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Taylor Swift’s podcast appearance on New Heights was full of moments that her fans adored. But what revelation was the greatest during the two-hour broadcast? Stylist contributor, Rose Gallagher, shares her thoughts.

Yesterday marked something of a revolutionary Taylor Swift moment. Of all the surprises she’s ever sprung upon us, from hidden messages to surprise double albums, she gave us the biggest scoop of all: a glimpse at the person behind the pop star.

Swift joined her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, and his brother Jason as a guest on their podcast New Heights, marking her first ever podcast appearance. 

Watching live on YouTube last night, Jason’s questions made for a fascinating listen. There is a lot of ground covered on things we’ve not verbally heard her take on yet. They discussed the saga of her losing the rights to and buying back her music. We got a deep dive into the logistics that helped to explain the magnitude of how monumental this was. Swift also spoke at length about her favourite parts of the Eras tour (the Willow fan project was among them, which made me so happy! I, too, took yellow balloons with me to light up with my iPhone torch like an orb for that witchy song). It was truly eye-opening to hear about what went into making her ground-breaking tour.

But, the thing that surprised me the most wasn’t hearing all of this, and it also wasn’t one singular quote or story. What surprised me was the sheer length of the episode – and how it was arguably the first time we’ve ever seen what Swift is like behind her billion-dollar image. We had two hours of no-holds-barred access to Swift and Kelce as a couple, with video footage, endless audio, inside jokes. For someone we know to be fiercely private, Swift gave us a real glimpse into her day-to-day life. You can be the most media-trained and professional person in the game – but sit next to someone you trust for two whole hours, and what you get is a beautiful insight into someone’s life. We couldn’t help but feel the playfulness, the happiness, and the cosy bond between them, and I think we got to see the real Swift.

Don’t get me wrong, there were scoops along the way that made it feel like a traditional interview. There was the shock news that Swift was announcing her new album, The Life Of A Showgirl, right there on the episode. She gave us the entire song list, including a title track that features Sabrina Carpenter, and told us all about its inception between Eras tour dates. 

But the real insight came in the smaller details. Kelce reads the commentary on their relationship online and finds it funny. She doesn’t; she sees her energy as an “expensive” commodity and won’t waste it doing that. The two of them mince about the house making sourdough and she scours online blogs to perfect her craft. 

Travis and Jason are known to be close, and you definitely felt a sense of how connected this whole unit are. Jason asked Swift, “were you aware that I had been told I had to be on best behaviour?” when they first met. We got a further glimpse into their dynamic when Swift was laughing about Jason not knowing what to do with his beer when offered the chance to meet the royal family on the Eras tour. He wanted to keep it, but didn’t want to be inappropriate, and the conundrum sent him into a tailspin. 

It’s easy to see glimpses of Swift’s life – a selfie with Prince William, Princess Charlotte, and Prince George – and think this is a normal day for her. But in reality, alongside preparing a performance for 90,000 people at Wembley, she’s got a brother-in-law having a meltdown about how he’s meant to act when he meets the royals – which is likely what any of the rest of us would likely be doing in that situation. 

If you haven’t had a chance to listen yet, I’d really recommend it. For those who aren’t familiar with her, it’s rare to get this depth of a chat with her, the likes of which we haven’t seen since her Miss Americana documentary – and arguably here, alongside people she feels safe and trustful of – we get an even greater glimpse of who she truly is.

For the fans, it’s lovely to get a glimpse into Swift the person rather than Swift the popstar. I really admire her bravery in showing us this side of her. Though we haven’t had this level of access to her before, we’ve certainly been aware of the highs and lows of her relationships. I remember when the Eras tour setlist changed to accommodate a new album, The Tortured Poets Department, and wondering if The 1 may have been removed because it felt too raw in light of her previous break-up. To have an awareness of how much her fans read into every little detail (like I’m doing right now!) and still put herself on the line to be observed like this? That’s the sign of a true optimist and a true romantic.

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From 1939 to 1941, a ragtag group of mostly Jewish refugee scientists from Hitler’s Europe, including Albert Einstein, approached the government and met with military officials. The scientists educated them on the discovery of nuclear fission, its implications for war and their fears that Hitler would develop an atomic bomb first.

