I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Corrections.

Our “What just happened” section of yesterday’s Sunday edition included two inaccuracies about recent news stories. First, we wrote that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had reportedly agreed to allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) access to the personal data of Medicare enrollees; the data will actually be for Medicaid enrollees. 

Second, we wrote that a man had driven through a crowd outside a club in East Hollywood, California, on Saturday night, after which he was pulled from his car and shot by the police. In reality, the man was pulled from his car by members of the crowd and shot by an unknown assailant, whom police are still searching for. 

We regret both of these errors, which resulted from misreading details from news reports about each story, and we have adjusted our editorial process to avoid similar mistakes in the future.

These are our 140th and 141st corrections in Tangle's 311-week history and our first corrections since July 14. We track corrections and place them at the top of the newsletter in an effort to maximize transparency with readers.

Last Friday's edition.

On Friday, Tangle Managing Editor Ari Weitzman took a deep look at the latest climate science and how it differs from public perception. Some people were quite pleased:

“I’m a climate scientist, and your take on this is so well presented and nuanced.”

“This essay ranks amongst the best I have read on our climate.”

Others… not so much:

“Your tendency to believe hype as fact is disappointing to say the least… If you are actually serious about truth and honesty, you will find more information easily, just by looking and not swallowing the dogma hook-line-and-sinker.”

“This perspective feels like a red herring. I am very pessimistic about climate change, but not because I'm worried about human extinction and the absolute worst case scenario.”

Quick hits.

1. Israeli soldiers fired at a crowd near a food-distribution site in southern Gaza, which the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry said resulted in at least 32 deaths. The Israeli military stated that soldiers fired warning shots after individuals approached their position and did not heed orders to stop. The Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation acknowledged that a deadly incident occurred outside the vicinity of the site hours before it opened. (The incident) Separately, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack announced that Israel and Syria agreed to a ceasefire after days of fighting last week. (The ceasefire)
2. President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law, marking the first major legislation governing digital currencies and establishing a regulatory framework for the stablecoin market. (The law)
3. The White House announced that President Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency following an examination. A letter from the president’s doctor said the condition is “benign and common.” (The diagnosis)
4. Ten Americans and an undisclosed number of Venezuelan political prisoners were freed from Venezuelan prison in exchange for approximately 250 Venezuelans who had been detained in El Salvador. (The exchange)
5. Officials in Kerr County, Texas, said almost 100 people listed as missing after flash flooding on July 4 had been found safe, and only three remain missing. The state’s total death toll stands at 135. (The update)

Today’s topic.

New developments in the Jeffrey Epstein saga. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published a report claiming that President Donald Trump signed a letter containing a lewd drawing and sexually suggestive text as part of a birthday album for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The Journal says it reviewed the contents of the previously unreported album and letters but has not released any of the documents. President Trump strongly denied writing the letter and, on Friday, filed a defamation lawsuit against The Journal and its owners. Separately, the Department of Justice (DOJ) asked a federal judge to unseal grand jury testimony from Epstein’s sex-trafficking prosecution as part of an effort to address ongoing public interest in the case. 

Back up: On July 7, the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a joint memo affirming prior findings in the investigation into Epstein, a wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who was found dead in his cell in 2019 while awaiting trial. Additionally, the FBI and DOJ refuted claims that Epstein had not died by suicide and denied the existence of a “client list” containing names of Epstein’s alleged associates. The findings prompted outcry from prominent supporters of President Trump and the broader public, who suggested the Trump administration had broken its promises to make further disclosures in the case. In response, President Trump has downplayed the significance of the investigation, calling it a “hoax” and telling his supporters to move on.

We covered the DOJ/FBI memo here.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Trump’s purported letter to Epstein contains “several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.” 

Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime associate, reportedly compiled the birthday album, which The Journal says includes letters from billionaire Leslie Wexner and attorney Alan Dershowitz, among other public figures. 

President Trump sharply criticized The Journal for publishing the story, writing on Truth Social, “I told [Wall Street Journal owner] Rupert Murdoch it was a Scam, that he shouldn’t print this Fake Story. But he did, and now I’m going to sue his ass off, and that of his third rate newspaper.” Subsequently, Trump filed a lawsuit in Miami federal court alleging that Murdoch, Dow Jones, News Corp and its Chief Executive Robert Thomson, and two Wall Street Journal reporters defamed him and caused “overwhelming” financial and reputational harm. The president is seeking at least $10 billion in damages. 

