From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Hailey Gomez

If something’s redacted, you will know the line, and you will know why it’s redacted, the victim’s name, identifying information of a victim.

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Monday evening on Fox News that the thousands of withheld files on deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein are now in the hands of the FBI, adding certain redactions will be made, with an explanation provided for each one.

The Department of Justice released the first phase of “The Epstein Files” — an over 100-page document — on Thursday, but it failed to contain a majority of new information, sparking controversy online. On “Hannity,” Fox’s Sean Hannity addressed the controversy, asking Bondi for her response. She said she had been informed fewer than 24 hours before the release that “there were way more documents that they were supposed to turn over.”

“You’re looking at these documents going, ‘These aren’t all the Epstein files.’ There were flight logs, there were names, victims’ names, and we’re going, ‘Where’s the rest of the stuff?’ That’s what the FBI had turned over to us,” Bondi said. “So a source said, ‘Whoa, all this evidence is sitting in the Southern District of New York.’ So based on that, I gave them the deadline, Friday at 8, a truckload of evidence arrived.”

“It’s now in the possession of the FBI. Kash is going to get me, and himself really, a detailed report as to why all these documents and evidence had been withheld,” Bondi added. “We’re going to go through it, go through it as fast as we can, but go through it very cautiously to protect all the victims of Epstein, because there are a lot of victims.”

Before the release of “Phase One,” Bondi told Fox News last Wednesday that the DOJ would be releasing “some” of the files by Thursday, hoping the public would see “a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information.” However, the DOJ and Trump administration faced pushback online after conservative influencers obtained a binder labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” Some of those influencers were seen smiling and holding it up outside the West Wing.

WATCH:

Hannity pressed Bondi about additional potential redactions in the files.

“National security, some grand jury information, which is always going to be confidential, but we’ll see. Let’s look through them as fast as we can. Get it out to the American people, because the American people have a right to know,” Bondi said. “Not only on that, but on Kennedy, on Martin Luther King, on all of these cases that the Biden administration has just sat on for all these years.”

“It’s really — it’s not sad. It’s infuriating that these people thought that they could sit on this information, but they can’t,” Bondi said. “And when we redact things, Sean, what we’re going to do is not just pull pages out like they used to do. If something’s redacted, you will know the line, and you will know why it’s redacted, the victim’s name, identifying information of a victim.”

Epstein was arrested and charged in 2019 with sex trafficking, only later to be found dead in his New York Metropolitan Correctional Center cell a month after his arrest. Since his death, Republicans, including Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, have called for the full, unredacted records of Epstein to be released to the public, which includes his infamous flight log.

After the release of phase one, Bondi requested that the FBI deliver the remaining documents to the DOJ by Friday at 8 a.m., tasking newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel with investigating “why the request for all documents was not followed.”

“We believe in transparency, and America has the right to know. The Biden administration sat on these documents. No one did anything with them. Why were they sitting in the Southern District of New York? I want a full report on that,” Bondi said.

“Sadly, these people don’t believe in transparency, but I think more, unfortunately, I think a lot of them don’t believe in honesty,” Bondi added. “It’s a new day. It’s a new administration, and everything’s going to come out to the public. The public has a right to know. Americans have a right to know.”

From the Fraser Institute

By Ross McKitrick

During the Superbowl, Doug Ford ran a campaign ad about fearlessly protecting Ontario workers against Trump. I suppose it’s effective as election theatre; it’s intended to make Ontarians feel lucky we’ve got a tough leader like Ford standing up to the Bad Orange Man. But my reaction was that Ford is lucky to have the Bad Orange Man creating a distraction so he doesn’t have to talk about Ontario’s high taxes, declining investment, stagnant real wages, lengthening health-care wait times and all the other problems that have gotten worse on his watch.