The military brushed them off. “The colonels kept rather aloof,” the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled after one such meeting in October 1939, as Hitler took Poland. “They were friendly, they smiled, but they never expected to see a working atomic bomb in this world.”

One of those colonels told Wigner and Edward Teller, dismissively, that he would award $10,000 to whoever could develop a death ray and prove it by killing a goat — the implication being he imagined that project more likely than a bomb that unlocked the power of the fundamental building block of the universe.

That the push came from refugees from fascist Europe was not a coincidence. “These people — these Hungarian-, German- and Italian-born — knew the organization in dictatorial countries; it occurred to them that there might be ties between research and military applications, that in Germany all scientific work might have been enrolled in the war effort,” Laura Fermi — the wife of the atomic pioneer Enrico — wrote later. “American-born and –

raised physicists had not yet found the door out of their ivory tower: The first knew the military state and the concentration of powers, the latter had seen only democracy and free enterprise.”

The physicist Arthur Holly Compton — who would go on to lead the effort to build the world’s first nuclear reactor in December 1942, tucked in an old squash court at the University of Chicago — explained: “Research in new fields of science had not been recognized by the United States government as a significant source of national strength. There was at Washington no indi­vidual or office having power to deal adequately with a new scientific development whose importance, though urgent and vital, was ill defined. It was simply not in our tradition.”

That arms-length relationship didn’t last long. What came to be known as the Manhattan Project, a $2 billion initiative, employed hundreds of thousands of Americans by 1945 in sites from Oak Ridge, Tenn., to Los Alamos, N.M. World War II efforts like it and the “Rad Lab” at M.I.T., which helped pioneer radar, forever transformed the country and the world.

Out of this grew a tradition of government-supported science, technology, and education efforts. Those fields became a source of national strength and arguably the primary driver of American economic hegemony and prosperity in the eight decades since.

Organizations like the national labs at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Berkeley that grew out of the Manhattan Project became the backbone of a stunning period of scientific and technological advances in the decades after the war. They were joined by the National Science Foundation (founded in 1950), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (founded in 1958); and the National Institutes of Health, which became a major grant-maker after the war, not to mention a host of other agencies like NASA and the Department of Energy.

The return on a relatively modest government investment has been astounding; DARPA alone helped birth the internet, GPS, and Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.

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US President Donald Trump issued an expansive executive order (EO) yesterday that would centralize power and upend the process that the US government has used for decades to award research grants. If implemented, political appointees — not career civil servants, including scientists — would have control over grants, from initial funding calls to final review. This is the Trump administration’s latest move to assert control over US science.

The EO, titled ‘Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking’, orders each US agency head to designate an appointee to develop a grant-review process that will “advance the President’s policy priorities”. Those processes must not fund grants that advance “anti-American values” and instead prioritize funding for institutions committed to achieving Trump’s plan for ‘gold-standard science’. (That plan, issued in May, calls for the US government to promote “transparent, rigorous, and impactful” science, but has been criticized for its potential to increase political interference in research.)

Impacts might be felt immediately: the latest order directs US agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to halt new funding opportunities, which are calls for researchers to submit applications for grants on certain topics. They will be paused until agencies put their new review processes in place.

Trump’s EO comes after the US Senate — which, along with the House, ultimately controls US government spending — has, in recent weeks, mostly rejected his proposals to slash the federal budget for science, totalling nearly US$200 billion annually.

The White House did not respond to questions from Nature about the EO.

Negative reaction

Trump, a Republican, has previously used EOs, which can direct government agencies but cannot alter existing laws, to effect policy change. In January, on his first day in office, he signed a slew of EOs with wide-ranging effects, from pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement to cutting the federal workforce, which had included nearly 300,000 scientists before he took office.

Scientists and policy specialists have lambasted the latest EO on social media. “This is a shocking executive order that undermines the very idea of open inquiry,” Casey Dreier, director of space policy for the Planetary Society, an advocacy group in Pasadena, California, posted to Bluesky.

Also on Bluesky, Jeremy Berg, a former director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, called it a “power grab”. Speaking to Nature, he said: “That power is something that has not been exercised at all in the past by political appointees.”

