Sources told the New York Times that venture capitalist Peter Thiel has explored spending more time outside California and opening an office for his Los Angeles-based personal investment firm, Thiel Capital, in another state.
Meanwhile, Google cofounder Larry Page has discussed leaving the state by year’s end, sources told the Times, while three limited liability companies associated with him have filed documents to incorporate in Florida.
Out of 102 print and 194 online articles, we found that just 8% and 6%, respectively, mentioned any connection between Epstein and Bannon. For broadcast news, not a single segment out of 67 covering Epstein (amounting to just over 3 hours) mentioned his connection to Bannon at all.
No shortage of material exists for these news outlets to draw from, though. Bannon and Epstein exchanged hundreds of emails and text messages, including a text exchange on the day of Epstein’s arrest on sex trafficking charges in 2019. Just 2 articles mentioned that Bannon and Epstein had been in regular communication in the months leading up to Epstein’s detainment. Bannon also recorded 15 hours of unaired interview footage of Epstein that year, reportedly to provide Epstein with media training and to help rehabilitate his image, which only a single New York Times article mentioned. (Bannon has denied that characterization and claimed he “never media-trained anyone.”)
According to the released files, Bannon requested to film Epstein at his private island, which Epstein agreed to. Epstein also invited Bannon to his other residences, which was mentioned in just 3 articles. Epstein appears to have offered to arrange a charter flight for Bannon, leading him to joke that he was Bannon’s “travel agent.” Just 2 articles mentioned that Epstein had arranged travel for Bannon. Epstein apparently also helped connect Bannon with far-right European politicians, which was alluded to in a single Washington Post article that discussed Epstein’s advice to Bannon for engaging with foreign leaders. Additionally, Bannon told Epstein that MAGA could help shield him for a “decade” from the social movements demanding accountability for sexual harassment and assaults committed by powerful men.
In short, Bannon is all over the released Epstein files. Once a leading voice for their release, he has gone quiet on the topic since the files were made public in November.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have demanded answers from the Department of Justice after details of a flight taken by an investigative journalist well known for covering Jeffrey Epstein turned up in the pedophile’s files.
Miami Herald reporter Julie K Brown, author of the book Perversion of Justice, which was published in 2020, posted on X Sunday: “Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why my American Airlines booking information and flights in July 2019 are part of the Epstein files (attached to a grand jury subpoena)?
“As the flight itinerary includes my maiden name (and I did book this flight) why was the DOJ monitoring me?”
Brown also addressed the matter in a post on Substack in which she said she had “expected” to see her name in the Epstein files because of her reporting, but added: “What I didn’t expect to see was an American Airlines flight record from 2019 with my full name on them, including my maiden name, which I don’t use professionally. It’s an unusual name, so it’s clear it’s me.”
Her X message was reposted by the official Oversight Dems account with the comment: “The Department of Justice needs to explain why travel information and booking itineraries for a journalist are in the Epstein files.”
Bannon was playing footsie -- dicksie? -- with Jeffrey Epstein. The US government should have long ago demanded copies -- if not the originals of all those interviews Bannon did Epstein.
Victoria Bekiempis (THE GUARDIAN) notes:
By the mid-2000s, Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teen girls was routine. From 2002 to 2005 alone, the late financier victimized “dozens” of underage teens by luring them into sex acts for payment under the auspices of massage work, some as young as 14, prosecutors said.
Epstein leaned on a coterie of employees and associates – including British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell – to secure a “steady supply of minor victims”. He also enlisted his victims to recruit other girls under the false pretense of providing massages, prosecutors said.
While the breadth of Epstein’s crimes is well-documented, papers in recently unveiled investigative files from the Department of Justice have put into sharper relief how he and his associates had an almost assembly line-like process for procuring victims.
These documents – released over the past week by a Trump administration under intense political pressure from both Democrats and Republicans – also make clearer how girls and young women were perceived as commodities: mere bodies meant to serve a predator’s twisted predilections – and possibly those of his associates.
One document from 2001 described how Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for aiding Epstein’s crimes, accosted three female students on a Palm Beach, Florida, college campus.
“Maxwell said she needed young, beautiful unmarried women to answer phones and do office work at her home on Palm Beach,” a police report stated. At least one of the students went to the house on several occasions and “described the telephone calls as men call[ing] in saying when they were going to drop of[f] particular girls”.
“All three girls said Maxwell and Epstein were secretive about what was going on at the house, and at least two of the girls complained about Epstein touching them inappropriately. They said Maxwell asked for a list of other girls who she could call to work on short notice,” the report continued. Maxwell “said she needed a large pool of girls to call as she did not know how many she would need at any given time”.
Investigative notes from 2019 describe what seemed to be a crisis for Epstein: his supply of girls to abuse was running low.
