Journalist Julie K. Brown, whose Miami Herald reporting in 2017 and 2018 led to additional charges for Epstein and identified nearly 80 of his victims — sits down with Rick to unravel all of the significant details that the public might not know yet, or might not be paying attention to.
Blowing the lid off of an already UNBELIEVABLE story (again), Julie sheds light on the victims’ stories, Epstein and Maxwell’s extensive child trafficking network, the colossal names woven into the network, why investigators should follow the money, and, of course, the unprecedented sweetheart plea deal Alex Acosta (who’d later slither into the role of Trump’s Labor Secretary in 2017) handed to Epstein during his 2008 criminal case in Palm Beach County.
Rick and Julie also untangle the important details surrounding Epstein’s 2006 Palm Beach investigation where a Victim’s Rights Lawsuit (filed after the sweetheart plea deal) exposed a chummy email paper trail between the Prosecutor’s office (i.e. Alex Acosta’s office at the time) and Epstein’s attorney. For more of her investigative groundbreaking reporting, please check out Julie’s book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” and her Miami Herald 2017-2018 investigation
President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.
In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in [the] top 10 dangerous cities in [the] U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.
If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.
Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.
The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.
Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.
Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions…while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”
The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.
This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.
This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”
The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”
Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.
Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”
Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.
But Trump’s press conference did not show a president in control of these dramatic changes. His words echoed the rhetoric he used to win office in 2016, rhetoric he summed up in his inaugural address that turned a speech usually designed to be uplifting into a description of what he called American carnage: “Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our Nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
But in the context of the president’s rambling nonsense, that apocalyptic rhetoric, along with Trump’s focus on renovating and redecorating the White House to look like one of his gold-splattered properties, seems like an attempt to return to a past in which he felt powerful.
Meanwhile, Trump’s second presidency has been following the plan outlined in Project 2025 closely, even though Trump denied any association with Project 2025 when he ran for office. Russell Vought, now director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the section of the plan that called for an extraordinarily strong executive in order to put in place Christian nationalism. Increasingly, it looks like members of his administration are using Trump in order to create a system that will respond to whoever is in charge, making it possible for today’s leaders to retain control over the country even without Trump there to mobilize MAGA voters.
Trump’s press conference today showed a badly weakened president. His apparent connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have already weakened him with his base. That story is not going away, and Trump has made it clear he is frantic over it. Then today he indicated even he is worried about his mental deterioration. At 7:36 this morning, he posted on social media that Representatives Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) are “morons.” He wrote: “Each of these political hacks should be forced to take a Cognitive Exam, much like the one I recently took while getting my ‘physical’ at our GREAT Washington, D.C., Military Hospital (W[alter] R[eed]!). As the doctors said, ‘President Trump ACED it, something that is rarely seen!’ These Radical Left Lunatics would all fail this test in a spectacular show of stupidity and incompetence. TAKE THE TEST!!!”
Vice President J.D. Vance appears to have been distancing himself from Trump and the administration by taking repeated vacations. As Bill Kristol noted today in The Bulwark, Vance also appears to be undercutting Trump over the Epstein files, twisting the knife while also seeming to make overtures to Trump’s MAGA voters, who have never warmed to Vance. As Kristol notes, Vance set up what Kristol calls a “very unusual” meeting at his residence to discuss Epstein, a meeting that just happened to leak to the press. Then yesterday, Vance brought up the issue again in an interview with Maria Bartiromo on the Fox News Channel, parroting MAGA beliefs that the files name prominent Democrats.
“[A] lot of Americans want answers. I certainly want answers,” Vance told Bartiromo. As Kristol notes: “With this bland statement, Vance succeeded—inadvertently, needless to say!—in reminding us that we don’t yet have the answers we want and deserve,” thus ginning up the Epstein story again.
Those people cheering on Trump’s drive for autocratic power because they still somehow think he will use that power to make their lives better might want to consider how their lives may change if that power is in the hands of J.D. Vance.
And so we have come full circle: the arbitrary nature of autocrats was, after all, what made our nation’s founders base a government not on men, but on impartial laws that defended the rights and liberties of the people.
An AI created a podcast of your paper,” the email said. I blinked and read it again.
The paper was a work I had written in graduate school and uploaded to the website Academia. The subject was digital freedom and social control in authoritarian states.
I uploaded it in 2010 to thwart the paywalls that blocked academic research from the public. I wanted people to grasp the digital dangers of surveillance, censorship, and impersonation. I wanted them to understand that no one was safe from the future.
