The Week: Epstein Revisited | July 18, 2025

◼ President Trump’s most vociferous media supporters have been in a full meltdown over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Last week, the Department of Justice and the FBI put out an unsigned two-page statement saying that no additional charges would be filed in the case. Rather than putting the matter to rest, the memo caused an uproar. Who’s to blame? Everyone who has built vast castles of fantasy atop the Epstein case, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Don Bongino prior to assuming their current positions, and especially Attorney General Pam Bondi. Bondi hyped Epstein revelations as AG by handing out worthless white binders supposedly full of Epstein files to sundry MAGA influencers and by seemingly saying in a TV interview that she had an Epstein client list on her desk. In fact, there is no evidence that there was any “client list” of those partaking of Epstein’s crimes. Nor is there serious evidence that Epstein was murdered, or that he was an agent of Mossad. Bondi should have heeded the DOJ practice of not speaking about cases if charges aren’t going to be brought, and that offense shouldn’t be compounded. Yet the documents a judge has ordered released in a civil case should be made public expeditiously. And it’s hard to understand why other materials related to the case—including the autopsy report on Epstein—haven’t been released. Questions about this case will never be answered to everyone’s satisfaction. But so far, the administration has only made it worse.

◼ There’s plenty to criticize about the Federal Reserve and its chairman, Jerome Powell. The Fed stayed in emergency mode for too long in 2021, spurring inflation at a level that Americans had not seen in four decades. The three interest rate cuts late last year were arguably mistakes, given that inflation has remained above 2 percent and the unemployment rate has continued to be historically low. None of that means Trump should fire Powell. Charges of election-based favoritism don’t stick, since two of the three rate cuts came after Trump won the 2024 election. Independent central banks are demonstrably better at keeping inflation down than politically controlled ones are. Trump simply wants low interest rates no matter what (he criticized Powell for not cutting rates during his first term as well). The case for a cut now is close. There is, however, no good case for undermining the Fed’s reputation for being able to fight inflation even under political pressure.

◼ Better later than never. Trump announced Monday that NATO would buy American weapons and pass them on to Ukraine. He said much-needed new Patriot air-defense batteries could reach Ukraine in days. He also announced his intention to impose new tariffs on Russia if there is no cease-fire within the next 50 days, although the details are vague, and he has made such threats before. Since taking office for his second term, Trump has bent over backward to get Russian leader Vladimir Putin to agree to a cease-fire. Meanwhile, Putin has strung Trump along but made clear, over and over again, that he has no intention of halting his invasion of Ukraine, nor his bombing of civilian targets. Considering the Oval Office meltdown with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the end of February, the restoration of good relations with Ukraine and the belated recognition of Putin’s intransigence and belligerence are nearly miraculous. It took much longer to get here than it should have. But President Trump is now a functioning ally to Ukraine, and NATO and is making life more difficult for Vladimir Putin and his barbaric military aggression.

◼ Early Thursday morning, the Senate passed a rescissions bill requested by Trump that would cut $9 billion in spending on foreign assistance and public broadcasting. It won’t materially alter the nation’s dire fiscal trajectory—the federal government is set to spend $7 trillion this year—but at least Congress is rooting out some unwarranted spending. Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes money to PBS and NPR, is the biggest victory here. In a country with 15,000 commercial radio stations and 4,000 television stations, as well as the internet, there is no justification for the federal government to subsidize two news and entertainment outlets. The rescissions bill also slims down America’s unfocused foreign aid apparatus by shaving $8 billion from economic development assistance and other accounts, none of which is essential to American interests abroad. Though these cuts are welcome, it is a bit strange that no rescissions have been signed into law in the 21st century. The process of passing them, established in 1974, is immune to the Senate filibuster. President Reagan sent 133 requests to Congress, which approved 101 of them, saving taxpayers billions. President Trump and congressional Republicans should aim to make up for lost time—and money.

