<....One of those documents — a Justice Department spreadsheet cataloging evidence shared with prosecutors and defense lawyers in the Epstein case — now returns a simple “page not found” when accessed online.

Archived versions of the file tell a far more complicated story.

Buried in the records was a reference to at least four FBI interviews conducted in 2019 with a woman who accused Trump of violently assaulting her when she was between 13 and 15 years old.

According to reports, a 21-page slideshow included allegations that sometime between 1983 and 1985 Trump forced the girl to perform oral sex. When she bit down on his exposed penis, he allegedly punched her in the head and kicked her out. The woman later told investigators that Epstein introduced her to Trump in 1984.

Those interviews were referenced in internal Epstein case materials but later disappeared from the publicly accessible Justice Department database.

Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger reported that FBI agents deemed the woman a “credible accuser,” though legal experts note that the designation does not mean the allegations were verified.

What the records do show is sustained investigative interest.

Justice Department materials indicate the FBI interviewed the woman at least four times in 2019 — on July 24, Aug. 7, Aug. 20 and Oct. 16. Three of those interviews were accompanied by FBI notes that were later provided to Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense team as part of standard evidence sharing.

That spreadsheet documenting the material was once publicly accessible. It isn’t anymore.

The Justice Department has not explained why the file disappeared, whether other records tied to the same case are missing or how removing public access aligns with the administration’s repeated assurances that the Epstein disclosures were complete and transparent.

Now, with Bondi facing a subpoena and Republicans beginning to fracture over the issue, the strategy that once helped contain the Epstein fallout may be reaching its breaking point.

For Trump and the attorney general who has worked aggressively to defend him, the next phase of the scandal will unfold under oath — and under far more scrutiny than before.>

Pity she didn't bite harder, lo, those many moons ago.

<Aldo Álvarez’s vans sat idle for three weeks, baking in the Cuban sun.

There was no fuel to be found in the capital for his delivery company’s fleet of 10 trucks and vans.

Power outages ran 15 hours a day. Airlines canceled flights due to inability to refuel. Hotels were shuttered. Classes canceled. Tourism dried up.

After the dramatic capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela by U.S. special forces on Jan. 3., President Donald Trump shut off the flow of oil to Cuba. An island of 10 million people plunged into darkness.

Cuba appeared to be the Trump administration’s next target for regime change – one that would realize the dreams of Cuban exiles and many Republicans for a U.S.-backed blow that would end the enduring communist regime.

But the administration’s aim for the island nation seems to be a more subtle one, despite calls from the White House for Cuba to “make very dramatic changes very soon.”

Trump, in lockstep with his Secretary of State and longtime Cuba hawk, Marco Rubio, is rolling out moves designed to make Cuba dependent on the U.S. economy – a striking about-face from decades of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

On Feb. 25, the Trump administration began allowing U.S. petroleum products, such as diesel, to be sold directly to Cuba’s private sector, circumventing the longstanding 1960 U.S. embargo.

And hoping business owners like Álvarez can play a key role.

Álvarez was buoyed recently with news that U.S. companies would be exporting diesel directly to Cuba’s small businesses – something that hadn’t been done in more than six decades. Fuel reached the nearby gas station.

The vans revved back up.

“It’s transformative,” Álvarez, founder of Mercatoria, told USA TODAY from Havana. “I can guarantee my [fuel] supply in a stable way … Without a doubt, it’s good news.”

Though Trump hasn’t hesitated to use military force in places like Venezuela and Iran, bringing change to Cuba’s repressive regime may be more akin to a slow, steady economic dependence on U.S. products – a Caribbean-style perestroika, or the gradual granting of market-like reforms that led to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Trump administration officials, including Rubio and others, have been negotiating with Cuban representatives and feel change to the communist island is imminent, Trump said at the "Shield of the Americas" Summit near Miami on March 7.

"As we achieved a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba," he said. "Cuba is in it’s last moment of life as it was."

‘A friendly takeover of Cuba’

Washington's shift in approach -- from isolating Cuba to empowering its private sector -- is huge, said Ric Herrero, executive director of the Cuba Study Group, a Washington-based non-profit policy and advocacy group.

“You have the Trump administration recognizing the Cuban private sector as both a real sector and also a key strategic partner on the ground to help relieve the humanitarian crisis," he said. “We’ve never seen that before."

Speculation on U.S. intervention in Cuba flared after recent reports that Rubio and his aides had back-channel talks with the grandson of Cuba’s aging dictator, Raul Castro.

Trump confirmed on Feb. 27 Rubio was talking with Cuban officials “at a very high level” and warned that Cuba is a weakened state. “Maybe we'll have a friendly takeover of Cuba," he mused to reporters.

On March 6, the president reiterated his focus on Cuba, telling CNN the communist island "is gonna fall pretty soon." Federal prosecutors are also looking into potentially charging members of Cuba's regime or communist party with crimes, as they did with Maduro before his ouster, according to NBC News.

Trump and Rubio will confer with like-minded Latin American leaders from countries such as Argentina and El Salvador at a March 7 summit at the president's Doral golf club, where Cuba is expected to be part of the discussion.

Then, the high-seas shootout.

The murky gunfight last week between a boat full of Cuban-Americans and the Cuban coast guard near Cuba’s northern coast last week ended in the killing of four people on the boat – including at least one U.S. citizen – and the injury and capture of six others. The incident made headlines and hatched online conspiracies as to the gunmen’s motives but is not expected to alter U.S. strategy toward Cuba.

It’s unclear how U.S. officials plan to use direct economic contact with Cuba’s private sector as a means to foment change. At a Feb. 25 summit at St. Kitts and Nevis, Rubio reiterated that U.S. officials are not expecting abrupt change in Cuba....>

<....“The status quo is unacceptable … Cuba needs to change,” he told reporters. “It doesn’t have to change all at once. It doesn’t have to change from one day to the next … But Cuba needs to change. It needs to change dramatically.”

Eric Jacobstein, former deputy assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs in the Biden administration, traveled to the island repeatedly to meet with Cuban entrepreneurs and encourage them to connect with U.S. businesses.

For Trump’s strategy to take root, Cuba’s private sector will need increased help from American businesses, particularly the banking sector, he said.

“It's critical to engage this independent Cuban private sector,” Jacobstein said. “They're independent, they're entrepreneurial … It's a group that has embraced capitalism within a failing communist system.”

The Obama opening

Ever since Fidel Castro stormed Havana with his battalion of barbudos in 1959 and later announced the country’s allegiance to communism, American presidents have sought to coerce, constrain and even kill Cuban leadership. A U.S. embargo placed in 1960 barred most U.S. companies from doing business in Cuba.