In a statement, Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from California, called the EO “obscene”. It could lead to political appointees “standing between you and a cutting-edge cancer-curing clinical trial”, she said.

The EO justifies the changes to the grant-awarding process by casting doubts on past choices: it accuses the US National Science Foundation (NSF) of awarding grants to educators with anti-American ideologies and to projects on diversity, equity and inclusion, which are disfavoured by the Trump team. It also points to senior researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Stanford University in California who have resigned over accusations of data falsification.

To “strengthen oversight” of grants, the EO imposes several restrictions, including prohibiting grants that promote “illegal immigration” and prohibiting grant recipients from promoting “racial preferences” in their work or denying that sex is binary. In some cases, the restrictions seem to contradict Congressional mandates. For instance, the NSF has, for decades, been required by law to broaden participation in science of people from under-represented groups — an action that takes race into consideration.

In addition to these broader restrictions, the EO directs grant approvals to prioritize certain research institutions, such as those that have “demonstrated success” in implementing the gold-standard science plan and those with lower ‘indirect costs’. As part of its campaign to downsize government spending and reduce the power of elite US universities, the Trump administration has repeatedly tried to cap these costs, used to pay for laboratory electricity and administrative staff, for instance. It has proposed a flat 15% rate for grants awarded by agencies such as the NSF and the US Department of Energy, but federal courts have so far blocked such policies

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In a desperate parenting moment after dinner, I told my six-year-old, who was mid-meltdown, to “use your words!” He had just started yelling and hitting his eight-year-old sister because she wasn’t sharing a stuffed animal he believed was his. Both kids froze for a moment, giving me just enough of a pause to slow my own quickly rising emotions.

Looking back, I realize I never actually explained to my kids why words can help. But putting feelings into words is how we begin to name what’s happening inside of us, and that naming can start to change the experience itself. Sometimes, as research shows, the words we choose to describe our lives can shape our mental health for months and years to come.

As a psychologist who has spent the better part of two decades studying stress and resilience in my Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, I’ve been exploring how verbalizing our feelings can transform experience. They can help manage heated moments but also support healing from life’s hardest moments. Research published over the past 40 years on expressive disclosure—literally, using your words—especially about stressful life events, shows it can lead to significant health improvements. After writing about a difficult situation, people report fewer doctor visits, reduced pain, stronger immune function, and better outcomes for conditions like asthma and arthritis.

There are some rules of thumb we’ve learned from these studies with adults. First, writing about a difficult life event three or four times in close succession (such as on consecutive days) tends to be more effective than spreading the sessions out. Second, for each writing session, the sweet spot seems to be at least 15 minutes; shorter sessions can even backfire, making health worse. Third, for those who don’t like to write, talking through one’s feelings works just as well. In fact, when one study directly compared talking and writing, talking came out ahead because we can express more in 15 minutes of speech than in writing.

One reason talk therapy can be so powerful is that it helps people put words to their experiences in a safe, structured way. In one study, psychologist Jonathan Adler followed a group of adults who wrote narratives about themselves over a period of 12 psychotherapy sessions. He found that as participants in therapy began to describe themselves with a greater sense of agency—seeing themselves as active authors of their own lives—their mental health improved.

He noticed that the change in the stories came first, followed by improvements in well-being. For parents, this is a reminder that helping kids tell their own stories with a sense of choice and authorship, whether about a playground conflict or a family move, can plant seeds of resilience.

One of the surprising findings to me is that translating our feelings into words can transform the feelings themselves. For example, neuroscience studies show that the act of naming one’s emotional experience (“angry”) activates emotion regulation circuits in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. In the scientific literature, this process is called “affect labeling,” and it has powerful clinical benefits. In one study, participants with a spider phobia who labeled their feelings during exposure therapy—while sitting next to a tarantula—had a reduced physiological stress response to spiders one week later relative to participants who used other strategies, like distraction.

