Jimmy Kimmel on the US justice department’s handling of the Epstein files: ‘A brazen cover-up’
Late-night hosts recapped US attorney general Pam Bondi’s contentious congressional hearing as she faced tough questions over the justice department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.Jimmy Kimmel opened Wednesday’s monologue with a begrudging acknowledgement that Donald Trump won the one and only “Undisputed Champion of Coal Award” from an organization called “the Washington Coal Club”.The prize “brings his real award total to zero”, he joked.“All he wants is awards and for everything to be named after him,” he continued.“The Kennedy Center, Dulles airport, Penn Station – I mean, if that’s the way to keep him happy, I have another suggestion for something we could name after him.
And it’s big, and I’ll think he’ll like it, because it’s something that everyone is talking about,It’s something that he actually, unlike most everything else he wants named after him, deserves to be a part of,”The host proposed adding his name to the Epstein files – “or, with your cooperation and the cooperation of others, will heretofore be known as the Trump-Epstein files”,Kimmel then tore into the files, which have become the defining albatross around the Trump administration’s neck,Though the US justice department accidentally published many of the victims’ names, it has also redacted many Epstein co-conspirators, including the US president, who reportedly appears in the files about 1m times.
“And that doesn’t even include the 3m pages they still haven’t released,” Kimmel reminded.“Which obviously puts Maga in a bit of a fix.Popping up a million times obviously isn’t a positive for the Pizzagate party.So now they’re grabbing at anything they can,” including a document that says when authorities were closing in on Epstein for the first time in 2006, Trump called the police chief in Palm Beach, Florida and said: “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.”“And that’s the evidence they want people to see right now,” Kimmel marveled.
The ongoing saga of the Epstein files was the talk of Capitol Hill on Wednesday, where Bondi appeared unrepentant before a congressional panel.Bondi refused to apologize to several Epstein victims present in the gallery, but did accuse multiple lawmakers, including Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky, of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.“Yes, the ultra-conservative congressman from Kentucky who endorsed Trump three times has ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’,” Kimmel responded.“Trump himself, the man who tweeted the Obamas as monkeys the other day? Solid as a rock.Everyone else is deranged.
“I mean, seriously, there’s nothing to defend here,” he continued.“This Department of Justice is hiding the names of people who were not victims.Why are they doing that? If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding names? That’s it.That’s the only question anybody needs to ask.“It’s maddening,” he concluded.
“It is a brazen cover-up,”And on the Daily Show, Jordan Klepper savored a particularly cringeworthy moment from the Winter Olympics, when the Norwegian skier Sturla Holm Lægreid won the bronze medal in the men’s 20km biathlon and then admitted, in a viral post-race interview, that he had cheated on his girlfriend of six months,“It has been the worst week of my life,” he said, in a plea to win her back,“I would’ve gone with a ‘thank you, mom and dad’ or a ‘thank you, God’, but instead you went with ‘guess what, world, I can’t keep it in my pants,’” Klepper laughed,“You know what, if repairing your six-month situationship is that important, I guess it’s fine to hijack the news cycle to talk about it.
I’m sure your teammate who won the gold had nothing more important to draw attention to.”In fact, it was a very emotional win for fellow Norwegian Johan-Olav Botn.Botn dedicated his gold medal to their late teammate Sivert Guttorm Bakken, who died unexpectedly in December.“Oh right, our dead teammate! I was between honoring him or talking about how much pussy I was getting,” Klepper joked.“Dude, come on! You hijacked that to try to win back your fling? This is basically like if instead of interrupting Taylor Swift, Kanye had interrupted the in memoriam segment.
”Later in the segment, Klepper touched on Bondi’s vituperative appearance before Congress.“You’d be in a bad mood too if you spent the last month redacting old man genitals from the Epstein files,” he joked.Bondi, who reacted angrily to any questions from lawmakers, “acted like a bratty senior who got called into the principal’s office”.“Her performance upset a lot of people, because they were hoping for justice for Jeffrey Epstein’s victims,” he noted.“But for Pam Bondi, there’s only one victim in all of this.
