☕️ COACH JEFFREY ☙ Saturday, November 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump targets Epstein pals; leaked emails show Epstein was an idiot; Dems caught plotting with a pedophile; Trump slashes costs fast; grocery prices fall; SNAP rules tighten; Ukraine corruption; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your blockbuster weekend edition roundup includes: Trump orders DOJ to investigate high-profile Epstein buddies; emails show Epstein was a moron; House democrats conspired with pedophile to target Trump; Trump tackles affordability at unprecedented light speed; tariff dashboard dialed back on groceries; prices for consumer goods already falling; Thanksgiving got cheaper; SNAP recipients in the crosshairs for re-application under tighter rules; evidence of successful swamp draining; and new, even bigger problems for Ukraine, as the SS Zelensky takes on corruption water and lists to starboard.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, President Trump shoved the Democrats down into the pit they’d been building to trap him. On cue, the New York Times yowled like a scalded cat in this morning’s top-of-page headline: “Justice Department to Investigate Epstein Ties, but Not to Trump.” We have reached peak Epstein: I couldn’t count all the Epstein stories clogging yesterday’s already dense news cycle. They were uncountable, like ticks on a dying deer from Fauci’s backyard.

Twenty-four hours after House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an pending vote to “compel” the DOJ to release the Epstein files, President Trump shocked the world by demanding an investigation of people named in the Epstein disclosures, including (but not limited to) Bill Clinton, former Harvard President Larry Summers, billionaire Democrat donor Reid Hoffman, and mega-bank J.P. Morgan-Chase.

Well, Democrats demanded investigations. So. Within an hour, Attorney General Bondi promptly and enthusiastically responded:

In August, Trump appointed Jay Clayton as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He is a serious guy. He served as SEC Chairman from 2017-2020, and before that, Jay was a long-time mergers & acquisitions lawyer. So he understands complex financial stuff. He holds degrees from U. Penn. and Cambridge. Jay has a solid and well-respected reputation.

The Times never saw this coming. The article practically gasped with shock, angrily reminded readers about the DOJ’s unsigned July memo closing the investigation, and frantically speculated that Trump only opened these new investigations so DOJ would have an excuse not to turn over its Epstein files because of pending investigations.

Nobody knows Trump’s plan, it is brimming with strategic ambuiguity, which has become Trump 2.0’s hallmark. But it was still politically brilliant, in a dizzying array of ways. Let us count them.

First, criminal investigations are at least part of what Trump’s MAGA critics have long said they wanted. It will be up to the US Attorney to decide whether he’s got enough evidence to defeat tall-building criminal defense attorneys and support any high-profile arrests. But it seems the investigations will soon be underway (if they weren’t already in progress).

Second, this puts high-profile Democrats, including former President Clinton, in play. In a hostile op-ed yesterday, the Washington Post editorial board called Trump’s move “escalation,” and predicted it would eventually backfire. “Trump is keeping the story alive,” the editors sneered. Someone is. But maybe the high-profile Democrats in the crosshairs would prefer the story to quietly die.

Third, Trump’s turnaround raises the stakes on all further disclosures. Each new tranche raises the stakes for whoever appears in them. The more stuff that comes out, the more “many other people and institutions” will require scrutiny.

In many remarkable ways, the Epstein scandal is unfolding just like the Russiagate revelations. First comes the “evidence” in the form of the document dumps. The now-public evidence supports the investigations. The investigations become indictments.

Beyond the initial three emails that Democrats unsuccessfully tried to mischaracterize, Wednesday’s dump of 20,000 new documents is beginning to bear fruit.

🔥 So far, the new documents have revealed media collaborating with Epstein against Trump (in yesterday’s post), a growing narrative in Epstein’s own sloppy words that he perceived Trump to be his Great Nemesis, and evidence that Epstein thus tried to destroy Trump by conspiring with media and House Democrats.

The emerging picture is of an Epstein who was terrified of Trump. Leading up to the billionaire’s arrest, he increasingly wanted to injure Trump, and created a false narrative that he, Epstein, was the ultimate Trump weapon. Gullible reporters, Democrats, and Trump enemies believed Epstein, which also gave him a huge public relations boost.

