☕️ FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS ☙ Saturday, August 23, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

DOJ drops Maxwell files; RFK Jr. fires 600 CDC staff; CBO shows tariffs slash deficit; media admits no inflation spike; Trump targets windmills; US buys 10% of Intel—is it socialism? And more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your weekend edition roundup includes: DOJ drops Ghislaine Maxwell transcript (and audio), making the most transparent ongoing investigation in history, but what does it (or doesn’t it) prove?; Kennedy fires 600 CDC scientists, alarming progressive medical fetishists; tariffs updates! CBO scores massive tariff revenue win, upsetting the expert applecart; more expert beclowning as media admits inflation is stable despite dire predictions; Trump turns tariff dashboard to stymie windmills; and my thoughts on the US government’s acquisition of 10% of Intel stock.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The New York Times ran a story this morning headlined, “Maxwell Never Witnessed Trump in ‘Inappropriate Setting,’ Transcript Says.” The sub-headline added, “The transcripts and audio are likely to raise as many questions as they answer.” Spoiler: whatever else it might be worth, it left the Democrats feeling frustrated— with no happy ending.

Yesterday, as he’d promised, DOJ Number Two and former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche released the lightly redacted transcripts and audio from the two-day interview with oceanic explorer, daughter of disgraced British scion Robert Maxwell (who died mysteriously), convicted sex trafficker, and former Epstein Sexretary with Benefits Ghislaine Maxwell. (Epstein, ditto.)

It is a fascinating historical document and, dare I say, tantalizing. It came so close, so many times. Blanche asked all the right questions, but ultimately, there were no bombshells. To his credit, Blanche probed her about nearly everything that anyone would be curious about. His questions were direct and well-framed, if not particularly aggressive.

Now we have Maxwell’s answers.

Unsurprisingly, Maxwell generally denied, or couldn’t remember, or wasn’t involved in, key aspects of the main Epstein theories. She wasn’t aware of any voluntary intelligence contacts (though she waffled on Mossad). She supervised construction of all his luxury properties —including the neo-occult island buildout— but never knew of any video equipment except “normal” security surveillance— although she didn’t deny others were there. She knew nothing about any blackmail operation, not personally, but allowed it could’ve happened. You never know.

To be clear, Maxwell didn’t deny that Epstein developed a taste for underage girls. She described him as “sick,” and weakly defended her own involvement by claiming Epstein’s behavior slowly evolved over the decades as his sexual appetites became more monstrous. (At one point, for instance, she helpfully suggested that Epstein’s taking testosterone might have something to do with it— maybe they should add that to the warning labels.)

She admitted the various “massage therapists” she’d hired often gave Epstein and passengers “therapy” in various states of undress. Cagily, she did not deny that “extra services” may have been provided. You can ride the plane and the therapist. That’s why we call it the friendly skies.

For example, in this excerpt from transcript page 317, Maxwell allowed that Epstein was a “disgusting guy who did terrible things to young kids,” but argued he “wasn’t really as interesting” as people make him out to be:

So the narrative that was created and then built upon just mushroomed into what—basically this is like a Salem witch trial. People have gone and lost their minds over this thing. I understand that.

But the issue is, how do you satisfy a mob who can’t understand the lifestyle? Because it’s like P. Diddy Redux on TV with the Clintons and Trump. I mean, it’s bananas. And while some of it is real—he did do those things, I’m definitely not disputing that—this was a man people didn’t even believe had a real business. I happen to believe he did. Did he grift? I don’t know, because I wasn’t really in his business. But this is one man.

He’s not some—well, they’ve made him into something he wasn’t. He’s not that interesting. He’s a disgusting guy who did terrible things to young kids. You’re not going to hear me say what he did to people who I wasn’t there to see. I didn’t see it.

It was their lifestyle! In other words, we normies don’t understand how the rich and famous and well-connected live their lives, and so, to us, it all looks gross and immoral and conspiratorial. But it’s just their jam, man. That’s just like, how it is. Try being sympathetic for once.

And also, as a lawyer, when a deposition witness says, “I wasn’t there to see; I didn’t see it,” that’s an evasion. “What I saw” is completely different from what a witness knows or believes using their other senses or from indirect evidence, such as former presidents emerging from the bedroom with their pants off, or the girls dishing about peculiar sausage shapes.