Separately, on Thursday, Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to “produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony [from the Epstein case], subject to Court approval.” The next day, Bondi filed a request for grand jury testimony from Epstein’s and Maxwell’s cases to be unsealed, writing that the DOJ will work to make “appropriate redactions” of information related to victims and “other personal identifying information” before releasing the transcripts.

Today, we’ll break down the latest developments in the Epstein story, with views from the left and right. Then, my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left views The Journal’s story as plausible and suggests it could do significant political damage. 
• Some argue Democrats should continue pressing for answers about Trump and Epstein’s relationship. 
• Others say the story is rightly animating both sides of the political spectrum. 

In The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan wrote “Trump worked to kill a story about his friendship with Epstein. Now we know why.”

“It’s not just that the 50th birthday card he reportedly penned for the future convicted child-sex offender is so damning in itself… It’s not just that Trump has been denying a tight friendship with Epstein — who died in jail in 2019 — for some time, and that this would clearly put the lie to that,” Sullivan said. “No, there’s another element — and a brutal one for the president. It’s where the story was published: in the Wall Street Journal, whose conservative opinion side has often backed him and whose news side has a reputation for ensuring that explosive stories are bulletproof.”

“When the paper has taken a big swing at exposing wrongdoing — do you remember John Carreyrou’s exposé of the blood-testing company Theranos, by any chance? — their reporting holds up,” Sullivan wrote. “Granted, Trump has had a lot of success in recent months in his various suits against big news organizations… This, I suspect, will be quite different. A lawsuit won’t make this damning story go away. And I doubt that Trump really wants to put himself through legal discovery, with all the ugliness that might be exposed.”

In Vox, Eric Levitz wrote “Trump’s relationship with Epstein is indisputably scandalous.”

“The [Democratic] party’s decision to dedicate so much energy to promoting this controversy might seem dubious. For one thing, Democrats’ ostensible outrage over the alleged suppression of the Epstein Files is obviously hypocritical. After all, he died six years ago. A Democratic administration was in power from January 2021 through January 20 of this year,” Levitz said. “Thus, by affirming the notion that incriminating ‘Epstein Files’ exist, Democrats risk perpetuating the idea that both parties are toxically corrupt — a form of cynicism that Trump has long exploited to excuse his shameless graft and malfeasance.”

“But these worries are misguided. The Democrats’ decision to lean into the Epstein controversy is a political no-brainer for several reasons… First, the incontrovertible facts about Trump’s relationship with Epstein are unflattering and eyebrow raising, even though they are not incriminating,” Levitz wrote. “Even if we put Trump’s conspiracizing to one side, his claim that he doesn’t understand why the Epstein case interests people still seems disingenuous… It seems clear then that Trump knows perfectly well why the Epstein case interests people. The fact that he now feels compelled to claim otherwise, while begging his supporters to stop talking about the controversy, seems rather odd — and also, like an indication that Democrats would be wise to keep attention focused on this matter.”

In Bloomberg, Matthew Yglesias argued “bipartisan outrage over Epstein is just what America needs.”

This story “differ[s] from the more extreme Russiagate allegations against Trump (or Trump’s infamous charges that Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya) in that they are not narrowly partisan. As such, they are especially appealing to the kinds of people who are disengaged from politics and alienated from mainstream institutions. In other words, just the kinds of people who’ve flocked to Trump’s banner over the past decade,” Yglesias wrote. “The conspiracists turning on Trump now are part of a more natural process of restoring balance to the political system.”

“Democrats, especially Democrats who aren’t socialists, need to relearn the habit of standing up for the little guy versus the establishment in ways that go beyond the distributional tables of a tax bill. A core reason that Epstein conspiracy theories are so widespread is that the public is broadly cynical about the way rich people are treated by the state and the legal system,” Yglesias said. “The kind of change many people want is not necessarily dramatic policy change, but change in personnel — the elevation of outsiders uncorrupted by ties to the system, either the party’s or the government’s.”

What the right is saying.

