Clinton: “There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

HCR
Heather Cox Richardson

February 5, 2026

The past two days have seen a growing struggle between Democrats, who are demanding accountability from the Trump administration, and Republicans trying to hide what the administration is up to.

Last night, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) published a letter he sent to Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Ratcliffe. Wyden is the longest-serving member of the Senate Intelligence Committee and is a careful, hardworking, and dogged member of Congress. When Wyden speaks, people listen. Ratcliffe was an attack dog for Trump during his first impeachment trial and had no experience with intelligence before Trump forced his nomination to become director of national intelligence through the Senate. Now he is Trump’s appointee to the directorship of the CIA.

Wyden’s letter to Ratcliffe said: “I write to alert you to a classified letter I sent you earlier today in which I express deep concerns about CIA activities. Thank you for your attention to this important matter.” When Wired senior reporter Dell Cameron, who covers different forms of surveillance, commented, “I don’t like this,” Wyden reposted the comment.

Wyden has a long history of alerting the public in whatever way he can when something bad is going on that he cannot reveal because of its classified nature. This letter appears to be a way to alert the public while also notifying Ratcliffe that the CIA director will not be able in the future to deny that he received Wyden’s letter.

Also last night, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) sent Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SC) and House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) a letter outlining demands Democrats want incorporated into a measure that will appropriate more funds for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the department that contains Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol. Democrats insisted on stripping DHS funding out of the bills to fund the government for 2026 after ICE and Border Patrol agents began to inflict terror on the country.

Those demands are pretty straightforward, but if written into law as required for the release of funds, they would change behavior. The Democrats want federal agents to enter private homes only with a judicial warrant (as was policy until the administration produced a secret memo saying that DHS officials themselves could sign off on raids). They want agents to stop wearing masks and to have their names, agencies, and unique ID numbers visible on their uniforms, as law enforcement officers do. They want an end to racial profiling—that is, agents detaining individuals on the basis of their skin color, place of employment, or language—and to raids of so-called sensitive sites: medical facilities, schools, childcare facilities, churches, polling places, and courts.

They want agents to be required to have a reasonable use of force policy and to be removed during an investigation if they violate it. They want federal agents to coordinate with local and state governments, and for those governments to have jurisdiction over federal agents who break the law. They want DHS detention facilities to have the same standards of any detention facility and for detainees to have access to their lawyers. They want states to be able to sue if those conditions are not met, and they want Congress members to have unscheduled access to the centers to oversee them.

They want body cameras to be used for accountability but prohibited for gathering and storing information about protesters. And they want federal agents to have standardized uniforms like those of regular law enforcement, not paramilitaries.

As Schumer and Jeffries wrote, these are commonsense measures that protect Americans’ constitutional rights and ensure responsible law enforcement, and should apply to all federal activity even without Democrats demanding them.

Thune has said the demands are “very unrealistic and unserious,” and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, the second-ranking Senate Republican, called them “radical and extreme” and a “far-left wish list.” But Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) agreed that agents “need body cameras. They need to remove masks. They need proper training. They need to be conducting operations that are consistent with their mission.”

Trump’s determination to prove that he actually won the 2020 election continues to drive the administration. This morning, in a rambling and often crazed speech at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump told attendees: “They rigged the second election. I had to win it. I had to win it. I needed it for my own ego. I would’ve had a bad ego for the rest of my life. Now I really have a big ego, though. Beating these lunatics was incredible, right? What a great feeling, winning every swing state, winning the popular vote. The first time, you know, they said I didn’t win the popular vote. I did.”

The reality that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 by about 2.9 million votes explains Trump’s lie that undocumented immigrants voted in the election.

Trump also offered yet another explanation for the presence of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard at the FBI raid on a warehouse holding ballots and other election-related materials in Fulton County, Georgia, saying that Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted Gabbard there.

