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Pentagon withdraws all 700 marines from Los Angeles – live updates
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 July 2025, 21:41
The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles.The redeployment of the marines comes after 2,000 National Guard troops were withdrawn from the city last week. The troops were sent to the city last month by the federal government after violence broke out on the fringes on protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in LA.According to Parnell, the deployment of the marines, which state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative at a time when protests against immigration raids were already under control, had achieved it aim.“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the Secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated”, Parnell said in a written statement. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”Citing concerns over possible violations of bribery laws, senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden wrote on Monday to David Ellison, whose company Skydance is about to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck a “secret side deal” with Donald Trump in exchange for federal approval of the purchase, or played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show.In their letter, the senators asked Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle and a friend of Trump, to reply to 7 detailed questions, probing whether he was involved in any “quid-pro-quo arrangement” that could violate the law.The questions about a possible secret side deal were prompted, in part, by Trump’s own claims, after he accepted $16 million from Paramount to drop his lawsuit over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, that the deal was worth twice as much.There have been recent reports that Ellison has been considering a possible role for the conservative journalist Bari Weiss in remaking CBS News.Among the questions Ellison is asked to reply to by 4 August are:
“Is there currently any arrangement under which you or Skydance will provide compensation, advertising, or promotional activities that in any way assist President Trump, his family, his presidential library, or other Administration officials?” the senators ask Ellison in the letter.
“Have you personally discussed with President Trump, any of his family members, any Trump Administration officials, or presidential library fund personnel any matters related to the Paramount-Skydance transaction?”
“Has Skydance agreed or have you personally agreed to make changes to Skydance’s content or Paramount’s or CBS’s content at the request of the Trump Administration, to facilitate approval of the transaction?”
The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles.The redeployment of the marines comes after 2,000 National Guard troops were withdrawn from the city last week. The troops were sent to the city last month by the federal government after violence broke out on the fringes on protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in LA.According to Parnell, the deployment of the marines, which state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative at a time when protests against immigration raids were already under control, had achieved it aim.“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the Secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated”, Parnell said in a written statement. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”Democrats this afternoon are forcing another vote to push for the release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents, further placing pressure on Republican lawmakers, according to a report from Politico.The Democratic lawmakers are planning to offer Republican representative Thomas Massie’s bill as an amendment during a Rules Committee meeting Monday afternoon. Massie’s bill, a bipartisan effort, seeks to push for the release of Epstein-related documents.On Monday, Politico also reported that the Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson does not have plans to put forward a Republican-led alternative Epstein bill before August’s recess break.The White House is removing the Wall Street Journal from the group of reporters covering Trump’s trip to Scotland, Politico reports.The Wall Street Journal’s removal from this upcoming weekend’s press pool follows the paper’s report that alleged Trump wrote a sexually suggestive letter to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump has sued the paper and its owners for its report, demanding $10 billion.“Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump wrote a “bawdy” note to Epstein for his 2003 birthday.The Trump administration has flouted court orders in just over one-third of the lawsuits filed against its policies, a Washington Post analysis found. The Post’s analysis says it suggests a “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system” by the White House.A number of plaintiffs that have sued the Trump administration say that agencies and officials are ignoring rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence and quietly acting in defiance of court rulings.Since Trump took office, there has been a battle between the White House and the judiciary, during which officials have defied numerous court orders. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized federal judges as “activist judges.”According to the Post, despite judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents agreeing that the administration is flouting court orders, “none have taken punitive action to try to force compliance.”The Post analyzed 337 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration since January. Courts have ruled in 165 of the lawsuits. And the Post found that the Trump administration is accused of defying court orders in 57 of those cases.Two suspects are in custody for the alleged shooting and wounding of a customs officer in New York, officials said on Monday, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports.During a press conference on Monday, homeland security secretary Krsiti Noem and Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, also said the episode was a direct result of New York’s sanctuary city policies and the approach to border security under Joe Biden’s presidency.On Saturday night, an off-duty customs officer was shot and wounded during an apparent attempted robbery. The officer was not in uniform at the time and police said there was indication he was targeted because of his occupation.A suspect in the incident, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, was later taken into custody after turning up at a hospital in the Bronx with gunshot wounds to the leg and groin.During Monday’s press conference, Noem also focused on the profile of Nunez, who she said had been arrested four times since entering the US illegally in 2023. She also discussed the profile of his accomplice, Christhian Aybar-Berroa, saying he had “entered the country illegally in 2022 under the Biden Administration and was ordered for final removal in 2023 by an immigration judge.”