White House Uses Shutdown as Excuse to Not Release Key Economic Data

The Trump administration is using the government shutdown as an excuse to avoid releasing the official jobs and inflation data for the second month in a row.

“The Democrats may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system with October [consumer price index] and jobs reports likely never being released. And all of that economic data released will be permanently impaired, leaving our policymakers at the Fed flying blind at a critical period,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced at a Wednesday press conference.

While the White House has previously hinted that the inflation report won’t be released due to the shutdown, there is less explanation for why the jobs report can’t be released.

The reality is that the economy is bad and Trump can’t hide the data—or blame it on Joe Biden—forever.

Private-sector data from payroll company ADP showed that the U.S. lost 32,000 jobs in September. In October, an estimated 11,000 jobs were lost per week. “The labor market struggled to produce jobs consistently during the second half of the month,” said ADP chief economist Nela Richardson.

Trump is planting the seeds to question any future jobs reports that do eventually come out because they will likely be abysmal. He already fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer in August when the agency reported that the economy created 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than initially thought. Now, he’s insisting that a government shutdown (which most people blame him for) will permanently delete two months of jobs data because the numbers won’t be anywhere near where he wants them.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Democrats and “an unhinged judge” Wednesday while making excuses for President Donald Trump’s concerted efforts to get out of paying SNAP benefits.

During a press briefing, one reporter asked Leavitt to make sense of her claim that the Democrats were to blame for SNAP recipients missing their benefits in November. The Trump administration has taken multiple steps to block a judge’s order that would require the government to disburse the full funding.

“So recipients missed their SNAP benefits because the Democrats shut the government down, and they forced the administration to tap into a contingency fund that did not even fund the full entirety of this program,” Leavitt said. “So then you had an unhinged judge who was trying to dictate from the bench what the executive branch has to pay for and where that money has to come from. That is judicial overreach at its finest, and so that’s why the administration pushed back on that.

“We can’t have the judicial branch telling the executive branch that we need to rob the children nutrition fund, which is what this judge was trying to do, to pay for SNAP benefits. That’s completely inappropriate and it’s unconstitutional,” Leavitt said. “And we’ve been proven right with that argument.”

This certainly isn’t the first time Leavitt has railed against a federal judge who ruled against Trump. And in reality, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to avoid funding SNAP benefits.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration started pushing the unprecedented claim that it couldn’t legally use the Department of Agriculture’s contingency funds to pay for SNAP benefits during a shutdown. The agency has claimed the fund only contains around $4.65 billion, or about half of what is required for November benefits, and the government has maintained that taking from it would siphon funds from other child nutrition programs. Meanwhile, Trump has managed to move money around to fund the military’s $5.3 billion payroll.

When federal judges ordered Trump to use the funds to pay at least some of the benefits, the president said it would be his “honor” to do so but later claimed that no one would see a penny until the government shutdown ended. His open expression of his “intent to defy” the judge’s order prompted District Chief Judge John J. McConnell Jr. to demand that Trump pay SNAP benefits in full.

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to step in to block McConnell’s order. On Tuesday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson signed an order extending her temporary stay on McConnell’s request, as the Senate has approved a measure that would resume appropriations and reopen the government.

Donald Trump is pleading with Republicans not to release the Epstein files.

The president called at least two of his congressional allies on Tuesday in an effort to get them to remove their names from a discharge petition that will force a vote on releasing details of the investigation into the pedophilic sex trafficker and his associates.

That included a “very early wakeup call” to Representative Lauren Boebert, and phone tag with Representative Nancy Mace, The New York Times’s Annie Karni reported Wednesday.

Trump has since met with Boebert, a White House official confirmed to CNN, though the meeting did not successfully sway her. Instead, the Colorado lawmaker “remains committed to keeping her name on the discharge petition,” according to Karni.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt failed Wednesday to address why Trump had probed MAGA acolytes on the vote, claiming instead that the president was displaying an incredible case of “transparency” by “briefing members of Congress whenever they please.”