Phil Stewart, Erin Banco, and Jonathan Landay of Reuters reported yesterday that a team working for Gabbard seized voting machines and data in Puerto Rico in what sources told the Reuters reporters was an attempt to prove that Venezuela had hacked the voting machines there. The reporters say that Gabbard’s team was looking at whether the government of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro hacked the election.

There is no evidence for this theory, but it has strong adherents among Trump’s followers. Legal and political analysts, including Asha Rangappa, Norm Ornstein, and Allison Gill, have noted that administration officials might force Maduro, who is currently in prison in the U.S. after a raid in which U.S. forces took him and his wife into custody, to “cooperate” on this lie. In The Breakdown, Gill notes that while Trump has no role in elections, the Supreme Court has said that he must be given deference in the conduct of foreign affairs. He has relied on that deference to justify tariffs, immigration sweeps, attacks on small boats, and so on. It is not a stretch to think he is now trying to interfere with the 2026 election by claiming elections are part of foreign affairs.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Reuters reporters: “What’s most alarming here is that Director Gabbard’s own team acknowledges there was no evidence of foreign interference, yet they seized voting machines and election data anyway. Absent a foreign nexus, intelligence agencies have absolutely no lawful role in domestic election administration. This is exactly the kind of overreach Congress wrote the law to prevent, and it raises profound questions about whether our intelligence tools are being abused.”

Tonight, Matt Berg of Crooked Media reported that the FBI has “summoned state election officials from across the country for an unusual briefing on ‘preparations’ for the midterms” on February 25. A top election official from one state told Berg that it’s the “strangest thing in the world.” The FBI official who sent the email, Kellie Hardiman, used the title “FBI Election Executive.” When Berg asked the FBI for an explanation, the spokesperson wrote: “Thank you for reaching out. The FBI has no comment.”

On Monday, Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber of the Wall Street Journal reported that Gabbard had bottled up a May 2025 whistleblower complaint without transmitting it to congressional intelligence committees as required by law. Congress members learned about the complaint in November, but the government maintained it was too highly classified to be shared. This was deliberate obfuscation: the Gang of Eight, which is made up of the leaders from both parties in the House and Senate, and the leaders of the intelligence committees from both parties, was set up precisely so that Congress could always be informed of classified information.

Today Gabbard handed over the complaint, after heavily redacting it under claims of executive privilege—which means the president is involved.

The administration’s determination to hide the actions of its own members while exposing opponents has shown dramatically in the redactions in the Epstein files that have been released to date. Officials neglected to redact identifying information about survivors and even sexually explicit photographs of them, while blacking out the names of apparent friends and co-conspirators of the sex offender.

Trump’s name appears throughout the files, and in an attempt to center former president Bill Clinton, rather than Trump, in public discussion of the Epstein files, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) has subpoenaed Clinton and former first lady and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton to testify under oath. He says he doesn’t have to do the same for Trump about his relationship with Epstein because Trump is answering questions for reporters.

Yesterday the Clintons agreed to testify. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton posted on social media: “For six months, we engaged Republicans on the Oversight Committee in good faith. We told them what we know, under oath. They ignored all of it. They moved the goalposts and turned accountability into an exercise in distraction. So let’s stop the games. If you want this fight, [Representative Comer], let’s have it—in public. You love to talk about transparency. There’s nothing more transparent than a public hearing, cameras on. We will be there.”

Forcing a former president to testify under threat of contempt establishes the precedent that Congress can force past presidents and their spouses and families to testify under threat of criminal charges. Scott Wong, Melanie Zanona, Sahil Kapur, and Ryan Nobles of NBC News reported that Democrats are taking note. Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) told them: “We are absolutely going to have Donald Trump testify under oath.” Maxwell Frost (D-FL), who sits on the Oversight Committee, said that forcing Clinton to testify does indeed set a precedent. “[A]nd we will follow it,” he said. “Donald Trump, all of his kids. Everybody.”

