Epstein Secrets

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

hed from the network, or find it too inhospitable to stay on. And yet he was pained by Trump’s slavish attentions to Murdoch, who had not only ousted Ailes but whose conservatism was at best utilitarian. “He was for Hillary!” said Hannity. Ruminating out loud, Hannity said he would leave the network and

he network seemed held in a peculiar Murdoch family limbo between conservative father and liberal sons. A few hours after the O’Reilly announcement, Ailes, from his new oceanfront home in Palm Beach—precluded by his separation agreement with Fox from any efforts to compete with it for eighteen months—se

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

, 14 Trump, Don, Jr., 17-18, 27, 204, 252-61, 271, 278-79, 307 Trump, Donald Abe meeting at Mar-a-Lago and, 106 Afghanistan and, 263-68 Ailes on, 2-8 Ailes’s funeral and, 222-24 Alabama GOP Senate run-off, 301-4 Apprentice and, 30, 76 Bannon and, 1-8, 31-32, 35, 52-53, 59-65, 93, 122, 146-47, 158, 187, 1

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

tically described some of the possibilities for coming up with the billion or so dollars he thought he would need for a new cable network. Both men, Ailes and Bannon, fancied themselves particular students of history, both autodidacts partial to universal field theories. They saw this in a charismatic s