Key events
Closing summary
We’re going to wrap up this live coverage now but you can read all the latest key lines around the Epstein case in our full report. Here’s a recap of all the day’s major US political stories. Thanks for reading.
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Donald Trump’s administration will ask a court to allow the release of grand jury testimony related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case after some of the president’s supporters reacted in fury to a report concluding there was no evidence to support long-running theories about the late financier’s case.
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Trump said he had directed attorney general Pam Bondi to seek the release. He also 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”. “This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform.
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Bondi said on X shortly after that the justice department was ready to ask the court on Friday to unseal the grand jury transcripts.
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The moves 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 Epstein associate Ghislane Maxwell.
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Trump denied to the Journal that he was the author of the birthday tribute and, after the story was published, said on Truth Social he intended to file a lawsuit, decrying the reporting as fake and condemning it as what he called “the Epstein Hoax”. The president said in the post that he had personally told Rupert Murdoch and the Journal’s editor-in-chief that the letter was fake and that he would sue if a story about the letter was published.
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Vice-president JD Vance called the report on the letter “complete and utter bullshit” on social media. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the letter was fake and “is like the Steele Dossier”, the collection of unverified rumours about Trump and the Russian government’s effort to elect him in 2016.
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The US House of Representatives has passed Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid, sending it to the White House to be signed into law. The Republican-controlled chamber voted 216 to 213 early on Friday in favour of the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400m in funds for the global Pepfar HIV/AIDS prevention program, Reuters reports.
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An evaluation of swelling in Trump’s lower legs has revealed chronic venous insufficiency, “a common condition, particularly in individuals over the age of 70”, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, reading from a doctor’s letter. “Recent photos of the president have shown minor bruising on the back of his hand,” Leavitt added. “This is consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen.”
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Critics have slammed an agreement between Medicaid officials and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) – which allows agents to examine a database of Americans’ personal information, including home addresses, social security numbers and ethnicities – as a privacy betrayal carrying serious civil rights and health risks.
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Republican senators advanced through the judiciary committee Emil Bove’s nomination to serve as a judge on a federal appeals court, after Democrats walked out of the session in protest against the GOP’s refusal to call a whistleblower who alleged the nominee advocated for ignoring court orders.
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Trump’s huge spending boost for the Pentagon will produce an additional 26 megatons of planet-heating gases – on a par with the annual carbon equivalent (CO2e) emissions generated by 68 gas power plants or the entire country of Croatia, new research reveals.
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A new US assessment has found that US strikes in June destroyed only one of three Iranian nuclear sites, NBC News reported, citing current and former US officials. Trump rejected a military plan for further comprehensive strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, which would have lasted several weeks, the report added.
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Two months after Trump floated the idea of reopening Alcatraz as a federal prison, Pam Bondi and interior secretary Doug Burgum have visited the tourist site. California Democrat and former House speaker Nancy Pelosi called the plan “lunacy”.
US media reported on Thursday that a federal prosecutor who handled Jeffrey Epstein’s case, and who is the daughter of a prominent Trump critic, was abruptly fired.
Maurene Comey, whose father is former FBI director James Comey, was dismissed on Wednesday from her position as an assistant US attorney in Manhattan. There was no specific reason given for her termination, the AP reported.
Comey also prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the only former Epstein associate who has been criminally charged in connection with his activities.
Maxwell is the person who compiled the leather-bound book of letters for Epstein in 2003, the Journal reported.
Here is more:
House passes $9bn Trump cut to foreign aid and public broadcasting
The US House of Representatives has passed Donald Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid, sending it to the White House to be signed into law.
The Republican-controlled chamber voted 216 to 213 early on Friday in favour of the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400m in funds for the global Pepfar HIV/AIDS prevention program, Reuters reports.
Only two House Republicans voted against the cut, Representatives Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio, along with Democrats.
“We are taking one small step to cut wasteful spending but one giant leap towards fiscal sanity,” said Representative Aaron Bean, a Florida Republican, advocating for a similar spending cut package from the White House every month.
House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries countered that the funding cut “undermines our ability to keep our people safe here and to project America’s soft power all over the globe”, arguing that rural Americans’ access to emergency information on public radio would be diminished.
The funding vote was delayed for hours amid Republican disagreements about other legislation and calls from some members of the party for more government transparency about the Jeffrey Epstein.
Donald Trump really wants people to stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein, but his Maga base – including some prominent commentators such as Laura Loomer – want his administration to “release the files”.
Jonathan Freedland speaks to Ali Breland of the Atlantic about the tricky situation the US president finds himself in.
Listen to the Guardian podcast here:
The release of the “Epstein client list” has long been the holy grail for the Maga movement. Supposedly, this list, once released, would incriminate a veritable who’s who of liberal elites complicit in Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex-trafficking operation and expose the moral rot at the heart of the Democratic establishment, Tess Owen writes.
In her analysis of how the Epstein case in driving a driving a wedge in Maga movement, she continues:
The mystery surrounding the Epstein files also became a vehicle for QAnon conspiracy theorists to push their ideas about a “deep state” cover-up of a network of global pedophiles into the broader tent of the Maga movement.
During his campaign, Donald Trump promised on several occasions to declassify the Epstein files, which would include the “list” … Then, on the heels of the Fourth of July holiday weekend, the justice department quietly dropped a bombshell in the form of a memo. A “systematic review” of the Epstein files by justice department officials “revealed no incriminating ‘client list’,” the memo stated, nor did they find evidence that Epstein blackmailed powerful figures.
Since the memo’s release, Maga has been in turmoil – and some of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers have been in open revolt against his administration, accusing it of now being part of a cover-up …
On Truth Social, Trump offered a stern rebuke to his detractors, claiming that the Epstein files were actually a hoax … But not everyone’s buying it.
You can read the full analysis here:
Donald Trump has reportedly denied writing a “bawdy” letter that the Wall Street journal alleged was in the unreleased Epstein files and bore Trump’s name for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday.
News reports have quoted the Journal as saying Trump told the newspaper:
I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women. It’s not my language. It’s not my words.
California governor Gavin Newsom, who has had a running feud with the US president, later posted “I never wrote a picture in my life” on X above the top of a 2019 Washington Post story headlined “A sketch Donald Trump made of the Manhattan skyline is up for auction” and including an apparent image of the work.
House Republicans have been grasping to formulate a response to the Trump administration’s handling of records in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, ultimately putting forward a resolution that carries no legal weight but nodded to the growing demand for greater transparency.
The House resolution, which could potentially be voted on next week, will do practically nothing to force the justice department to release more records in the case, the Associated Press reports.
Still, it showed how backlash from the Republican base is putting pressure on the Trump administration and roiling GOP lawmakers.
The House was held up for hours on Thursday from final consideration of Donald Trump’s request for about $9bn in government funding cuts because GOP leaders were trying to respond to demands from their own ranks that they weigh in on the Epstein files.
Late in the evening they settled on the resolution as an attempt to simultaneously placate calls from the far-right for greater transparency and satisfy Trump, who has called the issue a “hoax” that his supporters should forget about.
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.”