Representative Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—who flusters Comer so badly Comer once cracked and told him he looked like a Smurf, a childish insult Moskowitz needled him over for months—said that after Democrats regain control of the House, Republicans will blame Comer for what comes next:

“The folks here are going to run with it everywhere. It will be crypto. It will be their business. It will be all the investments in the Middle East. It’ll be the Qatari plane…. It’s going to be the latest thing with the UAE. It’s going to be all of it…. They are giving a license to these new chairmen in January and that will be Comer’s legacy. So when [Don] Junior and Eric and their children…[are] all here, they can thank James Comer for that.”

It seems likely Trump has already figured out that forcing Clinton to testify opens up some avenues he would rather leave closed. When asked about the Clintons’ testimony at the end of the month, he answered: “I think it’s a shame, to be honest. I always liked him.” Hillary was “a very capable woman.” “I hate to see it in many ways.”

Another court case might tear away some of the administration’s obfuscation, as well. Zoe Tillman of Bloomberg reported today that U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang of the District of Maryland has denied the government’s request to block depositions of Elon Musk and two other former officials from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in a lawsuit charging Musk with unlawfully dismantling the agency.

Because Musk and the other two “likely have personal, first-hand knowledge of the facts relevant and essential to the resolution of this case,” Chuang said the testimony could go forward. While courts have generally said that “high-ranking government officials may not be deposed or called to testify about their reasons for taking official actions absent ‘extraordinary circumstances,’” Chuang said it was not clear that Musk and the other two were, in fact, high-ranking government officials.

At the same time, the case appeared to meet the criteria for extraordinary circumstances. The government employees who brought the case argue that Musk personally dismantled USAID when he had no authority to do so. The judge noted that the government’s failure to produce documents that explained the decisions killing the agency, as required, suggested that the decisions had been made orally, so the testimony of Musk and the other two men is crucial to the case.

Finally, the last existing arms treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired today. The New START treaty of 2011 capped the number of nuclear warheads each country could maintain. Trump’s account on social media posted that instead of extending the terms of the existing treaty, “we should have our Nuclear Experts work on a new, improved, and modernized Treaty that can last long into the future.” Until that time, though, there is no longer a cap on nuclear weapons for the U.S. or Russia.

Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Sarah Kendzior: Jackhammering into the sewer

by
Sarah Kendzior

A look through the Epstein files.

By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 18 2024

“They’re jackhammering into the sewer and the whole house is shaking,” I texted my husband.

I was sitting on a window seat watching a construction crew drill into the sidewalk below. I didn’t want to stand on a floor that trembled. Everything valuable threatened to fall. A photo of my children flipped over like a memory I couldn’t trust.

Outside, a stream of liquid coated the road. The workers gathered in a circle and looked down at something terrible. One picked up the jackhammer again and drilled deep and hard. The rest stood back and watched while he did it. I closed the windows, but I could not block out the sound or the feeling of earth giving way.

When will this stop, how can I make it stop I started to write, then deleted it. I saw my original text. I wrote instead:

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to accidentally summarize the state of the nation.”

* * *

Two weeks later, the DOJ released the Epstein files. The first people I looked up were the ones who tried to prevent my two books on Jeffrey Epstein, Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew, from being published. The next were the people who threatened to kill me for writing them. The ones whose names I know, anyway.

Looking through the files, I felt an old familiar sensation: this was the first time in years I got search results without an AI summary. I try to configure search engines to avoid AI, but Big Tech learned to override tricks like writing “-AI” or “-fuck”. The new robot overlords stole my old hobby of researching the technofascists who birthed them. The public domain that made it possible for me to write my books is gone.

I remembered when I found documentation of Trump and Epstein’s rape cases over a decade ago, and wrote about them, and thought people would care. When a timeline was a chronology on a social media site and not an alternate reality about which you fantasize: an alternative reality in which predators face consequences.

Then I felt another familiar sensation: I was jackhammering into the sewer now too.

When you jackhammer into the sewer, you get covered in shit. That’s what the Epstein Files are: shit. Unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear.

