Trump Personally Intervenes to Block Release of January 6 Documents

The Department of Justice has confirmed that President Donald Trump blocked the release of more than 4,100 documents related to the deadly riot on January 6.

In a court filing Monday night, lawyers for the DOJ revealed that Trump had stepped in to prevent the release of some material requested as part of a lawsuit brought by police officers injured by violent rioters at the U.S. Capitol. The materials were originally subpoenaed from the National Archives and Records Administration in February.

The filing included the December 1 memo signed by Trump, which claimed the subpoena had requested an “extremely broad set of materials” and blocked the release of 4,152 documents.

“I have determined that the following records are subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege. This privilege helps respect the separation of powers enshrined in the United States Constitution and the need for the President of the United States to receive candid and confidential advice in decision making,” the memo stated.

Trump’s memo asserted that claiming executive privilege did not waive other privileges, such as that for presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson released a statement last week confirming that Trump had asserted executive privilege in response to “overly broad” discovery requests in this case, Politico reported at the time.

With this action, Trump is directly blocking a case alleging that he helped to fuel the riot. In a 2022 ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the current case, found that there were indications Trump may have been aware that some of his supporters were armed and had discouraged security checks.

A federal judge opened the floodgates Tuesday, allowing the Justice Department to publicly release investigative materials related to a sex trafficking case brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate and girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The decision, made by Manhattan-based federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, could release hundreds or even thousands of previously unseen documents, reported the Associated Press. They will be released to the public in a searchable format in the next 10 days, as required by the recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The DOJ argued that the release was what Congress intended after the legislature passed the law last month. The latest document release will “encompass 18 categories of investigative materials” collected in the sex trafficking probe, including “search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida,” according to the AP.

Engelmayer is now the second judge to allow the DOJ to release previously secret Epstein documents, after a judge in Florida approved the release of transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into the New York financier roughly two decades ago.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, and the British ex-socialite signaled in a court filing last week that she would ask a court to free her from her captivity.

In a statement issued prior to Engelmayer’s ruling, Maxwell’s attorneys claimed that the release of the documents “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial.”

Engelmayer made headlines in August when he denied the president’s request to release grand jury transcripts related to Maxwell, claiming that the administration’s renewed focus on those specific documents was little more than a ruse to shake public frustration over lagging progress on the Epstein files. At the time, Engelmayer claimed that the content of the grand jury transcripts were already publicly available elsewhere and wouldn’t reveal anything new.

Donald Trump trashed America’s European allies in an interview with Politico published Tuesday, calling them “decaying” nations led by “weak” people.

“I think they’re weak,” Trump said of European politicians. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct,” adding, “I think they don’t know what to do. Europe doesn’t know what to do.”

“NATO calls me ‘Daddy,’” Trump said when asked about European elections. “I have a lot to say about it.”

The president claimed that he had a new draft of a peace plan that some Ukrainian officials received favorably, but that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had not read it yet. Meanwhile, Zelenskiy met with the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany Monday and stressed that Ukraine would not give up territory in any peace deal.

Trump said that regarding Ukraine, European leaders “talk, but they don’t produce, and the war just keeps going on and on.” He also made a jab at Zelenskiy, urging new elections in Ukraine.

“They haven’t had an election in a long time,” Trump said. “You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.”

The president denigrated cities like Paris and London for being overrun with immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, saying that unless European states tightened their borders, they “will not be viable countries any longer.”

Trump singled out London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is of Pakistani descent, as a “disaster,” making the racist insinuation that he was “elected because so many people have come in. They vote for him now.”

Trump’s words are not going to inspire confidence from Europe, especially with Ukraine-Russia peace talks going so abysmally. European leaders are already worried that Trump will kowtow to Russian demands, and the White House’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, was seen as almost a carbon copy of rhetoric coming from Russia.

Despite Europe’s backlash to the security policy document, which praised far-right political movements, Trump said in the interview that he would be willing to endorse far-right politicians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

“I’d endorse,” he continued. “I’ve endorsed people, but I’ve endorsed people that a lot of Europeans don’t like.”

That security document was more concerned with bringing Europe to heel than any consideration of any external security threats to Europe or the U.S., instead projecting the Trump administration’s own racism and white nationalism onto European states. But those views are not likely to earn the president or his policies any goodwill across the Atlantic.

In a recent visit to the White House, Paramount CEO David Ellison promised President Trump that he would completely rehaul CNN if the president allowed them to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery instead of Netflix, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. 

Ellison’s father, billionaire founder of Oracle, also privately called Trump after the deal with Netflix was announced last week to express his concerns.

The president has yet to publicly side with anyone, but it seems clear where his loyalties lie. He’s already expressed his desire to be involved in the decision, saying over the weekend that Netflix already has “a very big market share. And when they have Warner Bros. you know that share goes up a lot, so I don’t know, that’s going to be for some economists to tell, and also I’ll be involved in that decision too.” 

Trump and Larry Ellison already met last month to discuss firing CNN hosts Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar (both of whom Trump has issues with) and putting CBS’s 60 Minutes on CNN if Ellison were to acquire Warner. 

