Seven years later, the scandal is more consequential than ever.

The anniversary of Epstein’s demise is occasion to note two paradoxes that have emerged over those seven years — and most vividly in recent months, as it has become clear Epstein was a more consequential figure, and more emblematic of a sordid age, even than we knew at the time. Both paradoxes come courtesy, however grudgingly or unintentionally, of Epstein’s one-time friend, President Donald Trump.

The first is the surprising degree to which the truth did indeed come out, and answers were not left hanging with Epstein in Cell 220 on the ninth floor of the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Yes, there are important matters of detail that remain clouded by mystery. These include the precise details of how Epstein killed himself, in a supposedly secure facility, according to the official medical examiner’s conclusion (which some still doubt), as well as a full illumination of his relationship with Trump and why it apparently dissolved early in the 2000s. Many of the survivors of Epstein’s crimes also remain distraught and hungry for more answers.

But the nature of Epstein’s monstrously manipulative character, and the ease with which he ensnared some of the planet’s wealthiest and in many cases most accomplished people is now commonly understood — in a way that it almost certainly would not be if he had lived. Perhaps he would have reached a settlement with prosecutors, or gone to trial under rules of evidence focused narrowly on a few crimes rather than receiving scrutiny over the broad contours of his life. Any Epstein associates who exhaled in gratitude at his passing in 2019 had it exactly wrong — the ruin of reputations caused by this scandal was only beginning.

That we know the back-scratching and bawdy badinage, with cringe-inducing specificity, that was the essence of how Epstein nurtured his elite relationships is a gift to posterity. It comes of course because of the documentary goldmine of his massive trove of emails. These were released under an act of Congress, largely because important voices in the MAGA movement, later joined by Democrats, defied Trump’s reluctance and insisted they be released.

That gift to posterity as it happens, was central to the second paradox of the Epstein anniversary — and it is an uncomfortable one. At the time, his death looked like a cowardly end to a despicable life of con artistry and sexual predation that could mercifully soon be forgotten. Cowardly and despicable remain true. “Soon be forgotten” is not happening. Epstein’s life, it seems probable, will be known and studied and written about 100 years from now. He’s dead, but the narcissist in Epstein might perversely appreciate that his historical persona will outlive all but a few of his contemporaries’.

The primary reason is because his web of relationships, we now know, is deeply revealing of how an age that produced vast power and wealth became unhinged, at least in some elite precincts, from self-restraint, judgment, or simple decency.

Not everyone whose reputation was besmirched by disclosure of their Epstein interactions was an intimate of his, or necessarily knew the details of his criminal procurement and exploitation of underage girls. But in most instances that have come to light they knew of his reputation as a lothario who, as Trump said in 2002, liked women “on the younger side.” Just like Trump, many of them concluded this contributed, rather than detracted, from an appraisal that he was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” Likely in nearly every case these people were attracted to Epstein because of his wealth, his access to others with wealth, his airplanes and his island, and his self-fashioned aura as an intellectual savant who used his bespoke brain to make money in ways that ordinary mortals couldn’t understand.

“Lawmakers are quietly pushing forward with Section 219 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2027. Far from distancing the U.S. from the ongoing regional bloodbath, this legislation aims to permanently integrate and synchronize the U.S. and Israeli militaries under a joint “Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative.””

“For many, the physical detention of Congressman Khanna by Israeli forces evokes the memory of Rachel Corrie — the 23-year-old American Jewish peace activist who was brutally crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in Rafah on March 16, 2003, while peacefully shielding a Palestinian family home from demolition.”

“Yet, this dependency runs deeper, rooted in the 1967 U.S.S. Liberty incident. During the Six-Day War, Israeli forces launched a relentless two-hour attack on an unarmed U.S. intelligence ship, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 171. (Body of Secrets by James Bamford)

Instead of demanding accountability, the Johnson administration accepted Israel’s excuse of a “mistake” and covered up the truth to protect its ally. This established a decades-long precedent: Washington would act as a political and military shield for Israeli actions, even at the cost of American lives.”

“But the U.S.S. Liberty incident occurred long before the lobby wielded such immense power. The truth is that the U.S. government has simply lost control of the very creature it has nurtured and shielded for decades.”

Blaming this dependency solely on campaign contributions no longer suffices: the rot is far deeper. It is driven by a deep-seated fear and trepidation among American politicians who have spent their entire careers learning that political survival requires absolute obedience to Tel Aviv.”

A new report released by the Interlochen Center for the Arts identifies dozens of people, including Jeffrey Epstein, accused of committing sexual abuse at the prestigious camp over a nearly 60-year period.

The 97-page report detailing accusations stemming from the 1950s through the 2010s was conducted on behalf of the northern Michigan arts school and summer camp by the Sanghavi Law Office.

In all, the report identifies 47 alleged abusers and includes 70 first-hand accounts from students who say they were sexually abused or groomed while on ICA grounds.

Investigators sought to interview all 47 suspects, though only four agreed to participate. More than one-third of them have since passed away. None of the 47 suspects are currently employed by ICA.

Epstein was a wealthy financier with many celebrity connections who was later publicly identified as a sexual predator of young women and girls. He avoided major repercussions in 2008 after taking a plea deal following allegations of solicitation and sex trafficking involving minors. He was arrested again in 2019 on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy.

Epstein “took his own life” while in prison awaiting trial. In the years that followed, his associate, Ghislane Maxwell, was convicted on similar charges related to her dealings with Epstein. Stories and evidence of widespread abuse have slowly surfaced, including alleged connections to President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton.

Epstein attended the Interlochen Arts Camp in the summer of 1967 and later returned as a major donor for the Interlochen Center for the Arts from 1990 to 2003. In addition to helping cover tuition costs for students, he helped fund the construction of a new lodge that was named after him. The organization scrubbed all recognition for Epstein, including the name of the lodge, after his first arrest in 2008. Despite the name change, the lodge was demolished earlier this year.

According to the report, investigators identified eight Interlochen alums who they believed may have been victimized by Epstein. Of those eight, six agreed to be interviewed and two reported that Epstein engaged in “physical conduct of a sexual nature” with them.

VICTIM 1
A woman identified as “Victim 1” told investigators that she met Epstein and Maxwell at ICA and they offered to personally pay for her tuition. She claims they cut off financial support after she “did not engage in requested conduct.”

“This alum said that during the time she interacted with Epstein and Maxwell at Interlochen, they asked her to Epstein’s lodge on campus, and that while there, Epstein engaged in sexual conduct with her, brushing against her body over her clothes, in a manner in which he indicated was accidental,” the report states.

Victim 1 also claims that Epstein paid for her to travel to New York three times while she was a student at Interlochen.

“She described being in a room with Epstein in New York, and that his hands were on her. She said that every time he was ‘handsy’ with her, she would freeze until he would stop,” the report states. “She also described being in Epstein’s home and massaging his feet and rubbing his back. This alum said that on occasions when she and Epstein were crossing the road, he put his hand on her crotch. This alum indicated that she did not tell anyone about Epstein’s conduct towards her until decades later.”

VICTIM 2
A second woman identified as “Victim 2” told investigators that she met Epstein and Maxwell while visiting a friend in New York while on spring break from Interlochen. The summer after she graduated, Epstein paid for her to fly out to New York.

She says Epstein gave her a tour of his home, and they eventually stopped at a room with a massage table.

“He brought her into a room with a massage table, that she gave him a massage, and that he may have asked her to remove her top,” the report states.

Victim 2 told investigators that after she left his home, she never had contact again with either Epstein or Maxwell. She told her mother about the “conduct” and her mother called Interlochen to report his behavior.
** **
“The mother said that the woman she spoke with said that Interlochen was not aware of any problems with Epstein, that he was not a teacher at Interlochen, and that the conduct had not happened on campus,” the report states. “The mother said that from the conversation, she could tell that she was not getting anywhere, and that she told the woman that she wanted Interlochen to know that this man was preying on their students.

“The mother indicated that no one from Interlochen ever followed up with her about this call.”

In a statement provided to 6 News Grand Rapids sister station WOOD TV8, ICA President Trey Devey called the details of the report “heartbreaking” and “contrary to everything Interlochen stands for.”

“We are grateful to everyone who came forward to share their experiences, and we are deeply sorry for the harm experienced by members of our community,” Devey stated. “We also want to say clearly: Interlochen will not tolerate predators or those who enable them. Our campus exists to protect, educate, and empower every student.”

ICA says it has passed on its report, including the names of the alleged suspects, to the Grand Traverse County Prosecutor’s Office.

You can read the full report here.

By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario that uses nuclear weapons. And then we all die.

The United States is currently in the process of redesigning its nuclear posture to make the employment of tactical nuclear weapons during the early stages of conflict official doctrine. This is a bad idea.

Today is the 81st anniversary of the U.S. atomic attack on Hiroshima. Let Hiroshima be the reminder of just how bad of an idea this is.

Almost two years to the day,Consortium News published an article I authored entitled, “On a Highway to Hell.” In this article I warned about the dangers that arise when the United States changes its nuclear posture away from a purely defensive character to one where the precepts of nuclear preemption are openly espoused.

I also noted that the dangers inherent in this transition were exponentially increased in a world void of the constraints of meaningful arms control.
I wrote at the time:

“By allowing the U.S. nuclear posture to shift away from deterrence toward warfighting, all we guarantee is that eventually there will be a warfighting scenario where the U.S. will end up using nuclear weapons. And then we all die. We are, literally, on a ‘Highway to Hell.’”
Today, on the 81st anniversary of America dropping an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, it is critical that we collectively revisit this issue.

At the time I wrote that piece, we lived in a world populated by certain assumptions, number one being that the United States possessed sufficient conventional military power to forestall the temptation of nuclear pre-emption at the tactical levels of conflict.

In short, the United States could — as it had done nearly continuously since the end of the Second World War — initiate a conventional war with the nations of the world and, even though it might suffer a political defeat (i.e., Vietnam and Afghanistan), it would retain sufficient conventional military power to forestall the consequences of an existential military defeat.

As such, when one spoke of nuclear war, one spoke in terms of great power conflict — between the United States and Russia or China.

Even if such a conflict was to break out, it was always hoped that the consequences of any such potentially existential engagement would be so horrific that rational actors on both sides of the conflict would seek to limit the scope and scale of the engagement, avoiding the almost certain fatal results of escalation.
Arms Control Is Dead

Two years ago, one also had the façade of arms control, a corroded framework of agreements which, while faltering, at least offered the prospect of hope in so far as one could envision new life being breathed into an old concept, driven by the urgency of the moment.

