HOL UP!
Have yall seen this?
These ppl actually fukking went to Epstein’s island!
Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell sent a mystery USB drive to the Justice Department days after Melania Trump sought to distance herself from the pair’s heinous sex crimes.
The disgraced former socialite sent the USB on April 16 in a fresh attempt to quash her criminal conviction and 20-year jail sentence for helping Epstein recruit and abuse women and girls.
The foursome were photographed at Mar-a-Lago in Feb. 2000. Melania Trump has denied having a relationship with Epstein and Maxwell.
Melania Trump has denied having a relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, though she has been photographed with the couple.
Davidoff Studios Photography/Getty Images
While the details of the electronic files are not known, the timing of it—seven days after the first lady delivered a surprise statement about Epstein and Maxwell—raised eyebrows across Washington.
In her April 9 statement, Melania Trump denied any ties to Epstein’s crimes and demanded that “lies” being spread about her must end.
Reading from prepared remarks at the White House, she told reporters that she went to the same parties as Epstein “from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common.”
However, she never had a relationship with Epstein or Maxwell, the first lady insisted, despite numerous photos with the pair, as well as a gushing email exchange with Maxwell being included in a recent dump of Epstein files.
“Dear G! How are you?” read one email message. “Nice story about JE in NY mag. You look great in the picture.”
A 2002 email from Melania Trump to Ghislaine Maxwell was released in the Jeffrey Epstein files on Friday, January 30, 2026.
A 2002 email from Melania Trump to Ghislaine Maxwell was released in the Jeffrey Epstein files on Friday, January 30, 2026.
Justice Department
The mysterious USB was received this week by Trump prosecutor Jay Clayton, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.
In a letter to federal judge Paul Engelmayer, Clayton confirms receipt of the package and asks the court to give the government until June 5 to file a response.
He did not outline the details of the material Maxwell sent, but noted that her arguments appear to be “duplicative” and “meritless”.
Melania Flees Questions After Dropping Epstein Bombshell
BEAST IN THE ROOM
Farrah Tomazin
U.S. first lady Melania Trump delivers remarks regarding the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein s from the Grand Foyer of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
According to Clayton, Maxwell also cited about 50 exhibits to support her claims, but only 33 were included in the package.
“Yesterday, the Government received a FedEx envelope—marked with a “ship date” of April 16, 2026—that contained a USB drive with the defendant’s amended motion and exhibits,” his letter says.
“Upon an initial review, the amended motion seems to have some overlap with the defendant’s claims in her original motion.
“Although the claims raised appear to be equally meritless, the arguments pressed by the defendant appear to be fact and document intensive and thus the Government is not in a position to assess how much of the new material is truly duplicative.”
Ghislaine Maxwell Gets a Puppy to Play With in Cushy Jail
RUFF TREATMENT
Farrah Tomazin
Donald Trump, Melania Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell pose together at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida, February 12, 2000.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for his crimes, while Maxwell was subsequently sentenced for being his accomplice, after spending years helping to recruit young girls for Epstein to sexually abuse.
One of those girls, the late Virginia Giuffre, was only 17 when she was befriended by Maxwell while working at Trump’s Mar-a-lago spa, something that the president claims led to his eventual falling out with Epstein.
Virginia Giuffre, with a photo of herself as a teen, when she says she was abused by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew, among others. (Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Virginia Giuffre, with a photo of herself as a teen, when she says she was abused by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew, among others.
Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
“He stole her,” Trump told reporters earlier this year.
But as the political scandal over the Epstein files escalated, Maxwell was moved last July, without explanation, from her jail in Florida to a minimum security prison camp in Texas, which industry publications have listed as one of the “Best Jails in America to Serve Time.”
Melania Flees Questions After Dropping Epstein Bombshell
BEAST IN THE ROOM
Farrah Tomazin
U.S. first lady Melania Trump delivers remarks regarding the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein s from the Grand Foyer of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 9, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche signed off on the deal after an unorthodox meeting with the 63-year-old, in which she declared that she never saw Trump acting inappropriately with Epstein.
