Mike Schaefer, an 87-year-old disbarred attorney with a misdemeanor spousal abuse conviction, a $1.83 million slumlord judgment against him, and a permanent restraining order obtained by actor Brad Garrett, filed Tuesday to run for Congress in California's 48th District. He filed from a Las Vegas address.
This is what Democrats mean when they talk about expanding the map.
Schaefer joins a handful of other Democrats hoping to flip CA-48, a seat currently held by Republican Darrell Issa and one of five GOP-held districts now in play after Proposition 50 redrew California's congressional boundaries. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the new maps on Feb. 4, and Democrats have wasted no time trying to capitalize. The district shifted from formerly Republican-leaning to what's being characterized as toss-up or even left-leaning territory—not because voters changed, but because the lines did.
Schaefer has run for office approximately 33 times over more than 50 years, according to the Daily Caller. He usually loses badly.
He was elected the youngest San Diego City Council member ever at age 27 in 1965 and served two terms. After that, the wins dried up. He pulled 0.98% in the 1971 San Diego mayoral race. He managed 2.5% in a 2016 Nevada congressional primary. He started as a Republican before switching to the Democratic Party around 2004—a conversion that coincided not with any discernible ideological awakening but with the discovery that one party's ballot lines were easier to get on in the districts where he wanted to run.
The one bright spot: in 2018, at age 80, Schaefer won a seat on the California State Board of Equalization, beating a Republican state senator. He was re-elected in 2022 with his party's endorsement, dubbing himself "The Equalizer." He is now termed out of that position, which apparently means it's time for Congress.
Schaefer was disbarred in both California and Nevada in 2001 for serious ethics violations. The Nevada Supreme Court cited a litany of offenses:
He has not been reinstated despite multiple appeals, the most recent in 2014.
Then there's the housing record. In 1981, Schaefer owned a 64-unit building in the mid-Wilshire area of Los Angeles for eight months. A 1986 jury in Los Angeles Superior Court awarded his former tenants $1.83 million—a record at the time. The building was found overrun with rats, cockroaches, and sewage backups that caved in ceilings and floors. Street gangs operated inside the property. Schaefer blamed the gangs for blocking improvements.
That wasn't an isolated episode. In 1979, he faced fire-code violations and threats of jail time in San Diego over unsafe conditions in properties he controlled. In 1982, he was involved in a rent dispute case in Arizona. He owned rundown apartments in Baltimore that drew complaints over alleged neglect and poor maintenance. The man earned the "millionaire slumlord" label across multiple states and multiple decades.
In 1993, Schaefer was convicted of misdemeanor spousal abuse. He later served jail time for violating the terms of his probation.
By 2013, actor Brad Garrett—best known for "Everybody Loves Raymond"—secured a permanent restraining order against Schaefer in Las Vegas Justice Court. The dispute reportedly began over a complimentary show ticket at the MGM Grand and escalated from there, with Garrett accusing Schaefer of stalking and harassment.
The court ordered Schaefer to stay 100 feet away from Garrett at all times, banned him from the MGM Grand entirely, and required him to obtain court permission before filing any future lawsuits against Garrett or his staff. Schaefer had allegedly kept pushing unwanted promotion offers on Garrett and refused to stop. Garrett cited Schaefer's history of violence and erratic behavior in seeking the order.
A man who needs a judge's permission to file a lawsuit wants voters to send him to Washington to write laws.
Schaefer is a sideshow, but the circus he wandered into matters. Proposition 50 handed Democrats a redrawn map that puts five Republican congressional seats in jeopardy. Republicans challenged the maps in court, arguing they were drawn in at least one area to favor Hispanic voters in violation of federal voting rights law. The Supreme Court disagreed on Feb. 4, and the maps stand.
The term for this is gerrymandering, though polite company only uses that word when Republicans draw the lines. When Democrats do it in California through a voter-approved ballot measure, it's called "independent redistricting" or "democracy in action." The result is the same: lines redrawn to predetermine outcomes.
Issa is running for re-election in November in a district that no longer resembles the one his voters chose him to represent. Democrats smell blood—and their recruiting standards reflect the urgency. When your redistricting scheme is so aggressive that an 87-year-old disbarred, convicted, restraining-order-carrying perennial candidate sees a viable path, the maps aren't expanding democracy. They're diluting it.
The California Democratic Party endorsed Schaefer for his Board of Equalization re-election in 2022. That endorsement came decades after his disbarment, his spousal abuse conviction, his jail time, and the largest slumlord judgment in Los Angeles history. None of it disqualified him in the eyes of the party apparatus. None of it gave anyone pause.
This is the party that lectures the country about character, about protecting women, about housing as a human right. They endorsed a man convicted of beating his wife, who let tenants live with rats and sewage. They didn't just tolerate him—they put their brand behind him.
Now he's running for Congress, and the silence from California Democrats tells you everything about what "standards" mean when a seat is in play. The district is new. The candidate is the same man he's been for 50 years.
Thirty-three campaigns and counting. The voters have answered him 32 times. He keeps asking.
Gail Slater, the head of the Department of Justice's antitrust division, resigned Thursday after reportedly losing the support of key cabinet officials — leaving behind a record that should trouble anyone who expected the Trump administration's trustbusters to actually bust trusts.
Her tenure's marquee case, the antitrust suit against Google, failed to secure a breakup of the internet giant or any penalty beyond what most onlookers considered a slap on the wrist. The biggest monopoly case in a generation ended not with a bang, but with Google's business model essentially intact.
And then there were the mergers she approved.
As Breitbart News noted, Slater greenlit the Disney-FUBO merger. She approved the NFL-Disney merger without even a second request review — the standard deeper examination that signals regulators are taking a deal seriously. Meanwhile, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has been actively taking on Disney, investigating The View for violating equal time rules and publicly noting the importance of not approving anti-competitive deals from monopolistic companies like Disney.