THE TIMES OF LONDON's Jim Armitage coveres one of Epstein's friends that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell provided females to:
fter a summer when his stellar banking career spectacularly crashed and burned in a London courtroom, Jes Staley might have hoped for a quiet Christmas.
Instead, the former chief executive of Barclays has once again endured unwelcome headlines, along with, among others, Donald Trump, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Bill Clinton, over his close friendship with the late paedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Staley had been trying to overturn a lifetime ban from working in finance over that relationship, but it proved a disaster.
Not only did the judge rule in June that the ban should stand, declaring his evidence “lacked credibility”, but the married father, famously devoted to his two daughters, was forced to admit under questioning that he had had sex with one of Epstein’s staff in the financier’s notorious Manhattan apartment on East 66th Street.
Comprehensively defeated, Staley returned to his native United States to lick his wounds, his career destroyed.
Yet, after years of his attempts to claim he and Epstein had a “close business relationship” and nothing more, last week’s trove of evidence from the US Department of Justice hammered a final nail in his reputation.
Epstein, the documents revealed, had felt their friendship was so strong, so trusting, that he gave Staley the honoured position of executor to his will.
“It’s really significant,” a source close to the Barclays case said. “We knew that they were closer than Jes had claimed. But executor to the will? Come on.”
Staley was not the only high-profile financier Epstein had brought so close into his circle, the documents revealed.
The former Harvard University president Lawrence “Larry” Summers, a former US Treasury secretary under President Clinton, had also been named as his executor. Likewise, Jimmy Cayne, the late chief executive of one-time Wall Street giant investment bank Bear Stearns.
“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Later, the two had a public falling out, and Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Great. But denial after the fact is only one side of this story. The other is harder to digest: Either the self-proclaimed “very stable genius” spent nearly two decades around Epstein without recognizing what was happening in plain sight — or he recognized it and chose silence. Neither explanation reflects on intelligence as much as it does on character. No wonder Trump’s defenders keep raising the most overused word in American politics today: hoax.
Attorney Gloria Allred on Friday speculated on why the friendship between President Trump and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein ended, and what the files released by the Justice Department (DOJ) could reveal about the falling out.
“Well, I‘ve heard different explanations from the White House about why he dropped him,” Allred told CNN’s Phil Mattingly. “One explanation was that he was a pervert, Jeffrey Epstein. But if he was a pervert, in the view of the president — not the president at the time — then why did he believe he was a pervert?”
“And was he — did he investigate?” Allred continued. “Did he look into what actions or misconduct he knew that perhaps Jeffrey Epstein was inflicting on underage girls, children, or adults?”
The attorney said she also heard that Epstein bid against Trump in purchasing a property in Palm Beach, Fla., which stirred “bad will” between them.
“So we don‘t know whether, what‘s the truth,” she said. “We‘ll just have to wait and see why he and Jeffrey Epstein were no longer friends. We‘ll look at the, all the files when they‘re released to see when the last communications may have existed between the two of them.”
“Dear L.N.,” the letters reads, “As you know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home. Good luck! We shared one thing … our love and caring for young ladies and the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our President also shares our love of young, nubile girls.” The letter makes another lewd reference to Trump’s treatment of women.
“Life is unfair,” the letter reads.
As the clock struck midnight on Christmas morning at one Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, at least one someone was stirring.
Starting in the early hours of December 25 and ending in the evening, President Donald Trump posted over 100 times on Truth Social.
Hours before Trump sat alongside first lady Melania Trump to answer the calls of children dialing into the North American Aerospace Defense Command, during which he told kids from Oklahoma that “we’re not infiltrating into our country a bad Santa,” the president shared posts attacking Rep. Nancy Pelosi, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and former President Joe Biden, amongst several others.
At 12:01, Trump began the spree by sharing an over-eight-minute video by someone explaining “The DEMOCRAT FRAUD PYRAMID.”
Throughout the day, concluding around 7 o’clock, the president repeated many times that the 2020 election was stolen. He also shared a post that praised White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s handling of the “fake news,” another of someone who called Democrats a “criminal organization,” and one where Trump said, of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), “Throw her out of the U.S., Now!”
Hate was the message Chump chose to send. He's evil and he has hate on the mind. That's all he has to offer. He's probably creating hell on earth to prepare himself for being damned eternally in the pits of hell. There will be no pardon for Chump, no clemency. Just a lifetime in the pits of hell -- a sentence he deserves and a sentence he's earned. He has destroyed so many lives this year alone. There is no repentance from him, no acknowledgement of the harm he's done, no awareness. Just the desire to spread more hate.
He feeds on it and then he pukes it back up all over this still great country which will survive him. He will not survive his own presidency. All that hate churning in him? The idiots around him encourage it. They ignore the fact that he's morbidly obese. They ignore the fact that he eats garbage. They ignore the fact that golfing isn't exercise -- especially when you lean so heavily on the cart as Chump does. His already poor health is only getting worse and that will continue. Will a stroke result in a President JD Vance? That's highly likely as his health continues to deteriorate.
