s executive assistant.”
Asked by Plaskett if she would be able to corroborate Cohen’s testimony, he said yes. “Her office is directly next to his, and she’s involved in a lot that went on.”
Plaskett, who was the first nonvoting delegate to the House to serve as an impeachment manager, during Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate in 2021, declined to comment when reached by the Post. Her chief of staff told the paper she was “not in a position to confirm or not” whether the congresswoman was texting with Epstein during the hearing.
Key events
Trump refuses to rule out pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell
Donald Trump just took questions from reporters for the first time since Monday, and refused to rule out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, his former associate who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2022, for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of a decade.
Maxwell is reportedly preparing to ask Trump to commute her sentence, and was recently moved to a low-security prison camp after she told the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, that she had never seen Trump do anything inappropriate during their years of friendship.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday night, Trump was asked: “Have you ruled out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell?”
“I haven’t even thought about it,” Trump replied. “I mean, I haven’t thought about for months. Maybe I haven’t thought about it at all, you’re just asking me a question.”
“Why can’t you rule it out?” the reporter followed up.
“I don’t talk about that. I don’t rule it in or out, I don’t even think about it,” Trump answered.
In 2020, when Maxwell was arrested, Trump was asked if he expected her to “turn in powerful men” during a White House briefing.
“I don’t know, I really haven’t been following it too much. I just wish her well”, the president said. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well.”
In one of the emails from Epstein released this week, sent to the write Michael Wolff in 2019, the late sex offender said, of Trump, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”.
As he struggled to explain his long friendship with Epstein, Trump said earlier this year that he had asked Epstein to stop recruiting young women from the Mar-a-Lago spa, including Virginia Giuffre, who was hired away from Trump’s club by Maxwell. The newly released email from Epstein suggests that it was Maxwell, not Epstein, that Trump asked to stop using his club as a place to recruit girls.
The United States carried out a lethal strike on Monday against a vessel in the Caribbean Sea that US officials say was operated by a “designated terrorist organization,” according to a post on X by the US Southern Command.
According to the post, four men aboard the vessel were killed.
“Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” reads the post.
The strike comes a day after defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new operation called “Southern Spear” to target “narco-terrorists” in the Western Hemisphere. It’s the latest escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela.
Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has announced what he called a “massive deployment” of land, sea, air, river and missile forces, as well as civilian militia, to counter the US naval presence off his country’s coast.
The Trump administration appealed today a ruling from a federal judge in Oregon that barred it from deploying the national guard in Portland.
The appeal comes after district court judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, ruled a week ago that there was no evidence of widespread violence to justify federal intervention. She found that protests near Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility were “predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence”.
The administration criticized the decision and said the troops were needed to protect federal personnel and property in a city that Trump has described as “war ravaged”.
“The district court’s ruling made it clear that this administration must be accountable to the truth and to the rule of law,” Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield said in response to the administration’s appeal in an email to the Associated Press. “We will keep defending Oregon values and standing up for our state’s authority to make decisions grounded in evidence and common sense.”
Trump refuses to answer reporter questions on Epstein or Venezuela as he leaves the White House
According to the White House pool reporter, Donald Trump again refused to answer any questions from the media when he emerged from the Oval Office on Friday evening and left for a weekend in Florida.
Trump did not respond to shouted questions about possible US military strikes on Venezuela, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or other topics.
In an unusual move, the former TV gameshow host has not taken any questions from reporters since emails from Epstein about him were released on Tuesday morning.
Documents show Jeffrey Epstein texted with House member during 2019 testimony from Michael Cohen – report
Documents provided to Congress this week by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein include transcripts of text messages that appear to show the late sex offender was in direct contact with a member of the House during a 2019 congressional hearing with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, the Washington Post reports.
Although the identity of the person Epstein was texting with as the February 2019 hearing unfolded is not revealed in the transcripts, an analysis by the Post suggests that it was Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the US Virgin Islands as its nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives.
By matching time-stamps on the text messages with video of the hearing, the news outlet identified Plaskett as the lawmaker Epstein was messaging with during the hearing.
At 10.41am on the day of the hearing, for instance, Epstein texted to the person: “Are you chewing”. One minute before, a live television feed of the hearing had cut to Plaskett, as she appeared to be chewing.
“Not any more,” the person replied to Epstein. “Chewing interior of my mouth. Bad habit from middle school.”
Later, Epstein appeared to offer advice about questions Cohen could be asked. “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” Epstein texted at 12.25pm.
“Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets,” misspelling the first name of Trump’s former executive assistant Rhona Graff.
“RONA??” the person responded at 2.25pm. “Quick I’m up next is that an acronym.”
Three minutes later, when Plaskett began her questioning of Cohen, she asked who “Mr Weisenberg” and “Miss Rona” was and if there were “other people that we should be meeting with?”
