Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Saturday, July 19th, 2025.

This is USA Today's The Excer.

Today, the latest on Trump and Epstein Records.

Plus, we take a look at a prisoner exchange between the U.S. and

Venezuela and how the Trump administration is impacting litigation over gun regulations.

President Donald Trump sued the Wall Street Journal and its owners, including Rupert Murdoch,

for at least $10 billion yesterday. The suit was filed over the newspaper's report that his name was on a 2003 birthday greeting

for Jeffrey Epstein that included a sexually suggestive drawing and a reference to secrets they shared.

Move came after Trump bowed to some of his critics by pushing for the release of certain

additional Epstein records.

I spoke with USA Today, White House reporter Zach Anderson for more.

Thanks for joining me, Zach. Good to be here. So President Trump has tapped Attorney General

Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony from Jeffrey Epstein's legal proceedings.

Let's just start there. Zach, what's the latest and how did we get to this point?

So Trump has really faced a lot of

pressure, both from Republicans in his party and from Democrats to release more records related to

Epstein. The Justice Department put out a memo last week that was attempting to close the book

on this issue and dispel some of the concerns that people had.

There's a lot of talk that Epstein had a client list of accomplices who were involved in his alleged sex trafficking scheme and speculation about how he died.

The DOJ put out this memo saying they didn't have any reason to believe that he had this

client list, that they affirmed that he died by suicide in jail, and that they weren't going to

put out any more records, justice officials said. And that really set people off, especially

...