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 defense bill that Trump signed into law the day before, still can’t pass an audit of its roughly $4.7 trillion in assets. Eight years running.
They’ve never passed a single audit since Congress mandated them in 2018. The only one of the government’s 24 major agencies with that record.
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” under a Trump executive order - but legally it’s still the Department of Defense, because only Congress can 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 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 petition on Wednesday asking a federal court to throw out 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 low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. The same facility holds Elizabeth Holmes, and held Jen Shah until earlier this month.
Victims’ advocates have called it preferential treatment for a convicted child sex trafficker. In interviews recorded in July and released in August, Maxwell claimed she never saw Trump in any “inappropriate” setting. Her attorney said she “answered all the questions” and that they discussed “about 100 names.” Rep. Jamie Raskin says a whistleblower told him she’s working on an application to get her sentence commuted - and the Supreme Court already turned down her appeal back in October.
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 at first. 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 bombing Syria, with more strikes expected. 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 2011 collection of short essays by defense insiders on navigating the Pentagon.
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
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/pentagon-fails-8th-audit
Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said Hegseth was breaking the law by calling the Pentagon the “Department of War” - Trump authorized that second name by executive order, though legally it’s still the Department of Defense. It also said Maxwell’s legal team was seeking clemency while her Supreme Court appeal was pending - the Court turned down her appeal in October, and Rep. Jamie Raskin says a whistleblower told him she was working on a commutation application. And a few smaller things were off: Maxwell was moved from a low-security prison, not a maximum-security one; she filed a petition to throw out her conviction, not a motion to dismiss all charges; her interviews were recorded in July, not August; Jen Shah had already been released on December 10th; her attorney said she “answered all the questions,” not “every single question”; and the U.S. hit 70 targets in Syria, not more than 70.
Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now stick closer to what the Pentagon audit found, say more Syria strikes were expected rather than already underway, and describe the Epstein search glitch and the Go Deeper book more exactly.