While taking a hot emotion and putting it into words has the potential to blunt its immediate force, expressive disclosure can also reshape our emotional memories. When we narrate difficult experiences, whether in writing or speech, we aren’t simply recalling a memory. We are pulling it back up from long-term memory, reshaping it with our words, and then putting it back into long-term storage as a new, altered memory. This process, known as memory

reconsolidation, gives us a window of time to change how that memory is structured. By describing painful or overwhelming events, we don’t just relive them. We reorganize them. We add meaning, emotional context, and resolution. In doing so, we can reduce the distress these memories trigger and make them easier to live with.

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Hmmmmm…Donald is infatuated!

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For a city that federal law leaves vulnerable to the prerogatives of the White House, the raw rhetoric was a warning. Under the Home Rule Act of 1973, which gave residents the power to elect a mayor and a city council, Washington has a degree of self-governance, but it is limited.

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One of the best annual meteor showers, the Perseid meteor shower, is peaking now. The view this year may be slightly marred by a nearly full, waning gibbous moon—the phase that directly follows the full moon—in the sky. The Perseids, however, are often so bold and bright that the show is probably still worth checking out.

The meteors should be most visible after midnight local time and into the early morning hours before dawn from August 11 through August 13. The best times to see them will be between 2 A.M. and 3 A.M. local time. If you look in a dark patch of sky as far from the moon as possible, you should see fast streaks of light zip out from a patch of sky in the constellation Perseus, near the star Eta Persei.

The Perseids are known for being especially swift and bright, and in a good year, viewers can expect to spot between 50 and 100 meteors in an hour. This year, with moonlight hampering dark skies, fewer than half the usual number of meteors could be visible. Still, 25 shooting stars an hour is worth waking up early for.

As a bonus, Venus and Jupiter will be converging in the eastern dawn sky. The bright planets will be making their closest approach to each other between August 11 and August 13, when they will appear as a double star. This sight should be bright enough to spot even from light-polluted cities.

Meteor showers are caused when Earth passes through a trail of debris left by a comet or asteroid. As comets orbit the sun, they shed dust and small particles, which linger along their orbital path. More rarely, asteroids can create similar trails when they break into fragments following a collision with another space rock. When our planet crosses through such a path, these bits of rock and dust burn up in our atmosphere in a glorious spectacle. The Perseids and other annual meteor showers occur at the same time every year because Earth intersects with these debris trails at predictable spots along its orbit.

The Perseids originate from the particles left behind by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. The comet itself is long gone, having moved on to the far reaches of the solar system by now. Its 133-year orbit around the sun last brought it through Earth’s cosmic neighborhood in 1992. But its detritus remains, giving rise to streaks that wow sky watchers every August.

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A key measure of underlying inflation rose in July as President Trump’s tariffs intensified price pressures across a wider range of consumer goods and services, although the overall increase was likely not significant enough to deter the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates at its next meeting in September.

The Consumer Price Index stayed steady at 2.7 percent compared to the same time last year. On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.2 percent from June. But an important gauge tracking consumer prices that strips out volatile food and energy prices accelerated more rapidly.

For the markets, today’s numbers “delivered a mild relief rally,” said Gina Bolvin, president of Bolvin Wealth Management Group. “But with tariffs in play, investors should enjoy the calm while keeping an eye on the horizon.”Although prices for new vehicles rose modestly in July, prices for used cars and trucks rose 4.8 percent from a year ago. With new cars selling for an average of almost $49,000, according to Cox Automotive, many buyers have turned to the used market, pushing up prices. That trend is expected to continue if, as expected, automakers begin adding the cost of tariffs to new car prices.

Stephen Miran, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the inflation report today shows that there is “no evidence whatsoever” that tariffs have caused a spike in prices. “It just hasn’t panned out,” he said.

Miran, who has been nominated for an open spot on the Federal Reserve, said on CNBC that he can “never rule out anything,” when asked if price increases are coming as more tariffs come online and companies work through their inventories. But he insisted that the president’s global trade war was not responsible for the categories of goods that recorded price increases last month.

Miran, however, declined to answer questions about his nomination to the Fed or how the central bank should approach interest rates in September, saying only that its independence is “of paramount importance.” He declined to say if he believed he would be confirmed before the Fed’s September rate-setting meeting.

While a key measure of underly inflation rose in July, the White House described the report as a positive on Tuesday. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement that it “beat market expectations once again and remains stable, underscoring President Trump’s commitment to lower costs for American families and businesses.”

