Chump's unqualified personal attorney Todd Blanche has been nominated to be Attorney General. His confirmation hearings are supposed to take place July 15th and July 16th. It's expected most Republicans will support him and, on the Democrat side, all but John Fetterman will oppose him. There are 51 Republican senators in the Senate now and 2 independents and 45 Democrats. Putting the 2 independents with the 44 Democrats (not including Fetterman in the group of Democrats because he's a closet Republican who will likely vote for Blanche) brings it to 46 versus 52 Taking one out for Mitch McConnell whose health has sidelined him and it's 46 to 51. If three Republicans are persuaded not to vote for him that would be 49 against and 48 in favor of Blanche. That's if the nomination comes to a floor vote. It can die in the Committee, it only takes on Republican to kill the nomination.
Based largely on his tough cross-examinations of FBI Director Kash Patel last year, Jeffrey Epstein’s “Minor Victim No. 1” is pressing U.S. Sen. John Kennedy to oppose the confirmation of Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general.
“I feel like he’s somewhat, you know, starting to feel like that there’s something much bigger going on here. And I think he wants to find out,” Marina Lacerda said of Kennedy, R-Madisonville, in an interview.
Lacerda and 19 other survivors wrote in a letter that they were concerned that Blanche was among senior administration figures who adopted a strategy of minimizing the Epstein files instead of choosing to pursue “investigative leads and try to figure out what actually happened. These revelations confirm our worst fears about the administration prioritizing political expediency over justice for survivors and truth for the American people.”
[. . .]
The survivors need one Republican senator on their side to kill Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will hear from the nominee on Wednesday and Thursday. Kennedy is a member of that committee.
President Donald Trump is trying to ram through his controversial assistant attorney general, Todd Blanche, to be America’s official attorney general — and despite their claims to independence, it appears many Senate Republicans are prepared to go along with him.
“Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican undecided about Todd Blanche’s nomination as permanent attorney general, drew a red line last month: He would vote no if Mr. Blanche was too soft on the rioters who had ransacked the Capitol on Jan. 6,” reported The New York Times’ Glenn Thrust and Alan Feuer on Sunday. “Soon after, Mr. Tillis, a moderate on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he had a ‘positive predisposition’ after meeting with Mr. Blanche, despite the fact that the acting attorney general had recently signed off on a $1.8 billion fund that could have been funneled to those who stormed Congress.”
In general, the Tillis anecdote reflects the broader sentiment among Senate Republicans. Since the start of Trump’s second term, GOP lawmakers have often expressed skepticism or even outright opposition to Trump’s more controversial picks — from FBI Director Kash Patel to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth — before ultimately lining up in lockstep behind Trump’s choices and deferring to his wishes.
The Epstein scandal refuses to go away. Blanche's refusal to follow the act of Congress mandating that the Justice Dept release all of the Epstein files should make him a "no" for every member of the Senate regardless of party. He's refusing to follow the law. He's spitting on all the members of Congress who voted in favor of the Epstein act (all but one member of Congress voted for the act, US House Rep Clay Higgins voted against it). They should be rallying together to demonstrate their power.
In other Epstein news, THE EASTERN HERALD reports the response to a witness from last month, Lesley Groff, questioning her claims:
Marina Lacerda remembers the cash: hundreds of dollars in a long white envelope, handed to her directly by Lesley Groff. She remembers Groff asking about new girls sent to Epstein – what they looked like, where they were from, how old they were. She says she met Groff in person more than once. On June 9, Groff told the House Oversight Committee under oath that she had never met any of the young women who visited Jeffrey Epstein. Six survivors are now telling Congress that is not true.
CNN reported Thursday on accounts from six Epstein survivors – four of whom spoke on the record – who say Groff’s sworn testimony contradicted three specific aspects of what they experienced: personal meetings, direct cash payments, and handling of their identification documents. The House Oversight Committee has confirmed it is “currently reviewing Ms. Groff’s transcript against the available evidence,” the kind of language congressional investigators deploy when a perjury referral is under consideration, though no referral has been formally made.
Groff spent 18 years as Epstein’s personal assistant and was named in his 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement alongside Ghislaine Maxwell and others – a deal that extended immunity to co-conspirators and has been the subject of sustained criticism from victims and legal advocates ever since. She has never been charged. When she testified before the House Oversight Committee last month, she described Epstein as a man who concealed his crimes from his own staff. “For 18 years, I worked for Dr. Jekyll but was never permitted to see the true Mr. Hyde,” she told lawmakers.