So one arm of the administration was challenging Disney's market dominance while Slater's DOJ was waving Disney's deals through without serious scrutiny. That's not a policy disagreement — it's a contradiction.
The one major merger she did block — the HPE-Juniper deal — drew concerns from Trump administration intelligence officials and MAGA leaders such as Charlie Kirk, who argued that killing the deal would help empower Huawei. Whether or not that argument is decisive, it's notable that Slater chose to flex enforcement muscle on a deal where national security figures wanted it approved, while giving Disney a pass.
Before joining the DOJ, Slater served as a member of the Transatlantic High-Level Working Group on Content Moderation Online at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at UPenn. The group's report offers a window into the intellectual circles she traveled in — and they weren't exactly free-speech friendly.
The Working Group called for "scalable solutions" to stop social media companies from:
If that language sounds familiar, it should. It's the same framework that was used to justify sweeping content moderation campaigns against conservative voices for years. The report went further, praising Big Tech for specific acts of censorship:
"Removing apps like Infowars for spreading COVID-19 disinformation" and "deleting misleading tweets from major political figures such as Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro."
The Working Group also championed a:
"Recognition by platforms of their moral/de facto responsibility as good corporate citizens for the content posted on their platforms."
Translation: Big Tech should police speech, and the policing they've already done — including against right-leaning outlets and world leaders — is the model to follow. This is the intellectual ecosystem that produced the person running antitrust enforcement for the Trump DOJ.
The reaction to Slater's resignation tells its own story. Luther Lowe, head lobbyist for Y Combinator and formerly Yelp's top lobbyist, posted on X:
"This is not a good development for those who care about little tech."
Lowe personally gave over $150,000 to Democrats and not a cent to Republicans. His boss, Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan, co-hosted a "Little Tech for Harris" fundraiser headlined by Nancy Pelosi during the 2024 election. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman co-hosted the same event.
When the people mourning your departure from a Republican administration are Democratic mega-donors who fundraised for Kamala Harris with Nancy Pelosi, it's worth asking whose interests were actually being served.
Even left-wing commentator Daniel Dayen of the American Prospect framed the resignation as a loss, posting on X that Slater was defeated by lobbyists who made:
"Corrupt deals with corporate monopolists for millions of dollars."
The left sees Slater as one of theirs who got pushed out. That alone should clarify where she stood.
Slater's departure leaves unfinished business. A proposed merger between Netflix and Warner Bros remains under review, and Slater's stance on the deal was described as unclear. Her successor will inherit that decision — along with the broader question of whether the DOJ's antitrust division will match the energy that Brendan Carr and others in the administration have brought to reining in consolidated corporate power.
Conservative populism's promise on antitrust is straightforward: the government shouldn't pick winners among corporate giants, and consolidated power — whether in tech, media, or entertainment — threatens the competitive markets that make free enterprise work. That promise requires enforcers who actually enforce, not appointees whose prior work championed Big Tech's right to censor and whose tenure is defined by waving through mega-mergers for companies the rest of the administration is actively challenging.
Slater is gone. The question now is whether her replacement understands the assignment.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson spent this week on a media tour — not to discuss the weighty constitutional questions sitting on her desk, but to defend her night out at the Grammy Awards and promote her memoir.
Jackson appeared on "CBS Mornings" on Feb. 10 and ABC's "The View" on Feb. 11, where she defended attending the Grammy ceremony this month as a nominee for the audio version of her 2025 book "Lovely One." She did not win. The Dalai Lama took the award for best audio book, narration, and storytelling recording.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court still has not issued a ruling on President Trump's tariffs — a case argued back in November — and has decided only one of the other eight cases from that same oral arguments session. The court is currently in the middle of a four-week break from hearing arguments and issuing opinions.
The issue isn't that a Supreme Court justice attended an awards show. The issue is which awards show, and what happened there.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., laid it out plainly, according to USA Today: many attendees at the ceremony wore "ICE OUT" pins, and two award winners used their acceptance speeches to denounce the Trump administration's immigration enforcement. Blackburn called it:
"Such a brazenly political, anti-law enforcement event."
Jackson, seated in that audience, is part of the court currently deliberating a major case on presidential authority. The optics aren't complicated. A justice who will rule on the legality of the president's enforcement powers attended an event where enforcement of immigration law was treated as something to protest — accessorized with lapel pins, no less.
On "The View," Jackson waved it off. She described the evening in glowing terms:
"It was extraordinary. I'd never been to any kind of event like that before."
When pressed on the criticism, she framed attendance as part of her duties:
"Another part of the job, actually my job, is public outreach and education. I thought this is a great opportunity to highlight my work in this ways and to see what's happening at the Grammy's."
Public outreach. At the Grammys. While your pending caseload includes whether the president can use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg rushed to Jackson's defense, arguing that the justice "had no way of knowing what anyone's speech was going to be." Jackson agreed:
"That's right."
Fine. She didn't know what the speeches would say. But she also didn't leave. She didn't issue any statement distancing herself from the politicized spectacle. She went on two talk shows afterward and described the evening as "extraordinary."
On "CBS Mornings," Jackson addressed the still-pending tariffs case with the kind of reassurance that sounds reasonable until you think about it for more than a few seconds:
"The court is going through its process of deliberation. The American people expect for us to be thorough and clear in our determinations and sometimes that takes time."
Thoroughness is a virtue. But the court heard oral arguments on these tariffs in November. It's now mid-February. They've managed to resolve exactly one of the nine cases argued that month. The tariffs — which function as a centerpiece of the president's economic agenda and a major foreign policy tool — remain in legal limbo.
During those November arguments, many justices sounded skeptical that the president can tap emergency powers to sidestep the standard tariffs process. That skepticism, combined with the glacial pace, has fueled speculation that the court is in no rush to invalidate a sitting president's signature economic policy — preferring to let the clock run rather than issue a politically explosive ruling.