“There’s absolutely zero reason that someone who has scum of the earth like this should be running loose on the streets of New York City,” Noem said, referring to Nunez. “Arrested four different times in New York City and because of the mayor’s policies and was released back to do harm to people and to individuals living in the city. Make no mistake, this officer is in the hospital today, fighting for his life because of the policies of the mayor of the city and the city council and the people that were in charge of keeping the public safe.”Homan said “sanctuary cities are cities for criminals.” He said the administration would “flood the zone” with immigration, customs and enforcement (Ice) officials to detain undocumented people in sanctuary cities.“What we’re going to do [is deploy] more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want – more agents in the community and more agents in the worksite,” he said.“I’m sick and tired of reading in the media every day how Ice is not doing what the Trump administration has promised, that we’re not arresting criminals, that most of the people we arrested are not criminals. I look at the numbers every day. The numbers I looked at [are] 130,000 arrests and 90,000 criminals. Do the math. That’s 70%.”Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has blamed the sanctuary city policies applied by Democratic mayors for the wounding of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer in an attempted robbery, allegedly carried out by undocumented immigrants, one of whom was reportedly subject to a deportation order, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports.The 42-year-old officer sustained gunshot wounds to his face and arm after being attacked in a Manhattan park shortly before midnight on Saturday night.He was shot after drawing his service weapon after being approached by two men on a scooter as he sat on a bench with a female companion. The officer was not in uniform at the time and police said there was indication he was targeted because of his occupation.At a news conference on Monday, Noem, flanked by Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, and several law enforcement officials, said the episode was a direct result of the sanctuary city policy adopted by New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, as well as the approach to border security adopted during Joe Biden’s presidency. Noem also criticized Adams during the conference.Noem’s criticism of Adams came despite widespread reports of a deal made between the mayor and the Trump administration that involved New York giving greater cooperation than before on immigration. The agreement was reached around the same time that the justice department moved to dismiss federal corruption charges against Adams, although the mayor has insisted there was no quid pro quo.Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles had also suffered crime waves, according to Noem, because their mayors and municipalities were “protecting criminals” by declaring them sanctuary cities, whereby local authorities give only limited cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies.President Donald Trump has appointed Mike Rigas, a Bush-era official from the General Services Administration (GSA), as acting administrator of the agency, Politico reports.The move is seen as a further step by the White House to curb Elon Musk’s influence in the GSA, which is one of the federal agencies that Musk’s initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) nearly fully controlled.Rigas previously worked under the Trump administration as Deputy Secretary of State for management and resources. The former acting administrator was selected by a Musk ally to lead DOGE. The Rigas appointment is seen as a strategic move by the White House to rein in DOGE leadership.Border czar Tom Homan said Monday that immigration officials will escalate operations in New York and other so-called sanctuary cities.“Sanctuary cities are now our priority,” Homan said. “We’re gonna flood the zone.”Homan’s comments follow an attempted robbery and shooting of an armed, off-duty customs officer in Manhattan this weekend. The New York City Police Commissioner said the officer was not likely targeted due to his employment.When two men approached the off-duty officer to rob him and a companion in a Manhattan park, the officer withdrew a gun and engaged in a shootout with one of the robbers. The robber was arrested after being taken to a hospital. The customs officer is recovering from gunshots.Trump administration officials have said that so-called sanctuary policies were to blame for the shooting. New York and other cities have policies that limit local government cooperation in federal immigration matters.President Donald Trump threatened to appeal a federal judge’s decision in Massachusetts amid the ongoing and escalating battle between his administration and Harvard University.In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the federal judge hearing the case is a “TOTAL DISASTER” and that when “she rules against us, we will IMMEDIATELY appeal, and WIN.”Massachusetts district judge Judge Allison Burroughs heard arguments from lawyers with Harvard and the federal government on Monday, in a case that may decide whether the Trump administration’s attempts to cut billions of dollars in university funding is legal. Burroughs has not yet ruled on Monday’s arguments.In his Truth Social post, Trump also said Harvard is “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America.”The US Border Patrol chief patrol agent for the El Centro Sector in southern California posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) saying that federal immigration officials “are not leaving” Los Angeles until “the mission is accomplished.”