What Powerful People Knew: Lutnick, Alito, and the Biden-Israel Near-Confrontation
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Three unrelated stories this weekend share a single unifying thread: revelations about what powerful people knew, when they knew it, and what they chose to do with that knowledge. A banker who reportedly exposed email exchanges between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Jeffrey Epstein has died at 57. The circumstances have not been publicly characterized as suspicious, but the timing — given that the emails purportedly link a sitting Cabinet member to Epstein — is generating sustained attention from journalists tracking the Epstein network. No evidence of anything other than a death has been established, but the question of whether documentary records exist beyond what has already been reported is one investigative journalists will continue to pursue.
Justice Samuel Alito told Fox News Sunday that he has 'a hunch' about who leaked the Dobbs draft opinion in 2022 — the leak that preceded the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade — but said the evidence is too weak to name anyone. The court's formal investigation, closed without identifying a leaker in early 2023, apparently did not capture Alito's current suspicion. A sitting Supreme Court justice speculating publicly about unresolved suspicions regarding colleagues or clerks is genuinely unusual — it reads either as an unresolved grievance finding a public outlet, or as a signal directed at someone he suspects.
Former NSC Coordinator for the Middle East Brett McGurk, speaking on Face the Nation, revealed that President Biden came very close to taking what McGurk described as 'draconian' steps against Israel in April 2024 following the Israeli strike that killed seven World Central Kitchen aid workers. Those plans were frozen when Iran launched its massive drone and missile attack on Israel shortly afterward, forcing an immediate recalibration of US-Israel posture. McGurk's account explains why the intense domestic pressure to respond harshly to the aid worker deaths never translated into action: the Iranian attack made any simultaneous US pressure on Israel politically and strategically untenable. The humanitarian question about those seven deaths, he acknowledged, remains entirely unresolved.