The News You Need on Friday, June 12, 2026.
J.D. Vance tries to cover up Trump's crimes, racist riots continue in Belfast thanks to a international coalition of far-right thugs and... we're cooked.
Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files
New York Times
Scott: The White House reporting of Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which is the basis of this excerpt from their forthcoming book, reflects the very pinnacle of access journalism inside the Beltway.
Susie Wiles offers Haberman a steady flow of scoops with some basic ground rules as to how and when they are reported, against an assurance that these rules will be followed. In consequence, utterly insane goings on are presented as if they were something perfectly routine and normal—in essence, they are sane washed. This is not journalism with a critical twist, and indeed, it is remarkably muted. But it’s useful to have, just the same.
The core incident in this excerpt is a meeting in the White House Situation Room, designed for the president and his senior counselors to deliberate on national security issues. For J.D. Vance, however, the meeting is convened as a gathering of fixers, pondering how to preempt coming revelations of Trump’s predatory sex acts with a child, in what is coming to be called “Nipplegate.”
Sarah Ransome claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransome also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransome wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. “They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,” she wrote.
Haberman and Swan leave out that the child in question was identified and interviewed and FBI field notes existed of her encounters, which the Bureau men thought credible. Instead, what you hear from the pair is a discussion of how this was to be “nipped in the bud,” by stopping the disclosure of the compromising materials, for instance. Or by preparing attacks with the help of cooperating media designed to smear the victims of Trump’s alleged sexual perversities.
The information The New York Times has collected takes the form of what legal scholars call “pleaks,” that is sensitive or confidential information which has been furnished to a cooperating press for the purposes of those in power. In this regard, it is particularly noteworthy to see who of the people sat around the conference room table is made to look ridiculous. That man is Vance:
Vance had… floated to colleagues an extraordinary PR gambit—that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.
Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily—including whatever material existed about the president—it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on.
Note that Carlson was at this point already on the outs with Trump, so confiding such a sensitive mission to him was a strange move. But note how the comments and approaches attributed to Vance in this piece are very sharply at odds with everything that Vance was saying to the public contemporaneously.
Vance is being made to look like a two-faced charlatan. Which of course he is.
We should keep in focus that the upshot of this meeting was simple: Defy Congress, redact the hell out of the documents, and withhold the most damaging of them. And this was the mission tasked to Todd Blanche, which he is fulfilling to this moment.
Trump Knew and Funded Child Sexual Abuse Parties At His Golf Course
Miami New Times
Scott: The New York Times story is remarkably bereft of detail or reference to documentation. You have to look elsewhere to find it.
The specific FBI report that forms the crux of the meeting in the situation room was suppressed by the Department of Justice, and was revealed by the Miami New Times—48 hours before the NYT story.
An FBI document from the US Department of Justice Jeffrey Epstein files contains extraordinary allegations involving President Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and a Trump-owned golf course—claims that appear to have originated from a single tipster who contacted federal authorities in 2021.
The FBI intake report does not identify the golf course referenced by the caller. However, the allegation appears in files connected to Epstein, whose sprawling Palm Beach mansion served as the center of many of the activities that ultimately led to his conviction and the federal sex-trafficking investigation that followed.
The document, dated June 21, 2021, summarizes a call received by the bureau’s National Threat Operations Center from an individual who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of criminal activity involving Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Trump.
Among the allegations in the report, the caller claimed to have recordings of Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell discussing “marketing strategies” for high-profile sex parties held at a Trump golf course. The caller alleged the recordings had been mailed to an attorney in the Cayman Islands.
The Times Does the Oyster Farmer: Chaos Ensues
The New York Times
Charles: How can you tell when two reporters are determined to destroy their subject, when the evidence they’ve accumulated is half favorable and half not?
Katie Glueck and Lisa Lerer of The New York Times interviewed two dozen people about the romantic life and the Nazi tattoo of Graham Platner, the Maine Oyster farmer who was chosen this week by 72 percent of Maine Democrats to be their Senate nominee in November.
The Times found six ex-girlfriends of the candidate.
Three of them described him as “a gentle giant,” “a great boy friend,” and “responsible, intelligent and supportive.”
Three other ex-girlfriends were hostile to him, particularly Lyndsey Fifield, 40, identified by The Times as a “Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns.” Fifield called him “cavalierly contemptuous of women’s emotions.”
She also described him as violent, particularly when he was drunk, but he “never hit me.” Fifield said “he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.”
The Times published 3,700 words about Platner.
His supporters got 30 words at the top of the piece.
Then there were 1,700 words attacking him.
Then there were 139 words from the girlfriends who liked him.
Then the reporters went back to attacking him
That’s the definition of a hatchet job.