That's a choice. And it's a choice that has consequences for American businesses, trading partners, and the broader economy every single day it goes unresolved.
There's a deeper pattern worth noting. Jackson is not the first justice to have a public life outside the court. Justices write books. They give speeches. They attend events. None of that is inherently problematic.
But the left spent years demanding that conservative justices recuse themselves from cases based on the flimsiest associations — a flag on a neighbor's lawn, attendance at a legal conference, a friendship with someone tangentially connected to a litigant. The standard they set was that even the appearance of bias was disqualifying.
Now, a liberal justice attends an event where performers and attendees openly protested federal law enforcement, where anti-ICE sentiment was literally pinned to people's chests — and the defense is that she couldn't have predicted the speeches. The recusal industrial complex that targeted conservative justices has gone remarkably quiet.
Jackson also used her Grammy loss to charm the talk show audience:
"If you're going to lose, I mean, you might as well lose to the Dalai Lama, for sure."
It's a good line. It's the kind of thing that plays well on daytime television. And that's precisely the concern — a sitting Supreme Court justice who seems more comfortable on a talk show couch than behind the bench, building a media persona while cases of national significance collect dust.
Jackson described her Grammy attendance and media appearances as "public outreach and education." She called the criticism itself just:
"Part of the job."
But there's a difference between public engagement and a publicity tour. Promoting a young adult version of your memoir on "The View" while the country waits for a ruling on presidential trade authority isn't outreach. It's branding.
The Supreme Court's authority rests on the perception that its members are above the political fray — that they deliberate with care, speak through opinions, and let their work product do the talking. Every appearance on a daytime talk show, every photo op at an awards ceremony dripping with partisan signaling, chips away at that perception.
Jackson has every right to attend the Grammys. She has every right to go on television. But rights and wisdom aren't the same thing. The American people waiting on a tariffs ruling might prefer their justices spent February working — not explaining why losing to the Dalai Lama was actually kind of fun.
Attorney General Pam Bondi turned a House Judiciary Committee hearing into a masterclass in political accountability on Wednesday, ripping into Democrats who spent years ignoring Jeffrey Epstein's crimes only to suddenly discover their outrage now that a Republican administration is doing the work their side never bothered to attempt.
The hearing — ostensibly about the release of files related to the Epstein prosecution — devolved into a series of clashes between Bondi and Democratic members, with Ranking Member Jamie Raskin absorbing the sharpest blow. Bondi called him a "washed-up, loser lawyer — not even a lawyer" after he accused her of filibustering during questioning.
It was that kind of afternoon.
As reported by the New York Post, the core tension of the hearing was impossible for Democrats to escape. More than 3 million pages of investigative materials on Epstein and his convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell have been released under a bill co-authored by Rep. Thomas Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna, signed by President Trump last November. The release happened on this administration's watch. The silence happened on the last one.
Bondi drove that point like a nail:
"None of them asked [former Attorney General] Merrick Garland, over the last four years, one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump."
That framing is difficult to argue with. Democrats controlled the Judiciary Committee. They had Garland in the same chair. They chose to spend that time on other pursuits. Now they want credit for caring about Epstein's victims — the same victims the DOJ under their preferred attorney general apparently never warranted a single question about.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal tried a theatrical move, asking Epstein victims or their family members in attendance to stand and raise their hand if they had not been able to meet with the current Department of Justice. Bondi didn't take the bait:
"Why didn't she ask Merrick Garland this twice when he sat in my chair? I'm not going to get in the gutter for her theatrics."
Raskin came in swinging. He accused Bondi of siding with perpetrators and ignoring victims — not just on Epstein, but on what he called "homicidal government violence against citizens in Minneapolis," a reference the article provided no context for and Raskin apparently felt no obligation to substantiate.
"You're not showing a lot of interest in the victims. Whether it's Epstein's human trafficking ring or the homicidal government violence against citizens in Minneapolis, as attorney general you're siding with the perpetrators and you're ignoring the victims."
This is the rhetorical equivalent of throwing everything at the wall. Epstein's trafficking ring and an unrelated Minneapolis grievance crammed into a single breath, designed to create an emotional impression rather than an argument. Raskin then complained that Bondi was filibustering — a rich accusation from a man who used his own time to deliver a two-topic indictment with no connective tissue.
When Raskin demanded that Chairman Jim Jordan restore time to Rep. Jerry Nadler and warned Bondi about speaking on "our time," her response was clean:
"You don't tell me anything."
The retiring New York Democrat didn't fare much better. Bondi confronted him directly over past claims that President Trump conspired with foreign actors in the 2016 election:
"You said the president conspired, sought foreign interference in the 2016 election. Robert Mueller found no evidence, none, of foreign interference in 2016. Have you apologized to President Trump?"
The hearing record does not reflect an apology. What it reflects is an attorney general unwilling to let Democrats use their time without being reminded of how they spent the last decade.
"You all should be apologizing. You sit here and you attack the president, and I am not going to have it. I'm not going to put up with it."
Perhaps the most damning detail of the hearing wasn't a quote from the dais — it was a fact about one of the members' colleagues. According to reporting, US Virgin Islands Delegate Stacey Plaskett texted with Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 House Oversight Committee hearing to get tips about questioning ex-Trump legal fixer Michael Cohen.
A sitting member of Congress was taking advice from a man who had already pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution and was registered as a sex offender. A representative for Plaskett previously acknowledged Epstein had contacted her among other "staff, constituents, and the public at large, offering advice, support, and in some cases partisan vitriol."
Former Bondi chief of staff Chad Mizelle connected the dots:
"Jerry Nadler attacking Attorney General Bondi over Epstein, while his colleague Rep. Plaskett was using Jeffrey Epstein as a confidant and adviser, is the height of hypocrisy."
Democrats want to be the party of accountability on Epstein. Their own members were in his text messages. That contradiction doesn't need editorial commentary — it speaks fluently on its own.
