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    What is the truth about Trump and Epstein? The story keeps getting murkier … | Arwa Mahdawi

    You have to keep this hush-hush, OK? I have top-secret information to share. You know Donald Trump has been reluctant to release the Epstein files? Well, it’s not because there’s anything nefarious going on. Trump may be an adjudicated sexual predator accused of sexual misconduct by at least 27 women (all of which he denies), who publicly boasted in 2002 about how his “terrific” pal Jeffrey Epstein liked women “on the younger side”, but you shouldn’t read too much into all that. Nor should you overanalyse a Wall Street Journal report claiming White House officials told Trump in May that his name appeared multiple times in the files. Or that House Democrats have now released a sexually suggestive letter and drawing sent to Epstein in 2003 for his birthday that appears to show Trump’s signature, the same note the president has denied writing. Nor should you worry yourself with the photo that has been released showing Epstein holding a novelty check signed by Trump with the suggestion that Epstein “sold” him a woman for $22,500.No, the real reason Trump is being weird about Epstein is … drum roll, please … because the president may or may not have been covertly operating as an FBI informant and investigating the disgraced financier.To be clear: I did not learn this information by scrolling conspiracy theory subreddits at 3am. It comes via the highest levels of government. Last week, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, told a CNN reporter that the president cares deeply about justice for Epstein’s accusers. In fact, when Trump first heard “the rumour” about Epstein, he “kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago; he was an FBI informant to try and take this stuff down”.Why would Johnson make such an explosive and weird claim? Is it because he reckons Maga supporters, some of whom are angry about the president’s handling of the Epstein files, are gullible? With conspiratorial thinking on the rise, is he playing into a proclivity among certain voters to flip Occam’s razor and believe in the most complex explanation? (Macco’s razor, if you will.)Honestly, I don’t know what Johnson was thinking. Nor does anyone else; even the Trump administration was reportedly perplexed by the claim. And on Sunday, Johnson’s office delicately walked back his assertion in a statement: “The speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump – who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago – was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator.”The attorney referenced is Brad Edwards, who represents a number of Epstein survivors and said last week that Trump was “friendly” to the cause before doing an “about-face”. As per the Washington Post, Trump “helped” Edwards with efforts against Epstein in 2009. Not quite the same as being an FBI informant.To give Trump his due, he did, as Johnson claimed, bar Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. This reportedly happened in 2007, after the latter behaved inappropriately towards a club member’s teenage daughter. And he doesn’t appear to have been friendly with the paedophile after his sex crime conviction in 2008 – unlike Bill Gates, who met Epstein multiple times after that.Epstein and Trump were good friends for at least 15 years, but there’s little record of them interacting after 2004. Rather than Trump’s concern for abused girls causing the falling out, it seems a bidding war over a Palm Beach mansion may have been to blame. In July, Trump also said he rowed with Epstein because the financier “stole” young women who worked for his Mar-a-Lago spa. The president seemed rather more upset about his “property” being taken than the safety of the women Epstein “stole”.Whatever happened between the pair, questions about their relationship are not going away. The White House is saying the suggestive birthday note is FAKE NEWS and part of a “Democrat hoax” – but is that landing with Maga supporters? Maybe it’s time for Team Trump to sit down and workshop some better deflections. Perhaps blame the brouhaha on an extraterrestrial plot or Hillary Clinton’s emails; anything to stop people from coming to the simplest possible explanation for why Trump wants to bury this story. “Enigma’s never age,” a line on Trump’s supposed birthday note reads. But this Epstein enigma is ageing like raw milk. If only it would sour voters on Trump. More

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    House committee releases image of ‘sickening’ Trump birthday note to Epstein – US politics live

    US immigration officers are ramping up immigration sweeps in Los Angeles again after the supreme court reversed a temporary restraining order that banned the Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language or job.In a post on Twitter/X, Greg Bovino, the head of US border patrol in Los Angeles, called the temporary restraining order “very poorly” written and “the worst” he’s ever seen. He also said that border patrol would be starting operations back up again today.“We are going hard in Los Angeles today and are hitting a location as I write this,” Bovino wrote.Immigration officers were forced to pause their sweeping immigration raids after advocacy groups sued the Trump administration for systemically racially profiling brown-skinned people. US district judge in Los Angeles Maame E Frimpong granted the groups a temporary restraining order after finding a “mountain of evidence” that the immigration enforcement tactics were violating the constitution.But the supreme court ruled 6-3 to lift those restrictions on Monday. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who voted to approve the stay on the order, wrote that the Immigration and Nationality Act allows immigration officers to “interrogate any alien or person believed to be an alien as to his right to be or to remain in the United States”. While “ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” it can be used as a “relevant” factor, he wrote.Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that House Democrats on Monday released an image of a sexually suggestive letter and drawing that appears to bear the signature of Donald Trump, the very same note the president had denied writing after reports of its existence were published earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal.The letter, described as “sickening” by one representative, was turned over by lawyers for disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in response to a subpoena from the House oversight committee, and was included in a set of notes sent to the convicted sex offender for his 50th birthday.The image showed a letter that in effect comported with a description in the Journal’s report from July. Inside the sketch of a woman’s torso, the note depicts an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein, with what appeared to be Trump’s signature below.“The oversight committee has secured the infamous ‘Birthday Book’ that contains a note from President Trump that he has said does not exist,” Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the panel, said in a statement. “It’s time for the president to tell us the truth about what he knew and release all the Epstein files.”The White House did not immediately comment on the letter, but officials sought to discredit the note. Deputy chief of staff for communications, Taylor Budowich, suggested in an X post carrying a different version of Trump’s signature that the letter or the signature had been falsified.“Time for news corp to open that check book, it’s not his signature. DEFAMATION!” Budowich wrote, referencing the defamation suit that Trump filed against News Corp, the parent company of the Journal, over its original story.Maryland representative Jamie Raskin called the letter “sickening” and called for the full Epstein files to be released. Posting on X, he said:
    House Democrats fought to bring this sickening letter into the light while Trump and MAGA mouthpieces assured us it did not exist. Trump even sued the Wall Street Journal for reporting on it!
    We can’t trust a word MAGA says. Release the full Epstein file NOW!
    Read the full story here:In other developments:

    US immigration officers are ramping up immigration sweeps in Los Angeles again after the supreme court reversed a temporary restraining order that banned the Trump administration from stopping people solely based on their race, language or job. In a post on Twitter/X, Greg Bovino, the head of US border patrol in Los Angeles, called the temporary restraining order “very poorly” written and “the worst” he’s ever seen.

    Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK will see a big policing operation led by drones in the airspace over Windsor, police have said. King Charles is to host the US president and his wife, Melania Trump, at Windsor Castle from 17 to 19 September, where they will be entertained with a ceremonial welcome and state banquet.

    Donald Trump launched a vitriolic attack against Tom Hanks for supposedly being “destructive” and “woke” after one of America’s most beloved actors was snubbed without much explanation by West Point last week. On his social media site on Monday, the US president applauded the alumni association of the US Military Academy (or West Point) for abruptly calling off a ceremony honoring Hanks, twice an Academy award winner who has played numerous military characters and also has a long history of advocating for veterans.

    Donald Trump now cannot claim presidential immunity to get off the hook from paying $83.3m in damages to the writer E Jean Carroll, a federal appeals court ruled on Monday, upholding a jury’s 2024 award against the president for defamation. Trump’s lawyers had pointed to the supreme court’s ruling last year saying the president has immunity for official acts to argue that the damages should be overturned.

    The US supreme court allowed Donald Trump on Monday to keep a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission away from her post for now, temporarily pausing a judicial order that required the reinstatement of the commissioner who the Republican president has sought to oust.

    Intent on vindication after spending four months in prison last year, Donald Trump’s White House trade adviser Peter Navarro asked a federal appeals court on Sunday night to force the justice department to explain why it would not defend his 2022 conviction for defying a January 6 committee subpoena. More

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    House Democrats share screenshot of apparent Trump birthday note to Epstein

    House Democrats on Monday shared a screenshot showing what appears to be a letter signed by Donald Trump, the very same letter Trump had denied writing after reports of its existence were published in the Wall Street Journal.The letter was included in a set of birthday notes sent to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003.The note depicts a conversation between Trump and Epstein inside the sketch of a woman’s torso. Trump’s signature appears just below the drawing’s hips in the pubic region.“HERE IT IS: We got Trump’s birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein that the President said doesn’t exist,” the House oversight committee’s Democratic minority wrote on social media when releasing the image.The screenshot mirrors the description published by the Wall Street Journal back in July, which first revealed the existence of the “bawdy” letter.According to the Journal’s reporting, the book and letter carried Trump’s name, with typewritten text framed by the outline of a nude woman. It ended with the words: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”Beneath the waistline, a squiggly “Donald” appeared as the signature, stylized to resemble pubic hair.View image in fullscreenAttorneys representing the co-executors of Epstein’s estate handed over a copy of the so-called birthday book on Monday after receiving a subpoena from House oversight committee chair James Comer of Kentucky, a Republican.The request followed a 25 July letter from Democrats Sylvia Garcia and Ro Khanna, who urged the estate’s legal team to produce the material “to assist in bringing transparency and accountability”.The volume, a professionally bound collection presented to Epstein in 2003, three years before his first arrest, featured notes from numerous figures in his social circle at the time, according to the Journal.Contributors reportedly included Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and the billionaire Leon Black. While some entries offered routine well-wishes, others contained sexual innuendo, provocative sketches, or photographs.Trump vehemently denied having written or illustrated the note, dismissing it as “a fake thing” and insisting “these are not my words, not the way I talk”.He later filed a defamation lawsuit against the Journal’s reporters, publisher Dow Jones and parent company News Corp. In response, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said: “We have full confidence in the rigor and accuracy of our reporting.” The lawsuit sought $10bn in damages and specifically named media mogul Rupert Murdoch.Meanwhile, the Trump administration has spent months shifting its position on whether Epstein-related files would be released or even if they existed at all, with Trump at one point calling them a “Democrat hoax”.The House oversight committee, with participation from Democrats and Republicans, continues to review Epstein-related records. Epstein, a wealthy financier with numerous powerful connections, died by suicide in prison in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. More

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    Epstein estate records release could shine light on sex trafficker’s connections – or show nothing at all

