Epstein case ‘a matter of public concern’, Pam Bondi says in motion to unseal grand jury transcripts – as it happened

Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal’sreportthat he sent Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender he socialized with for at least 15 years, a birthday letter with a lewd drawing in 2003 focuses relentlessly on one fact: that the Journal did not publish an image of the letter.

The reason, according tothe suitfiled by Trump in federal court in Miami on Friday, is simple: “no authentic letter or drawing exists”.

While the Journal’s report states that the letter “was reviewed by the Journal” and was “among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein”, Trump and his defenders have seized on the fact that the newspaper did not publish an image of the letter to suggest, in public comments and the lawsuit, that the letter is either a forgery or does not even exist.

The text of the suit returns again and again to the apparent lack of physical evidence for the letter’s existence.

“Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article”, the suit claims. “That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump”.

Later, the suit makes the contradictory claim that Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper’s owner, and Robert Thomson, its parent company’s chief executive, chose to publish the report “after President Trump put them both on notice that the letter was fake and nonexistent”.

The Journal’s report is not clear about where, exactly, the letter its reporters reviewed was at the time, or is now, but if it was among the trove of approximately 100,000 records from the federal investigation of Epstein before he was charged in 2019, that would mean it is, or war, under the physical control of theTrump administration.

Ina lettersent to the attorney general on Friday, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin wrote that approximately 1,000 FBI personnel, working on 24-hour shifts, had reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March.

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin added. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he then asked.

This concludes our live coverage of the secondTrump administrationfor the day. Here are some of the latest developments:

Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal’sreportthat he sentJeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender he socialized with for at least 15 years, a birthday letter with a lewd drawing in 2003 focuses relentlessly on one fact: that the Journal did not publish an image of the letter. That’s because, according tothe suit, “the letter was fake and nonexistent”.

The extraordinary dollar amount demanded by Trump is identical to what he asked of CBS when hefiled suiton the eve of the 2024 election alleging that a 60 Minutes interview withKamala Harriswas edited in a misleading way to cast her in a positive light and amounted to “election interference”.

Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committeewroteto attorney generalPam Bondito ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.

In a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump, Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern”.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called forBarack Obamaand former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justiceAlexandre de Moraesfrom the United States in retaliation for the prosecution ofJair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.

Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal’sreportthat he sent Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender he socialized with for at least 15 years, a birthday letter with a lewd drawing in 2003 focuses relentlessly on one fact: that the Journal did not publish an image of the letter.

The reason, according tothe suitfiled by Trump in federal court in Miami on Friday, is simple: “no authentic letter or drawing exists”.

While the Journal’s report states that the letter “was reviewed by the Journal” and was “among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein”, Trump and his defenders have seized on the fact that the newspaper did not publish an image of the letter to suggest, in public comments and the lawsuit, that the letter is either a forgery or does not even exist.

The text of the suit returns again and again to the apparent lack of physical evidence for the letter’s existence.

“Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article”, the suit claims. “That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump”.

Later, the suit makes the contradictory claim that Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper’s owner, and Robert Thomson, its parent company’s chief executive, chose to publish the report “after President Trump put them both on notice that the letter was fake and nonexistent”.

The Journal’s report is not clear about where, exactly, the letter its reporters reviewed was at the time, or is now, but if it was among the trove of approximately 100,000 records from the federal investigation of Epstein before he was charged in 2019, that would mean it is, or war, under the physical control of theTrump administration.

Ina lettersent to the attorney general on Friday, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin wrote that approximately 1,000 FBI personnel, working on 24-hour shifts, had reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March.

“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin added. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he then asked.

As we all parseDonald Trump’s claims in a lawsuit againstRupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, a federal judge in Manhattan just dismissed the president’s nearly $50m lawsuit againstBob Woodwardfor publishing audio from interviews with Trump in the audiobook version of Woodward’s 2020 book Rage.

The decision by US district judgePaul Gardephewas a victory for Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster and its former owner Paramount Global.

Woodward interviewed Trump 19 times between December 2019 and August 2020, and about 20% of the book came from the interviews.

The book was released in September 2020, while an audiobook, called The Trump Tapes, which also included Woodward’s commentary, was released in October 2022.

In a 59-page decision dismissing the suit, Gardephe said Trump did not plausibly allege that he and Woodward intended to be joint authors of The Trump Tapes.

The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio,announcedon Friday that he has barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for his role in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.

Rubio described the investigation of Bolsonaro as a “political witch hunt” and called the judge’s effort to have social media posts supporting Bolsonaro removed, including in the US, as “a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans”.

