Managing Trump(his Tariffs… and everything else):1)Epstein emails released by Democrats say Trump ‘knew about the girls’ and spent time with a victim; 2)Trump pardons Rudy Giuliani and others who backed efforts to overturn 2020 election; 3)Trump threatens to sue BBC over edited speech that sparked resignations by news bosses
1)Epstein emails released by Democrats say Trump ‘knew about the girls’ and spent time with a victim
Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press
By Canadian Press, November 12, 2025
Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein wrote in a 2011 email that Donald Trump had “spent hours” at Epstein’s house with a victim of sex trafficking and said in a separate message years later that Trump “knew about the girls,” according to communications released Wednesday.
The emails made public by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee add to the questions about Trump’s friendship with Epstein and about any knowledge he may have had in what prosecutors call a yearslong effort by Epstein to exploit underage girls. The Republican president has consistently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes and has said he ended their relationship years ago.
The messages are part of a batch of 23,000 documents provided by Epstein’s estate to the Oversight Committee. The release resurfaces a storyline that had shadowed Trump’s presidency during the summer when the FBI and the Justice Department abruptly announced that they would not be releasing additional documents that investigators had spent weeks examining, disappointing conspiracy theorists and online sleuths who had expected to see new revelations.
In an April 2, 2011, email to Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein girlfriend now imprisoned for conspiring to engage in sex trafficking, Epstein wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. (Redacted name) spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.”
Maxwell replied the same day: “I have been thinking about that.”
The name of the person said to have spent time with Trump was blacked out of the email, but House Democrats identified the person as a “victim.”
In a separate 2019 email to journalist Michael Wolff, who has written extensively about Trump, Epstein wrote of Trump, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt accused the Democrats of having “selectively leaked emails” to “create a fake narrative to smear President Trump.”
She said in a statement that the unnamed person referenced in the emails is Virginia Giuffre, who had accused Britain’s then-Prince Andrew and other influential men of sexually exploiting her as a teenager and who died by suicide in April. Andrew, who recently was stripped of his titles and evicted from his royal residence by King Charles III after weeks of pressure to act over his relationship with Epstein, has rejected Giuffre’s allegations and said he didn’t recall meeting her.
Leavitt said in a statement that Giuffre had “repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever and ‘couldn’t have been friendlier’ to her in their limited interactions.”
“The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club decades ago for being a creep to his female employees, including Giuffre,” the statement said. “These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again.”
Giuffre came forward publicly after an initial investigation ended in an 18-month Florida jail term for Epstein, who made a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by pleading guilty instead to relatively minor state-level charges of soliciting prostitution. He was released in 2009.
In subsequent lawsuits, Giuffre said she was a teenage spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida, club, when she was approached in 2000 by Maxwell.
Epstein took his own life in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges.
Lawyers for Maxwell, a British socialite, have argued that she never should have been tried or convicted for her role in luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. She is serving a 20-year prison term, though she was moved from a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas after she was interviewed in July by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
2)Trump pardons Rudy Giuliani and others who backed efforts to overturn 2020 election
Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press
By Alanna Durkin Richer, November 10, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, a Justice Department official says.
Ed Martin, the government’s pardon attorney, posted on social media a signed proclamation of the “full, complete, and unconditional” pardon, which also names conservative attorneys Sidney Powell and John Eastman. The proclamation, posted online late Sunday, explicitly says the pardon does not apply to Trump.
Presidential pardons apply only to federal crimes, and none of the Trump allies named were charged in federal cases over the 2020 election. But the move underscores President Donald Trump’s continued efforts to rewrite the history of the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. It follows the sweeping pardons of the hundreds of Trump supporters charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, including those convicted of attacking law enforcement.
The proclamation described efforts to prosecute those accused of aiding Trump’s efforts to cling to power “as a grave national injustice perpetrated on the American people”. It said the pardons were designed to continue “the process of national reconciliation.”
The White House didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment Monday.
Also pardoned were Republicans who acted as fake electors for Trump in 2020 and were charged in state cases of submitting false certificates that confirmed they were legitimate electors despite Biden’s victory in those states.
Trump himself was indicted on felony charges accusing him of working overturn his 2020 election defeat, but the case brought by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith was abandoned in November after Trump’s victory over Democrat Kamala Harris because of the department’s policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
Giuliani, Meadows and others who were named in the proclamation had been charged by state prosecutors over the 2020 election, but the cases have hit a dead end or are just limping along. A judge in September dismissed the Michigan case against 15 Republicans accused of attempting to falsely certify Trump as the winner of the election in that battleground state.
