Trump live updates: President says Texas is ‘entitled to five more seats’ as Dems ready for ‘knife fight’

A victim of Jeffrey Epstein has condemned what they called the Trump administration’s “political warfare” in its handling of government files on the late convicted sex offender as the Justice Department pushes for the release of grand jury transcripts in his New York federal case.

Epstein was a wealthy financier who died in a New York City jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for federal sex trafficking charges. He had been accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls. About a decade earlier, Epstein pleaded guilty to Florida state charges of soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.

During his CNBC interview, President Donald Trump hailed prices falling for “everything” except stocks.

“We were in such bad shape when I took over, eggs had tripled in price. More than that, everything was up, and prices are down,” he said.

However, as Erin Keller reports, more than half of Americans are experiencing financial strain due to the rising cost of groceries.

The disgraced British socialite and former girlfriend of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was quietly transferred this week from a stricter low-security prison in Tallahassee, Florida, to a prison camp 100 miles outside Houston, Texas.

Maxwell’s new prison mainly houses inmates convicted of “white-collar” crimes and minor offenses, and they are said to be angry about her presence.

The battle surrounds the redistricting process, in which state legislatures and other officials take a look at once-a-decade census results to redraw congressional districts to balance the changing population.

But in Texas, Republican lawmakers — under the direction of the president and Governor Greg Abbott — are taking the rare step of drawing a new map in the middle of the decade, only a few years after the last redistricting cycle, in the hopes of picking up more Republican seats in the House of Representatives in 2026.

Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly set to formally scrap a controversial program, championed by his billionaire adviser Elon Musk, which required federal employees to summarize five weekly workplace achievements. The move, expected as soon as Tuesday, was reported by Reuters, citing two individuals familiar with the matter.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal human resources agency that had implemented Musk’s drive to reduce the federal workforce, is expected to announce the termination of the “five things” email to HR representatives across the federal government later today. The sources declined to be named as the information was not yet public.

Although many federal agencies had already begun phasing out compliance with the weekly email, this unannounced decision signals the Trump administration is moving past one of Musk’s most unpopular initiatives, especially following a dramatic falling out between the two men in early June.

Neither the White House nor OPM immediately responded to requests for comment from Reuters.

President Donald Trump is set to crack down on Wall Street banks accused of dropping customers over their conservative beliefs and shutting out cryptocurrency companies, a new report states.

Trump, the self-professed first “crypto-president,” is expected to sign an executive order as soon as this week that threatens financial penalties in response to so-called politically motivated “debanking,” sources told the Wall Street Journal.

Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice and former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has said via her legal team that she is against the unsealing of the grand jury transcripts relating to her case, as requested by President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.

Maxwell argues that because she hasn’t seen them and is “actively litigating her case,” it shouldn’t be made public.

In her filing with the court, her team writes: “Jeffrey Epstein is dead. Ghislaine Maxwell is not. Whatever interest the public may have in Epstein, that interest cannot justify a broad intrusion into grand jury secrecy in a case where the defendant is alive, her legal options are viable, and her due process rights remain.”

Earlier, the Justice Department admitted that grand jury transcripts in the criminal cases of Epstein and Maxwell contain mostly publicly available information, as Kelly Rissman reported:

Phoning in to Squawk Box, Trump spoke at length about his economic record nearly seven months into his second term – maintaining that several members of his administration, whom Trump has expressed dissatisfaction with, were “highly political.”