That was just one example of the mouthwatering future possibilities if Ghislaine is ever pressed on these points.

Maxell extended her theme by attempting to pour frigid water on the idea that high-profile politicians were using Epstein just as a “deluxe benefits” provider:

But to suggest that Larry Summers or Clinton would go, “Oh my gosh, this is the guy I’m going to get my body rubbed and have sex”—no. They’re men who went and had a massage and maybe did something sexual. They’re men; I wasn’t in the room. I cannot tell you if that happened.

And if it did, I never paid for that. Just so we’re clear, nobody ever said to me, “Oh, we had sexual intercourse and that was a three.” Uh-uh. I’d have been like, “Okay. TMI. Not my business.” You want to—it’s just not. And I didn’t want to know. Maybe there’s that.

But did I think these guys were coming for that? I really don’t. If you met Epstein, there is no way that this cast of characters—extraordinary men, some of whom are in your cabinet, whom you value as your coworkers—would have been with him if he was just a creep or if it was only because they wanted sexual favors.

Coming or going. She didn’t say the men didn’t come for the extra-special plane rides, or were friends with Epstein just because he was “a creep.” She only said that she didn’t think so. That’s my opinion, and I’m sticking to it.

See? It all came so close. She essentially admitted that officials like Summers and Clinton did have sex with Epstein’s underage therapists (“maybe they did something sexual”). But she claimed she hadn’t seen it happen (“I wasn’t in the room.”). And she emphatically —and repeatedly— insisted she never saw anything nonconsensual or forcible (e.g.: “I never saw tears”).

Maybe more useful information will surface if it gets that far, and Blanche presses her. That’s the most tantalizing possibility. For instance, I was aching for him to ask her something like, “Why did you think this international massage connoisseur wanted you to hire inexperienced sixteen-year-old therapists?”

Sadly, this was just a softball proffer interview, and Blanche understandably never challenged her lack of knowledge or the many inconsistencies in her statement.

Oh, and like the rest of us, she doesn’t think Epstein killed himself. So there’s that. She didn’t speculate on why anyone would want to kill him, though. Probably just jealous.

🔥 Turning to politics, Maxwell described, at length, her and Epstein’s cozy relationship with Bill Clinton and their many plane rides and vacations together. Still, she denied Clinton ever went to the island. But what infuriated the Times more than anything else was that she completely exonerated President Trump (p. 106):

TODD BLANCHE: Did you ever observe President Trump receive a massage?

GHISLAINE MAXWELL: Never.

At bottom, this interview will leave Epstein watchers and bloodthirsty Democrats unsatisfied. If anything, Maxwell’s denials, coupled with all the additional new details about Epstein’s life, will probably fuel even more theories. Nothing was resolved either way, since Maxwell isn’t credible, and if she is an intelligence asset, then she would easily navigate this kind of softball interview, providing just enough information to signal helpfulness, without disclosing anything actually useful.

I’m sure that the independent Epstein experts will have a lot more to say once they’ve digested all this new material. (I checked, and Whitney Webb, for example, hadn’t chimed in yet.)

You can read and listen to it yourself on the DOJ’s website at this link. Here’s one page (of hundreds) just to give you an idea what the back and forth was like:

Did it move the needle? I think so. Bondi, Patel, and Bongino have forcefully said that there’s no reliable evidence in the FBI’s Epstein files, over which Democrats enjoyed four years of complete control and may have packed with wild goose chases and punched through with rabbit holes.

Reading Todd Blanche’s questions, one gets the lawyer’s sense he’s starting the investigation all over. You might read it differently.

Crusted into the seams of her testimony, Maxwell confirmed much more than it appears at first blush. She also confirmed the lack of any prior real investigation. For instance, Blanche asked whether she’d ever received a subpoena for bank records; Maxwell said no.

Whatever else she is, Maxwell is the only living witness, never previously questioned, who was right there when everything happened. Now, the public can see at least the outlines of her “side” of the story. However incredible it was —like when she testified that she got a securities license, became a day trader, and was just lucky— it’s still a concrete foundation stone planted at the base of an evolving Epstein disclosure.