Both Larry and David are vocal Trump supporters with a right-wing media empire to go with it, having already acquired CBS and Bari Weiss’s anti-woke publication The Free Press, and having brought TikTok under U.S. ownership to push pro-Israel views. 

If Paramount acquires Warner instead of Netflix and the Ellisons fulfill their promise to Trump,  we could see Trump blatantly using them to shape the entire mainstream media landscape—from CNN to TikTok—in his own image. 

MAGA world is on the fritz.

Far-right influencer Tim Pool dialed up his critique of his fellow conservative influencers during a livestream Monday, claiming he was “fucking done” with the political caucus while branding its own as “scumbags” and “psychopaths.”

Pool, who rose to prominence during the Occupy Wall Street Movement, ignited when the topic of his podcast veered toward Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, which he claimed was being destroyed by conspiracy theories.

“The organization that helped get Donald Trump elected ... is being gutted by fucking psychopaths telling people to pull their donations,” Pool said. “Their leader and founder is murdered, and prominent pieces of human trash are trying to destroy it. It’s fucking evil.”

He took specific aim at influencer Candace Owens, whom he called a “degenerate cunt” for communicating to CNN last month that she didn’t believe Kirk was killed by the man charged with the crime, 22-year-old Utah native Tyler Robinson.

“I first and foremost do not believe Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk.… Whether he was involved, I think the answer was yes,” Owens, an old friend of Kirk’s, told the network in November.

Since then, Owens has shared social media posts insinuating that Turning Point is no longer aligned with Kirk’s vision, citing an alleged redirection from America’s colleges to faith-based organizations.

Pool went on to slam conservatives who had reached out to him, thanking him for excoriating Owens while failing to take a stand themselves.

“She is burning everything down and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it,” Pool ranted. “Don’t fucking DM me like I did something for you, as you cower, as you fucking cower, scared that she’ll put you on her thumbnail and claim you benefited from Charlie Kirk’s assassination, which she’s doing to me right now. I’m fucking done with these people.”

Owens, in turn, appeared to stand by her right-wing ally, writing to her 7.5 million social media followers that she “wouldn’t turn” Pool’s violent reaction into “a cheap internet moment.”

“He is genuinely not well right now,” Owens posted on X late Monday night. “There is just so clearly something personal going on in his life. It’s hard to run a business and he’s under pressure. Pray he comes through it.”

President Donald Trump once again threatened to increase tariffs on one of America’s biggest trading partners, Mexico.

Hours after his roundtable meeting Monday to announce a $12 billion aid package for farmers hurt by his own policies, Trump took to Truth Social to claim that Mexico was under-delivering on its water obligations to the United States.

“Mexico continues to violate our comprehensive Water Treaty, and this violation is seriously hurting our BEAUTIFUL TEXAS CROPS AND LIVESTOCK,” the president wrote.

Trump was referring to the Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande Treaty, which requires that the United States receive an average of at least 350,000 acre-feet of water from Rio Grande tributaries each year. In cases of “extraordinary drought,” a term not actually defined in the treaty, Mexico is permitted five years to make up the difference—but has repeatedly failed to do so.

“Mexico still owes the U.S over 800,000 acre-feet of water for failing to comply with our Treaty over the past five years. The U.S needs Mexico to release 200,000 acre-feet of water before December 31st, and the rest must come soon after,” Trump wrote, and threatened to levy an additional 5 percent tariff on Mexico, which would raise the tariff rate to 30 percent.

In April, Trump alleged that Mexico had withheld 1.3 million acre-feet of water and threatened unspecified tariffs and even sanctions. Shortly after, the State Department announced that it had struck a deal with Mexico to increase water deliveries. The International Boundary and Water Commission observed an uptick in water deliveries from Mexico to the United States compared to the previous two years.

Raising tariffs on the America’s largest trading partner would undoubtedly continue to raise prices for consumers.

For some strange reason, two members of President Trump’s Cabinet, both men, spoke about the benefits of breastfeeding at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, Monday afternoon.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were at the airport to announce new family and health-centric travel initiatives. Kennedy began by waxing poetic about the “mother’s breast.”

“All of the ingenuity of corporate America, all the resources, all the resourcefulness, has not produced an infant formula that is superior in nutrition and all the qualities that we want to the infant formula that God made, which is the infant formula in a mother’s breast,” Kennedy said, adding that the Department of Health and Human Services was encouraging mothers to breastfeed as much as possible.

If hearing those words in Kennedy’s voice wasn’t bizarre enough, Duffy then spoke about his wife’s complaints about a lack of facilities for nursing mothers at airports, and, referring to the presence of Kennedy, himself, and infamous pseudoscience health influencer Paul Saladino, pointed out the obvious: “It’s maybe a little odd for three guys to talk about nursing and options for nursing.”

Duffy then introduced the one woman and mother at the event: conservative content creator Isabel Brown, who was there to speak about the lack of nursing facilities at airports. By that point, though, Kennedy and Duffy had spoken at length about breastfeeding before Brown even said a word. Thankfully, Saladino, known for pushing pseudoscience like a carnivore diet and feeding raw milk to infants, didn’t broach the topic in his remarks.