I’m not the only one saying it. Yesterday, after reviewing the latest Epstein documents, the Washington Post ran an astonishing story under this headline:

The article’s first three paragraphs summarized the entire sordid story:

Here’s what we can now see of the timeline. In 2007, Trump threw Epstein out of his club, one month after Epstein signed the plea deal in his Florida prosecution. The widely reported story was that Epstein had sexually harassed the teenage daughter of another club member while the young lady was working at the spa. Trump heard about it and, according to accounts from both journalists and attorneys involved, revoked Epstein’s membership and banned him from the club in October 2007.

Over the years, Trump has also publicly complained that Epstein “stole people that worked for me,” going as far back as 2000, when Epstein poached Virginia Guiffre, then 16, when she was working as a locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago’s spa. Ghislaine Maxwell hired Guiffre in late 2000 to be Epstein’s “traveling masseuse.”

The emails and text messages from the latest dump show that Epstein smelled a rat. He suspected that Trump was behind all his criminal problems. He began to counterattack, and communicated with any Trump enemy who’d listen, up and down the progressive food chain. This revived the convicted pedophile’s flagging fortunes, since progressives happily overlooked his sordid criminal history, since Epstein could help them take out the Bad Orange Man.

So far, and don’t miss this, we’ve seen not a single email or text between Trump and Epstein. Zero. From the documents, it looks like they never spoke. Everything the media has published to date is just Epstein obsessively chatting about Trump.

🔥 More solid evidence of Epstein’s war against Trump appeared in a second WaPo story bearing this equally astonishing headline:

Four months before his second, final, and fatal arrest, Epstein was apparently watching the live broadcast of a February, 2019 impeachment hearing with great interest, frantically texting ideas and suggestions with House Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-USVI), who was sitting front and center:

CLIP: House Representative Stacey Plaskett nailed for being coached by Epstein during Trump impeachment hearings (1:32).

Not coincidentally, a 2023 Business Insider story broke the news that Epstein had generously donated to Stacey’s 2018 campaign:

Last night, Plaskett admitted the texting had happened, but brushed it off as constituent communications. “During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents, and the public at large offering advice, support, and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” the statement said.

Whatever you think about this ghastly Democrat pay-for-play stuff, it proves beyond argument that Epstein was doing everything he could to hurt Trump, but had no real ammunition.

Indeed, in the many emails and text messages between Epstein and reporters, Epstein and other high-flyers, and Epstein and Democrats, he constantly hints that he holds incriminating evidence against the President but never actually says what that evidence is. So far as we can tell from tens of thousands of communications, he had nothing. Bupkis.

But Epstein used that nothing to get a whole lot of attention.

🔥 When you aim for the King, don’t miss. In Hamlet, King Claudius proclaimed, “Revenge shall have no bounds.”

Epstein is now a former pedophile. Yesterday —at last!— President Trump unexpectedly plunged the apparatus of government right into Democrats, using the same Epstein sword they’ve been sharpening since January. And what can they say? Having become a part of the dramatic political opera that they composed, Democrats cannot reasonably argue that anyone is off the table for investigations.

In short, it’s too late to say never mind.” WaPo’s editors whined, “Trump wants to redirect the Epstein furies away from himself and toward his political opponents.” Indeed.

The good money says Democrats will soon be playing defense on Epstein. And not just on that issue.

📉📉📉

In a record-breaking display of nimble political acrobatics, in a span of mere days, the Administration has turned the federal cruise ship around and sailed into sunnier political waters of affordability. The helpful headlines are flooding out. Here are a few. The New York Times, Thursday:

“The Trump administration,” the Grey Lady skeptically allowed on Thursday, “is preparing broad exemptions to certain tariffs in an effort to ease elevated food prices that have provoked anxiety for American consumers.” (We could argue about what or who provoked consumers’ anxiety, but I digress.)

Now consider yesterday’s headline from CNN, which closed the loop and showed it took only one day between “preparing tariff exemptions” and actually deploying them:

(And how about that: Coffee! I like to think that the Administration is looking out for us.) Ask yourself: when was the last time you heard of the federal government preparing to do something and then actually doing that thing twenty-four hours later? I bet it’s never happened.