Starting in 2014, former President Barack Obama launched attempts at normalizing relations with Cuba, encouraging U.S-Cuban business ventures and even re-opening the U.S. embassy in Havana. In a historic visit to Cuba – the first for a sitting U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge 90 years earlier – Obama met with activists and entrepreneurs, bolstering the island’s fledgling private sector.

But those efforts were mostly superficial because they were not conditioned on anything, said John Kavulich, president of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, a trade group that has been dealing with Cuba since 1994.

A few U.S. businesses sought ventures on the island under Obama and cruise ships and airlines began ferrying travelers there. But the Cuban government mostly refused to reform the island’s stagnant economic system or allow direct foreign investment, he said.

Trump’s strategy is different in that it includes coercion and comes at a time when Cuba is struggling to survive, Kavulich said.

“The Cuban government does not have the elasticity to be able to play games as they did with President Obama,” he said.

‘Everyone’s deathly afraid’

A key question is how the Cuban exile community in Miami and elsewhere will react to the U.S. having such direct contact with officials and entrepreneurs on the island – something they’ve strongly opposed for years, said Michael Bustamante of the Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami.

The recent interaction between Rubio, who as a U.S. senator strongly criticized Obama’s overtures to Cuba, and Raul Castro’s grandson was a jarring turn of events, he said.

“I think it’s a surprise to many folks,” Bustamante said. “Maybe it’s a surprise to him.”

As the U.S. Cuba strategy emerged, Kavulich said his council was contacted by members of the Trump administration, asking if any executives would be willing to publicly support the president’s strategy of dealing directly with Cuba’s private sector. They suggested forming a “CEO Council for Free and Democratic Cuba,” or something akin.

Kavulich polled members and non-members. None would agree.

“Everyone's deathly afraid that the administration will be supportive in the morning and by lunchtime will be criticizing them,” Kavulich said. “So, they're just taking a ‘wait-and-see’ attitude.”

He said the strategy emerging from the White House is less perestroika and more bankruptcy filing.

“They're not liquidating, they're reorganizing,” Kavulich said of the Cuban government. “We're going to continue to see a government version of Chapter 11 reorganization.”

11,000 Cuban businesses ready to flourish

Cuban officials – their main supply of oil pinched off, images of a cuffed and blindfolded Maduro inside a U.S. assault ship just a few weeks old – so far seem to be paying attention....>

Guess what, <stalkers>? <I alone> dictate content here; stuff those whistles up yer asses!

<....At a meeting of high-ranking officials in Havana this week, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel stressed the importance of “implementing the most urgent and necessary transformations to the economic and social model,” according to Granma, Cuba’s communist party newspaper – a stark reversal from a communist island historically averse to economic reform.

He added that the initiatives "are fundamentally related to business autonomy; municipal autonomy … leveraging economic partnerships between the state and private sectors, especially at the municipal level; and promoting business with Cubans residing abroad."

Cuban officials like Diaz-Canel have promised reform before without delivering, but this time Trump’s bellicose coercion and the growing crisis on the island could force them to actually act, Kavulich said.

There are an estimated 11,000 small- to medium-sized independent businesses in Cuba, many of them centered around Havana, from restaurants in homes known as paladares to online delivery services.

“It was easy to see President Trump was not going to focus on removing communism from Cuba as much as he was going to focus on commercial, economic, financial engagement first,” Kavulich said. “I don't think anyone should be surprised if we eventually see [special U.S. envoy] Steve Witkoff and [Trump advisor] Jared Kushner in Havana negotiating with the Cuban government.”

Robert Muse, a Washington attorney who specializes in helping U.S. businesses in Cuba, said most business leaders are still cautiously watching events unfold.

For years, many waited for Cuba to evolve into a Vietnam or China – a country that retained its communist ideology but opened its economy to allow trade and foreign investment, he said. But that never happened, despite pressure from China and Russia, two of Cuba’s biggest benefactors.

The fading embers of a revolution

Now, most vestiges from the 1959 Cuban revolution are fading or dead. Fidel Castro died in 2016 and his brother, Raul Castro, the island’s de facto dictator, and Ramiro Valdés, former vice-prime minister and close confidant of the Castros, are both in their 90s.

That, along with a suffering population and the oil embargo, creates an ideal opportunity for the Trump administration to spark meaningful change on the island, Muse said. Doing it through the private sector was a wise move, he said.

“There's a slowly emerging consciousness that this is the year of decision” in Cuba, Muse said. “This is elemental economic reform in Cuba.”

Álvarez, the Havana-based entrepreneur, said he recognizes the weight of the moment and the rarity of receiving U.S. fuel directly from U.S. companies.

He said the situation in Cuba has been dire, with many companies dormant due to the oil crisis and people struggling to get by.

But he feels Cuba is entering a period of reform – and business owners such as himself are at the forefront.

“They’ve given us a huge responsibility,” Álvarez said. “And the private sector will meet that responsibility.”....>

It is now unclear, but my view leans towards the latter:

<The killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air attacks has caused one of the most significant blows to the country’s leadership since the 1979 Islamic revolution, triggering protests by his supporters.

Khamenei assumed Iran’s supreme leadership in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the Islamic revolution against the pro-United States Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said seeking revenge for the killing of Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials is the country’s “duty and legitimate right”.

President Donald Trump has framed the operation as a “liberation” moment, predicting that the removal of the “head” will lead to the swift collapse of the body. However, in Iran, the reality suggests a far more complex situation.

Interviews with insiders, military experts and political sociologists suggest that the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership may not go the way the West envisions. Instead, it risks birthing a “garrison state” – a paranoid, militarised system fighting for its existence with no political red lines left to cross.

The limits of ‘decapitation’

The central premise of the US operation is that Iran is too brittle to survive the death of its supreme leader. In a phone interview with CBS News, Trump claimed he “knows exactly” who is calling the shots in Tehran, adding that “there are some good candidates” to replace the supreme leader. He did not elaborate on his claims.

However, military analysts warn against the assumption that air strikes alone can trigger “regime change”. Michael Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence, told Al Jazeera Arabic that without “boots on the ground” or a fully armed organic uprising, the state’s deep security apparatus can survive simply by maintaining cohesion.

“You cannot facilitate regime change through air strikes alone,” Mulroy said. “If anyone is left alive to speak, the regime is still there.”

This resilience is rooted in Iran’s dual military structure. The government is protected not just by a regular army (Artesh), but also by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a powerful parallel military force constitutionally tasked with protecting the velayat-e faqih system – the principle of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.

Supporting them is the Basij, a vast paramilitary volunteer militia embedded in every neighbourhood, specifically trained to crush internal dissent and mobilise ideological loyalists.

That cohesion is already being tested.

Hossein Royvaran, a political analyst based in Tehran, confirmed that the strikes wiped out the country’s top security tier, including Khamenei’s adviser and secretary of the newly-formed Supreme Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani.

The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said the leadership transition will begin on Sunday.

