Prosecutor reveals REAL REASON Bondi announced new Epstein probe

“You Have Arrived in Hell”: Venezuelans Sent By U.S. to El Salvador Faced Torture, Sexual Abuse

 

Trump’s Spending Abuses Are Out of Control. He Shouldn’t Have That Power in the First Place.

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“The editorial board criticizes President Trump for overstepping his authority by ignoring Congress’s spending decisions. Trump has withheld allocated funds, spent unapproved funds, and effectively overturned Congress’s spending decisions, expanding presidential power and weakening the legislature. The board urges Congress and the courts to act against these abuses, emphasizing the importance of the separation of powers envisioned by the founders.

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Nov. 14, 2025

Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

The Constitution gives the authority to tax and spend not to the head of state, but to the elected representatives who are closest to the people: the members of Congress. Money is power, and the founders of this country feared that a president would turn into a monarch if he alone could dictate how the government uses the federal Treasury.

President Trump, however, has tried to take Congress’s constitutional power and make it his own. He has repeatedly ignored laws passed by the House and the Senate to spend money, or not spend it, based on his whims and agenda. He has violated the law at least six times, according to the Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency. That total does not include the government shutdown, when he continued to disregard the law.

The moves are part of a strategy designed chiefly by Russell Vought, Mr. Trump’s budget director and an author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, which laid out a potential agenda for a second Trump term. The moves also fit with Mr. Trump’s broader strategy to push the United States away from its democratic traditions and concentrate power in a single person — him. Alarmingly, congressional Republicans have stood by while Mr. Trump has executed this power grab.

Mr. Trump’s abuses of spending power fall into three categories. First, he has refused to spend money that Congress allocated. He avoided allocating foreign aid with a maneuver known as a pocket rescission, and he withheld funds for electric vehicles, libraries and museums, preschools, other schools, grants for scientific research and emergency response operations.

Second, Mr. Trump has spent money that Congress has not allocated. During the shutdown, he paid military troops and some other federal workers without congressional approval. He used private funds from a billionaire supporter for some of the payments, setting a dangerous precedent. Earlier in his term, he declared an emergency to divert funds for the military to his border crackdown.

Third, the president has taken steps that effectively overturn Congress’s spending decisions. In these cases, he has not added or subtracted federal funds, but he has taken other steps that make it so an agency cannot carry out the mission that Congress envisioned for it. He has gutted the Department of Education with layoffs, making it impossible for the agency to do things, such as protect students’ civil rights, that Congress appropriated funds for it to do. He has taken similar steps with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In some of these instances, courts have attempted to stop Mr. Trump, but his policies remain in effect while the cases wind through the courts. In too many other instances, the Supreme Court has unwisely endorsed Mr. Trump’s approach. (It allowed his cuts to foreign aid, for example, asserting that the president has broad authority over foreign policy.) Either way, the result is an expansion of presidential power and a weakening of the legislature that should alarm anybody who shares the American founders’ suspicion of centralized power.

Mr. Trump and his supporters can fairly argue that they did not start the trend of executive overreach. In response to gridlocked and disagreeable Congresses, previous presidents have sought to expand their powers in ways that violated the spirit, if not the text, of federal laws. President Joe Biden’s attempt to forgive student loans, in the face of opposition in Congress that included even a few Democrats, is one example. Yet Mr. Trump is different. He has gone much further than previous presidents, which explains why the Government Accountability Office has found he violated the law six times in the span of a few months. Regardless, “he started it” is not a reasonable justification for a child’s misbehavior, much less a president’s.

Republicans have done little to confront Mr. Trump’s abrogation of Congress’s spending powers. They have largely refused to criticize his actions. They have chosen not to block his executive and judicial nominees, which they could use as leverage to get the president to respect the constitutional order. They have failed to pass new bills that would emphasize their constitutional role in setting taxing and spending. These moves would raise the political costs of Mr. Trump’s actions by signaling that this issue is not narrowly partisan. It is constitutional. The country’s founders envisioned a legislature that was a primary center of power in its own right, rather than subservient to an executive.

It would be a useful exercise for Republicans in Congress to envision how a future Democratic president might use the sort of spending powers Mr. Trump has claimed for himself. Democrats, after all, typically like to use government power ambitiously. Imagine a Democratic president who allocates money to health insurance subsidies, clean energy programs or preschool classes without congressional approval. Or imagine a president who refuses to spend money that Congress had allocated for oil exploration, immigration enforcement or corporate subsidies. That future president would be able to cite Mr. Trump as a precedent.