“Better get used to us now because this is going to be normal very soon,” Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol agent said in a video. “I don’t work for [Los Angeles mayor] Karen Bass, the federal government doesn’t work for Karen Bass.”Border Patrol and other immigration officials have been conducting operations in Los Angeles to arrest, detain and deport undocumented immigrants. The operations gained widespread backlash in early June. Protests, opposing immigration arrests, engulfed certain areas of the city.Texas’s Republican-led state legislature is pushing to redistrict the state in a way that would favor Republicans when electing House representatives, the Washington Post reports.During the state’s special legislative session, beginning today, Trump is pushing for lawmakers to redistrict the state to add up to five more House districts.National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an anti-gerrymandering group, threatened to file lawsuits to stop attempts to redistrict the state.The special session was called by Texas’s state governor Greg Abbott after devastating floods in central Texas.Four US senators met with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney amid the looming 1 August deadline to strike a new trade and security deal.The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is being renegotiated and has faced strain from the Trump administration regarding a few key points, including lumber, digital services taxes and metal tariffs.This is the second congressional delegation to visit the Canadian prime minister in the past three months, Politico reports.Democratic senator Maria Cantwell, from Washington, is pushing for the Trump administration to bolster the US government’s weather disaster readiness, after recent tragic floods, hurricanes and wildfires, and as the administration seeks to slash resources.This comes as the Trump administration is pushing to drastically reduce the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).The Trump administration is looking to cut the NOAA’s budget by 27%, a reduction of $2.2 billion.In a letter, Sen. Cantwell made five recommendations. They include modernizing weather data collection, funding more research and modernizing alert systems.“Communities across the United States are experiencing more frequent, intense, and costly flash floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, atmospheric rivers, landslides, heatwaves, and wildfires,” Cantwell wrote. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create the world’s best weather forecasting system that would provide Americans with much more detailed and customized alerts days instead of minutes ahead of a looming extreme weather event.” More
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Are non-voters the key to Democrats winning in 2028? | Alex Bronzini-Vender
by Evelyn Reynolds 21 July 2025, 10:00
Since Bernie Sanders’s first presidential campaign, the electoral theory of the American left has rested upon the idea that a sizable bloc of Americans – alienated from the traditional politics of left and right – have withdrawn from politics entirely. They stand closer to the Democrats on many issues, but, seeing little by way of material benefit from the party’s soaring rhetoric of “defending democracy”, they have opted out of the political process. And, as the theory goes, a bold, populist candidate – someone like Sanders himself – could bring this silent constituency back into the fold.If that logic once explained how Sanders might have won, it might now explain why Kamala Harris lost. And, as new troves of post-election data surface, the debate over whether Democrats might have avoided last year’s defeat by mobilizing non-voters has become one of the party’s hottest factional disputes.Among those strategizing within the Democratic party, one’s confidence in voter activation is often a proxy for their broader politics. Those who believe Harris’s campaign failed to activate non-voters typically argue her platform lacked the populist edge needed to mobilize disaffected Americans. Their critics tend to believe the problem ran in the opposite direction: the electorate had moved right and the Democrats’ failure lay in their inability to meet it there.Detractors of the activation theory point to a 26 June Pew Research report – which found Donald Trump leading Harris by three points among non-voters – as decisive proof that non-participants lean Republican. The catch, though, is that the survey concluded less than two weeks after Trump’s victory. Polling taken in the aftermath of a race is notoriously vulnerable to distortion, and the bandwagon effect can temporarily inflate a victorious candidate’s popularity. That effect is especially pronounced among disengaged or loosely affiliated voters. That number almost certainly marks the high-water line of Trump’s support among non-voters.Another oft-cited figure from the New York Times/Siena College, which the Democratic strategist and data scientist David Shor referenced during his own interview with the Times’s Ezra Klein, found Trump leading by 14 points among 2020 non-voters. But it uses survey data collected before Biden dropped out of the race. Then there is Shor’s own post-election poll, conducted through his polling firm Blue Rose Research, which found Trump leading by 11 points among non-voters – though the underlying data remains private and the methodology undisclosed.The Cooperative Election Study (CES) – a late-November survey of more than 50,000 voters – offers one of the few high-quality, public windows on 2024. An analysis of the CES data by political scientists Jake Grumbach, Adam Bonica and their colleagues found that a plurality of non-voters identified themselves as most closely aligned with the Democratic party – and an absolute majority of registered voters who declined to cast a ballot in 2024 considered themselves Democrats. The non-electorate certainly wasn’t blue enough to have swung the race, but by no means as red as the activation theory’s opponents claim.What’s even clearer is the geography of turnout. Voter