Managing Trump (Tariffs & ALMOST everything else: General & Canada): 1)The Latest: Huge cache of Epstein documents includes his emails with wealthy and powerful; 2)Trump’s racist post about Obamas is deleted after backlash despite White House earlier defending it
1)The Latest: Huge cache of Epstein documents includes his emails with wealthy and powerful
Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press
By Canadian Press, January 31, 2026
A huge new tranche of files on millionaire financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has revealed details of his communications with the wealthy and powerful, some not long before he died by suicide in 2019.
The U.S. Justice Department said it was disclosing more than 3 million pages of documents, as well as thousands of videos and photos, as required by a law passed by Congress. By Friday evening, more than 600,000 documents had been published online. Millions of files that prosecutors had identified as potentially subject to release under the law remain under wraps, however, and House Democrats called on Attorney General Pam Bondi to share unredacted versions with Congress.
Britain’s prime minister suggests again Mountbatten-Windsor should tell Congress what he knows on Epstein
The disclosures have revived questions about whether Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, should cooperate with U.S. authorities investigating Epstein and his links to powerful individuals around the world.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Saturday suggested Mountbatten-Windsor should tell American investigators whatever he knows about Epstein’s activities.
“In terms of testifying, I’ve always said anybody who’s got information should be prepared to share that information in whatever form they’re asked to do that, because you can’t be victim-centered if you’re not prepared to do that,” Starmer said as he arrived in Japan to meet with the country’s leaders.
The former prince has so far ignored a request from members of the House Oversight Committee for a “transcribed interview” about his “long-standing friendship” with Epstein.
Slovakia’s national security adviser resigns after Epstein links resurface
Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister, said Saturday that he had accepted the resignation of his national security adviser, Miroslav Lajcak.
Lajcak’s resignation comes a day after Lajcak’s past communications with Jeffrey Epstein appeared in newly released U.S. documents.
Lajcak, a former Slovak foreign minister and a onetime president of the U.N. General Assembly, denied any wrongdoing. He said his contacts were part of his diplomatic duties and occurred before U.S. authorities opened their investigation into Epstein.
Pressure mounted for his ouster from opposition parties and a nationalist partner in Fico’s governing coalition.
Epstein shared Sandusky thoughts to ex-prosecutor on his own case
Epstein was emailing with Matthew I. Menchel, a former federal prosecutor who was involved in a deal that allowed Epstein to avoid federal prosecution in 2007 in exchange for a guilty plea to a state charge.
Menchel replied but didn’t discuss Sandusky. A message seeking comment was left for him.
Epstein told Menchel that he saw nothing in trial transcripts “that proved that Sandusky was innocent” and nothing “that proved to me, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Sandusky is guilty either.”
Epstein thought Jerry Sandusky might be innocent
After his own legal trouble involving a minor, Epstein weighed in on ex-Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky’s conviction, writing in a December 2012 email “I also entertain the possibility that Sandusky is innocent.”
Sandusky was convicted of 45 counts of sexual abuse involving at least 10 victims over two decades. He is serving 30 to 60 years in prison. Like Epstein, he was accused of preying on children from broken homes and downtrodden lives and enticing them with gifts and, in Sandusky’s case, access to the revered Penn State football program, before sexually abusing them.
Epstein said he was disturbed by the “speed and conviction at which Sandusky was tried and found guilty by the media and public” before trial, saying it reminded him of “the community hysteria surrounding the Salem witchcraft trials. Scary.”
New details shock former correspondent who covered royals
Jennie Bond, who reported on the royal family for the BBC, said it would be highly unusual for a royal to meet with someone they knew so little about.
“I mean, what was he thinking?” Bond told the BBC. “What was he thinking when Epstein offered him a 26-year-old Russian very beautiful lady to have dinner with? I mean, was there no red light saying, ’Oh my goodness, you know, is this a security risk? Could she be a spy? Should I do this?’ Nah. He says, ‘That would be absolutely lovely.’’’
A dinner date between ‘The Duke’ and a Russian woman
The emails released on Friday include an August 2010 exchange between Epstein and an account labeled “The Duke” that occurred soon after the financier was released from home detention following his earlier conviction. Before he was barred from using the title, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was the Duke of York.
“I have a friend who I think you might enjoy having dinner with,” Epstein writes.
“The Duke” replies: “Of course. I am in Geneva until the morning of 22nd but would be delighted to see her. Will she be bringing a message from you? Please give her my contact details to get in touch.”
The email is signed “A.”