Sorry, Democrats. One of the legs just fell out of the “get Trump” stool.

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The accountability express continues trundling down the tracks. Two days ago, Fox ran a gratifying story headlined, “About 600 CDC workers terminated after court clears part of Trump admin restructuring plan.” Bye, Felicia.

Following a flurry of injunctions and court orders, HHS was finally cleared to begin firing CDC employees who’d been frozen on administrative leave since April. Diagnosis: terminal. You’re fired.

The most ironic and amusing part of this story is how entitled the progressive left feels about public health. Pruning public health agencies is not just problematic for them, it’s simply impossible. You’d think these fired bureaucratic authoritarians were each on the brink of curing cancer or something, even though the CDC has never cured anything, not even pimples or jock itch.

As the CDC gets smaller, America gets healthier.

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Narrative failure alert! This week, US News and World Report published this remarkable, expectation-defying headline:

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is as liberal a pack of partisans as ever stepped. These are the same folks who found no inflation occurred while Biden tripled the money supply by printing dollars faster than concupiscent jackrabbits. So nobody will claim it’s just a fake promo figure.

The new estimate was devastating news for corporate media, which angrily ignored the story, and ran more DC protest tales instead. The financial experts were also unavailable for comment, even though they’d predicted the exact opposite, that Trump’s tariffs would mushroom the deficit. For instance, the Washington Post, three weeks ago:

Whoops! (Portlanders: the deficit is the difference between what the government spends and its tax revenues).

If anything, the CBO’s estimate was low. The prediction of a $400 billion deficit reduction over ten years is very conservative, since tariff revenue in 2025 is already estimated to blow past $400 billion, and tariffs weren’t in place for the whole year.

I don’t mean to minimize the accomplishment. Even $4 trillion over a decade isn’t exactly pocket change; it’s more than most major tax packages ever dare to promise.

That wasn’t the only thing experts were wrong about. On the same day, CBS News ran this delightfully contrarian story:

Until this week, most “mainstream” economists screamed that Trump’s sweeping tariffs would quickly push consumer prices higher, triggering a new inflation wave. Costs will just be passed on to American consumers, they cried. CBS’s article shows that didn’t happen: prices have stayed “relatively stable,” and the hysterical predictions of immediate inflationary shock did not materialize.

Unlike with the prior story, this time the economists are talking. Maybe we were wrong, they admitted, but it will still happen like we said, later, just you wait. “Economists caution,” CBS said, “that there is no guarantee that prices won't surge later this year.”

There’s no guarantee economists won’t move to Venezuela and take up communal farming, either.

If the credentialed doctors of economics misdiagnosed the national patient once, why should we trust their second prognosis? CBS didn’t say.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, Trump is still using his tariff dashboard in even more creative and unexpected ways. The New York Times, Friday:

Not hamper wind turbines! Please say it isn’t so.

Sweeping aside the giant piles of diced bird parts, the Times reported that on Thursday, the Trump Administration filed notice of an investigation into wind turbines under a law called Section 232, “which allows the president to apply tariffs to foreign products if their imports threaten national security.”

Trump has never liked wind. He calls turbines “ugly,” “bird killers,” and recently “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY.”

The Times warned that the investigation shows Trump plans to smite the wind industry —which apparently heavily relies on foreign parts, another subsidy for Europe and Mexico— and “stymie” new construction projects. Making wind power more expensive will, the Times fears, translate into fewer turbines scarring the landscape and beaching whales.

More than anything, the turbine debate exposes the rotten hearts of so-called environmental activists. Oil firms get pilloried for a single duck in a retention pond. But a wind farm can shred bald eagles all day long, and the same activists say nothing. In other words, for modern environmentalists, climate orthodoxy trumps conservation. Wildlife, serene landscapes, and endangered blue whales are all completely expendable when they become inconvenient to the decarbonization project.

Since the late 1960s, many critics —especially in law, economics, and political philosophy— have noticed how modern environmentalism often drifts away from protecting nature into restructuring society into a collectivist utopia. It’s just boring old crypto-marxism, repackaged for “modern audiences.” But I digress.