It did not occur to me that in 2025 a robot would steal my words and make a podcast out of them and try to charge people, including me, $170 to listen.
I don’t know what the podcast says. I ain’t paying no doppelganger ransom.
In 2010, I sought to debunk the widespread belief that the internet was an inherently democratizing force. In that halcyon era, when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto did not yet prompt bitter laughter, this was a controversial take. It came from researching the internet in authoritarian states, where dictators used it to monitor dissidents and torpedo their rebellions.
* * *
I miss those days, because the people were real: the dissidents, the government, the infiltrators. The latter two were liars — but real liars. They had not yet been replaced with AI. When someone ruined your life, they had to make an effort. There was more “human” and less “inanity” in the “inhumanity”. (Am I doing it right, AI? We’re supposed to shove woods into a virtual woodchipper and mimic coherence, right?)
No one should feel nostalgic for this time. It’s a sign of ours that I do. Now the journals are defunded, the programs where I got my degrees have been cut, and I live in a semi-authoritarian state where podcast-producing robots steal my speech.
My research was on dictatorships of the former Soviet Union: countries where no one trusted anyone. Their political culture is now indistinguishable from that of the US. How can we trust anybody when anybody might be nobody? We no longer tilt at windmills but shoot at the wind. Shoot the breeze, shoot in the futile hope that the robots don’t take the shells and piece them into a funhouse facsimile of conversation.
“In America, bad news breaks you!” Yakov Smirnoff’s voice whispers as I close my laptop. This is a joke I invented for a fake Yakov Smirnoff, a Yakov Smirnoff that only lives in my mind. I give my fake versions of real people privacy. I wish others would extend me the same courtesy.
Like many technologies, AI is designed to kill humans, but in the most soulless way possible, stripping away even our ability to own and express our pain.
In 1938, the poet Bertolt Brecht, living in exile from Nazi Germany, wrote “In the dark times/ Will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing/ About the dark times.”
AI steals even that option. When I was discussing the Brecht poem, a commenter wryly noted that AI could write a song about its own thievery. But it can’t. A song written by AI isn’t a song any more than dust is skin.
AI wins not when it becomes more human, but when humans become more like AI: disengaged and devoid of original thought.
What began as a threat to creativity and critical inquiry has moved into tragic terrain. Sacred rites are being outsourced to machines. AI is used to write obituaries and for pundits to profit off murder by pretending to commune with dead children. Chatbots give cold comfort to real grief, exploiting an empathy deficit that has soared since covid appeared.
Meanwhile, AI spits lies, steals jobs, and destroys the natural environment. Tech companies sell it hard so it can be integrated into daily life before buyers realize they have purchased their own replacements. Extinction is being marketed as ease of life.
I used to be frustrated by people’s lack of imagination. Now I’m frustrated by their rejection of it and replacements for it.
Imagination is nothing to take for granted. It is one of the main qualities that fascist regimes attempt to outlaw. But they do not need to outlaw what is surrendered.
AI is soul stripping.
* * *
In 1990, the Kyrgyz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov popularized the term “mankurt” in his novel This Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. A mankurt is a Central Asian zombie who, due to imperial domination and war, has lost touch with his history, his family, and himself. He is a former person with an enslaved mind.
“They can take your land, your wealth, even your life,” wails the agonized mother of a mankurt in the novel, “but who ever thought, who ever dared to attack a man’s memory? Oh God, if you do exist, how did you give such power to people? Isn’t there evil enough on earth without this?”
In interviews, Aitmatov explained that a mankurt did not recognize himself as a human being. The term spread across the USSR as it crumbled and citizens from colonized nations like Kyrgyzstan tried to rediscover their culture, religion, and roots.
The mankurt is the sort of topic I wrote about in my graduate school papers now being vomited up by AI. That is the terror of the post-existence age: I have taken pains to avoid this fate, but it got me anyway.
I have never used ChatGPT. I have never streamed music, used a QR code, or taken an Uber. I leave home without a phone and boycott cashless establishments. I avoid apps, including the Substack app. I am behind the times and determined to stay there.
It is easy for me to live an analog life in Missouri, which tends to be about twenty years behind the rest of the country. But we’re at about 2005 now, the last year the internet was good, and big tech has come to make me its mankurt.
