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(WASHINGTON) — In the wake of the “massive” strikes on Iran by the U.S. and Israel Saturday, members of Congress have begun weighing in — with Democrats demanding answers — and some calling for lawmakers to return to Washington to vote on resolutions that would check President Donald Trump’s power to wage war.

Republicans have so far praised President Donald Trump’s decision to undertake “massive combat operations” against Iran, with an eye towards liberating the Iranian people.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., one of Trump’s most ardent supporters, said in a post on X “the end of the largest state sponsor of terrorism is upon us” and celebrated “freedom” for the Iranian people.

“My mind is racing with the thought that the murderous ayatollah’s regime in Iran will soon be no more,” he said in another post. “The biggest change in the Middle East in a thousand years is upon us.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reached out to some members of the so-called Gang of 8 to notify them of the operation in Iran before it was underway, multiple congressional offices confirmed to ABC News.

Members of the Gang of 8 include the top bipartisan House and Senate leaders and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

On Tuesday of this week, hours ahead of the president’s State of the Union address, Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe virtually briefed the Gang of 8 on Capitol Hill on Iran.

Immediately following the briefing, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters: “This is serious, and the administration has to make its case to the American people.”

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, an Arkansas Republican briefed ahead of the strikes in Iran, issued a statement providing a sense of why the president moved forward with the operation.

“Prior to the initiation of this action, in earnest diplomatic engagements with Iran, President Trump was very clear about his red line from the start and his expectations of Iran during these negotiations. Iran absolutely cannot be allowed to maintain a nuclear weapon or capabilities,” he said in a statement posted on X. “The safety and security of Americans and our allies are on the line.”

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, said he is praying for U.S. service members but emphasizes, “everything I have heard from the Administration before and after these strikes on Iran confirms this is a war of choice with no strategic endgame.”

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia is calling on the Senate to return to Washington immediately to vote on a war powers resolution to check the president’s authority to wage war with Iran.

“Has President Trump learned nothing from decades of U.S. meddling in Iran and forever wars in the Middle East?” Kaine said in a statement.

“These strikes are a colossal mistake, and I pray they do not cost our sons and daughters in uniform and at embassies throughout the region their lives,” he added.

“The Senate should immediately return to session and vote on my War Powers Resolution to block the use of U.S. forces in hostilities against Iran. Every single Senator needs to go on the record about this dangerous, unnecessary, and idiotic action,” he said.

It’s very unlikely Republican leadership will heed Kaine’s call to action.

Kaine’s war powers resolution is co-sponsored by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senate Minority Leader Schumer. Earlier in the week, Kaine said he would push for a vote in the Senate as soon as next week.

Congressional Democrats announced they too will compel a vote on a war powers resolution relating to Iran next week. House Democratic leadership is expected to force a vote on the bipartisan war powers resolution.

Both efforts in the House and Senate will receive some bipartisan support, but it’s unclear if they will have enough votes to actually pass both chambers.

As strikes were underway on Saturday, Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., said that after the “Iranian regime has slaughtered thousands of its own people in recent days,” the attack on Iran should be a warning to despotic regimes.

“Tyrants and terrorists everywhere should take note: the world is watching. History is watching,” Mace wrote on X.

Notably Sen. John Fetterman, D.-Pa., said he believed Trump was making the right move.

“President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region. God bless the United States, our great military, and Israel,” Fetterman wrote in an X post.

But other Democrats demanded an explanation for the strikes, like Sen. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a veteran, who lamented the action.

“I lost friends in Iraq to an illegal war. Young working-class kids should not pay the ultimate price for regime change and a war that hasn’t been explained or justified to the American people,” he wrote on X.

Others called for a full briefing and a vote on a proposed war powers resolution that would limit Trump’s power.Rep. Jared Moskowitz demanded a briefing.

“This is a serious moment that demands full transparency and congressional oversight,” Moskowitz, D-Fla., wrote on X.

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(WASHINGTON) — The late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appears to have successfully hidden a trove of potential evidence of his crimes from investigators for more than a decade, according to documents released this month by the Department of Justice. 

Internal correspondence between Epstein’s attorneys and private investigators, as well as previously sealed court filings, suggest that the disgraced financier went to extreme lengths to hide the potential evidence during the critical three-year period when local and federal law enforcement began investigating him before he secured a lenient plea deal that allowed him to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. 

Less than two weeks before the Palm Beach Police Department raided Epstein’s mansion in October 2005, a private investigator retained by Roy Black, a criminal defense lawyer for the disgraced financier, removed a trove of evidence from the home, including multiple computers, more than two dozen phone directories, and sexually explicit material, according to documents released by the DOJ.

