What’s in today’s Feb. 5, 2026 issue
🦸🏻♂️ Intro from Chris
🍿 Complex Melania
🗂️ Latest Epstein file dump
🗳️ Nationalized voting
🏰 Washington Post Traitors
⛺️ Hegseth takes on the Scouts
👨🏼💻 Dave’s take on the Post layoffs
Jeff joined the protest today! (photo via Maggie Penman)
Hi friends,
This is Chris Vazquez, your Friday newsletter writer. I’ve been thinking a lot the past few days about my former employer and one-sided arch-nemesis, Jeff Bezos. And I’ve also been thinking about this very silly concept in journalism called the “appearance of bias.”
Here’s the way it typically plays out: In order for journalists to keep their jobs at legacy newsrooms like The Washington Post, we not only need to ensure that our work is “objective” — whatever that means to the newsroom leaders defining it — but outside of work, we also need to avoid doing anything that could make us look biased. In the years Dave and I spent working at The Post, that always felt hypocritical to me. Somehow, an opinionated social media post or attendance at a protest would constitute the appearance of bias, but our newspaper being owned by a billionaire didn’t?
That hypocrisy came home to roost this week. Bezos dominated headlines for spending millions on right-wing government propaganda and refusing to spare a fraction of his net worth to avoid hundreds of layoffs at his newspaper. His pro-Trump, pro-wealth hoarding, anti-journalism bias is on full display. And the people in his employ — the ones trying to keep you informed about developments on the Epstein Files, Trump’s erosion of democracy, the administration’s anti-DEI efforts, and more — are paying the price.
We’ve got coverage of all that and more this week — including from Post journalists and ex-Post journalists, who need our support now more than ever. With that, let’s dive in.
Untangling the Melania Industrial Complex
Jeff Bezos, who refused to pay the salaries of one in three employees that his newspaper laid off yesterday, owns a tech company that reportedly paid $75 million for a propaganda film about First Lady Melania Trump.
Critics allege Bezos’ company spent so much money on the film in an effort to suck up to Trump. Bezos has faced more widespread criticism for cozying up to Trump. Marty Baron, The Post’s former top editor, pointed to Bezos and War Secretary Pete Hegseth appearing together at Blue Origin, another Bezos-owned company scoring federal contracts.
Bezos’ funding of state propaganda over real journalism also comes amid the Bezos-supported administration’s prosecution of two independent journalists. Last week, federal agents arrested Don Lemon and Georgia Fort, who were indicted alongside activists protesting the federal occupation of Minneapolis. They now face federal charges. The arrests and prosecutions are part of a longer history of the US working to criminalize Black journalists.
The latest on the Epstein Files
The Justice Department released 3 million pages, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images from the Epstein files. The New York Times found over 5,300 files with references to Trump and related terms. That includes sexual assault claims against Trump. The release includes only half of the 6 million total pages the Department says it has. The DOJ broke the law by not releasing all of the files earlier.
The files also include emails from Elon Musk in which he asked to visit Epstein’s island, though he claims that visit never ended up happening. Notably, Musk has lied before about never planning a visit. Draft emails from Epstein’s account also allege that Bill Gates used Epstein to set up affairs. Gates has denied those allegations.
After releasing the files, the Justice Department then took some of them down that may have identified survivors. But survivors’ identifying information — including nude photos — was still publicly available as of Wednesday night.
Trump lies about stolen elections while making it easier for himself to steal elections
During a podcast interview, Trump called for Republicans to “take over the voting” in at least “15 places.” The Constitution says he can’t do that, but that hasn’t stopped him before.
State and local officials run federal elections to guard against someone like Trump rigging an election in his favor. Trump has infamously tried to do this through lies about election results and a whole insurrection.
Trump’s effort to take over elections is already underway in Fulton County, Georgia. Last week, the FBI seized hundreds of boxes of ballots and voting records there. (Fulton County was also at the center of Trump’s effort to pressure officials into rigging the 2020 election in his favor.) He’s trying to do the same thing in Minnesota.
Billionaire butchers his own newspaper
The Washington Post laid off 300 employees Wednesday, almost a third of the entire staff. The paper is owned by Jeff Bezos, who could make up for the paper’s $100 million loss last year with less than 0.0004 of his $256 billion net worth. For context, 0.0004 of what I have in the bank right now would buy me a meal out. That cost was apparently too high for Bezos to spare the livelihoods of 300 people.
Additionally, Bezos cost the paper a significant chunk of change himself through his own decision to block a 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris. Marty Baron, The Post’s former top editor, tied Bezos’ mismanagement of the paper to his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump.”
Top editor Matt Murray announced the layoffs over Zoom. Publisher Will Lewis, whose tenure has been mired in controversy, didn’t bother to log onto the call. Staffers were largely notified that they had been laid off through emails. Reporter Lizzie Johnson received one such email while she was in the middle of a war zone.
In a statement, The Washington Post Guild condemned the layoffs and said, “If Jeff Bezos is no longer willing to invest in the mission that has defined this paper for generations and serve the millions who depend on Post journalism, then The Post deserves a steward that will.” The Guild held a rally to protest the layoffs Thursday, and a GoFundMe to support the laid off employees was still roughly $20,000 shy of its goal at the time I wrote this.