Graham Platner and Lyndsey Fifield in happier days.
It didn’t help the story’s credibility (or Fitfield’s) when GOP operative and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson disclosed in his podcast that Fitfield “ran a group called Ladies for Kavanaugh, which might have been a giveaway if you thought it through.”
So apparently Kitfield’s attitude towards men who are disrespectful towards women can be greatly influenced by whether they are Democrats or Republicans.
Wilson showed a clip of one of Kitfield’s allies who fought to get Brett Kavanaugh confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice after he faced charges of being abusive towards women.
The group wrote a memo “about supporting Kavanaugh without alienating the Me Too movement. . .It was used by a lot of members of the Senate and the House and Fox News and elsewhere,” the speaker said in the clip. “But most important is Susan Collins told me that without that memo, she could not have seen how to support him, and if you look at her speech that she gave on the Senate floor, it is entirely the playing out and architecture of how we structured the argument.”
Collins, of course, is Platner’s opponent in November. The Times story reported that Fifield had said in a private chat last year “I will personally go campaign for Collins,” but that Fitfield said “the comment was a joke.”
And after the disclosure of Fifield’s support of Kavanaugh, this quote of hers in the Times story didn’t stand up so well either: “I know it looks like a bitter ex-girlfriend Republican trying to take down a Democrat — it has nothing to do with that,” Ms. Fifield said. “If he was running as a Republican, I would be doing this exact same thing.”
Things got even weirder when Fifield attacked the story she had given to The Times: “The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign,”
No one else saw it as a gift to Platner.
Finally, to make things even messier, after the Times story was published someone dug up the fact that one of its authors, Katie Glueck, had won an “Activist of the Year” award from AIPAC, the pre-eminent pro-Israel lobbying organization which spends millions to defeat any Senate candidate it deems unacceptable. Glueck won the award when she was an undergraduate working on her college newspaper at Northwestern. Perhaps it’s unfair to bring up an award she won 17 years ago. But much of the article she co-authored about Platner was about very old stories from his past, including his Nazi tattoo, which he said he had gotten nineteen years ago.
Katie Glueck
Platner is a big opponent of AIPAC. Collins has reportedly received $1.8 million from pro-Israel PACs.
Naturally The Times defended its reporter:
“Katie Glueck has covered politics for over a decade and is one of the best journalists in media at producing incisive coverage of candidates and campaigns. She approached this article about Graham Platner’s past personal conduct with the same independence she brings to all of her reporting. We published accounts provided by several women who were in romantic relationships with Graham Platner. Our story accurately presents each of these accounts as told to our reporters and according to our standards. We stand by our reporting of the accounts from Ms. Fifield and the other women, who provided a revealing look at the behavior of a major candidate for the U.S. Senate.”
How Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and the Kremlin Hook up to Trigger a Racist Pogrom in Belfast
Byline Times
Scott: The rioting in Belfast was hardly a spontaneous development.
Rather, it was timed and nurtured with particular care and reflected a perfect confluence of resources between the tech bros, British populist politicians Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon), and the Kremlin—whose army of social media influencers flooded the zone with “White Lives Matter” propaganda, with a critical assist from Musk.
A network of Russian far-right extremists steeped in neo-Nazi antisemitism—created under the umbrella of a sanctioned oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and now openly promoted by Tommy Robinson [Yaxley-Lennon]—has been driving ‘White Lives Matter’ propaganda over the murder of 18-year-old student Henry Nowak, Byline Times can reveal.
The organisation promoted by Robinson [Yaxley-Lennon] is part of a wider Russian state-linked campaign to sow division across the UK and Europe,
A Byline Times review of X and Telegram posts by the Brotherhood of Academists, a Russian ultranationalist youth movement which operates under the leadership of the US-sanctioned Tsargrad Society, reveals that the group pushed a white supremacist framing of Nowak’s killing on May 20—the day media coverage of his killer’s trial intensified.
The Horton-Kaiser Report Is Independent, Different From Other US Media.
Scott: On the issue of the journalist and the journalist’s responsibility, I’m really quite struck by something that Pope Leo said. That the moral, ethical and professional responsibility of journalists is not to be regurgitating the views of people in power—like political figures and wealthy corporate interests that control commercial media—but to be an independent voice.
To assess carefully whether the things that are claimed as facts really are facts, and to discover what the facts are.
Charles: Scott Horton and I first bonded 20 years ago when we were each blogging about the horrendous torture being carried out by the second Bush administration during the so-called War on Terror. The New York Times news department never called torture torture. They always called it ‘enhanced interrogation.’
We both thought it was a terrible thing.
Listen to Scott speaking to NPR’s On The Media in 2009 about torture.
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