“An interim leadership council will soon be formed. The president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist from the Guardian Council will assume responsibility until the election of the next leader,” said Larijani.

“This council will be established as soon as possible. We are working to form it as early as today,” he said in an interview broadcast by state TV.

The rapid formation of an interim leadership council – comprising the president, judiciary chief, and a Guardian Council religious leader – indicates that the system’s “survival protocols” have been activated.

According to Royvaran, the system is designed to be “institutional, not personal”, capable of functioning on “autopilot” even when the political leadership is severed.

But a Tehran-based analyst said direction of Iran is still unclear as officials try to ‘project stability’.

“Officials here are trying to project stability, emphasising that the situation is under control and that state institutions are functioning effectively,” Abas Aslani, senior research fellow at the Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, said.

“Today, [the US-Israeli] air strikes targeted security and military infrastructure in the capital [Tehran] and other cities. There are expectations that such strikes could continue – and possibly intensify – in the coming hours or days,” he told Al Jazeera.

“That prospect of escalation is not something many ordinary Iranians welcome. At the same time, Iranian officials are issuing strong warnings, suggesting they could respond with capabilities that have not previously been used against Israel or the United States.”....>

<....From theocracy to nationalist survival

Perhaps the most significant shift in the immediate aftermath is Iran’s pivot from religious legitimacy to survivalist nationalism.

Aware that the death of the supreme leader might sever the spiritual bond with parts of the population, surviving officials are reframing the war not as a defence of the clergy, but as a defence of Iran’s territorial integrity.

Larijani, a conservative heavyweight and key figure in the transition, issued a stark warning that Israel’s ultimate goal is the “partition” of Iran. By raising the spectre of Iran being broken into ethnic statelets, the leadership aims to rally secular Iranians and the opposition against a common external enemy.

This strategy complicates the US hope for a popular uprising.

Saleh al-Mutairi, a political sociologist, notes that the government’s declaration of 40 days of mourning creates a “funeral trap” for the opposition. The streets will likely be filled with millions of mourners, creating a human shield for the government and making it logistically and morally difficult for antigovernment protests to gain momentum in the short term.

The end of ‘strategic patience’

If Iran survives the initial shock, the nation that emerges will likely be fundamentally different: less calculated and probably more violent.

For years, Khamenei championed a doctrine of “strategic patience”, often absorbing blows to avoid all-out war.

Hassan Ahmadian, a professor at the University of Tehran, says the era died with the supreme leader.

“Iran learned a hard lesson from the June 2025 war: Restraint is interpreted as weakness,” Ahmadian told Al Jazeera Arabic. The new calculus in Tehran is likely to be a “scorched earth” policy.

“The decision has been made. If attacked, Iran will burn everything,” Ahmadian added, suggesting that the response will be broader and more painful than anything seen in previous escalations.”

This risks a scenario where field commanders, freed from the political caution of the clerical leadership, lash out with greater ferocity. The killing has humiliated the security establishment, exposing what Liqaa Maki, a senior researcher at Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, calls a catastrophic intelligence failure.

“The believer is not bitten from the same hole twice, yet Iran has been bitten twice,” Maki said, referring to the pattern of US strikes. This “total exposure” is likely to drive the surviving leadership underground, turning Iran into a hyper-security state that views any internal dissent as foreign collaboration, he said.

While the “head” of Iran has been removed, the “body” – armed with one of the largest missile arsenals in the Middle East – remains, Maki said.>

<This is going to be one of the shorter newsletters in recent Silver Bulletin history. My main mission for the next week is to finalize our NCAA tournament forecasts. But as you might have noticed, there’s a lot going on in the world. And there’s a story that seems very likely to become a major part of the political conversation while the tournament is underway.

As the headline suggests, it’s gas prices. Although the United States is less reliant on foreign oil than it once was, the war in Iran could be a perfect storm for gas and energy prices in the U.S. and elsewhere to spike.

Iranian production of oil is severely disrupted, of course, with the U.S. and Israel attacking the country’s fuel infrastructure. But Iran itself isn’t that large a supplier of oil. Estimates vary from source to source, but it was something like the 6th to 8th largest producer in 2024, extracting 4 to 5 percent of the world’s oil.

However, there are two other problems downstream from cutting off Iranian production. One is that Iran has retaliated by attacking oil production facilities in other Gulf States. The other is that the Strait of Hormuz is essentially shut down to shipping traffic. Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Bahrain, combined with Iran, collectively provide about 30 percent of the world’s oil.

According to the AAA, average retail gas prices in the U.S. are now $3.45 per gallon, up about 50 cents from a week ago. However, the problems are likely to worsen significantly as supply chains are disrupted. Traders at Polymarket anticipate that the most likely range for gas prices to land by the end of March is between $4.50 and $5.00. And although there’s a wide range of uncertainty, there’s a 41 percent chance they exceed $5.00 by the end of the month. The all-time record, according to the EIA, was $5.01 in June, 2022.

Polymarket prediction market

Americans are used to gas price fluctuations, but it’s not all that common for prices to go quite this vertical in the span of a month

So far, as Eli wrote at our Trump tracking page, there hasn’t been much of a shift in the president’s approval ratings. The war is broadly unpopular in polls, but Trump was unpopular to begin with. Unlike something like Venezuela, however, this isn’t some sort of surgical strike. It’s not at all clear what the U.S. and Israel even want to achieve.

<“We are just getting started,” Trump’s secretary of “war,” Pete Hegseth, said yesterday, adding that the attacks on Iran will escalate, with “death and destruction all day long.”

So far more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in Iran, according to human rights monitors, including 180 children, most of them schoolgirls aged 7 to 12 years old who were killed when a missile directly hit their school.

Wars can be morally justifiable if they are necessary to protect a nation’s people, but Trump has failed to make the case that this war is necessary. His allegation that Iran is close to building a nuclear weapon has been rejected by the International Atomic Energy Agency and much of the intelligence community.

As I have noted before, the moral purpose of civilized society is to prevent the stronger from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Otherwise, we’d be permanently immersed in a brutish war in which only the fittest and most powerful could survive.

This moral aspiration lies at the center of America’s founding documents — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — although this nation has not always honored the aspiration.

It’s also the core of the postwar international order championed by the United States, including the UN charter — emphasizing multilateralism, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

But it’s a fragile aspiration, easily violated by those who would exploit their power. Maintaining it requires that the powerful have enough integrity to abstain from seeking short-term wins — and that the rest of us hold them accountable if they don’t.

Every time rich and powerful countries or corporations or people attack and exploit those that are not, the fabric of civilization frays. If such aggression is not contained, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the entire world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.

We now inhabit a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Political and economic power are more concentrated than ever before. This invites the powerful to exploit the weaker, because the powerful feel omnipotent.

