“Give a soft answer to an angry person. If you touch a match to gasoline, you get an explosion. However, if you touch the same match to water, you extinguish the match.”
Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files
CNN Reliable Sources: “Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files” is the title of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s explosive excerpt from their forthcoming book “Regime Change.” Now comes the freakout over the “freakout” article. The New York Times published the “Regime Change” excerpt at 6 a.m. ET today, and it immediately intensified the White House’s anxiety about the book.
Follow up to Trump Mentioned in Epstein Files ‘More than One Million Times’ – The New York Times – Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan: “On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files. Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women.
Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base. And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention.
They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t…”
Login.gov – identifying data about you in third party control
The Drey Dossier: “…Login.gov is open source, which means the government publishes its code in the open for anyone to read, so I read it, and I walked the recent changes, since every edit gets posted in public with a date stamped on it. Over the last couple of months somebody added a new piece and named it a proofing agent.
Proofing is just the bureaucratic word for proving you are who you say you are, so a proofing agent is a stand-in that does the proving for you. What it actually does, according to the code, is let an approved outside organization hand login.gov your name, your Social Security number, your date of birth, your address, even your passport, and login.gov will run the full identity check on that pile of data and, if it all lines up, stamp you verified. You come out the far side a confirmed, government-trusted person, and you were never anywhere near it. So the single promise the whole system was built on, that it has to actually be you, is gone, traded for an approved organization that can conjure a verified you out of a spreadsheet. Of everything in this piece, that is the part that scares me most. And it appeared in the code right after a particular man arrived to run the place…”
[Note – Login.gov – “The public’s one account for government. Use one account and password for secure, private access to participating government agencies” – this site is required to access services including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Your personal identifying data has been compromised multiple times using portals such as these, with increased security breeches due to the DOGE project [Elon Musk] as well as other billionaire controlled government contracts awarded during this administration.]
See also Notes from the Circus: “…Trump installs DOGE personnel inside the Treasury payment system, the IRS database, the Social Security records, the security clearances database, in violation of the Privacy Act and a stack of other statutes. Some plaintiffs have managed to establish standing in some of these cases, after extended litigation. In many of the cases, plaintiffs have been dismissed on standing grounds. Where plaintiffs have survived, the merits proceed slowly while the data continues to be accessed…”
Trump's Bloody, Garish Birthday Gift to Himself: A White House UFC Fight
The wild weekend in Washington began with MMA fighters menacing one another on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and ended with the Trump clan stalking the octagon.
It was an imperial scene in the shadow of the executive mansion, a showcase of American excess to celebrate the president’s birthday.