Trump is flexing his tariff dashboard again.

Tweaking tariffs will surely help grocery prices, but they are already falling. Consider a widely reported story and headline from Heraldo USA, also yesterday:

According to Newsweek, Target has cut prices on everyday items like Kraft mac and cheese ($1.69, down from $1.99), Good & Gather Honeycrisp apples ($5.99, down from $6.99), Up & Up cough syrup ($6.59, down from $9.19), and Munchkin cup packs ($5.79, down from $7.00). It is also now marketing a Thanksgiving Meal Pack with all the items for overdoing dinner at under $5 a person.

It’s a good move. Target needs some good P.R. after all its cross-dressing scandals. Together, we see not only a rapid-fire tariff plan, but also a high-profile, grocery price-lowering story all on the same day. If you think that happy confluence of events was coincidence, I have some timeshares in an Everglades R.V. Park to sell you.

Anecdotally, a new Aldi just opened up on the corner down from our neighborhood. If you don’t have them, Aldi is a self-bagging corner grocery positioned just under K-Mart but above a budget Bodega. Michelle was excited to try it, and yesterday she hauled home a full grocery cart (40+ items) for $123.59. Seems like progress.

📉 Rounding out a trifecta of grocery affordability moves, yesterday Politico published this encouraging headline:

“People keep talking about SNAP. But SNAP is supposed to be if you’re down and out,” Trump told Fox News on Monday. “The number (of recipients) is many times what it should be.” Also Monday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Newsmax that she plans to “have everyone reapply for their benefits, make sure that everyone taking a taxpayer-funded benefit through food stamps is literally vulnerable and they can’t survive without it.”

During late Trump 1.0, the President tried to shrink SNAP, but was sandbagged by impeachment scandals and blocked by a Democrat-controlled House. Now he is back to working on his original plan, with an even more target-rich environment, since SNAP mushroomed to historic levels under Biden.

SNAP is basically free grocery money dished out to 42 million American grocery shoppers every month. Reducing SNAP by any amount will also reduce demand for lots of grocery items people wouldn’t otherwise buy if it was their own money. Thanks to ordinary competitive pressures, SNAP reductions will drain demand and produce lower prices for everyone.

📉 This is nothing less than a lightspeed, whole-of-government response to inflated grocery prices. It was a massive flex. I’m not sure we’ve ever seen anything like it before. First, presidential administrations have never moved at this velocity. Not even close. Usually, before anything tangible can happen, it takes ages for committees to meet, stakeholders to be consulted, plans to be circulated, and consensus to be achieved, by which time everyone has forgotten what the problem was to start with.

Not this time.

Trump is finally showing a frustrated but grateful nation what functional government should look like. And the surreal velocity isn’t all. The other side of the coin is that this kind of rapid response to a transient political issue used to be completely impossible, thanks to the deep state. Presidential administrations were simply unable to prod the lethargic behemoth of bureaucracy into anything but glacial action, especially if the partisan careerists disagreed with a particular plan or even how the plan was to be done.

But Trump has built a brand-new federal government; one that actually responds to his orders. There is no better proof that the deep state swamp has been effectively dried out and the swamp rats sidelined than the Administration’s ultra-fast affordability response this week.

🚀🚀🚀

Prepare to be shocked once again. Remember that brave outpost of democracy, courageously and single-handedly holding off the Russian dictator? The UK Express ran an awkward story this week, headlined, “Chaos in Ukraine as corruption scandal threatens to bring down Zelensky.” But this time, the hit piece didn’t just run in one cooperative outlet. This time, all corporate media platforms are carrying the story. And someone has served reporters salacious details, not just snack packs, but full Thanksgiving dinners, in the form of things like pictures of gold-plated toilets and shrink-wrapped bundles of embezzled cash.

The $100 million dollar scandal was broken by Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, or “NABU,” which this week “conducted raids on seventy Ukrainian businesspeople and energy sector insiders.” To be perfectly clear, after the 2014 coup, NABU was established by the US State Department, with on-the-ground assistance from USAID, the FBI, CIA, DOJ, and DoD. Various memoranda and agreements have maintained U.S. oversight and information sharing.