They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it’s about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers.

Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth — and believed the truth-tellers.

This story could have been told in real time: and if it had been, it wouldn’t be this story. If people had believed the Epstein victims when they first came forward, the next wave of horrors would not have happened. If careerists had not been so easy to bribe and blackmail, ordinary people would not have to suffer under this group of sadistic oligarchs and politicians. Our era is the culmination of complicity.

Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I’m done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know.

In the Epstein files, I found primary source documents related to events I described in my books: email invites to pedophile parties, open and cavalier. The brazenness stemmed from a lifetime of elite criminal impunity. I lost track of the Biden and Trump administration members I found in the files, along with their family members and friends and lawyers, who often overlap.

They like their worlds small, like the children they rape.

* * *

In 2021, I read the personal archives of Danny Casolaro, a journalist who had covered many of the same criminal networks as me. I wrote about him in They Knew as an example of a journalist murdered for going down this road, but he was more than that. He was a lyrical writer, a tenacious researcher, and a poetic soul. I felt invasive looking through his unpublished work. This is not how it was meant to be seen: by a stranger nearly the same age as he was when he was killed. Casolaro was 44 when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel on August 10, 1991.

I remember shaking when I found a paper with Robert Maxwell’s name and address on it. “The European,” Casolaro called him. I took photos of the documents. After I did that, my phone was hacked and died. I had to go back and do it again, this time with different precautions.

Robert Maxwell was an espionage operative who procured Israeli passports for mobsters in the USSR so they could expand their criminal network worldwide. After he died falling (or being pushed) off a yacht in 1991, he was given an elaborate hero’s funeral by the Israeli government. Ghislaine Maxwell, along with Epstein, continued her father’s criminal operations, which included human trafficking.

Everyone I’ve just mentioned died in a suicide called a murder or a murder called a suicide, except Ghislaine, who is benefiting from the largesse extended by Trump and his Kushner-affiliated backer, the Aleph Institute.

I don’t want to write this article. Can you tell? I did not want to write books about crimes this depraved either. But it felt like the right thing to do: maybe exposure would bring consequences. Casolaro expressed hesitation, too, due to the enormity and danger of the topic. But he knew he had something, and he put his heart into his work.

That’s the irony: this work can only be done well by people with a heart, and you have to resign yourself to letting it break again and again. Or you will lose yourself, and you’ve lost too much already to let them take that too.

* * *

Two years after They Knew, a documentary about Casolaro came out. I couldn’t watch it. When you spend a lot of time with someone’s unpublished writing, it feels both intimate and exploitative. I didn’t want to feel the latter.

I had also recently watched The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, a documentary about journalist Maury Terry and his struggle to prove a satanic group was involved in the murders committed by David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam. Terry was traumatized by his search. Desperation for clarity on the case consumed his life.

The documentary was released in May 2021. This was when Google still worked and most news sites were not paywalled. After watching, I read Terry’s 1987 book, The Ultimate Evil, and began looking up the officials he described as blocking his inquiry.

Once again, I found pedophiles in positions of power. For example, Eugene Gold, the Son of Sam prosecutor, admitted to assaulting a 10-year-old girl in Tennessee, a crime that would normally get a man life in prison, but in 1983, the judge let it slide. Gold had announced in 1981 that he was resigning as an attorney and would devote his life to serving Jewish causes. He moved to Israel in 1982. As CBS reported, Israel allows American pedophiles to become Israeli citizens. (You should print this report, as ultra-Zionist Bari Weiss now runs CBS.) Gold never faced punishment for sexually assaulting a child. He returned to the US and lived to be 100 years old.

I’m telling this story now because it’s hardly unique. I’m telling this story because it may disappear with the rest of the public domain into AI controlled by oligarchs. I’m telling this story for that 10-year-old girl in Tennessee.

The Trump administration is releasing a selective cache of Epstein documents because they believe their network has consolidated power. But as they release them, they take over media — Twitter, Tik-Tok, CBS, the endless outlets they bully into compliance — and rewrite history.