In response to a redacted email, “The Duke” then writes, “Great. Any other information you might know about her that might be useful to know? Like what have you told her about me and have you given her my email as well?”
Epstein, whose emails often contain typographical errors, responds: “She 26, russian, clevere beautiful, trustworthy and yes she has your email.”
“That was quick!” The Duke replies. “How are you? Good to be free?”
“Great to be free of many things,” Epstein says.
Raskin seeks rapid review of unredacted Epstein files
Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, is pressing the Justice Department to let lawmakers review unredacted versions of the latest Epstein files release as soon as Sunday.
Raskin’s demand is the latest signal Democrats believe the Justice Department has not fully complied with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Raskin said the review is urgent ahead of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Feb. 11 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee.
He argues Congress must assess whether DOJ’s redactions, from a universe of more than six million pages tied to Jeffrey Epstein, were lawful or improperly shielded from scrutiny.
Former Prince Andrew can’t escape Epstein’s shadow as new documents reveal details about friendship
The latest release of documents includes emails between the convicted sex offender and a correspondent who appears to be the man formerly known as Prince Andrew.
They include an invitation for Epstein to dine at Buckingham Palace, Epstein’s offer to introduce his correspondent to a 26-year-old Russian woman, and photos that appear to show Andrew kneeling over an unidentified woman who is lying on the floor.
Images from an undated and redacted document released by the U.S. Department of Justice, photographed Saturday, Jan. 31, 2026, show Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, leaning over an unidentified person. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)
The revelations come three months after King Charles III stripped Andrew of his royal titles, including the right to be called a prince, as he tried to insulate the monarchy from a steady stream of stories about his younger brother’s relationship with Epstein that has tarnished the royal family for more than a decade. The former prince is now known simply as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Epstein survivors group urges full disclosure when Bondi appears before House committee
A group representing Epstein survivors is pressing for the full release of Justice Department files with Attorney General Pam Bondi scheduled to appear before the House Judiciary Committee next month.
In a statement released Friday by the publicist for the late Virginia Giuffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent accusers, the group said the Justice Department “cannot claim it is finished releasing files until every legally required document is released and every abuser and enabler is fully exposed.”
“We need to hear directly from Attorney General Pam Bondi when she appears before the House Judiciary Committee,” the statement said, adding that the matter “is not over.”
The group said it would continue pressing for accountability and urged lawmakers from both parties to support the full release of the Epstein files, emphasizing that their demands are “not about politics,” but about transparency and justice for survivors.
Harvard review found Epstein donated $9 million and had own campus office
Harvard University’s review determined that the convicted sex offender visited campus more than 40 times and had unfettered access to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, a research center Nowak created in 2003 with $6.5 million from Epstein.
The review also found in 2020 that Harvard accepted more than $9 million from Epstein during the decade leading up to his conviction but barred him from making further donations after that point.
The review done at the request of the university’s president also found that about $200,000 of Epstein’s money had not been spent, and would be given to groups that support victims of sexual violence.
Nowak gave Epstein an office at the program’s building in Harvard Square, the review found, and circumvented campus security rules to grant the financier a key card and “unlimited” access to the facility. Epstein frequently visited Office 610, which was known as “Jeffrey’s Office,” and met with scholars to hear about their work, the review found.
Epstein assistant says she can’t find Harvard key card
Epstein gave millions of dollars to research projects associated with Martin Nowak, a Harvard University math professor. In a 2018 email, Epstein assistant Lesley Groff asked someone about a missing key card for Nowak’s office.
“We can’t find it. … it is kept in my office drawer and it is not there…do you happen to know where it is?” Groff asked. The email recipient is redacted.
In 2021, Harvard barred Nowak from starting new research or advising students for at least two years because of his ties to Epstein after the financier’s 2008 sex crimes conviction. An investigation determined that Nowak gave Epstein an office in his campus research center, along with a building key card.
At the time, Nowak said he regretted the connection between Harvard and Epstein “and the hurt that it has caused.”
The records also have new details on Epstein’s incarceration and suicide
Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019, and found dead in his cell just over a month later.
The latest batch of documents includes emails between investigators about Epstein’s death, including an investigator’s observation that his final communication doesn’t look like a suicide note. Multiple investigations have determined that Epstein’s death was a suicide.
The records also detail a trick that jail staffers used to fool the media gathered outside while Epstein’s body was removed: they used boxes and sheets to create what appeared to be a body and loaded it into a white van labeled as belonging to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The reporters followed the van when it left the jail, not knowing that Epstein’s actual body was loaded into a black vehicle, which departed “unnoticed,” according to the interview notes.
