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Politico
7 minutes ago
- Politico
House Dems prepare to force more Epstein votes
Democrats are hoping to jam Republicans with Jeffrey Epstein-related amendments ahead of a Thursday Appropriations subpanel markup, according to two senior Democratic aides granted anonymity. The Epstein issue had already scuttled the House floor schedule for the remainder of the week, leading Speaker Mike Johnson to send the House home early for their five-week summer recess. Democrats have attempted to force the issue in the Rules Committee and on the House floor, dividing Republicans who have faced a backlash from the MAGA base. Now, according to the aides, Democrats will do the same at the subcommittee markup at 10 a.m. Thursday. The aides were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge plans. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma said Wednesday morning that the panel will proceed with the subcommittee meeting as planned. 'There are no changes to our schedule,' he said, despite the House floor schedule being scrapped a day earlier. 'I will, however, convey any changes to you as soon as possible. ... Honestly, I want to see how things go today.' Forging ahead with committee debate would put Republicans on record on controversial amendments, including on ordering the release of information about the Epstein case. Then if House Republican leaders want to pass the bill on the floor in the coming months, it would resurface the drama they are trying to hush. Getting the House out of town early was intended, in part, to starve the Epstein narrative of oxygen on Capitol Hill, and Republicans may not want a fresh fight on the issue Thursday. Cole had articulated for months his goal to get all 12 House spending bills on the floor ahead of the August recess. But he acknowledged this week that delays by the massive GOP tax and domestic policy bill put that goal out of reach. Canceling a full committee markup would put his committee further behind that goal. Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
The Hill
30 minutes ago
- The Hill
NPR editor-in-chief Edith Chapin resigning amid attacks from Trump administration
This week, NPR's editor-in-chief and acting chief content officer, Edith Chapin, announced she is stepping down — a decision she says was entirely her own. But the timing couldn't feel more symbolic. Her resignation comes just days after Congress voted to eliminate all $500 million in federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which supports NPR and PBS. And while NPR itself doesn't rely heavily on federal dollars, the same can't be said for its member stations — especially in rural areas where these grants keep the lights on. This isn't just a media story. It's a story about who gets to stay informed — and who gets left behind. Let's start with Chapin. During her time at NPR, she didn't just hold a title — she elevated the newsroom. She led the charge to hire senior editors specifically tasked with ensuring fairness, accuracy, and balance across NPR's reporting. In a time when media bias has become a political football, Chapin doubled down on journalistic standards. She once said, "We need to hear from all kinds of people — and that is our job. And we need to be as clear and transparent as we possibly can, and our audiences can decide how useful we are for them." Her departure is a loss for public journalism at a moment when it is already under siege. Now, let's talk about that funding cut. It's a move that's small-minded and shortsighted. Here's why: First, rural communities will be hit the hardest. Small stations don't have the same access to donors or corporate sponsors as big-city outlets. Without federal funding, they risk shutting down entirely — cutting off essential access to local news, weather alerts, and educational programming. Second, public media is a lifeline, not a luxury. Nearly three in four Americans rely on public radio for public safety updates. It's also the home of beloved shows like "Sesame Street" and "Daniel Tiger," especially for families who can't afford streaming platforms. Third, not everyone has Wi-Fi. Lawmakers arguing that public media is 'obsolete' forget that rural broadband is still unreliable in many parts of the country. Radio is still a reliable source of information that many Americans are using. This funding cut also defies the original purpose of public broadcasting, which was meant to provide unbiased, educational content for all Americans. Stripping it away because of perceived political slights? That's retaliation — not policy. So yes, Edith Chapin may have chosen to leave. But we all lose something when a principled journalist walks away in the shadow of a system that's being dismantled. And what's at stake isn't just news — it's access, it's education, and it's equity. Lindsey Granger is a News Nation contributor and co-host of The Hill's commentary show 'Rising.' This column is an edited transcription of her on-air commentary.
