Come and whisper in my ear, give us tabby laundry …
“It’s where you can go online to get basically the latest of what’s going on.”
Where can I invest?? https://t.co/rJloVua4mh
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) February 5, 2026
Ed: Just in case anyone thought Harris’ failures in 2024 were a fluke, here she is to make her incompetence clear again.
===
WSJ: The partners, who manage the firm and refer to themselves as the “Deciding Group,” were grappling with the release of new emails suggesting Karp had a more extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than they realized, including in the months before the convicted sex offender’s death.
Karp led one of the country’s biggest law firms for 18 years and had survived a maelstrom less than a year ago when he struck a first-of-its-kind settlement with President Trump on his firm’s behalf. He wouldn’t survive a second controversy as the firm’s leader.
By the end of that meeting, people familiar with the matter say the group agreed to replace Karp with Scott Barshay, a top rainmaker Karp brought in a decade ago to help transform the firm into an M&A powerhouse.
It fell to Barshay to break the news.
Ed: Get ready for much more fallout like this. There is some justice in this, as long as the punishment fits the crime, so to speak. When there is no crime, though, as will be the case with some whose names will come up in these files, will they still pay the same price?
===
🇺🇸 Obama’s WH Counsel legal advice: “I think the point is that if she was underage, she could not legally consent to engaging in prostitution.”
→ Obama’s former White House Counsel gave Epstein legal advice on sex with minors!
🗣️ Epstein: “If girl X continues to claim that she… https://t.co/Wx7nMenvQI pic.twitter.com/x1491vAa5R
— Lord Bebo (@MyLordBebo) February 4, 2026
🗣️ Epstein: “If girl X continues to claim that she had sex with people for money, why is that not prostitution and what I pled guilty to?
For every massage a person got, she was paid money. No girl came to the house to learn math. Does sex for money change the equation?
There was a massage person every day. Some turned out to be younger than others, some as old as 60?? I’ll explain when I see you.”
🗣️ Kathy: “I think the point is that if she was underage, she could not legally consent to engaging in prostitution.”
🗣️ Epstein: “She claims Dersh is over age.”
🗣️ Kathy: “But if she claims she was coerced into it when underage, then any consent given when of age is probably not valid as a legal matter.”
🗣️ Epstein: “She says she received money, nothing else.”
Kathryn Ruemmler is now Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Goldman Sachs.
LMAO! Epstein really had everyone helping him.
Ed: Via Twitchy. This is a more substantive connection to Epstein than the Karp connection, because it involved public officials. Did Ruemmler’s connection to Epstein influence the reluctance to pursue Epstein during the Obama years? To release the files in the Biden years? Those are questions worth pursuing, rather than carping about Karp.
===
NY Post: Senior executives at Goldman Sachs are reportedly uneasy about the bank’s decision to stand by its top lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler — despite a newly released cache of emails that shed more light on the close friendship she shared with late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Ruemmler, the chief legal officer and general counsel at the Manhattan-based investment bank, has had the backing of CEO David Solomon despite dozens of emails that show how chummy she was with Epstein after he pleaded guilty to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution.
But top partners at the firm are privately ruing the bank’s public statements of support for Ruemmler in recent months, including from Solomon, Bloomberg News reported.
Ed: There is another aspect to this story that makes it newsier, too. Ruemmler insisted that she never worked for Epstein, and only interacted with him as a friend. One e-mail, however, showes Reummler advising Epstein on his legal options in attempting to paint the victims of his predation as prostitutes. Ruemmler had to remind Epstein that courts don’t consider underage girls to have the ability to consent to sex work. The ick practically drips off that exchange, and it shows that Ruemmler was closer to the issues in Epstein’s life than she first let on.
===
The Clintons are going to Clinton and try to spin the facts.
On Tuesday, at the eleventh hour, their lawyers, Jonathan Skladany and Ashley Callen, said their clients accepted the terms of the depositions.
These terms are no different than any other deposition we have held on… https://t.co/Sxq3HSOJi1 pic.twitter.com/2MgiynzbH0
— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) February 5, 2026
These terms are no different than any other deposition we have held on this case—even with Republicans like former AG Bill Barr and Secretary Alex Acosta.
Then they pretended that we were moving the goalpost when they received, along with the subpoenas, the House deposition guidance that explicitly mentions video recordings.
We are not going to debate the meaning of the word “is.” We are going to get answers for the American people. The full truth.
The buck stops here.
Here are the receipts 👇🏻
Ed: Wonderful thing, subpoenas.
===
Campus Reform: The $450,000 ask came from Dr. Thomas J. Magnani D.D.S., a Manhattan dentist identified by Columbia University as a member of its College of Dental Medicine’s Board of Advisors. Six years prior to the email, Magnani apparently coordinated with Epstein and top Columbia officials to get Epstein’s girlfriend Karyna Shuliak admitted to the university’s dental school.
According to emails released Friday by the Department of Justice, Shuliak “withdrew” from the Belarusian State Medical University’s dental school in 2010 after having “completed 4 of the 5 years of study required for the dental degree” and desired to complete her studies at Columbia starting in the fall 2012 semester.
