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Mike Johnson calls for Epstein files and ICE memos gives deportation guidance: Morning Rundown
Donald Trump brushes off his supporters’ interest in the Jeffrey Epstein case, and House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks out. An ICE memo details how officials can deport immigrants to third countries. And Grok, the Elon Musk-owned AI chatbot, debuts two so-called “companions.”
Here’s what to know today.
Trump’s supporters won’t quit talking about Jeffrey Epstein
Donald Trump responded to mounting criticism of his administration’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s case, saying yesterday that he doesn’t understand the buzz. “He’s dead for a long time,” the president said when asked about frustration from his supporters. “He was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody.”
Earlier in the day, Trump said Attorney General Pam Bondi should release “whatever she thinks is credible” on Epstein, while Bondi herself declined to answer questions about the issue. Though some have called for her to resign, Bondi was defiant during a press conference. “I’m going to be here as long as the president wants me to be here,” she said.
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Meanwhile, House Speaker Mike Johnson showed a rare break from Trump by joining other conservatives in calling for the release of documents. The administration “should put everything out there and let the people decide,” he told conservative commentator Benny Johnson yesterday. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and John Kennedy are among those who have also called out the Trump administration.
The uproar about the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case comes after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo last week saying they found no evidence that the late financier had kept an “incriminating ‘client list’” or evidence that would lead to the prosecution of third parties. Conspiracy theories that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” began to spread almost immediately after Epstein’s 2019 death in a New York City jail as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
Trump also took to Truth Social last Saturday to urge people to move on. If he thought his words would put an end to things, he was wrong. Data from Google shows that searches for Epstein spiked after Trump posted. It was also notable that the post, on the president’s own social network, received many frustrated responses from supporters.
Data from Google shows that searches for Epstein spiked after Trump posted. It was also notable that the post, on the president’s own social network, received many frustrated responses from supporters.
Trump has used conspiracy theories for political gain since before he ran for president, like when he stoked false claims that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was fake. During his most recent presidential campaign, Trump said he would have “no problem” looking into an Epstein client list. And once he took office, Trump appointed people who have also promoted conspiracy theories to senior positions in his administration.
But now, Trump is bearing the brunt of those same conspiracies in an inescapable viral commotion.
Read the full story here.
More politics news:
- Republicans in Congress are racing to pass a $9.4 billion spending cuts package before a Friday deadline.
- Former DNC chair Jaime Harrison is back in the political arena with a new podcast. He spoke with NBC News about why one of his first guests will be Hunter Biden.
- Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said the focus of a special legislative session starting next week would shift to flood relief, but his agenda shows lawmakers will be considering more than flood-related measures.
ICE restarts third country deportations with little notice
The Department of Homeland Security resumed third country deportation flights on Tuesday by deporting five immigrant detainees, all from different countries, to the small nation of Eswatini in Southern Africa. The resumption of third country deportations comes as ICE put out new guidance that its employees are allowed in certain circumstances to deport migrants to countries that are not their own in as little as six hours — and without assurances from the third country that they “will not be persecuted or tortured.”
But “in all other cases” where the U.S. has not received those assurances, ICE must follow certain procedures, including that officials must give immigrants a removal notice in a language the person understands and which tells them where the government intends to deport them. Read the full story here.
More immigration news:
- The Pentagon ordered the removal of half of the 4,000 National Guard troops who were mobilized in response to immigration protests in Los Angeles.
- New ICE guidance requires that people who entered the U.S. without legal authorization remain in immigration detention as they fight deportation proceedings in court — meaning they can’t get bond hearings and could potentially be detained for months or years.
- Immigration authorities want landlords to turn over leases and other information on their tenants, signaling a potential new front in the Trump administration’s efforts to locate people in the country illegally.
- ICE detained a father in Washington state who had been working to legalize his residency status in the United States. His pregnant wife pleaded, “I just want him home.”
Adelita Grijalva wins Democratic primary for Arizona House seat
The daughter of the late Rep. Raúl Grijalva won the Democratic primary to fill his former House seat in Arizona, The Associated Press projects. Adelita Grijalva, a former member of the Pima County Board of Supervisors, defeated activist Deja Foxx and former state Rep. Daniel Hernandez and is set to face Republican Daniel Butierez in a special election in September. Both Grijalva, 54, and Foxx described themselves as progressives, but fissures emerged during the campaign over the issue of generational change.
Raúl Grijalva won 12 terms representing Arizona’s 7th House District before he died in March at the age of 77. The heavily Democratic district encompasses most of Tucson and the state’s southern border. Read the full story here.
Read All About It
- A man is in custody after “American Idol” music supervisor Robin Kaye and her husband, Thomas Deluca, were found dead in their Los Angeles home.
- An elite Chinese cyberspy group hacked at least one state’s National Guard network for nearly a year, the Pentagon found.
- TV personality Chip Gaines defended the inclusion of a same-sex couple in the new show “Back to the Frontier” after backlash from religious conservatives.
- Vance Boelter — the man accused of fatally shooting Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband last month — was indicted on federal murder charges.
- “Severance” racked up 27 Emmy nominations, the most of any show this year, followed by “The Penguin” with 24 and “The White Lotus” with 23. See a full list of nominees.
- The National League defeated the American League in the 2025 MLB All-Star Game after the Philadelphia Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber went 3 for 3 in the game’s first home run swing-off, following a 6-6 tie.
Staff Pick: Grok’s new chatbots seem designed to shock and entertain
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok turned heads last week for writing antisemitic social media posts on X. Now, Grok has introduced so-called “Companions” that interact with users. One is a flirty Japanese anime character named Ani who offers to make users’ lives “sexier.” The other is a red panda named Bad Rudi with a penchant for foul language.
Tech reporter David Ingram wrote that both bots criticized the Nazis and the action of xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok. But the graphic nature of the companions makes them outliers among other AI chatbots with a willingness to embrace hateful language and sexual content. Just look at snippets of Bad Rudi’s conversation with NBC News, in which the character advocated for stealing a yacht, overthrowing the pope and spiking a town’s water supply with hot sauce and glitter. — Elizabeth Robinson, newsletter editor
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Virginians approved a new congressional map on Tuesday that would aggressively gerrymander the state in the Democrats’ favor, giving the party as many as four more U.S. House seats.
The new map draws eight safely Democratic districts and two competitive districts that lean Democratic, according to a New York Times analysis of 2024 presidential results. It leaves just one safe Republican seat, compared with the five seats the G.O.P. holds on the current map.
The proposed map was drawn by Democratic state legislators and approved by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat. It eliminates three Republican-held seats in part by slicing the densely populated suburbs in Arlington and Fairfax Counties and reallocating their overwhelmingly Democratic voters into five congressional districts, some stretching more than a hundred miles into Republican areas.
Perhaps the most extreme new district is the Seventh, which begins at the Potomac River and stretches to the west and south in a manner that resembles a pair of lobster claws. Several well-known Virginia Democrats have already announced their candidacies and begun campaigning in the district.
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.
“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.
The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The center has been targeted by Republicans
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
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