3)Trump threatens to sue BBC over edited speech that sparked resignations by news bosses
Courtesy Barrie360.com and The Associated Press
By Jill Lawless, November 10, 2025
Media members wait outside the BBC Headquarters in London, Monday, Nov. 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened legal action against the BBC over the way a speech he made was edited in a documentary aired by Britain’s national broadcaster.
BBC chairman Samir Shah on Monday apologized for the “error of judgment,” which triggered the resignations of the BBC’s top executive and its head of news.
Director-General Tim Davie and news chief Deborah Turness quit Sunday over accusations of bias and misleading editing of a speech Trump delivered on Jan. 6, 2021, before a crowd of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington.
The hourlong documentary — titled “Trump: A Second Chance?” — was broadcast as part of the BBC’s “Panorama” series days before the 2024 U.S. presidential election. It spliced together three quotes from two sections of the 2021 speech, delivered almost an hour apart, into what appeared to be one quote in which Trump urged supporters to march with him and “fight like hell.” Among the parts cut out was a section where Trump said he wanted supporters to demonstrate peacefully.
Shah said the broadcaster accepted “that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action.”
A letter from Trump attorney Alejandro Brito demands the BBC “retract the false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements,” apologize and “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused,” or face legal action for $1 billion in damages.
The BBC said it would review the letter “and respond directly in due course.”
Top executives quit
Trump had earlier welcomed the resignations of the two BBC executives. He posted a link to a Daily Telegraph story about the speech-editing on his Truth Social network, thanking the newspaper “for exposing these Corrupt ‘Journalists.’ These are very dishonest people who tried to step on the scales of a Presidential Election.” He called that “a terrible thing for Democracy!”
In a resignation letter to staff, Davie said: “There have been some mistakes made and as director-general I have to take ultimate responsibility.”
Turness said the controversy was damaging the BBC, and she quit “because the buck stops with me.” She defended the organization’s journalists against allegations of bias.
“Our journalists are hardworking people who strive for impartiality, and I will stand by their journalism,” she said Monday. “There is no institutional bias. Mistakes are made, but there’s no institutional bias.”
Trump speech edited
Pressure on the broadcaster’s top executives has been growing since the right-leaning Daily Telegraph published parts of a dossier compiled by Michael Prescott, who had been hired to advise the BBC on standards and guidelines.
As well as the Trump edit, it criticized the BBC’s coverage of transgender issues and raised concerns of anti-Israel bias in the BBC’s Arabic service.
The “Panorama” episode showed an edited clip from the January 2021 speech in which Trump claimed the 2020 presidential election had been rigged. Trump is shown saying: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell.”
According to video and a transcript from Trump’s comments that day, he said: “I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down. Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.
“Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.
“I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Trump used the “fight like hell” phrase toward the end of the speech, but without referencing the Capitol.
“We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Trump said.
In a letter to Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee, Shah said the purpose of editing Trump’s words had been “to convey the message of the speech” so that viewers could understand how it had been received by Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground.
He said the program had not attracted “significant audience feedback” when it first aired but had drawn more than 500 complaints since Prescott’s dossier was made public.
Shah acknowledged in a BBC interview that “it would have been better to have acted earlier. But we didn’t.”
A national institution
The 103-year-old BBC faces greater scrutiny than other broadcasters — and criticism from its commercial rivals — because of its status as a national institution funded through an annual license fee of 174.50 pounds ($230) paid by all households who watch live TV or any BBC content.
The broadcaster is bound by the terms of its charter to be impartial, and critics are quick to point out when they think it has failed. It’s frequently a political football, with conservatives seeing a leftist slant in its news output and some liberals accusing it of having a conservative bias.
It has also been criticized from all angles over its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza. In February, the BBC removed a documentary about Gaza from its streaming service after it emerged that the child narrator was the son of an official in the Hamas-led government.
Governments of both left and right have long been accused of meddling with the broadcaster, which is overseen by a board that includes both BBC nominees and government appointees.
Some defenders of the BBC allege that members of the board appointed under previous Conservative governments have been undermining the corporation from within.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s spokesman, Tom Wells, said the center-left Labour Party government supports “a strong, independent BBC” and doesn’t think the broadcaster is biased.
“But it is important that the BBC acts to maintain trust and corrects mistakes quickly when they occur,” he said.
___ Associated Press writer Seung Min Kim contributed from Washington.