The Brief | Melania "Epstein was not alone," and Trump says podcaster are low IQ
Plus: Vance flies to Islamabad, a Delta Force whistleblower gets Espionage Act'd, and Anthropic says its own AI is too dangerous to release.
It’s Friday!
The weekend has arrived, and I could not be more grateful!
It’s been 41 days of war coverage, and your girl needs a break. My plans this weekend are to put the decorative finishing touches on my office and spend some time outside cleaning up the yard. I am literally touching grass this weekend.
If the president could be chill this weekend, that would be awesome, but Vance and crew are headed to Islamabad to pow-pow with Iran, so my hopes are slim.
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In today’s Brief:
Melania steps to a microphone in the Cross Hall and resurrects the Epstein story on purpose.
Vance, Witkoff, and Kushner land in Islamabad Saturday for the highest-level U.S.–Iran meeting since 1979.
A former Army employee who exposed harassment inside Delta Force just got charged under the Espionage Act.
Anthropic says its newest model is so good at hacking that only eleven companies on Earth are allowed to touch it.
Plus: a judge accuses the Pentagon of acting like an autocracy, and Trump goes nuclear on Tucker.
Let’s get into the news!
“Epstein was not alone.” Melania breaks her silence and demands a hearing.
Thursday afternoon, Melania Trump walked into the Cross Hall, spoke for six minutes, took zero questions, and single-handedly resurrected a story her husband’s team has spent months trying to move past.
She denied being an Epstein victim. She denied friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell. She dismissed the 2002 “Dear GI” email as “trivial,” noting the Daily Beast, Carville, and HarperCollins UK have all retracted. Then she did the part nobody saw coming. She demanded a public, sworn-testimony congressional hearing for Epstein’s survivors.
“Now is the time for Congress to act,” she said. “Epstein was not alone.”
So the First Lady, whose husband pushed against the bipartisan transparency law that forced the FBI file release, just endorsed the exact hearings House Oversight Democrats have demanded since January. The beltway was stunned. The President told MS NOW he didn’t “know anything about” it beforehand.
This is stunning from a First Lady who is famously private. So why this week, with Iran peace talks two days away? Had she had enough, or is something about to drop, and she’s setting the terms first?
The real line wasn’t what she said about herself. It was what she said about everyone else. “Several prominent male executives resigned from their powerful positions after this matter became widely politicized.” Every wealthy man who flew on that plane just got put on notice. By the First Lady. From the Cross Hall.
Then came the pushback. Within hours, Jim Acosta published a statement from Epstein’s survivors threading a fascinating needle. They’ve told their stories, they say, and being asked to tell them under oath in front of Congress is a “deflection.”
Let me get this straight. Melania offered them a microphone, a hearing room, and subpoena power. They called testifying a “burden.”
These are the same survivors whose advocates have spent years demanding accountability on TV, in op-eds, and in documentaries that carried zero perjury risk. The moment someone says, “Okay, say it under oath,” it becomes, sorry, I can’t, too retraumatizing. Maybe it’s easier to workshop the story in friendly media than say it where Jim Jordan gets to cross-examine.
Update after Publishing:
Vance to Islamabad: the highest-level U.S.–Iran sit-down since 1979
Saturday morning local time, VP JD Vance, envoy Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner meet Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Islamabad. It’s the highest-level U.S.–Iran engagement since the 1979 revolution. Vance, now Trump’s designated “closer”, warned in Budapest that if Tehran doesn’t negotiate in good faith they’ll “find out that President Trump is not one to mess around with.”
The ceasefire is held together with duct tape and Truth Social posts. Per The Hill, Israel just launched its largest barrage on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran calls it a breach. Ghalibaf says three of ten clauses are violated. Trump told Netanyahu to “low-key it.” Meanwhile Iran is demanding $1-per-barrel in crypto to let tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. About 20,000 mariners are stranded in the Persian Gulf. Oil is flirting with $100 again.
The nuclear question is the only one that matters, and the press is treating it like an afterthought. The minimum for this war to end as anything but a failure: remove the 60% enriched uranium from Iran, dilute the 20% stockpile, suspend enrichment for years. If Iran keeps the capability, this “ceasefire” is just halftime. Mike Pence publicly warned Vance this week not to sign an “Obama-style” deal. No pressure.
The big question is, will this meeting happen, and will there ever be a deal?
A Delta Force whistleblower gets the Espionage Act
Courtney Williams, 40, held top secret clearance at Fort Bragg from 2010 to 2016. She was the on-the-record main character of a 2025 Politico Magazine feature adapted from Seth Harp’s book The Fort Bragg Cartel, which alleged rampant sexual harassment inside Delta Force.
