White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt unleashed an angry, nonsensical tirade Tuesday claiming that she’d never said the Jeffrey Epstein files were a “hoax.” 

Actually, she’d said it less than 24 hours before.

On Monday, Leavitt published a statement claiming that Trump had not drawn the crude picture on the birthday note to Epstein, or signed it, writing, “This is FAKE NEWS to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!” 

But speaking to reporters at a White House press briefing the next day, Leavitt fumed when asked to explain her claims undermining the Epstein documents. 

“You said the Epstein documents are a hoax the Democrats are perpetrating against the president,” reporter Maggie Haberman of The New York Times asked. “You said he didn’t sign that check, that he didn’t sign the birthday card that he allegedly signed. So, what is the theory, since these documents came from the Epstein estate? Who is, I guess in your view, faking these documents?” 

“I did not say the documents are a hoax,” Leavitt snapped. “I said the entire narrative surrounding Jeffrey Epstein right now that is absorbing many of the liberal cable channels on television is a hoax, that is being perpetuated by opportunistic Democrats—” she ranted.  

“What exactly is the hoax?” Haberman pressed. “I’m just trying to understand what’s fake. What’s fake is not the documents?”

“The hoax is the Democrats pretending to care about victims of crime, when they do not care about victims of crime,” Leavitt explained. “When they have done nothing to solve crimes, when they have done nothing to lock up child pedophiles and child rapists across the country, and when they are now using victims as political props, to again, try and smear the president of the United States—” she went on, lost in the spiral of her own semantic spin.

It seems that by contrast, Trump is not even pretending to care about the victims of crime. Last week, the president described calls to release the documents from survivors of Epstein’s abuse as a “Democrat hoax that never ends.” 

Spin aside, Leavitt seems to know that there is nothing fake about the government’s documents on Epstein—but that conviction doesn’t extend to the ones that might incriminate her boss. 

As the White House flailingly denies the authenticity of Donald Trump’s lewd 2003 birthday note to his then-friend Jeffrey Epstein, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is, apparently, just creating evidence out of whole cloth.

Since the letter was released Monday—as a result of the House Oversight Committee subpoenaing Epstein’s estate—Leavitt and other Trump spokespeople have sought to deny its veracity by arguing that the signature at its close doesn’t match Trump’s current handwriting.

In reality, examples abound of nearly identical signatures by Trump from around the time of the letter’s writing.

Nonetheless, Leavitt dug in her heels at a Tuesday press conference, where she even claimed to have brought receipts: “I have already seen many forensic analysts of signatures coming out. I believe it was The Daily Signal that published a piece with three separate signature analysts who said that this absolutely was not the president’s authentic signature,” the press secretary said.

No such Daily Signal story exists, as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters observed on X. Instead, Leavitt was likely thinking of an article by another conservative website, The Daily Wire. But even that story was a far cry from her description.

The Daily Wire, for instance, did not cite “three separate signature analysts,” It cited three “AI research systems”—which did not remark, at all, on Trump’s signature, but rather compared the diction in the 2003 letter to Trump’s other publicly available writings. The AI models apparently cast doubt on the note’s authenticity, finding it inconsistent with the president’s speech habits (namely, too “sophisticated” for Trump).

And the AI models’ conclusions are quite dubious. For example, although the AI systems flagged that the 2003 letter employs third-person narration, words like “enigma,” and a theatrical opening line (“There must be more to life than having everything”), these by no means prove Trump was not the author.

In July, when The Wall Street Journal first reported on the existence of the letter, Judd Legum of Popular Information showed that each of these elements of the letter are plausible Trumpisms. This is not to mention that The Daily Wire overlooks the fact that one’s verbiage varies depending on context.

The Daily Wire story, in other words, is quite thin gruel—failing in its desperate mission to prove the letter was faked (and certainly not proving that Trump’s signature was forged). It’s no wonder Leavitt had to invent an imaginary article instead.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman had a gross and callow response to Israel’s attack on Qatar’s capital city.

Israel struck Hamas’s political leadership in Doha, Qatar, on Tuesday, as they gathered to discuss a U.S. ceasefire proposal, killing six people.

Qatar, a U.S. ally, has condemned what it called a “flagrant violation of international laws and norms,” and President Donald Trump said in a statement that this bombing “does not advance Israel or America’s goals.”

But Fetterman’s take on the strike, which left five lower-ranking Hamas members along with a Qatari security guard dead, was horrific and infantile all at once.

https://t.co/q03dhz5KVW pic.twitter.com/q1eL1MF6jz

The senator shared the AP’s story with a gif of Winnie the Pooh gleefully dancing, about to dig into a pot of “hero hunny.”

Pod Save America host and former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor wrote of Fetterman’s response, “I fucking hate this idiotic, childish memeification of deadly serious issues. Any hope of getting the remaining Israeli hostages out alive could be gone, any hope of ending the war in Gaza could be dead, and this clown is posting a Winnie-the-pooh gif.”

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and during the ensuing genocide in Gaza, Fetterman has been fervently pro-Israel—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even gifted him an honorary pager, mocking the Israeli attack on Hezbollah in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed at least 12 people, including two children, and wounded around 2,800, in September 2024.

In addition to being a likely violation of international law, the strike may very well destroy any progress that’s been made toward reaching a ceasefire agreement, and comes as Israel threatens a full invasion of Gaza City, which is sure to add to the already horrific death toll of more than

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