Atlantic
31 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump's Epstein Denials Are Ever So Slightly Unconvincing
The president is not behaving like an innocent man with nothing to hide. Stephanie Keith / Getty July 23, 2025, 10:57 AM ET Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You'd probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You'd demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly. Donald Trump's behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is … not that. The latest cycle of frantic evasions began last week, after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had submitted a suggestive message and drawing to a scrapbook celebrating Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday, in 2003. This fact alone added only incrementally to the public understanding of the two men's friendship. Rather than brush the report off, however, Trump denied authorship. 'I never wrote a picture in my life,' he told the Journal —an oddly narrow defense for a man reported to have written 'may every day be another wonderful secret' to a criminal whose secret was systematically abusing girls, and one that was instantly falsified by Trump's well-documented penchant for doodling. On Truth Social, Trump complained that he had asked Rupert Murdoch, the Journal 's owner, to spike the story, and received an encouraging answer, only for the story to run. Under normal circumstances, a president confessing that he tried to kill an incriminating report would amount to a major scandal. But Trump has so deeply internalized his own critique of the media, according to which any organ beyond his control is 'fake news,' that he believed the episode reflected badly on Murdoch's ethics rather than his own. Helen Lewis: MAGA influencers don't understand what journalism is Having failed to prevent the article from being published, Trump shifted into distraction mode. In a transparent attempt to offer his wavering loyalists the scent of fresh meat, Trump began to attack their standby list of enemies. On Friday, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, renewed charges that the Obama administration had ginned up the Russia scandal to damage Trump. None of the facts she provided supported this claim remotely. The entire sleight of hand relied on conflating the question of whether Russia had hacked into voting machines (the Obama administration said publicly and privately it hadn't) with the very different question of whether Russia had attempted to influence voters by hacking and leaking Democratic emails (which the Obama administration, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and a subsequent a bipartisan Senate committee investigation all concluded it had done). Why did Gabbard suddenly pick this moment to release and misconstrue 2016 intelligence comprising facts that the Obama administration had already acknowledged in public? Trump made the answer perfectly clear when he used a press availability with the president of the Philippines to deflect questions about Epstein into a rant about the need to arrest Obama. 'I don't really follow that too much,' he said of the Epstein matter. 'It's sort of a witch hunt. Just a continuation of the witch hunt. The witch hunt you should be talking about is that they caught President Obama absolutely cold.' Trump has yet to specify why the 'witch hunt' he's been stewing over nonstop for nearly a decade remains fascinating, while the new 'witch hunt' he just revealed to the world is too tedious to address. In fact, Trump himself suggested that the two matters were related. He described the Epstein witch hunt as a part of a continuous plot that culminated in Joe Biden stealing the 2020 election. ('And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race. And the 2020 race was rigged.') You might think that this link would increase Trump's curiosity about the Epstein matter, given his inexhaustible interest in vindicating his claim to have won in 2020. Not this time! By invoking 2020, Trump managed to make the Epstein conspiracy theory sound more world-historically important—while attaching his protestations of innocence to claims that were hardly settled in his favor. Again, imagine you were in Trump's position and were completely innocent of any involvement with Epstein's crimes. You would probably not try to compare the Epstein case to the scandal in which eight of your associates were sentenced to prison, or to the other time when you tried to steal an election and then got impeached. Instead, Trump is leaning into the parallels between the Epstein case and his own long record of criminal associations and proven lies, arguing in essence that the Epstein witch hunt is as fake as the claim that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election (i.e., 100 percent real). Ashley Parker and Jonathan Lemire: Inside the White House's Epstein strategy Yesterday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, faced with demands by some Republican members to pass a nonbinding resolution calling for full disclosure of the government's files relating to the Epstein investigation, announced that he would instead shut down the House for summer recess. Given that Trump had previously been eager to squeeze as many working days out of his narrow legislative majority as he could get, and the impression in Washington that Johnson will not so much as go to the bathroom without Trump's permission, declaring early recess communicates extreme desperation on the part of the president. Also yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was releasing thousands of pages of documents relating to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It is difficult to see why this disclosure was suddenly necessary. Trump's contention that the Epstein scandal is too dull and familiar to be worth discussing seems to be ever so slightly in tension with the notion that the death of Martin Luther King in 1968 is fresh material. If anything, the disclosure of documents nobody asked to see painfully highlights his unwillingness to disclose the documents everybody is clamoring for. If the police ask to look in your basement for a missing hitchhiker recently spotted in your car, and you offer to let them inspect your desk and closet instead, this will not dispel suspicions about what a basement inspection might reveal. Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.
