Raw Story

A resurfaced memo from the Justice Department may compromise President Donald Trump’s latest ploy to save face amid growing scrutiny into his past ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is currently facing a firestorm – largely of his own making – over his past ties with Epstein, who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and his subsequent stonewalling on releasing files on the disgraced financier.

In an effort to quash outrage from his most loyal supporters, Trump has moved to unseal grand jury testimony related to Epstein – a move that has already been denied by the courts – and has directed Justice Department officials to meet with Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking victims for Epstein.

Trump has not ruled out pardoning Maxwell, with some experts theorizing that the president may order her release in exchange for damaging information on political opponents such as former President Bill Clinton who, like Trump, also had close ties with Epstein.

However, a 2022 sentencing memo from the DOJ may have already poured cold water on that idea. In it, officials suggested that any testimony from Maxwell couldn’t be trusted.

“If anything stands out from the defendant’s sentencing submission, it is her complete failure to address her offense conduct and her utter lack of remorse,” the memo reads.

“Instead of showing even a hint of acceptance of responsibility, the defendant makes a desperate attempt to cast blame wherever else she can.”

Comments from several high-profile Republicans on Maxwell may also compromise Trump’s potential plan to pardon Maxwell as a way out of what some have described as a “MAGA revolt.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said over the weekend that he believed Maxwell’s 20-year sentence was “a pittance,” and that she should instead be serving a life sentence, “at least,” The Daily Beast reported. Alyssa Griffin, a former Trump White House aide, said “there’s a special place in hell for women who would help men abuse younger women,” speaking with CNN.

And former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger suggested that pardoning Maxwell would be impossible for Trump to spin to his base as anything less than an effort to conceal culpability as it relates to Epstein.

“She knows about Trump – and if Trump pardons her, she won’t talk,” Kinzinger said, The Daily Beast reported. “How are you going to spin this one? Do we care about child sex trafficking or don’t we? Answer that, guys.”

The city manager of Kerrville, Texas vented his frustrations at Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in private messages, KSAT reported — including calling her a derogatory nickname.

The messages from Dalton Rice, who handles the day to day operations of the city on behalf of Mayor Joe Herring Jr., reveal a local government struggling to get back on its feet amid a horrific crisis that killed over 100 people in the surrounding area.

"On July 5, Rice took part in an afternoon press conference in Kerrville with federal, state and local leaders to update the public on search and rescue efforts," said the report. "Hours after the press conference ended, a city staffer texted Rice, 'Just saw you met Homeland Barbi, how is she?!?!?!'"

In a text response, Rice wrote, “Beahahaha basically homeland Barbie.”

Noem has come under criticism for the federal response to the crisis, particularly after reports that because of rule changes to when spending contracts needed to be signed off on personally by the secretary, first responders from the Federal Emergency Management Agency were delayed around three days.

Other issues have been scrutinized at every level of government, including the fact that state and local officials in Texas were unwilling to spend the money for a siren system along the Guadalupe River where the deadliest parts of the flood occurred, and the fact that President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force pushed out a vital emergency coordination officer from the National Weather Service.

Documents obtained by The Guardian and reported on Monday further detail how the Trump Justice Department has been forced to drop cases against protesters in Los Angeles because of false claims made by federal immigration agents.

The Guardian's review of federal law enforcement files revealed that "out of nine 'assault' and 'impeding' felony cases the Justice Department filed immediately after the start of the protests and promoted by the attorney general, Pam Bondi, prosecutors dismissed seven of them soon after filing the charges," the newspaper reported.

"In reports that led to the detention and prosecution of at least five demonstrators, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents made false statements about the sequence of events and misrepresented incidents captured on video," The Guardian continued.

"One DHS agent accused a protester of shoving an officer, when footage appeared to show the opposite: the officer forcefully pushed the protester. One indictment named the wrong defendant, a stunning error that has jeopardized one of the government's most high-profile cases."

