Lawmakers Call For Epstein Files, Trump's Crypto Token, China's Military Parade

Women who say they were victimized by Jeffrey Epstein want the government to release more information about the convicted sex offender.

It's a human rights issue, you know, to get justice.

What do they hope to learn?

I'm Michelle Martin.

That's Steve Inskeep, and this is Up First from NPR News.

The Trump family's cryptocurrency is now publicly traded.

The launch added $5 billion to the Trump family wealth.

Why would people invest so much?

Is this the kind of money that somebody wanting to influence the president would want to invest in?

Absolutely.

Also, China held a military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

And that allowed China rather than America to pose as a defender of the post-World War II order.

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Today, President Trump faces another news story he'd prefer not to hear.

The president spent part of yesterday dismissing questions about a decline in his health, saying he was, quote, very active.

Today, some members of Congress are trying to force a vote to make the Trump administration release the Epstein files.

Trump's Justice Department first promised to release more information about the convicted sex offender, and then abruptly said, move along, nothing to see here.

Some of the women that Epstein victimized plan to appear at the Capitol today, and one of them, Lisa Phillips, spoke with NPR.

I mean, for me, it's not a a political issue, or one side or the other.

It's just a human rights issue, you know, to get justice.

NPR senior political editor and correspondent, Domenico Montenaro, is with us now to tell us more about all this.

Good morning, Domenico.

Hey, good morning, Michelle.

So explain what these lawmakers are trying to do.

Well, the two members of Congress who are at the center of this effort are Republican Thomas Massey of Kentucky and Democrat Roe Conna of California.

Massey filed what's known as a discharge petition on Tuesday.

That's a procedural maneuver to try and get around leadership and force a vote.

They need 218 House members to sign it and force that vote.

It would still need to pass the Senate, though, so this wouldn't force a release on its own.

But proponents hope that this will ramp up political pressure on the administration to do more.

To an extent, it's already having an effect.

I mean, after the petition was filed, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee released some 30,000 more pages of documents related to the investigation, but a lot of that information is already public.

It's not new.

And those in favor of the release of more release are saying, don't be fooled by that.

So, what exactly do those calling for the full release of the files want or expect to find?

Well, I want to highlight how Rokana describes what this effort and discharge petition are about here on Morning Edition on Tuesday.

The petition is about restoring trust in government.

It protects victims' identity.

It's simply calling for the release of all of the Epstein files to to hold rich and powerful men who abused underage girls accountable.

You know, more than this being about individual men who are Democrats or Republicans, this is seen as a question of who has power, money, and influence, and how it's used or abused.

Very rarely have we ever seen Congress really involve itself in the Department of Justice and its investigations quite in this way.

You know what?

We don't want to discount the fact that there are young women here who experience something terrible, okay?

But how much of this pressure is really about political opportunity?

Yeah, everything in Washington has some tinge of politics, right?

So, you know, I take Khanna at his word that he wants full accountability and is advocating for victims.

But politically, a day that's focused on Epstein is a day that is likely more helpful than not to Democrats.

I mean, it's an irritant for Trump, especially since he's had a longtime friendship with Epstein.

The White House says Trump and Epstein had a falling out in the early 2000s because Epstein was, quote, being a creep.

Other reporting has said it was over a property dispute.

Nonetheless, there's a lot we don't know about their relationship.

The association is certainly something Democrats, though, don't mind reminding people about.

And polling has shown big majorities of people don't think the government is being transparent enough and disapprove of how Trump is handling that.

Can you say more about that polling very briefly?

Is this something that's resonating with voters?

You know, it's hard to say that this is going to be something that factors into people's minds more so than, say, prices, crime, or immigration.

But that's not to say it doesn't matter to people.

It's one of the rare areas where we've seen some splits with people who are key in Trump's base.

That is NPR's Domenico Montanero.

Domenico, thank you.

You're welcome.

We're also following this story.

A federal judge in California ruled that President Trump's use of the National Guard in Los Angeles this past summer was illegal.

Trump deployed about 4,000 Guard troops to confront anti-immigration and customs enforcement protests in the city.

Around 300 troops are still there.

They did things like set up traffic blockades, which the judge said violates a prohibition on the military taking on a law enforcement role.

The president has since deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., and on Tuesday, he vowed to send troops to Baltimore and Chicago, although he did not give any details about when.

We're going in.

I didn't say when.

We're going in.

When you lose, look, I have an obligation.

This isn't a political thing.

At a press conference, Illinois' Governor J.B.

Prisker, a Democrat, said it is about politics.

We know before anything has happened here that the Trump plan is to use any excuse to deploy armed military personnel to Chicago.

The California ruling just applies to California and the administration has until September 12th to appeal.

President Trump's family crypto business seemingly made a fortune this week.

The cryptocurrency World Liberty Financial, co-founded by the president and his sons, started trading publicly on Monday.

The launch added some $5 billion to the family's wealth, at least on paper.

NPR Financial correspondent Maria Aspen has been following the story.

Maria, good morning.

Good morning.

State in the obvious, $5 billion.

Sounds like a lot, but we said $5 billion on paper.

How is this currency doing?

Indeed, President Trump and his family own a big stake in World Liberty Financial.

But other than the theoretical boost to their wealth, the first few days of trading kind of fell flat.

