Dear Commons Community,

Democratic Party leaders have expressed concern over a significant decline in voter registrations, as a New York Times report revealed that Democrats have lost ground in all 30 states since the 2020 elections. Republicans have reportedly gained over 4 million voters in the same period of time. Strategists warned that the party has struggled to connect with working-class communities and risks further alienation if it does not address the concerns.

Republican strategist Susan Del Percio said, “The drop in voter registration for Democrats matches what we see in the polls. People are unsatisfied with what the Democrats are offering.”

Percio added, “It shows how Democrats took things for granted and got outhustled by Republicans, and I don’t say that with glee or anything else. But the numbers are there, and this is proof in the pudding.”

Get your act together Democrats!

Tony

Geoffrey Hinton delivers his Nobel Prize lecture in 2024.  Pontus Lundahl—TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Images

Dear Commons Community,

Pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, whose work earned him a Nobel Prize and the moniker “godfather of AI,” said artificial intelligence will spark a surge in unemployment and profits.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the former Google scientist cleared the air about why he left the tech giant, raised alarms on potential threats from AI, and revealed how he uses the technology. But he also predicted who the winners and losers will be.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” Hinton said. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

That echos comments he gave to Fortune last month, when he said AI companies are more concerned with short-term profits than the long-term consequences of the technology.

For now, layoffs haven’t spiked, but evidence is mounting that AI is shrinking opportunities, especially at the entry level where recent college graduates start their careers.

A survey from the New York Fed found that companies using AI are much more likely to retrain their employees than fire them, though layoffs are expected to rise in the coming months.

Hinton said earlier that healthcare is the one industry that will be safe from the potential jobs armageddon.

“If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,” he explained on the Diary of a CEO YouTube series in June. “There’s almost no limit to how much health care people can absorb—[patients] always want more health care if there’s no cost to it.”

Still, Hinton believes that jobs that perform mundane tasks will be taken over by AI, while sparing some jobs that require a high level of skill.

In his interview with the FT, he also dismissed OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s idea to pay a universal basic income as AI disrupts the economy and reduce demand for workers, saying it “won’t deal with human dignity” and the value people derive from having jobs.

Hinton has long warned about the dangers of AI without guardrails, estimating a 10% to 20% chance of the technology wiping out humans after the development of superintelligence.

In his view, the dangers of AI fall into two categories: the risk the technology itself poses to the future of humanity, and the consequences of AI being manipulated by people with bad intent.

In his FT interview, he warned AI could help someone build a bioweapon and lamented the Trump administration’s unwillingness to regulate AI more closely, while China is taking the threat more seriously. But he also acknowledged potential upside from AI amid its immense possibilities and uncertainties.

“We don’t know what is going to happen, we have no idea, and people who tell you what is going to happen are just being silly,” Hinton said. “We are at a point in history where something amazing is happening, and it may be amazingly good, and it may be amazingly bad. We can make guesses, but things aren’t going to stay like they are.”

Meanwhile, he told the FT how he uses AI in his own life, saying OpenAI’s ChatGPT is his product of choice. He uses it mostly for research.

Hinton knows of what he speaks!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fearing pressure from the Trump administration, the College Board, the non-profit administrator of the SAT college admissions exam, has said it is discontinuing a tool aimed at helping to identify promising college applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds and neighborhoods.  As reported by Reuters.

The Trump administration has been pressuring universities and colleges to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion policies and has threatened to cut their federal funding if they don’t comply.

The Trump administration says such practices disregard merit and their focus on marginalized groups such as ethnic minorities, women and the LGBT community puts white people and men at a disadvantage. Civil rights advocates say DEI helps to address historic and generational inequality.

“As federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions, we are making a change to ensure our work continues to effectively serve students and institutions,” the nonprofit company said in a statement.

It has discontinued Landscape, a tool used by college admissions officers to review applicant data related to neighborhoods and schools, among other parameters.

A Brookings Institute study in 2022 found that Landscape marginally increased admissions offers for students from disadvantaged areas but it did not cause a rise in the actual enrollment of such students.

