| From President Donald Trump’s ties to a sex offender, to his attempts at distraction, to losing immigration battles in the court, a lot has happened this week under the Trump administration. We’re taking the next two newsletters to review it all. Here’s what’s going on. Trump’s connections to Epstein By far, the political news that dominated this week was Trump’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and how the Republican-controlled Congress isn’t relenting on trying to get information about the sex offender. This all comes after the Justice Department said this month it wouldn’t share any further information. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s attorney general told him he is named multiple times in the Epstein files — which may not be surprising given the two were friends and these “files” are thousands of pages of a federal investigation into Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking that has many names in them. The New York Times quickly matched the reporting. Trump socialized with Epstein, though there’s no public evidence of any wrongdoing on Trump’s part. But reporting that Trump contributed a nude drawing with “may every day be another wonderful secret” to an Epstein birthday gift and that Epstein attended one of Trump’s weddings again raises questions about how much Trump knew about what Epstein was doing. At the same time, various committees in the House have voted three times to push for the files’ release or investigate Epstein’s past. While it’s unclear if the congressional actions will yield new information, the message seems pretty clear: Democrats and a number of Republican lawmakers don’t want to drop the issue, despite Trump’s urging. But as his base demanded something, Trump said his administration should try to release some files, such as the grand jury testimony that led to Epstein’s indictment. That information is typically kept secret, and a judge this week said it wouldn’t be released. The Justice Department on Thursday made moves to interview Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for offenses including sex trafficking. “I think she’s just going to tell them what they already know,” said Evan Gotlob, who prosecuted similar crimes as a federal prosecutor in New York during the first Trump administration and is now with the Lucosky Brookman law firm. “So this could be just for show.” Trump baselessly accuses Obama of a coup As Trump struggles to control the Epstein story, his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, announced she had found “irrefutable evidence” that President Barack Obama and his administration planned a coup to undermine Trump before he took office in 2017. “After Donald Trump was elected, led by President Obama there was an effort to create a document that would serve as a foundation for what would be a years-long coup against President Trump, therefore trying to subvert the will of the American people who sent him to the White House in 2016,” she said. The allegations stem from federal investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and have no substantial evidence to support them, as The Washington Post’s Fact Checker explains. To believe Gabbard has a bombshell about a “treasonous conspiracy” plot ignores multiple federal investigations into Russia’s actions, including one led by Trump’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, when he was in the Senate. They all found Russia tried to influence people to vote for Trump and does not mention Obama. “How can she discover new evidence that somehow eluded four previous investigations?” the Fact Checker’s Glenn Kessler asks. Trump, though, called for a criminal investigation into Obama, which would be a remarkable escalation in his already forceful efforts to punish or prosecute his enemies. (And that effort also extended to one of his allies, Rupert Murdoch. He owns the Wall Street Journal, which Trump is suing for its recent reporting on Trump and Epstein.) “Whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people,” Trump said this week. Trump loses two big immigration court battles Trump can’t ban birthright citizenship, an appeals court ruled. Birthright citizenship gives citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, no matter the parents’ immigration status — even if their parents are undocumented. Trump tried to ban it, but it’s enshrined in the Constitution, and an executive order from the president can’t change the Constitution. The ruling comes despite the Supreme Court’s conservative justices recently saying Trump could deny birthright citizenship for now because the lower courts overstepped when they temporarily paused a nationwide policy by the president. It’s part of a pattern of the justices giving the president extraordinarily wide latitude while cases work their way through the courts, even when lower courts say what he’s doing is unconstitutional. The second loss this week came in a high-profile deportation battle. Judges ruled Kilmar Abrego García should be freed from criminal detention and barred immigration officials from deporting him for now. His wrongful deportation to El Salvador highlighted what can go wrong with Trump’s rapid deportations: mistaken deportations, cruel treatment, the government undermining people’s due process rights and questions of whether the Trump administration was obeying court orders about trying to get him home. Abrego García was eventually brought back to the United States and immediately detained and charged with human smuggling. But the rulings mean he is expected to await that trial in Maryland, where he and his family live, and would be free and able to work. The Post’s Steve Thompson reports that one of the judges sounded angered and exasperated by the Trump administration fighting her on Abrego García, describing its “troubling history” of disregarding court orders, “defiance and foot-dragging” and “persistent lack of transparency.” As this has played out over months, many major polls now show a majority of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. For instance, a majority of Americans now don’t back Trump’s handling of deportations, a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted this month finds. That’s a reversal from the start of Trump’s term, when the same poll found a majority approved of Trump’s immigration policies. | 
