Episode Details

The President of the United States lost the Saudis. The Commerce Secretary forgot his story. A federal judge found a lost note by Jeffrey Epstein, Elon Musk’s ex-partner says she’s done with right, and Ted Turner — the man who built 24-hour news — died on a day tailor-made for cable news..

Trump declared “Operation Project Freedom” on Truth Social Sunday. He told nobody — not Mohammed bin Salman, not Oman, not Kuwait, not the UAE — that he was going to launch a U.S. Navy escort mission through the Strait of Hormuz that needed their bases, their airspace, and their overflight rights to function.

Saudi Arabia revoked all three.

Within thirty-six hours, Project Freedom was dead on the tarmac. Trump called MBS to fix it. The call did not fix it. The White House dressed up the retreat as a “great progress” peace deal. Iran’s Mohsen Rezaei went on Al Mayadeen Thursday morning and called the proposal “unrealistic,” demanding war reparations as a precondition for any agreement. The Iranians sent the deal back like a wrong order.

5️⃣ Mullin’s customs law — DHS reaches into Canada

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security used a 1930 customs statute — Section 1509 of the Tariff Act, written to verify duty payments on shipped merchandise — to subpoena Google for the full digital life of a Canadian who criticized ICE on X. Hundreds of similar subpoenas have gone to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord since the start of the second Trump term, aimed at anyone who criticized ICE or pointed to ICE locations. The 2017 Inspector General audit of the same statute found one in five Section 1509 summonses exceeded the agency’s legal authority. CBP folded then. DHS has not folded now.

4️⃣ The note the DOJ never had

Wednesday evening, Judge Kenneth Karas unsealed a yellow legal-pad note in White Plains. The text: “They investigated me for month — FOUND NOTHING!!!” / “It is a treat to be able to choose one’s time to say goodbye.” / “NO FUN… NOT WORTH IT!!”

Epstein’s cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione — a former NYPD officer convicted of murdering four people — found the note in a graphic novel after Epstein’s July 2019 jail-cell incident and kept it. It sat in his court file for years. It is not in the three-million-page Epstein Files Transparency Act release. The Justice Department admits it has never seen the document.

It surfaced because The New York Times petitioned the court to unseal it. Without that petition, it would still be a sealed exhibit in a federal courthouse.

3️⃣ Lutnick under not-oath

Howard Lutnick did not testify Wednesday. He gave a transcribed interview, off-camera, not under oath, in front of the House Oversight Committee for more than four hours. By the end of it the Republican chairman, James Comer, was telling reporters Lutnick had not been truthful.

The story keeps refusing to stay still. The first version: Lutnick met Epstein once in 1998, saw the massage table, was disgusted, never spoke to him again. The second version, as the files came out: Lutnick sat next door at 11 East 71st Street for twenty-one years, did Adfin with Epstein in 2012, kept Cantor Ventures correspondence going through 2014, took his wife and four children and a full deployment of nannies to Little St. James in December 2012, accepted a $50,000 contribution from Epstein for a 2017 dinner honoring himself, and emailed Epstein about a museum expansion through 2018.

Wednesday produced version three. Lutnick, who had told a podcast that Epstein was one of the greatest blackmailers of all time, told the committee that he had simply been speculating and that Epstein never engaged in blackmail. The podcast audio exists.

Rep. Ro Khanna, on camera afterwards: “If Donald Trump had seen the video transcript, he would have fired Howard Lutnick.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene has now publicly described Trump telling Pam Bondi that the Eps