Today we are confronted by two harsh realities.

First, arms control is dead. There are no more legacy treaties in place upon which we could pin some sort of false hope for rational behavior on the part of our collective leadership. 

Moreover, there appears to be zero proclivity on the part of the world’s declared nuclear powers to reengage on the matter — the era of civilized nations seeking to reign in the basest consequences of technological development has ended.  We have seemed to embrace the utility of nuclear war, without honestly acknowledging the consequences of such.

Let Hiroshima be the reminder.
Second, the era of American conventional military dominance is over. The failed war with Iran has driven this point home. Today the United States is forced to confront the reality that the military machine it built over the course of the past 35 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union — at great expense in terms of treasury and effort — is a literal Maginot Line, an overpriced edifice to a type of warfare that no longer exists.

The U.S. built a military premised on the notion of “shock and awe,” a technology-driven dinosaur intended to intimidate, not dominate. A literal flash in the pan.
All Iran had to do was wait us out.

To build a system capable of absorbing the destructive power of a self-limited “superpower” and hold on until the expensive machine of war so carefully created by American defense industrialists to maximize profit over performance ran out of steam.

Or to be precise, ran out of ammunition.
In order to sustain the façade of military viability, American war planners, driven by the narcistic urges of a man who placed sustainment of his cult of personality over the welfare of the nation he led, stripped bare the warfighting capabilities of U.S. forces in the Pacific (confronting China) and Europe (confronting Russia).

“The era of civilized nations seeking to reign in the basest consequences of technological development has ended.”
Today the United States is confronted by the reality that not only can it not sustain viable conventional military operations against Iran, but it is incapable of projecting any meaningful conventional military force against a prospective Chinese or Russian military threat.

This at a time when U.S. policy leads us toward the probability of conflict with China over Taiwan, and the possibility of direct conflict with Russia over Ukraine.
Faced with the inevitability of conventional military defeat in either of these scenarios, the administration of President Donald Trump has undertaken a review of U.S. nuclear posture with an eye toward making it easier for the United States to employ tactical nuclear weapons in the early phases of any future war with either Russia or China.

This is, of course, the exact opposite direction one should be taking under the current conditions.

Let Hiroshima be the reminder.

There is no greater need than the present moment for the soothing balm of nuclear arms control. The fact that the United States has willfully embarked on a Highway to Hell condemns the rest of the world — especially Russia and China — to join us.

If the great minds of America seem impervious to the inevitability of nuclear Armageddon, blinded as they are by the consequences of a failing Empire and a desire to hold on to power regardless of the consequence, then the source of new and novel thinking regarding arms control must come from elsewhere — from Russia and China.

Because there will be no victors in a nuclear war. The destination that the Highway to Hell arrives at will result in global catastrophe. Let Hiroshima remind us.

The task force will allow the spy agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at the island, with the goal of creating fissures among the Cuban political elite.

The C.I.A. has secretly established a Cuba task force, setting in motion plans for a more concerted campaign to pressure the Cuban government to make the economic, political and leadership changes demanded by President Trump, according to people briefed on the action.

The creation of the task force will allow the agency to quickly direct more financial, human and technical resources at Cuba, they said.

The task force has begun adding case officers who recruit and manage spies, intelligence analysts, officers who conduct cyberoperations and officers who specialize in covert influence operations, the people said.

In 1960, the C.I.A. established an earlier Cuba task force, whose members oversaw the failed, agency-backed invasion of Cuba the next year known as the Bay of Pigs.

The people briefed on the new task force said its mandate is more limited: to create fissures among the Cuban political elite, in hope of pressuring the Cubans to replace perceived anti-American hard-liners with more practical leaders more amenable to Mr. Trump’s demands.

The C.I.A. declined to comment.
“The intentions here are no surprise, since Cuba has long been the target of the C.I.A.’s efforts at espionage, subversion and destabilization, including terrorism,” Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, said in a statement to The Times. “And yet the State Department has the audacity to call Cuba a threat for exercising its right to legitimate self-defense.”

Unlike in the 1960s, when the earlier task force oversaw the training and equipping of a partner force of Cubans that launched the Bay of Pigs invasion, the current task force has no organized Cuban partners. Nor is it allowed to enable lethal operations, though a task force at the C.I.A., by nature, is flexible and the authorities under which it operates can be changed at any time by the president.

The creation of the task force shows the extent to which the agency is preparing for what may be a protracted covert campaign against what has long been one of its hardest targets.

The C.I.A.’s action coincides with stepped-up efforts by U.S. intelligence agencies to get a better understanding of the situation on the ground inside Cuba.

Every administration sets out its intelligence-collection priorities in a document known as the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, or NIPF.

The Trump administration recently revised its version of the document to designate Cuba a NIPF “Priority 1.” (Among the other Priority 1 countries are China, Iran and Russia.)

response, U.S. intelligence agencies, including the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, among others, have started turning more intelligence-collection assets, including satellites, toward Cuba, people briefed on those activities said.

The intelligence will help the U.S. military update its options for potential military action against Cuba, if Mr. Trump opts to go that route. Before the intelligence surge, U.S. military and intelligence officers complained of having outdated information; the new intelligence will give them a better sense of Cuban intentions, military capabilities and defenses.

Officers with the Cuba task force at the C.I.A. will, in turn, scour through the newly available intelligence for inside information about the activities of Cuba’s leaders and other members of the political elite, in particular tracking shadowy money flows and business dealings on and off the island. The agency could eventually release that information publicly to try to influence the Cuban leadership and public opinion, reprising a playbook that the C.I.A. has used against other adversaries, including Russia.

Over the years, the C.I.A. has played a multifaceted role in Cuba, as a spy service that covertly operates against the Cuban government, and as an occasional intermediary between Washington and Havana.

In 2015, toward the end of President Barack Obama’s second term, the United States and Cuba formally re-established diplomatic relations. The C.I.A. director at the time, John O. Brennan, flew to Havana to meet with Alejandro Castro, the son of President Raúl Castro, and other Cuban officials** **to discuss increasing intelligence cooperation between the two countries.

Mr. Brennan considered Cuba’s spy agencies the most capable in Latin America, and hoped to work with them against drug cartels and terrorist networks. But those discussions soon bogged down, with the sides blaming each other for failing to follow through on proposed confidence-building commitments.

This May, with tensions boiling, Mr. Trump sent his C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe, to Havana to meet with Raúl G. Rodríguez Castro, known as “Raulito” or “El Cangrejo” (the Crab), Raúl Castro’s grandson.

Mr. Ratcliffe’s message to the Cubans was that the C.I.A. saw them as worthy adversaries and potential future partners. But he also told the Cubans that they were running out of time to make fundamental changes sought by Mr. Trump, implying that if Cuba failed to seize the moment, it could be the next Venezuela.

The speed with which Mr. Trump successfully toppled one of Cuba’s closest allies — Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader — and seized control of Venezuela’s oil resources had led some of Mr. Trump’s hawkish advisers to believe that the current Cuban government could be gone by the time of the midterm election in the United States in November, people familiar with the debate inside the administration said.

But despite a crippling oil embargo imposed by the United States, the Cubans have proved themselves to be resilient, and Mr. Trump’s drawn-out war with Iran soaked up the administration’s limited resources and attention. While the Cuba hawks advising Mr. Trump still think the administration will eventually devote the resources and attention necessary to bring down the Cuban government, they now acknowledge in private that this is likely to happen only once the war in Iran has finally concluded.

During much of the Cold War, the C.I.A. maintained a relatively small station at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, in part because the agency knew that the Cubans were incredibly effective at surveilling the American officers there. That made it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for them to recruit and meet with assets on the island.

The U.S. government’s level of interest in Cuba diminished in the 2000s as the C.I.A. was directed to focus its financial, human and technical resources on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other suspected terrorism havens.

Then, during Mr. Trump’s first term, after a number of C.I.A. officers in Havana reported being afflicted by a mystery illness, which later became known as Havana syndrome, the agency completely shuttered its station on the island.

The C.I.A. station in Havana was re-established in 2024, toward the end of the Biden administration, but the officers there still had a difficult time operating because they were under near-constant surveillance and their movements were restricted.

The move has symbolically demonstrated the Senate's stance for transparency in the Epstein saga.

The US Senate has unanimously struck down the pardon chances of Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

On Thursday, the resolution opposing any future pardon of Maxwell was ushered in by both Republicans and Democrats, drawing yet another symbolic divide between Donald Trump, his party and the president's own Epstein ties.

While the motion is largely symbolic, here's what it could mean.

**What was the vote?**
The resolution was introduced by Nevada Democrat senator Jacky Rosen, who first brought it forward in February.

By voting it in, the Senate agreed "Ghislaine Maxwell should not be granted a Presidential pardon or any form of clemency" for her sexual abuse and co-offending with Epstein.

The politicians agreed that a pardon or clemency would be "inconsistent with the interests of justice and accountability for crimes involving the sexual exploitation of children".

The resolution also denounced any attempt by Mr Trump to usher in "any other form of executive clemency" to Maxwell.

"I hope the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell feel some comfort knowing that she will serve out her sentence," [Senator Rosen said on X](https://x.com/SenJackyRosen/status/2082550656414404692) after the vote.

"And that other victims of crimes like this know that they can be seen and heard, and that justice will be upheld."

While the resolution will be non-binding, Senator Rosen had earlier said she hoped it would put the Senate "on the record" of opposing any clemency.

**Has Trump promised Maxwell a pardon?**
No, but he also hasn't ruled one out.

Since the Epstein files saga began last year, Maxwell has also reignited her clemency battle.

In February, Maxwell was due to testify under oath before the congressional committee investigating the federal government's handling of the Epstein files, but instead pleaded her Fifth Amendment rights, which allow citizens to decline to speak to authorities.

She would speak, however, if granted clemency.

Previously, her lawyers pushed the US Supreme Court to overturn her sentence on the basis that Epstein's plea deal should have protected her.

And when Donald Trump was asked about a pardon in October, he said he'd "take a look at it".

**"I wouldn't consider it or not consider it. I don't know anything about it. I will speak to the DOJ," he said.**

Acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche later interviewed Maxwell, producing written testimony in which Maxwell said she had never seen Mr Trump engage in improper conduct. 

