President Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate the dealings of Democrats with Jeffrey Epstein, after a week in which his own relationship with the convicted sex offender was in the spotlight.
President Trump’s announcement came after Democrats released emails earlier this week suggesting that Mr. Trump’s knowledge of Mr. Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was deeper than previously known.
For all his bluster, the F.B.I.’s deputy director Dan Bongino played a central role in stoking expectations that the bureau would quickly find the suspects who planted pipe bombs.
The emails are the latest disclosure in a sex-trafficking scandal that still occupies a central role in American politics six years after the disgraced financier was found dead in a Manhattan prison cell.
The pardons of former Trump aides, which would only apply in federal court, are largely symbolic and cannot shield them from continuing state-level prosecutions.
Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York City mayor and lawyer for President Trump, at a commemoration ceremony on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan in September.
The Justice Department moved an inquiry that appeared initially focused on the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan to South Florida and is beginning to recruit line prosecutors.
Maryland sued the Trump administration on Thursday for abandoning an agreement to move the F.B.I. from its Washington headquarters to Prince George’s County.
The flashpoint was the Justice Department’s failure to turn over seized communications from a confidant of Mr. Comey’s, Daniel C. Richman, a law professor at Columbia University.
The former special counsel has told people in his orbit he welcomes the opportunity to present the public case against the president denied to him by adverse court rulings and the 2024 election.
Connexion