Tuesday, the FBI arrested her. Wednesday, the complaint was unsealed in Raleigh federal court. She’s charged under the Espionage Act for allegedly transmitting national defense information to Harp across “more than 10 hours of phone calls” and “over 180 messages” between 2022 and 2025. Up to 10 years in prison. FBI Director Kash Patel went on X to tell other would-be leakers that more arrests are coming.
Harp’s response, per the Washington Post: “Former Delta Force operators disclose ‘national defense information’ on podcasts and YouTube shows every day, but the government is going after Courtney for the sole reason that she exposed sexual harassment and gender discrimination in the unit. This is a vindictive act of retaliation, plain and simple.”
DOJ’s theory is clean. NDA signed, classification understood, ten batches of documents handed over. The defense theory is also clean and uglier. Prosecute the woman who said “harassment” out loud while the guys cashing consulting fees off Zero Dark Thirty walk around Austin doing podcast rounds. Both can be true. Right now, the scoreboard reads: harassment whistleblower in jail, Pete Hegseth’s Department of War trying to lock reporters out of the Pentagon entirely.
Anthropic to the world: “Our new AI is too dangerous for you to use”
Anthropic announced this week that it will not release its new model, Claude Mythos Preview, to the public because it can already find and exploit software vulnerabilities better than nearly every human on Earth.
A major AI lab looked at what it built and said “nope, not for you.” Instead, Mythos Preview is being locked inside Project Glasswing. The eleven companies with access: AWS, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Palo Alto Networks. Anthropic is throwing in $100 million in usage credits and $4 million to open-source security groups.
Per PCMag, the model has already found “thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities,” including a 27-year-old flaw in OpenBSD. Early versions were capable of “hiding their reasoning” and exhibited “strategic thinking and situational awareness, at times in service of unwanted actions.” Translation: it can hack your bank, your hospital, your power grid, and it knows how to lie about why.
Anthropic frames this as responsibility. Maybe it is. But offensive cyber capability just got privatized behind a velvet rope. Eleven tech and finance giants get a hacking god. The open-source maintainer working on FFmpeg in his spare bedroom gets a newsletter. Chinese state-backed attackers already have an autonomous version running on DeepSeek. That’s not a guardrail. That’s a moat.
Welcome to the new arms race.
Quick Rundown
Judge checks the Pentagon. Judge Paul Friedman ruled Thursday that the “Department of War” violated his March order restoring NYT press access, writing that “suppression of political speech is the mark of an autocracy, not a democracy.” Pentagon has until April 16 to file a compliance declaration.
White House: stop betting on the war, staff. After $760 million in oil futures changed hands in the two minutes before Trump paused the Iran strikes — and three Polymarket accounts cleared $600,000 on the ceasefire timing — the White House sent staff a federal-ethics “refresher.” Blumenthal and Kim have a bill to ban war-related prediction markets.
Trump goes thermonuclear on Tucker, Megyn, Candace, and Alex Jones. In a 500-word Truth Social tirade, Trump called them “NUT JOBS” and “TROUBLEMAKERS” after Carlson urged troops to refuse Iran orders and Owens called for Trump’s removal under the 25th. MAGA’s Iran civil war is no longer subtext.
Disclose.tv@disclosetvJUST IN - Trump calls Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Megyn Kelly, "Low IQ... stupid people... nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS."
8:38 PM · Apr 9, 2026 · 2.57M Views3.56K Replies · 3.25K Reposts · 16.3K Likes70+ Democrats intensify 25th Amendment calls. House Dems are publicly calling for Trump’s removal over his Iran rhetoric. They don’t have the votes. Jeffries and Schumer are pushing war powers resolutions instead.
Swalwell’s misconduct cloud. Eric Swalwell is facing unverified sexual misconduct allegations ahead of California’s June gubernatorial primary, with Villaraigosa and Porter circling. Campaign calls it “outrageous.”
Planned Parenthood lost $29.3 million on $2.14 billion in revenue while performing a record 434,450 abortions. Taxpayer funding still grew by $39.8 million. Pap tests and cancer screenings fell.
Let’s Talk About It
Two questions before I let you go:
Be honest: what do you think Melania is getting ahead of, or is she just fed up? Drop your best theory, wrong answers encouraged.
Lightning round: Which of the eleven Project Glasswing companies would you trust LEAST with a hacking supermodel? Apple? JPMorgan? Microsoft? Amazon?
Reply in the comments.
See you Monday. Stay nosy.
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