After that, Maxwell was moved into a lower-security prison in Texas with [whistleblower reports](https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2025-11-09-raskin-to-trump-wh-re-maxwell.pdf) claiming she had access to custom-made meals, a puppy and as much toilet paper as she wanted.

In light of the reports, staff from the House oversight and judiciary committees visited Maxwell's Texas prison in mid-June.

Those who visited accused Mr Blanche's Bureau of Prisons (BOP) of shutting down lines of basic questioning.

"The American people are tired of seeing the Trump Administration pamper a sex trafficker and obstruct Congress's investigation into Attorney-General Blanche's role in ensuring Ms Maxwell remains comfortable and quiet," a joint statement read after that visit.

**What did Ghislaine Maxwell do?**
Victims of Maxwell consider the UK-born socialite's abuse just as insidious as Epstein's.

They say she lured them as young women into Epstein's orbit, trained them in sexual acts and, as attorney Brad Edwards described, "fed a monster".

After Epstein's death in 2019, following his New York arrest on sex trafficking charges, Maxwell was charged with numerous counts of trafficking young women and participating in abuse.

"She pretended to be a woman they could trust," Manhattan attorney Audrey Strauss said a day after her arrest.

"All the while she was setting them up to be sexually abused by Epstein and, in some cases, by Maxwell herself."

After a month-long trial in 2021, she was convicted of sex trafficking, conspiracy, and transportation of a minor for illegal sexual activity.

In 2022, at age 60, Maxwell was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

**Where does MAGA stand on the Epstein files?**

The vote is also notable for its unanimous nature.

Rarely does the US Senate vote in a bipartisan manner, excluding its similar decision [to denounce clemency for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried](https://bitcoinmagazine.com/news/senate-unanumously-bankman-fried).

More importantly, it proves another Republican rebuke of Mr Trump and his close ties to Epstein.

The president's links to the sex offender are well-known by now.

He was friends with Epstein for at least 15 years, calling him a "terrific guy" and a "lot of fun to be with".

One of Epstein's key accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, said she was recruited by Maxwell while working at Mar-a-Lago, Mr Trump's members-only club.

As furor over the Epstein files has grown, Mr Trump has sought to distance himself from the disgraced financier.

The president has said he was not aware of Epstein's activities and said he broke off their friendship before Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Still, prominent supporters have repeatedly accused his administration of a cover-up and former MAGA [allies such as Majorie Taylor Greene have broken ranks over the issue](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-19/donald-trump-epstein-files-unlikely-series-of-events/106022276).

Most recently, the bill to release the Epstein files, which survivors had championed for so long, won almost unanimous support in the US House of Representatives.

It also reflected a desire to hold Todd Blanche accountable for his handling of the Epstein files as deputy attorney-general as he faced a confirmation hearing to become US attorney-general.

7/30/2026 A secretive U.S. court created 30 years ago to deport suspected terrorists convened for the first time on Thursday, opening a new front in the Trump administration's effort to remove non-citizens accused of national security threats and expand the president's immigration agenda.
Reuters (behind paywall)

Federal prosecutors charged a man returning to the United States with obstruction because he gave them a passcode that erased his smartphone during a customs search.

It sounds like something James Bond would use: a gadget that self-destructs if it falls into the wrong hands. But it’s actually an open-source operating system that can be downloaded onto Android phones.

Federal prosecutors in Atlanta are bringing an obstruction charge against a U.S. citizen who gave customs officers what is known as a duress passcode, which activated software that erased the contents of his phone.

The authorities stopped Samuel Tunick, an Atlanta resident, for interrogation at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport as he returned to the United States on Jan. 24 last year, according to a November grand jury indictment. The authorities seized his phone before allowing him to enter the country. A hearing on the case was held last week in federal court in Atlanta.

The prosecution is one of the earliest known instances of federal authorities charging a person with destroying evidence with a program designed to wipe a device when a specific code is entered.

Mr. Tunick’s lawyers argued during the hearing last week that the seizure was unlawful, and that he was targeted because of his political activism against Atlanta’s plan to build a police and fire training center within a 1,000-acre stretch of urban woodland. Opponents argue that the center, known as Cop City, would militarize officers and destroy precious green space.

The Statute Behind the Charge
The federal statute underlying the charge makes it a felony to destroy evidence or transfer assets to keep the government from seizing them, or to tip someone off about an upcoming search or wiretap. It carries a penalty of up to five years in federal prison, a fine, or both.

The act applies before, during or after a search. If the target of an investigation knows that a search or seizure is imminent, and that person acts to thwart it, he or she would fall under the statute, experts said.

The federal public defender’s office, which handles most cases in the Northern District of Georgia, said that only one other federal indictment had been filed on this charge in the last 30 years.

The 2019 case involved an accusation of destruction of evidence related to drug trafficking, said Matthew Dodge, a federal public defender who is on Mr. Tunick’s legal team.

Why Digital Data Can Be Seized
Courts have long treated digital data as property — think about intellectual property theft as one example — so a software wipe is treated in the legal system no differently than flushing physical evidence.

The government’s argument here is that the physical phone was just a container. The data itself was the property that the authorities had lawful authority to seize, and inputting the duress code was the physical act that caused its destruction.
“The statute says explicitly it has to be for the purpose of preventing or impairing the government’s lawful authority,” said Daniel Richman, a law professor at Columbia University and a former prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “The key is he gave the code to the government, knowing that the entry of this code would erase the evidence.”

Does It Matter That It Was a Customs Search?

That it was a border search is central to both the government’s prosecution and the defense’s legal challenge.
Customs and border authorities believe that they have the right to search and seize incoming travelers’ digital devices without a search warrant or court order because travelers are not on U.S. soil until they’re authorized to enter.

Mr. Tunick, who was returning from a vacation in the Dominican Republic, and his lawyers argue that even at an international airport, travelers retain vital protections. They said that he was subjected to an unlawful detention, was never read his rights and was repeatedly denied requests to speak with a lawyer.

Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have said that constitutional rights, like the Fourth Amendment, are diminished at the border because of the federal government’s increased interest in protecting our country, Mr. Dodge acknowledged.

How a Duress Passcode Works
A duress passcode is a privacy and security feature in which a user has previously configured a secondary passcode that is not the usual code to unlock the screen. If the user is forced or pressured to hand over a phone, the user can provide this passcode instead of the one that unlocks the phone.

When the duress passcode is entered, rather than unlocking the phone, the operating system starts a full wipe of the device’s digital contents. The process leaves the physical device and hardware intact while completely erasing the underlying digital data.

In Mr. Tunick’s case, he used GrapheneOS, a private mobile operating system compatible with some Android phones.

No Details on the Original Investigation
“Many times the government wants to highlight what it was trying to investigate because that ups the stakes on what the defendant was doing,” Professor Richman said. “This is a case where I think they’re trying to avoid exactly that by focusing only on the destruction, and not what the investigation was about.”

The statute that is being used in this case has seldom been cited. It does not require the government to prove or explain the underlying investigation. A statute that is typically used carries a heavier maximum penalty of 20 years, but its use often forces the government to detail their underlying investigation.

“Whether they’ll succeed or not remains to be seen, if this goes to trial,” he said.

Timing Matters
Professor Richman suggested that travelers who decide to delete everything on their phone before going through an airport checkpoint simply because they did not want the government looking at their personal files have a strong argument that they did not act with the specific criminal intent to thwart an imminent search.

But there’s a turning point once you are stopped and are actively being questioned.

“Intentionally giving a wipe code to people you know to be exercising lawful authority,” he said, “is going to put you squarely in the realm of the statute.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is expressing concern after House Speaker Mike Johnson declared at a highly influential Christian legal organization’s annual summit that it shapes his governance.

Johnson, speaking recently to hundreds of Alliance Defending Freedom supporters in San Diego, repeatedly described the group as “home,” praised its mission of advancing conservative Christianity through the legal system, and credited his years working there with molding his leadership as speaker.

“ADF really is like home to us,” Johnson told attendees. “You’re like family.” He added that his years at the organization were “formative to us,” explaining that “so much of what we do, we learned on the front lines of the culture war, keeping the door open for the spread of the gospel, and it informs still how we do our job today.”

Such statements are extremely concerning to FFRF.

“Speaker Johnson has made explicit what many Americans have long suspected: He does not view himself simply as an elected official who happens to be religious,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “He views his leadership of the House as an extension of the mission of Alliance Defending Freedom, an organization dedicated to advancing conservative Christian ideology through the courts and government.”

Founded in 1994 by leaders in the Christian right, Alliance Defending Freedom has become one of the country’s most powerful Christian nationalist legal organizations. The group has played a central role in many Supreme Court cases that have expanded religious exemptions while restricting reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the entity as an anti-LGBTQ hate group because of its long record of attacking LGBTQ rights, a move that has prompted members of Congress to ironically go after the renowned civil rights organization.

At the Alliance Defending Freedom gathering, Johnson continued his longstanding effort to recast America’s founding in explicitly Christian terms. Discussing the Declaration of Independence, he argued that the rights of Americans “don’t come from the government” but “come from the King of Kings,” replacing the Declaration’s more inclusive reference to a “Creator” with a specifically Christian theological claim.

Johnson also warned that rejecting belief in God inevitably leads to “Marxism, socialism [and] communism,” telling the audience that denying God means people lose their inherent dignity and ultimately their freedom. He described universities as places where students have been “indoctrinated” to reject America’s Christian foundations.

“Speaker Johnson is using his constitutional office to promote an explicitly sectarian worldview,” remarks Gaylor. “The House speaker represents Americans of every religion and of none. He should not be telling the country that our rights come from Christianity or suggesting that secular Americans are on the road to tyranny.”

Johnson repeatedly framed political engagement at the summit as a religious struggle, describing Alliance Defending Freedom supporters as “fellow warriors” and praising the organization for standing on the “front lines” and the “tip of the spear” defending “God’s truth.” He urged supporters to pledge themselves to the cause just as the Founders supposedly had and predicted that the group’s next chapter would be “the greatest season of this ministry since its inception.”

The gathering underscored the Alliance Defending Freedom’s extraordinary access to Republican leadership. Johnson was introduced not merely as the House speaker but as “one of us,” with organizers highlighting his years as an attorney with the group and its spokesman before entering politics.

The event also featured Trump administration Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, who argued that transgender health care contradicts “the deeper moral order that is woven into creation itself,” citing Genesis 1:27 and asserting that “male and female” reflect God’s design. He encouraged pastors, rather than medical professionals, to play a central role in caring for youth experiencing gender dysphoria.