And, again, he invites cardiac problems with his weight, his eating habits and his inability to get off his fat ass and exercise. He can't even manage walking. All the footage of him in the last weeks, when he's trying to walk, it's a huge effort. And, yes, he's morbidly obese so that's a lot of weight to carry around but it's more than just his weight. His balance is off. His feet drag. A family that cared wouldn't have let it get this far. His family either is in denial or they're paying him back for the asshole he's always been. The monster who used to make Don Jr. cry. Don Jr. tries to play like their best friends, but there's not a woman that Don Jr.'s slept with who can't tell you the way he was damaged by his own father.
There will be no heartfelt tributes for Chump when he passes. There will be relief and there will be celebration. But no one outside of his dwindlilng cult is going to mourn him.
He's losing his hold on his cult and he's losing his hold on Republicans in Congress and on Republicans in this country. Why? Because you can't "Make America Great Again" by destroying democracy. And he hates democracy. It's a built-in for a number of trashy people who get wealthy. Look at Zuckerberg. Look at Bezos. They're garbage trash. Both know better and, during Chump's first term, did better. They weren't huge defenders of freedom (though Bezos pretended he was and cheap whores like Meryl Streep lied to make him come off like one). But they didn't join him in attacking our country. Now they have. Political conversion?
No, trashy greed. They're his partners in crime because one hand greases the other.
Chump will be out of office by January 2029.
Donald Chump made Florida his base because NYC society never welcomed him and never will. But he could find a home in all the other trash that moved from New York to Florida. Most of them, like him, that moved in disgrace. They're 'eccentrics' and 'oddballs.' They're Donald's people -- people who are so disgusting that all the money in the world can't wash the stink off him.
And history won't let Chump shake off his own stink. David Smith (GUARDIAN) explains:
Wendy Schiller, a political scientist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, said: “He promised to secure the border but the deportations have gone too far. City after city, community after community has expressed frustration and dismay at the tactics.”
Trump had also promised to fix the economy but his signature legislation, the “one big, beautiful bill” – rebranded as the Working Families Tax Cut Act – will, critics say, transfer wealth from the poor to the rich and strips healthcare from millions of people. Meanwhile the president’s disruptive policy centred on aggressive tariffs that caused market volatility and fuelled higher prices for consumers.
Schiller added: “The greatest self-inflicted wound that the president has brought on himself and the Republicans are the tariffs. In the first administration, they were primarily directed at China and you can make an argument about that.
“In this administration they are so much broader and more sweeping and it’s showing in supply chains, in consumer purchasing, in pricing, in every corner of people’s lives. Whether it’s a supermarket or it’s holiday gifting or whatever it is, they’re feeling it.”
Trump’s appointment of Robert F Kennedy Jr helped fan anti-vaccine sentiment, leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases and a politicisation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He withdrew the US from the Paris agreement and systematically dismantled climate science infrastructure.
At his political zenith, Trump’s embrace of authoritarianism appeared unstoppable. He quickly fired 17 independent inspectors general in apparent violation of federal law. He ordered the justice department to investigate perceived enemies including James Comey, the former director of the FBI, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general.
The administration targeted law firms that represented adversaries, stripping contracts and security clearances to extract multimillion-dollar settlements. Billions in federal funding were frozen for universities including Harvard and Columbia, leveraging antisemitism and DEI policies to force changes in curricula and leadership.
Trump also pursued an aggressive campaign against mainstream media, suing news organisations such as CBS/Paramount, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, pushing the Federal Communications Commission to revoke broadcast licences and restricting access for some outlets while promoting “Maga media”.
It reads like a rap sheet -- and it reads like that because he is a convicted crook and because he truly is enemy of democracy. And that's why his popularity fades just as his health does. Before our eyes, the braggart lose his hold and that's one thing we can all be grateful for as 2025 draws to a close.
Again, how did you spend your holiday because there was nothing peace & joy about how Chump spend his. He continued his attacks on immigrants and those mistaken for them. It's part of his campaign to spread hate all over the country. And his hate campaign was not put on hold for Christmas. Malcolm Ferguson (THE NEW REPUBLIC) reports:
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in Yakima, Washington, spent Christmas Eve arresting a man in a Walmart parking lot—even taking his already purchased groceries for themselves.
Four ICE officers in masks and tactical gear can be seen in a video surrounding a man with a car full of food while he loads it into his car. A woman watching the arrest asked ICE if she could take down the phone number of the man’s wife to let her know her husband had been detained. The ICE agents refused.
“No, guess he should’ve complied,” an agent said.
The agents then start to divvy up the man’s groceries, as the bystander tells them they had previously detained and deported her husband.
