On this day in 2021, Donald Trump was acquitted in his second Senate impeachment trial, on the charge of inciting an insurrection at the Capitol just a month earlier. We could have all avoided this second Trump presidency and the current shitshow had Mitch McConnell not been such a shameless coward four years ago today.

Good morning! It’s Friday the 13th! OOOOOHHHH. Mehdi here, back from taping two episodes of my Al Jazeera English show ‘Head to Head’ in London, as well as stopping off in Dublin to pick up the prestigious Praeses Elit award from Trinity College. Some good news: There’s no paywall on today’s edition of the newsletter, thanks to our friends and sponsors over at Ground News – but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still become a paid subscriber and support independent journalism like Zeteo. (Or donate too, if you’re already a paid subscriber! Thanks!)

In today’s ‘First Draft,’ how does Jared Kushner keep getting away with it? We also bring you the latest from Minneapolis; from the Bangladeshi elections; from the UK, where Britain’s High Court just handed Palestine Action a major victory; and from behind bars in Pakistan, where Imran Khan is allegedly going blind.

Why Did They Redact Jared?

There is a page on the White House website headlined ‘The Most Transparent Administration in History!’

Like almost everything else that is published on the White House website these days, that’s complete and utter bollocks.

This is an administration, lest we forget, that has refused to release President Donald Trump’s financial and medical records and is currently engaged in what might be the biggest political cover-up in US history.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act required Trump’s Department of Justice to release all of the 6 million Epstein files, and to do so with minimal redactions. Instead, the DOJ released 3.5 million files last month and did so with heavy redactions.

Take Donald Trump. If you or I search his name in the library of redacted files released to the public on the DOJ website, his name appears almost 5,000 times. But this week, when Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, searched for the president’s name in the unredacted files that only members of Congress can access, Trump’s