The administrator of the SAT college admissions exam said Landscape “was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memo in July warning federal fund recipients to use universally applicable criteria, such as academic merit or financial hardship, applied without regard to protected characteristics or demographic goals.

Trump has threatened funding cuts for institutions over pro-Palestinian student protests against U.S. ally Israel’s war in Gaza, and over climate initiatives, transgender policies and DEI.

Tony

Hagi Abucar places flowers for his former coworker Lindsey Herkness on the south reflecting pool during the 9/11 Memorial ceremony on the 23rd anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Sept. 11, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura, File)

Dear Commons Community,

Trump’s administration said Friday that it is exploring whether the federal government can take control of the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York City.

The site in lower Manhattan, where the World Trade Center’s twin towers were destroyed by hijacked jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001, features two memorial pools ringed by waterfalls and parapets with the names of the dead, and an underground museum. Since opening to the public in 2014, the memorial plaza and museum have been run by a public charity, now chaired by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a frequent Trump critic.

The White House confirmed the administration has had “preliminary exploratory discussions” about the idea, but declined to elaborate. The office noted the Republican pledged during his campaign last year to make the site a national monument, protected and maintained by the federal government.

But officials at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum say the federal government, under current laws, can’t unilaterally take over the site, which is located on land owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The U.S. government shouldering costs and management of the site also “makes no sense,” given Trump’s efforts to dramatically pare back the federal bureaucracy, said Beth Hillman, the organization’s president and CEO.

“We’re proud that our exhibitions tell stories of bravery and patriotism and are confident that our current operating model has served the public honorably and effectively,” she said, noting the organization has raised $750 million in private funds and welcomed some 90 million visitors since its opening.

Last year, the museum generated more than $93 million in revenue and spent roughly $84 million on operating costs, leaving a nearly $9 million surplus when depreciation is factored in, according to museum officials and its most recently available tax filings.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, voiced her own concerns about a federal takeover, citing the Trump administration’s recent efforts to influence how American history is told through its national monuments and museums, including the Smithsonian.

The takeover idea also comes just months after the Trump administration cut, but then restored, staffing at a federal program that provides health benefits to people with illnesses that might be linked to toxic dust from the destroyed World Trade Center.

“The 9/11 Memorial belongs to New Yorkers — the families, survivors, and first responders who have carried this legacy for more than two decades and ensured we never forget,” Hochul said in a statement. “Before he meddles with this sacred site, the President should start by honoring survivors and supporting the families of victims.”

Anthoula Katsimatides, a museum board member who lost her brother, John, in the attack, said she didn’t see any reason to change ownership.

“They do an incredible job telling the story of that day without sugarcoating it,” she said. “It’s being run so well, I don’t see why there has to be a change. I don’t see what benefit there would be.”

Trump spokespersons declined to respond to the comments.

In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed when the hijackers crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in southwest Pennsylvania during the Sept. 11 attacks. More than 2,700 of those victims perished in the fiery collapse of the trade center’s twin towers.

The last thing that New Yorkers would want is Trump having any involvement with the 9/11 memorial. It is sacred ground.  He has no understanding of the word “sacred”!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Even Fox Business is having a hard time putting a positive spin on the latest jobs report.

A Fox panel on “Mornings With Maria” unpacked August’s jobs report Friday morning in real time, and when they learned that U.S. employers added just 22,000 jobs last month — compared to the expectation of around 76,000 — the show took on a somber tone. The report also shows the unemployment rate has ticked up to 4.3%.

“So that would be higher than July’s 4.2%,” Lauren Simonetti said, who was reading the report just seconds after it was released. That rate, CNN reports, is the highest level since 2021, which was in the midst of the pandemic.

The report also included revised figures that showed that June’s job total was in the negative, and that the economy actually lost 13,000 jobs that month.

“That 22,000 number … it’s a weaker than expected number,” fill-in anchor Cheryl Casone admitted. “And these revisions are pretty brutal.”