The hearing wasn't exclusively a left-right affair. Rep. Thomas Massie, one of the co-authors of the very legislation that produced the document release, turned his fire on Bondi over how the DOJ handled redactions. He showed three documents he described as "emblematic of the massive failure of the DOJ to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act" and argued that potential co-conspirators' names had been blacked out while some victims' identities were exposed.
"Literally the worst thing you could do to the survivors, you did."
Bondi addressed the redaction issue directly, committing to correct errors in both directions:
"If any man's name was redacted that should not have been, we will of course unredact it. If a victim's name was unredacted, please bring it to us, and we will redact it."
She also told Chairman Jordan that Massie "has Trump Derangement Syndrome" and called him a "failed politician" — a notable choice of words aimed at a Republican ally of the legislation. The redaction question is legitimate. The process of releasing 3 million pages of investigative materials is massive, and errors in a release of that scale are correctable. What matters is whether the administration fixes them — and Bondi committed on the record to doing so.
Strip away the theatrics, and what Wednesday's hearing revealed is simple. The Trump administration released more than 3 million pages of Epstein-related materials. The previous administration released none. Democrats who had four years and a willing attorney general to demand transparency on one of the most significant sex trafficking cases in American history chose instead to focus on partisan investigations. Now they want to interrogate the people who actually opened the files.
Mizelle summarized it without excess:
"The Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee did nothing to bring justice and transparency to the Epstein saga. Attorney General Pam Bondi has."
Epstein's victims were in that hearing room. They didn't come to watch Democrats perform outrage they never felt when their own party held the gavel. They came because someone finally released the files — and it wasn't Merrick Garland.
A federal grand jury in Washington declined to indict six Democratic members of Congress who published a video last November urging service members to refuse unlawful orders. The US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, led by Trump appointee Jeanine Pirro, had sought the charges — and came up empty.
The six lawmakers — Senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, along with Representatives Jason Crow of Colorado, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania — all have backgrounds in the military or intelligence community. Their November 2025 video was brief and direct:
"Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders."
That single sentence detonated a political firestorm. And now, months later, the legal machinery marshaled against them has stalled at the grand jury stage, as the Daily Mail reported.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice already establishes that service members must obey lawful orders — and may refuse illegal ones. The six Democrats weren't announcing a novel legal theory. They were restating existing law on camera.
But context matters. The video landed in November 2025, and its timing carried an unmistakable political charge. It wasn't a civics lesson — it was a message aimed at the commander-in-chief. The Democrats knew exactly what they were doing, and the reaction was immediate.
President Trump responded on social media, calling the video:
"SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!"
Followed by:
"HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD !!"
Capitol Police moved to provide 24/7 security for the lawmakers. Senator Slotkin described the shift in mid-November:
"Capitol Police came to us and said, 'We're gonna put you on 24/7 security.' We've got law enforcement out in front of my house. I mean, it changes things immediately."
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth pursued his own track against Senator Kelly — a 25-year Navy combat pilot and former astronaut — seeking to strip his military rank and pay. That process remains ongoing.
The DOJ probe moved forward despite the lawmakers announcing they would not cooperate with it. The federal attorneys assigned to the case were reportedly political appointees rather than career DOJ prosecutors, according to an anonymous source cited by NBC News.
That detail matters. Grand juries are famously sympathetic to prosecutors. The old line about indicting a ham sandwich exists for a reason. When a grand jury declines to indict, it signals something beyond reasonable disagreement — it suggests the case presented to them was not persuasive on its most basic terms.
The Speech or Debate Clause in Article I of the Constitution provides lawmakers with broad protections for remarks relating to the "legislative sphere." Whether this specific video falls within that sphere is a legitimate legal question. But a grand jury didn't need to reach the constitutional argument — they apparently weren't convinced the case cleared even the preliminary threshold.
This is the core problem. If the administration believed these lawmakers committed a prosecutable offense, the case needed to be airtight. Instead, they handed Democrats exactly the narrative they wanted.
The six lawmakers wasted no time framing the outcome. Senator Kelly released a statement Tuesday evening:
"It wasn't enough for Pete Hegseth to censure me and threaten to demote me, now it appears they tried to have me charged with a crime — all because of something I said that they didn't like. That's not the way things work in America. Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him. The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down."
Senator Slotkin posted on X:
"But today wasn't just an embarrassing day for the Administration. It was another sad day for our country. Because whether or not Pirro succeeded is not the point. It's that President Trump continues to weaponize our justice system against his perceived enemies. It's the kind of thing you see in a foreign country, not in the United States we know and love."
Representative Crow was characteristically blunt:
"If these f***ers think that they're going to intimidate us and threaten and bully me in the silence, and they're going to go after political opponents and get us to back down, they have another thing coming. The tide is turning."
Representative Houlahan called it:
"It's a vindication for the Constitution."
None of these statements is surprising. What's notable is how cleanly they land. When you pursue a case and lose, your opponents get to write the story.
Here's where conservatives should be honest with themselves. The "seditious six" — as some on the right dubbed them — published a video that was politically provocative and deliberately timed to undermine confidence in the chain of command. There are legitimate reasons to find it objectionable. Encouraging service members to second-guess orders, even under the banner of existing law, carries implications that extend well beyond a civics refresher.
But objectionable speech and criminal conduct are not the same thing. The gap between the two is where American liberty lives. Conservatives spent the better part of a decade arguing — correctly — that the Obama and Biden DOJ had been weaponized against political opponents. The IRS targeting of Tea Party groups. The FISA abuse during the Russia investigation. The unequal application of the law during the summer of 2020. Those arguments carried weight because they were grounded in evidence of institutional overreach.
A failed indictment of sitting members of Congress — pursued by political appointees, rejected by a grand jury — hands the left the mirror image of every argument conservatives have made about prosecutorial abuse. It doesn't matter whether the two situations are truly equivalent. Politics runs on narrative, and this narrative writes itself.