The new reporting builds on a story published last week by the Los Angeles Times, which detailed how interim U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California Bill Essayli has struggled to secure grand jury indictments against Los Angeles demonstrators who have taken part in protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in recent weeks.

"Although his office filed felony cases against at least 38 people for alleged misconduct that either took place during last month's protests or near the sites of immigration raids, many have been dismissed or reduced to misdemeanor charges," the Times reported.

Cristine Soto DeBerry, a former California state prosecutor who currently works as director of the criminal justice reform group Prosecutors Alliance Action, told The Guardian that "when I see felonies dismissed, that tells me either the federal officers have filed affidavits that are not truthful and that has been uncovered, or U.S. attorneys reviewing the cases realize the evidence does not support the charges."

"It seems this is a way to detain people, hold them in custody, instill fear, and discourage people from exercising their First Amendment rights," DeBerry added.

I have no doubt that Zohran Mamdani, upset winner over the heavily favored former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the New York City Democratic mayoral primary, would have greatly preferred that his much better financed opponent would graciously accept the will of his party’s voters, thereby allowing the Democratic nominee to sail on through the final election in November as is generally the case. And so would we, his supporters, all.

Instead, Mamdani finds himself actively opposed by elements of just about every significant anti-democratic, anti-working class faction in American politics. As the Talking Heads song put it, this race “ain’t no disco; this ain’t no fooling around.” Should Mamdani’s campaign prevail over all of them, the victory will realign the nation’s politics more profoundly than anything since the first Bernie Sanders presidential campaign — a shift the nation is obviously in desperate need of.

On the one side we have a candidate arguing the need to pull out all the stops, to try all avenues — increased rent control and housing construction, reduced transit fares, city-owned supermarkets, higher taxes on great wealth, and so on down the line — in an effort to allow the city’s working class to remain the city’s working class, rather than become a stream of economic refugees who can no longer afford to live there.

On the other side we’ve got a magpie’s cast of characters, united only by their dread of the prospect of a mayor siding with the struggling many, while openly acknowledging that the overprivileged few — the billionaires who think that the city owes it all to them — are not the saviors they think themselves to be, but are actually part and parcel of the problem.

First up in the cast, of course, is the Republican Party, nominally in the person of its candidate Curtis Sliwa, founder of the unarmed crime prevention group the Guardian Angels.

Sliwa, however, is not expected to be a factor in the final outcome. Naturally, the party’s interest in the race is primarily represented — as it is in all things — by our intermittently coherent president, who has fulminated about arresting Mamdani, revoking his citizenship, cutting off federal funding to the city, and even taking direct control of it, a threat he was bound to make sooner or later to some local government not to his taste.

Then we have the Democrats more interested in corporate cash than in the working class — unfortunately a rather large sector of the party — along with those troubled by the fact that Mamdani opposes Israel’s ongoing obliteration of Gaza, two groups with significant overlap.

This dominant wing of the party is actually directly involved in this race to an unusual degree by dint of the fact that the minority leaders of both branches of Congress — Rep. Hakeem Jeffries and Sen. Chuck Schumer — are Brooklyn voters.

So are they going to pull the lever for their party’s nominee in November? We don’t know. Neither has actually opposed Mamdani, but the failure of the party’s leaders to endorse him thus far is without recent precedent. Since Schumer was recently pleased to be seen smiling in a group photo with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, you can see the problem. Others have been outright hostile. Democrat Laura Gillen, representative of a New York city-adjacent district, for instance, has characterized Mamdani as “a threat to my constituents.”

Next we have the independent candidates themselves, who have now come to seem more like anti-Mamdani place holders, even though one of them is actually the current mayor of New York.

That would be Eric Adams, elected to the position as a Democrat, who declined to enter his party’s primary after running into a few bumps in the road during his term of office. The problems were indictment on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, soliciting campaign contributions from foreign nationals, and soliciting and accepting a bribe; and a subsequent pardon by the ubiquitous Donald Trump.