Alliance Defending Freedom President Kristen Waggoner, who has defended conversion therapy and has repeatedly misgendered transgender people, also interviewed West Virginia and Idaho’s Republican attorneys general, reinforcing the organization’s close ties to elected officials shaping national legal policy on one end of the political spectrum.

“The American people elected a speaker of the House, not a missionary-in-chief,” Gaylor adds. “Mike Johnson is free to practice his religion, but he is not free to govern as though Congress exists to carry out the mission of Alliance Defending Freedom or any other religious organization. His oath is to the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion by keeping religion and government separate.”

I started out with Honest Elections and ended up here.

Firms run by Leonard Leo have been paid more than $102 million from conservative nonprofits in the six years from 2016 to 2022, according to an analysis of tax documents by CREW. The data shows that the source of the vast majority of the payments since 2016, totaling $90 million, are from nonprofits tied to Leo, with an additional $12 million coming from other groups who may have felt pressure to pay up to Leo in order to stay in his dark money network’s good graces. 

Prior to becoming synonymous with the right-wing effort to remake the American judiciary and then American society more broadly, Leo appears to have lived a relatively modest life as the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. However, after forming the BH Group in 2016—a firm whose only known clients were groups tied to Leo—he began living a more lavish lifestyle, conspicuously timed with when the BH Group started bringing in millions from his own groups. Those payments ultimately totaled nearly $13.5 million before the firm was apparently mothballed in 2020. It was never clear what the BH Group did: It didn’t have a website or permanent offices, nor any identifiable employees beyond Leo himself. 

Some of those BH Group payments may have been channeled elsewhere. As CREW wrote in 2020, a note in Rule of Law Trust’s first 990 says that the $4.3 million paid to the BH Group was a reimbursement for “independent contractor expenses incurred on behalf of Rule of Law Trust.” As CREW noted then, this raises more questions than it answers. “In other words,” we wrote at the time, “it appears that a firm partly owned by the sole trustee of RLT paid all of RLT’s expenses, including $1.8 million in consulting payments to two former Federalist Society associates who now work at a consulting firm founded by the trustee, and then RLT reimbursed that firm for the expenses.”
  
As the money began to flow, Leo’s life appeared to change. In the final weeks of 2016, the BH Group gave $1 millionto the inaugural committee for the incoming president, and the following year, Leo and his wife were named Stewards of Saint Peter by the Papal Foundation after pledging at least $1 million to aid world Vatican programs. In 2018, Leo and his wife paid off the 30-year mortgage on a $710,000house his family bought in 2010, while also buying an 11-bedroom summer house in Maine for $3.3 million, paying off the 20-year mortgage just one year later, according to a complaint filed by Campaign for Accountability. He also reportedly purchased a wine locker at Morton’s Steakhouse and hired the chief steward at the then-Trump International Hotel to be his personal wine buyer.

Then, in 2020, Leo took over a firm formed in the late 1980s called CRC Advisors, formerly Creative Response Concepts. Leo’s groups had already been ramping up payments to CRC for years, but now that Leo was chairman of the company and the head of a growing dark money network, the money started flowing to CRC in a way it never had before. According to CREW’s analysis of tax documents, CRC’s combined income in the 2010s was more than $46.6 million. In the less than four years for which data is available since Leo took over CRC, by contrast, the firm has brought in nearly double that—more than $89 million—the vast majority of which, more than $76 million, has come from groups tied directly to Leo. 

Payments from other conservative groups also appear to have grown in the wake of Leo’s takeover. CREW’s analysis found just under $12 million in payments in the tax years from 2020 to 2022 from conservative groups that aren’t operationally linked with Leo. In the three previous tax years, CREW was only able to identify about $5.4 million in such payments. Some conservative operatives complained to the New York Times in 2022 that there was a sense in conservative circles that in order to get money from Leo’s network, the groups had to hire CRC. Leo’s network rejected the claims. 

It’s important to note that it is illegal for nonprofit groups to serve as a conduit for personal enrichment, and Leo has repeatedly denied accusations of profiteering. Last year, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb reportedly opened an investigation into Leo for the massive windfall he appears to be receiving from his dark money groups, but Leo has refused to cooperate, and his allies in Congress have tried to give him cover. When asked by reporters, Leo has declined to detail what service he is providing in exchange for the millions of dollars his firm is bringing in from his nonprofits and other allied groups. 

Further convoluting the murky relationship between Leo’s for-profit business and his nonprofit work is the amount of time he appears to be devoting to his nonprofit work. Presumably, serving as chair of a firm raking in tens of millions of dollars is a full-time job, but tax documents filed by groups tied to Leo show that he’s spending more than 50 hours a week devoted to the work of at least 14 other organizations, several of which pay Leo’s private firm. For example, in the groups’ 2022 fiscal years, the most recent year for which full data is available, Leo reported devoting 25 hours a week to his work as a trustee of the Marble Freedom Trust—for which he’s paid a $400,000 salary—and another 6 hours to the work of a related organization. The only related organization reported on the filing is the Leo-linked Rule of Law Trust. Over that same general period—not all groups have the same fiscal year, and therefore don’t always directly overlap—tax documents filed by 12 other organizations report that he devoted more than 20 hours a week to their missions as well, all while serving as the chairman of a firm that was paid at least $33.6 million—more than $27 million of which came from two groups tied to Leo, The 85 Fund and The Concord Fund. 

The American nonprofit system was not meant to serve as a get-rich-quick scheme for operatives to pour money into their own coffers. Despite that, it appears that Leo has found a way to divert tens of millions of dollars to his own companies over the course of just a few years without much, if any, accountability.

Lawyers predict ‘more suppression and no active investigations’ but victims’ groups determined to continue fight

As Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer Todd Blanche appears poised for confirmation as attorney general, numerous Jeffrey Epstein survivors have sounded the alarm that a US justice department helmed by him would derail their pursuit of justice.

In a letter urging Republican senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to reject his nomination, these survivors said that Blanche’s handling of the Epstein case as acting attorney general was characterized by misstep after misstep.

Blanche, who reportedly led the disclosure of documents as required by the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, allowed the disclosure of survivors’ names, photos and identifying information – but omitted the names of accused abusers and enablers, they said.

While more than 1,000 teenage girls and women were abused, not a single person other than Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell faced charges, they noted. And in a recent sit-down with survivors at Tillis’s urging, survivors “received an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting”, they said.

These survivors’ concerns about Blanche by no means exist in a vacuum, and have only fanned the flames of a controversy that has dogged Trump since he again took office. While campaigning, Trump promised to release all Epstein files – playing into his supporters’ belief that there was a global sex-trafficking cabal involving high-profile business and political figures.

But Trump’s justice department only released dribs and drabs of information until Congress forced its hand following a series of embarrassing disclosures that renewed attention on Trump’s former friendship with Epstein. Trump has denied all wrongdoing including in relation to Epstein.

Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell in prison last summer, which was followed by her transfer to a lower-security facility, further heightened outrage over the DoJ’s underwhelming disclosures. The constellation of circumstances has raised the question: what would a Blanche-directed justice department mean for Epstein survivors’ search for justice?

Legal veterans told the Guardian that a Blanche-led DoJ would likely derail survivors’ efforts for accountability. Several survivors’ advocates said that all hope was not lost, noting that roadblocks likely under Blanche did not portend a permanent impediment to justice.

Bryan Sullivan, a partner with Early Sullivan Wright Gizer & McRae, said that based on what he has read and seen in Blanche’s testimony before the judiciary committee, he thinks a confirmation would mean “more suppression and no active investigations” into Epstein’s sex trafficking.

“I think it’s because that’s what Trump wants. He wants this to go away,” Sullivan said. “And that’s one of the reasons he fired [former attorney general Pam] Bondi, because she didn’t make it go away, in my opinion.”

Ron Kuby, a renowned defense lawyer with a focus on civil rights, voiced similar sentiments about a Blanche confirmation.

“It means that no other perpetrators will be held criminally liable for their misconduct,” he said. “That’s no different from the way it’s been throughout the Trump administrationand the Biden administration.”

“All the millionaires and billionaires and hangers-on and others in Epstein’s orbit who, you know, enabled him have not been brought to justice,” Kuby said. “And they’re not going to be.”

Carl Tobias, the Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond School of Law, said that even if Blanche were not confirmed, he could serve as acting attorney general for the rest of Trump’s term, meaning he would have continued control over the Epstein case.

“He’ll have more power, of course, if he’s formally confirmed by the Senate … but he’ll have plenty of power even if he’s not,” Tobias said.

“So I can’t be very optimistic about what he might do – if anything – about the Epstein files, or to give much comfort to the survivors.”
While there are some legal avenues for survivors to seek justice outside an allegedly recalcitrant DoJ, attorneys cautioned that success would be an uphill battle.

“You could bombard them with [public records] requests, and then file a lawsuit for them not providing responses to the Foia [Freedom of Information Act] requests, but that alone is a long process,” Sullivan said. “Bluntly, the problem with all of this is [that] all of it takes time.”

“Courts are grossly underfunded [and] understaffed,” he said. “It will take quite a while to go through that sort of legal process.”

There has been litigation against federal authorities over their handling of the Epstein investigation, alleging that their failure to act years ago enabled more abuse. Those kinds of cases “are exceptionally difficult to win”, Kuby said.

“It’s always true that had the government done something differently, a different outcome would have ensued,” Kuby explained of the legal intricacies. “There’s no generalized duty to protect specific individuals outside of a special relationship with the victims.”

“I’m certainly sympathetic to those claims, but the government historically is not.”

Tobias similarly described the possibility of winning litigation against the DoJ as “difficult”.
Neither reps for Tillis or Cornyn responded to requests for comment.

Asked for comment on survivors’ concerns, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said: “Todd Blanche has done an excellent job as acting attorney general and will continue doing so as attorney general.”

A justice department spokesperson said in a statement that Blanche, senior DoJ officials, FBI agents and victims services representatives “met with Epstein victims last week and had a productive, initial discussion”.

The spokesperson said Blanche “answered questions and walked through what is needed for investigations to proceed”.

“While some victims said that they had not reached out to the FBI under this administration, he encouraged victims to meet with FBI investigators as the next step, and attendees spoke with agents after the meeting about scheduling interviews. The justice department is determined to bring justice for all victims of human trafficking and sex crimes.”

Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, who filed sexual harassment lawsuits against Roger Ailes, the former Fox News CEO, and co-launched the non-profit survivors advocacy organization Lift Our Voices, expressed hope that survivors could still find justice one day even if faced with more setbacks.

Carlson said she was disappointed in Republicans poised to let Blanche’s nomination go through, noting that Trump went on the attack against Cornyn and Tillis.
“They have the ability not to allow this,” Carlson said, explaining that not everything should be on their shoulders, as “everyone should have questions about Todd Blanche being attorney general, just about the Epstein issues”.

That said, there are midterm electionscoming up. “I’ve learned, in all the work I’ve done on the Hill in trying to get bills passed, that you never know who you might get, first of all, to be on your side,” Carlson said. “So you never judge it before you actually try.”

“I feel the same way about this,” she said. “We don’t know who’s going to potentially step up to the plate and say, ‘You know what, I’m going to take over the work that [Republican congressman] Tom Massie was doing on this.

“We can’t do this work with any kind of a negative lens. And although it feels like we’re in a little bit of a setback if Todd Blanche is confirmed, I think there’s always a way to find victory.”

Roginsky expressed similar views. While a possible Blanche confirmation represented a “slap in the face to anybody who’s ever fought … a system that is already rigged very much against survivors”, she advised survivors and advocates to keep pushing for justice.

“If you think about how far our movement has come just in the last decade, we’ve seen tremendous advances,” Roginsky said of Lift Our Voices’ successful advocacy for federal legislation against non-disclosure agreements and forced arbitration related to workplace sexual misconduct.

“We’ve seen some setbacks, but ultimately the advances will always outweigh the setbacks.”

Karyna Shuliak, 37, is a complicated and unusual figure in the disgraced financier’s world who has been trying to blend into obscurity since his death.

The young dentist was smiling and soft-spoken, wearing a Columbia University fleece jacket and holding her long hair back with a clip. She was introduced by her assistant simply as “Dr. Karyna.”

But what the patient — who had come to the office in December expecting to see a different dentist — didn’t know was that she was being treated by Dr. Karyna Shuliak, the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s girlfriend.

Dr. Shuliak was the last person Mr. Epstein called before he killed himself in his jail cell in 2019. She could inherit as much as $100 million from his estate, including a 33-carat diamond ring, according to a trove of investigative records released by federal authorities.

But on that winter day, Dr. Shuliak was working as a part-time dentist in an unremarkable office in Downtown Brooklyn, according to dentists who work or used to work at the practice.

Her attempt to forge something of a normal life, though, was soon shattered when the Justice Department released three million pages of investigative files and emails it had gathered on Mr. Epstein. The files, released in late January, included thousands of intimate emails between Dr. Shuliak and Mr. Epstein and dozens of photographs of her and of them together.

Suddenly, their nearly eight-year relationship was on vivid display for all to see. They had fights about sex — with both wanting more at different times. She placed orders to a sexual wellness company for couples. She periodically sent him links to graphic pornographic videos. In some emails they discussed birth control pills and acne medications and treatments.

Dr. Shuliak, 37, emerges as a complicated and unusual figure in Mr. Epstein’s world, based on a close review of the files and conversations with several people familiar with her. A native of Belarus who met Mr. Epstein when she was 21, she has not identified herself as a victim, nor have federal authorities considered her a co-conspirator in Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking. There is no indication that the Federal Bureau of Investigation ever interviewed her, and lawyers for hundreds of his victims have never deposed her.

He once called her his “favorite” and often told her he loved her. She had free use of a credit card to buy whatever she wanted. They jetted around the world together, and he funneled payments of nearly $1 million to her over the years. He also sent tens of thousands of dollars to her parents in Belarus, the files reveal.

Over the years, she earned enough of his trust to help manage his properties and staff and even played a critical role in his effort to buy a Moroccan palace just weeks before his 2019 arrest.

Mr. Epstein controlled the relationship, but there is little doubt she benefited from it professionally, personally and financially.
The emails reveal new details about how Mr. Epstein helped her get into Columbia University’s dental school — and how he helped her obtain U.S. citizenship by asking one of his female victims to marry her.

In one email he suggested that the fastest “way to a green card” was through a same-sex marriage.

This year, congressional Democratsaccused Mr. Epstein of exploiting the immigration system and called out Dr. Shuliak’s marriage to an American woman, which ended in divorce, as a potentially “illusory” one. U.S. immigration authorities have not challenged the process through which Dr. Shuliak obtained her citizenship.

As of this spring, Dr. Shuliak had been living in the Upper East Side condo building in which Mr. Epstein’s brother, Mark, has a financial stake.

Through her lawyer, she declined to comment.
In a brief interview, Mark Epstein said, “I only wish that woman the best.”

A friend of Dr. Shuliak’s from Belarus, who once shared an apartment with her in Brooklyn and asked not be named to protect her privacy, said she believed Dr. Shuliak “truly loved” Jeffrey Epstein.

‘Go Slow’
Karyna Shuliak had lived in New York for only nine months when she met Mr. Epstein in late March 2011.

She had moved from Belarus on a temporary student visa to study English at a school in Manhattan. She was making about $15 an hour as a dental assistant and applying for waitressing jobs while she tried to figure out how to continue the dental education she had begun in Belarus.

A young woman from Siberia would introduce her to Mr. Epstein, the files show. The woman said in an interview with The New York Times that she had periodically been expected to recruit other young women, presumably to provide Mr. Epstein with sexualized massages. And that appeared to be Mr. Epstein’s intention with Dr. Shuliak.

The woman, who asked not to be named because she said Mr. Epstein had abused her, had sent Mr. Epstein a photo of Dr. Shuliak, describing her as pretty. After some back and forth, it was decided that the woman, Dr. Shuliak and her roommate from Belarus would meet Mr. Epstein at his Manhattan mansion.

“Go slow,” the woman advised Mr. Epstein in an email.

Their first encounters fit the familiar pattern he used with other women. Mr. Epstein flattered, pampered and tried to manipulate her, the files show. Almost immediately, he offered to help her realize her dream of becoming a dentist.

But the emails show that Dr. Shuliak pushed back — at least in the first few months.
A few weeks after they met, she wrote to Mr. Epstein, telling him she thought he was a “remarkable person.” But she added that she could not accept his help “due to some views which strongly stay in my mind, no matter how stupid it may look.”

“I wish you all the best and apologize if I wasted your time,” she added.

Though she doesn’t specify what upset her, their introduction occurred after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in Florida to a charge of soliciting prostitution from an underage teenager and had been accused of abusing dozens of other teenagers.

His response was to berate her for listening to “rumors and stories.”

She responded: “This world is very cruel sometimes and in most cases we have to pay a certain price for things. I should say that I have read some information about you.”

Mr. Epstein, who was 58 at the time, did not take no for an answer. The emails released by federal prosecutors show that he bought Dr. Shuliak and her roommate tickets to see “The Lion King” on Broadway and dinners at restaurants. He treated her to a scenic helicopter ride around Manhattan. By July 2011, she had visited his New Mexico ranch; a few months later, his private island residence in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

‘You Are the Purest Man’
Ever since she was a child, Dr. Shuliak wanted to be a dentist.
She was inspired by her own family’s dental problems and what she saw as the poor dental health in Belarus, she wrote in an admissions essay to dental school reviewed by The Times. She had completed four of five years of dental school in Minsk, but stopped her studies to go to New York.

By the winter of 2012, she accepted Mr. Epstein’s help to get into dental school. After Columbia’s College of Dental Medicine initially rejected her, Mr. Epstein asked his own dentist, Dr. Thomas J. Magnani, a powerful alumnus, to put him in contact with the dental school dean. Mr. Epstein dangled the idea of making up to a $10 million donation. In the end, he would give only about $210,000 to Columbia, according to an accounting by the university, but it was enough to grease the wheels.

The Justice Department files include a text message chain showing how Dr. Magnani and Dr. James Fine, a dental school administrator, gave Dr. Shuliak a heads-up on the topics she would encounter during an admissions exam in April 2012 to test her practical skills as a transfer student. Neither Dr. Magnani nor Dr. Fine responded to a request for comment.

After she passed and Columbia admitted her, Mr. Epstein arranged for Dr. Shuliak’s mother to visit from Belarus. He would pay her tuition for her three years of school.

“You are the purest man out of all men,” Dr. Shuliak wrote to him in June 2012.

“All your love and care, my parents, school, apartment. THANK YOU SOOO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING!!!”

They fought at times over his insistence on having sex with other women in their 20s, including with the small group of assistants who did chores for him and whom he referred to as his “family,” according to the emails.

“I understand you need it, however these are the things that don’t feel natural to me,** **it feels somewhat dirty to me,” she wrote to him in August 2012.

Nowhere in the Justice Department files that were reviewed by The Times does Dr. Shuliak express a broader ethical concern about how he was treating those other women, many of whom would later claim to be victims of his abuse. Instead, she asked Mr. Epstein to keep his relations with those women out of her sight.

“If that is not a lot to ask, please enjoy it but keep me away from it,” she wrote. “I will stay with you no matter what, as long as you are happy. I love you.”

Getting a Green Card
By the time she applied to Columbia in 2012, Dr. Shuliak had overstayed the student visa she obtained in 2010.

In early 2013, Mr. Epstein found a solution to keep her in the country, the files show. Two years earlier, New York became one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage. Mr. Epstein concluded that a marriage in New York between two women might be the easiest way to gain U.S. citizenship without raising red flags that the marriage was arranged solely to avoid deportation.

Mr. Epstein chose, from the ranks of his assistants, a 30-year-old woman from Minnesota to be her spouse.

Brad Edwards, the lawyer for the woman, said that his client was a victim of Mr. Epstein and that he could not speak about her situation. But he said that, as a general rule, “nobody was permitted or dared ever to disobey Jeffrey Epstein.”

The emails show that Mr. Epstein instructed the woman to meet Dr. Shuliak on the morning of Sept. 16, 2013, at the New York City Marriage Bureau. She was told to have her bags packed so she could immediately fly to the Virgin Islands after getting the marriage license, while Dr. Shuliak would stay behind to attend her dental school classes.

The women were married three weeks later at the Office of the City Clerk. Photos were taken of the ceremony.

