A group of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse are going door-to-door on Capitol Hill to deliver the government’s files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The survivors gathered for a press conference at the National Mall Wednesday to launch theDonald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile, which will carry bound copies of all 3.5 million files to communities across the country throughout the midterm elections.
As part of their launch, the survivors delivered printed copies straight to lawmakers’ offices, according to Miles Taylor, a former Trump official turned activist now involved with the bookmobile.
The survivors took copies of the files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is set to vote on advancing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation on Thursday.
Speaking at the press conference, the survivors urged against confirming Blanche, who only recently met with survivors after months of dodging victims and their demands for the Department of Justice to keep investigating.That meeting did not go well.
“A vote for Todd Blanche is a vote against justice,” Elizabeth Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti–human trafficking educator,saidWednesday.
Blanche previouslytried to downplaythe Epstein files’ thousands of redaction errors thatexposed the names of survivorswhileconcealing the identitiesof alleged perpetrators.
Blanche’s confirmation is already in jeopardy at the hands of his own party. Two Republican lawmakers arerefusingto approve Blanche unless he puts in writing that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is actually dead.
The federal government’s investigation into former FBI Director James Comey has taken some extremely bizarre steps.
Comey was charged with allegedly threatening violence against President Donald Trump inAprilwith an Instagram post of numbers spelling out “86 47” in seashells. On Tuesday, Comey filed amotionto dismiss the case, and in that court filing, his lawyers listed somedrastic stepstaken by the authorities.
The Department of Justice spoke to former mafia boss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano in an attempt to prove that the “86” in Comey’s post was an allusion to murder. But Gravano’s interview didn’t help their case, as he pointed out that real organized crime figures would think using the term was too obvious.
Gravano also suggested the FBI should contact former federal prosecutor and judge John Gleeson for his opinion on the term, only for Gleeson to say, “The claim that ‘86’ is mafia jargon for ‘kill’ is preposterous.” Gleeson, who prosecuted notable organized crime cases, said that in thousands of hours of debriefings and conversations with mobsters, he had never heard the term used that way.
Federal agents also used emergency cell phone tracking, which doesn’t require a warrant, to monitor Comey’s location while he was driving from North Carolina to Virginia shortly after he made the post. That location tracking is only supposed to be used in extreme situations, such as an “imminent threat to life or limb.”
No such emergency existed, and one Secret Service agent later said in a memo that “we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger and legally it was a bad idea to ping the phone.”
Trump fired Comey in 2017 over the federal investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election, and has targeted the former FBI director in his second term as president. This case against Comey has fallenapartseveral timesalready, and has only recently been revived by acting Attorney GeneralTodd Blanche. It seems destined to fail yet again.