participation dropped especially sharply in Democratic strongholds – particularly urban counties in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia. By contrast, turnout in Republican areas held steady or even increased modestly. In other words, the Democratic campaign had more to gain from energizing its own base than from chasing centrist swing voters.Harris wouldn’t have prevailed under conditions of 100% turnout. (Grumbach, Bonica, etc don’t claim as such.) But a more focused strategy – mobilizing the Democratic base, speaking directly to material concerns, and resisting the pull toward bland centrism – might have narrowed the margin significantly.Ironically, the aforementioned Pew report concludes the same. “As in prior elections, a change in voters’ partisan allegiances – switching from the Democratic to the Republican candidate or vice versa – proved to be a less important factor in Trump’s victory than differential partisan turnout,” write the authors. “Republican-leaning eligible voters simply were more likely to turn out than Democratic-leaning eligible voters in 2024.”Even so, the CES data may disappoint progressives, if not for the reasons their critics imagine. An analysis of the CES from the Center for Working Class Politics’s Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella found that Democrats who stayed home in 2024 were, on average, less ideologically liberal on hot-button social questions – more skeptical of an assault-rifle ban, receptive to a border wall, less concerned with climate change, and cooler to the language of structural racism – than the Democrats who showed up.Yet, as Abbott and Guastella found, those same non-voters were more economically populist: disproportionately working-class and non-college, while eager for bigger public investment programs, a higher corporate tax rate, and a stronger social safety net.The Democratic non-electorate doesn’t clearly align with progressive orthodoxy. Equally clear, though, is that a blanket lurch toward cultural moderation, absent populist economics, would do little to fire up non-voters who already share many progressive economic instincts.Making decisive claims about non-voters is necessarily difficult. By definition, they are the least likely to respond to pollsters, and their political preferences are often tentative or inconsistent. Yet certain commentators’ eagerness to cast non-voters as Trump supporters reveals more about elite assumptions than about public sentiment.There’s been a rush to cast non-voters as conservatives, not because the evidence demands it, but because the alternative – that Democrats need to speak more directly to the working class – remains uncomfortable for the party establishment. There is no way around the fact that in 2024, those Americans didn’t hear anything worth voting for.
Alex Bronzini-Vender is a writer living in New York More
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Trump administration orders release of Epstein court documents amid mounting pressure – US politics live
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 July 2025, 09:34
The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.In other developments:
Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.
Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.
The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.
Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
As Donald Trump tries to claim he was “not a fan” of Jeffrey Epstein, photos, videos and anecdotes paint a picture of their relationship, writes Adam Gabbatt:Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.The post-election intelligence estimates contrasted with findings reached before the election, which indicated that Russia probably was not trying to interfere.In extraordinary comments calling for prosecutions, she added:
The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.
Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people.
No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. The American people’s faith and trust in our democratic republic and therefore the future of our nation depends on it.
Indigenous leaders have warn higher education institutions will close if the funding-slashing 2026 budget proposal passes, Meliss Hellmann reports:The former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison will testify at a US House panel hearing next week about countering China’s “economic coercion against democracies,” the committee said on Friday.Rahm Emanuel, the former US ambassador to Japan, will also testify before the House select committee on China.Relations with China, already rocky after Australia banned Huawei from its 5G broadband network in 2018, cooled further in 2020 after the Morrison government called for an independent investigation into the origins of the Covid-19 virus.China responded by imposing tariffs on Australian commodities, including wine and barley and limited imports of Australian beef, coal and grapes, moves described by the United States as “economic coercion”.Morrison was defeated in a bid for reelection in 2022. His successor, Anthony Albanese, visited China this week, underscoring a warming of ties.Away from the main story on the blog today, Japan’s top tariff negotiator, Ryosei Akazawa, said on Saturday he planned to visit Washington next week to hold further ministerial-level talks with the United States.Tokyo hopes to clinch a deal by a 1 August deadline that will avert President Donald Trump’s tariff of 25% on imports from Japan.“I intend to keep on seeking actively an agreement that is beneficial to both Japan and the United States, while safeguarding our national interest,” Akazawa told reporters in the western region of Osaka, according to Reuters.Akazawa was visiting Osaka to host a US delegation, led by treasury secretary Scott Bessent, that participated in the US national aay event at World Expo 2025. Akazawa said he did not discuss tariffs with Bessent.Here is the Guardian’s story on Donald Trump’s plans to sue the Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch over its Jeffrey Epstein report:Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.Trump’s lawsuit on Friday, which also targets Dow Jones and News Corp, was filed in the southern district of Florida federal court in Miami.The lawsuit seeks at least $10bn in damages.It came after the Journal reported on a 50th birthday greeting that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein in 2003 that included a sexually suggestive drawing and reference to secrets they shared.It was reportedly a contribution to a birthday album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence in Florida after being found guilty of sex-trafficking and other charges in 2021.