Hey, good morning. It's Sunday, July the 20th. We're covering the continued fallout this morning of the Trump administration's handling of the Epstein files, including a new deep dive from the New York Times into the president's friendship with the late financier and convicted sex offender and new reporting

on how Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal are positioned to fight back against the president's

$10 billion lawsuit over the journal's reporting on details of that friendship. I'll be joined later

in the show by Trump biographer Tim O'Brien and the journalist and former White House correspondent,

John Harwood.

We begin this morning with another Trump scandal, one that threatens the foundations of the rule of law in this country. If you need any more proof that Donald Trump puts Donald

Trump above the country he governs, look no further than his nomination of Amel Bovey,

his former personal defense attorney, to a lifetime

seat on one of the most powerful courts in America. This wildly unqualified pick is not just extreme,

but it marks a turning point in Trump's war on the judiciary. The goal is no longer just to steer

the courts to the right, but to bend them to his will.

On Thursday, over the objections of every single Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and more than

900 former Justice Department attorneys, Senate Republicans voted to advance Bovys nomination

to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. That's the same court that launched Justice

Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Now, here's what we know about the professional conduct of

Amel Bovi, the man that Trump is trying to install on that same storied bench. As acting deputy

attorney general, Bovi played a direct role in the firing or sidelining of prosecutors who were involved in the

January 6th investigation, launching a sweeping internal probe at the Department of Justice

into potentially thousands of agents who worked on the case, according to the Associated Press.

At the time, Bovi accused FBI leadership of insubordination for resisting his demand to identify the core

investigating team. Now, that power struggle sparked a dramatic internal standoff that shook the

Justice Department, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Bovi also helped orchestrate the

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