    The release of records from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate to US lawmakers this week, as well as potentially suspicious transaction reports, could offer a roadmap to where the scandal swirling around the late convicted sex trafficker goes next.Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed full transparency around Epstein and his links to a wide circle of powerful, rich and famous associates. But instead, the administration has been accused of foot-dragging and a cover-up, and has faced intense scrutiny over the extent of Trump’s own social contact with Epstein.Due to be handed over this week to the House oversight committee chair are estate records that include Epstein’s 50th “birthday book” compiled with notes from friends – including an entry allegedly signed by Trump that is now the subject of a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal.They also include Epstein’s last will and testament, agreements he signed with federal prosecutors in Florida in 2008, his contacts from his “black book”, non-disclosure agreements, and financial transactions and holdings. In addition, the committee has asked the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, for relevant suspicious activity reports (SARs) in connection with the investigation and prosecution of Epstein and his one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell on sex-trafficking charges.The committee this week also plans to hold a transcribed interview with Alex Acosta, Trump’s first-term labor secretary who was US attorney for the southern district of Florida when the justice department struck a plea deal with Epstein that victims have repeatedly said allowed him to get away with many crimes.Then there is a stalled campaign by the Kentucky Republican representative Thomas Massie and the California Democrat Ro Khanna to pass legislation to force the government to release all documents relating to the Epstein-Maxwell investigation.The White House has reportedly advised Republicans in Congress that supporting the effort would “be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration”.Adding to pressure on the Trump administration, Epstein survivors said last week they would compile their own client list of alleged abusers if the information was not released. Massie and Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene said they would read out the names on the House floor under a protective “speech or debate” clause.But none of the potential avenues for more information on the Epstein-Maxwell sex-trafficking conspiracy may be more fruitful than the financial disclosures, and especially the SARs, if they are made public.But the SARs request is already mired in partisan politics, with Democratic senator Ron Wyden accusing Bessent of withholding key information. In a letter, Wyden listed 58 people or institutions he wanted records on. “Treasury records shine a light on how high-profile individuals paid Epstein staggering sums of money, which was then used to move women around the world or engage in dubious transactions indicative of money laundering,” he said.Banks are required to file SARs with the treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network when they suspect a criminal violation, when specified transaction thresholds are reached, or when they suspect money laundering.According to Patrice Schiano, a former FBI forensic accountant now with the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, an SAR itself does not necessarily reveal much – but it can be used by law enforcement to subpoena information, including the originator and beneficiaries of the transaction.“They’re documents that speak for themselves. You might find things you don’t necessarily know you’re looking for. Maybe a source is telling you something but you don’t really know the support behind the SARs, and there are ways with SARs you can begin to figure things out,” Schiano said.In a 2023 lawsuit, the Epstein victims and the US Virgin Islands claimed that JP Morgan notified the government of $1bn in suspicious transactions by Epstein dating back to 2003 – but made the report only after Epstein was arrested in 2019.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLawyers for the bank said it had flagged the treasury department six times, including as early as 2002, about Epstein’s financial activity and that the federal government gave no response and took no action. The bank settled the action for $290m. JP Morgan said that any association with Epstein “was a mistake, and we regret it”.According to Schiano, Epstein’s banking information, if lawmakers can get it, could be “a rich source”.Schiano added: “But you have to have access to SARs, then you have to get a subpoena, and then you have to crunch the data. It’s not easy to do, and it takes a long time, but they could have all the information they need to do a comprehensive investigation.”But will they? A release last week of more than 30,000 pages of Epstein-related documents yielded little new. Wyden noted in his letter that Bessent has twice declined to produce treasury documents to the committee. The senator and his staff viewed some of the SARs last year, but they were not allowed to copy the documents.A treasury department spokesperson called Wyden’s request “political theater”.Representative James Comer, the chair of the House oversight committee, has also issued deposition subpoenas to several former senior US government officials and figures such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Loretta Lynch, Eric Holder, Merrick Garland, Robert Mueller, William Barr, Jeff Sessions and Alberto Gonzales to testify.Marie Springer, author of The Politics of Ponzi Schemes: History, Theory, and Policy, warned the truth about Epstein may remain a mystery and even the release of estate records may show little.“I’m very suspicious about the whole Epstein case. I don’t think we will ever have full disclosure,” Springer said. “He had a lot of money for someone who didn’t graduate from college. The curiosity is around why and how, and the people alive now aren’t willing to tell the story.” More

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    The Jeffrey Epstein cover-up is an affront to US democracy | Rebecca Solnit

    Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.Democracy, in this context, means a society and system in which everyone’s rights matter, everyone’s voice is heard and everyone is equal under the law. Rapists count on this not being true, but is has become more true over the past half century, thanks to feminism, and changed a lot more over the past dozen years, thanks to more feminism. There has been a shift toward equality of of voice, rights and support from the legal system, from arresting officers to investigations, judges and juries (who, thanks to feminism, are no longer exclusively male). It hasn’t changed enough, but it’s changed a lot, which is how a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s rape club were able to gather with the support of Thomas Massie, a Republican congressperson from Kentucky, and Ro Khanna, a Democratic representative from California, on Wednesday morning to speak to the world about their experiences and demand justice.They became victims, and some were abused for years, because of the power differential between Epstein and the girls and young women. His power consisted not only of his immense and still-unexplained wealth, but of aid from a host of others. Some actively cooperated in manipulating and abusing them, as groomer and pimp-in-chief Ghislaine Maxwell did, along with the fellow rapists to whom Epstein offered these children and young women. Others knew and chose to protect him and his fellow abusers, and some still do, all the way to the very top.Mike Johnson, the House speaker, adjourned Congress earlier this summer to prevent votes on measures relating to Epstein and thereby protect Donald Trump. As the New Republic reported on Tuesday, “House Speaker Mike Johnson is offering Republicans a cowardly out to avoid voting on a bipartisan discharge petition to release the Epstein files in full.” Johnson’s main concern in this (and pretty much everything else he does) is to protect Trump. He is not alone. Jamie Raskin said in July: “They’d conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock 24 hours going through a hundred thousand Epstein documents and told them to flag any mentions of Donald Trump … This might be one of the most massive cover-ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our eyes.”The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, ordered this frantic censorship scheme to protect Trump, which should have begotten a thousand front-page news stories demanding to know what exactly it took a thousand agents to hide from us and who exactly Trump is that he requires this kind of anti-democratic protection. Like Johnson, and like Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, who conducted a long, deeply wrong exculpatory softball interview with Maxwell, she’s serving one man rather than the 342 million people of this country. Trump himself, who over the summer seemed terrified and eager to distract from whatever there is to be found out about his role in all this, once again attempted to silence victims by calling the whole thing “a Democrat hoax” immediately after the news conference. Survivor Haley Robson called out Trump and declared: “I cordially invite you to the Capitol to meet me in person so you can understand this is not a hoax.”The women who spoke at Wednesday morning’s press conference made it clear they still fear they face threats, that the machinery of silencing is still at work. Katie Tarrant of the Washington Post writes, “Lisa Phillips, a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, and her lawyer Brad Edwards, said victims were scared to speak publicly about other abusers for fear of legal action. Her response came in response to a question about a client list some victims said they are compiling.” Another Post journalist reports, “Anouska De Georgiou, who said she was a victim of Jeffrey Epstein, said she and her daughter were threatened when she volunteered to be a witness in a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell.”And this attempt to suppress the truth about crimes and silence victims is only too consistent with the Republican party and the Trump administration. The attacks on immigrants, refugees, Black and brown people, women, trans people, the positioning of the administration as above the law with the cooperation of the rogue conservatives of the supreme court: all this is an attempt to roll back not only the democratic gains of the past several decades, but the democratic principles of universal rights and equality under the law embedded in the constitution and the Bill of Rights.Rendering women second-class or maybe 11th-class citizens again is at the heart of the current rightwing agenda, with its pursuit of criminalization of pregnancy, denial of reproductive rights including access to birth control, the right to choose whether to bear children, and life-saving care for women who have miscarriages or otherwise need a pregnancy terminated. But this is only part of the attack on women. The administration has disproportionately fired Black women from government jobs. 300,000 Black women have left – or been pushed out of – the workforce in the last three months.Pete Hegseth, who himself settled rape allegations out of court, has fired women in high positions in the military, claims women are less qualified than men and has been reposting videos from Christian fanatics asserting women should not have the right to vote. Trump’s is quite literally a pro-crime administration, as major branches of federal government are pulled away from pursuing criminals to persecuting immigrants, often violating the law to do so. The administration has sought to cut funding for and dismantle programs addressing domestic violence. And of course the Trump administration is headed by Donald J Trump – a judge found in a civil claim that it was “substantially true” that Trump raped journalist E Jean Carroll. It’s rapists all the way down, and enablers all the way up.

    Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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    Trump plans to sign executive order to rename Pentagon to ‘Department of War’ – as it happened

    Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will return on Friday. Among the day’s developments:

    The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.

    Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.

    Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “department of war”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.

    Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.

    As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.

    The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.