Having kidnapped the man at Walmart, they then divvy up the man's groceries? Guess that's how the knuckle dragging gestapo decides who to harass -- based on who leaves the store with the most groceries. That's disgusting and a real world of justice would find those ICE agents behind bars for a long time. It's theft, don't pretend it's anything else.
And the American people are rejecting Chump's hate. Joe Kohut (ABC NEWS 16) reports from Pennsylvania:
Dozens of tiny points of light illuminated a street corner in downtown Danville.
Friends and strangers held candles in solidarity for Sergio Chavez Jimenez, a business owner detained this weekend by agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Jimenez, 46, wasn't born in Danville, but they made him their own.
"What we were promised is that immigration enforcement would go after criminals...hardened criminals, murderers and rapists and drug dealers," said Trevor Finn, a Montour County commissioner who has been in contact with members of Jimenez's family. "What has happened instead is that they're picking up somebody like Sergio, (who) doesn't make this a worse place but makes this a better place for us."
"He's the type of person we really, really need to keep around here."
Jimenez is the proprietor of Amigos Pizzeria & Mexican Restaurant, a Mill Street eatery he opened around five years ago. Brought to the country from Mexico as a young boy, he's worked to try to get legal status. Now nearing 50, he's married, a father and a business owner, Finn said.
And they are rejecting it across the country. In New Haven? Richard Chumney (NEW HAVEN REGISTER) notes:
Billboards protesting Avelo Airline's contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport people who enter the U.S. illegally have returned to Interstate 95 after a legal battle.
The signs are located near Tweed New Haven Airport and urge travelers to reconsider flying with Avelo while the airline operates ICE deportation charter flights for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The signs are part of a larger nationwide campaign protesting deportation flights and the airlines that participate in the ongoing effort. On Sunday, demonstrators gathered at Tweed to protest Avelo’s contract with ICE.
The billboards were created earlier this month by Seth Miller, an aviation journalist and state lawmaker from New Hampshire. Miller said he funded the signs with his own money and through public donations.
“U.S. government agencies are snatching people off the street, moving them multiple times to evade the judicial process and putting them on planes before they can appeal,” Miller said in a statement. “Avelo is actively complicit in this process, placing detainees in dangerous environments."
People are outraged by what's happening and "people" include judges who know the law. One example there, Maxine Bernstein (THE OREGONIAN) reports:
A federal judge earlier this month ordered the immediate release of a Beaverton man who had been detained by federal officers when he was leaving his apartment to go to work.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers were targeting another man they believed was in the country illegally based on a nearly two decade-old photo and had staked out the Beaverton apartment for hours when Fernando Pichardo Medina emerged from the complex. Pichardo Medina got into his work van, went back to his apartment to grab his coffee and breakfast, returned to his truck, then realized he forgot his headphones.
“He sounds like me on most mornings,” U.S. District Judge Michael J. McShane said.
Ashleigh Fields (THE HILL) notes:
Former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh (Ill.) on Friday decried the Trump administration’s immigration raids that were carried out throughout the Christmas holiday.
“I did my best yesterday to turn off the news from Christmas Eve on and not think about anything and not tweet anything,” Walsh, a frequent critic of President Trump who became a Democrat earlier this year, said on “The Social Contract” podcast.
“But I scrolled a few times and ICE, those masked federal agents, were out on Christmas Day detaining immigrants. They were out on Christmas Eve detaining immigrants. What the f—?” he added.
Exactly Jacob Crosse (WSWS) reports:
The claim that the operation targets “criminals” is a lie. ICE has shifted away from jail-based arrests to mass workplace raids at car washes, construction sites and food processing plants. Immigrants are targeted whose only “crime” is seeking work.
Political opposition is also being criminalized. Yaa’kub Vijandre, a longtime Dallas resident and DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) recipient, has been detained for nearly three months and faces deportation to a country he has not lived in since childhood. His “crime” is refusing to become an FBI informant and continuing to speak out against US imperialism and the genocide in Gaza. If this is grounds for detention, it is grounds for the persecution of anyone.
Those seized are routinely denied basic constitutional rights. The recent CBS 60 Minutes investigation, which was pulled from airing, documented the illegal rendition of nearly 300 immigrants to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison under the Alien Enemies Act. They were held for months without lawyers under conditions amounting to torture. Similar conditions have been documented at detention facilities across Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, New Jersey and Louisiana.
What is being built is a nationwide deportation machine. ICE acting director Todd Lyons has openly stated that the goal of the Trump administration is to become the “Amazon” of deportations: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”
Overcrowding and neglect have already produced a surge in detainee deaths. At least 30 immigrants have died in ICE custody this year, several under highly suspicious circumstances. Earlier this month over a 4-day span, four immigrants died in ICE for-profit prisons.
The following sites updated:
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