If Congress refuses to act, the courts will need to do more. Lower court judges have already done an admirable job, ruling against Mr. Trump’s spending decisions on foreign aid, food stamps and more. Judges appointed by presidents of both parties have written detailed decisions that explain the illegality of Mr. Trump’s actions. They have called them out for what they are, using words like “arbitrary,” “capricious” and “disingenuous.” In one ruling, a judge cited a previous decision from Justice Anthony Kennedy: “Liberty is always at stake when one or more of the branches seek to transgress the separation of powers.”

Today’s Supreme Court has been far too tolerant of Mr. Trump’s steamrolling of Congress. It has stood by while Trump effectively cancels, after the fact, the agreements lawmakers make to pass a budget. What’s the point of the appropriations process if the president can just undo it? The justices have fresh opportunities to return our system to order, including the ongoing case about Mr. Trump’s tariffs. They should do so.

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.“

 

Why Is Ghislaine Maxwell Being Pampered in Prison?

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“Ghislaine Maxwell, serving a 20-year sentence for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, is reportedly receiving preferential treatment at a minimum-security federal prison. This includes custom meals, private family visits, and access to recreation areas. The author questions the Bureau of Prisons’ actions, especially given Maxwell’s potential knowledge of Trump’s involvement with Epstein.

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Nov. 14, 2025, 5:04 a.m. ET

A tableau outside the federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, where Ghislaine Maxwell has been transferred.Adrees Latif/Reuters

This week, Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, revealed that a whistle-blower gave the House Committee on the Judiciary information about the special treatment that Ghislaine Maxwell is receiving at the minimum-security federal prison she was recently transferred to.

In a letter to Donald Trump, Raskin wrote that Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her role in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, has had custom meals delivered to her cell. The warden, he said, personally arranged for Maxwell to meet privately with family members and other visitors and even provided snacks and refreshments. According to Raskin, her guests were allowed to bring computers, potentially allowing her unauthorized communication with the outside world.

Maxwell was allegedly taken to the prison’s exercise room after hours so she could work out alone, and “allowed to enjoy recreation time in staff-only areas,” wrote Raskin. An inmate who trains service dogs was reportedly instructed to give her special access to a puppy. Raskin claimed that a top official at the prison said that he is “sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch.”

Some of the details in Raskin’s letter were confirmed on Thursday by CNN, which added one more. Whereas other inmates carefully conserve their toilet paper because they’re given only two rolls a week, CNN reported, Maxwell “is given as much toilet paper as she needs. All she has to do is ask.”

What’s shocking here is not that Maxwell is being treated decently — all prisoners should be — but that she’s being treated so much better than everyone else. The relative pampering she’s enjoying seems particularly significant given newly released emails between her and Epstein suggesting she’s harboring some sort of secret about Trump.

On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released three messages from a tranche they’d received from Epstein’s estate. (Perhaps trying to drown them out, Republicans then released more than 20,000 more.) “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to Maxwell in 2011. One of his victims, Epstein wrote, “spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned.” Maxwell responded, “I have been thinking about that.”

Much about this email is ambiguous. Epstein could have been suggesting that Trump was keeping something quiet. Or he might have been expressing surprise that Trump hadn’t yet been dragged into his mess. Presumably, Maxwell could clear things up and explain the exact nature of Trump and Epstein’s entanglement. That’s why it’s striking that the Bureau of Prisons — which is part of the Justice Department — seems to be taking such extraordinary steps to keep her happy. Maybe there’s an innocent explanation for all the privileges she’s being accorded, but I can’t think of one.

Recall that on July 22, after Trump’s Justice Department and F.B.I. essentially closed the Epstein case, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell to testify. That day, Todd Blanche, the former Trump defense attorney now serving as deputy attorney general, announced he’d interview Maxwell himself. When they met, she told him she’d never witnessed Trump doing anything untoward. (She said the same of Epstein.)

Just days after speaking to Blanche, Maxwell was moved to a federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, a much less restrictive facility with a reputation for relative comfort. The transfer was highly unusual because, under Bureau of Prisons policy, convicted sex offenders like Maxwell are not typically eligible for minimum security.

Many inside the system, Raskin told me, are upset about all the exceptions apparently being made for her. “There are lots of people in the prison, and there are lots of people in the government, who are extremely disenchanted with the favoritism and indulgences being showered upon Ghislaine Maxwell,” he said.

These indulgences look like part of a broader pattern. We’ve seen in recent days how desperate Trump is to keep the Justice Department’s Epstein files from coming out. For months now, Representatives Ro Khanna, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, have been collecting signatures on a so-called discharge petition to override House leadership and force a vote on the files’ release. This week, they got the signature they needed to put their measure over the top, thanks to the swearing in of Adelita Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona.