The other major one is Andrew Cuomo, one-time Democratic governor of New York, forced to resign in the face of numerous charges of sexual harassment, and loser of the Democratic primary, despite the backing of independent expenditure committees spending more than $25 million — the heaviest spending in the history of New York City politics.

Cuomo has decided that the voters deserve a second chance to make up for their error in not choosing him the first time and declared that this time “It’s all or nothing. We either win or even I will move to Florida.”

His campaign has subsequently declared this was a joke — the Florida part, not the second shot. But there is precedent: Trump decamped there after the state’s voters rejected him and certainly he could fix the ex-governor up with something at Mar-a-Lago. It’d only be fair after everything he’s done for Eric Adams.

And last, but certainly not least, we have the billionaires, starting with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, never one to shy from putting his money where his mouth is — he spent over $1 billion on his own four-month presidential campaign in 2020 (he won American Samoa) — dropped $8.3 million on the Cuomo effort.

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman and William Lauder, executive chairman of The Estée Lauder Companies, were in for $500,000. Expedia chairman Barry Diller, Netflix chairman Reed Hastings, and hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb were down for $250,000. Alice Walton, of the Walmart family, contributed $100,000. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin was in for $50,000.

Ackman, Loeb, and Griffin were 2024 Trump supporters, by the way.

And reinforcements are on the way, with Hamptons polo patrons Kenneth and Maria Fishel of Renaissance Properties lining up new billionaires — in this case for Eric Adams — including grocery (Gristedes and D’Agostino) and real estate mogul John Catsimatidis, himself a former (Republican) candidate for New York City mayor.

As Kenneth Fishel told Fortune, “This is about keeping New York vibrant, keeping it free from socialism, and keeping it safe.”

At this point, this story might sound like something out of that recent Francis Ford Coppola movie that no one went to see, but it’s what’s actually happening.

(Personal disclosure: As one who was once slightly famous long ago, when elected to the Massachusetts Legislature at 32 as a self-described socialist — said to be the first since the Sacco and Vanzetti era — I am wildly jealous. Reading the news on election night, I was literally moved to tears of joy. And I don’t imagine I’m the only one feeling envious.

The upshot of all this? This is our race.

Who’s the we in “our”? Anyone who feels that we the people have to find a way to wrest control of the economic future of this country from the likes of Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, all of the above-named billionaires, and the ones we don’t know. Whether it be knocking, calling, texting, posting, giving a buck — even if just that — all of us should give this race at least a bit of our attention. Just think of how sweet it will be to beat that whole crew.

• Tom Gallagher is a former Massachusetts State Representative and the author of 'The Primary Route: How the 99% Take On the Military Industrial Complex.' He lives in San Francisco.

Pressing the Trump administration to explain its rationale for allowing federal agents to don masks and drive unmarked vehicles when carrying out immigration raids and arrests, two Democratic members of Congress on Friday pointed to numerous times in recent months when authorities working under President Donald Trump have eroded "public trust and fundamental constitutional rights" by concealing their identities.

"In Los Angeles, agents were photographed in June 2025 wearing face covers during residential raids," wrote Reps. Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Summer Lee (D-PA) in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. "In Chicago, witnesses reported masked agents detaining individuals without identification. Similarly, in New York City, then-mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested by masked federal agents."

The two progressive lawmakers sit on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, with Garcia serving as ranking member and Lee serving as ranking member of the Federal Law Enforcement Subcommittee. They reminded Noem that the panel has "broad authority to investigate 'any matter' at 'any time' under House Rule X" as they requested documents regarding Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protocols "governing agent identification and accountability during operations in civilian settings."

DHS, said Garcia and Lee, has been "in direct violation" of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution as it has allowed ICE and other federal agents to conceal their identities and the agencies they work for while raiding workplaces and residential neighborhoods, and waiting outside courtrooms and daycare centers to arrest immigrants.

