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House Judiciary Committee Democrats just released a 50-page report alleging that not only was Donald Trump an active and willing participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women, but that Attorney General Todd Blanche may have also committed federal crimes in order to protect him. That same report includes a brand-new allegation from a former beauty pageant contestant who says Trump raped her in the 1990s. Republicans are now expected to lose numerous House seats redrawn to be more favorable to them despite big money on their side. And even voters in deep-red territory are telling Democrats they’re fed up with Trump’s corruption and his contribution to the sky-high cost of living.
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Today, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee released an unsigned 50-plus-page staff report that meticulously lays out what they call the case against Donald Trump, using information pulled directly from the Epstein files. They’re calling for an independent special counsel to lead an investigation into the president. They also want to probe what they’re calling Attorney General Todd Blanche’s multiple conflicts of interest given his prior role as Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, and look into why Blanche’s DOJ has been so hesitant to share evidence with state and foreign law enforcement agencies.
Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who would chair the Judiciary Committee should Democrats retake the House in November, said in a statement tgar Epstein’s survivors “deserve to be heard,” and that Congress must have the complete Epstein files as required by the legislation Trump himself signed into law last fall.
The report alleges that Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s years of abuse of young women throughout the 1990s. It’s worth clarifying that the report offers no direct evidence of Trump’s alleged crimes beyond the accounts of survivors who testified to committee staff. The report also repeats some longstanding allegations that haven’t yet been substantiated. Trump has also maintained that he committed no crimes or misconduct as it pertains to Epstein and the girls and young women he trafficked.
The report also makes comparisons between Trump’s public statements and various emails and deposition transcripts. It also ties in his own drawings and signatures, while calling attention to inconsistencies in what the president has said about his knowledge of Epstein’s crimes.
Judiciary Committee Democrats also turned the microscope on Blanche, saying the then-deputy attorney general’s 2025 meeting with Epstein’s chief accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, “potentially constituted witness tampering and obstruction of an official proceeding.” In June of this year, a federal judge ruled Blanche effectively conceded DOJ was knowingly violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act, though Blanche’s DOJ is appealing the decision.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis dismissed the report and its findings, calling it a distraction concocted by what she called “crazed Democrats.”
When Richard Nixon ordered thar special prosecutor Archibald Cox be fired in October of 1973, his attorney general and his deputy attorney general at the time both resigned from their posts rather than carry out the illegal order. This is simply because they knew the Justice Department answers to the American people — not the current occupant of the Oval Office. If this report is correct, we now have an attorney general in Todd Blanche who has completely turned that principle on its head. A republic can’t survive long if the nation’s top cop is working for the perpetrator.
That report’s most explosive allegation is from Beatrice Keul, a Switzerland-born former beauty pageant contestant. Keul told Democratic committee staff that Trump raped her in a “brutal” way in 1993 at his Plaza Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This was apparently after the two of them had spent time with Epstein.
At the time, Keul was 24 years old. She says she met Trump at a pageant event that November, where he promised to help her obtain a visa and get admitted to New York University. She recalled Epstein introduced himself to her as “Don’s best friend,” and that after she was invited upstairs, Trump grabbed her from behind and assaulted her, tearing her dress and leaving her bleeding and bruised. The report then claims Trump demanded she promise to keep quiet about the attack.
Keul initially went public with her allegation in a 2024 interview with the Daily Mail. In that account, she said Trump groped her but that she got him to stop before he went further. That report doesn’t include transcripts from her interview with the Judiciary Committee or give an explanation for why her account changed from the initial claim in 2024. The White House continues to deny all allegations.
Democrats said Keul’s account is similar to that of writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully obtained a sexual abuse verdict from a New York jury in 2023. If Democrats win back control of the House this fall, Raskin’s committee would lead any effort to impeach him. and the report flags Epstein-related documents known to exist that are missing from DOJ’s public database.
The authors of our Constitution who wrote “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” into Article II in 1787 did so because they just fought a bloody war against a king who answered to nobody, and they had no intention of creating another one. Whether these allegations will be proven next year remains to be seen. However, a woman’s account deserves the same serious hearing it would get if the man she’s accusing were an ordinary American. Because in the United States of America, nobody should wear a crown.