The six Democrats are now more prominent than they were before the video. They have a persecution story. They have quotable defiance. They have a grand jury that functionally sided with them. Every strategic objective the prosecution might have served has been inverted.
Conservatives have stronger tools than failed indictments. The Speech or Debate Clause exists precisely to keep political speech disputes out of criminal courts and inside the political arena — where voters, not prosecutors, render judgment. The proper venue for accountability was always the next election, the committee hearing, or the public argument.
When the left overreached with its prosecutions, the result was a backlash that helped fuel a political realignment. Overreach doesn't become acceptable because the other side does it first. It becomes a gift to your opponents.
The administration has real power and a real mandate. Spending that capital on a case that a grand jury won't even return diminishes both.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday that a recently released Department of Justice document supports what President Trump has long maintained — that he took early, proactive steps to alert authorities about Jeffrey Epstein's behavior, years before the financier's crimes became a matter of national reckoning.
The document, released by the DOJ, contains details from a 2019 FBI interview with Michael Reiter, then the police chief of Palm Beach, Florida. According to that interview, Trump called Reiter in July 2006 to offer assistance with the investigation into Epstein, making him, per the document's language, "one of the very first people to call" the police chief about the case.
The timing matters. In 2006, Epstein had not yet become a household name. His crimes were still emerging through a local Palm Beach investigation, not splashed across cable news. And yet, according to Reiter's account to the FBI, Trump reached out on his own initiative.
According to Breitbart News, the DOJ document relays Reiter's recollection of his conversation with Trump. Reiter's 2019 FBI interview documents what Trump told the Palm Beach police chief:
"You should know that guy is a bad guy, and you should be looking at him."
Reiter further told the FBI that Trump offered to help the investigation in whatever way he could. According to the document, Trump said:
"If you need anything from me, you call."
These aren't quotes captured on tape or pulled from a deposition. They are statements attributed to Trump by Reiter during an FBI interview conducted over a decade after the phone call allegedly took place. That's an important distinction — but so is the fact that a law enforcement official was willing to relay them to the FBI under those circumstances.
At the White House briefing, Leavitt seized on the document's contents to push back against years of insinuation linking Trump to Epstein's crimes. She told reporters that the release "cracks" the establishment narrative surrounding the president and Epstein.
Leavitt pointed to Trump's long-standing claim that he banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, arguing the newly surfaced document adds weight to a pattern of behavior Trump has described for years.
"President Trump has always said he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago."
She added that the evidence suggests Trump was ahead of the curve:
"He was one of the first people — if not the first person — to call the Palm Beach Police Department to report what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein."
It's worth noting that Leavitt herself used conditional language when discussing the phone call, suggesting the White House is presenting the document's account as strongly supportive rather than independently verified in every detail. But her broader point is clear: when the question was whether Trump was complicit or cooperative, this document lands firmly on the side of cooperation.
For years, a certain class of commentator has treated a handful of photographs and passing social references as evidence that Trump and Epstein were close associates — or worse. The implication was always heavy, always directional, and seldom accompanied by anything resembling proof of wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the actual investigative record — now including this DOJ release — tells a different story. A man who called the police. A man who offered to help. A man who, by Reiter's account, flagged Epstein as someone worth investigating before most of the country had any idea who Epstein was.
The media spent years building guilt by association. What they never seemed interested in was the association that actually mattered: Trump's association with the investigation itself.
The released document does not appear to be the full scope of the DOJ's Epstein-related materials. There's no indication of why the department chose to release this particular document now, or what else may remain in the pipeline. Ghislaine Maxwell is referenced in the document, though her specific role in the context of these details is not elaborated.
Nor does the document resolve every open question about the Epstein case — a case that involves dozens of powerful figures across politics, finance, and media. The full Epstein story remains one of the most significant unfinished chapters in modern American public life.
But what this document does accomplish is straightforward: it provides a contemporaneous law enforcement account — relayed to the FBI — that Trump acted as a willing cooperator, not a person with something to hide.
Consider the asymmetry. Every time an Epstein-related document drops, a segment of the media reflexively scans it for Trump's name. When they find it in the context of cooperation with the police, the story vanishes from the front page. When a photo from a 1990s party surfaces, it leads the cycle.
This is not journalism. It is narrative maintenance.
The same outlets that spent years demanding transparency on Epstein have shown remarkably little interest in the transparency that has actually arrived — because it doesn't confirm what they assumed. The document doesn't show a man entangled with a predator. It shows a man who picked up the phone and called the cops.
That's not ambiguous. That's not spin. That's the FBI's own file.
The general counsels of America's three largest cell phone carriers sat before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday morning and defended their companies' decisions to hand over lawmakers' phone data to former special counsel Jack Smith — data obtained through subpoenas issued under non-disclosure orders that kept the targeted members of Congress entirely in the dark.
At least 84 subpoenas hit AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon as part of Smith's investigation. Ten of those subpoenas targeted the records of 20 current or former lawmakers. The companies complied. The lawmakers never knew.
That silence is the heart of the scandal.
According to Politico, each executive offered a variation on the same theme: we followed the law. T-Mobile general counsel Mark Nelson told the subcommittee that when T-Mobile receives valid demands from government entities, it responds "as required by law and with customer privacy top of mind." Verizon Consumer general counsel Chris Miller acknowledged the situation was imperfect but insisted his company operated within the legal framework. AT&T general counsel David McAtee offered a slightly different picture — his company actually pushed back.
McAtee testified that AT&T raised the Speech or Debate Clause with Smith's office when asked to produce lawmakers' phone data. The clause, a constitutional protection designed to shield legislators from executive branch intimidation, should have given any prosecutor pause. Smith's team apparently felt otherwise.
"The Special Counsel's office never responded to that email, at least not substantively. And ultimately, the office abandoned the subpoena, and no records were produced."