That we were right about tariffs from day one is now unavoidable. Trump’s tariff dashboard is about so much more than mere revenue. He’s using it to bring the globalists to heel. The much-desired goal of ending globalism for good would justify an enormous investment, but Trump has found a way to make trillions at the same time.

Since inflation is stable, it’s obvious that foreign treasuries are beginning to foot the bill for American objectives. Trump’s achieved the politically impossible; he’s transformed taxes into a profit center.

Think of it. For fifty years, politicians of both parties swore there were only two choices: raise taxes (career suicide) or cut spending (political suicide). Trump has once again found a third way: make foreigners pay America’s bills. And it’s fair, since the world benefits from American military and economic stability.

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Several alert readers sought my thoughts about the Intel play. The Times reported the story yesterday under the headline, “Intel Agrees to Sell U.S. a 10% Stake in Its Business.” It’s historic and nearly unprecedented. Is this socialism? Textbook fascism? What?

Intel’s woes have been brewing for over a decade. It stumbled in the 2010’s, failing to produce smartphone chips, outpaced by more nimble foreign competitors. In 2015, it launched a massive, $300 million DEI initiative, which didn’t help any. Last year, it posted record losses ($18.8 billion) and was delisted from the Dow, insultingly replaced by Taiwan-affiliated gaming chipmaker NVIDIA (now the world’s AI leader).

Despite all that, Intel is still one of the only fully U.S.-headquartered and sourced firms with the capacity to design and manufacture advanced chips here. That makes it a strategic choke-point. The NSA and DoD simply cannot operate without trusted silicon.

The wandering tale of how Intel stock found its way into the national treasury began last year, when Biden agreed to gift Intel with an $8 billion grant, essentially a bailout, though nobody dared call it that. Free money. Your tax dollars, at work, for someone else.

The chipmaker had only gotten $2 billion before Trump took over. He immediately put the remaining $6 billion in grants on hold. In June, Intel sued for its next installment. This deal was the result. In short, Trump said fine, we’ll give you the money, but American taxpayers get a piece of the action— a big piece.

Also, as part of the deal, Intel had to fire its new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan, who has deep ties to China (sitting on the boards of many Chinese tech companies). Two weeks ago, Trump called for him to quit. (“The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem.”)

Tan raced to the White House and reconciled with President Trump.

The simple version is that Trump saved Intel to protect American national security interests, and he also secured Biden’s “free” grant commitment with Intel stock. That’s unprecedented. Even the GM bailout, equally historic, only saw the US become the automaker’s temporary majority owner. (We later liquidated our position for an $11 billion loss. Great job.)

🔥 Since this long-term stake is unprecedented, many questions remain. Is Intel now “too big to fail?” Will competitors get a fair shake in bids for large US contracts if Intel is involved? Will this move quell or even destroy fair competition, discouraging other chipmaking entrepreneurs from even trying?

Those are all fair questions. As for me, I’m not sure how I feel about it. At the time, I vigorously opposed the GM bailout because of the US’s direct involvement, and swore never to buy another GM product. (I broke that promise two years ago, under duress, when we got a Tahoe. It was the best value for money. Competing priorities. What can I say? It was Michelle’s fault.)

This isn’t socialism. Bailouts are socialism. It’s not capitalism, either. It’s more like shareholder nationalism— Washington taking an equity cut of a strategic company instead of just regulating it or bailing it out. A distressed but critical manufacturer got the money to stay in business, but this time, American taxpayers get to enjoy the benefits.

Like much of what Trump does, the move is disruptive — and, in hindsight, maybe will seem obvious. He just rewrote the rules for government bailouts, resetting the old incentive structure. Companies can no longer think only in terms of lobbying costs. The question now is whether this shift will fundamentally transform the bailout landscape: will big corporations continue begging for government handouts, if they know it will mean giving up a big chunk of their stock?

These questions also remain unanswered, for now.

The bottom line is that we’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out. I’m certainly against bailouts, but this isn’t a bailout; and I can certainly recognize that Intel is a key American company at a critical moment when computer chips seem to be the single most important manufactured good on Planet Earth. If we can’t completely trust foreign chips —and we can’t— then we need our own.

Trump found a third way. It could be great. We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.

Have a wonderful weekend! Coffee & Covid will be back on Monday morning, bright and early, with another terrific roundup of essential news and commentary.

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