“I have therefore ordered visa revocations for Moraes and his allies on the court, as well as their immediate family members effective immediately”, Rubio wrote.

Rubio’s action to punish the judge came hours after Brazil’s supreme court issued new restrictions on Bolsonaro. The Brazilian dailyFolha De S Paulo reportsthat the court order Bolsonaro to wear an electronic ankle monitor while under house arrest and banned him from using social media and from contacting his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a federal congressman who has taken a leave of absence to live in the US and lobby the Trump administration to intervene on his father’s behalf.

Eduardo Bolsonaro has taken credit for convincingDonald Trumpto put a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil to the US as punishment for the prosecution of the former Brazilian president who was also banned from running for office after his supporters stormed Brazil’s capital in an attempt to overturn his election loss.

Donald Trump told Republican senators at a White House dinner on Friday night that 10 hostages still being held in Gaza would be released “very shortly”.

“We hope to have that finished pretty quickly” Trump said before praising his envoy, Steve Witkoff as “fantastic”.

Trump’s comments came in a rambling set of remarks that lasted 18 minutes, and included boasting about that his victory in the 2024 presidential election was, in terms of countries won, “a landslide”.

Here is the full text ofthe lawsuitDonald Trump filed in federal court in Miami on Friday, in which the president calls the Wall Street Journal’s report that he sent Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, a lewd birthday letter in 2002 “false and defamatory” and demands at least $10bn in damages and court costs from Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal reporters, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and related corporate entities.

The extraordinary dollar amount demanded by Trump is identical to what he asked of CBS when hefiled suiton the eve of the 2024 election alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited in a misleading way to cast her in a positive light and amounted to “election interference”.

Although theraw video of the interviewreleased later by CBS showed that the editing had been routine, although the outlet made the odd decision to use two different parts of one answer from Harris on different programs, the network’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump $16m to drop that suit.

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called forBarack Obamaand former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show thatDonald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.

She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.

The post-election intelligence estimates contrasted with findings reached before the election, which indicated that Russia probably was not trying to interfere.

In extraordinary comments calling for prosecutions, she added: “The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.

In a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation intoJeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump, US attorney general Pam Bondi calls the case “a matter of public concern”.

Inthe motion, filed on Friday in a Manhattan federal court, Bondi, and her deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, write that the request was prompted by the uproar following the justice department’s 6 July memo “describing an exhaustive review undertaken of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein” which was undertaken with the FBI “to determine whether evidence existed that could predicate an investigation into uncharged third parties.” The memo concluded that there was no such evidence existed.

“Since July 6, 2025, there has been extensive public interest in the basis for the Memorandum’s conclusions”, Bondi and Blanche write. “While the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation continue to adhere to the conclusions reached in the Memorandum, transparency to the American public is of the utmost importance to this Administration. Given the public interest in the investigative work conducted by the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation into Epstein, the Department of Justice moves the Court to unseal the underlying grand jury transcripts in United States v. Epstein, subject to appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information.”

They add that the justice department will work with prosecutors in Manhattan, where the grand jury testimony was taken, “to make appropriate redactions of victim-related information and other personal identifying information prior to releasing the transcripts. Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims.”

“Public officials, lawmakers, pundits, and ordinary citizens remain deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter” they argue later in the motion. “Indeed, other jurists have released grand jury transcripts after concluding that Epstein’s case qualifies as a matter of public concern.”

“After all, Jeffrey Epstein is ‘the most infamous pedophile in American history’” according to previous filings, and the “facts surrounding Epstein’s case ‘tell a tale of national disgrace.’”

Acting atDonald Trump’s direction, the justice department filed a motion in a Manhattan federal court on Friday, asking a judge to unseal grand jury testimony transcripts from the federal sex-trafficking investigation intoJeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender.

The move to share some but not all of the files related to Epstein come after fevered speculation about Trump’s connections to Epstein, who wasarrestedandchargedin 2019 and then found dead in his Manhattan jail cell.

Releasing the transcripts, however, will not satisfy even some supporters of the president who want to see him release all of the files from the federal investigation into Epstein, including a rumored list of powerful men alleged to have had sex with minors Epstein trafficked, and other documents.

The move comes after Trump filed a libel suit in Miami on Friday accusing two Wall Street Journal reporters, and Rupert Murdoch and his companies, of defaming him by reporting that one of the documents examined by prosecutors was a “bawdy” letter from Trump to Epstein in 2003, three years before Epstein was first indicted.

