Trump once endorsed the US-Canada bridge he’s now railing against – as it happened

As the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown first reported on Monday, Michael Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief, told the FBI in 2019 that he got a call from Donald Trump in 2006 denouncing Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell after criminal sex charges were first made public.

Reiter confirmed to the Herald reporter that a partially redacted document in the Epstein files posted online by the justice department was an account of a 2019 FBI interview with him in which he described the call from Trump.

“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter, according to the FBI summary of an interview with the former police chief conducted in October 2019.

When Epstein was arrested in July 2019, Trump was asked by reporters if he had ben aware that the friend he socialized with for most of two decades had been molesting girls. “No, I had no idea,” Trump said then.

In 2020, when Maxwell was arrested, Trump was asked at a news conference if he expected her “to turn in powerful men”.

“I don’t know. I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump replied.

“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach,” he continued, referring to someone he socialized with for years. “But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

Reiter also told FBI agents that Trump had called Maxwell Epstein’s “operative”, and recalled Trump telling him “she is evil and to focus on her”, according to the FBI report.

Trump also told Reiter in 2006 that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there’”, according to the FBI interview summary.

Candace Laing, the Canadian chamber of commerce’s president, points out that Donald Trump supported the construction of the Windsor-Detroit bridge in 2017, before calling it an outrage and threatening to block its opening on Monday.

In a statement Laing says:

Whether this proves real or simply threatened to keep uncertainty high – blocking or barricading bridges is a self-defeating move. Through decades of collaboration, Canada and the United States built things together, created jobs together and compete globally together.

The Trump administration was right in 2017 in its joint statement that endorsed the bridge as a priority project, calling it a “vital economic link between our two countries”. Modern border infrastructure strengthens shared economic security. The path forward isn’t deconstructing established trade corridors, it’s actually building bridges.”

An immigration judge has rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said in a statement on Monday.

Öztürk’s lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union submitted a document in federal court on Monday announcing that removal proceedings against her have been terminated by an immigration judge.

The document said that an immigration judge concluded on 29 January that the Department of Homeland Security had not met its burden of proving she was removable and terminated the proceedings against her, her lawyers informed a court in New York.

Her immigration lawyer, Mahsa Khanbabai, told Reuters, the decision was issued by immigration judge Roopal Patel in Boston.

“Today, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that despite the justice system’s flaws, my case may give hope to those who have also been wronged by the U.S. government,” Öztürk said in a statement. “Though the pain that I and thousands of other women wrongfully imprisoned by ICE have faced cannot be undone, it is heartening to know that some justice can prevail after all. I grieve for the many human beings who do not get to see the mistreatment they have faced brought into the light. When we openly talk about the many injustices around us, including the treatment of immigrants and others who have been targeted and thrown in for-profit ICE prisons, as well as what is happening in Gaza, true justice will prevail.”

On 22 January, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the government’s policy of arresting and detaining scholars like Öztürk violated the first amendment, and documents released as part of the case confirmed that the state department had targeted her solely on the basis of a 2024 opinion article she co-authored in a student newspaper calling for Tufts to divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel over of credible accusations of “deliberate starvation and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinian civilians and plausible genocide”.

US-Canada relations were further shaken on Monday by a 299-word diatribe from Donald Trump, in which he threatened to block the opening of a multibillion-dollar binational bridge, connecting Windsor and Detroit, which the president claimed his predecessor, Barack Obama had “stupidly” approved.

What Trump failed to explain to loyal readers of his social media platform is that he himself had publicly endorsed the bridge project in 2017, before construction began, in public comments and a joint statement issued by him and the then prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.

“No two countries share deeper or broader relations than Canada and the United States,” the joint statement issued on 13 February 2017 read.

“Given our shared focus on infrastructure investments, we will encourage opportunities for companies in both countries to create jobs through those investments. In particular, we look forward to the expeditious completion of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will serve as a vital economic link between our two countries,” Trump and Trudeau said after their first meeting that day.

“Prime Minister, I pledge to work with you in pursuit of our many shared interests,” Trump said that day. “America is deeply fortunate to have a neighbor like Canada. We have before us the opportunity to build even more bridges, and bridges of cooperation and bridges of commerce.”