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Depending on your age, you might think I’m describing Soviet-era Russia — or Russia in the Putin era. You’d certainly think about modern-day China, where the government is an official partner in many private companies, and has unofficial but meaningful influence over most of them.

And in 2025, you might also think that’s beginning to describe America in the second Trump administration.

Last week, for instance, Donald Trump called on the CEO of Intel to resign because of his past business connections to China. In June, Trump approved Nippon Steel’s plan to buy US Steel — but only after the US government was granted a “golden share” in the company that gives Washington the ability to approve or veto some actions, like closing plants. In January, Trump floated the idea of having the US government own a portion of TikTok’s US operations.

And now Trump is requiring Nvidia and AMD to hand over 15% of revenue from high-end chip sales to China, as first reported by the Financial Times. (Nvidia has released a statement noting it “follow[s] rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets,” without addressing reports about the deal directly; AMD and the White House have yet to comment.)

You can make arguments for or against any one of these transactions — US chip sales to China have been a particularly divisive issue, even within the Trump administration. But taken together, there’s little question that in Trump 2.0, we should expect the federal government to insert itself into private business.

Call it “state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises,” Wall Street Journal columnist Greg Ip wrote Monday morning. It’s an exceptionally timely piece he appears to have written before the Nvidia/AMD story broke, because it doesn’t contain any reference to it.

(You can make the list of Trump’s interventions even longer if you’d like: He personally required former Paramount owner Shari Redstone to pay him $16 million to settle a seemingly specious lawsuit, for instance. And Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Communications Commission, has required Paramount’s new owners to promise to “root out the bias that has undermined trust in the national news media.” You could also include the concessions Trump is demanding from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities and law firms.)

The chip story is particularly hard to get your head around, since it inverts the premise of the tariff plans Trump has been pushing this year. Instead of taxing goods made overseas and imported into the US, the US is now taxing goods made by American companies, in America — the thing he supposedly wants to see much more of.

It’s not surprising to see Donald Trump say one thing and do another. And half a year into his second presidency, it’s no longer surprising to see the Republican-controlled Congress let him do just about anything he wants: This is the same Congress that passed a law last year requiring TikTok’s US operations to find a US buyer or shut down — and hasn’t said a word about the fact that Trump has decided to ignore that law, repeatedly.

And again, you might not care about the moves the Trump administration has made to steer companies to date. You might even like them. But the odds are increasing that he’s going to end up involving the federal government in an industry or company you do care about. Maybe one you work in. How are you going to feel about it then?

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In Donald Trump’s second term, the US government is increasingly involving itself in private business, like a reported 15% tax it has placed on some chip exports to China. Fatih Aktas /Anadolu via Getty Images

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Thousands of cases of the chikungunya virus, which sickens people bitten by an infected mosquito, have broken out in China during the past week. The virus causes extremely severe joint pain and fever, both of which can be short-lived—but can sometimes continue for years. Chikungunya can sometimes cause heart damage. Three days ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a travel warning for the area of the outbreak (the province of Guangdong in southern China), advising people to take precautions. And experts warn that chikungunya could further spread in the Americas and parts of Europe, though cases there have been relatively rare compared with those in tropical regions. Here is what you need to know about the disease and the risk.

What is the chikungunya virus, and how do people get infected?

The virus was first identified in Africa in 1952. It is spread most often by two mosquito species: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. People can get sick within three to seven days of a bite. In 2025, about 240,000 cases and 90 deaths have been reported in 16 countries and territories through July. Cases have been reported in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Infection usually produces symptoms including deeply painful joints, fevers, nausea, fatigue, and a rash. Most of the time, these problems resolve in a week or two. “But sometimes they can continue for months and years, and the virus can also cause serious heart damage,” says Jean Lim, a microbiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a member of the Global Virus Network’s chikungunya task force. “In rare cases, it can be fatal, and those most vulnerable are people who are immunocompromised, the elderly, and babies.”

What has happened in China?