So when AT&T flagged a constitutional concern, Smith's office went quiet — and eventually walked away. That raises an obvious question: if the subpoena couldn't survive a polite email about constitutional protections, how solid was the legal basis in the first place?
T-Mobile and Verizon, by contrast, did not mount similar challenges. They turned over the records. Verizon, which controlled many accounts for lawmakers' personal and official phones, bore the brunt of senatorial anger.
Sen. Lindsey Graham's phone records were seized as part of Smith's probe. Graham directed his frustration squarely at Verizon's Miller:
"I don't think I deserve what happened to me."
"You failed me. You failed to honor the contract protecting us all."
Graham was among the most vocal in arguing that he and other affected lawmakers should be compensated. Sens. Josh Hawley and John Kennedy also gave Miller an earful during the hearing. The anger wasn't performative — these are sitting U.S. senators whose private communications were swept up by a political prosecution, and the companies they pay for phone service helped make it happen without so much as a courtesy call.
Miller, to his credit, conceded what others wouldn't:
"These were unprecedented circumstances, and while we fully complied with the law, we also acknowledge that we could have done better in terms of our process. One year ago, we began working with the Senate Sergeant at Arms on changes to the handling of legal demands for official Senate lines. And we have expanded those changes to include personal and campaign lines."
"Could have done better" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Verizon handed a politically motivated special counsel the call records of elected officials, shielded by non-disclosure orders that prevented those officials from knowing, challenging, or contesting the surveillance. A year later, they started talking to the Sergeant at Arms about maybe improving the process.
The carriers are the middlemen. The real question is what Jack Smith's office was doing issuing 84 subpoenas — ten of them targeting lawmakers — while operating under non-disclosure orders that ensured no one on Capitol Hill could raise a constitutional objection in real time.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley framed it plainly in his opening statement:
"Smith and his team irresponsibly steamrolled ahead while intentionally hiding their activities from Members of Congress."
Grassley has pledged to call Smith to testify before his committee in the coming months. Smith recently appeared before the House Judiciary Committee, where he maintained that politics played no role in his work and said he would have made the same prosecutorial decisions regardless of whether the former president was Republican or Democratic.
That claim grows harder to sustain with each new revelation. Dozens of felony charges were levied against a political opponent. Subpoenas vacuuming up the phone records of Republican lawmakers. Non-disclosure orders ensured none of the targets could fight back. And when one carrier — AT&T — raised a basic constitutional question, the special counsel's office abandoned the subpoena rather than answer it. That's not the behavior of a prosecution confident in its legal footing. That's the behavior of a prosecution hoping no one would ask.
Ranking member Sen. Dick Durbin offered the Democratic response, which amounted to: why are we even talking about this?
"This is frankly an embarrassing use of the committee's limited time, and I urge my colleagues to turn their attention to the threats that President Trump currently poses to our democracy."
A special counsel secretly obtained the phone records of sitting members of Congress, and the Democratic position is that investigating it wastes time. Durbin did say Smith should testify "as soon as possible," — but the framing tells you everything. For Democrats, the surveillance of Republican lawmakers isn't a civil liberties concern. It's an inconvenience that distracts from their preferred narrative.
Imagine, for one moment, the reaction if a Trump-era special counsel had secretly subpoenaed the phone records of 20 Democratic lawmakers. The words "constitutional crisis" would have trended for a week. Every editorial board in America would have discovered a sudden passion for the Speech or Debate Clause. The asymmetry isn't subtle.
Grassley's pledge to haul Smith before the Senate Judiciary Committee sets up the next act. Smith's House testimony offered his version of events — no political motivation, just following the facts. But the facts now include a special counsel who issued subpoenas he abandoned the moment a carrier questioned their constitutionality, who operated behind non-disclosure orders that neutralized congressional oversight, and who targeted the communications of the very legislators responsible for checking executive power.
The carriers will update their processes. Verizon already has. But process reforms don't answer the foundational question: What happens when a weaponized prosecution uses lawful mechanisms to achieve unlawful ends? The subpoenas were technically valid. The non-disclosure orders were technically legal. And yet the result was that a special counsel investigating the president's political allies secretly obtained the phone records of his political allies in Congress — and nobody could object because nobody knew.
The system worked exactly as Smith designed it to. That's the problem.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito sat for a 90-minute interview with journalist James Rosen — published in Politico — and offered a rare window into how he views his late colleague Antonin Scalia's unfinished work on the bench. The headline moment: Alito's quiet admission that Scalia, who died unexpectedly in his sleep in early 2016 at age 79, would barely recognize the country he left behind.
"He would have been appalled at so much."
Alito did not elaborate. He didn't need to.
The 75-year-old justice, who authored the Dobbs v. Jackson decision overturning the constitutional right to an abortion, went further in describing what Scalia's absence has meant — not just for the Court, but for the conservative legal project Scalia spent decades building.
"Even since Nino died, things are so different. I so often wish he were still here. He started so much and it would have been good to have him around to see it to completion."
That word — "completion" — carries weight. Alito isn't eulogizing. He's mapping unfinished terrain.
Scalia's death in early 2016 opened one of the most consequential political battles in modern Supreme Court history. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held the seat vacant for more than a year, blocking President Barack Obama from filling it. Donald Trump, who became the presumptive Republican nominee just months after Scalia's passing and won the general election that November, appointed Neil Gorsuch as Scalia's successor.
That single appointment preserved the ideological trajectory Scalia had charted. What followed — including Brett Kavanaugh's bruising 2018 confirmation hearings, during which Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexual assault, an accusation he denied — cemented a 6-3 conservative majority that has reshaped American law at a pace not seen in generations.
McConnell's gamble was, in hindsight, the most consequential act of Senate leadership in a generation. The seat didn't just stay conservative. As The Daily Beast reported, it became the fulcrum for everything that came after — Dobbs, religious liberty cases, and the broader restoration of originalist jurisprudence that Scalia pioneered from his appointment in 1986 until his death three decades later.
