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.”