“Yeah, extraordinarily,” Charles Payne agreed.

As the panel went on to discuss other aspects of the report, words and phrases like “surprising,” “disappointing” and “there’s a lot of concern” were used to describe the figures.

The report comes just a month after an enraged Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over a bad jobs report by claiming, without any evidence, that she was goosing the numbers to make him look worse than his predecessor, former President Joe Biden. The president then nominated a loyalist to replace her.

Yet August’s job report appears to be even worse. It seems that even Trump was aware of how ugly the numbers looked and, as per usual, decided to deflect.

“The real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is, but will be in a year from now,’’ Trump told reporters Thursday night at a dinner with wealthy tech executives, The Associated Press reported.

Daniel Zhao, chief economist at Glassdoor, told CNBC that the outlook is rough.

“The job market is stalling short of the runway,” he said. “The labor market is losing lift, and August’s report, along with downward revisions, suggests we’re heading into turbulence without the soft landing achieved.”

Recession anyone?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, his latest effort to project an image of toughness for America’s military.  As reported by the Associated Press.

The Republican president can’t formally change the name without legislation, which his administration would request from Congress. In the meantime, Trump will authorize the Pentagon to use “secondary titles” so the department can go by its original name.

The plans were disclosed by a White House official, who requested anonymity ahead of the public announcement, and detailed in a White House fact sheet.

The Department of War was created in 1789, the same year that the U.S. Constitution took effect. It was renamed by law in 1947, two years after the end of World War II.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth posted “DEPARTMENT OF WAR” on social media after the executive order was initially reported by Fox News.

Trump and Hegseth have long talked about changing the name, and Hegseth even created a social media poll on the topic in March.

Since then, he has hinted that his title as defense secretary may not be permanent at multiple public events, including a speech at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Thursday. He told an auditorium full of soldiers that it “may be a slightly different title tomorrow.”

In August, Trump told reporters that “everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”

When confronted with the possibility that making the name change would require an act of Congress, Trump told reporters that “we’re just going to do it.”

“I’m sure Congress will go along if we need that,” he added.

The move is just the latest in a long line of cultural changes Hegseth has made to the Pentagon since taking office at the beginning of the year.

Early in his tenure, Hegseth pushed hard to eliminate what he saw as the impacts of “woke culture” on the military by not only ridding the department of diversity programs but scrubbing libraries and websites of material deemed to be divisive.

The result was the removal and review of hundreds of books in the military academies, which ended up including titles on the Holocaust and a Maya Angelou memoir. It also resulted in the removal off thousands of websites honoring contributions by women and minority groups.

“I think the president and the secretary have been very clear on this — that anybody that says in the Department of Defense that diversity is our strength is, is frankly, incorrect,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters in March.

Hegseth has also presided over the removal of all transgender troops from the military following an executive order from Trump through a process that some have described as “dehumanizing” or “open cruelty.”

Trump has been begging anyone who would listen to be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize.  What a hypocrite!

Tony

Max-0-matic.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has just reported that a 2019 clandestine Navy SEALS operation approved by Trump failed leaving a number of North Korean civilians dead.  As reported. 

A group of Navy SEALs emerged from the ink-black ocean on a winter night in early 2019 and crept to a rocky shore in North Korea. They were on a top secret mission so complex and consequential that everything had to go exactly right.

The objective was to plant an electronic device that would let the United States intercept the communications of North Korea’s reclusive leader, Kim Jong-un, amid high-level nuclear talks with President Trump.

The mission had the potential to provide the United States with a stream of valuable intelligence. But it meant putting American commandos on North Korean soil — a move that, if detected, not only could sink negotiations but also could lead to a hostage crisis or an escalating conflict with a nuclear-armed foe.

It was so risky that it required the president’s direct approval.

For the operation, the military chose SEAL Team 6’s Red Squadron — the same unit that killed Osama bin Laden. The SEALs rehearsed for months, aware that every move needed to be perfect. But when they reached what they thought was a deserted shore that night, wearing black wet suits and night-vision goggles, the mission swiftly unraveled.