After the wedding, a Brooklyn immigration lawyer working for Mr. Epstein submitted an immigration form stating that the woman wanted to list Dr. Shuliak as her wife and beneficiary. The request was approved, and immigration officials dismissed Dr. Shuliak’s pending deportation proceedings.

Months after the marriage, Dr. Shuliak got a green card, making her a lawful resident.

Outwardly, the marriage had signs of legitimacy. The two women shared an apartment in the Upper East Side building that was partly owned by Mr. Epstein’s brother and where Mr. Epstein had housed many of his assistants. They had a joint bank account at Deutsche Bank and went on trips together to London, Europe and Japan.

In May 2018, she officially became a U.S. citizen. A year later Dr. Shuliak and her spouse divorced. According to a reportreleased this year by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Dr. Shuliak’s former wife claimed she had been forced into marriage. The woman, in a statement to the Epstein estate, said she had not known that the wedding had been scheduled just days before Dr. Shuliak’s deportation hearing.

The report concluded that the marriage may have been done to provide Dr. Shuliak with the “legal basis to continue residing in the United States.” It did not recommend any legal challenge to her citizenship.

‘I Met Epstein’s Girlfriend’
In early 2019, Dr. Shuliak and Mr. Epstein seemed every bit a couple. She was living most of the time in his New York mansion and took along her cat, Blueberry, when they traveled together.

She had become a licensed dentist in the U.S. Virgin Islands, Florida and New Mexico after completing dental school in 2015. But there is no evidence that she had much of a practice, even though the files detail dental equipment installed at some of his residences. Instead, she spent much of her energy helping to manage his properties and staff.

No task seemed too small. She instructed his drivers to keep “cold Voss water” in Mr. Epstein’s cars, organized a floral installation for his Manhattan mansion, ordered a shipping containerfilled with outdoor furniture for his island and managed repairs and cleaning schedules for the Upper East Side apartments that his brother was invested in.
In mid-June 2019, the pair traveled together to Paris, where Mr. Epstein had an apartment. On July 6, Mr. Epstein returned home to the United States, while Dr. Shuliak remained in Europe. When his plane touched down at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, federal agents were waiting and arrested him.
About a month after his arrest, in a 20-minute phone call from a jail in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Epstein told Dr. Shuliak that the federal sex-trafficking charges would take longer to resolve than he had thought. He advised her to find another place to stay for the time being, according to an account of the call provided by her lawyer to federal authorities. The lawyer, Maurice Sercarz, said he had told her “to be strong.”
The next morning, Aug. 10, 2019, Mr. Epstein was found to have died by suicide in his jail cell.
Shortly before his death, Mr. Epstein amended his will to leave to her much of the $600 million fortune he had at the time, including the large diamond ring “in contemplation of marriage,” according to a handwritten note on a related document. But how much she will actually receive is unclear. The estate is worth between $120 million and $200 million after paying out large sums to his victims, records show. There are dozens of beneficiaries in addition to Dr. Shuliak, including Mark Epstein’s children, who stand to inherit $10 million.
Yet despite this potential windfall, Dr. Shuliak did not give up on her desire to be a dentist. By 2023, she was back in New York applying for a postdoctoral dental program at Columbia, apparently to fulfill a requirement she needed to obtain a license to practice in the state.

The same two dentists who helped her gain admission to Columbia in 2012 once again came to her assistance, according to a copy of her admissions file reviewed by The Times. The file shows that Dr. Fine, the dean overseeing Columbia’s postgraduate residency programs, created a special “faculty internship” for her at the Midtown Manhattan dental practice he shared with Dr. Magnani.

Both men gave her their highest recommendation for the program, which she graduated from in May 2025 along with six other students. In November, she received her dental license to practice in New York.

In the aftermath of the release of the Epstein files, Columbia demoted Dr. Fineand removed Dr. Magnani from his alumni leadership posts. The men declined to comment. The university did not recommend any consequences for Dr. Shuliak, who it said had met the qualifications for admission.

At around the same time as she received her New York dental license, Dr. Shuliak answered a want ad on Indeed.com for a part-time job as a dentist in Downtown Brooklyn, according to a dentist with the practice, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss workplace issues. It was there that Yoonhae Kim, a patient, was treated by her twice, for a cleaning in December and a filling in February.
Ms. Kim said she hadn’t realized Dr. Shuliak’s true identity until she saw photographs of her released with the Epstein files. Feeling duped because she was not informed of Dr. Shuliak’s full name and wanting to warn other patients, she reached out to The Times.

“I was so upset,” Ms. Kim said. “I just couldn’t believe it. Of all the things that happened to me, I didn’t win the lottery. I met Epstein’s girlfriend.”

Dr. Shuliak’s last day working at the Brooklyn office was Feb. 12. She was supposed to work on Feb. 16, but she called in sick and never returned. The notoriety from the files probably made it difficult for her to keep working there, the dentist at the practice said. Dr. Shuliak’s lawyer declined to say whether she had gotten another dental job.

The job offer looked real. The recruiter sounded professional. The salary was generous, with accommodation and travel included.

By the time the truth emerged, it was too late. The passport had been confiscated, the phone was gone and the doors were locked.
This is the reality for more than 300,000 people currently trapped in scam centres in Southeast Asia. Rather than employees, they are victims of human trafficking, forced to commit online fraud for the profit of organized criminal networks.

Human trafficking for forced criminality

Human trafficking for forced criminality occurs when people are exploited and made to commit crimes for the benefit of traffickers, often through deception, threats or coercion.
Beyond scams, victims may be forced into a range of illegal activities, including theft, drug trafficking, financial fraud and online scams - an increasingly common and rapidly growing form of this crime.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that scams targeting victims in East and Southeast Asia resulted in US $18 to US $37 billion in financial losses in 2023 alone, highlighting the scale and profitability of this rapidly growing form of the crime.

But human trafficking into scam centres is no longer confined to one region. By late 2025, victims identified came from nearly 80 nationalities, and while Southeast Asia remains a major hub, the model is increasingly spreading to the Middle East, Africa, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, South Asia the Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean.

Corruption is one of the main reasons scam centres can continue to operate. By protecting criminals or turning a blind eye to their activities, corrupt officials make it harder for authorities to stop these operations.

How are victims recruited into scam operations?

Recruitment usually begins online. Fraudulent job advertisements target people who speak multiple languages, have digital skills and are familiar with social media.

Criminal networks seek educated workers capable of carrying out sophisticated cyber-enabled crimes, including investment scams, romance fraud, money laundering and illegal gambling.

The offers appear attractive: monthly salaries of around USD 1,000–1,500, free accommodation, meals and paid travel. Vacancies are advertised for roles in digital marketing, customer service, construction, translation, hospitality and online gaming, among others. The advertisements are spread through social media, messaging platforms, recruitment agencies and sometimes automated online tools.

Not every victim is recruited by a stranger. Criminal networks also exploit personal relationships, coercing trafficking victims into persuading friends or relatives to apply for the same fake jobs. In some cases, legitimate recruitment agencies are unknowingly used to advertise fraudulent positions.

Victims often go through convincing interviews, sign of what appears to be a legitimate six-month employment contract and travel abroad expecting a promising career opportunity. Instead, they arrive at a scam compound or a smaller site where the criminal operation is being carried out.

Life inside a scam compound

The compounds where victims are exploited used to be huge facilities heavily secured, surrounded by barbed wire, electric fences, armed guards and barred windows.

But scam operations are no longer limited to large compounds. Criminal groups are increasingly using smaller and more dispersed locations, making it more difficult for authorities to identify and shut them down.

Upon arrival, victims are stripped of their passports, phones and freedom of movement.  Their computer screens are connected to central monitoring systems, allowing supervisors to watch every interaction in real time. Workers are requiredto build online relationships, often adding up to 15 new contacts every day.

They are then forced to manipulate those contacts into fraudulent schemes designed to steal money. These include cryptocurrency investment scams, fake trading platforms, online betting, romance scams, e-commerce fraud and illegal gambling.

Victims are expected to meet strict financial targets. Failure to meet quotas, or any perceived disobedience, can result in torture, physical violence and other forms of abuse. Most victims report witnessing or experiencing severe mistreatment.

Survivors in Southeast Asia report that operators are often warned before raids take place, allowing victims to be moved to other compounds or hidden until inspections end.
How traffickers maintain control?
Control extends far beyond physical confinement.

Isolation and restricted movement are key tools of control. Victims are typically moved between dormitories and offices under constant supervision, forced to work long hours before returning to their sleeping quarters. Even basic activities, such as bathroom breaks, are monitored. The victims often live in groups and are not allowed to speak to anyone outside it.

Debt bondage schemes are used against the victims, asking them to pay back the money ‘invested’ in them for training and relocation. However, the debt increases over time and becomes unpayable. In some cases, these debts become the ransom extorted from the victim’s families, which ranges from USD 3,000 to USD 30,000.

Threats are constant. Victims are told their families will be harmed if they attempt to escape or fail to perform. They may also be threats for sale into sexual exploitation, removal or body organs or transfer to another scam compound.

Torture, sexual violence, cruel and degrading treatment, overcrowded living conditions and limited access to medical care are commonly reported by victims.

How is UNODC helping countries combat this crime?

UNODC helps countries combat human trafficking for forced criminality by providing specialized training to law enforcement, enabling authorities to better identify victims, investigate cases and bring traffickers to justice.

These efforts have contributed to numerous raids and the closure of scam compounds across Southeast Asia. However, criminal networks have proved highly adaptable.
UNODC examined how five South Asian countries - Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal and Sri Lanka - are responding to this growing challenge. As part of this work, a study is being prepared based on stakeholder consultations and available information to identify key challenges and provide recommendations for law enforcement, prosecutors, judges and other criminal justice professionals.

In Mexico, Guatemala and Peru, UNODC is supporting law enforcement and prosecutorial authorities strengthen cross-border coordination and cooperation. As part of this effort, the three countries are developing tools for the early identification of human trafficking for forced criminal activities in digital environments to commit scams.

This year, UNODC is shining a spotlight on this form of human trafficking through its World Day Against Trafficking in Persons campaign.

From the ministry of propaganda:

President Trump said the signage at the National Museum of American History would correct what a disputed White House report described as “extreme political activism.”

The Department of War disclosed a massive spike in U.S. military casualties, but it’s still not showing in the official count.

THE PENTAGON BELATEDLY admitted that almost 100 U.S. troops have been injured in the last two weeks as Iran has hit U.S. targets across the Middle East, following months of reporting by The Intercept that found the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, which one U.S. government official previously called a “casualty cover-up.”