AI articles with fake Sarah Kendziors are all over the internet. In the past month alone, I was fake-quoted about Jeffrey Epstein in an AI publication purporting to be a Haitian newspaper; about Trump being crazy in Dean Blundell’s AI slopstack; and most distressingly, about how Americans should leave the country in an AI-generated rag called Canada Resists. I found out that Trump was in Scotland from an AI article in which Fake Me was asked for comment.
I neversaid these quotes, nor would I tell people to leave the US. One reason I keep this newsletter unpaywalled is because my views on topics like that are clearly stated and can be used to debunk my AI doppelgangers. My own words are my best weapons — so long as people recognize they are mine.
An irony of my AI ubiquity is that I am sometimes banned from what’s left of mainstream media, thanks to my books about the mafia, the government, and Jeffrey Epstein. But AI doesn’t know. AI cannot tell fact from fiction or the popular from the pariah — or what to do with someone who is both.
I am used to people making up quotes from me and repeating them. It happens out of malice or to distract from what I actually said. For example, when I brought up Nancy Pelosi’s corrupt finances and disturbing proclamations of loyalty to Israel over the US, a brigade of bots appeared to falsely claim that I called her a “Russian agent”, when I stated point blank that she is not. The goal was to make me seem unreliable and discredit my accurate claims.
This fake “Russian agent” quote was repeated on social media thousands of times over six years — even though it could be debunked in seconds. I could not understand why it persisted until people told me chatbots were saying it in 2025. Social media repetition was necessary to make the false claim land.
By contrast, my new fake quotes are slop. They are trite statements that often appear in a list of quotes from other writers — with no source links for any of us. I have yet to discern the point, except to destroy the notion of reporting itself. I suspect that the other quotes are also fabricated, since I am not the only person with an AI doppelganger making the fake news rounds.
I had a nightmare recently that I was not admitted into a building because I am not “AI compliant.” I trust dreams more than reality these days, and I fear this is the American future: social credit scores, digital currency, mandatory tech. I refuse. I am AI disobedient, and I will stay that way.
But I will admit to a pang in my all too human heart. A longing for bygone days when nightmares ended when we woke up — instead of just beginning.
* * *
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Thank you for reading! I would never paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family of four, so I appreciate your support!
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Members of the House of Representatives are back in their districts for August, and on Monday, Republican Mike Flood of Nebraska held a town hall in Lincoln. A woman asked what she called a fiscal question. She said: “With 450 million FEMA dollars being reallocated to open Alligator Alcatraz, and 600 million taxpayer FEMA dollars being used to now open more concentration camps, and ICE burning through $8.4 million a day to illegally detain people—How much does it cost for fascism? How much do the taxpayers have to pay for a fascist country?” The crowd cheered wildly. Nicholas Wu, Cassandra Dumay, and Mia McCarthy of Politico reported today that by the end of Flood’s town hall, “chants of ‘Vote him out!’ threatened to drown out his closing comments.”
The Politico reporters also said that Republicans maintain they aren’t worried about their angry constituents and dismiss the town hall pushback as astroturfed and not reflective of real voter sentiment.
Maybe. But with the political tide running strong against the administration, that position sounds like posturing.
Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the same day that numbers from that bureau showed a dramatic slowdown in the economy seems to have awakened businesspeople who were willing to back Trump to the reality that he’s pulling down the economy. Today Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook expressed concern about the jobs numbers, suggesting that the big revisions in them “are somewhat typical of turning points” in the economy.
At the same time, the administration’s immigration policies are deeply unpopular and unlikely to improve as Americans learn more about them. Today a report by Hatzel Vela of NBC South Florida went national as a former corrections officer for a private contractor who worked at the detention center in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by supporters, said the detainees “have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days…. The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them.”
Florida is running the Everglades detention facility in expectation of reimbursement by the federal government. Immigration advocate Aaron Reichlin-Melnick pointed out that, unlike the federal government, the state of Florida “can be sued for civil rights violations and punished with monetary damages.”
Also today, the GEO Group, a private prison and services provider, reported a better than expected second quarter today, thanks in part to two ICE contracts that, together, it expects will produce $145 million annually. The company announced a $300 million stock buyback, a process that increases the value of the stock held by remaining shareholders.
The Department of Homeland Security continues to echo the language of Nazis, posting today, “Serve your country! Defend your culture.” It does not appear that people are rushing to sign up. The administration has worked hard to recruit new agents, offering a signing bonus of up to $50,000 and help repaying student loans. Today, it eased requirements for new recruits, removing age limits and posting “no undergraduate degree required!” David Dayen of The American Prospect noted today that probationary employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have been ordered to report to ICE within seven days or lose their jobs.