The new World Liberty Financial Crypto Tokens are currently trading at about 23 cents, which is down from the high of over 30 cents after their launch on Monday.

The company has also said that Trump and his sons are barred from selling their own tokens for the time being.

So there's not an immediate payday for the Trumps.

And even if they could sell, them selling would probably drive down the price even more.

All of that said, this launch sure does create more pathways for them to profit from the crypto industry, which, of course, President Trump has embraced wholeheartedly.

So they've created this currency with Trump's name on it.

The family holds a lot of the currency.

So if people outside buy the other currency, that drives up the price and drives up their wealth.

I get that.

What does it matter that the President of the United States went into the crypto business while also promoting that very same business as President of the United States?

Well, as you point out, it underlines the extraordinary degree to which President Trump and his family are using the Oval Office to profit personally and how much the crypto industry is really at the center of that.

I mean, you may recall, Steve, that just a few years ago, Trump called crypto a scam.

Now he's embraced it.

He's vowed to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.

He's loaded up his administration with crypto-friendly regulators.

And he's started crypto businesses so he's in a position to profit from these more relaxed rules coming out of his government.

All of this is why many government ethics and financial experts have raised alarms about conflicts of interest.

I spoke about this with Ross Delston, who's a lawyer and a former banking regulator at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Is this the kind of money that somebody wanting to influence the president, become friends with the president, would want to invest in?

Absolutely.

It used to be you had to join Mar-a-Lago.

This is much more fun.

You don't even have to get out of bed in the morning.

Delston also pointed out how upfront Trump is being about his business interests, despite all the concerns about conflicts of interest.

The White House has repeatedly said there are no such conflicts of interest, which a spokesperson again told NPR last night.

As Delson told me, there is really no federal regulator who seems likely to call Trump out on any of this because he controls them.

Under the Biden administration, deals like this would have drawn a lot of scrutiny from regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But now the president has appointed a lot of crypto-friendly people to his administration.

And Steve, it's worth pointing out that it was that tougher approach at the SEC that gave Trump an opportunity to court the crypto vote and their money.

And now he's in the position to shape the rules, or the lack of rules, for a business where he and his family stand to profit.

And Pierre's Maria Aspen, thanks for the reporting.

Thank you.

China held a military parade today to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The country flexed its military muscles in a big way, but also diplomatic ones.

It's the first time since the height of the Cold War more than six decades ago that the leaders of China, North Korea, and Russia have met.

NPR's Anthony Kuhn joins us now from Seoul, South Korea, where he's following this story.

Hi there, Anthony.

Hey, Steve.

I was just looking at some television images of the parade.

It looks like lots of tracked vehicles with missiles on them and so forth.

That's right.

And China holds these parades on, for example, national days every decade or so.

And there's a lot that's similar about them.

Beijing is blanketed in heavy security.

You see the military rolling its latest hardware through Tiananmen Square.

I think the defining image this time was seeing Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un together watching this parade.

The leaders of 26 nations were there, most of them pretty closely aligned with China and Russia, such as Iran, Vietnam, Cuba, Belarus, and Myanmar.

Well, why would you choose a commemoration of the end of World War II to hold this parade and make this joint appearance with all these leaders?

Well, Xi Jinping's message was that China fought Japan from 1931 to 1945, longer than other countries.

China suffered 35 million people killed and wounded in the war.

And as the winners in World War II, they got to become permanent members of the UN Security Council, and they see themselves as co-founders with the U.S.

of the post-war international order, and so they deserve a major say in it.

Xi Jinping compared China's World War II struggle for survival with the current day.

Here's what he said.

Today, he said, humanity once again faces the choice between peace or war, dialogue or confrontation, a win-win or a zero-sum game.

Now, Xi said that China stands on the right side of history at this crucial moment, but he also stood with President Vladimir Putin, and partly for that reason and Russia's war in Ukraine, Western leaders mostly stayed away from this event.

I just want to remind people, Anthony, of some of the context here.

At the end of World War II, the United States led the way in setting up a lot of global institutions, a U.S.-dominated post-war order that has endured in some ways ever since, but that we in the United States have decided we don't like anymore.

We're tired of paying for it.

We think our own allies are ripping us off and so forth.

Is there a larger message from China in that context, given this anniversary?

Yes, Xi's message ties in with us, and that message is that we are now seeing historical changes, including the rise of China and the decline of the U.S.-led post-war order.

And this shift in the balance of power is supposed to help China achieve its goals of modernization and having a world-class military by the middle of the 21st century.

Now, President Trump did comment about this.

He had a kind of sarcastic tweet saying, send my best wishes to Putin and Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, as you conspire against the United States.

Can we expect that those countries will cooperate even more against the U.S.?

We don't know that for sure.

Xi, Kim, and Putin are expected to hold bilateral meetings among themselves, but there's no trilateral meeting of these three nuclear-armed nations expected.

The question is, will they have them in future?

Unlike the U.S., South Korea, and Japan, they don't have a trilateral office of their own.

They don't have three-way joint military drills drills yet.

But as you noted, President Trump is certainly concerned about it.

NPR's Anthony Kuhn, thanks so much.

Thank you, Steve.

And that's Up First for this Wednesday, September 3rd.

I'm Steve Inskeep.

And I'm Michelle Martin.

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