That desire propelled Epstein and Magnani’s efforts to get Shuliak admitted to Columbia’s dental school. What followed in spring 2012 was a series of moves by top Columbia officials to ‘help’ and ‘accommodate’ her, and in the months and year later, discussions of financial gifts.
Ed: What I find interesting about these files is that they show Epstein’s circle primarily (but not exclusively) limited to the progressive elite in politics, Academia, finance, and the arts. That could easily have been predicted before the release of these files, and in fact was widely predicted. Most of the people being forced to deal with these disclosures are not really public-facing, but Columbia University’s sucking up is at least reprehensible, given that it took place after Epstein’s conviction for sex offenses involving underage girls.
===
Laid-Off Journalist Sits On Street Corner With Sign Reading ‘Will Call You Racist For Food’ https://t.co/mXuTPx6TRf pic.twitter.com/8oin927pKV
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 4, 2026
Ed: That’s basically their skill set these days, although some of these who are out of work were doing actual reporting. When your organization alienates its readers, though …
===
Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO: The outrage over the cuts at the Washington Post is annoying because the gap between the self-regard of those who were fired and the contributions of those who were fired is so enormous as to beggar belief. On days such as yesterday, Twitter is filled to the brim with “I was just laid off” posts, as though one had stumbled upon a battlefield strewn with the wounded — except, unlike on a battlefield, the wounded are all talking to one another in cloying, self-congratulatory tones. The result is a veritable web of grotesque and sycophantic encomia that does not stand up to even the slightest evaluation.
Don’t believe me? Click through on one of those posts, scroll past the pinned advertisement for the newspaper’s union, and look up the user’s name in the Post’s archive. If you do, you’ll typically learn that the person who is being praised as a “brilliant” and “talented” journalist who did “great work” has a job description like “sits at the intersection of civil rights and cooking,” that they wrote four things in the last two months, and that two of them were about how alligators are racist. This — not the second coming of Shakespeare — is what Jeff Bezos was supposed to pay for in perpetuity as penance for having been a useful member of society.
Today, a bunch of whiners are demanding that Americans cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions and subscribe to the Washington Post instead. But why, exactly, would they do that? If Amazon went away, most people’s lives would be worse. If Andrea Cluney-Funey, of the Immutable Characteristics newsletter, were to go away, most people either wouldn’t notice or, in some cases, they would actually be better off for the change.
Ed: Indeed. One might have thought that the Library At Alexandria had been lost all over again, when all that happened was that a business had to downsize to match its costs to revenue. The revenue has sharply declined because consumers lost confidence in the products that were being produced by these same people. And it’s not as if they got blindsided by it either; they have been warned repeatedly about it since at least June 2024.
===
If your position at The Washington Post was recently eliminated, please consider applying to write for The Babylon Bee. We are seeking applicants experienced in writing fictional content presented in the tone and style of a legitimate news organization.
— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) February 5, 2026
Ed: Learning to chide is better than learning to code.
===
Free Beacon: Maryland governor Wes Moore, who is widely expected to seek the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, has a powerful family story of racial injustice that he repeatedly tells during public speeches: His grandfather, as a small boy, fled 1920s Charleston with his family in the dead of night after his father—a prominent black minister and Moore’s great-grandfather—angered the Ku Klux Klan with sermons condemning racism. Narrowly escaping a lynching, the family took refuge in Jamaica. But Moore’s grandfather, just six years old at the time, vowed to return to America, where he eventually raised a grandson who made history in 2022 by becoming Maryland’s first black governor.
It’s a story straight out of Hollywood, and it was a central feature of Moore’s 2022 campaign stump speech, in which he described a version of American patriotism wherein “loving your country does not mean lying about its history.” Moore first told the tale of his exiled grandfather in a 2014 memoir and has since retold it countless times as he seeks to reclaim patriotism for the Democratic Party and to contextualize his own unlikely rise to power.
But there’s a problem with Moore’s story: It’s flatly contradicted by historical records and is almost certainly false.
Ed: Want to know why the Washington Post is dying? This is a perfect example. Maryland is the WaPo’s backyard. Moore has been telling his fabulist lies for years. Why did the Free Beacon expose Moore now, while the WaPo never bothered to check any of Moore’s claims – even while running for governor? Read it all.
===
Extremists from Virginia Party for Socialism & Liberation interrupted “war criminal” Kamala Harris’ book tour in Richmond 2/2
The man shouting about Palestinians is Violeta Vega of Richmond Defensa, which partners w VA PSL in Anti-ICE actions & protests pic.twitter.com/aI7FyVvb1q
— ((( 🫧 Charlottesville 🫧 ))) (@CvilleBubble) February 5, 2026
Ed: The Greta Thunberg chant is *chef’s kiss* perfection.
===
“Do you plan to apologize to the family of Alex Pretti?”
JD Vance: “For what?”
pic.twitter.com/pKX77ZyBCN— captive dreamer (@captive_dreamer) February 4, 2026
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