“A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair,” the Journal reported of the alleged drawing. The letter allegedly concluded: “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”Trump vehemently denied the Journal report and claimed the letter was fake. He said on Truth Social that he warned Murdoch, the founder of News Corp, the newspaper’s parent company, that he planned to sue.Donald Trump has sued Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters for libel and slander over claims that he sent the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a lewd letter and sketch of a naked woman.In the filing, Trump calls the Wall Street Journal’s report “false and defamatory” and demands at least $10bn in damages and court costs from Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal reporters, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and related corporate entities.Read the court documents in full at the below link:A lawsuit. Angry calls to editors. Public denunciations. In the wake of the Wall Street Journal’s story claiming Donald Trump contributed to a “bawdy” letter to the convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – featuring a drawing of a naked woman’s silhouette around a typewritten personal message – the president’s relationship with the outlet’s proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, appears on the surface to have deteriorated from temperamental to terminal.Just a few days ago, the 94-year-old mogul was spotted among the president’s high-profile guests at the Fifa Club World Cup final. Following the publication of the article, however, Murdoch now finds himself on the president’s lengthy list of media opponents threatened with court action.In an unprecedented environment in which a sitting president regularly takes direct aim at the media, there have been numerous claims of big outlets making decisions that make life easier for their billionaire owners. Yet the Journal published the Epstein allegations even after Trump picked up the phone to its British editor, Emma Tucker, to demand that she ditch the story. Trump also claims Murdoch himself was approached to stop the article, to no avail.According to some media watchers, it is the latest sign that Murdoch is taking a different approach to Trump’s return than some of his fellow billionaire moguls. Even before the Epstein story dropped on Thursday, Murdoch’s Journal continued to criticise Trump from the right over some of his early decisions.The justice department said in the court filings that it will work with prosecutors in New York to make appropriate redactions of victim-related information and other personally identifying information before transcripts are released.“Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims,” Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general wrote.But despite the new push to release the grand jury transcripts, the administration has not announced plans to reverse course and release other evidence in its possession. Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, had hyped the release of more materials after the first Epstein files disclosure in February sparked outrage because it contained no new revelations.A judge would have to approve the release of the grand jury transcripts, and it’s likely to be a lengthy process to decide what can become public and to make redactions to protect sensitive witness and victim information.The records would show testimony of witnesses and other evidence that was presented by prosecutions during the secret grand jury proceedings, when a panel decides whether there is enough evidence to bring an indictment, or a formal criminal charge.The US Department of Justice asked a federal court on Friday to unseal grand jury transcripts in Jeffrey Epstein’s case at the direction of Donald Trump amid a firestorm over the administration’s handling of records related to the wealthy financier.The move – coming a day after a Wall Street Journal story put a spotlight on Trump’s relationship with Epstein – seeks to contain a growing controversy that has engulfed the administration since it announced that it would not be releasing more government files from Epstein’s sex trafficking case.Todd Blanche, the US deputy attorney general, filed motions urging the court to unseal the Epstein transcripts as well as those in the case against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of luring teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein. Epstein killed himself in 2019 shortly after his arrest while awaiting trial.The justice department’s announcement that it would not be making public any more Epstein files enraged parts of Trump’s base in part because members of his own administration had hyped the expected release and stoked conspiracies around the well-connected financier.Trump’s demand to release the grand jury transcripts came after the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a sexually suggestive letter that the newspaper says bore Trump’s name and was included in a 2003 album for Epstein’s 50th birthday.The letter bearing Trump’s name includes text framed by the outline of what appears to be a hand-drawn naked woman and ends with, “Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret,” according to the newspaper. The outlet described the contents of the letter but did not publish a photo showing it entirely.Trump denied writing the letter, calling it “false, malicious, and defamatory” and promised to sue. Trump said he spoke to both to the paper’s owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its top editor, Emma Tucker, and told them the letter was “fake”.In other developments:
Attorney general Pam Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern” in a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump.
Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.
The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need. A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.