    New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
    As we reported earlier, during a contentious Senate hearing on Thursday, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was asked twice whether he agreed with Retsef Levi, an MIT professor the secretary appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), who has said that mRNA Covid vaccines “cause serious harm including death, especially among young people”.Kennedy said that he did agree with that statement, which Levi made in a video he posted on his X account in 2023, and has pinned at the top to this day.“I am filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time all Covid mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video, “because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level[s] of harm, including the death of young people and children.”Levi, who is Israeli, cited what he called evidence for this conclusion based on his reading of statistics from Israel’s EMS during its vaccination program in 2021. But he offered no scientific or medical evidence to support his claim, which is a fringe view not shared by the overwhelming majority or vaccine experts and medical doctors.It is worth stressing that both of the senators who asked Kennedy about that expert’s claim – Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator – referred to the new vaccine advisory board member as “Dr Levi”. That might have led some viewers to assume that Levi is a medical doctor, but he is not. He is a professor at MIT’s school of management, with a doctorate in operations research and no expertise in the science of infectious diseases or vaccines.It is unclear how Levi’s background qualifies him for a position on a vaccine panel responsible for making vaccine recommendations and whose members are supposed to be “medical and public health experts”.Donald Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.On his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk responded to a question about why he was not at the White House by writing: “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”Musk did not say who his representative was, but one of the guests was Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, until his nomination was withdrawn as Musk’s relations with Trump frayed.Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”As Donald Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, his labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, all have primary-residence mortgages on at least two properties, according to financial disclosure forms, real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media to ProPublica.Real estate experts told the non-profit investigative outlet that claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.But Trump has called for the prosecution of Cook, the Biden-nominated central banker, for allegedly having multiple primary-residence mortgages, and leveled the same charge against Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought a successful civil fraud case against Trump.Two days after an appeals court reinstated a Democratic member of Federal Trade Commission, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge, the justice department asked the supreme court to let Trump remove her again as the legal battle continues.The commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter, posted an image of herself back at work on Thursday, with the caption: “Back at my desk, back online, and have already moved to reinstitute the Click to Cancel Rule. Hope a majority of the Commission will join me – all Americans deserve to be protected from abusive subscription traps.”The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was adopted in October after the agency received more than 16,000 comments from consumers enraged about having to jump through hoops to cancel their enrollments.Implementation of the rule was delayed by the FTC in May, two months after Trump removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner.A federal appeals court vacated the rule on procedural grounds in July, just days before it was set to go into effect. Seven Democratic senators wrote to the new FTC chair that month, urging him to have the commission fix the procedural flaws identified by the court and reissue the rule.Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, just rejected Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claim, during a contentious senate hearing on Thursday, that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies.In an account of her firing published on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Monarez wrote that, at a meeting with Kennedy on 25 August:
    I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.
    When Kennedy was confronted with that accusation by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, at the Senate hearing, he denied that he gave Monarez that order.“No, I did not say that to her, Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her”, he added. “So there are witnesses to every meeting that we had, and all of those witnesses will say I never said that.”Kennedy was not asked if anyone else at the meeting did issue such an order to Monarez, which would be consistent with her account.Instead, Wyden asked Kennedy if Monarez was “lying today to the Wall Street Journal and the American people”.“Yes sir”, Kennedy replied.In a statement responding to Kennedy’s testimony, Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote: “Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she wrote in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions.”Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have already called for Monarez to be called to testify before the senate, which would be under oath.Hawaii announced today that it would join a new public health alliance formed by a trio of west coast states in response to the turmoil at the CDC.On Wednesday, the California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state had partnered with Washington and Oregon to form the West Coast Health Alliance, which they said would provide residents with science-based immunization guidance as the nation’s top public health agency – and a slew of red states – roll back long-standing recommendations medical experts and researchers have credited with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.“By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe,”Josh Green, theDemocratic governor of Hawaii, said in a statement.Green, an emergency room physician, said a science-driven approach was “critical as we all go forward into an era with severe threats from infectious diseases”.The Democratic governors of California, Oregon and Washington unveiled the new alliance on the same day that Florida’s Republican surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.The investigation, which followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the US attorneys’ offices in the northern district of Georgia and the eastern district of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s allegations, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her. Cook’s lawyer, prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, said the DoJ was scrambling to invent new justifications for Trump’s overreach in firing the Fed governor.“He wants cover, and they are providing it. The questions over how Governor Cook described her properties from time to time, which we have started to address in the pending case and will continue to do so, are not fraud, but it takes nothing for this DOJ to undertake a new politicized investigation, and they appear to have just done it again,” Lowell said.The case, which will likely end up before the supreme court, has ramifications for the Fed’s ability to set interest rate policy without regard to politicians’ wishes, widely seen as critical to any central bank’s ability to keep inflation under control.Trump has demanded that the US central bank cut rates immediately and aggressively, berating Fed chair Jerome Powell for his stewardship of monetary policy. The central bank is expected to deliver a rate cut at its 16-17 September meeting.In one of her recent legal filings challenging Trump’s actions, Cook said she listed mortgages on three properties on forms submitted to the White House and Senate in the vetting process for her appointment to the Fed in 2022. Any inconsistencies were known when she was confirmed and cannot give Trump grounds to fire her now.Cook is the third public official to be targeted in a criminal investigation over mortgage fraud allegations. Martin, who also presides over the “Weaponization Working Group” and serves as pardon attorney, is also pursuing criminal investigations into Democratic senator Adam Schiff as well as New York attorney general Letitia James.There are also grand juries convened in those two cases, which started prior to Martin’s new appointment as a special assistant US attorney, according to the source and documents seen by Reuters.The United States will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The plan comes in the broader context of Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” foreign policy, in which his administration has slashed foreign aid and is pushing European countries to cover more of the cost of their own security.The move, first reported by the Financial Times (paywall), comes as Russia’s war with Ukraine has heightened concerns in Europe about regional instability and the possibility of further aggression from Moscow. Key recipients of the funding include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Congress has approved funding for the assistance plan, which comes under the Department of Defense, but only through the end of September 2026. Trump’s administration has not asked that the program be extended, according to the FT report and confirmed to Reuters by one of its sources.Asked for comment, a White House official referred to an order Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term in January.“On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order to reevaluate and realign United States foreign aid,” the official said.“This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president’s longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defense,” the official said.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the decision misguided.“It makes no sense at all to undercut our allies’ defense readiness at the same time that we’re asking them to step up their own capabilities, and it puts American troops at risk when we slash the training of the allied soldiers they would fight alongside,” she said in a statement. 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    Judge sides with Harvard and orders Trump to reverse billions in funding cuts – US politics live