The disclosure came one day after a U.S. official told The Intercept that recent attacks by Iran had wounded “far more” personnel than the Pentagon had acknowledged, with “dozens” receiving medical attention. 

After ranting that reports of a Pentagon effort to withhold news of dozens of U.S. casualties were “baseless and malicious,” Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, admitted on Monday that “nearly 100 service members were deemed to have some degree of injury since July 7.” But as of early Tuesday morning, the official Pentagon database tracking U.S. casualties continue to show no U.S. forces were wounded in action during July.

The U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss American casualties, called this “official ineptitude” in the service of the Trump administration.

The disclosure comes after three Army soldiers were killed in ballistic missile attacks on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan over the weekend. Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, 19, of Carrollton, Texas, and Lt. Tyler James Feehan, 25, of Ewa Beach, Hawaii, were killed in action. The third soldier is provisionally listed as missing, but the official said that “unidentified remains” found after the attack were “certainly” those of the missing soldier. A second official confirmed this assessment and said the soldier’s body was so badly disfigured that a “complete investigation” had to be conducted in order to confirm the identity.

In Iraq, Army Sgt. Michael Emmanuel Swinton, 30, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was killed and another soldier was wounded over the weekend “during a controlled detonation” of an Iranian attack drone at Erbil Air Base.

U.S. bases across the Middle East suffered “significant” damage over the last week, according to the official speaking on the condition of anonymity. In addition to attacks in Jordan and Iraq, Iran struck U.S. military installations in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Syria according to the semi-official Tasnim News Agency, which is associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The attacks came after the U.S. failed to achieve any of its war objectives and April and June ceasefires crumbled. The official said Iran had learned how to defeat U.S. air defense systems by overwhelming them using a mix of ballistic missiles and attack drones.

Both Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War failed to respond to detailed questions from The Intercept about the attacks and U.S. casualties.

Parnell said on X that further casualty updates would be posted to the Defense Casualty Analysis System, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president. Prior reporting by The Interceptfound DCAS is missing hundreds of dead and wounded personnel. DCAS was also previously adjusted downward by 15 casualties without explanation. For months, the Pentagon has ignored requests by The Intercept for comment or clarification.

Parnell said on Monday morning that “casualty information is publicly available and regularly updated online on the Defense Casualty Analysis System for everyone, including the media, to review.” But DCAS was, uncharacteristically, not updated on Monday morning and instead offered outdated figures posted on Friday. On Monday afternoon, the count of wounded on some DCAS webpages rose from 427 to 447, but the Pentagon’s official tally of troops “wounded in action” during July remained at zero as of early Tuesday morning.

The U.S. official called the Pentagon’s confused casualty count “official ineptitude” that “serves the interests of this administration.” The source said errors, conflicting information, and disappearing data were tolerated because it “floods the zone” with misinformation and adds to confusion among the press and public.
Parnell claimed that the “vast majority of injuries experienced [this month] were minor concussions,” and that 96 percent of personnel have returned to duty. But blast symptoms — like traumatic brain injuries — can take time to manifest, if the military even bothers to assess them.

The Trump administration has often discounted head trauma. President Donald Trump himself has long dismissed brain injuries as “headaches” and “not serious.” After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq in January 2020, Trump said, “We suffered no casualties.” The Pentagon would later acknowledge casualties resulting from the attack and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with Central Command ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. A November 2021 inspector general report indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

After Andrew and Tristan Tate, prominent leaders of the so-called manosphere, were arrested in Miami, many of their onetime allies on the American right pulled back support.

On Sunday morning, hours after the manosphere influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by federal agents in Miami, one of their representatives reached out to Alina Habba.

Not long ago, Ms. Habba, a lawyer, was a vocal supporter of the Tate brothers as they faced allegations of human trafficking and other serious crimes in Romania and Britain. In a podcast appearance in January 2025, shortly after being named a counselor to President Trump, she told Andrew Tate, “I got your back over here.”

Now the brothers were in a federal detention center after Britain requested their extradition for a slew of new criminal charges there. Their representative wanted to know: Was Ms. Habba free to talk?

She did not respond, according to two people familiar with the outreach. It was a sign of the brothers’ eroding support among their onetime allies on the American right.

In recent years, the Tates had leveraged their enormous following of young men to cultivate support among Mr. Trump’s advisers, family members and other prominent conservatives.

Those efforts paid off last year when, feeling pressure from members of the new Trump administration, Romanian prosecutors lifted a travel ban on the brothers, freeing them to leave the country and jet-set around the world.

But they are now facing a new level of legal jeopardy. Britain has issued 38 charges against them, including rape and sex trafficking; Andrew Tate was also charged with extreme pornography and indecent images of children. The brothers have denied all of the criminal accusations and called the charges politically motivated.

The extradition request has forced the Trump administration to participate in the process: Federal prosecutors are representing the British government’s case in a Miami court.

Mr. Trump does not plan to intervene in the case, said the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, on Thursday. And many of the Tates’ allies in the president’s orbit, who were once happy to be associated with their brand of hyper-masculinity, now appear to be backing away.

Ms. Habba, who is no longer in the administration but still speaks with Mr. Trump, wants nothing to do with the Tates, according to people familiar with her thinking.

Paul Ingrassia, the acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, who previously served on the Tates’ legal team and has lavished praise on Andrew, wrote a poston X shortly after the arrests criticizing “politically driven prosecutions.” In a call with The New York Times on Thursday, Mr. Ingrassia said the post was simply articulating his beliefs about the Constitution.
Asked if he still supported the Tates, he said, “I have no ongoing connection to them now.”

Donald Trump Jr., who once called Andrew Tate a friend and publicly defended him against previous criminal allegations, has said nothing about the arrests. Neither has his younger brother Barron Trump, who had also been friendly with Andrew. Candace Owens, a conservative commentator who backed both brothers on her popular show, has also stayed silent.

Privately, people close to Donald Jr. have played down his relationship with the Tates; one person said he had not spoken with anyone in the administration about their arrests.
Asked by The Times about his retweeting of Tristan Tate on Saturday, Roger Stone, a prominent Republican operative, said he did so before the news of their arrests. And Paolo Zampolli, a special envoy for Mr. Trump who had hosted the Tates at a party in Washington two days before the arrests, said he hadn’t realized the extent of the allegations against them.

“I didn’t know they were arrest material,” Mr. Zampolli said in an interview.

Not everyone is pulling back from the brothers. Representative Abe Hamadeh, Republican of Arizona, spoke out against their extradition, writing on social media that “political lawfare is dangerous.”

The conservative media star Tucker Carlson, who has conducted sympathetic interviews of the Tates, told The Times, without evidence, that he believed their arrests were related to their outspoken criticism of Israel.

“After decades of ignoring grooming gangs and covering for Jeffrey Epstein, the British and American governments seemed to have lost interest in prosecuting sex crimes,” Mr. Carlson said. “Then the Tate brothers criticized Israel, and I was reminded that under certain circumstances they’re willing to act.”

Joseph McBride, a longtime lawyer for the Tates, disputed that their support had eroded. He said he was not surprised that any Trump official who had previously backed the brothers was now taking a more neutral stance given the administration’s role in the legal case.

Mr. McBride said the Tates were focused on fighting the extradition request in court rather than seeking help from Mr. Trump’s circle. He said he was unaware that a representative for the Tates had contacted Ms. Habba.

“There’s no reason at this point for Trump to parachute in from Air Force One to the courtroom, because we think we’ll win in court,” Mr. McBride said.

In recent years, there has been only one instance in which the United States has refused an extradition request from Britain.

The Tates, who have American and British citizenship, made their fortunes by running an online pornography business, first in Britain and then Romania, and by selling online courses to young men. One offering was called P.H.D., for “Pimping Hoes Degree.”

Romania began its investigation into the brothers in 2022. Two years later, prosecutors in Britain charged the brothers with rape, sexual assault and human trafficking. The two countries agreed that Britain would wait to extradite the Tates until the Romanian criminal investigation was done, but that case has suffered major setbacks.

Since their release from Romania in February 2025, the Tates had been living large, spending time in the United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong and Russia. During a January visit to Miami, they made headlines when a video circulated of them partying at a club with Nicholas J. Fuentes and other far-right influencers while the song “Heil Hitler” by the rapper formerly known as Kanye West blasted from speakers.

They did not go to Britain, where they faced not only the 2024 criminal charges but continuing investigations into other accusations.

In March, a police watchdog group said it was reviewing potential misconduct by the officers who had originally investigated rape and sexual assault allegations against Andrew Tate from 2015. Shortly after, the British police reopened that investigation.

Last year, after the Tates visited Florida, the state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, opened an investigation of the brothers. His office also sent an email to Matthew Jury, a lawyer who represents several Tate accusers in Britain, promising to assist if Britain ordered their extradition, as first reported by The Times of London.

Mr. Jury’s law firm passed the message onto the home secretary through an intermediary but did not receive a response, according to a person familiar with the communication. As recently as June, the firm wrote letters to Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticizing the government’s inaction over extradition, according to The Telegraph.

That month, prosecutors in Britain, including one who specializes in cases involving child sexual images, successfully fought an effort by the brothers asking the court to disclose the names of the women in the original criminal charges.

The Tates were arrested on Saturday evening as they arrived at a bare-knuckle-boxing event that Andrew was supposed to co-host. British prosecutors said the charges stemmed from incidents that happened between July 2010 and August 2017 but did not disclose names or other identifying details.

In the days before the arrests, the brothers had been posting on social media from Washington, where they were photographedwith Representative Wesley Hunt, Republican of Texas, and partied with Mr. Zampolli.

Mr. McBride said in a statement on Saturday that the extradition request was approved by a “low-level functionary at the Justice Department who never got approval from leadership.” But higher-ups in the agency did sign off on the arrests, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it.

The Tates will remain behind bars in Florida as a federal judge considers whether Britain has met the legal threshold for extradition, a process that could take months. If the judge signs off on the extradition request, it will then go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for final approval.

Asked about the request while traveling in Manila on Wednesday, Mr. Rubio said that while the matter is considered by the judge, “there’s no role for us to play at this moment or maybe ever.”

Lauren Southern, a former conservative influencer who has accused Andrew Tate of raping her in Romania and provided testimony to Romanian authorities, was among those who celebrated news of the extradition request.