They want a world where people know the worst truths but are prohibited from discussing them.

* * *

Across my street is a barricaded sidewalk where the construction workers were jackhammering into the sewer. A loose plank of wood lies on top. Hole, it says. Underneath, a sea of shit, barely covered. It’s Groundhog Day and the second Trump administration is one year old.

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Ye Vagabonds: All Tied Together – Five stars for this powerfully raw modern trad

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By Ed Power | Irish Times

Among the new wave of critically acclaimed Irish folk artists, it has been all too easy to overlook the Ye Vagabonds siblings, Diarmuid and Brían Mac Gloinn. Although their music has long had a beautifully rapturous quality, they lack the in-your-face wow factor of the Mercury-nominated drone punks Lankum or the storytelling charm of John Francis Flynn.

Their moment of recognition may at last be at hand with this stunning album for Geoff Travis’s River Lea label, a wonderfully vulnerable collection rooted in angst and woe but carried aloft by a poetic defiance.

Recorded in a house in Galway, All Tied Together is a powerfully raw listen that comes off as a sort of craggy Irish Simon & Garfunkel, the effect heightened by luminous harmonies and keening instrumentation.

Tender yet never maudlin, with diaristic lyrics about tragic break-ups and unfulfilled futures, it knits together the ancient and the modern with haunting verve. One moment you’re soaking up the turf‑fire glow of On Sitric Road, the opening track; the next the LP knocks you backwards with the dam‑busting instrumental refrain of The Flood.

Above all, it arrives as a blessed relief amid trying times for Irish traditional music. In one sense the genre has never been more acclaimed: Lankum headline festivals around the world; and the vampire caper Sinners, which has been nominated for a record-breaking 16 Oscars, including for its score, soundtracks a pivotal scene with a modern take on Rocky Road to Dublin, complete with Riverdancing undead.

But, as often happens in the music industry, the renaissance in trad has now been commodified. This has been brought painfully home over the past year with the existential horror that is Kingfishr’s Killeagh, an ode to the east Cork hurling team that marks the coming of age of the new “boggercore” genre.

Boggercore has been with us a while – it stretches, via the 2 Johnnies, right back to D’Unbelievables. But with Kingfishr and their sonic and sartorial clones Amble it came into its kingdom as a cynical dumbing down of the great strides made by traditional over the previous decade.

This isn’t to question anybody’s taste – people like what they like – or to pit, say, Lankum against Kingfishr. It’s merely to acknowledge that in every genre there comes a moment when the mainstream wants a piece of the action. That, alas, was trad’s fate in 2025 – to which we can only say, “Killeagh, nah, nah-nah”.

Without ever intending to, Ye Vagabonds offer some much‑needed spiritual respite from that bleak trend with the sublime All Tied Together. It’s as stark as a shriek, as murkily mysterious as bogwater and lit by a constant sense of curiosity and wonder.

The album also marks a new chapter for the duo, who were raised as Irish speakers in Carlow and went on to become embedded in Dublin’s folk underground.

Among their fans is the Boygenius singer Phoebe Bridgers, who asked for Ye Vagabonds to open for the indie supergroup in Dublin in 2023.

They pour all of those experiences into tracks such as Danny, a starkly modern tale of a young man unravelling in contemporary Ireland (“His girlfriend hit the needle … You could see that she was fading / By the shadows round his eyes”).

As with the best modern trad, the project constantly takes risks – on Gravity they fuse the melancholy of Irish folk with the menacing bite of postrock. The mood then swerves back to a-cappella pop on Mayfly, a tune that lives up to its name with its beautifully flitting evanescence.

A record full of cries and whispers ends with the hush of Forget About the Rain, which frames the siblings’ voices with gentle piano and guitar. It is heartbreakingly sad – as many of the songs here are – yet ultimately this is an album sure to fill its listeners with joy.