    A federal judge in Boston has sided with Harvard university in its court battle with the Trump administration, ordering that the federal government reverse funding cuts, the AP reports.The Trump administration had cut more than $2.6bn in research grants to the school as part of the president’s aggressive attacks on academic institutions.Judge Allison Burroughs ruled Wednesday the cuts constituted illegal retaliation after Harvard had refused the White House’s demands to change its policies and governance, the AP reported.Harvard’s complaint, filed in July, said:
    This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard. All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.
    The NAACP has filed a lawsuit against the state of Missouri to block the red state’s special legislative session to redraw congressional maps and expand GOP representation.The civil rights group said in a press release that it was suing to “stop an unlawful attempt to convene a special legislative session aimed at redrawing political maps in ways that would diminish the voting power of Black Missourians”.The NAACP filed a similar lawsuit in Texas last month to block the state’s redistricting plan, which is expected to add five GOP seats to Congress.Derrick Johnson, NAACP president, said in a statement:
    This case is about defending democracy and protecting the voice of every voter. The Missouri legislature’s attempt to force a rushed, unconstitutional redistricting process in a special session is a blatant effort to silence Black voters and strip them of their fundamental rights. We will not stand by while elected officials manipulate the system to weaken our power and representation.”
    The redistricting effort pushed by Mike Kehoe, Missouri’s GOP governor, followed calls by Donald Trump for the state to redraw its maps so it could “elect an additional Maga Republican in the 2026 midterm elections”. States traditionally have only redrawn maps every ten years based on the US census, but Republican efforts to add seats this year, in the middle of the decade, have sparked a redistricting battle with Democrats.A federal judge in Boston has sided with Harvard university in its court battle with the Trump administration, ordering that the federal government reverse funding cuts, the AP reports.The Trump administration had cut more than $2.6bn in research grants to the school as part of the president’s aggressive attacks on academic institutions.Judge Allison Burroughs ruled Wednesday the cuts constituted illegal retaliation after Harvard had refused the White House’s demands to change its policies and governance, the AP reported.Harvard’s complaint, filed in July, said:
    This case involves the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decisionmaking at Harvard. All told, the tradeoff put to Harvard and other universities is clear: allow the government to micromanage your academic institution or jeopardize the institution’s ability to pursue medical breakthroughs, scientific discoveries, and innovative solutions.
    Hundreds of federal agents are arriving to the Chicago area for Donald Trump’s deployment, with some already “practicing crowd control with shields and flash-bang grenades”, according to a new report in the Chicago Sun-Times.Roughly 230 agents, some who work for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP), are arriving from Los Angeles, the newspaper reported, with at least 30 of them training at a naval station near north Chicago.JB Pritzker, Illinois’ Democratic governor, has strongly condemned the deployment, which the president has claimed is meant to address crime. “Any kind of troops on the streets of an American city don’t belong unless there is an insurrection, unless there is truly an emergency. There is not,” the governor said on Sunday. “I’m going to do everything I can to stop him from taking away people’s rights and from using the military to invade states. I think it’s very important for us all to stand up.”More than 100 unmarked vehicles have been sent to the Navy training station, the Sun-Times reported.The deployment of troops and other federal agents in LA caused widespread outrage and protests. Some demonstrations were met with teargas and other munitions. Border patrol agents with CBP were also accused of injuring protesters in LA and were found to have made false statements about demonstrators they arrested.Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, said he backed the president’s threat to send federal troops to his state.“We will take President @realDonaldTrump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!” Landry said on social media, responding to a White House post that said Trump was determining whether to send federal forces to Chicago or New Orleans “where we have a great governor”.It’s unclear if Landry has formally requested that the president send in troops, and his office did not respond to questions from the Associated Press.New Orleans, like other cities attacked by Trump, has seen a sharp decline in crime. JP Morrell, president of the New Orleans city council, criticized Trump’s threats of deployment in a statement, saying:
    It’s ridiculous to consider sending the National Guard into another American city that hasn’t asked for it. Guardsmen are not trained law enforcement. They can’t solve crimes, they can’t interview witnesses and they aren’t trained to constitutionally police.
    Trump’s deployment of troops to US cities has been condemned as authoritarian, with scholars saying the president was increasingly acting like a dictator.Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has denied, sort of, having conversations with the Trump administration about him being given a government job in exchange for dropping his re-election campaign.The New York Times reported on Wednesday that advisers to Donald Trump “have discussed the possibility” of giving Adams a position, in an attempt to thwart Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic socialist who is currently the frontrunner to be elected mayor in November.According to the Times, “intermediaries” for Trump have spoken to “associates” of Adams about leaving the race. Adams, who has proved to be deeply unpopular among New York Democratic voters and is running as an independent candidate, is well behind Mamdani in the polls, and is draining support from Andrew Cuomo, another independent candidate.There is a suggestion that if Adams, a centrist Democrat, and the Republican candidate, Curtis Sliwa, were to drop out of the race, Cuomo could consolidate enough support to challenge Mamdani. The Times reported that there have been talks in the Trump administration about also finding a job for Sliwa.Sliwa did not respond when asked about the Times story, but the Adams campaign did reply to the Guardian.