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Starting last year, Trump and his team urged Republican-led state legislatures to redraw their own congressional maps in an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymander, with the goal of building an impenetrable firewall to prevent midterm losses. But Nathan Gonzales of Inside Elections reports it “just has not turned out that way.”
One primary example is North Carolina’s new 1st Congressional District. Republican lawmakers redrew it so Trump would have won it by more than 11 points two years ago. But the district is currently rated as a toss-up, despite an NPR analysis of showing more than $42 million in ad spending there just in the last seven weeks.
During a recent rally in eastern North Carolina, Trump called Republican nominee Laurie Buckhout to the stage and admitted Speaker Mike Johnson had asked the president to come give the candidate a final boost given how close the race was.
Democratic Congressman Don Davis of North Carolina is running for reelection on his third new district map. He says folks in his district are distinctly worried about keeping their heads above water given the high cost of living. He noted that farmers, truckers, and fishermen all tell him they’re getting squeezed by high has prices. He’s also recently quipped that the next gerrymander might have to annex Virginia or push his district into the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s not just happened in North Carolina, either. Two heavily gerrymandered congressional districts in Florida are now seeing a combined $90 million in ad spending in order to bolster Republicans. Multiple Texas districts drawn with the intent of giving the GOP 10-point advantage have also drifted in Democrats’ favor. North Carolina-based political consultant Morgan Jackson said the 2025 and 2026 redrawing frenzy will likely be remembered more as “a dummymander rather than a gerrymander.”
Back in 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry signed off on the redrawing of state senate district that was so thoroughly carved up that a Boston newspaper drew it as a salamander, hence the origin of the term “gerrymander.” More than 200 years later, Trump’s pet legislators tried the same trick on a national scale, but may have handed the advantage to the opposition anyway. This proves that while politicians may be able to draw all the lines they want, they still can’t draw away somebody’s sky-high grocery bill.
Ohio has been viewed as a Republican stronghold for more than a decade, but that could be shifting in this election cycle. Democrat Kim McCarthy is running for the Ohio House of Representatives in rural Greene County against a three-term GOP incumbent who beat her by 15 points last time, in an area Trump handily won with 60 percent of the total vote.
The district includes Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — Ohio’s largest single-site employer — where both civilian employees and federal contractors have been hit particularly hard by the Trump administration’s steep cuts to the civil service. Between that, rising mortgage rates and the significant increase in everyday living costs, McCarthy says she’s hearing from local voters that they plan on voting Democratic all the way down the ballot for the first time in their lives.
Early voting numbers suggest there’s something to that theory. By October 13, Democratic-affiliated voters in rural Defiance County had cast more early ballots than Republicans, in a county Trump won with nearly 70 percent of the vote. Residents there are fighting a proposed data center project that Trump has cheered. A local GM foundry that ships engine parts to Ontario is also caught in the middle of Trump’s tariff war with Canada.
Bowling Green State University political scientist Robert Alexander said the surge may reflect Democrats’ distrust of mail-in voting given the Trump administration’s attacks on the mail voting process. But with former Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod in a neck-and-neck race with Republican Senator Jon Husted, every single vote ,ayyers. McCarthy says registered Republicans are now coming to her meetings, saying they’re “disgusted at the corruption.”
Back in 1930, when Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff into law despite more than a thousand economists objecting, Canada fired back. This led to farm prices collapsing across the board. Just two years, Republicans in rural counties across the Midwest helped kick Hoover out and hand control of the country over to FDR and the Democrats. When a foundry in Ohio feels the heat from Trump’s trade war with Canada, those voters aren’t abandoning their conservative principles, but simply voting with their paychecks rather than to appease a president’s ego.
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Make sure to catch our live interview with Maju Varghese, co-founder and executive director of the Democracy Security Project, today at 2 PM ET! Watch live on our homepage at RawAmerica.com.
I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Once again, please be sure to tap the ❤️ and click the restack button so we can break through the algorithm and get these stories in front of the people who really need them.