State and federal prosecutors appeared to have never accessed the materials while they investigated Epstein, potentially shielding Epstein from criminal exposure and contributing to how he was able to evade justice for more than a decade. 

A 2020 report from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility about the issues with the investigation later concluded that the computers contained “potentially critical” evidence that could have changed the trajectory of the case. 

“There was good reason to believe the computers contained relevant — and potentially critical — information; and it was clear Epstein did not want the contents of his computers disclosed,” the report said. 

In the two decades that have followed — despite multiple investigations into Epstein’s criminal actions — the boxes of sensitive evidence appear to have been passed between representatives of Epstein but never fully recovered by law enforcement. 

While law enforcement has long been aware of the removed computers, documents released earlier this month by the Department of Justice for the first time shed light on the evidence removed from the home and the ill-fated effort to retrieve them by law enforcement. 

The documents outlining the trove of removed evidence were first reported by The Telegraph. 

‘Items of potential evidentiary value’

According to a 2005 memo from private investigator William Riley to Black, another private investigator, Paul Lavery, visited Epstein’s Palm Beach home at Black’s direction to remove “items of potential evidentiary value” from the home. 

Attempts by ABC News to contact Lavery and Riley Wednesday about the developments were unsuccessful. Riley’s partner in his private investigative firm Steve Kiraly declined to comment.

Black died last year, and an attorney at his former firm said he was occupied with an ongoing trial on Wednesday and unavailable.  

Searching Epstein’s home less than two weeks before police would raid it, Lavery removed more than a hundred pieces of potential evidence, including three computers, 29 bound telephone directories, a three-page listing of nearby masseuses, and at least ten photos of nude or partially nude women, according to the memo. At least two of the photos had handwritten messages on them, including from a woman who wrote, “You better never forget about me” before signing her name and ending the note “Class of 2005,” the memo said.  

Lavery also removed more than dozen items of sexual paraphernalia, five pieces of women’s underwear, Epstein’s concealed carry permit, an Epstein identification card for Harvard University, and more than $2,000 in cash, according to the memo. Among the removed items was also more than forty mainly pornographic VHS tapes and books titled “‘Compleat Slave’ — creating and living an erotic dominant/submissive lifestyle” and “‘Training with Miss Abernathy’ — a workbook for erotic slaves and their owners,” the memo said.  

The detective with the Palm Beach Police Department who was in charge of the investigation noted in a court filing that several items in Epstein’s home “were conspicuously absent” when they arrived to execute the search warrant. 

“For example, there were several hanging file folders that had their contents removed, and the pre-existing security cameras that I had observed during my last visit to Mr. Epstein’s residence were in place but were not connected to recording equipment,” he said in the filing. “In addition, at each location where a computer had been present, computer monitors, printers, and other peripheral devices were present but the computers (CPU-Central processing unit) themselves were removed.”

A FBI later agent attested in a then-sealed court filing that the items “were purposely removed from Mr. Epstein’s home in anticipation of an execution of a search warrant” and may contain vital evidence. 

“A review of Mr. Epstein’s computers may provide additional electronically stored message logs which could be further evidence of Mr. Epstein’s intent to travel to engage in sexual activity with teenagers he recruited from five Palm Beach County high schools,” the court filing said. 

According to the filing, one of the computers potentially contained critical surveillance camera footage because it previously was hard-wired to the home’s surveillance system. 

“The FBI investigation has determined that Mr. Epstein was actively involved in lewd and lascivious conduct with minor females as early as March 2004. To the extent that Mr. Epstein tries to deny that any or all of the victims ever visited his home, video footage of them at the house would rebut such a claim,” the filing said. 

A review of the Department of Justice’s Epstein library and an index of evidence released last year by the Trump administration earlier this year suggests the materials were never fully recovered by law enforcement. Testimony from an FBI analyst during the 2021 trial of Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell suggested that investigators recovered a copy of at least one of the computers, though the original computers and physical documents appear to have never been located. 

‘She needed to gather the stuff from the house’

The removal of the computers and other items was memorialized in multiple interviews conducted by law enforcement in the following two decades. 

A woman who worked as a personal assistant for Epstein told the FBI in 2021 that she was instructed by the disgraced financier to gather his items so an unidentified man could collect them from Epstein’s Palm Beach Home. 

“[She] recalled the conversation she had with EPSTEIN was where he told her that something happened to his detriment and she needed to gather the stuff from the house,” an FBI agent wrote in a report summarizing her account. 