President Trump’s obnoxious and erratic rhetoric also seems to have put his own advisors on the defensive. Peter Navarro, Kevin Hassett and Howard Lutnick have taken pains to clarify that what we are dealing with is a “drug war not a trade war.” This is confusing since many sources say that Canada is responsible for less than one per cent of fentanyl entering the United States. But if we are going to de-escalate matters and resolve the dispute, we should start by trying to understand why they think we’re the problem.

Suppose in 2024 Trump and his team had asked for a Homeland Security briefing on fentanyl. What would they have learned? They already knew about Mexico. But they would also have learned that while Canada doesn’t rival Mexico for the volume of pills being sent into the U.S., we have become a transnational money laundering hub that keeps the Chinese and Mexican drug cartels in business. And we have ignored previous U.S. demands to deal with the problem.

Over a decade ago, Vancouver-based investigative journalist Sam Cooper unearthed shocking details of how Asian drug cartels backed by the Chinese Communist Party turned British Columbia’s casinos into billion-dollar money laundering operations, then scaled up from there through illicit real estate schemes in Vancouver and Toronto. This eventually triggered the 2022 Cullen Commission, which concluded, bluntly, that a massive amount of drug money was being laundered in B.C., that “the federal anti–money laundering [AML] regime is not effective,” that the RCMP had shut down what little AML capacity it had in 2012 just as the problem was exploding in scale, and that government officials have long known about the problem but ignored it.

In 2023 the Biden State Department under Anthony Blinken told Canada our fentanyl and money laundering control efforts were inadequate. Since then Canada’s border security forces have been shown to be so compromised and corrupt that U.S. intelligence agencies sidelined us and stopped sharing information. The corruption went to the top. A year ago Cameron Ortis, the former head of domestic intelligence at the RCMP, was sentenced to 14 years in prison after being convicted of selling top secret U.S. intelligence to money launderers tied to drugs and terrorism to help them avoid capture.

In September 2024 the Biden Justice Department hit the Toronto-Dominion Bank with a $3 billion fine for facilitating $670 million in money laundering for groups tied to transnational drug trafficking and terrorism. Then-attorney general Merrick Garland said “TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crime to flourish. By making its services convenient for criminals, it became one.”

Imagine the outcry if Trump had called one of our chartered banks a criminal organization.

We are making some progress in cleaning up the mess, but in the process learning that we are now a major fentanyl manufacturer. In October the RCMP raided massive fentanyl factories in B.C. and Alberta. Unfortunately there remain many gaps in our enforcement capabilities. For instance, the RCMP, which is responsible for border patrols between ports of entry, has admitted it has no airborne surveillance operations after 4 p.m. on weekdays or on weekends.

The fact that the prime minister’s promise of a new $1.3-billion border security and anti-drug plan convinced Trump to suspend the tariff threat indicates that the fentanyl angle wasn’t entirely a pretext. And we should have done these things sooner, even if Trump hadn’t made it an issue. We can only hope Ottawa now follows through on its promises. I fear, though, that if Ford’s Captain Canada act proves a hit with voters, the Liberals may distract voters with a flag-waving campaign against the Bad Orange Man rather than confront the deep economic problems we have imposed on ourselves.

A trade dispute appears inevitable now that Trump has signaled the 25 percent tariffs are back on. The problem is knowing whom to listen to since Trump is openly contradicting his own economic team. Trump’s top trade advisor, Peter Navarro, has written that the U.S. needs to pursue “reciprocity,” which he defines as other countries not charging tariffs on U.S. imports any higher than the U.S. charges. In the Americans’ view, U.S. trade barriers are very low and everyone else’s should be, too—a stance completely at odds with Trump’s most recent moves.

Whichever way this plays out Canada has no choice but to go all-in on lowering the cost of doing business here, especially in trade-exposed sectors such as steel, autos, manufacturing and technology. That starts with cutting taxes including carbon-pricing and rolling back our costly net-zero anti-energy regulatory regime. In the coming election campaign, that’s the agenda we need to see spelled out.

How much easier it will be instead for Canadian politicians to play the populist hero with vague anti-Trump posturing. But that would be poor substitute for a long overdue pro-Canadian economic growth agenda.