”That would be Donald Trump.Bondi repeatedly called for public apologies to the man she also called “the greatest president in American history” as well as “the most transparent president in the nation’s history”.Klepper was not impressed: “If you’re going to embarrass yourself on national television like that, at least win a bronze medal first.”
Penalty notice: Euro Car Parks fined £473,000 for ignoring regulator
Euro Car Parks is infamous for dishing out fines but the private parking company has been hit with an almost £475,000 penalty of its own after it failed to hand over information to a regulator.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it had imposed a £473,000 fine after the company did not respond for three months to seven requests for information, including by registered post, email and hand-delivered letter.It is the first time the CMA has issued a penalty under the new fining powers it was given in 2024.The regulator sends out “information notices” to companies when deciding whether to open an investigation, and businesses have a legal obligation to comply.The CMA said Euro Car Parks, which provides payment systems in car parks, only responded after it raised the spectre of a fine
US inflation falls to 2.4% in January after Trump’s tariffs led to price fluctuations
US inflation moderated in January to 2.4%, an easing after Donald Trump’s tariffs triggered price fluctuations last year.Prices rose 0.2% from December to January, according to data released by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday measuring the consumer price index (CPI), which measures the price of a basket of goods and services. Core CPI, which strips out the volatile food and energy industries, went up 0
Anthropic raises $30bn in latest round, valuing Claude bot maker at $380bn
Anthropic, the US AI startup behind the Claude chatbot, has raised $30bn (£22bn) in a funding round that more than doubled its valuation to $380bn.The company’s previous funding round in September achieved a value of $183bn, with further improvements in the technology since then spurring even greater investor interest.The fundraising was announced amid a series of stock market moves against industries that face disruption from the latest models, including software, trucking and logistics, wealth management and commercial property services.The funding round, led by the Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC and the hedge fund Coatue Management, is among the largest private fundraising deals on record.“Anthropic is the clear category leader in enterprise AI,” said Choo Yong Cheen, the chief investment officer of private equity at GIC
How to deal with the “Claude crash”: Relx should keep buying back shares, then buy more | Nils Pratley
As the FTSE 100 index bobs along close to all-time highs, it is easy to miss the quiet share price crash in one corner of the market. It’s got a name – the “Claude crash”, referencing the plug-in legal products added by the AI firm Anthropic to its Claude Cowork office assistant.This launch, or so you would think from the panicked stock market reaction in the past few weeks, marks the moment when the AI revolution rips chunks out of some of the UK’s biggest public companies – those in the dull but successful “data” game, including Relx, the London Stock Exchange Group, Experian, Sage and Informa.Relx, the former Reed Elsevier, whose brands include the Lancet and LexisNexis, is the most intriguing in that list. The company’s description of itself contains at least five words to provoke a yawn – “a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers” – but the pre-Claude share price was a thing of wonder
Winter Olympics: Ilia Malinin misses podium in figure skating shock; Shaidorov takes gold – as it happened
Bryan Graham was at the arena tonight, you can read his full report below:Shaidorov’s win should be celebrated. He skated brilliantly. He may be Malinin’s rival for years to come.But it’ll be impossible to remember this event as anything other than a catastrophe for the world’s best skater over the past three years by a wide margin.The flip side is that Malinin came through in the team event, which means several US skaters will leave Italy with gold medals
Matt Weston slides to skeleton gold as Team GB finally win medal at Winter Olympics
And on the seventh day, Great Britain finally won their first medal of these Olympics. At nine o’clock on Friday night Matt Weston, the man his teammates call “Captain 110%”, became the first British man ever to win the gold in the men’s skeleton, after four faultless races across the two days of competition.The 28-year-old broke the track record at the Cortina Sliding Centre four times in succession, and won in a combined time of 3min 43.33sec, which was almost a full second ahead of the runner-up, Germany’s Axel Jungk. “I’ve been fortunate enough to win world championships, and European championships and other things, and this blows them all out the water,” Weston said
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