White House hits back after Democrats share alleged Trump ‘birthday note’ to Jeffrey Epstein – live updates

The vice-president, JD Vance, who is one of the administration’s most dedicated social media posters, has weighed in on X to accuse Democrats of hypocrisy after they released an image of a sexually suggestive 2003 birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, with what looks like Donald Trump’s signature.

“The Democrats don’t care about Epstein. They don’t even care about his victims,” Vance wrote. “That’s why they were silent about it for years. The only thing they care about is concocting another fake scandal like Russiagate to smear President Trump with lies. No one is falling for this BS.”

In July, when the existence of the letter was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Vance had demanded to see the letter and suggested that it was suspicious that the paper had not shown the White House a copy.

“Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bullshit. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it. Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it?” Vance wrote at the time.

In reference to the text of the letter, which begins with an imagined dialogue between Trump and Epstein, Vance asked: “Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”

While the literary device and the formal language used in the dialogue does not sound at all like the way that Trump speaks in public, it is an open secret that he has worked with ghostwriters throughout his career, so it is certainly possible that the letter was commissioned by Trump, but composed by someone else.

In 2000, for instance, when Trump flirted with the possibility of running for the presidential nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform party, Trump published a book of his policy ideas that was actually written by Dave Shiflett, a journalist.

Since that book was published just three years before the Epstein birthday letter, the Guardian contacted Shiflett to ask if it might have been written for Trump by someone else.

“My understanding is that Trump neither writes nor reads his books,” Shiflett wrote back. “Several years back a Washington Post reporter told me he had asked Trump about his books and he had said he never read them.”

Mary Trump, the president’s niece who is a fierce critic of her uncle, has weighed in on the image of the signed birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, bearing Donald Trump’s name.

“That’s definitely his signature,” the president’s estranged niece wrote on X. “Just saying.”

Another former member of Trump’s inner circle who has turned critic, George Conway, shared part of a Wall Street Journal visual analysis, which compared the signature “Donald” on the sexually suggestive wishes to Epstein on his 50th birthday in 2003 to that on two letters signed by Trump in the same period.

One of those letters was to thank Conway, in 2006. The other was Trump’s remarkably warm letter of congratulations, in 2000, to Hillary Clinton on her victory in the race to represent New York in the senate that year.

The effusive letter to Clinton congratulated her on a “well-deserved victory” and had the words “great going!” written by hand and underlined twice in black marker next to the signature.

The Journal’s analysis of the letter also points to other reasons to doubt Trump’s denial when first confronted by the letter. “I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women”, Trump told the newspaper. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”

As the Journal shows, however, Trump did line drawings in a similar style, in a similar black marker, at about that time. He also used the word “enigma”, which is central to the letter, in two of his books; and has frequently used the phrase “a wonderful thing”, which also appears in the note, in public remarks.

2h ago17.51 EDT

Lauren Gambino

Several speakers at the immigrants rights news conference in Westlake quoted from Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent.

“I dissent. We all dissent,” the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, said.

Bass called the ruling “enraging” and said she had already directed the city to strengthen protocols prohibiting resources from assisting with federal immigration enforcement.

“We will not and we will not participate in these cruel, inhumane tactics,” Bass said.

She warned that undermining the personal liberties of Angelenos would impact all Americans.

“The rule of law used to mean something not just to us, but to the supreme court, but now, with the stroke of a pen, the supreme court has undermined the rights of millions,” she said.

She added: “And how ironic is it that this same supreme court that ruled colleges cannot use race in the admissions process has now ruled that law enforcement can use race to conduct raids and detain people.”

Another speaker, representing the ACLU, also quoted a part Sotomayor’s dissent that stated the situation in stark terms: “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job.”

3h ago17.30 EDT

Lauren Gambino

Outside a Home Depot in a heavily Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles, immigrant-rights advocates, joined by the city’s mayor, Karen Bass, warned that the supreme court had “effectively legalized racial profiling”.

Cars honked in support as they passed signs that said “Keep Ice out of LA” and one that read simply: “Fuck Trump.”

“We are infuriated because the impacts will continue to show in our community,” Flor Melendez, the executive director of CLEAN Car Wash Worker Center and a plaintiff in the case. “We will continue to feel the pressure, because we could not depend on our legal system.”

She said 81 car washes across the region have been raided since Trump’s crackdown began earlier this summer, some multiple times. At least 247 car wash workers were detained, she added.

“The supreme court of the United States decided not to see this evil that has been visited on our people, not to hear the cries of all who have been victims and witnesses of these actions, and not to use the voice of the court to protect individual rights under the Constitution,” said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (Chirla), which was one of the organizational plaintiffs in this case.

“Do the conservative justices not have eyes to see the video evidence, or are they not able to read our multiple collected declarations that we have provided,” Salas added. “Our evidence demonstrated that these are not calm and consensual engagements with individuals who voluntarily offer information about their immigration status.”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, insists that a photograph of a sexually suggestive 2003 birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, bearing Donald Trump’s name and signature, released by House Democrats and published by the Wall Street Journal on Monday, is evidence that the president has been framed.

“The latest piece published by the Wall Street Journal PROVES this entire ‘Birthday Card’ story is false”, Leavitt wrote on X. “As I have said all along, it’s very clear President Trump did not draw this picture, and he did not sign it.”

The president’s spokesperson added that his legal team “will continue to aggressively pursue litigation”, against the Journal, which first reported the existence of the note and drawing.

Leavitt also referred to the reporting that Trump contributed the signed drawing and note to a birthday album for the late sex offender as an effort “to perpetuate the Democrat Epstein Hoax!”

Leavitt’s deputy, Taylor Budowich, chimed in on X with what he presented as definitive visual evidence that “it’s not his signature”, in the form of four images of Trump’s signature on cards inserted in copies of a book about the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania last year.

However, it appears that all four of those signatures were from 2024, more than two decades after the 2003 birthday note, and it is a documented fact that people’s handwriting and signatures commonly change as they age.

Andrew Feinberg, a White House correspondent for the Independent, posted two images of Trump’s signature from the years before 2003 on X, which appear closer to the one on the note to Epstein.

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, has denounced the US supreme court ruling that permits federal immigration agents to demand proof of citizenship from anyone who appears to be of Latin American origin or is speaking a foreign language in Los Angeles, a city with a population that is 35% foreign-born and where 56% speak a language other than English at home, in a county that is nearly 50% Latino.

Newsom said, of the 6-3 ruling by the Republican-nominated majority:

Trump’s hand-picked supreme court majority just became the Grand Marshal for a parade of racial terror in Los Angeles. This isn’t about enforcing immigration laws – it’s about targeting Latinos and anyone who doesn’t look or sound like Stephen Miller’s idea of an American, including US citizens and children, to deliberately harm California’s families and small businesses. Trump’s private police force now has a green light to come after your family – and every person is now a target – but we will continue fighting these abhorrent attacks on Californians.

Two Republican senators announced on Monday that they are opening a congressional investigation of “the preparation for and response to” the deadly Palisades fire in Los Angeles by state and local officials in California, who are Democrats.

The senators, Rick Scott of Florida and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, said in a press release that the fire, which burned for 24 days in January and killed at least 12 people, “was more than just a horrific tragedy, it was an unacceptable failure of government to protect the lives and property of its citizens”.

In a separate news release last week, Scott accused California Democrats of having “botched” the response to the California wildfires.

However, the senate investigation appears to focus only on the fire in the affluent Palisades, where Scott was taken on a tour last month by a former reality TV star turned rightwing podcaster, Spencer Pratt, and not on the Eaton fire, which burned through Altadena, a less well-off suburb to the east.

As soon as the investigation was announced, Pratt, a conservative Palisades resident, folded it into a partisan attack on California Democrats in a social media video. “Why is it that only Republicans are interested in finding out why a California city burned to the ground?” Pratt asked.

The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, announced three weeks ago that the city had been asked by the justice department to wait until federal investigation is complete to release its “after action report” on the Palisades fire.

I’ve been speaking with Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, about the ruling from a federal appeals court today which upheld the defamation lawsuit by writer E Jean Carroll, and orders that Donald Trump still pay an $83m judgment.

Tobias said that the ruling is significant because it affirms substantial “punitive damages” – which comprise around $65m of the total award to Carrol. These “send a message” to the president, according to Tobias, to avoid further defamation.

While Tobias isn’t surprised by the ruling, characterizing Judge Lewis A Kaplan – who tried the case in the district court – as a “savvy, experienced jurist, who has resolved many high profile cases” – he fully expects the Trump administration to challenge the decision and attempt to appeal to the supreme court.

Per my last post, Robert Garcia, a representative who serves as the ranking member on the House oversight committee, said that Donald Trump is lying about the existence of his birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein.

In a video, posted to X, Garcia said that the president is “leading a White House cover-up”. The lawmaker from California added that committee members plan to review the documents that they received from the Epstein estate today.

Democrats on the House oversight committee have released a scanned copy of a “birthday note” that Donald Trump allegedly sent to Jeffrey Epstein, that was eventually compiled into an album of messages to celebrate Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

The sexually suggestive note to Epstein includes a conversation between Trump and the late sex offender, with a naked female silhouette drawn around it. The president’s signature is at the bottom of the note.

“Happy birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” the note reads.

The committee recently subpoenaed the Epstein estate for more documents as part of their investigation into the handling of the Epstein case. Trump has denied writing a letter for the birthday book, and even sued the Wall Street Journal for defamation when they first reported his contribution.