While You Scrolled Clinton Hot Tub Photos, the Real News Got Buried
The Epstein files dropped Friday and dominated every feed for hours. Photos of Bill Clinton in a hot tub, old flight logs we’d already seen, Michael Jackson standing next to Epstein in front of what appears to be a painting of a naked woman. The internet went absolutely feral. And while everyone was busy playing Where’s Waldo with grainy 20-year-old party photos, the Pentagon quietly announced it failed its eighth consecutive audit.
Let me say that again.
The Department of Defense, which just got a record $901 billion budget that Trump signed into law the day before, cannot tell you where $4.7 trillion in assets actually are. Eight years running.
They’ve never passed a single audit since Congress mandated them in 2018. The only federal agency that literally cannot account for its own money.
Twenty-six material weaknesses. Two significant deficiencies. Auditors specifically called out the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program, the Pentagon’s crown jewel, for failing to report assets in its Global Spares Pool and misrecording property. These aren’t minor bookkeeping errors. A material weakness means there’s a reasonable possibility of financial misstatements going undetected.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s response was remarkable in its audacity. He issued a statement about being “dedicated to openly sharing audit results” while blaming decades of war and neglect for the problems. The Pentagon is now calling itself the “Department of War” in official documents, which is technically against the law – since Hegseth does not have the right ton change the name.
But Republicans in Congress don’t care about the law as long as they’re benefiting.
Meanwhile, the same Friday evening that everyone was scrolling through Epstein photos, the U.S. launched a large-scale strike against more than 70 targets across central Syria. Operation Hawkeye Strike. F-15s, A-10s, Apache helicopters, HIMARS rocket artillery. Over 100 precision munitions fired. This was in retaliation for an ISIS attack that killed two Iowa National Guard soldiers and a civilian interpreter a week earlier.
Hegseth called it “a declaration of vengeance.” The administration is framing it as decisive action, but the strikes are expected to continue for weeks, possibly a month, according to U.S. officials. Jordan’s air force participated. We’re conducting sustained military operations in Syria, and most Americans found out about it from buried news coverage sandwiched between Clinton hot tub takes.
And then there’s Ghislaine Maxwell, who filed a motion on Wednesday to dismiss all charges against her and vacate her conviction. This is the woman who spent nine hours over two days in closed-door meetings with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche back in July, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer.
Shortly after those meetings, she was transferred from a maximum-security federal facility to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. The same facility has Jen Shah and Elizabeth Holmes.
Victims’ advocates have called it preferential treatment for a convicted child sex trafficker. In interviews recorded in August, Maxwell claimed she never saw Trump in any “inappropriate” setting. She answered “every single question,” according to her attorney, about roughly 100 different people. Her legal team is now seeking clemency from Trump while her Supreme Court appeal remains pending.
The Epstein files release itself was incomplete.
Despite a law requiring full disclosure, large portions were heavily redacted. Entire pages blacked out. The search function on the DOJ’s “Epstein Library” website didn’t work for hours after launch. Rep. Thomas Massie, the Republican who led the push for the bill, said the release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”
The mechanism here is familiar. Drop something attention-grabbing, something that gets people riled up and clicking and debating, and bury the things that actually matter in the Friday evening news dump. A failed audit covering trillions in assets. Sustained military strikes in a foreign country. A convicted sex trafficker getting extraordinary access to the second-highest official in the Justice Department while preparing to ask for her conviction to be overturned.
Those grainy photos are doing exactly what they’re designed to do. They give everyone something to argue about, something to meme, something to feel satisfied about, while the machinery that actually matters keeps grinding away unremarked. The Pentagon can’t account for your money. Your military is conducting weeks-long bombing campaigns. And a woman convicted of trafficking children is getting meetings and prison transfers and filing motions to walk free.
Look at what’s happening while you’re distracted by the show.
Go Deeper: If you want to understand how the national security state avoids accountability, read “The Pentagon Labyrinth” – a collection of essays by defense insiders explaining exactly why these audits keep failing and why nobody seems to care.
SOURCES
https://breakingdefense.com/2025/12/pentagon-fails-another-audit-restates-2028-goal-to-finally-pass
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/19/g-s1-103194/u-s-launches-strikes-syria
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/19/isis-strikes-syria-us
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/19/politics/us-strikes-isis-targets-syria
https://www.rawstory.com/ghislaine-maxwell-2674451943
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/19/jeffrey-epstein-files-doj-release-order-maxwell.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/19/nx-s1-5615152/epstein-files-release-trump-pam-bondi-democrats