American financier Jeffrey Epstein (left) and then-real estate developer Donald Trump posed together at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida in 1997. (Photo: Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
The names of other high-profile figures were also redacted, according to Bloomberg.
Bloombergreported on Friday that FBI officials earlier this year redacted the name of U.S. President Donald Trump from the agency’s files on late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Three unnamed sources confirmed to Bloomberg that the FBI had redacted the names of Trump and other prominent public figures even before the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced last month that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files “would be appropriate or warranted.”
Bloomberg’s sources explained that “Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked out because he was a private citizen when the federal investigation of Epstein was launched in 2006.”
The reviewers applied two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) exemptions to justify their redactions, according to the report: One that “protects individuals against ‘a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy'” and another that protects against disclosures that “could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
Bloomberg noted that there is nothing particularly exceptional about this because these standards have long been employed by the FBI when it comes to redacting FOIA requests, even when it comes to high-profile public figures such as Trump.
The revelations about Trump’s name being redacted from the files came on the same day The New York Timesreported that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime accomplice who is serving a 20-year sentence on sex-trafficking charges, was transferred from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security women’s prison in Texas.
The DOJ’s decision to not release the Epstein files ignited a firestorm last month that the president has struggled to contain. At times Trump, who was friends with Epstein for several years, has even chastised his own voters for continuing to ask questions about the files, while at the same time insisting that he had nothing to do with Epstein’s sex trafficking ring that involved the sexual abuse of multiple underage girls.
Donald Trump and his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein.Donald Trump and his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein.Donald Trump, his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein and Trump’s daughter.Donald Trump picture with one of his wives, Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.Donald Trump with his paedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein’s associate Ghislane Maxwell.
The U.S. Department of Energy shared an image of coal with the message, “She is the moment,” on social media on July 31, 2025. (Image: U.S. Department of Energy/X)
“The Trump administration wants us all choking, sick, misinformed, and working ourselves to death so that a few from the luxury class can be ever more wealthy,” said one science communicator.
The U.S. Department of Energy came under fire from scientists and other climate action advocates on Thursday for a social media post celebrating coal, as President Donald Trump works to boost the fossil fuel, despite its devastating impacts on public health and the planet.
On X—the platform owned by billionaire Elon Musk, who left the Trump administration earlier this year—the department shared an image of coal with the message, “She’s an icon. She’s a legend. And she is the moment.”
The audio of television host Wendy Williams saying that, while speaking about rapper Lil’ Kim, often has been repurposed by social media users. However, the DOE’s use of the phrase to glamorize coal sparked swift and intense backlash.
“POV: It’s 1885 and you work for the Department of Energy,” wrote Jonas Nahm, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies who served on the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden.
Democratic members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources replied: “She is inefficient. She is dirtier air. She is higher energy bills.”
Multiple X users pointed to coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, a condition that occurs when coal dust is inhaled—including California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office, which wrote, “She’s black lung.”
The national Democratic Party account said, “In April, Trump cut a program that gave free black lung screenings to coal miners.”
After U.S. District Judge Irene Berger—appointed by former President Barack Obama in West Virginia—issued a preliminary injunction against firings at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, nearly 200 workers who screen coal miners for black lung were reinstated.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has taken various steps to attack the climate and benefit the fossil fuel industry, such as picking fracking CEO Chris Wright to lead DOE, signing coal-friendly executive orders in April and issuing proclamations that provide what the White House called “regulatory relief” for a range of facilities, including coal plants, earlier this month.
“Hard to fathom this coming from the DOE if there were any sane, reasonable, rational, or thoughtful government in control,” Graham Lau, an astrobiologist and science communicator, said of the department’s pro-coal X post. “The Trump administration wants us all choking, sick, misinformed, and working ourselves to death so that a few from the luxury class can be ever more wealthy. Coal is not the moment. Coal is not going to meet U.S. energy needs. Coal is not the way forward.”
Climate and clean energy investor Ramez Naam wrote, “She is the past,” and shared the graph below, which features data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration about coal consumption since 1960.
Ryan Katz-Rosene, an associate professor at Canada’s University of Ottawa studying contentious climate debates, quipped, “Just the U.S. Department of Energy shilling for one of the most destructive industries known to humanity cool cool cool.”
In the early 1900s, coal mining in the United States often killed more than 2,000 workers per year, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. Over the past decade, it has killed roughly 10 people annually.