The survivors describe a fundamentally different picture of her role. Sharlene Rochard said she met Groff multiple times at different Epstein properties. Lara Blume McGee told CNN she encountered her at least twice inside Epstein’s New York City townhouse – a location Groff told the committee she had been barred from entering between 2001 and 2013.
In other news, Robert Davis (RAW STORY) notes:
President Donald Trump's Department of Justice just made a damning admission about some key files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case that the agency possesses, one that could backfire spectacularly, according to analysts.
Kel McClanahan, executive director of public interest law firm National Security Counselors, and Allison Gill, founder of MSW Media, discussed their ongoing lawsuit to retrieve training manuals the Trump DOJ created to guide agents through the redaction process for the Epstein files during a new episode of Gill's podcast, "The Breakdown." Gill noted that the DOJ made a "stunning" revelation in its latest denial of her company's open records request to get the training documents, one that could put the DOJ in legal jeopardy.
Gill noted that a recent trove of Epstein files obtained by Bloomberg's Jason Leopold revealed a PowerPoint slide deck she believed could be the sought-after redaction training materials. So, Gill and McClanahan filed their own Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the PowerPoint.
She characterized the DOJ's denial of the request as, "We have the records, but we're not giving them to you." That appears to violate the section of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that required the DOJ to publish any documents concerning the alteration of the Epstein files themselves.
The DoJ that Todd Blanche is the acting head of currently can't keep their responses straight. Mary Papenfuss (DAILY BEAST) notes:
An embarrassing social media blunder briefly made it appear as if the Justice Department was admitting to impeding the only active criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
The apparent self-own came after journalist and lawyer Aaron Parnas posted on X that “The Trump Administration is impeding the only active criminal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.”
DOJ Rapid Response replied with two words: “We are.”
The response immediately appeared to validate the accusation before linking to a “fact check” claiming accusations about a lack of DOJ cooperation on the Epstein files were “demonstrably false.” The apparent bungle quickly drew ridicule online.
The DOJ told The Daily Beast that it was responding “we are” to Parnas’ first comment in his tweet that “not enough people are talking about” the issue.
The exchange stemmed from allegations by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who has accused the Justice Department of withholding unredacted files related to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe, where sex-trafficked women and girls are believed to have been housed and assaulted.
Former US House Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene has revealed that Chump told her she had to change her vote on the Epstein Act because it would impact his friends, it would detroy them if the files were released. Hmmm. Sharon Zang (TRUTHOUT) reports:
Billionaires with ties to Jeffrey Epstein have spent nearly $1.6 billion on influencing U.S. elections since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision unleashed a deluge of such spending on the electoral system, a new report finds, demonstrating the vast power over politics held by the so-called Epstein class.
Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund reveals in a new report Thursday that 40 billionaires and billionaire families with ties to Epstein have injected over $1.57 billion into U.S. elections since 2010.
According to the group’s analysis, 84 percent of this spending, or over $1.3 billion, went toward Republicans or conservative causes.
This is despite a roughly even split between Republicans and Democrats among the billionaires, which include people who formerly donated to the Clinton family. Only 7 percent went toward Democrats and aligned causes, while the remaining money went toward lobbying efforts that target members of both parties like AI and Israel.
The report includes spending from people like President Donald Trump, Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, Elon Musk, current U.S. ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack, Jared Kushner, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, among many other prominent figures across the business, tech, and sports sectors. The ties to the convicted child sex offender range from mentions in Epstein’s black book or in the Epstein files to extensive business and personal relationships, like Trump’s reported close friendship with Epstein.
Are you grasping why Chump went into a panic? Are you getting that Blanche is supposed to be working for the American people but is instead attempting to protect a handful of billionaires?
Epstein isn't the only crime Chump is covering up. Sabrina Haake reports:
House Democrats on the Natural Resources Committee have released a report describing how the White House cheated the American public on its 250th birthday. It outlines interim findings that the Trump organization put together a shell company to supplant the Congressionally-created commission, America250, with a partisan one, Freedom 250, defrauding donors and pilfering donations along the way.
In 2016, ten years in advance of the country’s 250th birthday, Congress created a nonpartisan commission called America250 to plan and orchestrate the largest commemoration in U.S. history. Its mandated purpose
was to encourage all Americans to ‘remember the nation's past,
celebrate the present, and look forward to building a promising future.’