“So Allen Weisselberg is the chief financial officer in The Trump Organization,” Cohen replied.
Plaskett jumped in to say: “You’ve got to quickly give us as many names as you can so we can get to them. Is Miss Rona, what is Miss Rona’s position?”
“Rhona Graff is the — Mr. Trump’s executive assistant.”
Asked by Plaskett if she would be able to corroborate Cohen’s testimony, he said yes. “Her office is directly next to his, and she’s involved in a lot that went on.”
Plaskett, who was the first nonvoting delegate to the House to serve as an impeachment manager, during Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate in 2021, declined to comment when reached by the Post. Her chief of staff told the paper she was “not in a position to confirm or not” whether the congresswoman was texting with Epstein during the hearing.
Democrats react to reports that Trump is discussing plans to bomb Venezuela by invoking Wag the Dog
After the Washington Post reported on Friday that Donald Trump was briefed for a second straight day on possible options for military strikes in Venezuela, some Democrats compared the situation to the 1997 film Wag the Dog, suggesting that the president might be ready to go to war as a distraction from his frantic attempts to cover up his long association with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In the film, a fictional president’s spin doctor, played by Robert De Niro brings in a Hollywood producer, played by Dustin Hoffman, to stage a fictional war with Albania to take the public’s mind off a presidential sex scandal.
A year after the film came out, Republicans invoked it to suggest that Bill Clinton had fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a training camp in Afghanistan associated with Osama bin Laden to distract from his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
Those 20 August 1998 strikes were launched two weeks after al-Qaida had killed 224 people in bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but also just three days after Clinton had admitted to an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky.
A chorus of Republicans quickly accused Clinton of trying to create a foreign crisis to distract attention away from the sex scandal, and the accusation was reflected on the banners and signs of protesters in Washington and Khartoum, including marchers in the Sudanese capital who held up a large, handmade sign with an image of Lewinsky emblazoned with the slogan: “No War for Monika.”
At a Pentagon news conference after the strikes aimed at the then relatively unknown bin Laden, one reporter asked Clinton’s defense secretary, William Cohen, about suggestions that the timing of the attack bore “a striking resemblance to Wag the Dog”.
“The only motivation driving this action today was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities,” Cohen replied. “That is the sole motivation.”
“I don’t think any president, regardless of party, would ever take military action to distract from personal problems,” Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary, told Jay Leno that week in an appearance on The Tonight Show. “Most of the Congress, most of the American people I think, will say: ‘I don’t believe that our president, regardless of how bad things are, would do that.’”
The fact that the fictional enemy in the 1990s film is Albania resonates in some way with contemporary politics, given that Trump recently boasted that he had resolved a war between Albania and Azerbaijan, confusing the Balkan country with Armenia. Days later, the president of Albania was caught on camera demanding an apology from the president of France, “because you didn’t congratulate us on the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan”. The president of Azerbajan, standing next to the two men, then broke out laughing.
Marjorie Taylor Greene refuses to relent on criticism of Trump – report
Speaking to NBC News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Maga congresswoman from Georgia who has been critical of Donald Trump’s focus on foreign policy, and his effort to block the release of the Epstein files, said that she is not swayed by the president’s recent claim that she has “lost her way”.
“I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” Trump said on Monday after he welcomed Syria’s new president, the former al-Qaida militant Ahmad al-Sharaa, to the Oval Office. “I guess she’s got some kind of an act going,” he added.
Asked about Trump’s criticism of her, Greene told the broadcaster: “I’m America First, America Only. Hardcore.”
She also said that she had not spoken with the president recently. “No, I haven’t talked to him. 100% haven’t changed,” Greene said.
The break in communications between Trump and Greene comes amid reports that his White House has been applying pressure on two other Republican congresswomen, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, who, like Greene, signed a petition to force a vote on the release of files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade. All three Trump loyalists have publicly refused to withdraw their signatures.
While Trump has angled for a Nobel peace prize, when not ordering the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites and suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers, Greene is not impressed.
“No one cares about the foreign countries. No one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week,” Greene told NBC News.
“We didn’t elect the president to go out there and travel the world and end the foreign wars,” Greene said. “We elected the president to stop sending tax dollars and weapons for the foreign wars – to completely not engage anymore. Watching the foreign leaders come to the White House through a revolving door is not helping Americans.”
Trump pulls pick for top IRS lawyer 24 hours after racist podcaster Laura Loomer attacked nominee
Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is “withdrawing the nomination of Donald Korb” to be the Internal Revenue Service’s top lawyer, days before Korb was expected to be confirmed by the Senate.