The wealth of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Charles Koch, and a handful of others is almost beyond comprehension. The influence of big tech, big oil, and the largest aerospace and defense corporations extends over much of the globe. AI is likely to centralize wealth and power even more. The destructive power of the United States, China, and Russia is unmatched in human history.

Trump — enabled by cowardly congressional Republicans and a pliant majority on the Supreme Court — has turned the U.S. presidency into the most powerful and least accountable agent of American government in this nation’s history.

A direct line connects Trump’s attempted coup in 2020 to his baseless assertion that the election was “stolen” from him, to his bombing of fishing boats in the Caribbean on his unproven allegation that they are smuggling drugs, his arrests and detention of people in the United States on unproven assumptions they are here illegally, the lawless cruelty and mayhem of his ICE and Border Patrol agents, his illegal abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and now his “death and destruction all day long” in Iran.

All are lawless. All are premised on the hubris of omnipotence. All are morally wrong.

You see much the same in Putin’s war on Ukraine. In Xi’s threats against Taiwan. In global depredation and monopolization by big tech and big oil. In Russian, Chinese, and American oligarchs who have fused public power with their personal wealth. In the swagger and entitlement of the late Jeffrey Epstein and his disgraced friends and accomplices.

But unfettered might does not make right. It makes for instability, upheaval, depravity, and war.

History shows that laws and norms designed to constrain the powerful also protect them. Without such constraints, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth eventually bring them down — along with their corporations, nations, and empires. And they threaten world war.

Trump’s blatant lawlessness will haunt America and the world — and civilization — for years to come. It is our sacred duty, to ourselves and future generations, to peacefully and legally put an end to it.>

<Jared Kushner grew up sleeping in Benjamin Netanyahu’s bed.

That isn’t a metaphor or hyperbole. Netanyahu, during his visits to New York over the decades, was close enough to the Kushner family that, as theNew York Times reported, he slept in Jared’s childhood bedroom. Jared Kushner didn’t grow up watching Netanyahu on the news the way the rest of us did. He grew up knowing the man as something close to a family institution.

And that man, who has said publicly that he has “yearned” to destroy Iran’s military and political leadership “for 40 years,” is the same man whose government may have been coordinating directly with Kushner in the days before the most consequential American military action since the invasion of Iraq or the Vietnam War.

We need to ask the question that official Washington is too timid, too compromised, or too captured by the moment’s war fever to ask: “Was Jared Kushner sitting across from Iranian negotiators in good faith? Or was he trying to get the Iranian leadership to meet together so Netanyahu could kill them all in one single decapitating strike?”

Here’s what we know. The third round of nuclear talks between the U.S. and Iran wrapped up in Geneva on Feb. 26th and 27th. The Omani foreign minister, who’d been mediating the talks for months, told CBS News on the eve of the bombing that a deal was “within our reach” and that Iran had fully given in to American demands and agreed it would never produce nuclear material for a bomb, or an ICBM capable of striking the United States.

A fourth round had already been scheduled for Vienna the following week to work through the technical details following final discussions in Tehran. The Iranian foreign minister told reporters his team was ready to stay and keep talking for as long as it took.

And then, less than 48 hours after those talks in Switzerland concluded, the bombs began to fall.

On the morning of Feb. 28th, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council was gathered together in their offices for meetings. That body, the one that manages Iran’s nuclear dossier and makes the regime’s most consequential decisions, is exactly where you would expect the Iranian leadership to be sitting after a round of talks with America that their own foreign minister was calling “historic.”

They were almost certainly deliberating whether to accept or reject Kushner's American proposal. And according to the Wall Street Journal, American and Israeli intelligence had verified that senior Iranian leaders would be gathered at three locations that could be struck simultaneously. How they knew that is, as the Journal carefully noted, still unknown.

In other words, Iran’s entire decision-making apparatus was assembled in one place most likely because they were in the middle of an active negotiation with Jared Kushner. The talks had created a predictable, intelligenceable window.

Diplomats who were part of the earlier rounds of talks now tell reporters that the Iranian side has come to believe they’d been misled, and that Tehran now views the Witkoff-Kushner negotiations as, in their words, “a ruse designed to keep Iran from expecting and preparing for the surprise strikes.”

That’s not the assessment of Iranian state media spinning a narrative after a military defeat; it’s the conclusion of people who were in the room, speaking to American journalists, on the record.

Now layer on top of that what we know about who Witkoff was meeting with in the days before they sat down with the Iranians. He flew to Israel and was briefed directly by Netanyahu and senior Israeli defense officials and then, with Kushner, flew to Oman and Geneva and sat across the table from the Iranian negotiators.

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

We also know that the Trump regime’s explanations for why the attacks happened when they did have collapsed into open contradiction. Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially told reporters the US struck because Israel was going to attack anyway and Iran would have retaliated against American forces. Trump then went on television and flipped the scenario upside-down, saying he might’ve “forced Israel’s hand.”....>

<....The two most senior officials in the administration told two diametrically opposite stories within 48 hours of each other, and neither story explains why the diplomacy that the Omani mediator called substantively successful — that essentially got America everything we said we wanted — was abandoned without the final round.

None of this proves that Kushner was running a deliberate double-cross operation designed to concentrate Iranian leadership in a killable location. What it does prove, though, is that the question is entirely legitimate and demands an answer under oath.

This is not the first time in American history that such a question has had to be asked, or that it damaged America’s reputation on the world stage. In October of 1972, Henry Kissinger stood before the cameras and told the world that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam. The Paris negotiations, he assured everyone, were on the verge of ending the war.

But it was a lie: two months later, Nixon ordered Operation Linebacker II, the most intensive bombing campaign of the entire war, dropping more tonnage on North Vietnam in twelve days than had been dropped in all of 1969 and 1970 combined.

The Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973 on terms that serious historians have long argued were not meaningfully different from what had been on the table long before the bombing. Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations. His North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, however, refused to accept his share of the prize, saying that peace had not actually been achieved and the Vietnamese had been deceived because the negotiations were a sham. And he was right: the war dragged on for two more years and was ended by Jerry Ford with the fall of Saigon.

The question that has haunted the world since those 1973 negotiations is the same question hanging over Kushner’s Geneva talks today: were the talks ever meant to succeed on their own terms, or were they simply a setup to destroy the Iranian leadership even if they gave us everything we wanted?

There’s also the Ronald Reagan precedent. His campaign was credibly accused of running a back-channel to Iran to delay the release of American hostages held in Tehran so that Jimmy Carter couldn’t get a pre-election boost from securing their freedom. It took decades for anything close to a full picture to emerge, but now we know that the Reagan campaign successfully committed that treason just to get him into the White House in 1980.

We don’t have decades this time. A war is under way and Americans are already dying. The leadership of a modern, developed country of ninety million people has been decapitated. And every foreign ministry on Earth is watching and drawing conclusions about whether they’ll ever again trust American diplomacy.

