BOMBSHELL: Secret White House Epstein meetings exposed

REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Good morning, this is Really American. It is Wednesday, June 10th. The news is moving fast.

A bombshell New York Times investigation has exposed secret White House Situation Room meetings where Trump’s inner circle scrambled to contain the Epstein scandal, with JD Vance panicking, Pam Bondi botching the response, and Dan Bongino storming out. If Trump is innocent, why did his team try so hard to bury it? Meanwhile, Trump’s Iran war just pushed inflation to its highest level in three years, with prices rising 4.2 percent annually as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and gas prices keep climbing. Bari Weiss, the woman who fired Scott Pelley for refusing to inject falsehoods into his reporting, is now poised to take editorial control of CNN on top of CBS, in what would be the most alarming expansion of pro-Trump media control in American history. And Bill Gates is being grilled by Congress today over his documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

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BOMBSHELL: THE WHITE HOUSE WAS HOLDING SECRET SITUATION ROOM MEETINGS TO SHIELD TRUMP FROM EPSTEIN

A stunning New York Times investigation, drawn from reporting for an upcoming book by White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has exposed a series of secret White House Situation Room meetings in which Trump’s most senior advisers desperately scrambled to contain the Epstein scandal, shield the president from damaging revelations, and manage a crisis that was, behind closed doors, consuming the highest ranks of the administration.

The first meeting was convened on July 17, 2025. Not to discuss national security. To figure out how to handle the growing public pressure over the Epstein files. Vice President JD Vance sat at the head of the table. Around him: Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Counsel David Warrington, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and others. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel joined on speakerphone.

“This is a huge problem,” Vance told the group. According to the Times, Vance appeared panicked, had privately bought into the darkest theories about Epstein, and pushed repeatedly for the administration to release all the files. Wiles later told others that Vance had “proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist.”

The crisis had been set off by Bondi’s catastrophic mishandling of the Epstein files from the very beginning. In February 2025, she appeared on Fox News and seemed to confirm the existence of a secret client list, saying “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” Days later, she brought binders to a White House meeting with MAGA influencers, billing them as the Epstein files, that turned out to contain almost entirely previously public information. The influencers felt duped. The MAGA base erupted.

Then the Wall Street Journal published a story the administration had desperately tried to kill, detailing how Trump had contributed a birthday card for Epstein in 2003 depicting a nude woman, hand-drawn and inscribed with an imagined dialogue between the two men, signed with what appeared to be Trump’s signature. Trump had personally called Rupert Murdoch, the Journal’s editor, and practically shouted at her that she must “hate America” and threatened a lawsuit. It ran anyway.

Inside the Situation Room, the group debated options. Should they release grand jury materials? Interview Ghislaine Maxwell? Give Maxwell a pardon in exchange for clearing Trump? That last suggestion was immediately shot down. “Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge PR problem,” Communications Director Cheung said. Blair was blunt: “We can’t offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything. If we give her any sort of break and she says nice things about us, it will feed the conspiracy theory.”

Meanwhile, Bongino, who had spent years on his podcast promising the MAGA base that a Trump administration would release everything, was furious. He had warned the White House from the beginning that the Epstein crisis was not just an online story. “You don’t understand,” he told advisers. When the Justice Department released its memo stating there was no client list and Epstein’s death was a suicide, Bongino erupted at Bondi in a Justice Department meeting. “You fucked this thing up from the start,” he shouted. He later told a confidant: “This is going to be President Trump’s Iran-Contra.”

At one surreal Situation Room meeting, officials debated whether to include in a public Epstein document database an unverified allegation from one of Epstein’s victims about a specific type of sexual abuse involving Trump. Vance said he thought it should go out. Wiles said Trump would not be OK with it. One official later described it as “surreal” to be discussing the subject in the White House Situation Room.

Trump’s own pollster Tony Fabrizio circulated an internal memo in March 2026 noting that Epstein had come up in every single focus group, ranking as the sixth most important issue among voters, behind only inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration, and healthcare.

Trump’s team held secret Situation Room meetings to shield him from Epstein. They tried to bury it for a year. They failed. The files named Trump more than 38,000 times. If he has nothing to hide, why did they try so hard?

INFLATION JUST HIT A THREE-YEAR HIGH. TRUMP’S IRAN WAR IS DRIVING IT.

New data released Wednesday showed that Trump’s Iran war has pushed inflation to its highest level in more than three years, with the Consumer Price Index rising 4.2 percent in May compared to a year earlier. It is the third consecutive monthly acceleration and the fastest annual pace of inflation since April 2023.

