BY MYCHAEL SCHNELL AND EMILY BROOKS |
House Republicans who were at odds all week over the Trump administration's handling of Jeffrey Epstein disclosures are holding their breaths to see if the tsunami of criticism from their base over the matter is finally subsiding.
GOP members on the House Rules Committee voted in favor of a resolution directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to release more materials relating to the late wealthy and connected sex offender. President Trump relented and directed Bondi to request grand jury testimony from the Epstein case be unsealed. And Republicans are banding together to dismiss and criticize the Wall Street Journal's report about a "bawdy" birthday letter Trump sent more than two decades ago.
But none of those developments have the weight to fully put the Epstein matter to rest. |
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Some top Democrats at the Hill Nation Summit on Wednesday paid grudging compliments to President Trump's political moves as the party looks to learn from its November losses and chart a new path forward.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) lauded the Republican as a "very talented politician" despite their disagreements, while Rep. Jim Himes (Conn.), the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, offered praise for Trump's foreign policy.
The lawmakers' careful acknowledgements come as the Democratic Party broadly tries to learn from their 2024 losses and build momentum for the 2026 midterms, when they'll be looking to cut into the GOP's narrow 220-212 majority. |
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President Trump sued The Wall Street Journal for defamation on Friday after the newspaper published a story detailing an alleged letter Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.
The 18-page complaint says the story has caused "overwhelming financial and reputational harm" for the president, demanding billions of dollars in damages. |
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BY BRETT SAMUELS AND REBECCA BEITSCH |
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released a report Friday alleging Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence related to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Gabbard asserted in a statement that former officials engaged in a "treasonous conspiracy" and said her office was turning over evidence to the Justice Department for possible criminal referrals. |
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A federal judge on Friday dismissed President Trump's lawsuit against famed Watergate journalist Bob Woodward for publishing audio tapes of interviews he conducted with Trump for a 2020 book.
U.S. District Judge Paul Gardephe's ruling comes a year and a half after Woodward and his publisher asked the judge to dismiss the suit. Trump's attorneys had long complained about the lack of progress, repeatedly urging Gardephe to rule. |
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The Justice Department (DOJ) asked a federal court on Friday to unseal the grand jury transcripts in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche filed two different, almost identical, motions to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to release the transcripts of the man convicted of sex-trafficking minors and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. |
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Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says he has received information that Attorney General Pam Bondi "pressured" about 1,000 FBI personnel to comb through tens of thousands of pages of documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and flag any mention of President Trump.
Durbin made the explosive allegation in letters he sent Friday to Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino seeking more information about the administration's handling of files related to Epstein and asking why senior officials were allegedly focused on looking for documents connecting Trump to Epstein. |
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The Trump administration announced Friday it helped facilitate a prisoner swap, securing the release of 10 U.S. citizens held in Venezuela in exchange for the return of more than 250 Venezuelan men the U.S. had sent to be imprisoned in El Salvador.
The Venezuelan men have spent months in El Salvador's most notorious prison, known by its Spanish acronym CECOT, after the Trump administration ignited the Alien Enemies Act to deport them in March. It is unclear what fate awaits them in Venezuela. |
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Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, is pushing back on the Trump administration's decision to allow technology company Nvidia to sell certain artificial intelligence (AI) chips to China once again.
In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Friday, the congressman raised concerns about the reversal on Nvidia's H20 chips, suggesting it could boost China's AI capabilities. |
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OPINION | Beijing's Kyodo News reported June 29 that China is planning to invite President Trump to attend a military parade at Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3.
The event marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II under the banner of the "Commemoration of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War." |
OPINION | President Trump has survived everything. Two impeachments, four criminal indictments, a conviction on 34 felony counts, civil lawsuits, the "Access Hollywood" tape, Jan. 6, classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and an assassination attempt that left him bloodied but unbowed. If cats have nine lives, Trump seems to have 900.
He is political kryptonite in reverse — every scandal that should have destroyed him only made him stronger. |
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BY ORLANDO MAYORQUIN AND POOJA SALHOTRA |
In the days after the deadly July 4 floods in Central Texas, Megan Newton spent hours sitting outside her parents' home in Marble Falls, looking overhead to spot medical choppers among the Black Hawk helicopters searching for the missing.
"I was just waiting for someone to call and say, 'We found him,'" Ms. Newton, 41, said, "that 'we've got him and he's good.'"
Since then, her hope has waned for her father, Michael Phillips, 66, the chief of the volunteer fire department in Marble Falls, about 80 miles north of San Antonio. Yet his name remains among more than 100 people still missing statewide after floodwaters roared through summer camps, riverside homes, campgrounds and R.V. parks, claiming at least 135 lives. |
BY LARA SELIGMAN, ROBBIE GRAMER AND ALEXANDER WARD
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The Trump administration has moved Germany ahead of Switzerland for the next Patriot air-defense systems off the production line, paving the way for Berlin to send two Patriots it already has to Ukraine, according to three U.S. officials.
The U.S. promise to quickly replace Germany's Patriots is the first instance of the Pentagon facilitating weapons deliveries for Ukraine since President Trump announced earlier this month that he favored sending more arms. But the move also underscored the difficulty in providing Patriots and other weapons to Kyiv, as defense production lines in the West struggle to keep up with Ukraine's appeals for help defending its cities and front line forces against increasing Russian missile and drone attacks.
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Three members of the arson and explosives unit of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were killed Friday in a blast at the department's training facility.
It was not immediately clear what they were doing when the explosion happened in a parking lot at the Biscailuz Training Facility or what caused it. However an early line of investigation is examining whether it may have been a training accident, according to a law enforcement official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The detectives who died were part of a team that undergoes in-depth training and responds to more than 1,000 calls a year, according to the Sheriff Robert Luna. |
BY ADAM TAYLOR, HANNAH NATANSON AND JOHN HUDSON |
The Trump administration's dramatic reorganization of the State Department, including this month's firing of more than 1,300 workers, was engineered primarily by a handful of political appointees lacking extensive diplomatic experience and chosen for their "fidelity" to the president and willingness to "break stuff" on his behalf, according to people with knowledge of the process.
Proponents of the initiative have declared its execution a historic success, overcoming years of resistance from a career workforce averse to major change. Critics say it was done arbitrarily, in furtherance of President Trump's polarizing brand of conservatism and will damage the United States' standing in the world by shedding invaluable expertise across the department. |
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