If the Iranians were right that they were “negotiated” into a kill box, no government facing an existential American ultimatum will ever be able to assume our good faith again.

The damage this administration is doing to American credibility isn’t abstract or temporary: when a country uses the negotiating table as a targeting opportunity, it poisons the well for every administration that comes after it.

North Korea is watching. Iran’s neighbors are watching. China is watching. The next time an American president sends an envoy somewhere with a genuine offer of peace, why would anyone believe it? Le Duc Tho knew the answer to that question when Kissinger betrayed his Vietnamese negotiating partners in 1973. The world is apparently relearning it now.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

The man at the center of this diplomacy grew up treating Benjamin Netanyahu like a member of the family. That’s not a reason to assume guilt, but it sure as hell is a reason to demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.>

<Wednesday was historic.

Not inspiring. Not admirable. Just…historic.

In the most “nothing to see here” political maneuver imaginable, Sen. Steve Daines waited until the final minutes before the filing deadline to drop out of his race for a third term in the U.S. Senate.

Minutes.

Then—almost magically—another candidate appeared.

A chosen one.

Republicans instantly fell in line. Like dominoes. Or perhaps like pre-written press releases waiting in a folder labeled “In Case of Emergency: Install Replacement Senator.”

Who endorsed the mystery candidate?

Let’s see.

Senator Steve Daines. Representative Ryan Zinke. Senator and wrist breaker, Tim Sheehy. Governor Greg Gianforte.

And, naturally, Donald Trump.

The endorsements came fast, very fast.

Almost as if everyone (except the public) already knew what was about to happen.

And the new candidate?

Kurt. Who?

A man who has never run for office, never held elected office and never campaigned statewide.

But suddenly—within minutes of the deadline—he’s the anointed successor to a United States Senator.

Amazing how that works.

Democracy usually involves voters, primaries, debates, competition.

But apparently we’re trying something new now — succession planning.

Apparently the voters of Montana are no longer supposed to choose their Senator. Instead, the sitting Senator (and Trump) simply appoints one.

How efficient.

No messy campaigns. No inconvenient challengers. No pesky voters asking questions. Just a quiet backroom decision.

Then—boom: “Here’s your new Senator. Please clap.”

So let’s ask the obvious questions.

Why did Daines wait until minutes before the deadline to withdraw?

Why did Kurt (who) wait until minutes before the deadline to file?

Why was there no transparency?

Why were other Republicans denied the chance to run?

Why wasn’t the party allowed to choose its own nominee in a primary?

Because make no mistake—this maneuver shut the door on competition.

Locked it, bolted it and then threw away the key.

If Daines had announced months ago he wasn’t running, there would have been a wide-open Republican primary.

Montanans could have heard ideas, evaluated candidates and compared records.

Instead, they got a political ambush — a last-minute switcheroo. A Senate seat was handed off like a family heirloom.

And the speed of those endorsements?

Impressive.

Trump posted his “complete and total endorsement.” Gianforte applauded. Daines praised.

Everyone smiled. All within hours.

Which raises another awkward question: How long was this planned?

Because this doesn’t feel spontaneous. It feels choreographed. Scripted and pre-approved.

Maybe it’s nothing.

Maybe it’s just the strangest coincidence in Montana political history.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s a backroom deal. Maybe it’s political stage management.

Maybe it’s exactly what it looks like.

Either way, it stinks.

And voters can smell it.

Now let’s talk about the new heir apparent. Kurt Alme’s central qualification appears to be enthusiastic loyalty to Trump and his agenda.

Fine. That’s a position.

But let’s examine what that agenda actually means.

Cuts to USAID that humanitarian groups say could lead to fourteen million deaths overseas. Cuts to the Veterans Administration—thousands of doctors and nurses gone (more than 14,400). Cuts to Affordable Care Act subsidies—leaving thousands of Montanans without affordable health insurance. Cuts to HIV medication programs that keep people alive. Cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also called “food stamps.” Cuts to medical research for cancer and other diseases. Cuts to education.

Cuts to the Mansfield Center and the Critical Defense Language Institute that trains U.S. military and intelligence officers.

And tariffs. Lots of tariffs. Taxes on fertilizer. Taxes on farm equipment. Taxes on parts. Taxes on American consumers.

Because tariffs aren’t paid by foreign governments.

They’re paid by you, by farmers, by ranchers and by businesses.

Then there are the tax cuts — massive ones. The ones tilted toward millionaires and billionaires. The ones projected to add roughly $4 trillion to the national deficit. That’s a bill our kids and grandkids will pay.

But sure: “Fiscal responsibility.” Let’s go with that....>

<.....And what about Daines?

Once upon a time, he presented himself as a man of principle. A man of faith. Now he enthusiastically backs a political movement led by a convicted felon, a habitual liar, and a man found liable for sexual assault.

That’s a choice.

Everyone makes choices.

History keeps score.

So why the sudden exit?

What’s next for Daines?

A cabinet job?

An ambassadorship?

A lucrative lobbying career?

Washington has a funny way of rewarding loyalty.

But here’s what we already know: This isn’t how democracy is supposed to work. We don’t crown successors. We don’t install Senators through backdoor deadline tricks.

We hold elections, real ones; with real competition.

And if Daines truly planned to step aside, the honorable thing would have been simple: Announce it early, let Republicans compete and let voters decide.

Instead we got a last-minute maneuver designed to ensure only one chosen candidate could file.

That’s not leadership. That’s not transparency. That’s not Montana values.

It’s a political stunt.

And Montanans deserve better than political magic tricks performed at 4:52 p.m. on filing day.

Because democracy isn’t supposed to happen behind closed doors.

It’s supposed to happen in the open.

With voters watching.

Right now?

Something clearly happened. And the public deserves to know exactly what it was. Nothing good happens in darkness. What Daines and Trump did here – total darkness.

Montana citizens deserve better. We deserve the truth.>

<Consider three of the biggest developments in our politics right now: We just learned that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, a capstone to a terrible year in terms of job creation. President Trump has fired widely despised Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a key architect of his mass deportations. And reports are indicating that the killing of scores of Iranian schoolchildren might have been the handiwork of the United States.

What links all these things? In addition to the massive human toll they’re inflicting, they suggest that Trump is about to pull off a unique trifecta. He is squandering the advantage he and Republicans have enjoyed in recent years on three major GOP-friendly issues: The economy, immigration, and national security.

This isn’t meant as a political gotcha; it has important ideological and policy implications. When Trump took office last year, it was reasonable to fear that the American public would rally behind mass deportations and tariffs—that is, embrace two of the main tenets of right-wing nationalism. Meanwhile, the launch of the largest military attack in the Mideast in decades might have plausibly produced a rally-around-the-war-president effect.

None of that is happening. And that’s significant in not-so-obvious ways.