Epstein chatted with Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick about island visits
Billionaire Tesla founder Elon Musk emailed Epstein in 2012 and 2013 about visiting his infamous island compound, the scene of many allegations of sexual abuse.
Epstein inquired in an email about how many people Musk would like flown by helicopter, and Musk responded that it would likely be just him and his partner at the time. “What day/night will be the wildest party on =our island?” he wrote, according to the Justice Department records.
It’s not immediately clear if the island visits took place. Spokespersons for Musk’s companies, Tesla and X, didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comment Friday.
Musk has maintained that he repeatedly turned down the disgraced financier’s overtures. “Epstein tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED,” he posted on X in 2025.
Epstein also invited Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to the island in Dec. 2012. Lutnick’s wife enthusiastically accepted the invitation and said they would arrive on a yacht with their children. The two also had drinks on another occasion in 2011, according to a schedule. Six years later, they e-mailed about the construction of a building across the street from both of their homes.
Lutnick has distanced himself from Epstein, calling him “gross” and saying in 2025 that he cut ties decades ago. He didn’t respond to an e-mailed request for comment on Friday afternoon.
Epstein talked politics with Steve Bannon and an ex-Obama official
The documents show Epstein exchanged hundreds of friendly texts with Steve Bannon, a top adviser to President Donald Trump, some months before Epstein’s death.
They discussed politics, travel and a documentary Bannon was said to be planning that would help salvage Epstein’s reputation.
In March 2019, Bannon asked Epstein if he could supply his plane to pick him up in Rome.
A couple of months later, Epstein messaged to Bannon, “Now you can understand why trump wakes up in the middle of the night sweating when he hears you and I are friends.”
The context is unclear from the documents, which were released with many redactions and little clear organization.
Another 2018 exchange focused on Trump’s threats at the time to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, whom he had named to the post just the year prior.
Around the same time, Epstein also communicated with Kathy Ruemmler, a lawyer and former Obama White House official. In a typo-filled email, he warned that Democrats should stop demonizing Trump as a Mafia-type figure even as he derided the president as a “maniac.”
Bannon did not immediately respond to a message from the AP seeking comment. Ruemmler said through a spokesperson she was associated with Epstein professionally during her time as a lawyer in private practice and now “regrets ever knowing him.”
AP reporters are reviewing the files
Compiling accurate and thorough information takes time. A team of AP reporters is working to confirm information regarding Jeffrey Epstein that the Justice Department is continuing to release in batches.
These standards guide our reporting process:
1. We generally do not identify those who say they have been sexually assaulted or subjected to extreme abuse
2. We must make significant efforts to reach anyone who may be portrayed in a negative way in our content
3. We will not knowingly introduce rumor or false information into material
4. We abhor inaccuracies, carelessness, bias or distortions
5. We always strive to identify all the sources of our information
The AP also is reviewing the documents in collaboration with journalists from Versant, CBS and NBC. Journalists from each newsroom are working together to examine the files and share information about what is in them. Each outlet is responsible for its own independent news coverage of the documents.
2)Trump’s racist post about Obamas is deleted after backlash despite White House earlier defending it
Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press
By Bill Barrow And Josh Boak, February 6, 2026
– Former President Barack Obama talks with then President-elect Donald Trump as Melania Trump reads the funeral program before the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
U.S. President Donald Trump’s racist social media post featuring former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, as primates in a jungle was deleted after a backlash from both Republicans and Democrats who criticized the video as offensive.
The Republican president’s Thursday night post was deleted Friday and blamed on a staffer after widespread backlash, from civil rights leaders to veteran Republican senators, for its treatment of the nation’s first Black president and first lady. The deletion, a rare admission of a misstep by the White House, came hours after press secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed “fake outrage” over the post. After calls for its removal for being racist — including by Republicans — the White House said a staffer had posted the video erroneously and it had been taken down.
The post was part of a flurry of social media activity on Trump’s Truth Social account that amplified his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, despite courts around the country and a Trump attorney general from his first term finding no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome.
Trump has a record of intensely personal criticism of the Obamas and of using incendiary, sometimes racist, rhetoric — from feeding the lie that Obama was not a native-born U.S. citizen to crude generalizations about majority Black countries.
The post came in the first week of Black History Month and days after a Trump proclamation that cited “the contributions of black Americans to our national greatness and their enduring commitment to the American principles of liberty, justice, and equality.”