A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone of the civilians on the North Korean boat were dead.

The SEALs retreated into the sea without planting the listening device.

The 2019 operation has never been publicly acknowledged, or even hinted at, by the United States or North Korea. The details remain classified and are being reported here for the first time. The Trump administration did not notify key members of Congress who oversee intelligence operations, before or after the mission. The lack of notification may have violated the law.

The White House declined to comment. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A federal judge on Wednesday gave Harvard University a victory in its fight against the Trump administration, siding with the Ivy League school in its effort to restore more than $2 billion in federal funding for research frozen by the White House.

The decision from US District Judge Allison Burroughs rejects the administration’s argument that it was targeting the university due to antisemitism on the school’s campus.  As reported by CNN.

“A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” wrote Burroughs, an appointee of former President Barack Obama.

“Their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes,” Burroughs added.

The decision is a major victory for Harvard, the only university targeted by the Trump administration to take on the White House directly in court. The administration has argued it is cracking down on antisemitism on campus, but Harvard has become the epicenter of a broader fight over academic freedom, federal spending and campus oversight.

While Wednesday’s ruling is a major win for the school, the Trump administration is almost certain to escalate its fight against the elite academic institution, prompting longer-term questions about the school’s financial future. Already, the White House said it plans to appeal.

“This activist Obama-appointed judge was always going to rule in Harvard’s favor, regardless of the facts,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told CNN on Wednesday. “To any fair-minded observer, it is clear that Harvard University failed to protect their students from harassment and allowed discrimination to plague their campus for years.”

In a statement to the Harvard community on Wednesday evening, Harvard President Alan Garber said the ruling “validates our arguments in defense of the University’s academic freedom, critical scientific research, and the core principles of American higher education,” but acknowledged some uncertainty ahead.

“Even as we acknowledge the important principles affirmed in today’s ruling, we will continue to assess the implications of the opinion, monitor further legal developments, and be mindful of the changing landscape in which we seek to fulfill our mission,” Garber said.

Burroughs pointed to some of the research projects impacted by the administration’s cuts, including efforts to create a predictive model to help emergency room physicians at the Department of Veterans Affairs determine whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized, research on Lou Gehrig’s Disease, the development of a chip to measure NASA astronauts’ radiation exposure on an upcoming excursion to the moon and support for a government program on emerging biological threats.

“There is no obvious link between the affected projects and antisemitism,” the judge said.

When the funding was frozen, Burroughs added, there was no investigation into whether any particular research labs, she said, “were engaging in antisemitic behavior, were employing Jews, were run by Jewish scientists, or were investigating issues or diseases particularly pertinent to Jews, … meaning the funding freezes could and likely will harm the very people Defendants professed to be protecting.”

She also took aim at numerous Trump social media posts. His concerns about Harvard, she said, “were untethered from antisemitism,” quoting many of them directly.

In her ruling, Burroughs wiped away a “Freeze Order” the administration issued in April that would have held up more than $2 billion multi-year grants to the university and barred the government from withholding any additional federal funds “to Harvard in retaliation for the exercise of its First Amendment rights, or on any purported grounds of discrimination without compliance with the terms of Title VI.”

Burroughs made clear in her opinion that she viewed combating antisemitism as an important goal. Harvard, she wrote, “was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did.”

“The record here, however, does not reflect that fighting antisemitism was defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard and, even if it were, combatting antisemitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment,” she wrote.

An important judicial battle won but the war is not over!

Tony

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Library of Congress; Getty.

Dear Commons Community,

Robert Ubell had an opinion essay published earlier this week in Inside Higher ED entitled, “Trump Hijacks American Science and Scholarship”.  His message is that Trump’s recent executive order giving political appointees authority over grant approvals amounts to a Communist-style takeover.  Below is his entire essay.  Well worth a read!