Let’s start with Trump and national security. According to an extraordinary video analysis by The New York Times, the horrific bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran—which killed 175 people, many children—occurred while the United States was conducting missile strikes in the area aimed at a nearby Iranian naval base.

What’s more, Reuters reports that military investigators now believe U.S. forces likely bombed the school. We should suspend final judgement, of course. But it’s looking very much like this atrocity—one of the worst massacres of civilians in memory—is the result of Trump’s war. Whatever we learn about it, there will inevitably be more such horrors.

Now look at this in the context of remarks from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller. Hegseth recently declared that the United States is dispensing with “stupid rules of engagement” and will no longer fight “politically correct wars.” Miller recently enthused that Trump’s military doesn’t have “its hands tied behind its back,” mocked the very idea of human rights, and insisted that “strength” and “force” and “power” are fundamentally all that matter in the international arena.

But we’re now learning why we have the sort of constraints on military conduct these men ridicule. “Trump, Miller and Hegseth’s FAFO approach to the use of official government force and violence comes with considerable risk,” Democratic Congressman Adam Smith told me, employing the acronym for “F*** Around and Find Out.” Atrocities like the school bombing, he added, show the perils that come when we “brazenly dismiss any sort of rules of engagement designed to protect the lives and rights of civilians.”

The swaggering certainty of Hegseth and Miller, those two giants of American statecraft, is what’s notable here. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, at times like this you can almost smell MAGA’s “bloodlust.” Clearly they have no doubt the public will rally behind this supposed display of Trump’s “strength.” Or maybe they don’t think it matters what the public thinks.

But it does matter. Data analyst G. Elliott Morris averaged high quality polling on Trump’s Iran invasion, and found that only 38 percent of respondents approve—the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever. Trump’s overall approval has also dropped a hair since the bombing began—it’s hovering at around 39-58—leading Morris to conclude that no rally-around-the-flag effect is materializing.

Also note that a CNN poll just showed that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make the right decisions regarding the use of force in Iran, suggesting already-entrenched skepticism of Trump’s commander-in-chief abilities exactly when a “war president” boomlet might be expected to kick in. The school bombing will make this worse. In short, Trump has no built-in national security advantage. If anything he’s viewed as bad on it.

I’ve already tried to demonstrate at length that Trump is throwing away the GOP’s recent edge on the economy and immigration, too. The latest news reinforces this: The abysmal jobs report adds to a bigger picture in which job growth has been significantly lower under Trump than under his predecessor. His numbers on the economy are awful....>

<....Meanwhile, Noem’s firing is partly a response to public anger over Trump’s invasion of Minneapolis. But it won’t solve his deeper problem. As long as the underlying agenda remains Miller’s dream of national ethnic reengineering—which requires going after non-criminals to get removal numbers up, necessitating more paramilitary violence in our communities—Trump will tank on the issue. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky notes, the durable public backlash is the big story here. Indeed, by one calculation, Trump’s net approval on immigration since last year has dropped by 20 points.

None of this guarantees a Democratic win this fall, and a rebound remains possible. Trump might end the war on a claim of victory, dial back paramilitary violence against Americans, and enjoy some kind of economic resurgence. Yet right now, George W. Bush’s fate is beckoning. While immigration was less relevant back then, the financial crisis and Iraq debacle wrecked Bush’s standing on the economy and foreign affairs alike. Iraq—and Hurricane Katrina—irreparably broke public impressions of Bush’s executive competence. From 2016 onward, Republicans largely recaptured these issues. But now Trump is drifting close to the Bush danger zone.

There’s another through-line here. I guarantee you that Miller and Hegseth believe a latent majority out there is quietly rallying behind zero-sum malignant nationalism (tariffs regardless of the consequences), the treatment of all undocumented immigrants as criminals (mass deportations), and a kill-first-think-later military posture (what Hegseth calls the “warrior ethic”).

This calculus assumes most voters will unthinkingly glimpse “strength” in nationalist belligerence, in unshackled state violence at home and abroad, in nakedly authoritarian abuses of power. The Miller-Hegseth calculation resembles the old Bill Clinton adage—that being “strong and wrong” is always politically better than “weak and right.” Trump can’t lose as long as he’s cracking the heads of the right “enemies,” whether they’re Euroweenie elites, “criminal illegal aliens,” or what Miller calls the “savages” in the Mideast.

That supreme hubris is now breaking up on the shoals of Trump’s malevolence and incompetence on tariffs, his undisguised white nationalist brutality on immigration, and his sociopathic warmongering amid an obvious lack of any real war rationale. In 2024, Trump coasted on (undeserved) GOP strength on the economy, immigration, and national security, but those pillars are now crumbling. Americans are seeing the real “America First” agenda up close—militarism, imperialism, malign nationalism, unabashed authoritarianism—and they’re recoiling. Though this is small consolation amid all the darkness enveloping us, it’s nonetheless a heartening development indeed.>

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.06.29"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "1"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Watson, John L"]
[Black "Pozarek, Steven J"]
[ECO "D45"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "21st World Open"] [Site "Philadelphia PA"]
[Date "1993.07.05"]
[EventDate "1993"]
[Round "9"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Wolff, Patrick"]
[Black "Olafsson, Helgi"]
[ECO "B80"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<[Event "US Amateur Team East"] [Site "Parsippany NJ"]
[Date "2026.02.14"]
[EventDate "2026"]
[Round "2.57"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[White "Shaw, Alan"]
[Black "Perumalla, Charun"]
[ECO "A80"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

So sez the Propaganda Minister:

<A woman who claims she was abused as a minor by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump has given the FBI vivid accounts that include aspects of her life corroborated by The Post and Courier through public records.

Her alleged encounter with Trump sometime around 1984 remains unproven, and the White House on March 7 said there is “zero credible evidence” that the woman’s account is true.

Using archived government records and news accounts, The Post and Courier found that the woman provided verifiable details to agents about her family background and its legal entanglements. She offered the name of an Epstein business associate on Hilton Head Island who became a central figure in the drama, with specifics that are reflected in public records.

The accounts describe an early phase in the mid-1980s of potential criminal conduct by Epstein that involved sexual activities with minors on Hilton Head. The alleged victim told the FBI she was under constant pressure from him to recruit more girls there to “come party” with him and his “disgusting” older friends. The incidents almost always involved drugs and alcohol and turned violent with hair-pulling and beatings, according to the woman.

Epstein went on to command a global sex trafficking ring that roped in hundreds of women, including many teenagers. He faced federal charges of sexually trafficking minors when he died in his federal prison cell in 2019.

In her account about Trump, she claimed that he forced her to commit a sex act on him sometime around 1984. But she provided foggy details to FBI agents, including that the alleged encounter with Trump happened when she traveled north to New York or New Jersey with Epstein, who was a fixture in elite society then. Decades before he sought the presidency, Trump had already become a prominent presence in the New York business and social scenes.