“That’s a defining factor of transparency, having discussions with members of Congress about various issues,” Leavitt said.

For months, Boebert and Mace were two of just four Republicans that had penned their signatures on the discharge petition. They were joined by Representatives Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene.

But earlier this month, concern swelled among Republican lawmakers that Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was even cozier than previously understood: A few conservative representatives with ties to the FBI and the Justice Department spilled last week that the true details of the Epstein files are “worse” for Trump than previously reported.

Files released by House Democrats early Wednesday shed even more light on the Trump-Epstein connection, illustrating as late as 2011 that Epstein was grateful Trump had stayed quiet about abuse that had taken place at one of his residences. The “dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to his longtime girlfriend and criminal associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, at the time.

When queried by Michael Wolff in 2019 about the extent of Trump’s knowledge of abductions of young girls, Epstein remarked: “Of course he knew about the girls he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won the special election in Arizona 50 days ago, has also vowed to sign the bipartisan petition, making her the last signature that the House needs to force a vote on the issue. Grijalva is scheduled to be sworn in on Wednesday, teeing up a vote on the Epstein files in the coming days.

In a desperate and misguided effort to exonerate Donald Trump, the White House is claiming that the trafficking victim mentioned in the Jeffrey Epstein emails released by House Democrats Wednesday is Virginia Giuffre.

One of the released emails, from Epstein to his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, stated that Trump spent “many hours at my house” with one of the victims, whose name was redacted in the Democrats’ release.

In response, Republicans on the House Oversight Committee posted on X that the redacted name was Virginia Giuffre, which was retweeted by the president’s “Rapid Response 47” account.

It’s telling that the Trump administration is confirming that the emails are accurate rather than issuing a blanket denial—and identifying a deceased Epstein victim, as well. Giuffre denied seeing Trump commit any wrongdoing prior to her death, so the president and his advisers probably think this lets him off the hook.

However, in another one of the emails, from Epstein to author Michael Wolff, he says point-blank that Trump “knew about the girls.” And what plausible, noncriminal explanation is there for Trump spending hours with Giuffre at Epstein’s house? Trump hasn’t personally said anything yet, but Maxwell has already been caught in a lie based on what she reportedly told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche during their July interview.

Maxwell told Blanche that she didn’t “recall ever seeing [Trump] in [Epstein’s] house” at the time, which these emails have now proven false. With Democrats promising the release of more documents soon, will more lies be exposed, and how will Trump and the GOP try to spin them?

Emails obtained by the House Oversight Committee Democrats have shed new light on disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump. Now top Democrats are promising that more bombshells are on the way.

Ranking member of the House Oversight Committee Robert Garcia appeared on MSNBC Tuesday morning to detail his party’s plans after the release of the Epstein email exchanges, in which Epstein wrote that Trump “knew about the girls” and that one of Epstein’s victims “spent hours at my house with [Trump].”

“There’s a total of about 23,000 documents.… We obviously released some today, we’ll be releasing additional documents likely later today,” Garcia said. “The important thing here is that we know, and we’ve been demanding that Donald Trump and the DOJ release the full Epstein files.”

Garcia continued, “In what’s been released today—which obviously is quite serious—I think connections between what Donald Trump may have known; there’s communication between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, obviously making some claims about Donald Trump spending significant time, hours, with possibly one of the victims. There’s also disturbing emails there about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein that people can read for themselves. What’s important right now is, we want to know why Donald Trump has spent the entire campaign saying that he would release the files, and now that he’s in the White House there is a massive cover-up going on. The survivors deserve the truth.”

Trump has yet to say anything about this massive new development, although it’s highly likely that an unhinged Truth Social rant is pending. His GOP lapdogs, however, have gone right into cover-up mode like Garcia said.

“Another publicity stunt by the Democrats. They’re trying to mislead people,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told Punchbowl’s Max Cohen. “I’ll refer you to the Oversight Committee’s response by the Republicans.”

The Oversight Committee Republicans, of course, have called the whole thing “clickbait.”