It’s not just coal miners who are at risk. Research published in the journal Science two years ago found that “from 1999-2020, approximately 460,000 deaths in the Medicare population were attributable to coal electricity-generating emissions.”
Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence, said Thursday: “The fact that they’re coding coal as female is right in line with the fact that Trump is a rapist. They take everything they want, they think the planet is like a woman they can just exploit, and fuck whomever they hurt in the process.”
Several women have accused the president of sexual assault, including journalist E. Jean Carroll, who said he raped her in a Manhattan department store dressing room in the 1990s. Although Trump has denied the allegations, in 2023, a New York City jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announcing the plan to repeal the endangerment finding on July 29, 2025 at a truck plant in Indiana. Credit: EPA
DeSmog has been tracking the efforts of fossil fuel trade associations, policymakers, and industry backed-groups out to demolish U.S. climate policy for years.
In late July, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin announced at a trucking facility in Indiana that the Trump administration would be moving to rescind the “endangerment finding,” an agency declaration which provides the legal foundation for many major U.S. climate regulations.
Zeldin was joined at the press conference by U.S. Energy Secretary and former fracking executive Chris Wright, as well as Republican policymakers and representatives of auto groups including the American Trucking Associations (ATA).
This was just a small sampling of a powerful anti-climate coalition that for over a decade has attempted to overturn the endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific determination from the EPA that for the first time recognized carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases as “pollutants” that are “harmful” and therefore must be regulated.
It’s a finding that helps provide the legal justification for EPA regulations on greenhouse gases from power plants, methane pollution from oil and gas operations, and limits on tailpipe emissions from cars and trucks. Now, the Trump administration will be seeking public comments and moving to officially repeal the finding by sometime next year.
DeSmog has been tracking and building databases on the anti-endangerment coalition for years. Below is our guide to the top fossil fuel groups, conservative policymakers, and climate deniers leading the effort to demolish the bedrock of American climate policy.
American Petroleum Institute
When the EPA first issued the endangerment finding in 2009, the American Petroleum Institute (API), the main lobby group for U.S. oil and gas producers, was immediately opposed. “[It] poses an endangerment to the American economy and to every American family,” the institute’s then-president Jack Gerardclaimed.
API joined with other fossil fuel and industrial lobby organizations, including the National Association of Manufacturers, to wage an unsuccessful legal challenge against the finding. It recently applauded Zeldin’s announcement of rescinding endangerment and rolling back auto emissions regulations, arguing that the Trump administration is “protecting the freedom of all Americans to decide what they drive.”
U.S. Chamber of Commerce
Another early business opponent of the endangerment finding was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobby group representing millions of businesses whose membership has included oil and gas majors, fossil fuel utilities, and coal companies. Like API, it helped lead an unsuccessful legal action against the finding.
The Chamber of Commerce has a long record of climate obstruction, including being a member of an infamous climate denial organization known as the Global Climate Coalition. Yet its leadership is now trying to distance itself from Zeldin’s proposed repeal of endangerment, telling Reuters that, “While we did not call for this proposal, we are reviewing it and will consult with members so we can provide constructive feedback to the agency.”
Project 2025
The radical plan for dismantling the U.S. government published by the Heritage Foundation contains specific proposals for the EPA, calling for “a system, with an appropriate deadline, to update the 2009 endangerment finding.” One of the contributors to the EPA chapter is Aaron Szabo, now an assistant administrator at the agency.
Szabo was an advisor to a pro-Trump think tank known as the America First Policy Institute. He was also a former lobbyist “who pushed the interests of major polluters like members of the American Petroleum Institute,” according to Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who spoke against Szabo at his EPA confirmation hearing.
One of Project 2025’s top architects, Russ Vought, now leads the White House Office of Management and Budget. He has also called for the repeal of the endangerment finding. “It’s long overdue to look at the impacts on our people of the underlying Obama endangerment finding,” he said in an EPA press release in March.
Trump’s Climate Working Group
The EPA has justified its repeal of the endangerment finding — which states unequivocally that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health and the climate — by citing a recent Department of Energy report written by five prominent climate crisis deniers.
