Here’s The Epstein File Trump Didn’t Want You To See
The bombs fell. The Epstein files followed. We noticed.
Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m on my third cup of coffee, and I’m here to cover what Trump tried to hide with bombs this week. I’ve also got some good news.
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Now let’s talk about what Trump tried to bury this week.
Trump’s Epstein War Didn’t Distract Raw America
While Trump successfully distracted the corporate media by bombing Iran, the Justice Department finally released FBI interview memos that implicated President Donald Trump.
The DOJ conveniently claimed they’d been “incorrectly tagged as duplicates” in earlier file releases.
Here’s what was in them. (I’ve included the actual files at the bottom of this email.)
The documents describe a woman who told federal investigators in 2019 that Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Donald Trump when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The meeting occurred in either New York or New Jersey, she said, adding that Trump sexually assaulted her.
According to the FBI summary of the interviews, Trump allegedly told the girl something to the effect of wanting to teach her “how little girls are supposed to be” before unzipping his trousers. When she resisted, the woman alleged Trump struck her, pulled her hair, and punched her on the side of her head. She told investigators she bit him because he disgusted her, and that Trump told others to get her out of the room.
The White House called the allegations baseless and said the president was “totally exonerated.”
What the White House didn’t explain is why the DOJ’s earlier document release included only the first of four FBI interviews with this woman, but left out the three that contained her specific allegations against Trump.
Thirty-seven pages remain missing from the public record. Only about 3.5 million of more than 6 million Epstein-related files have ever been made public.
A week into Trump’s Epstein War, we’re not fooled.
What Else Trump Tried to Bury This Week
The Epstein files weren’t the only thing Trump was hoping you’d miss.
The February jobs report landed this week with little coverage. The economy shed 92,000 jobs and unemployment climbed to 4.4 percent. Economists say the war is already making it worse, with companies freezing hiring amid the uncertainty.
Trump’s Epstein war also buried a chilling story about the government’s attempt to silence its own lawyers. Trump’s Justice Department quietly asked state bar associations this week to stand down any ethics investigations of DOJ personnel, claiming its own internal review should take precedence. The DOJ has no legal authority to compel this. It can only request it. The state bars are the last independent check on DOJ lawyers, the only thing standing between Pam Bondi’s department and total unaccountability.
Bondi is also simultaneously trying to disbar a former DOJ lawyer who went public about corruption inside the department. The message isn’t subtle: dissent and lose your license to practice law.
Then there’s the tariff refund scandal. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Trump’s sweeping tariffs were illegal. The government collected $175 billion from American businesses under those tariffs. A federal judge ordered the administration to start paying it back immediately.
The government’s response? Zilch. The Trump administration is slow-walking the refunds, claiming its systems can’t handle the volume. Meanwhile, businesses that paid for an illegal policy are still waiting on cash that may determine whether they stay afloat.
I’ve seen this playbook before. I watched the Bush administration use bombs in Iraq to bury a weak economy. Trump’s war isn’t just a distraction from Epstein; it’s a distraction from everything.
That’s why independent media exists: not just to cover the war, but to cover everything the war is designed to make you forget. If that’s the journalism you want, we need you with us.
What’s Really Happening in Trump’s Epstein War
The coverage you’re seeing focuses on explosions. Here’s what it’s missing.
The Washington Post reported this week that Russia has been passing Iran the locations of U.S. military assets since the war started: warships, aircraft, the works. While Pete Hegseth was at a podium insisting Russia and China are “not really a factor,” American intelligence officials privately told reporters the opposite. Iran spent years helping Russia overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses with cheap drones. Now Russia is returning the favor with targeting intelligence that’s made Iran’s strikes in this conflict unusually precise.
The Pentagon is burning through air defense interceptors at an unsustainable pace. Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine reportedly warned the White House that weapons shortages are significantly raising the risk to U.S. troops.
One more thing: our own military is likely responsible for striking a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed at least 150 students and staff. If confirmed, legal experts say this would rank among the worst civilian casualty incidents in decades of American military action in the Middle East.
When I built Raw Story, we covered the civilian toll of Iraq that the networks wouldn’t show: the wedding parties hit by drone strikes, the 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed in a war launched on lies. The mainstream media didn’t run those stories. We did. I’m watching the same choices being made right now, again, and it makes me sick.
Now For the Good News
Kristi Noem is gone. Fired via Truth Social on Thursday while she was mid-speech at a conference in Nashville.
The woman who called two dead Americans domestic terrorists, who spent border security money on Gulfstreams, who couldn’t explain her own department’s actions under oath. She’s out. We’ll take it.
Our reporter was on the ground for both of her Senate hearings this week, and delivered you an exclusive video of a protester being thrown to the ground.
I’ve got more good news.
In Texas — Texas! — Democrat James Talarico won his Senate primary Tuesday night with more than 50 percent of the vote. He’s the 36-year-old former teacher and seminarian who went viral for taking on MAGA legislators on the floor.
Here’s the number that should give you hope: more than 1.5 million Democrats voted early in the Texas primary. That’s double the 2022 turnout. In North Carolina, Democratic primary turnout was 24 percent higher than it was in the last midterm cycle.
If Democrats are going to take the majority, they need to win in places everyone else wrote off. I think this means Democrats are on track for November.
Raw America Won’t Let The Truth Die
I founded Raw Story to expose the raw truths of a misbegotten war. George W. Bush’s Iraq War killed nearly 7,000 Americans in uniform and more than 200,000 Iraqis. The media that cheerleaded us into it never fully reckoned with what it had done.
Raw America exists because I refuse to let that happen again.
We’re calling this what it is — Trump’s Epstein War — from day one. Not after the fact. Not once it becomes safe to say. Right now, at the beginning, when it matters most. Because that’s what independent journalism is for.
If you believe Trump launched this war to distract from the most explosive personal scandal of his presidency, you deserve a news outlet that says so plainly. No billionaire owner to protect. No defense contractor ads to preserve. No access to lose.
We need your support today. Please consider upgrading your subscription and join us in this fight. Because it is a fight. And we need to win it for our democracy to survive.
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— John Byrne
Founder, Raw America and Raw Story
P.S. Here, below, are the RAW Trump Epstein files he went to war to try to hide:
