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NZ Herald
2 hours ago
- Politics
- NZ Herald
House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed Epstein's imprisoned associate for a deposition
Ghislaine Maxwell is negotiating about testifying to Congress on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Photo / Getty Images Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Ghislaine Maxwell is negotiating about testifying to Congress on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Photo / Getty Images Jeffrey Epstein's imprisoned associate Ghislaine Maxwell would be willing to testify to Congress if lawmakers offer her immunity and provide her with the questions in advance, her lawyer said in a letter obtained today by the Washington Post. 'Our initial reaction was that Ms Maxwell would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights and decline to testify at this time,' her lawyer, David Oscar Markus, wrote in the letter to Representative James Comer (Republican-Kentucky), who chairs the House Oversight Committee. 'However, after further reflection we would like to find a way to co-operate with Congress if a fair and safe path forward can be established.' In addition to immunity and questions beforehand, Maxwell said through Markus that she also wants to delay testifying until after the Supreme Court rules on her appeal of her sex-trafficking conviction. Markus also said that if Maxwell receives clemency from the United States President, she would be willing to testify open and honestly in front of Congress.
CNN
4 hours ago
- Politics
- CNN
Analysis: Trump says Epstein poached young women from Mar-a-Lago. That raises new questions about what he knew.
President Donald Trump wants to move on from his administration's fiasco over the Jeffrey Epstein files, but he keeps hampering that effort by opening his mouth. The most recent instance has to do with precisely why the two men had a falling out about two decades ago. Trump acknowledged on Tuesday that the employees who he said Monday that Epstein poached from him, triggering their breakup, were young women who worked in the spa at his Mar-a-Lago club. 'The answer is yes, they were,' he told reporters on Air Force One while traveling back from Scotland. The answer doesn't just call into question Trump's honesty about his relationship with Epstein, but also his potential knowledge of the accused sex trafficker's misconduct. (Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein.) A day earlier, the president said they'd fallen out because Epstein 'stole people that worked for me' – including after he had warned Epstein not to do it again. But Trump had made no mention of the employees being young women. And the White House last week had said Trump barred Epstein from his Mar-a-Lago club 'for being a creep.' (Trump on Tuesday said the two reasons were 'sort of a little bit of the same thing.') But back in 2019, reporting traced their fallout to another factor entirely: the two powerful real estate men competing for the same Palm Beach property. It's clear that this is something of a sensitive subject. After Epstein's arrest in 2019, Trump declined to go into detail about their falling out, telling reporters, 'The reason doesn't make any difference, frankly.' But it surely does now. So where does the truth lie? Trump was the most forthcoming so far on Tuesday. Epstein hired away Mar-a-Lago spa employees more than once, Trump said, even after being warned against it, prompting him to cut ties with Epstein and throw him out of the club. 'I said, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa,'' Trump told reporters. 'And then not too long after that he did it again and I said, 'outta here.'' He also acknowledged that one of those employees may have been Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent accusers, who died by suicide earlier this year. 'I think she worked at the spa,' Trump said. 'I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her.' With these answers, there's clear overlap between Trump's account Monday and what the White House said last week. 'I wouldn't talk [to him] because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help,' Trump said of Epstein on Monday, adding: 'He stole people that worked for me. I said, 'Don't ever do that again.' He did it again, and I threw him out of the place, persona non-grata. I threw him out, and that was it.' And last week, the White House communications director said: 'The fact is that the president kicked [Epstein] out of his club for being a creep.' Both of those accounts differ from the falling out that's portrayed in a 2019 Washington Post report about the two men competing for a bankrupted oceanfront property called Maison de l'Amitié – a process that included plenty of hardnosed tactics. (The first Trump White House at the time did not comment on or deny that story.) When asked by CNN on Tuesday to reconcile these accounts, the White House said, 'Nothing more to add to POTUS' comments.' There are still plenty of unanswered questions. Trump casting Epstein as merely having stolen employees – even young women from the spa – would be a pretty shocking way to characterize recruiting someone into a sex-trafficking ring. The whole thing certainly adds to questions about what Trump knew and when about Epstein's activities. Those questions had already been relevant for a host of reasons. There's the infamous 2002 Trump comment about how Epstein 'likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' There's the Florida businessman who has said he expressed discomfort to Trump about putting on a 'calendar girl' event with Epstein. 'I said, 'Look, Donald, I know Jeff really well, I can't have him going after younger girls,' he recalled telling Trump, according to The New York Times. And then there's longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone's 2016 book, in which he quoted Trump citing how Epstein's 'swimming pool was full of beautiful young girls.' 'How nice, I thought,' Trump said, according to Stone, 'he let the neighborhood kids use his pool.' And then there's another reported scene at Mar-a-Lago. A 2020 book by reporters for the Miami Herald and Wall Street Journal reported that Trump actually severed ties with Epstein after he hit on a Mar-a-Lago member's teenage daughter. 'The way this person described it, such an act could irreparably harm the Trump brand, leaving Donald no choice but to remove Epstein,' one of the book's authors said. What's particularly striking here is the timeline. In former Trump aide Sam Nunberg's telling to the Washington Post in 2019, Trump's excommunication of Epstein from his club for recruiting a young woman for massages came years before Epstein's sex-trafficking investigation became public knowledge. That would mean years before 2005. But that — and Trump's own comments Tuesday – suggest the president might have known something unsavory was going on before a lot of other people did. Giuffre, after all, was a teenaged employee during the relevant period. The president doesn't seem to want to talk about that. But as with so many of his other answers on Epstein, that only leads to more questions.
Gulf Today
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Gulf Today
Trump's order on homelessness gets it all wrong
Steve Lopez, Tribune News Service President Trump has the answer to homelessness. Forcibly clear the streets. Recently, he signed an executive order to address "endemic vagrancy" and end "crime and disorder on our streets." He called for the use of "civil commitments" to get those who suffer from mental illness or addiction into "humane treatment." This comes after last year's US Supreme Court ruling making it legal for cities to punish people for being homeless, even if they have nowhere to go. There's some truth in what he says, and California's record on housing and homelessness is ripe for criticism. I've watched too many people suffer from addiction and mental illness and asked why the help is so slow to arrive. But I also know there are no simple answers for either crisis, and bluster is no substitute for desperately needed resources. Like a lot of what Trump does, this is another case of grandstanding. In the meantime, the Washington Post reported Thursday that the "Trump administration has slashed more than $1 billion in COVID-era grants administered by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and is proposing to slash hundreds of millions more in agency grants." As it happens, I was in the middle of a column on the latest Los Angeles homeless count when news of Trump's executive order broke. I had just spent time with two homeless women to hear about their predicaments, and none of what Trump is proposing comes close to addressing their needs, which are tragically commonplace. Namely, they're living in poverty and can't afford a place to live. In his executive order, Trump said that "nearly two-thirds of homeless individuals report having used hard drugs ... in their lifetimes. An equally large share of homeless individuals reported suffering from mental health conditions." I don't know where he got those numbers, but truth and accuracy are not hallmarks of this administration. No doubt, addiction and mental illness are significant factors, and more intervention is needed. But that's more complicated than he thinks, especially given the practical and legal issues surrounding coercive treatment — and it's not going to solve the problem. When the latest homeless count in Los Angeles was released, a slight decline from a year ago was regarded by many as a positive sign. But when Eli Veitzer of Jewish Family Service LA dug into the numbers, he found something both unsurprising and deeply disturbing. The number of homeless people 65 and older hadn't gone down. It had surged, in both the city and county of Los Angeles. "This isn't new this year. It's a trend over the last couple of years," said Veitzer, whose nonprofit provides meals, housing assistance and various other services to clients. "It's meaningful, and it's real, and these people are at the highest risk of mortality while they're on the streets." The numbers from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority showed a 3.4% decrease in the total homeless population in the city, but a 17.6% increase among those 65 and older. The county numbers showed a 3.99% decrease overall, but an 8.59% increase in the 65 and older group. In the city, the increase over two years was from 3,427 in 2023 to 4,680 this year — up 37%. Reliable research has shown that among older adults who become homeless, the primary reason is the combination of poverty and high housing costs, rather than mental illness or addiction. "They or their spouse lost their job, they or their spouse got sick, their marriage broke up or their spouse or parent died," Dr. Margot Kushel of UC San Francisco's Homelessness and Housing Initiative was telling me several hours before Trump's executive order was issued. Her team's landmark study, released two years ago (and covered by my colleague Anita Chabria), found that nearly half the state's homeless residents were 50 and older, and that participants in the study reported a median monthly household income of $960. "The results ... confirm that far too many Californians experience homelessness because they cannot afford housing," Kushel said at the time. Among the older population, Veitzer said, the jump in homelessness comes against the backdrop of federal and local budget cuts that will make it harder to reverse the trend. And harder for nonprofits, which rely in part on public funding, to keep providing group meals, home-delivered meals, transportation, social services and housing support. "Every provider I've talked to in the city of L.A. is cutting meal programs," Veitzer said. "We're going to have to close two of our 13 meal sites, and last year we closed three. We used to have 16, and now we're down to 11." On Wednesday, I went to one of the sites that's still up and running on Santa Monica Boulevard, just west of the 405, and met Jane Jefferies, 69. She told me she's been camping in her vehicle since February when living with her brother became impossible for various reasons. She now pulls into a Safe Parking LA lot each night to bed down. Jefferies said she collects about $1,400 a month in Social Security, which isn't enough to get her into an apartment. At the senior center, she uses her own equipment to make buttons that she sells on the Venice boardwalk, where she can make up to $200 on a good weekend. But that's still not enough to cover the cost of housing, she told me, and she's given up on government help. "All the funding has been cut, and I don't know if it's because a lot of the city and state funding is subsidised by the federal government. We all know Trump hates California," she said. As Veitzer put it: "There's nowhere near enough low-income senior housing in L.A. County. Wait lists open up periodically," with far more applicants than housing units. "And then they close." His agency delivers a daily meal to Vancie Davis, 73, who lives in a van at Penmar Park in Venice. Her next-door neighbor is her son, Thomas Williamson, 51, who lives in his car. Davis was in the front seat of the van when I arrived, hugging her dog, Heart. Her left leg was amputated below the knee two years ago because of an infection, she told me. Davis said she and another son were living in a trailer in Oregon, but the owner shut off the utilities and changed the locks. She said she reached out to Williamson, who told her, "I've got a van for you, so you'll have a place to live, but it's going to be rough. And it is. It's very, very rough." I've heard so many variations of stories like these over the years, I've lost count. The magnitude that exists in the wealthiest nation in history is a disgrace, and a sad commentary on an economic system and public policy that have served to widen, rather than narrow, the inequity gap. On Thursday, Trump's executive order on homelessness grabbed headlines but will do nothing for Jane Jefferies or Vancie Davis and for thousands like them. We know the interventions that can work, Kushel said, but with deep cuts in the works, we're moving in the wrong direction. Davis' son Thomas told Times photographer Genaro Molina about another person who lives in a vehicle and has been a neighbour of theirs in the parking lot. She wasn't there Wednesday, but we'll check back. It's a 91-year-old woman.
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The Independent
7 hours ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Putin's right-hand man tells Lindsey Graham to ‘Work on America' in response to peace talk demands
The former president and prime minister of Russia brushed off Senator Lindsey Graham's demand to 'get to the peace table' and end the war with Ukraine, saying neither he nor President Donald Trump could stop Russia from its military objectives. Dmitry Medvedev, a high-ranking Russian official who currently serves as deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, snarkily responded to Graham on X on Monday after the South Carolina senator echoed Trump's request for Russia to negotiate to end the war. 'To those in Russia who believe that President Trump is not serious about ending the bloodbath between Russia and Ukraine: You and your customers will soon be sadly mistaken. You will also soon see that Joe Biden is no longer president,' Graham told Medvedev. 'Get to the peace table.' But Medvedev waved off Graham's threat, insisting, 'It's not for you or Trump to dictate when to 'get at the peace table.'' 'Negotiations will end when all the objectives of our military operation have been achieved. Work on America first, gramps!' Medvedev said. The exchange between Medvedev and Graham occurred on the same day that Trump warned Russian President Vladimir Putin that he had 10 to 12 days to make progress on a peace deal to stop the war with Ukraine, or Russia would face 'severe tariffs.' Russia invaded Ukraine more than three years ago, and since then, the two countries have been battling. Ukraine has relied heavily on support from allies, including the U.S., to fight Russia. Trump had initially opposed providing Ukraine with financial, humanitarian, and military aid. He heavily campaigned on the idea that he could 'end' the war between Russia and Ukraine swiftly. However, it's proven difficult for the U.S. president. Earlier this month, Trump said he would give Putin 50 days to strike a deal. However, he shortened that timeframe on Monday while expressing some frustration with Putin's lack of effort in striking a ceasefire. Hours later, Medvedev took to X to warn Trump that 'playing the ultimatum game with Russia' would lead to war between Russia and the United States. That's when Graham stepped in to demand Russia begin peace negotiations. The Independent has asked Graham's office for comment. From Medvedev's response, it appeared Russia is in no hurry to stop the fighting in Ukraine. That was all but formally confirmed on Monday evening after Russia bombarded Ukraine with a series of missiles. At least 22 people were killed as part of the Russian strikes, which targeted a Ukrainian prison camp and a Ukrainian hospital. At least one of those people killed was a pregnant woman, the Washington Post reported. Should Russia fail to come to the peace table talks, Trump could impose hefty sanctions – which would be on top of the sanctions the U.S. has already imposed on Russia. Graham, who has largely supported the U.S. sending aid to Ukraine, has co-sponsored bipartisan legislation that would impose a 500 percent tariff on imported goods from countries that purchase Russian oil, gas, uranium, and other products.
L'Orient-Le Jour
8 hours ago
- Politics
- L'Orient-Le Jour
Air Force One: Qatar's gift soon to be in Washington's hands
It's just a matter of days now. The U.S. government and Qatar are expected to sign this week the controversial agreement for Doha to transfer a Boeing 747-8 to the Trump administration, according to a report by the Washington Post. The delivery is described as an "unconditional gift" to the U.S. Department of Defense, according to official communication reviewed by the newspaper . This approach is intended to sidestep corruption accusations that have surrounded the gesture since it came to light a few months ago. Last May, Washington confirmed this XXL gift, a "palace in the sky" estimated to be worth $400 updatesAccording to its first article, the U.S. Constitution forbids the president from accepting any present or emolument from any "king, prince, or foreign state" without the consent of...
