From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Melissa O’Rourke

Former President Bill Clinton personally asked to bring Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as guests to the Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s 2002 wedding, a move that unsettled Clinton’s own aides, the New York Post reported Thursday.

Clinton requested permission to include Epstein and Maxwell at the royal wedding in Rabat despite neither having any official relationship with the Moroccan royal family, the Post reported. Sources told the outlet that Clinton’s request was viewed internally as inappropriate and has quietly circulated in Democratic circles for more than two decades.

“[Clinton] brought them as guests to a king’s wedding. I mean, it almost sounds made up,” one source familiar with the matter told the outlet. “How many times in your life have you been invited as a guest of a guest at a wedding?”

Clinton traveled to Morocco with Epstein and Maxwell aboard Epstein’s private jet, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” according to the Post. Chelsea Clinton attended separately, and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton remained in Washington due to her schedule.

“[Former First Lady] Hillary [Clinton] was in the Senate, so she couldn’t go. Chelsea very much wanted to go, and the president very much wanted to go,” a second person told the outlet. “The idea that they would take [Epstein] was a head-scratcher. But nonetheless, the Clinton office moved forward and made this request … to bring these two guests, and that’s what happened.”

Once in Rabat, Clinton, Epstein and Maxwell were seated with King Mohammed VI during the black-tie wedding dinner, sources said. At one point, Chelsea Clinton requested a group photograph that included her father, Epstein and Maxwell.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year federal prison sentence for sex trafficking conspiracy and related offenses. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Their crimes were not publicly known at the time of the wedding.

The Clintons continue to downplay the extent of their past relationship with Epstein, maintaining that they cut off contact with him in 2005, three years before he pleaded guilty to state sex crimes in Florida.

Clinton spokesman Angel Ureña previously told the outlet that Clinton took four trips aboard Epstein’s jet between 2002 and 2003 and denied that Clinton ever visited Epstein’s private island or residences.

“I don’t know how many times we need to say there was travel more than 20 years ago before he was cut off. Apparently, we need to one more time. But nice try,” Ureña said, according to the outlet.

Neither of the sources quoted by the New York Post said they believed Clinton was aware of Epstein trafficking or sexually abusing children, but did say the ex-president is downplaying his former links to both Epstein and Maxwell.

The Clinton Foundation did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Both Bill and Hillary are scheduled to give depositions in January to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about their ties to Epstein. The Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Clintons in August, and Committee Chairman James Comer said that if the Clintons didn’t appear for depositions scheduled for Dec. 17 and 18 or arrange to appear for questioning in early January, then contempt charges would be pursued.

Photos released by Oversight Committee Democrats in December show Epstein with prominent figures, including President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Steve Bannon.

The Department of Justice is expected to release a new trove of documents related to the Epstein investigation Friday.

From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By David Blackmon

I’ve written frequently here in recent years about the financial fiasco that has hit Ford Motor Company and other big U.S. carmakers who made the fateful decision to go in whole hog in 2021 to feed at the federal subsidy trough wrought on the U.S. economy by the Joe Biden autopen presidency. It was crony capitalism writ large, federal rent seeking on the grandest scale in U.S. history, and only now are the chickens coming home to roost.

Ford announced on Monday that it will be forced to take $19.5 billion in special charges as its management team embarks on a corporate reorganization in a desperate attempt to unwind the financial carnage caused by its failed strategies and investments in the electric vehicles space since 2022.

Cancelled is the Ford F-150 Lightning, the full-size electric pickup that few could afford and fewer wanted to buy, along with planned introductions of a second pricey pickup and fully electric vans and commercial vehicles. Ford will apparently keep making its costly Mustang Mach-E EV while adjusting the car’s features and price to try to make it more competitive. There will be a shift to making more hybrid models and introducing new lines of cheaper EVs and what the company calls “extended range electric vehicles,” or EREVs, which attach a gas-fueled generator to recharge the EV batteries while the car is being driven.

“The $50k, $60k, $70k EVs just weren’t selling; We’re following customers to where the market is,” Farley said. “We’re going to build up our whole lineup of hybrids. It’s gonna be better for the company’s profitability, shareholders and a lot of new American jobs. These really expensive $70k electric trucks, as much as I love the product, they didn’t make sense. But an EREV that goes 700 miles on a tank of gas, for 90% of the time is all-electric, that EREV is a better solution for a Lightning than the current all-electric Lightning.”

It all makes sense to Mr. Farley, but one wonders how much longer the company’s investors will tolerate his presence atop the corporate management pyramid if the company’s financial fortunes don’t turn around fast.

To Ford’s and Farley’s credit, the company has, unlike some of its competitors (GM, for example), been quite transparent in publicly revealing the massive losses it has accumulated in its EV projects since 2022. The company has reported its EV enterprise as a separate business unit called Model-E on its financial filings, enabling everyone to witness its somewhat amazing escalating EV-related losses since 2022:

• 2022 – Net loss of $2.2 billion

• 2023 – Net loss of $4.7 billion

• 2024 – Net loss of $5.1 billion

Add in the company’s $3.6 billion in losses recorded across the first three quarters of 2025, and you arrive at a total of $15.6 billion net losses on EV-related projects and processes in less than four calendar years. Add to that the financial carnage detailed in Monday’s announcement and the damage from the company’s financial electric boogaloo escalates to well above $30 billion with Q4 2025’s damage still to be added to the total.

Ford and Farley have benefited from the fact that the company’s lineup of gas-and-diesel powered cars have remained strongly profitable, resulting in overall corporate profits each year despite the huge EV-related losses. It is also fair to point out that all car companies were under heavy pressure from the Biden government to either produce battery electric vehicles or be penalized by onerous federal regulations.

Now, with the Trump administration rescinding Biden’s harsh mandates and canceling the absurdly unattainable fleet mileage requirements, Ford and other companies will be free to make cars Americans actually want to buy. Better late than never, as they say, but the financial fallout from it all is likely just beginning to be made public.

• David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.