In his post on Monday, Trump told Americans they should be outraged that “Canada is building a massive bridge between Ontario and Michigan. They own both the Canada and the United States side.”

In fact, Canada’s public broadcaster CBC reported in 2017, “the Canadian government agreed to pay for all construction costs, including $250m for the inspection plaza on the American side of the river, with a plan to recoup the costs through tolls” due to the importance of trade between the two nations.

At the time, almost one quarter of all goods moving between the two countries passed over the existing, privately owned Ambassador bridge or a tunnel connecting Detroit and Windsor.

The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.

The statement said that the latest in what legal experts have called a series of extrajudicial killings by the Pentagon was carried out “at the direction of” the Florida-based combat unit’s new commander, Gen Francis L Donovan, who was sworn in at a Pentagon ceremony last Thursday. Donovan takes over after a US navy admiral, Alvin Holsey, chose to retire over reported disagreements over the boat-strike policy.

The announcement, which was accompanied by video of the attack, was carried out on a boat “transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific”, the Pentagon said. The US coast guard was called to search for a lone survivor of the attack, the statement said.

The new killings bring the death toll to at least 130 in 38 strikes, according to Pentagon statements tallied by the Intercept.

A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction on Monday that blocks part of a new state law that bans federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces.

The senior district court judge, Christina Snyder, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, ruled that the ban on masks in California’s No Secret Police Act could not be enforced, but did allow the part of the law that requires federal officers to display ID to the public to be enforced.

California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings when the act was signed into law in September by the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. The state acted after high-profile raids last summer by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Los Angeles and other parts of California.

The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in November challenging the laws, arguing that they would threaten the safety of officers who are facing harassment, doxing, and violence and that they violated the constitution because the state is directly regulating the federal government.

Snyder said she issued the initial ruling because the mask ban as it was enacted did not also apply to state law enforcement authorities, discriminating against the federal government.

The ruling left open the possibility to future legislation banning federal agents from wearing masks if it applied to all law enforcement agencies, with Snyder writing “the Court finds that federal officers can perform their federal functions without wearing masks”. Her ruling will go into effect 19 February.

Turning Point Action, the political organization of the late far-right activist Charlie Kirk, has endorsed Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in the Republican primary for US Senate, over the sitting Republican senator, John Cornyn.

Paxton, who was impeached by the Republican-majority of the Texas House in 2023 over allegations of corruption, said that he was “honored” by the endorsement. “The movement that Charlie Kirk built has inspired millions, and I’m proud to be standing alongside Turning Point Action in carrying on the fight to save this country and defend our freedoms,” Paxton wrote on social media.

Some Republican donors in Texas are reportedly concerned that the far-right Paxton would be at risk of losing to the Democratic nominee, likely to be either Jasmine Crockett, the congresswoman, or James Talarico, a state representative.

Recent polling from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs shows Paxton and Crockett leading the primary races, ahead of their more centrist rivals.

As Democrats prepare to force a vote in the US House this week on Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada, the president posted a lengthy diatribe on his social media platform in which he threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.

Trump began his latest screed against the US’s second-largest trading partner by claiming that “everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades”.

The president also threatened to block the scheduled opening of the Gordie Howe international bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, built by a binational partnership that got approval during the Obama administration but began construction in 2018, when Trump was president.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve”, Trump wrote on Monday, using his idiosyncratic capitalization.

The cause of Trump’s rage at Canada appears to be a closer trading relationship with China negotiated by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, after Trump raised tariffs on Canadian imports. “China… will eat Canada alive”, Trump wrote.

To illustrate his point, Trump then added a particularly wild claim with no factual basis at all: “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”

Trump’s bizarre claim that China would force Canada to give up its national pastime as part of a trade deal stunned many observers when they saw it in black and white on Monday, but Canadians have heard it before.

“Canada’s not doing well, they’re doing very poorly,” Trump said last month at the opening of his wife’s documentary about herself, in comments broadcast by Canada’s CTV. “You can’t look at China as the answer,” Trump added. “The first thing they’re going to do is say ‘You’re not allowed to play ice hockey anymore’”.

In subsequent comments to reporters on Air Force One on 31 January, Trump said: “We don’t want China to take over Canada, and if they make the deal that he’s looking to make, China will take over Canada. And the first thing they’re going to do: end ice hockey.”