Tony

————————————————

Inside Higher Ed

“Trump Hijacks American Science and Scholarship”

by Robert Ubell

September 4, 2025

In a nearly daily barrage, President Trump and his MAGA forces heave fireballs at science and higher education. In the last weeks alone, the administration has been busy hurling a demand for a billion dollars from the University of California, Los Angeles; axing proven mRNA vaccine research; and demanding colleges submit expanded sex and race data from student applications, among other startling detonations. Amid the onslaught of these unsettling developments, it would be easy to miss the decisive change in conventional scientific and scholarly practice, one so vast that it threatens to overturn our revered American research achievements.

On Aug. 7, Trump issued an executive order that uproots more than a half century of peer review, the standard practice for funding federal scientific grants. Taking approval out of the hands of experts, the new rule makes grant approval contingent upon the assent of political puppets who will approve only those awards the president finds acceptable.

When I first came upon the order, I was immediately struck by how closely it resembles the unquestioned authority granted to senior political appointees in Soviet Russia and Communist China. As if dictated by commissars, the new rule requires officials to fund only those proposals that advance presidential priorities. Cast aside, peer review is now merely advisory.

It took my breath away, suddenly realizing how completely threatening the new order is to the very foundations of the democratic practice of research and scholarship. As Victor Ambros, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of microRNA, aptly put it, the order constitutes a “a shameless, full-bore Soviet-style politicization of American science that will smother what until now has been the world’s pre-eminent scientific enterprise.”

Decades ago, long before I entered higher ed, I worked at a small publishing company in New York that translated Russian scientific and technical books and journals into English. As head of translations, I’d travel once or twice a year over many years to Moscow and Leningrad (now, once again, St. Petersburg) to negotiate with Soviet publishers to obtain rights to our English translations.

One evening in the late ’60s, I invited a distinguished physicist to join me for dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant not far from my hotel in Moscow. We talked for some time openly over a bottle of vodka about new trends in physics, among other themes. As dinner drew to a close, he let his guard down and whispered a confidence. Mournfully, he told me he’d just received an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a scientific conference in England, but the Party official at his institution wouldn’t permit him to travel. I still remember the sense of being privy to a deep and troubling secret, reflected in the silence that followed and the palpable unease at the table. Shame enveloped him..,

Over a couple of dozen years of frequent trips to the Soviet Union and Communist China, I never met a single Party official. My day-to-day interactions were with administrators, editors, researchers and faculty who managed scientific publishing or were involved in teaching, research or other routine matters. The Party secretary remained hidden behind a curtain of power as in The Wizard of Oz.

On one rare occasion in the 2010s, at a graduation ceremony at a local technical university in Beijing where I ran a couple of online master’s degrees in partnership with Stevens Institute of Technology, a student seated next to me in the audience drew near and identified a well-dressed official several rows ahead of us up front. “The Party secretary,” he revealed in hushed tones. I saw the officer later at the reception, standing by himself with a dour expression, as faculty, students and family members bustled about at a distance.

One afternoon at that university in Beijing, I came upon a huddle of faculty in a corner office. As they chatted quietly among themselves in Mandarin, I took a seat at the far end of the room to give them privacy. But I could make out that a man in the group was disturbed, his face flushed and his eyes close to tears. Later, I approached one of the faculty members in the group with whom I’d grown close and asked what had troubled his colleague.

“Oh,” he replied. “He often gets upset when the Party secretary objects to something we’re doing. He worries that our joint program is in jeopardy.”

These personal reflections, based on my limited encounters with scientists and faculty, do not reveal the full extent of the control over scientific research exerted by Party functionaries. But if you compare the president’s new order with that of the Party’s authority in Soviet Russia and Communist China, you’ll find they’re all out of the same playbook.

The order’s demand for political appointee approval takes decisions out of the hands of apolitical, merit-based peer-review panels. In the Soviet Union and China, adherence to the Party line and loyalty to the regime was (or is) paramount, with grant funds being used to advance ideological or state power. Similarly, the president’s order establishes a party line, stating that federal money cannot be used to support racial preferences, “denial … of the sex binary in humans,” illegal immigration or initiatives deemed “anti-American.”