America250 spent ten years organizing events, volunteer campaigns, and educational initiatives across all 50 states to celebrate our Semiquincentennial. America250’s slogan, “350 for 250- Engaging all 350 million Americans in celebrating our nation’s 250th anniversary,” stresses civic inclusivity devoid of politics.
But last year, after his attempts to pack America250 with loyalists were unsuccessful, Trump created a competing commission, Freedom 250, via executive order. Falsely describing Freedom 250 as the “national, non-partisan organization leading the celebration of our Nation's 250th birthday,” Freedom 250 was incorporated as an LLC in October 2025. Under the National Park Foundation, governed by a board of Trump loyalists, Freedom 250 solicited pay-to-play donations from companies with major federal contracts pending— including Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Oracle —to financially support Freedom 250 instead of America250.
The report describes how Trump demanded that his name and name-branded politics should dominate the historic celebrations. When America250 pushed back on Trump’s plan as too partisan, he supplanted the commission by creating his own.
After Freedom 250 hijacked federal planning activities, most scheduled performers withdrew from the celebration. They had agreed to perform at a national, nonpartisan concert, but cancelled when they found out it was overtly partisan. Other activities planned by Trump’s Freedom 250 included the very on-brand Military Parade for Trump’s birthday and this year's White House UFC cage fight, along with the controversial Great American State Fair. The latter featured partisan exhibits complete with a confederate flag; the 16-day event caused extensive damage to the lawns and the National Mall. Meanwhile, Freedom 250 continues the Trump-centric assault, planning construction on his 250-foot-tall “triumphal arch.”
Trump illegally billed his July 4 culminating speech on the National Mall as a “TRUMP RALLY”, making himself—not the nation, not our history— the central figure of America’s only 250th birthday celebration. Trump’s rally, replete with partisan rhetoric and fearmongering about Democrats, concluded with “the largest fireworks display ever,” costing taxpayers an estimated $45 million.
He robbed the country of the right to celebrate our 250th anniversary. That moment will never come again. He made it all about himself and he grifted on it to steal money.
In other troubling news for Chump, WONDERWALL reports:
A growing number of Republican lawmakers are breaking with the Trump administration over its mass deportation strategy as new polling shows most Americans now view immigration as a positive force and support for reducing immigration has fallen sharply, including among Republicans.
The dissent extends beyond isolated criticism. Reps. Carlos Gimenez of Florida and Mike Lawler of New York have publicly urged the administration to reconsider its approach after the Supreme Court allowed the White House to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian and Syrian migrants.
Gimenez told The Hill
that deporting Haitians to a country still in crisis would be “a huge
mistake,” adding that TPS “was made for those seeking a better life but
also getting away from difficult situations.” He also argued the
designation should be extended to Venezuelans following recent deadly
earthquakes. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine separately urged Trump to
“reconsider” ending TPS.
Lawler noted that roughly one-third of the more than 350,000 Haitian TPS recipients work in the U.S. healthcare system, warning on social media that “immediately shutting off TPS will create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing homes and in the I/DD community.” He has co-sponsored bipartisan legislation with Rep. Laura Gillen to extend TPS protections and urged the Senate to take up the measure.
Let's wind down with this from Senator Alex Padilla's office:
U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ranking Member of the Senate Rules Committee with jurisdiction over federal elections, and Representative Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.-25), Ranking Member of the Committee on House Administration, released the following statement following the Trump Administration’s illegal firing of the Democratic Commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — just weeks after the conservative Supreme Court’s unprecedented decision to upend decades of executive power to appease the President — and the resignation of the remaining Republican Commissioner, which leaves the EAC without any leadership less than four months before Election Day 2026:
“Here we go again. President Trump is trying to dismantle yet another independent guardrail of our democracy designed to keep elections fair and secure. Purging commissioners just months before the midterm elections and further gutting support for our state and local elections officials is a blatant part of his plan to politicize our elections and enable more unlawful and dangerous election interference. Trump continues to double down on his efforts to erode trust in our elections, undermine independent oversight, and further his Administration’s attempt to ‘take over’ elections. Americans deserve elections that are safe, secure, and run free from political interference — not overseen by partisan loyalists and election deniers beholden to Trump.”
Created by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002, the EAC is an evenly divided commission of four commissioners where only two may be of any one political party. Commissioners are appointed by the President, subject to advice and consent of the Senate, for up to two four-year terms and “[a] member of the Commission shall serve on the Commission after the expiration of the member’s term until the successor of such member has taken office as a member of the Commission,” according to 52 U.S.C. § 20923(b)(3)(B).
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