A friend of hers also reported the allegations about Trump to the FBI in 2019. The bureau cited her allegations in an email circulated within the agency and recently made public by the Justice Department. She asked that her friend be protected.

Of the details that The Post and Courier found supported by public records, none related directly to the alleged victim’s claims about Trump.

The Post and Courier is not identifying the woman in keeping with its policy on sexual assault victims. The woman did not respond to messages seeking an interview, and her attorney, Lisa Bloom, a leading sexual assault lawyer, declined comment.

To identify key players in the woman’s account and attempt to evaluate her claims, the newspaper scoured court records, police reports and old newspaper clippings in multiple states. It also deployed a reporter to the West Coast to retrace her steps in a journey that began on a tony resort island along the South Carolina coast.

An out-of-state connection

The alleged victim claimed that Epstein had business contacts in Hilton Head and lived temporarily on the island in two residences. One associate, she said, was a businessman in Ohio who took over a small real estate company on Hilton Head that hired her mother as a broker in the mid-1980s. The associate, who commuted to the island from the Cincinnati area, dated her mother as well, she said.

Records show the woman’s mother bought property in Hilton Head in 1981 for $55,000. At one point, her address was steps from Coligny Beach, now the most popular oceanfront for visitors to the island beaches. She moved often, records show.

In local classified advertisements, the company that employed her mother marketed long-term rentals of homes and villas. It offered an array of lodging, from a seaside cabin to a fully furnished locale at the Four Seasons Resort, with access to a jacuzzi, tennis and handball courts.

Her mom rented one home to financier Jeffrey Epstein, according to the alleged victim. She told federal agents that her mother advertised in a flyer that she, then 13, could provide babysitting services. Epstein, the woman said, summoned her to the house where he began his pattern of abuse....>

<....The Ohio associate who hired her mother also had sex with the teen several times and physically abused her, she told agents. She described him as a man with grey hair and “big ears.” She told agents she believed he was affiliated with a Cincinnati-based college. The Post and Courier confirmed that he was a board member of the for-profit school.

Local newspaper accounts from that time described problems with drug use among the young who were hanging out on Hilton Head’s beaches. The alleged victim said Epstein, who provided marijuana, cocaine and pills to her and others, brought “fat” older men to a pool gathering at a resort hotel.

She only recalled encountering Epstein once in a non-sexual situation, telling agents she bumped into him at a Rick James concert in Savannah, Ga., when she was around age 15. She said he got her drunk. Newspaper records show the “Super Freak” musician performed regularly in the Savannah area at the time.

Extortion and stolen funds
At one point, her mother became aware that Epstein had nude photos of the teen from their sexual encounters and was demanding money to keep them hidden, the woman told the FBI. The victim said she had seen the photographs in his bedstand, leading to a violent encounter when he discovered her snooping.

She said his extortion demand caused her mother to steal funds from her real estate company.

Epstein had departed investment and trading company Bear Stearns in 1981 after an internal investigation of his trading practices. Around the time of the allegations, he was operating a company he founded in New York. Epstein worked as a troubleshooter for wealthy clients, advising them on issues like corporate embezzlement and offering investment strategies.

The alleged victim said her mother’s boss — the Epstein associate from Ohio — and his company accountant helped the mother fix the books so she could pay off Epstein. The alleged victim told agents that the episode was so stressful her mother began drinking again. Her mother later went to prison near Columbia, the woman told agents.

Records confirm that her mother was implicated in such a crime around this time.

In October 1985, the S.C. Real Estate Commission froze her business escrow account and temporarily suspended her license, according to a local newspaper accounts.

A commission spokesperson, responding to a Post and Courier request, said the records were not immediately available. But other documents show the mother’s boss at the real estate firm sought criminal charges against the mother the following year. She was accused of stealing $22,000 from the escrow account, records show.

Months later, she was charged with six counts of forgery for writing bad checks, a crime she had been accused of in the past as well. Signing off on the charges was then-Solicitor Randolph “Buster” Murdaugh Jr., the grandfather of convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh.

Lawyers who represented the mother either declined to comment or did not recall the case. A deputy who transported her from Sumter to Beaufort County after her arrest told The Post and Courier he did not remember picking her up.

The mother ultimately pleaded guilty to all charges, was sentenced to probation and ordered to make monthly $150 restitution payments until she paid off the debt.

She failed to make those payments, and the daughter told the FBI she tracked down her mother’s old boss to ask him for help. She said the Epstein associate coldly told her not to call again and he did not care if she “ended up in the gutter.”

In 1990, a court in Charleston found that the mother violated parole by traveling abroad without permission and by failing to meet the payment schedule.

The alleged victim told the FBI her mother was sent to a state prison near Columbia. State officials confirmed details of the mother’s incarceration.

By that time the daughter was 17 or 18 years old and had moved to Summerville. She left Hilton Head High School before graduating. Records confirm that she attended the school, and it appeared that FBI agents had obtained a copy of its yearbook, “The Halcyon.”

The mother and her daughter remained physically close over the years, living near one another at various times.

Records show that her mother was accused by a Charleston woman of breaking and entering her home in 1996, and sued for eviction by a landlord in Washington state in 1998. She and her daughter eventually both ended up out west. And there, the daughter would level the accusations that have now placed her at center stage in the Epstein saga....>

<....An explosive allegation

Years after the events on Hilton Head, the woman said both she and her mother felt that Epstein was tracking their movements. Both faced suspicious calls and frightening incidents.

In addition to detailing her abuse at Epstein’s hands, the woman offered vague details across three interviews about her encounter with Trump. She said the incident occurred when he was a leading developer with a new casino in Atlantic City. She said she was led to Trump in a “very tall building with huge rooms.” The future president instructed others to leave the room, she said, and allegedly told her, “Let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.”

She said he unzipped his pants and forced her to perform a sex act. The alleged victim told the FBI she “bit the (expletive) out of it,” causing Trump to slap her across the face and curse at her.

It is unclear from the interview records how long she stayed in the New York area, but she had family connections in the state.

In her talks with the FBI, the woman also detailed calls to her mother at an assisted living facility on the West Coast, where both of them had settled. The Post and Courier verified that the mother used a private nursing care home as an address in her declining years. A death record matches the mother’s age and name, but Washington state does not publicly release other identifying details.

It is common for sexual trauma victims to have trouble recollecting specifics of abusive incidents, according to experts. The FBI recognized this during its decades-long Epstein investigation and provided free counseling services to victims.

One agent involved in the woman’s interviews with the FBI was a psychologist, trained in victim trauma. Critical elements of the woman’s story are difficult to verify without the ability to call witnesses, conduct sworn interviews and subpoena financial records. It is unclear whether the FBI attempted such an investigation.

The woman repeatedly told FBI agents she believed it served no purpose to tell her story because the events occurred so long ago. Trump had also been elected president in 2016. She informed agents in August, 2019 that she wanted them to know she had sued Epstein’s estate, in case it posed a conflict with their investigation.