• The right is skeptical of The Journal’s report, suggesting it mirrors past media attempts to take down Trump.
• Some criticize Democrats for exploiting the story for political gain.
• Others say the grand jury testimony shouldn’t be unsealed — and is unlikely to satisfy Trump’s critics if it is.

In The Federalist, Eddie Scarry said the report “reeks of being a fake plant to implicate Trump.”

“I have no idea whether the note is legitimate. We know Trump did have at least some semblance of a relationship with Epstein that goes back to the early 1990s, but so did a lot of people,” Scarry wrote. “We also know that this all sounds almost exactly like another story involving the F.B.I. and a newly discovered document that was damaging to Trump: the case of Paul Manafort and the ‘black ledger.’ Recall that in August 2016, just after Trump secured the Republican nomination for president, the New York Times broke the story about allegations of secret foreign payments… to demonstrate a link between Russia and Trump, using Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine.”

“This is the same F.B.I. that has been handling the Epstein case. And so here we are. Another seedy book turns up out of nowhere to associate Trump with criminal conduct. What a coincidence,” Scarry said. “The two events are almost comically identical. An office space in Ukraine was pillaged by political activists, but what luck! A little paper book was eventually recovered — oh, my! Inside is damaging information associated with Trump! In 2025, as Trump set about quickly restructuring the executive branch of the federal government and attempting to hold corrupt Democrats accountable, well, I’ll be — a leather-bound book that makes him look like the dear friend of a notorious pedophile.”

In The Washington Examiner, Christopher Tremoglie asked “why do Democrats suddenly care about Epstein?”

“The Trump administration has botched the long-promised release of Epstein-related information. But Democrats acting as if they’re the knights-errant of Epstein’s victims is the bigger scandal,” Tremoglie wrote. “Among the vociferous have been congressional Democrats, who, all of a sudden, are interested in the villainous and disgraced sex trafficker. Their conspicuous silence includes the period from Jan. 20, 2021, to Jan. 20, 2025. Merrick Garland was the Attorney General appointed by Biden and ran the Department of Justice. They had access to everything related to Epstein.”

“Yet it appears that, up until recently, the overwhelming majority of Democrats showed little, if any, interest in the Epstein files. That is, until the Trump administration walked back a campaign promise and created a public relations nightmare with such an unforced error… It’s shameful and speaks volumes about their vulture-like tendencies. Once again, Democrats seek to exploit the tragedies of innocent people, in this case, sexually trafficked minors, solely for political gain,” Tremoglie said. “Their silence from when Biden was president and Garland was attorney general is the real indicator of how little they cared about Epstein.”

In National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy wrote about the “Epstein disclosure morass.”

“Weary but indulgent of his MAGA base, President Trump yesterday directed Attorney General Bondi to seek the release of all grand jury testimony from the Epstein investigation. This is a double whammy: It is legally dubious and it won’t satisfy the mob,” McCarthy said. “Grand jury proceedings are secret by law. There is no overarching public right to know what is uncovered in criminal investigations. If the government actually, formally accuses someone of crimes, such allegations and the relevant evidence become public.

“Absent secrecy, the presumption of innocence would be eradicated. That is, people publicly identified as connected to a grand jury probe (including completely innocent people who were just witnesses or whose names randomly came up for some reason) would be assumed by the press and public to be under suspicion of committing crimes,” McCarthy wrote. Furthermore, “it is worth noting that the grand jury testimony typically amounts to just a small fraction of the government’s investigative file. Far more extensive are witness interviews conducted by law enforcement agents, evidence subpoenaed from various sources, and the fruits of search warrants.”

My take.

Reminder: “My take” is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.

• For several reasons, I strongly believe this letter is real.
• Trump may want to protect his reputation in keeping the Epstein files sealed, but I highly doubt they criminally implicate him.
• We should remember to continue to follow facts over speculation as this story progresses.

