Epstein Secrets

itutions. To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, “such a cunt.” HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020045 Since her firing on January 30, Yates had remained suspiciously quiet. When journalists approached her, she, or her intermediaries, explained that per her lawyers she was shut down on all

mp believed, of a sustained and well-organized media rollout for her. (His press view was confirmed later in May by a lavish, hagiographic profile of Yates in the New Yorker. “How long do you think she was planning this?” he asked, rhetorically. “You know she was. It’s her payday.”) “Yates is only famous

ought up the possibility of firing everybody. Should I fire Bannon? Should I fire Reince? Should I fire McMaster? Should I fire Spicer? Should I fire Tillerson? This ritual was, everyone understood, more a pretext to a discussion of the power he held than it was, strictly, about personnel decisions. Still, i

dy with foreign policy stature and an international network had been put in HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020053 place—even the new secretary of state designate, Rex Tillerson, had no real experience in foreign policy. To bewildered foreign secretaries, it seemed logical to see the presidentelect’s son-in-law as a figure of

cting AG job needed someone with Senate confirmation. And even though she seemed to see herself as something of a prisoner held in hostile territory, Yates accepted the job. Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn during the administration’s first week

White House in its assessment of the Yates message ended up seeing this as less a problem with an always hard-to-handle Flynn than as a problem with Yates, even as a threat from her: the Justice Department, with its vast staff of career and Obama-inclined prosecutors, had ears on the Trump team. 7 OK O

us impressions of the man, agreed to sign on. Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy De Vos, Jeb Bush loyalists—all of them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a pecu

every cabinet member for the next seven days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military 1950s-type cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Session is two days, Mattis is two days... .” Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominate

orld Bank, 257 World Wrestling Entertainment, 22 Wynn, Steve, 30 Xi Jinping, 193, 228, 258 Yaffa, Joshua, 154 Yahoo! News, 37 Yanukovych, Viktor, 101 Yates, Sally, 94-96, 98, 104, 214-16 Yemen, 6 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 128-28, 138 Zhukova, Dasha, 80 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_020140 Zucker, Jeff, 92 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT

USE_OVERSIGHT_020114 president’s part. The daily discussion among senior staffers, those still there and those now gone—all of whom had written off Tillerson’s future in the Trump administration—was how long General Kelly would last as chief of staff. There was something of a virtual office pool, and the j

believed that the sole upside of being part of the Trump White House was to help prevent worse from happening. In early October, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s fate was sealed—if his obvious ambivalence toward the president had not already sealed it—by the revelation that he had called the president “a fucki

ge Bannon’s ouster by McMaster’s hand from the NSC. With the president promising that he would make up his mind by August, and McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson pressing for a decision as soon as possible, Bannon- inspired media began a campaign to brand McMaster as a globalist, interventionist, and all aroun