"This causes a dangerous erosion of public trust, due process, and transparency in law enforcement. It also makes it nearly impossible for individuals to determine whether they are being detained by legitimate law enforcement agents or unlawfully abducted," wrote Garcia and Lee. "These tactics contradict long-standing democratic principles such as the public's right to accountability from those who enforce the law and pave the way for increased crime, making our communities less safe."

The lawmakers noted that federal agents' use of masks and unmarked cars has allowed some people to leverage "the opacity and fear surrounding immigration operations to commit serious crimes," such as an armed man who entered an auto repair shop in Philadelphia wearing a tactical vest labeled "Security Enforcement Agent" and restrained a female employee before stealing $1,000. Another man in Houston recently claimed to be an ICE agent as he used his vehicle to block another driver's car and stole $1,800 and a Guatemalan ID from the victim.

"These cases starkly illustrate how the use of masks, unmarked vehicles, and minimal identification by actual ICE agents does not just erode trust—it effectively hands bad actors a roadmap to exploit vulnerable communities," said Lee and Garcia.

In a statement, Lee accused federal agents, with the Trump administration's approval, of "cowardly concealing their identities behind masks."

"Federal agents under the Trump administration are operating like a secret police force on U.S. soil. These agents must identify themselves," said Lee. "Every person—regardless of immigration status—has a constitutional right to due process and protection from unlawful searches and seizures. These state-sanctioned fear tactics are opening the door for vulnerable communities to be abused and must not become the norm."

Lee and Garcia also noted that lawyers representing ICE and the Trump administration have begun concealing their identities by refusing to give their names when appearing in court to argue immigration cases.

The lawmakers quoted one immigration law expert who told The Intercept last week, "Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [DHS], the individual cannot be held accountable."

Judge James Boasberg indicated this week he may move forward with disciplinary proceedings for the Justice Department over a previous matter, a move flagged for its implications by a legal expert.

Boasberg was the judge who demanded that the Department of Homeland Security stop the deportation plans of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT prison. If they were in the air, the judge demanded they be turned around. If they landed, the judge said, the 140 men could not leave the plane and would have to be returned.

DHS ignored the ruling. At the time, Boasberg probed to determine who made the decisions in the matter and proceeded with his own questioning regarding who would be held in contempt for defying his ruling. In April, two judges above Boasberg, however, who were nominated by President Donald Trump, the other judge who voted in opposition was appointed by President Barack Obama.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that it sought to give “sufficient opportunity” for the judge to consider the government’s appeal. They claimed any contempt proceeding “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion.”

“In the absence of an appealable order or any clear and indisputable right to relief that would support mandamus, there is no ground for an administrative stay,” wrote Judge Cornelia Pillard in her opposition.

In June, Boasberg ruled that Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport the men was illegal, and he gave the administration a week to return the individuals. Last week, Trump used 250 of the men from CECOT to bring 10 jailed Americans in Venezuela back to the United States. The group included one man who was convicted of killing three people with an ax.

That has remained on hold over the past several months; however, on Thursday, Boasberg said that he may initiate proceedings again.

In the months-long pause, Justice Department prosecutor Erez Reuveni, a 15-year veteran of the department, blew the whistle on conversations had at the time and instructions that came straight from the top to ignore the judge's orders.

According to Reuveni's affidavit, emails and text messages, Bove told staff in the DOJ that the Trump administration should consider telling the courts “f--- you” if they make any rulings on the deportations.

One set of text messages between Reuveni, his colleagues, and his supervisor, August Flentje, all referenced Bove's words.

The reason all the evidence has been sent to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee is that Bove has been appointed by Trump to serve as an appellate court judge. The Senate left for the August Recess without voting on the nomination.

Just Security co-editor-in-chief Ryan Goodman pointed to Boasberg's renewed interest in contempt proceedings, noting, "If you don't see the connection to Emil Bove, you're missing the extra import of this."

Boasberg wants the details on the flights, including the timeline. He'll be able to compare that to the whistleblower documents to flesh out what transpired.