[This article first appeared at Common Dreams on August 27, 2025.]

A Timeline of Trump’s Futile Epstein Diversions

by Steven J. Harper

Drip, drip, drip…

For months, Trump has tried to divert public attention from the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislane Maxwell files. But he can’t shake the story, and it keeps getting worse.

The Reversal

Trump campaigned for the presidency on the promise to release all of the files relating to Epstein’s sex trafficking in minors. To supercharge his MAGA base, he fueled conspiracy theories that the files contained something sinister involving prominent Democrats.

February 2025: Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, told a Fox News interviewer that Epstein’s client list was sitting on her desk, awaiting her review before its release.

May: Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche informed Trump that his name appeared in the Epstein files, The New York Times later reported.

July 7: FBI Director Kash Patel – who had also pushed conspiracy theories about the files during Trump’s campaign – issued a two-page memo stating that there was no Epstein client list and that the Justice Department would not release any additional materials relating to the matter.

July 16: Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Maurene Comey was fired. Comey was a lead prosecutor in the investigation and prosecution of Epstein and his co-conspirator, Ghislane Maxwell. She was also the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey and chief of the Violent and Organized Crime Unit. The memo gave no reason for Comey’s abrupt termination.

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[This article first appeared at Common Dreams on August 19, 2025.]

by Steven J. Harper

President Donald Trump and Republicans face a daunting challenge: How to preserve power in the wake of their wildly unpopular policies? Their strategy is to intensify the GOP’s decades-long quest to limit voter participation. Selecting the voters likely to cast ballots for them is far better than letting all voters select their leaders.

Trump has taken the strategy to a whole new level. And he’s doing it out of fear and desperation.

Fighting History

During midterm elections, the president’s party loses seats in Congress. In Trump’s first term, Republicans lost 40 seats in the House in 2018. In 2010, President Barack Obama’s Democrats lost 63.

The exceptions are few and far between. In the aftermath of 9/11, President George W. Bush’s GOP gained eight House seats in 2002, but then lost 30 in 2006. In 1998, President Bill Clinton’s Democrats gained five seats, but that didn’t offset the 52 seats that they had lost in 1994. In all but three midterm elections from 1934 to 1994 – from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton – the president’s party lost House seats. It did a little better in the Senate, gaining seats in only six of 23 midterm elections since 1934.

With Republicans holding a slim 219-212 majority heading into the 2026 midterms, Trump has every reason to panic at what awaits him in 15 months.

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[This article first appeared at Common Dreams on August14, 2025.]

by Steven J. Harper

When we left convicted sex offender Ghislane Maxwell, she had just received several remarkable gifts from the Trump administration.

First, while serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking minors as Jeffrey Epstein’s procurer, she got an unprecedented meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the second highest official in the Justice Department. Blanche was also President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer in the hush-money trial resulting in his 34 felony convictions. That such a meeting even occurred astonished legal observers across the political spectrum.

Second, only a week later, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons transferred Maxwell out of the Florida Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, a minimum security prison with horrendous conditions. Her new home is the Federal Prison Camp in Bryan, Texas – a “Club Fed” that houses white-collar criminals and celebrities who have far better living quarters and relative freedom of movement.

The Plot Thickens

Now independent journalist and podcast host Allison Gill (“Mueller, She Wrote” on Bluesky) reports, “I have Ghislaine Maxwell’s security score, custody level, transfer code, public safety factor, and sex offender waiver.”’

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My August 5, 2025 interview with Ian Masters on Background Briefing is available here: https://www.backgroundbriefing.org

[This article first appeared on Common Dreams on August 3, 2025.]

by Steven J. Harper

On July 24 and 25, convicted sex offender Ghislane Maxwell met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche – the number two official in the Department of Justice. At the time, Maxwell was three years into her 20-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institute in Tallahassee, Florida (FCI Tallahassee). A week later, the Bureau of Prisons – an agency of the Department of Justice – confirmed that she’d been transferred to the Federal Prison Camp at Bryan, Texas (FPC Bryan).

It’s not a pardon, but it’s a big improvement in her quality of life. 

On the outside, it’s the difference between double-fenced barbed wire and a wrought iron fence akin to that of a gated community. On the inside, the differences are more dramatic.

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