“Mayor Adams has made it clear that he will not respond to every rumor that comes up,” said Todd Shapiro, a spokesman for Adams.“He has had no discussions with, nor has he met with, President Donald Trump regarding the mayoral race. The Mayor is fully committed to winning this election, with millions of New Yorkers preparing to cast their votes. His record is clear: crime is down, jobs are up, and he has consistently stood up for working families. Mayor Adams is focused on building on that progress and earning four more years to continue delivering for the people of New York.”On Tuesday a poll found Adams with 9% of the vote in the election – Mamdani was at 42%, Cuomo 26%, and Sliwa 17%. It’s worth noting that the Times story did not claim that Adams himself had discussed leaving the race with Trump.Speaking in Mexico City, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warned that the US military would continue to target vessels belonging to alleged Venezuelan drug cartels.Arguing that previous interdiction efforts in Latin America have not worked, Rubio said: “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”“The president of the United States is going to wage war on narco-terrorist organizations,” Rubio said, adding that the strikes would continue, according to reporters covering the news conference. “It’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now.”Rubio’s visit to Mexico, his first since taking office, comes after the US military launched what the president said was a “a kinetic strike” on a “drug-carrying boat” in the Caribbean Sea. Trump said 11 drug traffickers were killed in the attack.Defending Tuesday’s military operation, Rubio said of the Venezuelan vessel: “This one was operating in international waters, headed towards the United States, to flood our nation with poison. And under President Trump those days are over.”A handful of House Republicans helped tank a motion to censure Democratic congresswoman LaMonica McIver of New Jersey stemming from her indictment by a federal grand jury earlier this year for allegedly assaulting law enforcement during an altercation at an immigration facility in her home state – charges she denies.The censure, brought by Republicans congressman Clay Higgins, was expected to succeed in the GOP-led chamber where the once-rare form of public disapproval is now increasingly common. The House voted 215-207 to set aside the censure resolution, which would have stripped her of her position on the homeland security committee, a role the resolution claimed represented a “significant conflict of interest”.Nearly a half-dozen Republicans sided with Democrats in voting to table the resolution.Nigel Farage, the Reform UK leader, has crossed the pond and popped up at House judiciary committee, a guest of House Republicans.His testimony was met with scalding derision by Democrats on the panel, who accused the far-right leader of being a a “Putin-loving free speech impostor” working to “ingratiate yourself with tech bros”. At one point, Congressman Hank Johnson, asked Farage to confirm that Reform currently has four MPs.Farage, who missed prime minister’s questions to appear before the committee, testified to the “awful authoritarian” situation for free speech in the UK.Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio and hepatitis, the state’s surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, announced on Wednesday.In a speech announcing the move, Ladapo likened vaccine mandates to “slavery”.Ladapo, hand-picked for the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, is a long-time skeptic of the benefit of vaccines, and has previously been accused of peddling “scientific nonsense” by public health advocates.In his Wednesday speech he said that every state vaccine requirement would be repealed, and that he expected the move would receive the blessing “of God”.“All of them. All of them,” Ladapo said. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”In 2022, Ladapo altered data in a study about Covid-19 vaccines in an attempt to exaggerate the risk to young men who took one.The governors of California, Oregon and Washington announced on Wednesday the creation of a West Coast Health Alliance aimed at safeguarding access to vaccines, amid growing turmoil at the nation’s top public health agency under the leadership of Robert F Kennedy Jr.In a joint press release, governors Gavin Newsom of California, Tina Kotek of Oregon, and Bob Ferguson of Washington said the CDC had become a “political tool that increasingly peddles ideology instead of science”.“President Trump’s mass firing of CDC doctors and scientists – and his blatant politicization of the agency – is a direct assault on the health and safety of the American people,” the Democratic governors said in a joint statement, adding: “California, Oregon, and Washington will not allow the people of our states to be put at risk.”Speaking on Capitol Hill earlier, Chauntae Davies, one of Epstein’s victims, says the disgraced financier bragged often about his friendship with Trump.Epstein and Maxwell “were always very boastful about their friends – their famous or powerful friends”, she told reporters in Washington. “And his biggest brag forever was that he was very good friends with Donald Trump.”Davies added that Epstein kept an 8in x 10in framed photo of him and Trump on his desk. “They were very close,” she said.Vice-President JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance have arrived in Minneapolis, where they will meet with the families of the victims of the Annunciation Catholic church shooting that killed two schoolchildren and injured nearly two dozen people last week.“They will hold a series of private meetings to convey condolences to the families of those affected by the tragedy,” the White House said in a statement.Trump’s attorneys are asking the US supreme court to reverse a $5m sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit against him in the civil lawsuit brought by E Jean Carroll, Bloomberg News has reported.According to a new filing, the president’s lawyers are asking the justices to extend the deadline for him to formally ask the court to toss out the verdict.In 2023, a civil jury trial concluded that Trump had sexually abused Carroll, a former magazine columnist, in the 1990s, before he embarked on his political career, and then defamed her in 2022 when he denied the allegations as a hoax and said that she was “not my type”. Carroll was awarded $5m in damages.The petition was due on 11 September, but Trump’s legal team has asked for an extension, until 10 November, Bloomberg wrote.Here’s a look back at what’s gone on today so far:

    Democratic congressman Ro Khanna said only two more Republican signatures are needed for the success of a discharge petition to force a vote on legislation compelling the release of files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case.

    Donald Trump slammed the push for the files’ release as a “Democrat hoax that never ends” and mulled deploying federal agents into New Orleans to fight crime.

    Republican congressman Thomas Massie criticized how House GOP leaders handled the Epstein issue.

    At a separate press conference outside the US Capitol, Epstein survivors detailed abuse they suffered at the disgraced financier’s hands.

    The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said that the US would carry out more strikes like the one that targeted a suspected drug trafficking boat and killed 11 people on Tuesday off the coast of Venezuela.

    A federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday that Donald Trump unlawfully invoked the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans he alleged were part of a criminal gang.
    Donald Trump teased the possibility of deploying federal resources into New Orleans to fight crime.“We’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana, and you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in about two weeks. It’ll take us two weeks,” the president said.New Orleans has a homicide rate that is among the highest in the nation, but lies in a Republican-governed state – unlike Los Angeles and Washington DC, where Trump deployed federal troops earlier this year.Trump also confirmed that he was still sending federal agents into Chicago, saying: “We could straighten out Chicago”.Asked at the White House about the push in Congress to release the Epstein files, Donald Trump again accused Democrats of orchestrating the controversy, and attempted to change the subject to his own purported accomplishments.“This is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” Trump said. Referring to the recent release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, he said: “Nobody’s ever satisfied.”“They’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” Trump said. He went on to claim credit for making Washington DC a “totally safe zone” with “no crime, no murders, no nothing” – though crime, including murders and robberies, have continued since he deployed the national guard and took control of its police department.Another boast from Trump: “I ended seven wars, nobody’s going to talk about it because they’re going to talk about the Epstein whatever.” It’s unclear which seven he is referring to, though his claims of having quelled recent fighting between Pakistan and India played a part in souring the relationship with New Delhi. He also has notably not ended the war in Ukraine – something he boasted, on the campaign trail, that he could do right after taking office.The White House has referred to signing the discharge petition to release the Epstein files as a “hostile act”, and discouraged Republicans from supporting it.Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman who introduced the petition and is one of four lawmakers from his party who signed it, replied:
    I don’t know if that’s precedented in this country to have a president call legislators to say that they’re engaged in a hostile act, particularly when the so-called hostile act is trying to get justice for people who’ve been victims of sex crimes.
    He also said that the fact that there was little new in the case documents released yesterday may spur more lawmakers to sign the petition:
    What people are waking up and discovering right now is the folks who stayed up all night to go through the 34,000 individual pages have found that they’re so redacted as to be useless and that many of them were already available.
    A reality check on the discharge petition that could force a vote in the House on legislation to release the Epstein files.The petition needs two more signatures – which will probably have to come from Republicans – to reach the majority threshold to compel the vote. But even if the petition receives that support and the bill passes the House, the legislation will still need to be approved by the Senate, where Republican majority leader John Thune has given no indication he will put it up for a vote.Should it pass the Senate, it faces another obstacle: Donald Trump. He’s condemned the furor over the Epstein files as a distraction created by the Democrats, and could veto the legislation. That would punt the issue back to Congress, where the bill would need two-thirds majority support to overcome his veto – a tall order.Marjorie Taylor Greene is among the most outspoken conservatives in Congress, but has made a rare pact with the Democrats by signing the discharge petition that could force a vote on legislation to release the Epstein files.“This is an issue that doesn’t have political boundaries. It’s an issue that Republicans and Democrats should never fight about. As a matter of fact, it’s such an important issue that it should bring us all together,” she said at the press conference convened by the petition’s sponsors outside the Capitol.“The truth needs to come out, and the government holds the truth. The cases that are sealed hold the truth. Jeffrey Epstein’s estate holds the truth. The FBI, the DoJ and the CIA holds the truth. And the truth we are demanding comes out on behalf of these women, but also as a strong message to every innocent child, teenager, woman and man that is being held captive in abuse. This should never happen in America, and it should never be a political issue that divides us.” More

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    US House committee releases more than 33,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein files

    The US House of Representatives oversight committee on Tuesday released thousands of pages of records related to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein from the department of justice.The release comes as the Trump administration has been embroiled in months of controversy over its decision not to release additional files in the case. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and was alleged to have abused hundreds of girls.The 33,000 pages included years-old court filings related to Epstein and his former girlfriend and associate Ghislaine Maxwell, as well as what appears to be bodycam footage from police searches and police interviews. The files appear to contain information that is already public knowledge.The records were posted online as the Trump administration was facing renewed attention on the investigation into Epstein. With Congress back in session this week, Democratic and Republican representatives had planned to hold press conferences to demand greater transparency from the administration in the case.Donald Trump, a longtime friend of Epstein and part of his rich and powerful social circle, has, in recent weeks, tried to avoid the subject. Earlier this year he sued the Wall Street Journal for its reporting on his relationship with Epstein on a birthday note Trump was alleged to have written to him. The president has called the recent Epstein controversy a hoax.The White House has urged Republican lawmakers not to support a discharge petition from Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, which would force the release of all of the Epstein files.James Comer, the Republican chair of the committee, said there was no need for the discharge petition since the committee had subpoenaed the records. The question of how many of the files will be released by the committee remains unanswered.Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, said the petition was “moot” because of the release.“It’s superfluous at this point, and I think we’re achieving the desired end here,” he said.Johnson was among a bipartisan group of lawmakers who met with survivors of abuse by Epstein and Maxwell.The Trump administration has faced intense criticism, even from its fervent supporters, over its decision not to release additional files related to Epstein. A Reuters/Ipsos poll from July found that most Americans and the majority of Republicans believe the government is hiding details about the case.Most of the documents released this week were already public, including records from the 2005 investigation into Epstein which contained a notation indicating the inquiry had been released previously in a 2017 public records request. The files include a recording of a police interview of an Epstein employee who told law enforcement “there were a lot of girls that were very, very young” visiting Epstein’s Florida home but said he couldn’t say for sure if they were minors.The release appears to have done little to alleviate the controversy. Robert Garcia, the top Democratic representative on the House oversight committee, chided Republicans for releasing material that he said was almost entirely already available information.“The 33,000 pages of Epstein documents James Comer has decided to ‘release’ were already mostly public information. To the American people – don’t let this fool you,” Garcia said in a statement. More