Relegating peer review is no small matter. It is at the center of modern science, distributing responsibility for evaluating scholarly work among experts, rather than holding this responsibility in the fist of authority. Even though peer review is under criticism today for its anonymity and potential biases, among other perplexing features, when researchers referee proposals, they nevertheless participate in a stirring example of collaborative democracy, maintaining the quality and integrity of scholarship—characteristics anathema to far-right ideologues.

Of all the blasts shattering American science and higher education since the president assumed office in January, this executive order may be the most devastating. It is not one of Trump’s random shots at research and scholarship, but an assault on democracy itself.

Robert Ubell is vice dean emeritus of online learning at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. A collection of his essays on virtual education, Staying Online: How to Navigate Digital Higher Education, was published by Routledge.

Dear Commons Community,

Calling for the Trump administration to release the Epstein files in their entirety, victims of convicted sexual offender Jeffrey Epstein spoke publicly — and defiantly — outside the U.S. Capitol yesterday.  As reported by the Huffington Post.

“I am no longer weak, I am no longer powerless, and I am no longer alone. And with your vote, neither will the next generation be,” Anouska De Georgiou, a woman who said she was abused by Epstein on his island in the Caribbean and elsewhere for years, said at a press conference.

“President Trump, you have so much influence and power in this situation. Please use that influence and power to help us,” De Georgiou said.

Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) staged the press conference as they push to force the House to vote on a bill that would require the Justice Department to make the Epstein files public.

While the press conference was happening, Trump repeated his claim that the entire Epstein story is a “Democrat hoax” designed to hurt him politically.

Khanna and Massie were flanked not only by Epstein’s victims but by one of the largest crowds of media, activists and onlookers seen in years for a press conference on the east side of the Capitol ― a scene that suggests Trump’s efforts to bury the story won’t succeed. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), a major Trump ally, also joined the press conference.

“This is not a hoax,” Massie said. “This is real. There are real survivors. There are real victims in this criminal enterprise, and the perpetrators are being protected because they’re rich and powerful and political donors to the establishment here in Washington, D.C.”

Massie and Khanna are pushing for a vote on their bill using a “discharge petition,” which allows any House member to bring a bill to the floor for a vote ― even against the wishes of the speaker — if they can get 218 signatures from House lawmakers first. So far, Massie’s got only four of the six Republican signatures he needs, and the White House is lobbying hard against motion.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has said the petition is irrelevant because the Justice Department is already complying with a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee. Late Tuesday, the committee announced it had made thousands of Epstein documents publicly available, though it posted them in an unwieldy Google Drive folder and most of the material had already been made public.

“I appreciate the efforts of my colleagues on Oversight today,” Massie said Wednesday. “They may find something, but they’re allowing the DOJ to curate all of the information that the DOJ is giving them. If you’ve looked at the pages they’ve released so far, they’re heavily redacted. Some pages are entirely redacted, and 97% of this is already in the public domain.”

Khanna emphasized that the release of the Epstein files isn’t about one political party or movement.

“We’re united in restoring trust in government,” he said. “We’re here not as partisans but as patriots, Democrats, progressives and, yes, MAGA supporters, to demand justice.”

Releasing the material in a searchable format, as Massie and Khanna’s legislation would require, would allow internet users to enter the words “Donald Trump” and see if the president’s name is mentioned, for example. Trump and Epstein were friends for years before a mysterious falling out that preceded Epstein’s first arrest related to soliciting underage prostitutes. Trump’s name reportedly comes up repeatedly in the Justice Department’s material.

The Epstein victims who spoke Wednesday repeatedly rejected Trump’s “hoax” claim.

Haley Robson asked Trump to “meet me in person to see that this isn’t a hoax.”

Being painted as a liar, Robson said, was crushing.

“It feels like you want to explode inside because nobody, again, is understanding that this is a real situation. These women are real,” she continued. “To say this is a hoax — please humanize us. I would like Donald J. Trump and every person around the world to humanize us. There is no hoax. The abuse is real.”