Democrats are condemning CBS for its decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump. Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.” More
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‘The ghost of Epstein is haunting Trump’s presidency’: inside the ‘Maga’ revolt
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 July 2025, 05:00
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Listen up, weaklings: there’s no Epstein client list. Why are you so obsessed? Yours, Donald J Trump | Marina Hyde
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 July 2025, 10:53
You have to feel for Donald Trump’s Maga base. The one huge secret they didn’t want disclosed was that he actually really hates them. All populists despise their people, obviously – but please, Mr President, respect the playbook! You’re supposed to do it quietly. Regrettably, no one could accuse Trump of hiding his spite under a bushel after a week in which he described those of his supporters who want him to simply do what he repeatedly promised, and release the so-called Epstein files, as “weaklings” and “stupid people”. This is quite the (public) volte face from the guy who originally swept to office declaring “I love the poorly educated”.Most of you are unlikely to need a recap at this stage, but Jeffrey Epstein is the sex-trafficking financier and socialite, who conveniently died in jail while awaiting trial, apparently by suicide. A woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of conspiring with him to sexually abuse minors, and is currently serving 20 years in a low-security Florida prison. But no big-hitting or even small-hitting male associate in the US has so much as been arrested for participating in what I believe the dead paedophile would have encouraged us to call his “lifestyle”. This second Trump administration didn’t just sweep to power while repeatedly screaming about the “cover-up” of this story, but it spent a good portion of its early months assuring its ravenous base that Epstein’s supposed “client list” was on a desk waiting for release approval. Yet now, Trump and his associates say there is no list. Nope. Never even was a list. Where did these weakling idiots get that idea? To summarise his administration’s position: “We took a look at the deep state and it turns out to be very shallow. Seriously, I’m standing in it right now and it doesn’t even come up to my knees.”Understandably, a significant proportion of the Maga crowd are not taking this well at all. One of the key takeouts of Trump’s rise has been that as long as you tell people that up is down or black is white in an engaging or sufficiently discombobulating fashion, truth is an extremely low-status commodity in contemporary politics. But, contrary to perceived trends, it seems that there do still exist some subjects on which you can only push even your own people so far. Maybe the ancient political adage still holds true: live by the paedo conspiracy, die by the paedo conspiracy.Late on Thursday, as footage of people burning Maga hats spread online, a palpably frustrated Trump announced that he was instructing the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to seek release of the Epstein grand jury testimony, “based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”. Though you’ll note the president failed to add the two key words: “by me”. Still, it’s good to hear Trump characterising what’s currently happening as “publicity”, confirming that he sees even the desire to see justice served on a suspected paedophile sex-trafficker and his associates as a form of limelight – which, like all limelight, should by rights be his.It feels harder to sustain the idea that there is nothing to see here, especially when leading wingnuts such as the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, far-right activist Laura Loomer, Fox host Laura Ingraham, talkshow queen Megyn Kelly, Maga whisperer Steve Bannon and even the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, are out there pushing the base conviction that, actually, there might well be something to see here. “It’s definitely a full reversal on what was all said beforehand,” observed Marjorie in a once-in-a-career alignment with fact, “and people are just not willing to accept it.”We have to take our laughs where we can, meanwhile, so do please consider the cavalcade of podcasters and Maga influencers who got jobs like “director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and “deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation” and are now discovering that life comes at you fast. FBI chief Kash Patel spent the election campaign pushing Epstein conspiracies, and is now believed to be hiding under his big important desk wetting his pants. “Listen,” his deputy, Dan Bongino, used to instruct his podcast listeners. “That Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal, please do not let that story go. Keep your eye on this.” Will do, Dan. Incidentally, a lot of people spent the weekend speculating feverishly that Bongino would sensationally quit his job – but in the end, he just came into work a bit late on Monday. What a tough guy. Make America Deep State Again!Other developments? That are perhaps not unrelated? The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump had served as a contributor to some kind of cursed 50th birthday scrapbook for Epstein, compiled by Maxwell, for which he’d sent a “bawdy” letter. This missive was reportedly typed inside a drawing of a naked woman’s silhouette, in which the famous Trump signature served as a kind of scribble of pubic hair. So far, so FDR. Unfortunately, particularly in the circumstances, the letter itself is said to conclude: “Happy birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.”Alas, the current president is not thrilled by this report, denying it completely, adding that he has never in his life “wrote a picture”. (It goes without saying that all Donald Trump statements, always, are very much [sic].) Much more promisingly, Trump is furious with the WSJ owner, Rupert Murdoch, and threatening to “sue his ass off”. Oh please don’t, Mr President! His ass is 94 years old and incredibly wrinkled. Also, half of Britain’s political class still lives up it. Then again, perhaps Trump v Murdoch is very much the desiccated-dick-waving contest the world … wants? Needs? Will have to endure? Unclear which of those applies at this stage, but let’s hold out for the possibility that both men are wholly – and indeed literally – consumed by it.Angles-wise, however, there are already signs that the Wall Street Journal might just be the common enemy the Magas need as an off-ramp for their civil war, allowing people who are obsessed with paedophiles to find common cause both with people who don’t care about paedophiles, and also with people who may actually have been close personal friends with paedophiles. There’ll probably only be one casualty, and it’ll probably be Pam Bondi. Women are great at taking these falls. Furthermore, the whole conflagration would once more pit a billionaire president against one of his billionaire buddies – exactly the kind of better world his supporters voted for, and a true testament to how truly, truly deeply he values them.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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US House passes Trump plan to cut $9bn from foreign aid, public broadcasting