While the assistant said she believed she would likely be meeting with a member of law enforcement, she said she arrived at the home, gathered the material, and provided it to an unknown man. The assistant said she similarly removed items from Epstein’s island. 

Epstein’s property manager also recounted the handover in his interview with federal agents, describing that Lavery retrieved the computers in the fall of 2005. 

In the following years, law enforcement unsuccessfully made multiple attempts to retrieve the items, though court documents suggest that their attempt to recover the evidence was largely focused on the three computers, rather than the trove of physical evidence — such as dozens of address books and sexual paraphernalia — that were also removed from the home. 

‘Never seen the equipment again’

As the investigation into Epstein heightened in the months following the search, Epstein’s lawyers fought to keep the materials out of the hands of law enforcement, arguing in previously sealed grand jury materials that the attempt to recover the materials were “simply the most recent of a series of highly intrusive and unusual attempts to acquire highly personal and/or privileged information” about Epstein. 

In court filings, Epstein’s attorneys appeared to acknowledge that the items were removed from the home prior to the search but argued the materials were irrelevant to the investigation and protected by attorney-client privilege. 

“Without disclosing any work done by Mr. Riley or his firm on Mr. Epstein’s behalf and at my direction, any actions thereafter taken by him or the firm were taken in connection with the legal representation of Mr. Epstein,” Epstein’s attorney Roy Black told the court in a then-sealed motion. 

The exact location of the materials in the months following the search is not clear, though recently released documents suggest that the materials quickly changed hands. According to notes taken by federal agents in 2007, Lavery claims that he promptly delivered the items to Riley, another private investigator who worked for Epstein and managed multiple storage units for the financier, the Telegraph first reported. 

“I took the items that were given to me,” Lavery said, according to notes. “Never seen the equipment again.”

Riley was subpoenaed for the information but appears to never have handed over the material, objecting to the requests with the help of Epstein’s lawyers. During the critical three-year period when Epstein was investigated by law enforcement before reaching a plea deal that allowed him to avoid a lengthy prison sentence, the trove of evidence was never accessed by law enforcement. 

When Epstein fulfilled his objection to plead guilty in state court pursuant to his non-prosecution agreement, the grand jury subpoena was withdrawn. When victims suing Epstein began seeking the materials in 2009, lawyers for the convicted sex offender appeared to spring into action to further ensure the materials would not be disclosed, citing the terms of the non-prosecution agreement. 

“Over the weekend I learned that plaintiff’s counsel are looking to get from me the computers and paperwork I took from Jeff’s house prior to the Search Warrant. I have them locked in storage and would like to know what to do with them,” Riley told an attorney for Epstein. “They are no longer needed in the criminal case, I assume.” 

Riley later confirmed in a letter to Epstein’s attorney Robert Critton that he would continue storing the materials in a “safe and secure location.”

“If at any time, you are unable to maintain possession of those materials or have any concern whatsoever that Mr. Epstein’s possession may be compromised in any manner, please advise me immediately such that we can take the necessary actions to protect and preserve those materials as is required in the Non-Prosecution Agreement,” Critton wrote in a letter memorializing their conservation. Critton died in 2020. 

Email correspondence between Riley and Epstein suggest that the disgraced financier was paying to keep the materials in a storage unit as late as 2010, though their location in the following decade — when investigators in New York opened a new investigation into Epstein and charged him with sex crimes before his 2019 death by suicide — appears to still be a mystery. 

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(NEW YORK) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee appears set to amend the childhood immunization schedule, including potentially changing recommendations on a shot given to newborns.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is meeting Thursday and Friday. A draft agenda posted online on Monday provides little detail on what materials will be presented or which speakers will give presentations, but does mention a discussion about the hepatitis B vaccine on the first day as well as “votes.”

Although it’s not clear what will be voted on, past comments from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and ACIP members indicate the universal hepatitis B vaccine dose given just after birth will be at issue.

The ACIP may vote to remove the birth dose recommendation or delay vaccination to a later age.

Public health experts told ABC News there is no evidence to suggest the hepatitis B vaccine is unsafe and that vaccinating babies at birth has been key to virtually eliminating the virus among children. 

What is the hepatitis B vaccine?

The hepatitis B vaccine is typically a three-shot series. The CDC recommends the first dose given within 24 hours of birth, the second dose between 1 month and 2 months, and the third dose between 6 months and 18 months.

In addition to all infants, the vaccine is recommended for all children and adults aged 59 and younger as well as adults aged 60 and older with risk factors for hepatitis B.

The ACIP previously recommended that only babies screened and found to be high risk for hepatitis B receive a vaccine, but experts found that screening missed many hepatitis B-positive cases.