An Obama spokeswoman said the former president, a Democrat, had no response.
‘An internet meme’
Nearly all of the 62-second clip, which was among dozens of Truth Social posts from Trump overnight, appears to be from a conservative video alleging deliberate tampering with voting machines in battleground states as the 2020 presidential votes were tallied. At the 60-second mark is a quick scene of two primates, with the Obamas’ smiling faces imposed on them.
Those frames were taken from a separate video, previously circulated by an influential conservative meme maker. It shows Trump as “King of the Jungle” and depicts a range of Democratic leaders as animals, including Joe Biden, who is white, as a jungle primate eating a banana.
“This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” Leavitt said by text.
Disney’s 1994 feature film that Leavitt referenced is set on the savannah, not in the jungle, and it does not include great apes.
“Please stop the fake outrage and report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” Leavitt added.
By noon, the post had been taken down with responsibility placed on a Trump subordinate.
The White House explanation raised additional questions about the control of Trump’s social media account, which has also been used to levy import taxes, threaten military action, make domestic policy announcements and intimidate political rivals. The president often signs his name or initials after policy announcements.
The White House did not immediately respond to questions about its process for vetting posts and how it guarantees that the public knows when Trump himself is posting.
Condemnation across the political spectrum
Trump and the official White House social media accounts frequently repost memes and artificial intelligence-generated videos. As Leavitt did Friday, Trump aides typically dismiss critiques and cast the images as humorous.
Yet while it was still up, Trump’s post drew condemnation from across the political and ideological spectrum — and demands for an apology that had not come by the early afternoon.
The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the assassinated civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr., resurfaced her father’s words: “Yes. I’m Black. I’m proud of it. I’m Black and beautiful.” She praised Black Americans as “diverse, innovative, industrious, inventive” and added, “We are beloved of God as postal workers and professors, as a former first lady and president. We are not apes.”
The U.S. Senate’s lone Black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina, called on Trump to take down the post. “Praying it was fake because it’s the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House,” Scott, who chairs Senate Republicans’ midterm campaign arm, said on social media.
Another Republican, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, is white but represents the state with the largest percentage of Black residents. Wicker called the post “totally unacceptable” and said the president should apologize.
Some Republicans who face tough reelections this November voiced concerns, as well, feeding an unusual cascade of intraparty criticism for a president who often has enjoyed a strangle-hold over fellow Republicans who stayed silent over some of Trump’s previous controversial statements or fear a public spat with the president or losing his endorsement in a future campaign.
NAACP President Derrick Johnson pointed to Trump’s wider political concerns, asserting that Trump is trying anything to distract from economic conditions and attention on the Jeffrey Epstein case files.
“Donald Trump’s video is blatantly racist, disgusting, and utterly despicable,” Johnson said in a statement. “You know who isn’t in the Epstein files? Barack Obama,” he continued. “You know who actually improved the economy as president? Barack Obama.”
A long history of racism
There is a long history in the U.S. of powerful white figures associating Black people with animals, including apes, in demonstrably false and racist ways. The practice dates back to 18th century cultural racism and pseudo-scientific theories in which white people drew connections between Africans and monkeys to justify the enslavement of Black people in Europe and North America, and later to dehumanize freed Black people as an uncivilized threat to white people.
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, wrote in his famous text “Notes on the State of Virginia” that Black women were the preferred sexual partners of orangutans. President Dwight Eisenhower, discussing the desegregation of public schools in the 1950s, once argued that white parents were concerned about their daughters being in classrooms with “big Black bucks.” Obama, as a candidate and president, was featured as a monkey or other primate on T-shirts and other merchandise.
In his 2024 campaign, Trump said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” language similar to what Adolf Hitler said to dehumanize Jews in Nazi Germany.
During his first White House term, Trump referred to a swath of developing nations that are majority Black as “shithole countries.” He initially denied using the slur but admitted in December 2025 that he did say it.
When Obama was in the White House, Trump advanced the false claims that the 44th president, who was born in Hawaii, was born in Kenya and was constitutionally ineligible to serve. Trump, in interviews that helped endear him to many conservative voters, repeatedly demanded that Obama produce birth records and prove he was a “natural-born citizen” as required to become president.
Obama eventually released his Hawaii records. Trump finally acknowledged during his 2016 campaign, after having won the Republican nomination, that Obama was born in Hawaii. But he immediately said, falsely, that his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton started those birtherism attacks on Obama.
___ Barrow reported from Atlanta.