by Evelyn Reynolds 18 July 2025, 05:06
The US’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed president Donald Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid early on Friday, sending it to the White House to be signed into law.The chamber voted 216 to 213 in favor of the funding cut package, altered by the Senate this week to exclude cuts of about $400m in funds for the global PEPFAR HIV/Aids prevention program.Only two House Republicans voted against the cut – representatives Brian Fitzpatrick from Pennsylvania and Mike Turner from Ohio – along with Democrats.“We are taking one small step to cut wasteful spending, but one giant leap towards fiscal sanity,” said representative Aaron Bean, a Florida Republican.House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries countered that the funding cut “undermines our ability to keep our people safe here and to project America’s soft power all over the globe”, and argued rural Americans’ access to emergency information on public radio will be diminished.The funding vote was delayed for hours amid Republican disagreements about other legislation, and calls from some members of the party for more government transparency about the deceased convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.To satisfy the Epstein-related concerns without holding up the funding cut bill any longer, Republicans on the House rules committee introduced a resolution that calls for the release of Epstein documents by the US attorney general within 30 days.“It’s a sound, good-faith resolution that ensures protections for victims and innocent witnesses,” said representative Virginia Foxx from North Carolina, the Republican leader of the rules committee.But the top Democrat on the rules panel, representative Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, blasted the resolution as a “glorified press release” because it lacks an enforcement mechanism to make the Justice Department comply.When the chamber finally voted on the funding cut, it was the second close House vote on Trump’s request to claw back the funds previously approved by Democrats and his fellow Republicans in Congress.In June, four Republicans joined Democrats to vote against an earlier version of the rescissions package, which passed 214-212.House Republicans felt extra pressure to pass the Senate version as Trump’s administration would have been forced to spend the money if Congress did not approve the cuts by Friday.The $9bn cut is a small fraction of the country’s $6.8tn federal budget.Republicans say the foreign aid funds previously went to programs they deem wasteful, and they say the $1bn in public media funding supports radio stations and PBS television, which they claim are biased against conservative viewpoints.Prior to the vote in the House, the legislation, known as a rescissions package, was approved by a narrow margin of 51 votes to 48 in the Senate. All Democrats opposed the bill.This week’s funding clawback represents only a tiny portion of all the funds approved by Congress that the Trump administration has held up while it has pursued sweeping cuts.Democratic lawmakers say the administration has blocked more than $425bn of spending approved by Congress since Trump’s second term began in January. More
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Tensions over Epstein files hamper Republican plan to vote on cuts bill
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 July 2025, 21:00
Tensions over the release of documents related to disgrace financier Jeffrey Epstein have complicated House Republicans’ plans to hold a vote Thursday on legislation demanded by Donald Trump to cancel $9bn in government spending.The House of Representatives faces a Friday deadline to pass the rescissions package demanded by Trump and approved by the Senate in the wee hours of Thursday morning, otherwise the administration will be obligated to spend about $8bn meant for foreign assistance programs, and $1.1bn budgeted for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS.But before the House can vote on the package, it must be approved by the rules committee, where the Democratic minority has sought to capitalize on a growing furor among Republicans and their supporters over the Trump administration’s handling of documents related to the Epstein case by forcing the majority to take politically tricky votes.After several hours of delay, the committee announced it would hold a hearing into the package on Thursday evening, setting the stage for House Republicans to pass the legislation later in the night.Ranking member Jim McGovern accuse the GOP of “stalling” the rules committee hearing, and said Democrats would propose an amendment to the rescissions package meant to win release of any files related to Epstein.“They’re afraid to meet again to have another vote. Well, we’re going to keep the heat on and you need to keep the pressure on members of Congress,” McGovern said. “Release the files, full transparency.”On Monday, rules committee Democrats made two attempts to add language to a cryptocurrency bill that would have required the release of documents dealing with the financier, who was accused of running a sex-trafficking ring catering to global elites. Republicans voted both down.The Epstein case has grown into a crisis for Trump and the GOP ever since the justice department announced last week that, after a review of US government files, it had determined the financier’s 2019 death in federal custody was a suicide, and that no list of his clients existed to be made public.Trump’s Maga coalition includes believers in a conspiracy theory that the “deep state” is covering up a global pedophile ring in which Epstein was a major figure, and that files exist to prove it. The president has strenuously denied that his administration is hiding anything, and insulted those who call for the documents’ release as “weaklings” who fell for a “radical left” hoax intended to discredit him.Democrats, relegated to the minority in both chamber of Congress, have seized on that tension with an array of legislative maneuvers intended to make public any Epstein-related documents. On Tuesday, House speaker Mike Johnson told a conservative podcaster who asked about the case: “It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide it.”Meanwhile, Thomas Massie, an iconoclastic Republican congressman who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, and Democratic congressman Ro Khanna are trying to get a majority of the House to sign on to a petition that will force a vote on releasing the files, and has already received signatures from nine GOP lawmakers.The rescissions passage passed the House in June, but the chamber must vote on it again after the Senate declined to cut funding for Pepfar, a program credited with saving millions of people from infection or death from HIV that was created in 2003 under the Republican president George W Bush. More
