Representative James Comer, the chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, said Tuesday that he has no intention to follow up on President Donald Trump’s lewd birthday letter to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaking to CNN’s Manu Raju Tuesday, Comer said that he believed the White House’s desperate claim that the letter and signature were fake.

“The president says he did not sign it. So I take the president [at] his word,” Comer said, according to Raju on X. “You asked if I’m going to be trying to figure out whether that, you know, fake or not, probably not. We’re going to be trying to get justice for the victim.

“Twenty-two years ago was when that was allegedly sent,” Comer added. “So, I don’t think the Oversight Committee is going to invest in looking up something that was 22 years ago.”

But Comer saying that he won’t look into an incident from 22 years ago directly contradicts his claim that he’s seeking justice for survivors of Epstein’s decades-long abuse of women, which allegedly occurred more than 22 years ago.

It seems clear that the timing isn’t an issue. It’s just that the Kentucky Republican is unwilling to point a finger at Trump.

Comer had issued the subpoena of Epstein’s estate, demanding things like Epstein’s infamous 50th “birthday book” that includes a letter from Trump, flight logs, bank information, anything that “could be reasonably construed to be a potential list of clients.” But the actual results of the subpoena don’t seem to interest him, as the head of Congress’s main investigative arm.

During the previous administration, Comer relentlessly pursued debunked claims against former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

Now Comer is convinced that Trump, a famous and well-documented liar, is telling the truth.

President Donald Trump’s administration wants the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number—as part of its sweeping efforts to compile a federal voting database, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Michael Gates, deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s recently overhauled civil rights division, told top state elections officials in a private meeting that he planned to request information from all 50 states. Specifically, he wanted the last four digits of voters’ SSNs, so they could be cross-referenced with a database of noncitizens at the Department of Homeland Security.

The administration could use the database to investigate claims of noncitizen voting, an obsession of Trump and other Republicans who claimed the 2020 election had been stolen through massive voter fraud.

In reality, the only ones concocting a scheme to fake votes in that election were in Donald Trump’s camp.

The issue of noncitizen voting remains small to nonexistent. In 2016, noncitizen votes accounted for just 0.0001 percent of the votes cast, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. One might notice that Trump’s complaints about noncitizen voting evaporated after his victory last November. However, Trump seems to have revived his obsession ahead of the midterm elections.

The DOJ has already sent requests to 16 Republican-led states and at least 17 Democrat-led states or swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, and Wisconsin. Some states, like North Carolina, were approached by the DOJ and DHS with an offer to simply use the federal SAVE database to run their voter list.

But such a sweeping request for personal information may not be legal, according to Justin Levitt, a former Justice Department official and election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school. He said that it could potentially violate the 1974 Privacy Act, which requires agencies to be careful in their handling of sensitive information.

Across the country, both Democratic and Republican leaders have refused to hand over information. California’s Secretary of State Shirley Weber said her office was “not obligated to follow along” with Trump’s efforts to “conscript states to carry out nonstatutory policy priorities of the president.” Al Schmidt, the Republican secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania said the requests “represent a concerning attempt to expand the federal government’s role in our country’s electoral process.”

Earlier this month, a South Carolina local judge blocked the DOJ’s request for the “full name, date of birth, residential address, his or her state driver’s license number, or the last four digits of the registrant’s social security number” of every South Carolina voter, after one woman sued, saying it would violate citizens’ constitutional privacy rights.

The project, led by election deniers, has also raised serious concerns that the Trump administration could use the database to fuel claims of voter fraud in future elections.

“The biggest structural concern is using this information in an irresponsible manner to fuel the narrative that something is amiss in any election in which the preferred outcome is not the actual outcome,” Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Times.

GOP lawmakers are tying themselves in knots to defend President Donald Trump after his unsettling, sexually suggestive 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was released Monday. The damning document appeared in a scrapbook that the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed from the deceased sex criminal’s estate.

Below are some of the most pitiful reactions and denials from congressional Republicans.

1. “We’ve seen autopens they’ve used in the Biden administration”—Tim Burchett

Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, shown the letter by CNN’s Manu Raju, denied its veracity and weaved a fanciful narrative.

“I mean, anybody can do a signature. We’ve seen autopens they’ve used in the Biden administration,” he said, adding, “I’ve never known Trump to be much of an artist either”—even though, as Raju noted, there is actually a history of Trump making sketches.

“So you think really someone might have just forged this somehow?” Raju asked.

“Yeah,” Burchett replied. “I mean, ‘somehow’? It’s so easy to do.”

The Tennessee congressman suggested the document was created by the Biden administration, despite it having come from Epstein’s estate. “They’ve had all this stuff for four years, and now they’re bringing it out? I just don’t buy it,” he said.

Asked how the Biden administration could possibly be behind the letter—given that it was contained in a 2003 book subpoenaed from Epstein’s estate—Burchett replied, “I mean, was I there in 2003 when they got it? Were you? No. That’s the problem. You got to look at the chain of command on this stuff.”

2. “It’s not his signature”—Byron........

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