After privately viewing unredacted files from the federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender, Jamie Raskin, the senior Democrat on the House judiciary committee, accused the justice department, which blacked out the names of potential co-conspirators in the public release, of a cover up.

“I think that the Department of Justice has been in a cover-up mode for many months and has been trying to sweep the entire thing under the rug,” Raskin told Chad Pergram of Fox News and other reporters. “There’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes.”

After Raskin described seeing a redaction of an email in which Epstein had claimed that it was not true that he had ever been asked by Donald Trump to leave his Mar-a-Lago club, as Trump claimed last year, the Fox News correspondent asked him: “What did you see specific to President Trump or President Clinton, and were there specific redactions to them?”

Raskin replied: “Well I just gave you an example of one redaction related to President Trump; I did not see any redactions related to President Clinton.”

“We want all of the information to come out,” Raskin added. “And the only redactions should be the names of the victims and the identifying information. Unfortunately, they violated that precept by releasing the names of a lot of victims, which is either spectacular incompetence and sloppiness on their part or, as a lot of the survivors believe, a deliberate threat to other survivors who are thinking about coming forward, that they need to be careful because they can be exposed and have their personal information dragged through the mud as well.”

Later today, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, the Democrat and Republican who led the congressional push to release files from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein will address the press after their private viewing of copies of the files without redactions.

In an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show podcast released on Monday, the California congressman told the former navy Seal: “There are obviously people who need to be prosecuted and investigated. They haven’t released the names of the co-conspirators still.”

“Every single person who is in those files who says, ‘I went to Epstein’s island’… or ‘I went to Epstein’s home and I know that there were young girls there’… any one of those people need to be investigated, they need to be hauled in front of Congress and they need to be held accountable,” Khanna told the conservative podcaster.

• Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion and accomplice, invoked her fifth amendment rights while appearing at a virtual deposition before the House oversight committee today. Her lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, later said that if the American public “truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened” his client would be prepared to “speak fully and honestly” if Donald Trump grants her clemency.

• Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle decried Maxwell’s refusal to answer questions. James Comer, the Republican chair of the oversight committee, called her appearance “very disappointing”. Meanwhile, ranking member Robert Garcia said that Maxwell’s silence appeared to be part of a “cover-up” by the White House.“Who is she protecting? And we need to know why she’s been given special treatment at a low security prison by the Trump Administration,” Garcia said.

• James Comer also did not rule out deposing commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, when speaking to reporters today. Lutnick is facing mounting calls from lawmakers to resign for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including a planned visit to the disgraced financier on his private island in 2012 – four years after Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in jail for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

• Congress is facing a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if doesn’t pass a full year funding bill by Friday. Lawmakers passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the department running until 13 February, while Democrats negotiate with GOP colleagues and the White House over further guardrails for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

James Comer, chair of the House oversight committee, did not rule out deposing commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, when speaking to reporters today.

Lutnick is facing mounting calls from lawmakers to resign for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including a planned visit to the disgraced financier on his private island in 2012 – four years after Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in jail for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

On Monday, Comer noted that his committee is focused on the five upcoming depositions as part of their ongoing investigation into the handling of Epstein’s crimes. These include former president Bill Clinton and secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the five that we have on the book. So we’ll see what happens here, and we’ll move forward,” Comer added.

Lutnick said last year in a podcast interview that he had no relationship with Epstein after 2005. But email exchanges in the latest trove of documents released by the justice department show that the pair did exchange several emails and correspondence in the years following – often through assistants and intermediaries.

Earlier, we reported that Ghislaine Maxwell invoked her fifth amendment rights while appearing at a virtual deposition before the House oversight committee. Her lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, later said that if the American public “truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened” his client would be prepared to “speak fully and honestly” if Donald Trump grants her clemency.

“Some may not like what they hear, but the truth matters,” Marcus added. “For example, both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing. Ms Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation.”

After Maxwell refused to answer questions today, James Comer, the oversight committee’s Republican chair,  said that it was “very disappointing”.

“We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators. We sincerely want to get to the truth to the American people, and justice for the survivors,” Comer added.