Tonight in Your Rights: An Epstein files audit?
Senators demand an independent review of the Epstein files release. Plus, terror victims are furious about the Trump DOJ’s deal with Halkbank.
Four U.S. senators demanded an independent audit of the Epstein files on Wednesday.
In a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.) joined Democratic Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, giving the request bipartisan buy-in.
“On January 30, 2026, DOJ published over three million pages and files of Epstein-related records, including more than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images,” the senators wrote in a three-page letter. “Contrary to Congress’s explicit directive to protect victims, these records included email addresses and nude photos in which the names and faces of publicly-identified and non-public victims could be identified. But when it came to information identifying powerful business and political figures who are alleged co-conspirators or material witnesses, DOJ appears to have heavily redacted those records.”
Although it’s part of the legislative branch, the GAO operates independently.
“I can confirm that GAO has received a congressional request regarding the subject you mention,” the agency’s spokeswoman told All Rise News. “GAO has a process it goes through to determine whether we do work and when, which we are working through right now.”
Read the letter in full here.
Outrage grows over Trump DOJ’s Halkbank deal
Victims of state-sponsored terrorism are livid over the Trump Justice Department’s “sweetheart deal” with a Turkish state-run bank charged with the biggest anti-Iran sanctions evasion ever prosecuted.
“The DOJ is choosing to leave $20 billion in ‘blood money’ in the hands of a foreign bank while American victims wait for years for payments that will never come,” the group American Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism United wrote in an email to All Rise News.
As All Rise News previously reported, Trump has been trying to dismiss the case against Halkbank for the better part of a decade, and the government’s deferred prosecution agreement surprised many observers because the bank didn’t have to pay any fine.
During a federal court hearing on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Richard Berman notified the government that he received a letter from stakeholders in the United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund, an entity that has paid out more than $10 billion to victims since Congress established it in 2015.
Prosecutors argue that the deal brought about Turkey’s involvement in negotiations that led to the release of Oct. 7 hostages, but the group expressed “grave concern” that the deal sends “global actors” the message that they can escape legal consequences through “diplomatic maneuvering,” creating a “moral hazard.”
The victims also call it an “extraordinary departure from established justice standards.”
In 2014, BNP Paribas pleaded guilty and agreed to pay an $8.8 billion settlement to resolve sanctions violations on a far lesser scale, and Standard Chartered paid a $1 billion fine some five years later. Both deals also called for years of external monitoring.
By contrast, Halkbank simply has to hire an outside expert approved by the Justice Department to provide a “Compliance Report” without any provisions for long-term monitoring. Judge Berman questioned how the expert would be selected and what his role overseeing Halkbank’s compliance would be.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard said the judge had a limited role in approving the deal.
Judge Berman ended the hearing without signaling his next steps.
Halkbank’s lenient treatment led longtime Turkey watcher Sinan Ciddi, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Institute of Turkish Studies, and two of his colleagues at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies to ask in an op-ed published in The Hill: “Why is Washington going soft on the Turkish banks enabling Iran’s terrorism?”
Trump has had a long-running “bromance” with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom his former National Security Advisor John Bolton called one of the “dictators he liked.”
American Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism United called upon Congress to review the deal.
Read the group’s letter to the judge here.
Tish James: 2; John Sarcone: 0
Ex-Trump campaign lawyer John Sarcone can’t pause a ruling finding that he was illegally appointed as a prosecutor or revive the subpoenas of his now-dead investigation of New York Attorney General Letitia James, a federal judge ruled today.
Sarcone, one of several Trump-installed top prosecutors disqualified by federal judges, tried to serve James’s office with subpoenas related to her investigations of Trump and the National Rifle Association.
Both probes led to lawsuits that James won, but Sarcone tried to depict the cases as possible criminal civil rights violations.
In January, U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield found that Sarcone was unconstitutionally and illegally appointed, quashing his subpoenas and knocking him out of his office. Trump’s Justice Department appealed and asked Schofield to stay her order pending appeal.
Refusing, Schofield found that Sarcone would likely lose.
“The Federal Government has not demonstrated a strong likelihood of success on the merits or ‘serious legal questions’ coupled with a balance of hardships tipping decidedly in its favor,” she wrote in an 11-page ruling. “Any harm from the investigation-specific disqualification is abstract at best, whereas granting a stay would reinstate an official who acted without lawful authority — a clear injury to the State Government. The public interest likewise favors ensuring that governmental power is exercised only by officials with lawful authority.”
Sarcone served in the Northern District of New York. James also successfully fended off multiple attempts at criminal prosecution from the Eastern District of Virginia.
Read the ruling here.
‘Abhorrent to a society that cherishes free speech’
A judge who restricted the ability of Trump officials to deport pro-Palestinian student activists rejected the government’s request to pause his ruling, ending his ruling with a blistering sendoff.
“What the public officials did in this case was unconstitutional, abhorrent to a society that cherishes free speech,” Senior U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee in Massachusetts, wrote. “The public interest is clear. This conduct must never happen again.”
Young added an observation about Trump’s second term shortly before that.
“As this Court recognizes, the entire theory of this administration is that of a unitary executive with no agency independence where every single employee within the Article II executive dances to the tune of the President,” he wrote.
Read his opinion here.
News in brief
Trump personally ordered the Justice Department to reopen the appeals of rulings stopping him from blacklisting major law firms via executive orders, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Judges unanimously blocked his executive orders against Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey, finding violations of the First, Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
After learning the Justice Department withdrew its appeal, Trump replied: “I never signed off on that,” according to the Journal.
A foreign hacker compromised the FBI’s stash of Epstein files back in 2023, Reuters reported.
Although the government said that the perpetrator was a cybercriminal rather than a foreign government, an expert told Reuters that the intrusion raised “kompromat” concerns, referring to compromising information that can be used as blackmail.
The hacker, reportedly disgusted to find child sexual abuse material on the servers, threatened to turn the owner of the account in to the FBI.
“The source said bureau officials defused the situation by convincing the hacker that they actually were the FBI, in part by having the hacker join a video chat where they flashed their law enforcement credentials in front of a web camera,” Reuters reported.
The quote from Judge Young is blistering! Hurrah!
Thank you so much! Excellent--all super important cases that we need somehow to keep our eyes on while juggling the other 15,000 emergencies!
What if instead of "Sarcone served in the Northern district of New York"--which he didn't bc everything he touched was discarded--how about "Sarcone was appointed to serve..."? Just a tweak.