Alito's use of "Nino" — Scalia's nickname among friends and family — signals something the interview's clinical details don't fully capture. These weren't just colleagues who shared a judicial philosophy. Alito is speaking as someone who watched a friend build a framework and then inherited the responsibility of carrying it forward.
Rosen noted that one of Scalia's children expressed a similar sentiment — that the timing of Scalia's death spared him from witnessing much that would have upset him. Alito apparently agreed.
It's a striking thought. The justice who revolutionized conservative legal reasoning, who wrote dissents so sharp they read like blueprints for future majorities, died just before the political world cracked open in ways no one anticipated. He never saw Trump's presidency. He never saw his own dissents become the foundation for Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs. He never saw the Court achieve what he'd spent his career arguing it should.
And he never saw the cultural backlash that followed.
The conservative legal movement is in its strongest institutional position in modern memory. A 6-3 majority. Alito and his conservative colleagues have greenlit the vast majority of Trump's policies. The originalist framework Scalia championed is no longer a dissenting theory — it's the operating system.
But none of that has come without friction. The 2022 leak of Alito's draft Dobbs opinion to Politico was an institutional earthquake — the first time a full draft Supreme Court opinion had been disclosed before its official release. Notably, Rosen's 90-minute interview with Alito apparently either didn't address the leak or Rosen chose not to include it. That silence is its own kind of editorial decision.
Subsequent leaks revealed internal disagreements among justices over ethics rules and exposed a confidential memo in which Chief Justice John Roberts pushed to grant Trump broad immunity from prosecution. The Court's internal deliberations, once treated as sacrosanct, have become another front in the political war surrounding the institution.
Scalia operated in a different era — one where the Court's battles were fierce but largely contained within its marble walls. The justices argued in opinions, not through anonymous sources. The institution's legitimacy was assumed, not polled.
Alito's refusal to specify what Scalia would have found appalling is the most interesting part of the remark. The vagueness is doing real work. It lets the statement travel in every direction — toward the coarsening of political discourse, toward institutional decay, toward a culture that has lurched in directions Scalia spent his career resisting.
Rosen framed the broader context by writing that Scalia would have been less enthusiastic about American politics, which have grown "coarser and more polarized than ever before." That tracks with what most honest observers would acknowledge, regardless of ideology. But it also understates what's actually changed.
Scalia believed the Constitution meant what it said when it was ratified — and that judges who invented new meanings were the real threat to democratic self-governance. That argument hasn't gotten easier to make. It's gotten easier to prove. Every institutional norm that's crumbled since 2016, every leak, every political circus dressed up as a confirmation hearing, every attempt to delegitimize the Court because it reached conclusions the left doesn't like — all of it vindicates the originalist warning that when courts become political actors, politics will come for the courts.
Scalia saw that coming before most conservatives had the vocabulary for it.
Alito's reflection isn't nostalgia. It's an inventory. He described Scalia as someone who "started so much" — meaning the project is ongoing, the scaffolding is up, and the workers are still on site. Alito, at 75, is one of those workers. The question is whether the Court can finish what Scalia started while the institution itself faces pressures he never had to navigate — pressures that come not from legal opponents but from a political culture that has decided the judiciary is just another arena for power struggles.
Scalia would have had something to say about that. Something sharp, something quotable, something that cut through the noise with the precision of a man who believed words had fixed meanings and institutions had fixed purposes.
Instead, it falls to Alito to say it plainly: things are so different now. And the man who mapped the path forward isn't here to walk it.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are now objecting to the videotaping of their private depositions before the House Oversight Committee — depositions they already agreed to sit for. The dispute threatens to derail scheduled appearances on Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 in connection with the committee's probe into Jeffrey Epstein.
The agreement for those depositions halted the House from moving forward with a floor vote to hold the Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress. That deal, reached after a months-long back-and-forth between Clinton lawyers and the committee, appeared to settle the matter. Now the Clintons want to rewrite the terms.
Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, posted a statement Friday framing the entire process as a partisan setup:
"Chairman Comer says he wants cameras, but only behind closed doors. It serves only partisan interests. This is not fact-finding, it's pure politics."
He followed that with a sharper line:
"I will not sit idly as they use me as a prop in a closed-door kangaroo court."
The rhetoric is unmistakable. A former president who agreed to appear under oath is now publicly campaigning against the conditions of that appearance — conditions his own legal team negotiated.
Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, the Kentucky Republican, responded over the weekend with considerably less theatrics and considerably more documentation, Punchbowl News reported. His committee released correspondence with the Clintons' legal team showing that video guidelines were discussed throughout the negotiation process. Recording depositions, Comer noted, is common practice for House proceedings.
"The Clintons are now pushing a false narrative to play victim."
Comer also made clear that the Clintons' preferred alternative — public hearings — isn't off the table. It's just not a substitute for the depositions they already committed to:
"The Clintons can have their hearing after completing the depositions they agreed to."
That distinction matters. A deposition is a fact-finding tool — questions under oath, follow-ups, and detailed examination. A public hearing is a performance stage. The Clintons aren't asking for more transparency. They're asking for a format where cameras serve their interests, where opening statements and five-minute rounds replace sustained questioning.
Anyone who's watched a congressional hearing knows the difference. Depositions produce answers. Hearings produce clips.
While the Clintons wage a media campaign against sitting for questions, Ghislaine Maxwell was scheduled to be deposed virtually by the Oversight Committee today. According to Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, Maxwell's lawyers have indicated she intends to invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
That backdrop makes the Clinton maneuvering all the more striking. Maxwell, according to a New York Times report published Sunday, was integral in setting up the Clinton Global Initiative, including helping set up funding for it. The committee is probing the Clintons' relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell — Epstein's most notorious associate — helped build the infrastructure of one of the Clintons' signature philanthropic ventures.
And she's pleading the Fifth.
