Free Republic

Members on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are divided over whether President Donald Trump should pardon Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her cooperation in the panel’s Epstein investigation, Chair James Comer said in an interview Wednesday. Maxwell, who was deposed by the Oversight Committee as the sole convicted accomplice in the Epstein sex trafficking scheme, previously invoked her Fifth Amendment right in declining to answer the panel’s questions. Her lawyer has said that she would only speak if granted clemency — a power available solely to Trump, who has not ruled out the prospect...

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the once steadfast ally of Donald Trump who has since fallen out with the president, said the saga around convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has “ripped MAGA apart.” Greene made her comments while flanked by some of Epstein’s victims outside the Capitol on Tuesday, just hours before the House is set to vote on a bill that would force the Justice Department to release Epstein case files.

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy pressed FBI Director Kash Patel on Tuesday to continue the release of files in the Jeffrey Epstein case, specifically information about who other than Epstein, if anyone, was on the receiving end of girls and women being sex trafficked. “The issue’s not gonna go away,” said Kennedy during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s FBI oversight hearing, where Patel was testifying. “I think you’re gonna have to do more to satisfy the American people’s understandable curiosity in that regard.” Kennedy’s comments were notable as the Trump administration battles complaints about the Justice Department’s slow, piecemeal approach to...

WASHINGTON — For the diversity consulting industry, this summer was like no other. Amid the racial reckoning spurred by the death of George Floyd, a wave of senior-level executives began to look critically at their companies, and consultants like Melanie Miller and Loretta VanPelt found themselves deluged with work. Then President Trump stepped in. An executive order, issued in late September as Mr. Trump was stepping up his charged attacks on Black Lives Matter protesters and “political correctness,” banned the federal government, as well as its contractors, subcontractors and grantees, from offering certain diversity training on racial and gender biases...