Epstein Secrets

’s on the program. It’s his program.” Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon’—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—‘‘is all in. We know where we'r

t something. Everything. The billionaires had to rethink. So did everyone in the Trump orbit. The campaign staff, now suddenly in a position to snag West Wing jobs—career- and history-making jobs—had to see this odd, difficult, even ridiculous, and, on the face of it, ill-equipped person in a new light. He

he newly appointed deputy chief of staff, Katie Walsh, Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had peeled off to inspect the now vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, not rigorously cleaned on a regular ba

himself. Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered this: “We’ve put our man on top!” From Riyadh, the presidential party went on to Jerusalem, where the president met with Netanyahu and, in Bethlehem, with Abbas, expressing ever greater certainty that, in his third-person guise, “Trump will

as not only known by people outside the White House for the alacrity with which it returned calls and for the ease with which it seemed to accomplish West Wing tasks, it also seemed to be comprised of people who liked each other and who were dedicated to a common goal: eliminating as much friction as possibl

n Sachs, too, that in the middle of a Republican-controlled Washington and a virulent, if not anti-Semitic (at least toward liberal Jews), right-wing West Wing, the Kushner-Cohn Democrats appeared to be ascendant. Part of the credit went to Kushner, who showed an unexpected tenacity. Conflict averse—in the K

, 219, 227, 230, 265, 281, 289 Jackson, Andrew, 44, 67, 158 Jackson, Michael, 28, 42 Japan, 39, 106 Jarrett, Valerie, 129 Jefferson, Thomas, 293 Jerusalem, 6 Jews, 73, 140-45, 157, 293 John Birch Society, 127 Johnson, Boris, 70 Johnson, Jamie, 79-80 Johnson, Lyndon B., 6-7, 53, 66, 158, 167 Johnso

Republican Party had now become the symbol of its civil war. On that Monday, the president’s son-in-law appeared at the microphones in front of the West Wing to preview his statement to Senate investigators about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. Having almost never spoken before in public, he no

l influence with the president, but important members of the staff saw them as having this juice, and hence believed that they were the true north of West Wing advancement and power. Curiously, for all their callowness, Jared and Ivanka had become quite a fearsome presence, as feared by others as the two of

rogress during its two years in office, mostly because the White House insisted on a 100 percent construction freeze in the West Bank settlements and Jerusalem as a precondition for negotiations. This was politically impossible in Israel, and also meant that Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas could not come

l was praised as the right man for the job at the right time. On Friday, though, that capacity had reached its limit, and Mitchell told his bosses in the West Wing that he'd had enough. His reasons, he said, were personal-the kind of nebulous rationale that leaves ample room for interpretation. Unmentioned were