Fellow abuse survivor Chauntae Davies, who said she was flown to Epstein’s private island as well as to Africa with “Bill Clinton and other notable figures,” said she felt for years that, if she spoke out, no one would believe her. Epstein and his friends were too powerful, Davies said.

“The truth is, Epstein had a free pass,” Davies said, noting that Epstein often bragged about his relationships with the rich and powerful. “He bragged about our current President Donald Trump. It was his biggest brag actually.”

Former model Lisa Phillips, who said she was taken to Epstein’s island in 2000 while on a photoshoot at another island nearby, said that what she saw there was a “glimpse into a very dark and disgusting world.”

While U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has said there is no Epstein “client list,” Phillips said she and other Epstein abuse survivors have been discussing the creation of their own list.

“Many around him knew, many participated and many profited, and yet he was protected,” Phillips said of Epstein. “So I stand here today for every woman who has been silenced or dismissed, we are not asking for pity, we are here demanding accountability, and I am demanding justice. Congress must choose, will you continue to protect predators or will you finally protect survivors?”

The majority of what the Justice Department gave the House Oversight Committee appears to be already public. The records mostly appear to be court documents that emerged when Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell was on trial after Epstein’s death. Some of the records include redacted video footage of abuse victims relaying what happened to them when they worked as masseuses for Epstein.

Epstein died by suicide while in prison in New York in 2019. He was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. After he died, some of the women who said they were abused by Epstein appeared in court the next day and described how Epstein’s suicide felt like “new trauma all over again,” and said their hope to see justice done was dashed.

Some of those same survivors speaking outside of the Capitol Wednesday echoed that outrage and channeled it anew at Maxwell ― and at the Trump administration for apparently offering Maxwell special treatment.

In July, while actively seeking a pardon from Trump for her 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges, Maxwell met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for a two-day private interview. Transcripts of that interview were released in August.

During her time with Blanche, Maxwell — who had received limited immunity for the meeting — was effusive in her praise for Trump and told the president’s former personal lawyer that she never witnessed Trump “in any inappropriate setting in any way” or with “anybody.” Specifically, Maxwell told Blanche she never saw Trump receive any massages nor, she said, did Epstein recruit masseuses from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. That last claim directly conflicted with what Trump has said about why he cut off his relationship with Epstein.

After the meeting, Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a facility in Texas with some of the lowest security restrictions in the country, prompting outrage by lawmakers and former Bureau of Prison officials alike who questioned why someone convicted of preying and exploiting underage girls and young women would receive such cushy treatment.

Teresa Helm, who said she was groomed by Maxwell to be abused by Epstein, said when she listened to audio of Maxwell’s interview with Blanche, it disgusted her.

The same “polite coercive voice” Maxwell used when she recruited her and wanted to “send me off to a monster,” was the same she used in the interview with Blanche, Helm said.

“Nothing can be believed from what she’s said. She’s been charged with perjury. I sat there and listened to this woman’s voice lie, and there was no pushback from Todd Blanche because, does he even have the facts to be able to push back on her?” Helm said. “We could push back. Why couldn’t we attend that? Why weren’t we there that day? Why wasn’t one of us consulted prior to that meeting? I’m very angry. The feelings that come up listening to this woman’s voice. Yes, it’s triggering. We all worked very hard on healing, and it still gets to us.”

Annie Farmer, who was abused by Epstein and made some of the earliest police reports about his conduct, called Maxwell “a major architect” of Epstein’s trafficking and abuse.

“And the fact that she paints herself as a victim is disgusting. We weren’t told about her prison transfer, we were told about it on the news,” Farmer said.

De Georgiou said she only got a notification from the Justice Department about Maxwell’s prison transfer after it had already happened.

“This woman abused children,” De Georgiou said. “I was abused by Epstein and Maxwell for over 10 years, and she was present for some of my abuse. She was present, complicit and enabling. It’s one of my worst nightmares that she not only be transferred but the possibility that is very much going around that she might be pardoned. This is not OK.”

Tony