◼ When State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani humiliated Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, it was reasonable to expect the end of the former governor’s political career. Cuomo, however, has other plans. Having decided that not even the voters have the right to tell him he’s dead, he has announced he is staying in the race as an independent, with his own bespoke party line providing him ballot access in November. This would be a comical footnote were it not for the fact that Mamdani, with his radical leftist views, remains unpopular in the city overall, with support from only a plurality of November voters. It’s not hard to see why: In a recent discussion with city business leaders, Mamdani both refused to reject “Globalize the intifada” as a slogan—though he said he would “discourage” it—and doubled down on most of his economically ruinous promises. Mamdani could be defeated in November. But probably not by discredited incumbent Eric Adams, by perennial gadfly Curtis Sliwa (running as a Republican), or by the surly ghost of the state’s former governor. And certainly not with all three running at the same time.

◼ A federal appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision to allow West Virginia to restrict the sale of the abortion pill, mifepristone. This is a major win for the pro-life movement, as the decision cements states’ ability to protect the lives of the unborn within their own borders. It’s the right result legally, too. The Supreme Court rightly ruled in 2022 that states may protect unborn lives. It follows that they should be able to protect them from being deliberately killed by chemicals, even if the FDA has approved the chemicals in question as safe for the women who take them. That approval—under lax standards—is also open to question, and the further good news is that the FDA is reconsidering it.

◼ A documentary can sometimes be improved by involving someone connected to its subject. Not so much when the subject is Gaza, and the connection is through Hamas. Yet the BBC employees who produced and released Gaza: How to Survive in a War Zone, a program about the lives of children in Gaza, did not bother to inquire about the identity of Abdullah, its 13-year-old narrator, before its release. He turned out to be the son of Hamas deputy minister of agriculture Ayman Alyazouri. The documentary was removed from circulation after the discovery of this connection earlier this year. A recent internal review concluded that allowing its release without the disclosure of this essential information represented a significant editorial lapse. Deborah Turness, BBC’s head of news, attempted to defend the documentary’s production by distinguishing between the military and non-military divisions of Hamas. Both divisions, though, belong to an organization that has called for the extermination of Jews. The U.K.’s own government—i.e., the authority that ultimately controls the state-backed broadcaster—condemns Hamas in toto as a terrorist organization. We can learn from documentaries, but in this case the lesson was not the one the producers intended.

◼ Most sports leagues have been rejiggering their all-star games because athletes don’t really want to participate in them. NFL players often turn down Pro Bowl invitations, and NBA players don’t play defense. The NHL replaced its all-star game this year with the 4 Nations tournament. The MLB All-Star Game is the only stand-alone game that has remained fun to watch, and it lived up to expectations this year. The Brewers’ rookie Jacob Misiorowski threw a 98-mph slider along with his over-100 fastballs. The American League came back from a 6–0 deficit and tied the game in the ninth inning. Rather than go into extra innings, the game concluded with a home run swing-off, which the National League won, with three home runs in as many swings by the Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber. The midsummer classic remains intact as a great American tradition.

◼ Modern conservatism owes a great deal to its converts. Take Sol Stern. Stern began his professional life as a committed leftist. He wrote for Ramparts magazine, one of the radical left’s premiere journals, playing a major role while working there in making public the CIA’s secret backing of the National Student Association. But the left’s increasing radicalism pushed him down a familiar Cold War path: to the right. He covered many issues, in City Journal, Commentary, our pages, and elsewhere. He was strongest on and most passionate about two: education and Israel. Concerning the former, he waged a relentless war on behalf of educational standards and against the trendy bromides, pablum, and worse of the curricular distorters and diluters of his (and our) day. Concerning the latter, the left’s deteriorating views on which helped move him right, he refused to tolerate revisionist narratives biased in favor of Palestinians or against Israel (where he was born—before its recognition as such). Despite his yeoman’s work in both fields, recent years especially have revealed that there remains much still to accomplish in each. His late-in-life move away from the right does not detract from the debt that conservatives owe Stern. We can begin to repay it by drawing from his work, and continuing to fight for the causes he believed in. Dead at 89. R.I.P.