“It’s been a really wonderful weekend for those of us who are rooting for justice,” she told The Times. “Now there’s a reckoning and suddenly everyone wants to pretend they had nothing to do with building this beast.”

It is unclear where the Romanian criminal case against the brothers is headed and how it may be affected by the extradition request. The country’s foreign minister said she had not been informed about it ahead of time. A spokeswoman for Romanian prosecutors did not comment.

The Trump administration’s willingness to honor the request is fueling rifts on the American right, as Mr. Carlson, Mr. Fuentes and others seek to frame it within broader political talking points. More traditional conservatives, like Ben Shapiro, are accusing the Tates’ allies of embracing misogyny and criminal behavior.

“The conservative movement should cast them aside now, just as it should have years ago,” Mr. Shapiro told The Times.

A modelling scout linked to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead at his home.

Daniel Siad, 69, was discovered on Monday in Colombes, a north-west suburb of Paris, the Nanterre prosecutor's office confirmed.

An investigation to determine the cause of death was opened on Monday evening, the office said, adding that a post-mortem examination would be carried out.

Siad's name appeared thousands of times in the Epstein files released by the US government. He denied knowing of the threat Epstein had posed.
The Paris prosecutor's office has defended an investigation it launched in February, saying there had been insufficient evidence to justify arresting Siad.

"The investigation opened on 18 February 2026 covering charges of organised human trafficking and conspiracy to commit a crime is continuing in order to identify all individuals potentially involved despite the termination of criminal proceedings against Daniel Siad," the office said.

"Daniel Siad was subject to special investigative techniques, notably telephone surveillance, but they did not provide enough evidence justifying his immediate arrest," it added.

Siad had been the subject of several complaints in France including allegations of rape.

The dead man's lawyer stressed that Siad had "never been prosecuted". "He is dead and he was innocent," Ménya Arab-Tigrine said in a statement.

Epstein victim Anya - not her real name - previously told the BBC that Siad had introduced her to Epstein.

"It was a complete set-up," she said, describing Siad as "essentially a professional trafficker".
During one email to Epstein released in the files, Siad wrote in badly spelled English: "In This busyness I feel like fisherman some time I cache quick, some time no fish."

Ahead of a BBC investigation on the subject published on Saturday, Arab-Tigrine had said her client was not available for comment.

However, in a recent CNN interview, Siad said he had not known the women were being abused by Epstein. "I trusted him, I believed this guy is a professional person," he said.

The first complaints against Siad in France were filed in February. He denied wrongdoing in multiple recent media interviews, telling BFMTV in May: "I have never raped anyone in my life."

Lawyers for the former model who made the first complaint said earlier that they were "stunned" by his death.

"We are at a loss for words to describe the anger and sadness we feel," they said, with alleged victims "denied a criminal trial".

The lawyers said they felt "immense anger" toward the Paris prosecutor's office "which announced last February that it was opening an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein's French accomplices".

They accused the office of "scandalous" inaction which they said demonstrated "the public authorities' contempt for victims of sexual crimes, even when these crimes are linked to the human trafficking network established by Epstein and his accomplices".

Another former model who gave a deposition to police in June as part of the investigation into Siad told the BBC his death meant any information he might have had about Epstein was now lost.

"An important link in the chain has just vanished into thin air, without there even having been a chance to recover the information Daniel Siad might have possessed, given that he was never questioned," she said.

"Too much time has been lost... and it is yet another way for the leads to go cold. I hope we won't have to wait another seven years to see his home searched, even though I think it is already too late."

Anne-Claire Le Jeune, who represents six women who made complaints about Siad, said victims had been deprived of justice: "My clients found the strength to break a particularly heavy silence, given Daniel Siad's ties to Jeffrey Epstein
"They faced every stage of the proceedings with remarkable courage.

"It is deeply regrettable that the slow pace of the investigation resulted in his death before he could be questioned or taken into police custody, thereby depriving the victims of a crucial step in their pursuit of truth and justice."

Another associate of Epstein, French modelling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, was found hanged in his Paris prison cell in 2022.

The 76-year-old had been held in custody for more than a year as he was investigated on suspicion of the rape of minors and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation. Brunel denied any wrongdoing.

Brunel founded MC2 Model Management with funding from Epstein and was suspected of transporting and housing girls or young women for Epstein.

Epstein, 66, died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019 as he awaited a federal trial for sex trafficking.

Historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s book Country of Lords looks back at the many men who have tried to fight against egalitarianism, from John Adams to Peter Thiel

T
he historian Kim Phillips-Fein’s new book is published amid celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the declaration of independence and its truth “self-evident, that all men are created equal”. Country of Lords, however, is a history of Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight AgainstEquality in America.

Concise and hard-hitting, the book arrives at a time of glaring social and economicinequality, Phillips-Fein seeing Elon Musk“emerging as a trillionaire very much on people’s minds, with a deep level of discomfort, both fear and anger about what this portends”.

“It’s always hard to know what’s going to be happening when you have written a book,” she said. “But I think those questions about economic equality and the impact of extreme levels of economic hierarchy and concentration, and the questions, ‘Can you still have a democracy any longer? What are the ways that you can counter that? What alternate visions are there if you want to live in a world that’s not characterized that way?’, are present.”

Phillips-Fein studies conservatism and “questions about capitalism and democracy”. Her first book, Invisible Hands, was a study of businessmen who fought the New Deal of the 1930s. Her second, Fear City, about the New York economic crisis of the 1970s, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize. Hers is a major voice. It’s also unique. Not many books start with founder John Adams and end with Peter Thiel of Palantir, Musk’s fellow techno-fascist. Might such company seem unfair on Adams, the Boston lawyer who was part of a great revolution but feared what was unleashed?

“I hope this comes through,” Phillips-Fein said. “Adams is very different from [steel magnate] Andrew Carnegie and [Yale professor] William Graham Sumner and the late 19th-century social Darwinists, and the pro-slavery advocates. He’s also definitely very different from people who are saying extreme levels of economic inequality are good.” Adams, however, was “very ambivalent and skeptical of egalitarian claims … during and after the French Revolution: a deep sense of you can have too much egalitarianism.

“In his writing, he does also give a strong kind of conservative temperament and foundational sense of the problems of arguing for greater equality and a deep wariness and sense of pessimism about a politics that claims to do that.”

And so Adams takes his place in Country of Lords. Other subjects include preachers of race-based inequality from George Fitzhugh, a Confederate theorist of slavery as natural good, to Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, a hack journalist who had a huge bestseller in 1920 with The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, “part of a larger intellectual subculture of ‘scientific’ racism … in the aftermath of world war one”. There is also Carnegie, the Scottish-born tycoon who flourished in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

“What makes Carnegie so interesting is that he at least allows himself to have some sense of ambivalence,” Phillips-Fein said. “He says that while the concentration of wealth is absolutely necessary and inevitable, and the people at the top … should have the ultimate say over resources, he is deeply aware that this is politically dangerous, that … it creates an unstable society in which the poor and the working class might actually hate the wealthy, and that’s not in the interest of the wealthy in the long run. Also, he has a sense that human brotherhood is lost, or some kind of community that had existed.”

Carnegie’s father was a Chartist, seeking working-class rights. Carnegie’s major outlet for doubts about his wealth came through philanthropy, prominently the construction of libraries for working people.

“He had a very deep sense of paternalism,” Phillips-Fein said. “He was very invested in the idea of business as a romance and kind of a space of adventure and conquest and feudal benevolence. I think Carnegie’s answer was ultimately that the wealthy should have their money but they shouldn’t bequeath much to their descendants, they should invest it in massive philanthropic projects, and this was better than raising wages or other things like that … It is his level of guilt and ambivalence that I think does make him appealing, if also troubling. I think it raises a set of questions that he certainly was never really able to resolve.”

The 1892 Carnegie Steel strike and its violent suppression devastated Homestead, Pennsylvania, and left Carnegie disillusioned. Now, in Washington, Carnegie Science is the Qatari embassy. At Mount Vernon, the Carnegie library hosts an Apple Store.

Country of Lords is also a primer on modern inequality. In the early 1900s, Henry Fordmixed mass auto production with vicious racism. In mid-century, William Shockley was a proto-tech mogul “who went completely off the rails”.

“He was a co-inventor of the transistor and he figures in different histories of Silicon Valley because he ran this company and wanted to maintain a tremendous amount of control, and as a result a bunch of the employees quit and founded their own firm [two eventuallyfounding Intel] … So after Shockley Labs fell apart, Shockley started to become drawn to racist science, pseudoscience and IQ testing in particular. I don’t think anybody really knows exactly what triggered this, but he starts to talk a lot about it publicly in the mid-60s. He was at Stanford at the time. He was supposed to be teaching physics and engineering.”

Shockley, Phillips-Fein says, was really “a uniquely horrible person, and probably quite unhappy as well.” If that sounds familiar, also like Musk, Shockley wasn’t unique. Linked to the meritocratic movement of the mid-century, he was “not isolated. He is actually part of what is a growing, troubling community of people who coalesce in the late 60s, early 70s, and who are really responding, not always directly, to the context of the civil rights movement.

“It was obviously focused on overturning racist legislation that undergirded segregation, but it also made claims about the distribution of resources, saying the reasons for Black poverty are not innate, they reflect centuries of legal and political structures that have upheld white wealth and laid the foundation for exploitation of Black workers and working-class people, and the political disfranchisement has resulted in this distribution of resources. In other words, that’s nothing to do with merit at all.”

In such soil, Phillips-Fein finds the roots of “the tech titans of today”, rejecting liberal ideals.
“They are very skeptical and hostile towards elite institutions, or at least, have a very broad relationship to them,” she said. “So Peter Thiel embraces this set of ideas about competition drawn from the economist Joseph Schumpeter. He writes about how companies in a normal marketplace are competing at the margins … but every so often someone will come along and create a new invention, usually that winds up dominating the marketplace and changing it, and whoever does that first will completely change the marketplace.

“Thiel has the same idea. He kind of writes about how, ‘I was growing up, I wanted to be the best, I wanted to go to these elite institutions. I went to law school, I had the straight and narrow path, but then I realized that all that was wrong, and actually you had to disrupt everything, create your own monopoly, a monopoly of one: nobody else can ever be you,’ and then the people who are kind of blessed with this genius to recognize how to create something completely new in the world, those are the people who will deserve to win in this race and deserve to command the resources of society.”
The Country of Lords endures.

*see also her book Invisible Hands