In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty in state court in Florida to two felony charges, including soliciting a minor, in exchange for a deal in which he avoided federal charges.

Over a decade later, in 2019, the federal investigation into Epstein was revived and he was charged by Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, of having “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money” between 2002 and 2005 in both New York and Palm Beach.

Trump’s outrage over the report that suggests he sent Epstein a lewd birthday letter in 2003 is likely connected to the fact that this was during the period that Epstein was accused of committing the crimes he was later charged with.

Trump was known to have socialized with Epstein before his arrest and publicly called him a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”, inan interviewwith New York magazine in 2002.

Donald Trumpfiled a lawsuit on Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters, raising claims under federal libel law, court records show.

Reuters reports that a copy of the complaint was not immediately available. The case was filed in Miami federal court.

The White House is attempting to press ahead with other business but US politics remains consumed on Friday withDonald Trump’s desperate effort to deflect attention away from his administration’s decision to not release files from the federal investigation intoJeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who was friends with the future president before he was first indicted. Here are some of the day’s developments in that story, and the US government, so far:

House Republicans passed Trump’s funding cut proposal just after midnight on Friday – clawing back nearly $8bn in federal funding for foreign aid and $1.1bn in support for public broadcasting. The 216-213 vote, with two Republicans, Mike Turner of Ohio and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, opposing the package alongside all Democrats, could have been a tie but for the fact that three Democrats elected in November have already died.

Trump began his day by arguing on his social media platform that it was impossible that a ‘bawdy letter’ to Epstein from Trump was in the justice department files since Democrats would have revealed it when they were in control of the justice department. “If there was a ‘smoking gun’ on Epstein, why didn’t the Dems, who controlled the ‘files’ for four years, and had Garland and Comey in charge, use it? BECAUSE THEY HAD NOTHING!!!” Trump posted. His argument is flawed, however, since: a. Democrats like the former attorney generalMerrick Garlandare defenders of the norm that the justice department should be apolitical, and investigative files in cases that do not go to trial are supposed to remain secret; and b.James Comey, a Republican, not a Democrat, was fired as FBI director by Trump two years before the justice departmentarrestedandchargedEpstein.

Steve Bannonhas said thatthe Wall Street Journal storyabout the birthday letter bearing Trump’s name has united the president’s supporters behind him.

Democrats are questioning the timing of CBS’sannouncement that it was cancelingThe Late Show withStephen Colbert, days after Colbertcriticizedthe network’s parent companyParamountfor settling a $16m lawsuit with Trump.

The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency visited Washington this week as Israel seeks the Trump administration’s help in ethnically cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian population,Axios reported, citing two unnamed sources.

Democrats are questioning the timing of CBS’sannouncement that it was cancelingThe Late Show with Stephen Colbert, days after Colbertcriticizedthe network’s parent companyParamountfor settling a $16m lawsuit withDonald Trump.

Colbert panned Paramount for settling with Trump over the president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with the then presidential candidateKamala Harris. He called the settlement, which coincided with Paramount seeking approval from the US Federal Communications Commission for an $8.4bn merger withSkydance Media(a company ran byDavid Ellison, son of close Trump allyLarryEllison), “a big fat bribe”.

That sentiment was echoed by senatorElizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, who wrote on X that the settlement “looks like bribery”. RepresentativePramila Jayapalof Washington said: “People deserve to know if this is a politically motivated attack on free speech.”

Independent senatorBernie Sanders, of Vermont, also suggested that CBS’s announcement that the show would end in May 2026 was no coincidence. “CBS’s billionaire owners pay Trump $16m to settle a bogus lawsuit while trying to sell the network to Skydance,” he said. “Stephen Colbert, an extraordinary talent and the most popular late night host, slams the deal. Days later, he’s fired. Do I think this is a coincidence? NO.”

And senatorAdam Schiff, of California, who was a guest on Colbert’s show last night, demanded more answers as to whether the show was canceled for political reasons. “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know,” he wrote on X.

Celebrities have beenexpressing similar feelingsaround the timing of Colbert getting the axe. ActorJohn Cusackshareda clip of Colbert on social media and wrote: “He’s not groveling enough to American fascism – Larry Ellison needs his tax cuts – doesn’t need comedians reminding people they are not cattle.”

Severance actorAdam Scottcalled it “absolute bullshit” andJamie Lee Curtis, asked for her thoughts during a red carpet interview, said “it’s bad” and that “they’re trying to silence people”.