One of a handful of House Republicans to sign onto the petition was Lauren Boebert, usually a MAGA loyalist. On Wednesday, CNN reported that she’d been summoned to the Situation Room to meet with Blanche, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, to discuss the files. Boebert, who didn’t reverse her stance, denied that they’d tried to pressure her. But it’s extraordinary to have the leading law enforcement officials in the nation seemingly working to stop the vote, especially since even if the measure gets to Trump’s desk, he can just veto it.

The emails released this week don’t get us much closer to understanding what Trump could be hiding. Indeed, an email Epstein sent a few months before his arrest in 2019 suggests that while Trump might have been aware of Epstein’s child abuse, he didn’t participate in it. “He never got a massage,” Epstein wrote. Yet Epstein also seemed confident that he knew something damaging about Trump. “I am the one able to take him down,” he said in a 2018 text message about Trump.

Of course, Epstein was a self-aggrandizing criminal. The question remains: Why is Trump acting like he was right?

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.“

Jamie Raskin Makes Kash Patel SQUIRM

🚨 MASSIVE UPDATE at US Supreme Court

Supreme Court PULLS NUCLEAR Option as ELECTIONS SLIP AWAY from Trump

Trump’s EPSTEIN EVIDENCE BOMB goes off: Ari on email about Trump’s “hour...

Trump Spent Hours With Epstein’s Most Tragic Victim

OUTED THE VICTIM

"Moments after explosive new emails reignited the Epstein firestorm, MAGA Republicans named the victim at the heart of them.

Farrah Tomazin 

Political Correspondent

Updated Nov. 12 2025 2:21PM EST Published Nov. 12 2025 11:52AM EST 

Miami Herald/TNS/Getty Images

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Donald Trump spent hours with a sex trafficking victim that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell recruited from his Mar-a-Lago club and abused for years.

Moments after explosive new emails suggested the president may have known more about Epstein’s conduct than he has previously acknowledged, MAGA Republicans identified the victim at the heart of the documents as the late Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most high-profile survivor.

A photo composite of Donald Trump, Virginia Giuffre, and Jeffrey Epstein.The Daily Beast/Getty/Reuters

In one email to Maxwell, which was dated April 2, 2011, Epstein refers to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and reveals that a certain victim—whose name was redacted in the files—“spent hours at my house with him.”

The emails form part of a cache of documents provided by Epstein’s estate to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

Davidoff Studios/Getty Images

However, soon after they were released on Wednesday morning, Republicans on the committee posted on X: “Why did Democrats cover up the name when the Estate didn’t redact it in the redacted documents provided to the committee? It’s because this victim, Virginia Giuffre, publicly said that she never witnessed wrongdoing by President Trump.

“Democrats are trying to create a fake narrative to slander President Trump,” they added. “Shame on them.”

Giuffre, born Virginia Roberts, was one of the earliest and loudest voices calling for criminal charges against Epstein and his enablers.

She lit a fire under the Epstein scandal in 2011, bringing it into the international spotlight when she alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Prince Andrew as part of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

Her astonishing revelations turned the now-ex prince into Britain’s most tarnished royal, and contributed to him losing his royal titles last month.

Before she died by suicide earlier this year, Giuffre had testified that Maxwell hired her as a masseuse for Epstein after meeting her at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where she worked as a 16-year-old locker room attendant at the resort spa.

Prince Andrew rejected allegations he slept with an underage Virginia Guiffre.Virginia Roberts Giuffre/Fair Use

Maxwell, a British socialite, spotted Giuffre as she was reading a book about massage therapy. She then offered her a job interview to be a private, traveling masseuse, suggesting it would be a potentially life-changing opportunity.

Giuffre attended the interview at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, where she was introduced to Epstein naked and instructed by Maxwell on how to massage him.

The depraved couple soon made her their sex slave, pressuring her into gratifying not only the disgraced financier but also his friends and associates.

A view of the patio at Mar-a-Lago.Evan Agostini/Getty Images

As the firestorm surrounding the Epstein files escalated this year, Trump acknowledged in July that he knew Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago and lamented how Epstein “stole her” from him.

“I think she worked at the spa,” he told reporters at the time. “I think that was one of the people. He stole her.”

“Other people would come and complain, this guy is taking people from the spa,” he added.

“I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said: ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people—whether it was spa or not spa—I don’t want you to take our people. And he was fine, and then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said: out of here!”

Bombshell Epstein Email Reveals Trump ‘Knew About the Girls’THE FILES LEAK

Farrah Tomazin

But while the president has long described the Epstein files as a “Democratic hoax,” the new emails raise questions about what he knew and when in relation to Epstein’s sexual conduct.

The documents suggest that Epstein mentioned Trump by name multiple times in private correspondence over the last 15 years.