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A risky bet? Texas Republicans poised to redraw congressional map on Trump’s orders
by Evelyn Reynolds 17 July 2025, 11:00
At the behest of Donald Trump, Texas Republicans are poised to redraw their state’s congressional map to try and gain as many as five congressional seats, a move that is likely to further weaken the influence of the state’s fast-growing non-white population and could wind up backfiring on the party.The effort to redraw the map represents a blunt and undemocratic effort by Republican lawmakers to pick the voters who elect them, and comes at a time when many of the party’s positions are unpopular. The US president and national Republicans are making the push because the GOP holds a 220-212 advantage in the US House (there are three Democratic vacancies) and Trump’s party typically loses seats in the midterm elections, which will happen next year.But it’s a risky bet. Twenty-five of Texas’s 38 congressional districts are currently represented by Republicans, a result that was carefully engineered when lawmakers redrew the state’s congressional map in 2021. During that process, mapmakers focused on shoring up Republican seats instead of trying to pick up Democratic ones.In order to pick up new seats, Republicans will have to spread their voters from safe Republican ones into Democratic districts. It could allow them to pick up more seats, but also makes the Republican districts more competitive and potentially winnable by Democrats in a strong year.The number of seats Republicans are able to pick up “depends on how much risk Republicans want to take,” said David Wasserman, an analyst at the Cook Political Report who closely follows US House races. “Republicans could probably target three Democratic seats very easily, but once it gets to four or five, that could put additional Republican seats at risk.”When Republicans drew the existing map, they blunted the political influence of non-white voters in the state, who accounted for 95% of the state’s population growth over the last decade. The new maps could further weaken their ability to elect their preferred candidates.“The current maps are already blatantly racist and discriminate against voters of color, communities of color, all over the state,” said Anthony Gutierrez, the executive director of the Texas chapter of Common Cause, a watchdog group. “There would be absolutely no way you get to five more Republican districts without just completely trampling on minority voting rights.”Two Democratic seats likely to be targeted are the ones in south Texas currently held by representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, Wasserman said. Trump won both districts in 2024 and Republicans could easily tweak their boundaries to make them winnable. Democrats also represent four districts in the Houston area, and Republicans could shift the boundaries to try and pick up one or two districts depending on how aggressive they want to be.The Republican push to redraw the map comes as the state is still reeling from deadly floods that left at least 134 people dead with more than 100 people still missing. Democrats in the Texas legislature are reportedly considering walking out of the special session in order to deny Republicans a quorum needed to pass the maps. Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, has said he will assist in “hunting down” members who walk out and compel them back to the capitol.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTo justify redrawing the maps, Texas governor Greg Abbott pointed to a 7 July letter from the justice department claiming lawmakers had impermissibly sorted voters based on their race. Both the letter’s argument, and Abbott’s quick acceptance of it, raised eyebrows because Texas officials have said for years they did not consider race at all when they drew the maps.“My jaw dropped when I saw that letter,” said Mark Gaber, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center, who is representing some of the plaintiffs suing Texas over the maps already in place. “Either the witnesses were not telling the truth or the entire premise of this special session and the mid-decade redistricting is false.”In its letter, the justice department pointed to four districts where it claimed voters had been unconstitutionally sorted by race. In two of those districts, two different groups of minority voters constitute a majority that can elect their preferred candidates. Another district is majority Hispanic. The final district it raised issue with was drawn after judges found intentional discrimination in a previous district.Several legal experts said those claims were highly questionable.“The DoJ letter is completely concocted and it reflects a complete misunderstanding of the law, but that’s not what they’re interested in,” said Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is representing some of the plaintiffs challenging the current congressional map.“If I were them, I would be consulting legal counsel about the possibility of being found guilty of perjury in what they testified to under oath,” he added.Mapmakers may want to keep communities who share common interests together for reasons that have nothing to do with their race, said Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked on voting rights issues at both the justice department and White House said the letter was “nonsense”.“What they appear to articulate in the letters is the notion that any time there happens to be multiple minorities in a district, that’s a constitutional violation. And that’s like seven different versions of wrong,” he said. More

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