“Hepatitis B vaccine was initially recommended for older groups and eventually then for children, but not for newborns,” Dr. Susan Wang, a former CDC hepatitis B virus and vaccine expert, told ABC News. “We have learned over decades now of both the safety and the impact of the vaccine, and it was a very specific decision to move it, not just to infancy but … within 24 hours of birth.”

The ACIP recommended that infants begin receiving the vaccine within hours of birth in 1991 as part of strategy to stop hepatitis B transmission within the U.S.

Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, told ABC News vaccination is important because if a pregnant person is hepatitis B-positive at the time of birth, the infant has an 85% chance of developing an infection.

If the infant develops a hepatitis B infection, they have a 90% chance of developing chronic hepatitis B, which can predispose them to chronic liver disease, cirrhosis and liver cancer.

What effect has the vaccine has on hepatitis B cases?

During a Senate hearing earlier this year, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician, said that before the recommendation was put in place in 1991, as many as 20,000 babies every year contracted hepatitis B from their mothers in utero or during birth.

Today, fewer than 20 babies every year get hepatitis B from their mother, Cassidy said.

Schaffner, who was part of the 1991 ACIP committee that recommended the universal birth dose, called it a “brilliantly successful program.”

“Both from a clinical perspective and a public health perspective, this has been a program that is successful beyond the imaginings of us when we sat around that ACIP room debating this in 1991,” he said. “The cases are just coming down astoundingly.”

Schaffner said if the ACIP votes to delay the recommendation, he is worried some parents will never get their children vaccinated.

“A vaccine postponed is often a vaccine never received, that is sure to happen,” he said. “There will be some children born to hepatitis B-positive mothers who, because they don’t get their birth dose, will slip through the system. They will become infected and, when they get older, they will transmit the infection to others, and we won’t be able to interrupt the transmission of this virus in our population.”

What has RFK Jr., CDC panel said about the hepatitis B vaccine?

During a June interview on The Tucker Carlson Show, Kennedy falsely claimed the hepatitis B vaccine was associated with an increased risk of autism.

Numerous existing studies have examined whether vaccines, or their ingredients, cause autism and have failed to find any such link.

Kennedy and other federal public health officials, such as Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have claimed hepatitis is mostly transmitted through sexual contact or needle sharing, and therefore babies don’t need a vaccine to protect against the infection.

They have suggested pregnant people be tested for hepatitis B and that only the babies of infected patients receive the shot at birth.

During an ACIP meeting in June, then-chair Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor, questioned whether it was “wise” to administer shots “to every newborn before leaving the hospital.”

Wang said there are a few reasons why a testing-only strategy doesn’t work, the first being that even if every pregnant person were tested before delivery and only babies born to positive patients were vaccinated, the unvaccinated babies would be unprotected against the virus, which is highly contagious.

Another reason is that not all pregnant people get tested or, if they do, they don’t get tested in time or have receive their results quickly enough, Wang said. Under a testing-only strategy, this could prevent a newborn from getting a vaccine when they need it.

“The hepatitis B vaccine is inexpensive, extremely safe, and has a high value in terms of effectiveness,” she said. “There’s no downside. And again, this has been after decades of studying this and globally, millions and millions of infants getting vaccinated. So, the value and the benefit of it is so far outweighs any possible issue.”

What if the hepatitis B vaccine birth dose recommendation is changed?

Wang compared removing the universal hepatitis B vaccine birth dose to taking a seat belt off in a car.

“The purpose of having the seat belt there is to protect you from the risk of injury and death when you’re in a moving vehicle,” she said. “It’s the same thing with the vaccine.”

Wang explained that the vaccine is given early as a post-exposure prophylaxis in case an infant is infected from their mother, but they can also contract the virus from anyone who is infected, either around the infant or taking care of them.

She added that if an infant is exposed during their first 12 months of life, the risk of chronic hepatitis B infection is substantially higher than if they are exposed during adolescence or adulthood

“If you don’t interrupt transmission, if you don’t cut it off at the pass, namely, at birth, we’ll have hepatitis B-positive people in the next generation, who, when they get into their teenage and young adults and older adult years, will pass it on sexually to others, and we will maintain this virus in our population,” Schaffner said.

Additionally, insurers often rely on ACIP recommendations to determine what they will and won’t cover, experts told ABC News.

If certain vaccines aren’t recommended by the ACIP, it may lead to parents or guardians facing out-of-pocket costs if their children receive the shot. It could also mean the shots aren’t covered by the Vaccines for Children (VFC) program, a federally funded program that provides no-cost vaccines to eligible children.

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