Good evening, I’m British Chris, and this is Raw America.
Tonight, four stories that deserve your full attention. The DOJ appears to be hiding dozens of pages from the Epstein files that could implicate Donald Trump. The Telegraph discovers a network of storage units where Epstein kept potentially damning information from investigators. A Republican congressman accused of an affair with a staffer who died by suicide is refusing to resign. And Ted Cruz is being confronted for defending Kash Patel’s taxpayer-funded trip to the Olympics.
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Now let’s get into it.
DOJ Quietly Deletes Trump Allegation from Epstein Files
The morning of Trump’s State of the Union address, NPR dropped a report that the administration almost certainly did not want landing on that particular day.
According to NPR’s investigation, the Department of Justice withheld dozens of documents from its massive Epstein file release. The missing pages appear to relate specifically to a woman who accused both Trump and Jeffrey Epstein of sexually abusing her when she was around 13 years old, in the early 1980s.
The FBI took her allegations seriously enough to interview her four separate times in 2019. But only documents from that first interview ever made it into the DOJ’s public release. Independent journalist Roger Sollenberger flagged the discrepancy earlier this month.
What NPR found is that the next three interviews appear to account for more than 50 missing pages. Serial numbers catalogued by the Justice Department simply don’t appear in what was shared with the public.
Here’s the problem: Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly claimed her office released everything the Justice Department had. If 53 pages of interview documents and notes are catalogued but not public, that claim doesn’t hold up. What was said in those three subsequent interviews? Nobody outside the DOJ knows. And so far, the DOJ isn’t explaining why.
Epstein Hid Computers and Photos in Storage Units Across the US
There’s another Epstein story that deserves attention tonight.
The Telegraph has uncovered documents showing that Jeffrey Epstein paid private detectives to remove computers and photographs from his Florida home before a police raid in the mid-2000s, and then hid that material across a network of at least six secret storage units scattered around the United States.
Credit card receipts reviewed by The Telegraph show regular payments to these facilities stretching from 2003 all the way until 2019, the year Epstein died. One unit in Florida, called Uncle Bob’s, was billed $374 a month for over a decade. Another near his Palm Beach mansion ran until at least 2019. There was a Manhattan Mini Storage unit rented on his behalf starting around 2010. Additional units near his Zorro ranch in New Mexico. The network was deliberate and maintained over a long period.
The reason this matters isn’t just historical tidiness. Search warrants reviewed by The Telegraph suggest that US authorities never raided any of these external storage units. Not once.
This matters. The DOJ released three million Epstein files late last month. Attorney General Pam Bondi said it was everything the Justice Department had. But if computers were removed from Epstein’s home before searches, transferred into private storage, and those storage units were never subpoenaed or raided, then whatever is on those machines was never part of any government investigation to begin with. It couldn’t have been released because it was never collected.
Epstein’s own brother told The Telegraph he had no knowledge of the storage units. Florida law allows storage companies to auction unit contents if rent goes unpaid for 60 days. Whether the material in those units was destroyed after Epstein’s death, auctioned off, moved, or is still sitting somewhere in a rented locker off an industrial estate outside Palm Beach, nobody currently knows.
This massive external storage network, maintained specifically to keep material away from investigators, appears to sit in a gap that nobody has officially accounted for.
That gap is the story.
Republican Refuses Calls to Resign Despite Affair Allegations
Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas is flatly refusing to resign over allegations of an affair with a staffer who died by suicide, and is not answering questions about whether the rumored affair took place.
Gonzales faces allegations he had an affair with a senior staffer who later died by suicide, and that he sent her sexually explicit messages pressuring her to share images of herself. The staffer’s husband provided CNN with an exchange appearing to show Gonzales asking for a “sexy pic.”
When asked whether he had a relationship with the staffer or whether those messages were real, Gonzales didn’t answer. He said he’s been “blackmailed” and that there will be “ample time” for the truth to emerge.
The timing could hardly be worse. His Republican primary is one week away. Several of his Republican colleagues, including Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, Anna Paulina Luna, Thomas Massie, and Tim Burchett have called for his resignation. Speaker Mike Johnson stopped short of calling for his resignation, but described the allegations as “very serious.”
Gonzales isn’t the first politician to try to run out the clock on a scandal by saying the full picture hasn’t emerged. The question is whether Texas GOP voters will be willing to wait for that picture with a ballot in their hands.
Ted Cruz Confronted Over Kash Patel’s Taxpayer-Funded Olympics Trip
We all saw FBI Director Kash Patel go to the Winter Olympics on the taxpayer dime, and slam beers in the locker room with the U.S. Men’s Olympic hockey team after their gold medal victory. But the bigger story is what Patel said in 2023. In a clip that’s now circulating widely, he slammed then-FBI Director Chris Wray for using a “government-funded G5 jet to go to vacations,” suggesting the plane should be grounded or Wray should be fined $15,000 per use.
CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin played that clip to Sen. Ted Cruz on Tuesday and asked the obvious question: how does Patel’s Olympic trip look in that context?
Cruz, of course, defended it. He argued the FBI has a legitimate security role at the Olympics, praised Patel’s performance in the job, and tried to spin the outrage over obvious corruption and hypocrisy as Democrats being out of touch.
Whether you think the Olympics trip was justified on security grounds or not, the 2023 clip isn’t going away. Patel put himself on record with a very specific standard. He’s now the one being measured against it.
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That’s all for tonight. I’m British Chris for Raw America. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you next time.
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