As concerns grow about the economy and immigration policy, which were Trump’s strongest suits, Trump’s open attempt to steal the 2026 election by a rare mid-decade redistricting in Texas to carve out five more Republican seats in Congress has given Democrats a platform to call attention to MAGA’s attempt to stay in power regardless of the will of the voters. And they have seized the opportunity, calling the Republicans out in interviews and on social media.
At least fifty Democrats have left the state to deny the Republicans a quorum—the minimum number of people necessary to hold a vote—that would let them jam through a new voting map. Yesterday Texas governor Greg Abbott asked the Texas Supreme Court to let him expel the leader of the House Democrats, Representative Gene Wu, from the legislature, saying Wu had abandoned his office. According to Eleanor Klibanoff of the Texas Tribune, legal experts disagree. She quotes Charles Rhodes, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Missouri law school. “I am aware of absolutely no authority that says breaking quorum is the same as the intent to abandon a seat,” he said. “That would require the courts extending the premise to the breaking point. It’s inconsistent with the very text of the Texas Constitution.”
Yesterday Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas asked the FBI to find and arrest the Democratic legislators—a wild overreach of federal power—and Trump told reporters the FBI might have to get involved.
David Petesch of Shaw Local, a paper in Illinois, reported that a bomb threat early this morning at the hotel where the Texas lawmakers are staying in Illinois forced them to evacuate. After the threat was cleared, the Democrats said: “We are safe, we are secure, and we are undeterred. “We are grateful for [Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker], local, and state law enforcement for their quick action to ensure our safety.” On social media, one lawmaker blamed Texas Republicans for the threat. “This is what happens when Republican state leaders publicly call for us to be ‘hunted down,’” Representative John Bucy III said. He added: “Texas Democrats won’t be intimidated.”
Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo reported today that the administration is now turning to a plan to redistrict Indiana, sending Vice President J.D. Vance to meet with Republican lawmakers there. But, as Lafond notes, Republicans already hold seven of the state’s nine congressional seats. Indiana state representative Matt Pierce, a Democrat, told the Indy Star that the attention to redistricting Indiana shows that the White House is worried about 2026.
Those concerns are unlikely to be relieved by the news today that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is cancelling at least $500 million worth of awards and contracts to develop mRNA vaccines. These vaccines include those that addressed covid and were being explored for protection against HIV transmission and cancer.
And then there are the Epstein files, Trump’s appearance in them, and the administration’s attempts to change the subject.
Yesterday Democrats on the House Oversight Committee used a legislative maneuver to force its chair, James Comer (R-KY), to issue subpoenas for the Department of Justice records on the Epstein investigation, along with subpoenas for former government officials connected to the case. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) posted that the DOJ now has two weeks to release the files to the committee. She wrote: “It’s time to find out who’s been protected, who thought they were above the law, and who’s been hiding behind power.”
On Tuesday, Trump defended the fact that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former lawyer, had met with a lawyer representing Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker who obtained victims for Jeffrey Epstein, as well as with Maxwell herself. “[W]hatever he asks would be totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters. “And I think he probably wants to make sure that, you know, people that should not be involved or aren’t involved are not hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”
Meanwhile, outlets reported today that top administration officials, including Vance, Blanche, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel, were scheduled to meet at the vice president’s residence Wednesday to coordinate the administration’s Epstein strategy. Notably, they appear to be meeting without President Trump.
The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, issued a statement saying: “We understand that Vice President J.D. Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials. Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all. We also call upon the House subcommittee to invite survivors to testify.”
After news of the meeting leaked, a source told Nandita Bose of Reuters that the meeting had been canceled.
Today, reporters noticed that the online United States Constitution, maintained by the Library of Congress, was missing parts of Article I, the part of the Constitution that lays out the rights and duties of Congress. Parts of Section 8 and all of Sections 9 and 10 were gone.
Those include Congress’s control over the District of Columbia, Congress’s power to make the laws, the promise that habeas corpus would not be suspended, the stipulation that no money can be used by the government unless Congress has appropriated it, the requirement that no president can accept gifts from foreign countries, and the specification that only Congress can levy tariffs.
Officials said the deletions were “due to a coding error,” and by the end of today the missing sections were restored.