The president cited no reason for suddenly abandoning Korb in a brief post on his social media platform, but the reversal came just 24 hours after Laura Loomer, a far-right podcaster who holds unusual sway over Trump’s personnel decisions, posted a thread on X attacking Korb for supposedly “supporting Democrats and anti-Trump RINOs” and demanded that his nomination “should immediately be revoked”.
Loomer, a racist conspiracy theorist whose closeness to Trump alarmed some of his allies in the run-up to the 2024 election, immediately took credit, telling her 1.8 million followers on X (a website she was banned from before it was bought by Elon Musk) that Korb was “Loomered”.
As the author and double Pulitzer winner James Risen wrote in an assessment of Loomer’s informal role earlier this year, after she met with Trump in the Oval Office and handed him a list of people on the staff of the national security council that she believed were not loyal enough to Trump, leading to six of them being fired:
Loomer’s power in the Trump administration is ill-defined. Her many critics say she has just been taking credit for moves that Trump was already planning. But Trump himself has said he takes her seriously, so it may be more accurate to describe her as Trump’s de facto national security adviser.
My colleague, Lucy Campbell, notes that today’s decision to investigate several of the president’s political adversaries represents an apparent departure from a July memo issued by the justice department and the FBI, which stated officials had found nothing in the Epstein files that warranted the opening of further inquiries.
Investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”, the memo said.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Donald Trump directed the justice department to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with several prominent Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Larry Summers, and donor and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman. The president’s move, to focus on his rivals’ affiliations and relationships with Epstein, is seemingly his latest effort to distance himself from the renewed focus on his own relationship with the disgraced financier following the latest tranche of documents released by the House oversight committee. Trump went on to claim, baselessly, that the release of emails where Epstein said that the president “spent hours” at the late sex-offenders house, and that he “knew about the girls” was just “another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats”.
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In response, attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation at the behest of the president. Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”.
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Donald Trump has agreed to slash US tariffs on Switzerland to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters. The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms. In return, Switzerland will reduce tariffs “on a range of US products”, the statement said. “In addition to all industrial products, fish and seafood, this includes agricultural products from the US that Switzerland considers non-sensitive.”
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The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a rare condemnation of president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and advocated for “meaningful immigration reform”. In a special message, the first of its kind in 12 years, the bishops said that “we are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools.” In response, White House border czar, Tom Homan, hit back. “The Catholic church is wrong, I’m sorry. I’m a lifelong Catholic,” he said. “I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic church in my opinion.”
Bondi assigns prosecutor to lead investigation into Trump adversaries over Epstein ties
Attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation into Donald Trump’s political adversaries and their ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Earlier, Trump called the latest release of emails that renewed focus on the president’s relationship with the late sex-offender a “hoax”, and directed the justice department to launch a probe into former president Bill Clinton, Democratic donor and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, and former treasury secretary Larry Summers (who served under Clinton). “This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” the president wrote on Truth Social earlier.
Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”. She added: “As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.”
Oversight investigation has Trump ‘panicked’ and ‘desperate’ says top committee Democrat
Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, has responded to Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the ongoing Epstein investigation – which included the release of three emails this week where Epstein said that the president “knew about the girls” and “spent hours” at his home – is a “hoax” and “Russia scam”.
“Our Oversight investigation has Donald Trump panicked and desperate,” Garcia said. “He is trying to deflect from serious new questions we have about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.”
He added:
The President has not explained why he won’t release the files to the American people. Or why sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a cushy low-security prison after her interview with Trump’s former personal lawyer.
NIH employee says she was put on leave for criticizing Trump administration during the shutdown
Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that she was put on non-disciplinary administrative leave for “speaking up in my personal capacity” about the “harms that I have been witnessing” inside the agency. In a video posted to TikTok on Thursday, Norton said that being put on leave was “designed to scare and silence me. It was designed to scare and silence my colleagues, and it was designed to scare and silence everyone.”
According to Stat News, Norton was also one of the organizers of the “Bethesda Declaration” letter signed by hundreds of NIH staffers, calling on director Jay Bhattacharya to listen to their concerns about the direction of the agency.
Given that the president has no public events or meetings scheduled today, a White House official tells the press pool that Donald Trump “held calls with Thailand and Cambodia in an effort to mediate the most recent conflict” and “engaged with Malaysia as well to help end the violence”.
North Carolina sheriff confirms that Charlotte immigration operation is set to take place
Federal immigration agents will conduct their next major operation in Charlotte, according to the county’s sheriff.
In a statement on Thursday, Garry McFadden confirmed that his office was “contacted by two separate federal officials confirming that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel will be arriving in the Charlotte area as early as this Saturday or the beginning of next week”.
The sheriff added: “At this time, specific details regarding the federal operation have not been disclosed and the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has not been requested to assist with or participate in any enforcement actions.”
In an interview with NPR this week, McFadden said “we cannot control what is going to go on. We just have to better understand it and be prepared to respond and react.”
