Donald Trump wants to crush The Swamp. The leaks, the sneaks, and the secrets are all there. Our writers, David Gardner, Farrah Tomazin, and Sarah Ewall-Wice, are sifting through the ooze so you don’t have to. Don’t miss out.
In this week’s news from the ooze…Brett Ratner, Corey Lewandowski, Ghislaine Maxwell, Johannes Brahms, Thomas Massie, Kimberly Newsom Guilfoyle, Leon Black, Ro Khanna, Ivanka Trump, John F. Kennedy, Zaha Hadid, Melania Trump, Pete Hegseth, Raisa Gorbachev, and Alexander Scriabin.
Maxwell’s Hammer Should Come Down on Epstein Co-Conspirator Cover-Up
Ghislaine Maxwell may be locked up in the Club Med version of a Texas prison, but she just lobbed a rhetorical grenade straight into the middle of Washington’s most awkward silence.
Buried in a habeas petition that Maxwell recently filed in court, hoping to void her conviction, the convicted associate of Jeffrey Epstein references four potential “co-conspirators” and “25 men” who allegedly reached “secret settlements” connected to Epstein’s abuse—and were never indicted.
Which immediately raises the question Pam Bondi and her Department of Justice desperately want to avoid answering: Who are these men, and why are they still being protected?
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act specifically to stop this kind of institutional stonewalling. The law signed by President Donald Trump in mid-November requires the Justice Department to release unclassified Epstein-related records. Clear. Simple. Mandatory. And yet the DOJ continues to slow-walk, redact, and delay its way around compliance like it’s trying to outlast public attention.
Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna—still the most unexpected duo in modern politics—have been openly furious. They’ve hit out at the DOJ for defying the law, demanded timelines, and warned that subpoenas are on the way.
But before anyone pretends Maxwell’s petition is all theoretical, we already know what “settlement, no indictment” looks like in real life. As The Swamp has previously reported, billionaire Leon Black, a Trump ally and former Apollo CEO, paid $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle claims tied to his financial dealings with Epstein. No criminal charges, just a very large check and a quiet exit.
Notably, Black is the same person who, in 2018, as Congress probed foreign interference in the 2016 election, gave evidence about being with Trump during a trip to Russia in the naughty ‘90s, where they attended a concert, a discotheque, and, according to Black’s sworn testimony, “might have been in a strip club together.” Black paid Epstein roughly $170 million, nominally for “tax and estate planning” but denied knowing anything about his industrial-scale sex trafficking. But multiply that settlement by 25 and suddenly Maxwell’s filing looks less like noise and more like a roadmap.
So naturally, Trump’s response has been to deflect. Every time the Epstein story heats up, he magically discovers a new distraction: Venezuela, Greenland, the White House ballroom. If the DOJ had nothing to hide, transparency would be easy. If the files were harmless, they’d already be public.
If the names didn’t matter, nobody would be working this hard to keep them secret.
Coming Soon to an Empty Theater Near You…
Premiere planners tasked with filling the seats for Melania Trump’s Brett Ratner-directed documentary Blush Hour 4 are facing a formidable challenge at the (Donald J. Trump and) John F. Kennedy Center on Thursday night.
It was tough enough to drag Trumpers in from the cold to attend the 70-person black-tie White House screening in the East Room on Saturday night. “A Historic Moment,” Melania wrote afterward. “I am deeply humbled to have been surrounded by an inspiring room of friends, family, and cultural iconoclasts at the White House last night. Each of these individuals brought their unique vision to the world, making a lasting impression.”
First off, not to go all schoolmarm-y, but we think she meant “cultural icons” and not “iconoclasts. With all the usual suck-ups at the WH screening, organizers were furiously trying to rustle up some more guests for the struggling Trump Kennedy Center amid ice and ICE storms that are keeping folks inside.
Alexander Scriabin’s Le Poème Divin, with Johannes Brahms’ Double Concerto, is playing in the Center’s Concert Hall on Thursday night. Maybe they can ICE grab a few classical music aficionados from next door to sit through “Melania’s Waltz,” composed for the film by Hollywood composer Tony Neiman. (Is it just us, or did “Melania’s Waltz” sound like the theme from Emmy-winning theme from Succession in places?) But then again, Scriabin described his own Symphony Number 3 as, “the evolution of the human spirit, torn from an entire past of beliefs and mysteries… to a joyous and intoxicated affirmation of its unity with the universe.” So maybe not.
It’s clearly been left up to the reclusive leading lady to drum up some interest for the public release on Friday in approximately 2,000 theaters. She’s descending from her tower at Mar-a-Lago to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. It is supposed to mark Melania’s achievements over the past 12 months, so it shouldn’t take long.
Kimberly Cosplays in the Snow With Gavin and His Kneepads
After months of summer wear in Athens, Kimberly Guilfoyle finally got the opportunity to show off her winter chic in Davos when she made an appearance at Axios House and tried to convince her new European friends that her boss wasn’t such a bad guy. The Swiss trip gave her an opportunity to swaddle herself in a giant white fur coat. Less ski bunny, more Raisa Gorbachev. No telling whether she ran into ex-hubbie Gavin Newsom while cosplaying in the snow. We assume it would be a frosty greeting, especially as Trump wouldn’t let him inside to talk. While Kimberly played at being an ambassador, Gavin was doing his best to look like a presidential contender. “I should have brought a bunch of knee pads for all the world,” he said, scolding world leaders for their appeasing of Trump.