In Trump’s first term, the U.S. government had the opposite stance on breastfeeding, lobbying against a UN resolution’s language calling on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding.” While moving away from this stance is a positive step, having Kennedy and Duffy speak about the topic doesn’t inspire much confidence, especially considering the pseudoscience Kennedy continues to traffic in.

Five days after he promised the American public that they would be able to see drone footage from the September 2 airstrike in the Caribbean, Donald Trump has decided to walk it all back.

The president scolded a reporter during a White House roundtable Monday, berating her for quoting comments he made less than a week prior, in which he stated that any video of the merciless double tap would be released.

“Mr. President, you said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela,” a reporter asked. “Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has—”

“I didn’t say that,” Trump interjected. “You said that. I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news.”

“You said you would have no problem releasing the full vid—well, OK,” the reporter flustered.

Unfortunately for Trump, it’s not so easy to rewrite history when it exists in recent memory on tape, video, and in print. On December 3, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that “whatever” footage the government had in its possession of the attack, it would “certainly release.”

That, however, was apparently no longer the case come Monday.

“Whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me,” Trump said.

“He now says it’s under review. Are you ordering the secretary to release that full video?” the reporter pressed.

“Whatever he decides is OK with me,” Trump repeated. “So every boat we knock out of the water, every boat, we save 25,000 American lives. That was a boat loaded up with drugs.”

Since early September, the U.S. has conducted at least 22 strikes on small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 86 people have been killed in the attacks. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country.

“Are you committed to releasing the full video?” the ABC News reporter asked for clarification—a move that seemingly really got under the president’s skin.

“Didn’t I just tell you that?” Trump said.

“You said it was up to Secretary Hegseth,” she responded.

“You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place. Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious—actually, a terrible reporter, and it’s always the same with you,” Trump said.

It could be that Trump’s sudden reluctance to release the footage is because the tapes make his administration look cruel, callous, and careless. Lawmakers that were briefed on the September 2 double tap left the meeting appalled by the country’s actions, relaying to members of the media that they were “deeply disturbed” by footage of the killings.

President Donald Trump revealed Monday just how clueless he is about his own tariff policies, and appeared to improvise new rice tariffs on the fly after speaking with one rice farmer.

During a roundtable to unveil a $12 billion bailout package for American farmers, Meryl Kennedy, CEO of Louisiana-based Kennedy Rice Mill, told Trump that she believed other countries were “dumping” rice into the United States.

“Which countries?” Trump asked.

“India, Thailand, even China into Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico used to be one of the largest markets for rice, we haven’t shipped rice into Puerto Rico for years,” Kennedy said, adding that the president needed to “double down” on his tariffs.

“You want more?” Trump asked incredulously, and Kennedy replied that other countries were “cheating” by subsidizing their rice production.

Trump seemed to have no idea whether other countries were “dumping” rice, and asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent if India had a tariff exemption for rice.

“No sir, we’re still working on their trade deal,” Bessent replied. As of August, India is facing steep 50 percent tariffs on all exports, with exceptions for certain agricultural products, such as tea, coffee, and spices—not rice. In October, exports from India to the United States rose for the first time in months as trade negotiations were underway.

As Kennedy tried to explain how India might be illegally subsidizing its rice production, Trump interrupted her. “Give me the countries, if you could? Go ahead. India, who else? Mark it down, Scott,” the president said.

Kennedy repeated the “main culprits” of India, Thailand, and China, adding, “But there’s others too, and we can get you a full list.” Trump promised he’d “take care” of the problem quickly.

U.S. rice production is small compared to that of other grains, such as soybeans or corn. Across the six states that produce rice, there are only an estimated 5,500 farmers for that crop. In 2025, rice production in the U.S. reportedly suffered from adverse weather, while rice production in South American countries surged.

During the same roundtable, Trump also floated placing “very severe” tariffs on fertilizer imported from Canada—the largest supplier to the United States—which could boost domestic production but risks further hurting farmers.

President Trump on Monday lashed out at a reporter who asked about impending GOP House resignations.

“There’s at least 20 House Republicans who have either said they’re going to retire or not run again—”

“And Democrats, and Democrats also. And Democrats also,” Trump chimed in. “Why don’t you mention them? How many Democrats have retired? How many Democrats?”

“Well that’s what I was gonna ask—”

“Well, why don’t you tell me the number of Democrats too?”

“Well, are you concerned about the narrow margins?”

“No, I’m not concerned, I think we’re gonna do well,” Trump said, talking over the reporter. “We’re gonna have the greatest economy.... We’re gonna have the greatest economy in history. How many Democrats are retiring? How come you only know the Republicans and not the Democrats?”

“Because I came prepared to ask you a question—”

“No no, you’re unprepared. Because you should know the Democrats. You’re totally unprepared.”

This weekend, Puck News reported that 20 House Republicans will announce their retirement in the coming weeks, in addition to the 23 who’ve already said they’re leaving Congress.

The reporter at the roundtable Monday, who was from Newsday, was likely asking President Trump a question about the Republican resignations because he is the Republican president. But the question—coming in the wake of months of reporting on internal rifts within the GOP—clearly struck a nerve with President Trump.