Trump acknowledged on July 29 that some of the staffers at the Palm Beach spa were young women. He first declined to provide the detail, telling reporters who were on a flight with him from Scotland, 

"Everyone knows the people that were taken."

But he then affirmed that young women were involved, telling a reporter: 

"The answer is yes, they were." Asked what the workers did, Trump offered that they were "in the spa."

Trump told reporters that the staff Epstein "stole" from him worked in the spa and staffers. Trump was asked if Virginia Giuffre was one of the people Epstein had hired. At first, the president said, "I don't know." But after a short pause, he said, 

"I think so, I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us."

Virginia Giuffre was a former attendant at his Palm Beach resort who said in a unsealed deposition for a defamation lawsuit against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell that she was forced as a teenager to have sex with powerful men. Giuffre died by suicide in April of this year. She is the only person Trump has named since he attested he'd ended his friendship with Epstein.

The White House previously said that Trump ended his friendship with Epstein, whom CNN reported attended the president's second wedding to Marla Maples, because the financier was a creep. Trump told reporters today that the two explanations were essentially the same. 

Maxwell argues her conviction violates a non-prosecution agreement Epstein signed with federal prosecutors. The appeal turns on the scope of the 2007 deal, which let Epstein avoid federal charges for pleading guilty to state-level sex crimes in Florida and serving 18 months in prison. 

“No one is above the law—not even the Southern District of New York. Our government made a deal, and it must honor it. The United States cannot promise immunity with one hand in Florida and prosecute with the other in New York. President Trump built his legacy in part on the power of a deal—and surely he would agree that when the United States gives its word, it must stand by it. We are appealing not only to the Supreme Court but to the President himself to recognize how profoundly unjust it is to scapegoat Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein’s crimes, especially when the government promised she would not be prosecuted,” attorney David Oscar Markus said in a statement. 

The Justice Department has opposed Maxwell’s Supreme Court appeal, rejecting the notion that the non-prosecution agreement spans any judicial district in the country. 

“That contention is incorrect, and petitioner does not show that it would succeed in any court of appeals,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court filings. “This case would also be an unsuitable vehicle for addressing the matters raised.”

Maxwell’s attorney, David Oscar Markus, declined to clarify what exactly Blanche had asked or what Maxwell had answered so far. However, he said,

“He took a full day and asked a lot of questions,” Markus said. “And Ms. Maxwell answered every single question. She never stopped, she never invoked a privilege. Never declined to answer.”

Trump said today he has not thought about pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted enabler of financier sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I haven’t thought about,” Trump told reporters outside the White House on his way to Scotland.

After spending nearly five hours with Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorney, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell asks “what did Todd Blanche offer her to make her suddenly decide she was safe” with him?

“It’s reassuring isn’t it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends,” the Clinton note said, according to the Journal.

Clinton, now 78, has always denied having had any knowledge of the “terrible crimes” committed by Epstein. “I had always thought Epstein was odd but had no inkling of the crimes he was committing,” he wrote in his 2024 memoir, Citizen: My Life after the White House.

A Clinton spokesman declined to comment to the WSJ on the reporting and instead referred to a previous statement saying the former president’s association with Epstein ended more than a decade before he was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges. Black, Wang, and Zuckerman declined to comment.

U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg in West Palm Beach said the request to release grand jury documents from 2005 and 2007 did not meet any of the extraordinary exceptions under federal law that could make them public. In 2008, Epstein cut a deal with federal prosecutors in Florida that allowed him to escape more severe federal charges and instead plead guilty to state charges of procuring a person under 18 for prostitution and solicitation of prostitution. 

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche had asked judges in Florida and New York to unseal transcripts from grand jury proceedings that resulted in indictments against Epstein and former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, saying “transparency to the American public is of the utmost importance to this Administration.” Yet, we know that if this were true, the Republican MAGA party would have released the documents before Bondi and Trump began their back on forth on the existence of the files, before turning it into the Russiagate/Obama Hoax (which we reported on).

Experts say the transcripts likely would not reveal much because prosecutors typically are trying only to present enough material to get charges and don’t introduce the entire investigation. 

The vote came just hours before the House was scheduled to end its July work session and depart Washington for a monthlong break. A subcommittee of the House Committee on Oversight voted today to subpoena the Department of Justice for files in the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Three Republicans on the panel voted with Democrats for the subpoena, sending it through on an 8-2 vote tally.

The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, while a subcommittee voted to subpoena the Justice Department for documents related to Epstein. And senators in both parties have expressed openness to holding hearings on the matter after Congress’ August recess.

Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, has introduced legislation with bipartisan support that would require the Justice Department to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” related to Epstein and his associates.

Trump’s letter, which the paper said was reviewed as part of the criminal investigation of Epstein, bears his signature and “contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker,” according to the Journal article.

“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” Trump told the Journal. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
Vice President Vance chimed in, coming to Trump’s defense on social media and criticizing the Journal for the piece. “Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bullshit. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it,” Vance wrote on Twitter/X.
“I’m calling bullshit on this Trump ‘birthday letter’ to Epstein,” Laura Loomer said. “It’s totally fake. Everyone who actually KNOWS President Trump knows he doesn’t type letters.”

While Trump doesn't "write pictures" he certainly use to doodle:

Now, further analysis shows that one of the source clips was approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds longer than the segment included in the final video, indicating that footage appears to have been trimmed before release. It’s unclear what, if anything, the minutes cut from the first clip showed....
The metadata confirms that the first video file, which showed footage from August 9, 2019, continued for several minutes beyond what appears in the final version of the video and was trimmed to the 11:58:58 pm mark, right before the jump to midnight.
On Friday, WIRED published an analysis of metadata embedded in the video, confirmed by independent video forensics experts, which indicates that the file was assembled from at least two source clips, saved multiple times, exported, and then uploaded to the DOJ’s website, where it was presented as “raw” footage.

WIRED’s initial analysis found that those saves took place over a 23-minute span; however, further analysis of additional metadata shows the file was actually edited and saved several times over a period of more than three and a half hours on May 23, 2025. Specifically, the file was created at 4:48 pm and last modified at 8:16 pm ET that day. The metadata also references “MJCOLE~1,” which is likely a shortened version of a longer username. While it likely begins with “MJCOLE,” the full name cannot be determined from the metadata alone.
Both analyses found that the two clips, labeled “2025-05-22 16-35-21.mp4” and “2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4,” were stitched together. The first clip is 4 hours, 19 minutes, and 16 seconds long, but only the first 4 hours, 16 minutes, and 23.368 seconds appears in the published version, meaning nearly 2 minutes and 53 seconds were cut from the end. According to the metadata, the cut occurs just at 11:58:58 pm. The cut is milliseconds before the one-minute recording gap that Bondi said was caused by a quirk of the surveillance system. The second clip, “2025-05-22 21-12-48.mp4,” picks up immediately afterward, continuing the footage from 12:00:00 am until 6:40:00 am.

It is important to note that this new metadata information doesn't incriminate anything (necessarily). However, this does further hinder their attempt at transparency. However, just as Noem doesn't know what habeus corpus is, it is highly possible that the term "transparency" in relation to politics is not in their vernacular.

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), who voted for the Khanna measure in the Rules Committee on Monday, told Axios he did so because "I believe in transparency, I believe in putting things on the table." Despite his party rejecting the Khanna measure, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said in an interview that "we should put everything out there and let the people decide it."