In a statement to The Post and Courier, Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the allegations “baseless accusations from decades ago’’ that “are backed by zero evidence or facts.” She described the alleged victim as "a sadly disturbed woman who has an extensive criminal history."

Falling on hard times

After her time with Epstein, the alleged victim accumulated a record of criminal charges, drug dependency and domestic turmoil. She had a daughter and was prosecuted for filing false claims for food stamp applications. The alleged victim avoided prison by completing a drug diversion program.

The alleged victim had a turbulent domestic life, with three marriages including one that lasted only a few weeks. Her mother shows up in court records as a witness in a violent domestic incident between her daughter and her first husband, who declined to speak when a reporter approached him at his door.

The alleged victim eventually returned to the East Coast and lived with relatives in Georgia, developing a romantic relationship with a terminally-ill man who was saving money for his funeral.

She stole an envelope filled with cash from him and spent a year in the county jail for it. Her public defender told The Post and Courier that she described her life to him as having been permanently scarred by her experience with Epstein.>

<The center-left group Third Way held a conference last week where moderate Democratic strategists and politicians blasted progressive ideas and the party’s left wing. Third Way and other centrist Democratic groups espouse positions such as opposing Medicare for All and wealth taxes. In Washington, the idea that these groups speak for moderates across the country is never questioned. But now, some evidence is emerging that suggests Democratic voters who describe themselves as moderate are in a different place. They want Democrats to push harder to increase taxes on the wealthy and corporations and don’t think the party is overly liberal on issues such as abortion and transgender rights.

This distinction between moderate Democratic voters and the party’s moderate elites is critical to understand. Moderate Democratic voters are not centrists clamoring for a return to the Clinton era or rebukes of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders. So progressive groups and politicians can probably push rank-and-file Democratic voters to the left on a wide range of issues. And more center-left Democratic politicians must (and increasingly do) adopt more progressive positions to remain viable in a party where even the people who call themselves moderate have fairly liberal views.

I’m basing this analysis in part on a recent poll of some 2,400 prime Democratic voters (those who vote regularly in primaries) conducted in January on behalf of The New Republic by Embold Research. Respondents were given five choices to describe their ideology: conservative, moderate, moderate-to-liberal, liberal, and progressive. Only 12 percent said they identify as moderate, while another 21 percent called themselves moderate-to-liberal. And the interesting thing is that even among those two groups, their beliefs are pretty liberal.

Around 70 percent of moderates (combining the moderate and moderate-to-liberal respondents) said Democrats are “too timid” in taxing the rich, taxing corporations, and cracking down on companies that break the law. A clear majority of moderates said the party is too timid in regulating Big Tech companies. Fewer than 5 percent of moderates said Democrats are “too aggressive” in their dealings with the rich, corporations, and Big Tech.

On other issues, from government spending to fighting climate change to LGBTQ rights, the overwhelming majority of moderate respondents said that Democrats’ positions are “about right.”

Overall, about 70 percent of moderate Democrats think the party’s economic policy positions are about right, compared to around 15 percent who think those stances are too liberal and another 15 percent who think they are too conservative. On social issues, about 65 percent of moderate Democrats are aligned with the party’s stances, while about 25 percent think the party’s positions are too liberal and 10 percent think they are too conservative.

Other polls have similar findings. For example, recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight surveys show that 74 percent of moderate Democrats favor the creation of a single-payer health care system, and 67 percent of them support increased taxes on households with incomes above $400,000. Seventy percent of moderate Democrats have favorable views of Sanders, compared to only 20 percent who view him unfavorably, according to a Data for Progress survey conducted last month.

These numbers are remarkable when you consider the discourse about the Democratic Party. There has been a constant drumbeat over the last decade, particularly in the months after the 2024 election, that the party’s progressive wing is full of woke, over-educated scolds out of step with average Democrats. What this data suggests is that moderate Democratic voters are fully in line with the growing economic populism in the party and actually want more of it. And on social issues, they aren’t as worried about a Democratic Party that strongly defends transgender people and abortion rights as many centrist pundits are.

To be sure, there are differences within the party. Liberals and progressives are (of course) even more left-wing on all of these issues. In the TNR survey, a whopping 63 percent of progressives think Democrats are too conservative on economic issues. (Only about 15 percent of moderates think that.) Ninety-three percent of progressives think Democrats are too timid about taking on the rich.

There are also demographic differences. The party’s moderate bloc has more African Americans, people without college degrees, people age 50–65, and people with family incomes below $50,000 than the party overall. The progressives are younger, whiter, richer, and more educated than the broader party....>

<....And none of these surveys asked respondents about defunding police departments, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, canceling education debt, and other firmly left-wing positions that might have shown a bigger gap between progressives and moderates and more outright opposition from moderates.

But the overall picture is one where even the most moderate Democrats aren’t clamoring for a more aggressively centrist or conservative Democratic Party.

This data has important implications. Politicians associated with the party’s center-left wing, such as new governors Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, often take populist and progressive actions. That’s probably because that’s where their voters are. Sherrill and Spanberger are cracking down on ICE’s conduct in their states because that’s what even moderate Democrats want. Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego, who has also positioned himself as a moderate and is considering a 2028 presidential run, is warning corporations currently collaborating with the Trump administration that Democrats will break them up if they get back into power. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is also courting moderates by attacking the wealthy.

The party’s growing liberalism doesn’t mean that Ocasio-Cortez will cruise to the 2028 nomination. What it means is that taking some progressive stands, particularly on economic issues, is probably a necessity for even 2028 candidates, such as Governors Andy Beshear and Josh Shapiro, who are trying to appeal to moderate voters. And more progressive hopefuls, such as Ocasio-Cortez and Representative Ro Khanna, have a real chance to win the nomination if they can convince moderate voters that they could win a general election.

This data also presents some real challenges for groups such as Third Way that don’t want the party to move left on policy. In an interview with The New York Times last week, Third Way president Jon Cowan praised Democratic politicians who have been critical of teachers' unions and increased taxes on billionaires and supportive of more aggressive immigration enforcement. He said Third Way would be promoting candidates with such centrist stands in the 2028 primary. Good luck with that, Jon. (I don’t actually wish him good luck.) It is not 1992. There is no evidence that Democratic voters are clamoring for candidates who distance themselves from progressive policies. Nor are there signs that Democratic voters are so despondent about the party’s prospects of winning a general election that they will accept a nominee with a Republican-lite platform.

These surveys suggest moderate voters are not like the people who purport to speak for them. And that’s crucial for Democratic candidates and strategists, as well as journalists, to understand. A moderate Democratic candidate can (and should) be someone who wants to tax the rich, regulate the powerful, and support the vulnerable. In praise of 2026-style moderation.>