I’ll start with something I said on X that ended up getting a lot of attention: I’m 97.5% sure (roughly speaking) that Trump wrote or signed the letter described in The Wall Street Journal story. Why am I so sure? Five main reasons:

1. Trump has a well documented history of drawing. This may seem kind of silly, but a key part of Trump’s (and his surrogates’) denials is that he would never send someone a note including some kind of a doodle. Donald Trump Jr., for instance, said “in 47 years I’ve never seen him doodle once. Give me a break with the fake ‘journalisming.’” Yet I can easily find example after example of signed Trump drawings. You don’t have to take my word for it: In his own book published in 2008, Trump wrote about drawing for charity.
2. The language in the note does, actually, sound like Trump’s. Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis, who always seems to take Trump’s side, claimed he asked Grok to search every record of Trump speaking or writing and never found him using the word “enigma,” which the note to Epstein used. It seems that Grok got this one wrong, since Trump has said ‘enigma’ repeatedly — in both writing and in speeches. Davis’s post on X was immediately plastered with community notes describing all the times Trump has used the word. 
3. Trump was really good friends with Epstein! Even though the two eventually had a falling out, the timing of the birthday letter lines up quite well, actually. Trump purportedly wrote the message in 2003; in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine what a terrific guy he thought Epstein was and how “it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” For his part, Epstein thought he was Trump’s closest friend. Trump flew on Epstein’s plane several times in the 1990s, and the two were repeatedly pictured together at parties. So, yes, it’s totally plausible that Trump could have written him this intimate and cryptic birthday note in 2003. 
4. Trump is not only well known for drawings, but also sending personalized signed notes. The Washington Post ran a whole story about Trump’s lifelong love of letters just this month. The New York Times wrote a similar piece all the way back in 2016, referencing his “most powerful and memorable form of communication… the old-fashioned ritual of a personal letter.”  
5. Finally, I sincerely doubt The Wall Street Journal would publish this story if it weren’t 100% sure about its veracity. Trump has been successfully intimidating news outlet after news outlet with lawsuits. The Journal is obviously aware of this, and would never take the massive risk of lobbing a grenade at Trump if it didn’t have the goods. A lot of people don't understand the layers of review these pieces go through to get published, but the process is substantial. I’m quite confident that The Journal has buttoned this piece up and protected itself, because Trump suing wasn’t just a predictable outcome — he literally told them he would sue if they ran the story.

Now, a few points on what we can take from any of this. For starters, I certainly don’t think we should dismiss the relationship between Trump and Epstein. All told, the stories of them partying together, the allegations of sexual misconduct against Trump, the footage of Trump judging underaged models, and the other oddities like this letter can and should set off all sorts of alarms. 

At the same time, I agree with Trump that if he were criminally implicated in the Epstein case, that information would likely have leaked during the Biden administration — or any one of his three presidential campaigns. I do not think Trump decided to crush this story to cover up his own wrongdoing; I think it’s far more likely that he is trying to protect his own or his friends’ reputations, knowing that a mere mention in the Epstein files would create an air of guilt. If you read how Julie K. Brown, the reporter who initially investigated the Epstein case, talks about Trump’s role in it all, I think you’ll see the facts are much less interesting than all the speculation. 

As for the implications of Epstein’s other personal connections, we still don’t know — after all these years — how Epstein built his wealth, if his powerful friends were actually part of his sex-trafficking scheme, or where his web of professional connections and his sex-related crimes overlapped. And as I said on the Sunday podcast this week, there is no “client list,” if you define that as some kind of running record of clients he brought in to abuse underaged girls. There are Epstein files, which include FAA records of where he flew, potential connections to intelligence agencies, or his autopsy report — all of which could be released, but haven’t been.

Still, we do actually know a lot already. David Wallace-Wells summed it up efficiently in a recent piece:

Gawker published his address book a full decade ago; New York magazine delivered an annotated version in 2019 and Business Insider a searchable version the next year. There followed investigations by The Times and The Wall Street Journal, prolific enough that they now have their own landing pages, and depositions and civil suits and a public criminal trial for Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime partner in crime. The Epstein flight logs were made public in 2021, the same year that Michael Wolff published an astonishing account of Epstein’s final months, including the long transcript of an interview that Steve Bannon conducted with Epstein. Bannon has said he is sitting on 15 hours of material; Wolff says his own audio recordings run about a hundred hours. In one clip released just before the election, Epstein calls himself Trump’s “closest friend.”