Pentagon Pete’s Weekend War Plans
Pentagon Pete Hegseth released his shiny new 2026 National Defense Strategy last week, the way Washington releases all contentious documents: at 7 p.m. on a Friday with barely a whisper. No rollout. No speech. And definitely no selfie-video from the former Fox News Host explaining why this isn’t a routine update. It’s a doctrinal earthquake.
Buried within the strategy is a new organizing concept: “Homeland and Hemisphere,” reminiscent of the Nazi slogan “Heim ins Reich.” This phrase translates to “Home into the Reich” and was used to justify Germany’s annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Just as Hitler wanted more territories to belong to Greater Germany, Hegseth’s new doctrine effectively expands the definition of the American homeland to include all of North and South America.
“We will actively and fearlessly defend America’s interests throughout the Western Hemisphere,” it declares, promising to guarantee U.S. military and commercial access to “key terrain”, specifically naming the Panama Canal, the Gulf of America, and Greenland.
The strategy also openly invokes 19th-century imperialism, praising the idea that America’s “predecessors recognized” the need for a more powerful hemispheric role and crediting the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary as the model.
That’s right: the same Roosevelt Corollary that justified U.S. military invasions of Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Occupations. Coups. “Stability operations.”
There’s also a warning for Canada and Mexico: that America “will engage in good faith with our neighbors” provided those neighbors “do their part to defend our shared interests.”
“And where they do not,” the defense strategy asserts, “we will stand ready to take focused, decisive action that concretely advances U.S. interests.” No wonder the strategy was dropped late on Friday as Washington braced for a massive snowstorm. It’s much easier to normalize hemispheric militarization when nobody’s paying attention — and when Pentagon Pete is hunkering down with his third wife.
Shiny DJT Plan for Plane Dulles Airport
The firm founded by the late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid has come up with an enterprising way to edge out the other 20 firms vying for a contract to renovate the tired Washington Dulles Airport—by proposing the Donald J. Trump Terminal. The president has yet to find a building he doesn’t want his name on, so the suck-up move is a no-brainer. The good news is they want to replace the obsolete shuttles with speedy Direct Jet Transport vehicles. Or “DJT” as they are known in the business. And what would founder Hadid have thought of this bid? Her portfolio included works for dictators in Azerbaijan and Libya, so she’d probably not be turning in her grave. Still, it’s also worth noting that Hadid was the first woman and Muslim to win the prestigious Pritzker Prize (founded by the family of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker), which is called “the Nobel Prize of Architecture.” No word yet if Trump will demand that Hadid’s firm present him with her medal if they want the airport contract.
The Vanishing Man Who Never Goes Away
Donald Trump met late Monday night with Kristi Noem and her ever-lurking political shadow, Corey Lewandowski, to talk through the spiraling crisis in Minneapolis. Officially, the meeting was about law enforcement and unrest. Unofficially, it looked like the latest episode of The Apprentice: Recurring Characters Edition—the one where everyone pretends they’re surprised Lewandoswki is still in the room. His first firing came in 2016, when Trump dumped him as campaign manager after months of internal warfare with longtime GOP campaign consultant Paul Manafort. Manafort was brought in to professionalize the operation; Lewandowski preferred chaos, cable hits, and scorched earth. The feud split the campaign down the middle. Jared and Ivanka Trump, Trump donors and the RNC all sided with Manafort—and Lewandowski was out. He then resurfaced in Trump’s orbit in 2021, running a pro-Trump super PAC, until that comeback collapsed under allegations of unwanted sexual advances toward a donor at a Las Vegas event. The accusations were detailed, corroborated, and politically toxic enough that even Trump allies quietly shoved him back into the shadows. And then there’s the John Kelly brawl in 2018, in which Trump’s chief of staff grabbed Lewandowski by the collar and tried to remove him —a chest-to-chest showdown serious enough that the Secret Service had to intervene. But Lewandowski doesn’t disappear. He rebrands. Enter Kristi Noem, who welcomed him into her inner circle, where he reportedly began exerting behind-the-scenes influence over staffing and decisions, irritating career officials and alarming Trump advisers who saw him as a walking oppo file. Which brings us back to today: Trump once again reportedly weighing whether to fire the same man he keeps rehiring. In Trumpworld, loyalty often counts more than competence, but Lewandowski’s time may well be up… again.
The Speaker’s ICE Cold Silence
The House is in recess this week, which has given one of the most powerful people in the U.S. and second in line for the presidency the cover he needs to stay silent in the wake of another ICE killing. Speaker Mike Johnson has not issued any public statements about the killing more than four days after the incident. He also hasn’t addressed it on social media. The speaker ushered the legislation through, including funding for ICE, last week, then skipped town. While Democrats are now demanding that the DHS money be stripped from the funding package, it might be time for the top congressional leader to weigh in on the mounting outrage. Instead, Johnson has been posting away about the tax law, but not a word on the shooting or ICE.
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