The Clintons, for their part, aren't invoking any constitutional right. They're not claiming privilege. They're complaining about cameras — in depositions they agreed to, under terms their lawyers helped shape, to avoid being held in criminal contempt of Congress.
The Clinton playbook here is vintage. Agree to cooperate when the legal pressure peaks. Then, once the contempt threat recedes, contest the terms. Shift the argument from substance to process. Call it partisan. Call it a kangaroo court. Make the investigation the story instead of what the investigation might uncover.
It worked for decades in Washington. The question is whether it works now, with a committee that holds the contempt card and has already shown willingness to play it.
Consider the sequence: the Clintons' lawyers negotiated for months. They reached a deal. The deal prevented a criminal contempt vote. Video was discussed throughout those negotiations, per the committee's own correspondence. And now — with the deposition days away — Bill Clinton takes to social media to recast the entire arrangement as an ambush.
If the videotaping terms were unacceptable, the time to reject them was during the months of negotiation, not two weeks before the deposition date. The timing suggests this isn't a procedural objection. It's a pressure campaign designed to either extract new concessions or manufacture a pretext for non-compliance.
The Feb. 26 and Feb. 27 dates remain on the calendar. If the Clintons refuse to appear under the agreed-upon terms, the contempt question resurfaces — this time with even less sympathy for the subjects, who struck a deal and then tried to wriggle out of it.
Meanwhile, Maxwell invokes the Fifth from behind a screen, and a New York Times report draws a line between her and the financial scaffolding of the Clinton Global Initiative. The committee's probe is pulling threads that the Clintons clearly prefer stay untugged.
Bill Clinton says he won't be a "prop." But a man who voluntarily agreed to testify under oath, then launched a public campaign to avoid the format he negotiated, isn't fighting for principle. He's fighting for control of the frame.
The cameras, it turns out, are only a problem when you can't pick the angle.
A Hong Kong court sentenced 78-year-old media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison Monday under Beijing's national security law, drawing immediate condemnation from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who called the verdict "unjust and tragic" and urged Chinese authorities to grant Lai humanitarian parole.
Lai — the founder of Apple Daily, once Hong Kong's most prominent pro-democracy newspaper — was convicted on two counts of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one count of conspiracy to publish seditious materials. Judges labeled him the "mastermind" of alleged plots to use his media platform and international network to lobby foreign governments for sanctions against China and Hong Kong.
His crime, in plain terms: running a newspaper that criticized Beijing.
Rubio's statement, reported by Fox News, left no ambiguity about how Washington views the conviction:
"The conviction shows the world that Beijing will go to extraordinary lengths to silence those who advocate fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong."
Prosecutors cited hundreds of Apple Daily articles as evidence against Lai. Let that register — a government cataloging journalism as proof of criminal conspiracy. The newspaper Lai founded in 1995 became, under Beijing's 2020 national security law, Exhibit A in a case designed not merely to punish one man but to demonstrate what happens to anyone who dissents.
Lai had already spent more than five years behind bars, serving a separate sentence for fraud and for organizing unauthorized assemblies during Hong Kong's anti-CCP protests. The 20-year addition isn't a sentence. For a 78-year-old man, it's a burial order with extra paperwork.
His son Sebastian Lai put it bluntly:
"Twenty years, he's 78 years old now. This is essentially a life sentence — or more like a death sentence, given the conditions he's being kept in."
Sebastian told Fox on Monday that his father has lost significant weight and suffers from heart issues and diabetes. He said the family is "incredibly worried about his life."
What makes Lai's case remarkable — and what separates it from the stories of countless other political prisoners around the world — is that he had every opportunity to leave. Lai is a billionaire. He had the means, the connections, and the warning signs. Beijing's national security law swept through Hong Kong in 2020 after months of massive pro-democracy protests, reshaping the city's legal landscape. Lai knew what was coming.
He stayed anyway.
Sebastian Lai described his father as "a man of deep faith" who believes "no matter how hard the conditions he was under, that he still did the right thing." That's not political theater. That's conviction of the kind that embarrasses regimes built on coercion, which is precisely why Beijing wants him locked away until he dies.
President Trump raised Lai's case directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in December 2025. His comments at the time were characteristically direct:
"I spoke to President Xi about it, and I asked to consider his release. He's not well, he's an older man, and he's not well, so I did put that request out. We'll see what happens."
Trump is expected to travel to Beijing in April amid broader negotiations with China. Lai's imprisonment now sits squarely within the wider framework of U.S.-China relations — trade, Taiwan, military posture, and the question of whether Beijing faces any real cost for crushing internal dissent.
Rubio's public call for humanitarian parole adds diplomatic weight. It signals that Lai's case isn't a side issue to be quietly shelved during trade talks — it's on the table.
The national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020 was sold as a stabilizing measure. In practice, it has become the instrument through which a once-vibrant city was brought to heel. The prosecution of Jimmy Lai — a publisher, not a general — tells you everything about the kind of "stability" Beijing values. It's the stability of silence.
Prosecutors argued Lai and unnamed co-defendants used his media platform to lobby for sanctions and "other hostile actions" by foreign governments. The colonial-era Crimes Ordinance was dusted off and applied alongside the national security regime to convict him of publishing seditious materials. A law written by the British Empire, repurposed by the Chinese Communist Party, to jail a man for printing newspapers.
Sebastian Lai argued that Beijing's broken "one country, two systems" promise should serve as a warning for Taiwan. He has a point. Whatever guarantees Beijing extends to its neighbors, Hong Kong is the proof of concept — and the proof is a 78-year-old man sentenced to die in prison for the crime of publishing.
Jimmy Lai built Apple Daily into a media force that gave Hong Kong's people a voice Beijing could not tolerate. He could have taken his fortune and left. He chose the newspaper, the city, and the principle over his own freedom.
Twenty years. Hundreds of articles entered as evidence. A courtroom that called journalism a conspiracy.
Beijing delivered its verdict on Jimmy Lai. In doing so, it delivered a verdict on itself.