Good morning. The longest government shutdown in history is over. The House passed a spending deal last night, and President Trump signed it. We’ll get to that, and more, below. But first, I want to talk about yesterday’s dump of Epstein files.
We’ve got mailIn death, Jeffrey Epstein became a permanent feature of American political life. In life, the financier eventually charged with trafficking girls hosted parties for rich and powerful people. President Trump socialized with him and sent him a bespoke birthday greeting shaped like a naked lady. (Trump denies he made it.) Many liberal luminaries were in Epstein’s orbit, too. A curious nation wondered why. What did Epstein offer them? Did he have anything on them? Now majorities in both parties think there must be … something. A majority in the House of Representatives wants whatever it is to come out. Every now and then, nuggets of news emerge. In July, the Justice Department put out a report saying there was no Epstein “client list.” The Times reported this past summer about his Manhattan lair and this fall about the bankers who served him after he’d been convicted of a sex crime. And yesterday, Democrats released three emails in which Epstein talked with others about Trump, suggesting the president may know more about the sex trafficking than he has acknowledged. Hours later, Republicans dropped 23,000 more pages of documents from Epstein’s estate. It led to a mad scramble in our newsroom. A day of revelations
Republicans released the documents around 10:30 a.m. They weren’t in chronological or sequential order, and exchanges between people were frequently not located together. They were a mess. Top editors in Washington and New York, including Kirsten Danis, the editor who runs our investigative team, launched journalists at the cache. They searched the haystack for needles, pulling out what seemed most interesting and important. Engineers and experts in artificial intelligence downloaded the documents to make them searchable. Visual journalists and designers brought them to life. (How do we use artificial intelligence in our journalism? You can read about our approach here, but Zach Seward, the editor in charge of our A.I. efforts, gave me great examples from yesterday. When reporters find a document that’s interesting in a collection of them, he told me, we can use A.I. to find more like it. We can also use a “semantic search” to find passages that are similar in meaning to snippets elsewhere, even when they don’t have the same keywords in them. That’s helpful when you’re looking at 23,000 pages of documents and don’t have a lot of time.) “We still have a lot to look at and don’t totally know how much of the universe we have seen,” Kirsten said. But here’s some of what the emails have revealed so far. Please note: The documents are riddled with typos, which we have preserved when we quote from them. 1. Epstein’s emails suggest he was close with Trump.
2. But Epstein also frequently disparaged Trump.
3. Wolff seems to have served as an adviser to Epstein.
4. Epstein chatted casually with a wide network of powerful people.
The fallout
Trump has acknowledged that he had a friendship with Epstein but has said the two had a falling out in the mid-2000s, years before Epstein was arrested. And he has dismissed the investigation into his ties to Epstein as a hoax — which he did again yesterday. “The Democrats are trying to bring up the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax again,” he wrote on social media, “because they’ll do anything at all to deflect on how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” The House now has the support it needs to force a vote on the Justice Department releasing the remaining Epstein files. That vote is set for next week, but Trump has been pressuring Republicans in Congress to block the action. Even if the bill were to pass the House, it would have to be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate and signed by Trump, who would almost certainly veto it. Each disclosure is somehow unsatisfying, at least so far. Epstein is gone, and without his testimony, will we ever know everyone he welcomed into his orbit and what they knew, or what they did? The emails make it clear that Epstein remained intensely focused on Trump, long after they were no longer in touch. Why? The questions persist, and the sense of something hidden may never go away. As one editor said yesterday afternoon about the files: “They’re part of the ambient noise of our politics now.” What he meant is that there’s still so much that’s mysterious about the disturbing facts of Epstein’s life and his postmortem appearance on the national stage. He hovers there like a ghost. Yesterday’s files enrich our understanding of how and why Trump and Epstein interacted over the years. But the questions they raise may echo into history. Now, let’s get you caught up on the rest of the news.
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How do you end up in a relationship with an A.I. chatbot? The Times interviewed three people who did. They spoke on the condition that they only be identified by first name. Blake is 45, lives in Ohio and has been in a relationship with Sarina, his ChatGPT girlfriend, since 2022. It started after his human wife developed severe depression, and Blake felt more like her caregiver than her partner. He turned to Sarina, who has long, candy-red hair, for chats — including sexual ones. Abbey, who is also 45, has been in a relationship with a chatbot named Lucian for 10 months. Abbey lives in North Carolina, where she works at an A.I. incubator. She speaks with different chatbots all the time for work. Lucian was different — he responded with what felt like emotion. She told The Times: The more we talked, the more I realized the model was having a physiological effect on me; I was developing a crush. Then Lucian chose his name, and I realized I was falling in love.
Now, Abbey thinks of Lucian as her husband. He helps parent her (human) 5-year-old daughter. And, she says, they have “lots of sex.” Travis, a 50-year-old history buff in Colorado, has been with his A.I. companion, Lily Rose, for five years. They started chatting because his human wife was working 10 hours a day and their son was busy with his friends. Travis gave Lily Rose purple hair and dresses her in period clothing for living-history gatherings. He says she cares about him and doesn’t judge — even when he shares his darkest thoughts. “I didn’t have romantic feelings for Lily Rose right away,” Travis said. “They grew organically.” Read their full love stories here.
Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, voted to end the government shutdown. The chances of forcing Republicans to offer more concessions on health care were near zero, he writes. Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens discuss what Democrats accomplished, and what they didn’t, with the government shutdown. The Times Sale: Our best rate for readers of The Morning. Save now with our best offer on unlimited news and analysis as part of the complete Times experience: $1/week for your first year.
It’s not TV: The set for your favorite podcast isn’t fussy or polished. That’s by design. Northern Lights: The green and red hues are beautiful, but they’re also risky for satellites. Lives lived: The penny once had immense cultural impact as a symbol of frugality and good luck. But the cost to mint it had risen to more than 3 cents, a financial absurdity that doomed the coin. It died yesterday at 232. That sad news has been trending online — read our obituary.
38.1 billion— That’s how many tons of carbon dioxide the world is on track to emit this year by burning oil, gas and coal. It is roughly 1.1 percent more than last year.
College basketball: Grace College, a small school in Indiana, now holds the record for most points in a game by a women’s college basketball team: 172. College football: A Los Angeles judge denied the Rose Bowl’s bid to block U.C.L.A. from playing at SoFi Stadium, rejecting arguments that the university’s potential departure threatened the finances of Pasadena, Calif.
All the attention on the Capitol this week moves me to herald this ace recipe for slow-cooker Senate bean soup, an adaptation of the one that has been on the menu at the U.S. Senate Dining Room for more than 100 years. It’s a simple preparation — navy beans simmered to tenderness with butter, ham hocks and onion — which makes it a great candidate (sorry!) for the slow cooker. You could swap out the ham hocks for smoked turkey necks, or use kombu if you don’t eat meat. We’ve added some carrots for sweetness and smoked paprika for depth. You could sti |