The numbers are devastating for Republicans heading into the midterms. Inflation had been running at just 2.4 percent annually before Trump launched the Iran war in February. Months of instability and fears over global oil supplies, driven directly by the ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which carries roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil, have pushed prices steadily and relentlessly higher. Prices climbed 0.5 percent in May alone, with energy costs accounting for much of the monthly surge.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, hit 2.9 percent, its highest level since September. The data complicates Federal Reserve plans for interest rate cuts, even with Trump’s handpicked Fed Chair Kevin Warsh now leading the central bank.

Trump responded Wednesday morning with a characteristically unhinged Truth Social post. “Iran’s Military is a complete and total mess. Much of it, like their Navy and Air Force, doesn’t even exist anymore. The Bully of the Middle East is DEAD!!!” He then threatened to escalate the war further, posting that Iran had “taken too long to negotiate” and would now “have to pay the price.”

At a Wisconsin farmers roundtable last week, an event nominally about rising agricultural costs caused by his own war, Trump told struggling farmers that “we’re the strongest, we’re the hottest, and we’re the most respected country anywhere in the world” before immediately veering into a lengthy rant about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. He also dismissed cost-of-living concerns as a hoax. “I inherited all these high prices. They came in and they said, ‘affordability.’ They made up the word, because that’s the only thing they’re good at,” he said.

Inflation is at a three-year high. Trump’s Iran war is driving it. Gas is $4.32 a gallon. Trump is posting about Iran’s dead navy and threatening escalation. The midterms are five months away.

BARI WEISS IS NOW POISED TO TAKE OVER CNN ON TOP OF CBS.

Bari Weiss, the woman who fired Scott Pelley after he refused to inject falsehoods into his reporting, who fired executive producer Tanya Simon and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, who cancelled Colbert, and who has spent the past seven months systematically dismantling the most respected television journalism brand in American history, is now poised to take editorial control of CNN as well, according to a report from Axios confirmed by the New York Post.

When Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery closes, expected in the third quarter of 2026 pending regulatory approval, Weiss is expected to oversee editorial operations across both CBS News and CNN under a unified news structure. Paramount executives are currently searching for a business-side executive to run operations alongside Weiss, with candidates including current CNN CEO Mark Thompson, NBCUniversal News Group chairman Cesar Conde, and former NBC News chief Noah Oppenheim.

“The Paramount brass loves Bari Weiss,” a source told Axios. “She has the full confidence of David Ellison, who believes Bari has done a fantastic job as editor-in-chief.”

The prospect is staggering. Weiss would control the editorial direction of both CBS News and CNN, one of the last major television news networks not already under the thumb of a Trump-aligned billionaire. The same person who told Pelley to describe a police killing differently than what the video showed, to match what Trump said, would oversee the editorial decisions of two of the most watched news organizations in America.

California, New York, and other states are preparing a lawsuit to block the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger entirely. The DOJ is expected to make a decision on the deal soon. Bari Weiss ran CBS for seven months. She fired Pelley for refusing to lie. She is now about to get CNN too.

BILL GATES IS BEING GRILLED BY CONGRESS TODAY OVER HIS EPSTEIN TIES.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and global health philanthropist whose ties to Jeffrey Epstein were documented in the millions of pages of files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, is appearing before the House Oversight Committee Wednesday for what members are promising will be an unsparing grilling over his documented relationship with the convicted sex offender.

Photographs and emails released from Epstein’s estate and the Justice Department show Gates and Epstein spent time together and corresponded. Gates’s name appears in a document that looks like an email Epstein sent himself, containing allegations which Gates has called “absolutely absurd and completely false,” that Epstein had procured medicines for Gates after the latter contracted sexually transmitted diseases from Russian girls. Two pictures show Gates standing next to women whose identities have been obscured. Gates has said he posed with them because Epstein asked him to.

“Did he ever go to the island? Did he know of other people who engaged in abusing or raping underage girls? Does he know anyone who was involved other than Epstein and Maxwell in the abuse?” asked Representative Ro Khanna, ticking off his planned questions ahead of the hearing.

Gates is not the only powerful figure facing scrutiny. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers resigned his Harvard teaching post after files revealed he had asked Epstein for advice on conducting an affair with a woman he was mentoring. Goldman Sachs general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler is resigning after files showed Epstein had given her luxury gifts. Prominent lawyer Brad Karp stepped down as chair of Paul Weiss after it emerged he had asked Epstein to help his son get a job.

Gates is testifying today. The Epstein files named Trump more than 38,000 times. The White House held secret meetings to contain the damage. The crisis is not going away.

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