According to a whistleblower, Maxwell has enjoyed several perks at the Texas jail, such as access to a puppy, customized meals delivered to her cell and permission to go to the exercise area after hours.
Maxwell has nonetheless sought to quash her conviction multiple times.
Maxwell Lobs Grenade Naming 29 ‘Protected’ Epstein Friends
MAXWELL’S SILVER HAMMER
The Swamp
A photo illustration of Ghislaine Maxwell with an explosion behind her for The Swamp.
Last December, for example, she filed a habeas petition referencing four potential “co-conspirators” and “25 men” who allegedly reached “secret settlements” connected to Epstein’s abuse but were never indicted.
Democrats, meanwhile, say that she and the Department of Justice still have questions to answer.
“Convicted sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell socialized with Melania from Palm Beach to Manhattan,” the Democrats Oversight Committee posted on X on Thursday.
“Emails revealed in the Epstein Files show that the two communicated. Today, the DOJ is still hiding nearly half the files. Why? What’s being hidden?”
As for the first lady, it is still not clear what prompted her surprise statement earlier this month, something that even caught the president and his aides by surprise.
Paolo Zampolli and Amanda Ungaro
Paolo Zampolli and Amanda Ungaro attend the Ambassador Paolo Zampolli Reception For Petro Rio CEO Al Nelson on May 16, 2019 in New York City.
Eugene Gologursky/Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Paolo Zampolli
However, before the bombshell announcement, Brazilian model Amanda Ungaro began messaging the first lady online, threatening to reveal alleged connections.
“She knows that I witnessed highly compromising interactions over the course of 20 years,” Ungaro said of Melania in an interview with the Courier over the weekend, without providing details.
Ungaro met Epstein when she was 17 aboard his private plane. She also made headlines earlier this year by accusing Paolo Zampolli, the father of her teenage son, Melania’s former modeling agent, and now a special envoy for Trump, of using his influence to trigger her deportation. He strongly denies this.
76ers
- Josh Harris was an analyst at Drexel Burnham Lambert and co-founded Apollo Global with Leon Black, who funded Epstein’s operations for years.
- For reasons that have not been explained, Jeffrey Epstein emailed Leon Black’s assistant to say that he was arranging for Josh Harris to pay her $2.4 million.
- Harris met with Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates for an “intimate” breakfast at Epstein’s house. It was scheduled to last two hours, afterward Epstein emailed to ask Harris if he had fun.
- The money behind Harris comes from Apollo Global. The money behind David Blitzer, Harris’s partner in sports investments including the 76ers, comes from the Blackstone Group. Blackstone is a complex firm run by Stephen Schwarzman, whom Epstein knew, invited to dinner, and called “terrific.”
- There’s a lot more in this TrueHoop story.
Nuggets
Substack has hosted breathtaking investigative journalism over the last few months, with brilliant people stitching together insight from the Epstein documents from the Department of Justice. Two stories stand out:
Both are must read; if you haven’t, please don’t delay.
- Kait Justice on the Deutsche Bank files that Epstein and Steve Bannon were utterly convinced would end Trump’s presidency, and
- Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez on defense and intelligence implications of Epstein’s New Mexico property.
And then note that Nuggets billionaire Stan Kroenke is in both.
In support of Kait Justice’s work, I researched and published a list of the biggest clients of the business unit at Deutsche Bank that attracted so many Epstein-connected people, including Donald Trump and Carl Icahn. Near the very top of the list, in terms of assets invested with Deutsche at the time, was Stanley freaking Kroenke.
And it’s even creepier when you read Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s story which traces the commingled origins of the American intelligence and defense industries, and the people connected to both who bought up ranchland in New Mexico with proximity to the two major sites of America’s nuclear weapons industry. A focus of that story is a man named Henry Singleton, a major defense contractor and massive landholder, including a ton of land adjoining Epstein’s ranch. It turns out the Singleton family recently sold most of that land to … Stanley freaking Kroenke.
How it all fits together is unclear, but Kroenke is certainly traveling in some iffy circles.