Bad news while wearing a Ring Leaders jacket. Diabolical.
Hegseth to Scouts: No girls allowed
A Pentagon spokesperson announced that the US military would end its relationship with Scouting America, the organization formerly known as Boy Scouts, unless it implemented “core value reforms.”
What reforms do they want to see, exactly? According to a statement, they want Scouting America to ramp up the misogyny and transphobia. Citing Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, the Pentagon spokesperson criticized Scouting America’s “embrace of DEl and other social justice, gender-fluid ideological stances. This is unacceptable.”
What “social justice, gender-fluid ideological stances” might they be referring to? The group allowed girls to join in 2019 so that they’d no longer be blocked out from becoming Eagle Scouts, lifted bans on LGBTQIA+ scouts and leaders before then, and changed its name last year to reflect its expanded membership.
I have mixed feelings about framing military support for a children’s organization as a DEI win, but the fact that people at the highest levels of government are so upset about this is newsworthy. It sends a message to girls and LGBTQIA+ children about where they can' and can’t feel welcome. The military partnership includes equipment and transportation for a scout gathering and allowing scouts to meet at military installations.
Each week, after running through the news Dave has covered, I turn things over to him for some analysis. Dave, take it away!
The last thing I want to do in the middle of launching Local News International is to look back at my previous job. The Washington Post was overall a very positive experience for me. I’d like to just leave it there. But I simply cannot ignore the latest act of self-infliction this week.
I think I made it pretty clear in Wednesday’s video how I feel about the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos, publisher and CEO Will Lewis, and Executive Editor Matt Murray (cowards, they’re cowards).
Generally, I don’t think it’s good practice to speak bad publicly about any former colleagues. This obviously breaks that rule, but here’s why: their decisions are affecting hundreds of the smartest people in journalism.
I never worked with any of these gentlemen. I don’t know them and, importantly, they’re completely disconnected from my glowing feelings about The Washington Post.
Jeff Bezos was never around, especially in the last five years or so. Initially, this was widely considered a good thing. He was a hands-off owner who consistently told newsroom leaders he would not affect our decisions editorially. And he didn’t! I made countless videos about Amazon on The Washington Post TikTok. They were almost all completely negative. I never received any negative feedback from management. Then, Bezos slowly began making hiring decisions, harmful company decisions (stepping in last minute to spike the Harris endorsement), and the decision to ignore the pleas of the newsroom (he never addressed the FBI raiding a reporter’s house just a few weeks ago). Still, I don’t know him. I never spoke to him.
Will Lewis is very good at the public-facing part of his job. He’s easy to talk to. He’s funny, too. But I’m basing this off of two one-minute interactions with him and a few company-wide meetings. Like Bezos, Lewis disappeared entirely from the newsroom. Once, last year, his assistant scheduled, then rescheduled, then rescheduled a meeting with him. When a time and location was eventually finalized, he didn’t show up. He wasn’t present for the layoffs yesterday. I don’t know Will.
I sort of met Matt Murray once. And at first, I felt it was unfair to hold it against our lack of communication against him. He arrived shortly before I went on paternity leave, and then I moved to Kansas City. In one of my many visits back to DC and the newsroom, I made the point of attending one of his small group staff meetings in 2024. The meetings were designed for journalists to ask him questions. Instead, he pontificated for 22 minutes of the half hour. I never got to ask him a question. This turned out to be a very common tactic for him across every Post town hall. At another event, he quite intentionally ignored me as I attempted to introduce myself (I was still working at the Post). I’ve never had a conversation with Matt.
What I’m trying to illustrate is that these three strangers have nothing to do with my memories of The Washington Post.
I remember Michelle Jaconi, my career guardian angel, who got me the job in the first place. The kindest, most enthusiastic person you’ll ever meet. I remember our entire Creative Video team, constantly on the move, making the weirdest videos we could imagine.
I remember Gene Park and Teddy Amenabar being so willing to help me out early in 2019 when I launched the TikTok account. And Marty Baron, Carlos Lozada, Ashley Parker, David Fahrenthold, and all the other genius journalists who took the time to cameo in my TikTok’s.
I think about working with Chris, Carmella and Joey to create our own literal universe - doing a “world tour” of the solar eclipse across three cities in the space of an hour.
Those people, and literally hundreds more, made The Washington Post an incredible place. The three men up top destroying it - whether intentionally or not - having nothing to do with the place.
You get two rewards for making it to the end of this newsletter. The first is a pet picture from a loyal reader. This is Jean Ralphio and Lili Sebastian!
if the email from which i learned their names was supposed to say “lil sebastian” and autocorrect changed it i am sorry
The second is the reveal for this week’s link scavenger hunt, in which I hid a non-news related link somewhere above in this email. This week, in the blurb about Trump’s FBI taking ballot boxes, I included a link to a summary of a chapter in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” where soldiers do the same thing. I’m planning to give myself a day off on Monday and finish the book. Late ’90s X-Men comics aren’t doing it for me, so I’m pivoting to postcolonial literature.
Until next week!
Chris