The difficulty with the Epstein story has always been separating the speculation from the facts, or the conspiracy theories from the open questions. Trump and his camp helped to stir some of those questions into a conspiratorial mania, and that mania now seems to be swallowing him up. He’s fighting back with his usual bluster and victimhood, pursuing lawsuits and claiming fake news — even though his history with Epstein is very well documented. If the end result is more disclosures and attention to this story and the victims, that’s probably a good thing; but if we follow speculation further down the conspiracy rabbit hole, and further away from any solid facts, we’ll only be left with more questions. 

Take the survey: What do you think about the alleged birthday note? Let us know!

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Your questions, answered.

Q: In regard to budget cuts to NPR and PBS — I am under the impression that the cut(s) will amount to about 3–3.5% of their annual budgets. Am I incorrect in this impression? 

— Guy from North Haven, CT

Tangle: Yes and no. On Thursday, the House of Representatives voted to pass a package rescinding about $9 billion of funding from the already allocated federal budget. Among the clawbacks was a roughly $1 billion cut to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). The cuts effectively eliminate all of the government’s funding for the CPB over the next two years.

Even though the CPB’s budget to administer these stations will be eliminated, neither NPR nor PBS are dependent on government funding for the majority of their operations. About 1% of NPR’s national budget and about 15% of PBS’s national budget come through government funding; the rest comes from audience donations. And although affiliate stations can broadcast much of PBS and NPR’s offerings for free, some stations pay dues to run nationally syndicated shows. 

Local stations that rely more on government funding say their operations are seriously threatened, and some are already making a push for donations to address the shortfall. Later this week, we plan to cover the rescissions package more broadly and in more detail as a main topic.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

On Monday, July 14, chipmaker Nvidia announced it would resume selling one of its artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China after the Department of Commerce lifted export controls on the product. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called the export controls a “negotiating chip” in United States–China trade talks, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said resumed chip sales were a provision in the recent agreement with China on rare-earth minerals. The Trump administration had previously restricted Nvidia’s chip sales to limit China’s use of U.S. technology to advance its military and AI systems, but Nvidia lobbied the government to lift the controls, arguing restrictions could spur unwanted Chinese innovation on AI. CNN has the story.

Numbers.

• 17% and 63%. The percentage of registered voters who say they approve and disapprove, respectively, of the Trump Administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, according to a July Quinnipiac University poll. 
• 40% and 36%. The percentage of Republicans who say they approve and disapprove, respectively, of the Trump Administration's handling of the Epstein files.
• 2% and 83%. The percentage of Democrats who say they approve and disapprove, respectively, of the Trump Administration's handling of the Epstein files.
• 11% and 71%. The percentage of independents who say they approve and disapprove, respectively, of the Trump Administration's handling of the Epstein files.
• 46%. The percentage of U.S. adults who consider the Wall Street Journal report that Donald Trump sent Jeffrey Epstein a birthday message in 2003 to be “completely” or “mostly” true, according to a July YouGov poll.
• 10%. The percentage of U.S. adults who consider the Wall Street Journal report to be “completely” or “mostly” false.
• 27%. The percentage of U.S. adults who said they hadn’t heard of the report.

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just published a Friday edition giving a closer look at the Secret Service.
• The most clicked link in Thursday’s newsletter was the firing of Manhattan federal prosecutor Maurene Comey. 
• Nothing to do with politics: Grand Teton has posted fliers warning campers of a shoe thief: a local fox.
• Thursday’s survey: 4,099 readers responded to our survey on the Biden autopen story with 35% saying they were not concerned about the autopen story but concerned about President Biden’s acuity. “Biden is the political gift that keeps giving to the Trump administration… That people in his administration agreed with those pardons is another reason why the Democrats are deservedly in political wilderness,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

Baltimore struggled with a rising homicide rate in the years leading up to and during the Covid-19 pandemic, but in April, the city recorded only five homicides — a record monthly low. Furthermore, the total number of homicides (39) through the first four months of 2025 is the city’s lowest for the start of any year on record, with both homicides and nonfatal shootings down significantly from 2024. Local leaders stressed they still have more work to do, but praised the collaboration between the city’s police department, district attorney, and community violence-intervention partners for the progress to date. “These numbers show that we’re moving in the right direction, together,” Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Richard Worley said. WYPR has the story.

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