Good evening. I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
A bipartisan pair of senators is asking a federal judge to keep blocking Trump’s slush fund for insurrectionists. Republicans in Congress are pressing the Todd Blanche to investigate explosive new allegations against men tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s network. New reporting shows connections between Jared Kushner’s business world and Epstein’s inner circle. And Trump’s own former White House strategist is now openly predicting that Republicans will lose the Senate this fall.
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Republican Asks Judge to Keep Blocking Trump’s January 6 Slush Fund
Republican Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey just filed a joint brief in court, urging a federal judge to keep blocking the Trump administration’s proposed taxpayer-funded $1.8 billion compensation fund for MAGA loyalists. That fund was created to pay people claiming they were victims of politically motivated prosecutions, and critics on both sides of the aisle have called it a slush fund for the president’s allies.
Judge Leonie Brinkema already put a temporary hold on the fund last week. She’s got a hearing scheduled for June 12 in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. The senators’ brief urges her to rule against the administration, calling the fund “an immediate and dire threat to our constitutional order.”
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the DOJ was withdrawing the proposal entirely. But the very next day, Trump walked it back, saying he still loved the idea of handing taxpayer money to January 6 rioters. And now the administration is citing a decades-old law to greenlight payments anyway.
The original lawsuit was filed by Andrew Floyd, a former federal prosecutor who was fired after working Jan. 6 cases. Skye Perryman of Democracy Forward, which brought the suit, put it plainly: the Constitution still matters.
And now that a Republican is joining that fight, Trump’s slush fund has a powerful new enemy.
Republicans Want Answers from Blanche on New Epstein Revelations
Todd Blanche has made it clear he wants the Epstein story to go away. But a group of Republicans aren’t letting go of it.
House Oversight Committee chair James Comer, along with Republicans Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Clay Higgins, and William Timmons, sent a referral to the acting attorney general this week asking him to investigate new criminal allegations made by Sarah Kellen, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime personal assistant.
Kellen told the Oversight Committee that she was assaulted by celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai and Philip Levine, the former mayor of Miami Beach, both of whom she identified as Epstein co-conspirators. She also testified that fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier exposed himself to her, and that Ghislaine Maxwell abused her as well.
Kellen has long been listed as a potential co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2007 plea deal, and other Epstein victims have accused her of participating in his abuse. But Kellen insists she has been wrongly vilified, that she was groomed and exploited, and that law enforcement never once contacted her for nearly two decades. Kellen also testified that she met Donald Trump briefly at Mar-a-Lago, where Epstein had been a regular at the gym.
This puts Blanche in a tough spot. He’s already taking heat from both parties over the slush fund controversy and a backroom IRS immunity deal with the president. His predecessor, Pam Bondi, reportedly blamed him for bungling the release of the Epstein files. And now Trump, whose base spent years demanding Epstein accountability, is calling the whole thing a hoax.
Kushner’s Epstein Ties Revealed in New Report
The more the Epstein files come into focus, the more familiar the names become.
Jared Kushner’s planned $1.4 billion development on an Albanian island traces back to a yacht trip with Nathaniel Rothschild. And according to new reporting from Grabien founder Tom Elliott, Nat Rothschild’s world overlaps substantially with Jeffrey Epstein’s.
Rothschild doesn’t appear directly in Epstein’s flight logs. But he shows up repeatedly in the emails of Peter Mandelson, a former British government minister who was simultaneously a friend of Rothschild’s and a close Epstein associate for roughly a decade.
In one 2010 exchange, Mandelson forwarded Epstein an email he had written to a JPMorgan executive, promoting Rothschild’s plans for a London stock listing. Epstein responded, calling him “devious.” The released correspondence also includes Mandelson reporting to Epstein from a Rothschild family estate in Buckinghamshire, and Epstein asking whether Nat Rothschild’s sister knew about him.
That’s not the question of someone who has never been near the family.
A separate branch of the family connects more directly. Ariane de Rothschild, chair of the Edmond de Rothschild Group, met with Epstein more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2019, according to the Wall Street Journal. Released correspondence shows Epstein arranging meetings for her, and the two discussing internal Rothschild family business at length. The bank calls it routine contact, but the emails show a lot more.
The bottom line: Kushner’s new business deal came about thanks to a family that has close ties to Jeffrey Epstein. And we should all be asking a lot more questions about why Trump’s family is so closely intertwined with perhaps the most notorious child sex trafficker in history.
Steve Bannon Says Republicans’ Senate Majority May Be Doomed
Even Trump’s former White House chief strategist thinks Republicans’ days as the majority party in Congress are numbered.
On the most recent episode of his War Room podcast, Bannon said flatly that the GOP will lose its Senate majority in the November midterms. He said grassroots Republican voters have gone cold on the party, noting that there’s no enthusiasm for door-knocking or voter engagement.
Bannon pointed specifically to the Texas Senate primary, where incumbent John Cornyn lost his seat to Trump-backed Attorney General Ken Paxton in a race that shattered previous primary spending records. Bannon worried that Republicans spent too much money trying to save Cornyn.
He didn’t stop there. Bannon issued what amounted to a threat, telling the establishment to put their “freaking pencils down” in North Carolina, Maine, Ohio, and Michigan. He argued that grassroots Republicans would rather let Democrats win rather than reward the GOP establishment.
That’s a remarkable thing to hear from one of Trump’s closest former advisers. The fact that Bannon is saying this out loud at all reflects the growing fractures inside the Republican coalition heading into November.
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Thanks for watching. I’m British Chris. We’ll see you next time.
STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Ballroom Funders Won $50 Billion in Contracts After Donating. A new Washington Post analysis found that 14 of the 27 corporations that gave money to President Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom were awarded more than $50 billion in federal contracts. This includes corporations like Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, Palantir, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Caterpillar and T-Mobile.
Nearly 100 Pardoned January 6 Rioters Went on to Commit Additional Crimes. Lawfare reported Thursday that of the more than 1,500 people who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 — who were later pardoned by Trump —at least 97, or roughly one in 16 people, went on to commit more crimes. The crimes include low-tier offenses like property damage and possession of drug paraphernalia, while others committed major felonies like child molestation and reckless homicide.
Kennedy Center Directs Employees to Remove Trump’s Name from Institution. After a federal judge ruled that President Trump improperly added his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Kennedy Center is instructing employees to remove all references to Trump by June 12. This includes not only the building itself, but the Kennedy Center’s website, voicemail, social media accounts, press releases, brochures, forms and signage. Federal statute requires that any name change to the facility has to first be authorized by Congress.
Bipartisan Group of Senators Say Trump’s Boat Strikes Being Conducted Illegally. Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) are now publicly saying the Trump administration’s bombings of boats in the Caribbean Sea are being carried out on false pretenses. While the Pentagon has insisted that the boats are being piloted by “narcoterrorists” transporting drugs to the United States, Kaine and Paul say that, according to classified briefings they’ve attended, the U.S. military doesn’t require boats singled out for strikes to have drugs or weapons on board. More than 200 people have been killed in the strikes since last September.
50 Senate Republicans Vote to Kill Resolution Opposing Trump’s Slush Fund. The U.S. Senate voted 50-49 on Thursday to kill legislation meant to stop President Trump from setting up a taxpayer-funded compensation scheme for MAGA loyalists. Republicans’ support for the slush fund came despite a federal judge halting the Trump administration from implementing the plan. Only Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Jon Husted (R-Ohio) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) voted for the measure.