In other words, though it is ostensibly a Ukrainian anticorruption unit, the U.S. actually runs NABU. Remember that.

Ironically, back when Zelensky was a comedian who played Ukraine’s president on TV, his platform was anticorruption. And he leaned into the same fake TV platform when he ran for real president, convincing Ukrainians that his acting experience would translate into progress against one of the country’s longest-lasting and most pernicious problems.

In other words, if Zelensky has a political weakness, it’s corruption. He was elected to stop corruption. That’s basically his entire political portfolio.

🚀 The highest-profile target of NABU’s new investigations is one Tymur Mindich, who —presumably tipped off— fled to Israel the morning of the raid, leaving his gold-plated bidet behind. (Mindich is a dual citizen, and Israel does not cooperate with extraditions. I know, I know.)

Mindich and Zelensky have been best friends since back in the old days; they were business partners who jointly owned Kvartal 95, the comedy television studio and production company foundational to Zelensky’s entertainment career.

As you can imagine, after Zelensky somehow became president, Mindich somehow became a government expert, and his grubby hands grasped some of Kyiv’s most profitable government agencies, including banking and energy. Ukrainians nicknamed Mindich “Zelensky’s wallet,” since Mindich was always the money man. (Zelensky isn’t great at math. He’s the comedian.)

In July, Zelensky suddenly tried to shut down NABU. Just as suddenly, Kyiv’s capital square was packed with angry protestors. Zelensky backed off.

NABU was preparing to take out most of Zelensky’s remaining team, inlcuding his alter-ego. In other words, the bullet of accountability struck right next to Ukraine’s green sweatshirt. It also swept in many of his other friends and provoked immediate resignations by spooked cabinet members.

Even the New York Times ran the story, calling the president’s problems a “remarkable reversal,” as if he were previously the paragon of honor and reliability:

The article, appropriately and ironically, began with a Zelensky schtick. “Is it possible to become president and not steal?” Mr. Zelensky once joked. “It’s a rhetorical question, as no one has tried so far.” Haha!

“Ukrainian investigators (NABU) say that a criminal organization led by a business partner of Mr. Zelensky (i.e. Mindich),” the Times reported, “siphoned off and then laundered $100 million from the country’s publicly owned nuclear power company and engaged in other fraud and financial crimes.”

Without directly saying it, the New York Times obviously smelled a hit job —after all, it would know— aimed at the green sweatshirt.

NABU slowly (and painfully) “unfurled” the case, “drip-fed revelations,” leaked “recordings from wiretaps,” produced “slick videos,” and “gradually ratcheted up pressure on Mr. Zelensky.” The Times is right to smell a rat; that sounds a lot more like a psy-op and a hit job than any normal criminal investigation.

The released recordings were uglier than stink on a Ukrainian private. Here’s how the Times described part of one of the recordings:

If the NABU disclosures were a military operation, it might be called a decapitation strike. It sent a broad message: first, it enraged a Ukrainian public, who have been living on scraps and donating small amounts to the war effort wherever they can. It also instantly made all Kyiv’s other corruptocrats paranoid, wondering how many of their own phone calls were monitored, too.

The scandal makes it much more difficult for Ukraine’s NATO allies to continue demanding billions for the war-torn country. Whether it will starve the war effort to death remains to be seen. But it seems more likely that the comet will turn out to be aliens than the U.S. will put any more cash in the ushanka the next time it’s passed around.

Whoever is pulling the strings behind the scenes just yanked Zelensky’s leash, hard. It is impossible to know whether this was intended to end his presidency or just send him an irresistible message, to compel him to do … something. Make a deal? Either way, Zelensky’s circle of corrupt friends just significantly shrank.

As they always say at this stage of the shrinking dictatorship, he’s increasingly isolated. Ukraine has reached the Baghdad Bob stage. It’s just a matter of time.

Have a wonderful weekend! Come back here on Monday morning to kick off another terrific week of Coffee & Covid-style essential news and commentary.

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