Knicks
James Dolan inexplicably built an intelligence-grade surveillance infrastructure, staffs it with former CIA and FBI officers, and is sitting on a trove of surveillance material that could be used for just about anything that billionaire wants. And that billionaire’s empire was financed by the same machine that produced a CIA Executive Director on the Apollo board, a former Drexel trader running the Pentagon, and the deep pockets that funded Jeffrey Epstein’s operation.
Hawks
Tony Ressler was a senior vice president at Drexel Burnham Lambert in the high-yield bond department. He left when Drexel collapsed in 1990 and co-founded Apollo Global Management in 1990 alongside Leon Black, Marc Rowan, and Josh Harris—using Credit Lyonnais money to buy distressed Drexel bonds at fire-sale prices. Adam Silver’s college roommate at Duke, Jim Zelter, runs Apollo as president. Ressler left Apollo in 1997 to co-found Ares Management. Leon Black, who funded Epstein, is married to Anthony Ressler’s sister Debra. Anthony’s brother Richard was also an associate of Epstein. The word “Ressler” appears 487 times in the recent Epstein file dump. Reportedly the most successful investment in the history of private equity–Lyondell Basel–was a collaboration between Ares, Apollo, and oligarch Len Blavatnik.
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Tilman Fertitta and Richard Handler MONICA SCHIPPER/GETTY/HAUTE LIVING
Rockets
Tilman Fertitta comes from a family with well-documented historical mob ties.
Fertitta himself made his fortune from investing in hospitality properties like Landry’s restaurants and Golden Nugget casinos. Donald Trump appointed Fertitta as U.S. Ambassador to Italy.
But Fertitta’s most interesting ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s world come through his good friend Richard Handler, who runs Jefferies. Handler was a 28-year-old trader at Drexel when it collapsed in 1990, and has a career that has intertwined in interesting ways with Leon Black and Carl Icahn. The word “Handler” is in the Epstein files almost 700 times.
Handler and Fertitta have a well documented friendship: Jeffries served as lead underwriter when Fertitta financed the Rockets purchase with $1.4B in bond sales, bought his yacht in 2024, and they co-founded the SPAC Landcadia Holdings (the name is evident part Landry’s and part Handler’s Leucadia).
Thunder
A lot of TrueHoop’s investigation into the dirty money around Epstein has focused on A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, a former CIA executive who was on the board of Apollo Global when Apollo founder Leon Black funded Epstein’s operation. The thing is, Buzzy has been on a lot of boards—often in companies where Carl Icahn is a big investor. Starting in 2014, Krongard was a board member of a Chesapeake offshoot called Seventy Seven Energy. In the years to follow, McClendon got in legal trouble, and then died driving his Chevy Tahoe into a bridge embankment. I’m not sure anyone has explained to the public how it all fits together, but I do know that this guy Buzzy connects the Thunder’s ownership group, Apollo Global, and the CIA. Read more about all that here.
Lakers
The Lakers are now owned by Mark Walter, who made his name at Guggenheim Partners. Guggenheim formed in 1999 and quickly became a big player in the world of sports investing—but it always seemed to exist in the shadow of Michael Milken, whose Drexel Burnham formed the network and defined the methods that made Apollo Global successful. Indeed, the SEC investigated and fined Guggenheim $20 million for failing to disclose that Guggenheim president Todd Boehly had taken a $50 million personal loan from Milken while Milken was under a lifetime securities industry ban. The SEC found Guggenheim “breached its fiduciary duty” to clients. Mark Walter and Boehly used Guggenheim insurance company funds (at least $300 million) alongside their personal capital to buy the LA Dodgers in 2012. Government regulators investigated the insurance fund arrangement but declined to act. Guggenheim is mentioned here and therein the Epstein files.

So what was the deal with Pushas name allegedly in the files?
deflectionnikka shut updeflection
Supposedly, he and Jay were best buddies with Eric Weinstein, and supposedly a chick called the FBI tip line accusing Pusha and Weinstein of being involved with the assault/rape of another woman.So what was the deal with Pushas name allegedly in the files?