This so-called “Climate Working Group” includes Steve Koonin, John Christy, Ross McKitrick, Judith Curry, and Roy Spencer, all of whom have worked for years to publicly downplay the urgency of the climate crisis or deny that it exists. They argue in their report that carbon dioxide is good for humankind because it boosts “agricultural productivity,” an assessment that isn’t shared by actual climate scientists warning of dire threats to the global food supply from higher global temperatures.
Heartland Institute
One of the longest-running U.S. climate denial groups, the Heartland Institute was a partner of Project 2025, and for years has advocated against the endangerment finding. It applauded Zeldin’s announcement, saying in a statement that “President Trump is doing the right thing for the economy, the environment, and the American people.”
The Heartland Institute has a major UK ally in Nigel Farage, head of the right-wing political party Reform UK, who last year helped launch a European branch of the denial group. At the Jordan Peterson conference known as the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) earlier this year, Farage invoked a frequent climate denier talking point about endangerment, claiming that it’s “absolutely nuts” that carbon dioxide is considered a pollutant.
Koch Network
Climate denial groups that have received funding from foundations linked to the oil and gas billionaires Charles and David Koch are some of the most stalwart opponents of the EPA’s greenhouse gas finding. They include the CO2 Coalition, whose co-founder William Happer was on the National Security Council in Trump’s first administration, as well as the American Energy Alliance and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Koch-backed groups have achieved key U.S. Supreme Court victories that have paved way to undo the endangerment finding, including the case West Virginia vs. EPA, which weakened the agency’s ability to address climate change.
Zeldin cited that legal precedent explicitly in his announcement on Tuesday, saying, “would you want the administrator of the EPA to be ignoring the Supreme Court decisions in West Virginia vs. EPA?” He also cited the court’s rejection of the Chevron Deference — a long-standing doctrine giving federal agencies power to interpret the law where vague — which was the result of legal efforts backed in part by Charles Koch.
Critics argue this powerful anti-climate coalition ultimately serves the interest of companies profiting from polluting and warming our atmosphere. Senator Whitehouse said in a statement that “the Trump Administration’s repeal [of the endangerment finding] has the fossil fuel industry’s oily fingerprints all over it.” He added that “Trump chose his fossil fuel megadonors over the American people.”
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
On Wednesday we were crammed into the unsalubrious court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice to hear the judgment from Judge Chamberlain on whether Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action would be granted a judicial review of the proscription of the organisation.
Judge Chamberlain breezed in and went immediately into a summary of his judgment, beginning with an account of the process so far. This was covered in my last report; the only new information was that the Special Advocate who had been present during the closed session was Tim Buley KC.
In this extraordinary abuse of process, the security services are allowed to bring alleged “intelligence” material into proceedings, which Huda Ammori and Palestine Action are not permitted to see. Nor are their lawyers allowed to have any idea what allegations have been made.
Instead a court-appointed “Special Advocate” is supposed to represent their interests, without being allowed to tell them what the accusations are. Nor can they tell the special advocate what points to make, as in “we absolutely have no foreign funding and have never had any contact with any foreign intelligence agencies”.
Nobody is ever allowed to know what a “Special Advocate” actually does or says in the closed session, nor what the government lawyers or those giving evidence on behalf of the security services do or say.
If I were a Special Advocate, I would do nothing except hand the judge a copy of the Dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and say: “This shows the quality of security service intelligence. Now go and wipe your arse with it.”
Having told us there had been a closed evidence process, Judge Chamberlain then gave us what he said would be a brief summary of his judgment. The link is to the full judgment.
… [A detailed account of events and arguments by Craig Murray.]
So while the granting of a judicial review represents some kind of victory, it is meaningless for now, as both the proscription and the repression continue – as does the Genocide.
I do not have any hope for success from the judicial review – all this is part of the smoke and mirrors of process and legality behind which the British Establishment seek to mask their complicity in the crimes of Zionism.
The London mayor doubled down on his opposition to the plans, warning that it will have a “severe impact” in terms of noise and air pollution and leave Britain’s climate targets in jeopardy.
But the chancellor Rachel Reeves said it was “essential” that the UK increases its airport capacity.
…
Rachel Reeves dismisses opposition to the third runway as futile (PA)
Rachel Reeves has already said a challenge to the expansion plans, part of her and Sir Keir’s push to get the economy growing, would fail.
The defiant chancellor said she has “huge respect” for Sir Sadiq, who is one of the most influential figures in the Labour Party, but she said she disagrees with the London mayor and is confident the third runway will go ahead.