China has reported an outbreak with about 7,000 cases, mostly in Guangdong and its city of Foshan. The Chinese government has distributed mosquito nets and sprayed insecticide through residential areas, streets, and places where people work outside. There have been reports that authorities have forced infected people into hospitals, reminding some of the strict measures China took during the COVID pandemic.

It remains unclear what triggered the outbreak, says Robert Jones, an insect biologist at the London School of Hygiene &Tropical Medicine and another member of the Global Virus Network’s task force. But several weeks of rain and high humidity in the area have created good conditions for A. aegypti and A. albopictus to breed and bite more people, he notes.

Can the virus get from China to the U.S.?

Chikungunya moves easily in this age of fast global travel. There are current outbreaks in France and a case reported in Italy, Jones says. The most likely scenario, according to Lim, is that “a mosquito in China bites and infects someone. That person hops on a plane and flies to the U.S. There a U.S. mosquito bites that person and picks up the virus, and then begins to spread it through the local insect population.”

For this to happen, the new country needs to already have mosquitoes that can host the virus. “Neither of these species is established in the UK, so there is no risk of onward transmission,” Jones says. But “in the United States, both Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus can be found, particularly in the south and east. To date, there have been 47 cases of chikungunya confirmed in the U.S. this year.”

Still, there are limiting factors that should minimize worry, says William Klimstra, an immunologist at the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Vaccine Research. Spraying insecticide and eliminating mosquito breeding areas are effective ways to curb outbreaks. And in a temperate area, the first killing frost will get rid of the insects, stopping viral transmission.

Are there treatments or vaccines for the virus?

Unfortunately, there are no good antiviral therapies, Lim says. Treatment usually consists of supportive care, such as keeping a patient hydrated and managing their pain.

There are, however, two effective and Food and Drug Administration–approved vaccines that get the body to produce antibodies against chikungunya, Jones says, and these lower the risk of infection. One, called IXCHIQ, uses a weakened, noninfective form of the virus. The other vaccine, VIMKUNYA, is based on viruslike particles.

And fortunately, insect repellents and protective clothing work quite well to keep the biting mosquitoes away in outbreak-prone regions of the world.

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Engelmayer also called into question the “entire premise” of the Trump Administration’s request. 

“Contrary to the Government’s depiction, the Maxwell grand jury testimony is not a matter of significant historical or public interest,” the judge said, adding that much of the information in the materials was revealed at Maxwell’s trial.

“Its entire premise—that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them—is demonstrably false,” he wrote.

Releasing the documents “would expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal,” he went on to say. “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) asked judges to release grand jury transcripts and other materials in both Epstein’s and Maxwell’s cases amid growing backlash over how the Trump Administration has handled the Epstein matter.

Public interest in the late sex offender, who has long been the subject of conspiracy theories on the far right in particular, amplified after the DOJ and FBI released a memo in July that stated that Epstein didn’t have a “client list” of co-conspirators and that his 2019 death in jail was a suicide. While the Trump Administration has tried to brush off questions and concerns over the case, many of the President’s own supporters have expressed frustration over how he has handled the matter.

President Donald Trump’s own years-long relationship with Epstein has also drawn heightened scrutiny amid the renewed attention to the case. The Wall Street Journal published an article last month alleging that Trump sent a “bawdy” letter to Epstein in 2003. The President has denied doing so and has since filed a lawsuit against the Journal’s parent firms, its owner, and the two reporters behind the story. Trump has tried to distance himself from Epstein over the years, recently saying that he broke off his friendship with the disgraced financier after Epstein “stole people that worked for me.”

The controversy has led to increased attention on Maxwell as well, who was convicted in 2021 for her role in recruiting underage girls to engage in illegal sex acts with Epstein and is currently serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison. Late last month, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena her for a deposition. DOJ Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche also interviewed Maxwell over the span of two days late last month.

About a week after meeting with Blanche, Maxwell, who is appealing her conviction, was transferred from a federal facility in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. The move sparked outrage from the family of Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein. Her family accused the Trump Administration of giving Maxwell “preferential treatment.”

A separate federal judge in Florida previously rejected one of the DOJ’s requests to release grand jury transcripts from an investigation into Epstein in 2005 and 2007, but another judge is still weighing another request.

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Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend an event in New York City on March 15, 2005.Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan— Getty Images

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