In another email, written to author Michael Wolff on January 31, 2019, Epstein seems to address Trump’s earlier claim that he asked the sex offender to resign his membership at the president’s Mar-a-Lago Club.

“trump said he asked me to resign,” Epstein wrote, adding, “never a member ever. . of course he knew about the girls as he asked to Ghislaine to stop.”

Trump Was Furious at Epstein for ‘Stealing’ Virginia, 17POACHED!

Farrah Tomazin

The president did not receive or send any of the messages, nor has he been accused of any criminal wrongdoing in connection with Epstein or Maxwell.

However, the latest revelations are certain to inflame tensions about the administration’s handling of the Epstein files and the decision by Trump’s Department of Justice to renege on a pledge to fully release them.

House Oversight Committee ranking member Robert Garcia said the emails formed part of about 23,000 documents they received from Epstein’s estate in the last few days, and more would be released later today.

Britt Jacovich, spokesperson for progressive group MoveOn Civic Action, said: “It’s no wonder why Trump and Republicans have spent weeks hiding the Epstein emails and files from the public. This is textbook corruption.

“Just as Trump promised on the campaign trail, the American people deserve to know who enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses and his victims deserve justice. Release the Epstein files.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described the latest Esptein firestorm as a “hoax” designed to distract from the president’s achievements.

“The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump. The ‘unnamed victim’ referenced in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and “couldn’t have been friendlier” to her in their limited interactions,” she said."

Trump Spent Hours With Epstein’s Most Tragic Victim

Supreme Court Extends Order Allowing Limits on Food Stamp Payments - The New York Times

Supreme Court Extends Order Allowing Limits on Food Stamp Payments

The justices allowed the Trump administration to withhold full benefits for two more days while Congress worked to advance a government funding bill.

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By Abbie VanSickle

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The Supreme Court extended on Tuesday a temporary ruling that allowed the Trump administration to withhold full food stamp benefits while Congress worked to advance a measure to end the government shutdown.

The new order will expire just before midnight on Thursday, giving lawmakers and President Trump two more days to approve and sign a government funding bill. The House is expected to vote as early as Wednesday on a measure passed by the Senate.

But the order, however briefly, extended delays and uncertainty for millions of Americans who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, the nation’s largest anti-hunger initiative. They were already confronting new delays and disruptions to their benefits after the court’s initial ruling last week.

The new order did not give a vote count or include the court’s reasoning, which is common in such emergency rulings.

On Friday evening, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the court’s three liberals, had temporarily granted an emergency request by the Trump administration to block a lower court judge’s order that the government fund the anti-hunger program during the shutdown.

Justice Jackson, who has written critically of many Trump administration policies, handled the emergency request because she is assigned to applications from the region of the country where the case originated.

After Justice Jackson granted the temporary pause, she set a speedy briefing schedule in the food stamp case. Both the Trump administration and the challengers had laid out their cases to the justices by early Tuesday.

The court’s emergency ruling on Tuesday noted that the matter now had been referred to the full court. The order also said Justice Jackson would have denied both the Trump administration’s request for an extension from the court and its emergency application.

Roughly 42 million Americans use monthly SNAP benefits to buy groceries. Although the government has enough money in reserves to fund the program, Mr. Trump has refused to do so. The president’s actions in the fight over funding the food stamp program during the shutdown stand in stark contrast with the other ways he has rearranged the budget as the government remained closed, including billions to pay for officers conducting mass deportations.

A group of cities, religious groups and nonprofits had sued to force the Trump administration to fund SNAP during the shutdown. They brought a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Rhode Island and argued that the administration had both a legal and a moral obligation to fund the program.

A federal district judge, John J. McConnell Jr., agreed and ordered the White House to fund SNAP. The Justice Department quickly appealed the ruling, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit to weigh in. That court on Friday declined to impose a temporary block on Judge McConnell’s order, prompting the administration to seek an emergency pause, known as an administrative stay, from the Supreme Court on Friday night.

In a brief to the court, lawyers for the Trump administration had urged the justices to continue to block the lower court order, allowing the government to withhold food stamp benefits as the shutdown continued.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, in a court filing on Monday, asserted that the lower courts had injected themselves into “the political branches’ closing efforts to end this shutdown” by requiring the Trump administration to fund the food benefits, causing “irreparable harms” by deciding “how to triage limited funds.”

In response, the groups challenging the Trump administration urged the court to lift the pause and clear the way for full funding of the program. In a brief to the justices, the challengers argued that “people and families have now gone 10 days without the help they need to afford food,” asserting that any further delays “would prolong that irreparable harm and add to the chaos the government has unleashed, with lasting impacts” on the food benefit program.

Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting."

Supreme Court Extends Order Allowing Limits on Food Stamp Payments - The New York Times