Trump Team to Hold Daily Meetings on Getting Revenge

The Trump administration’s chief priority for 2026: persecuting the president’s political nemeses.

Despite efforts by the judiciary to limit Donald Trump’s revenge quest, Justice Department officials are expected to meet as early as Monday to reignite efforts to investigate and punish government officials who played a role in investigating him prior to his return to the White House.

The DOJ staffers will meet under the banner of the “Weaponization Working Group,” an entity that Attorney General Pam Bondi invented mere days after she entered office, reported CNN. The group was designed to challenge former special counsel Jack Smith and his staff, as well as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The initiative would also target any officials who attempted to hold Trump accountable in the wake of the January 6, 2021, attack.

Some of those efforts may already be a dud, however, thanks to the loud mouths of some of Trump’s own staff: In December, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles fessed to Vanity Fair that the president’s flimsy charges against James were his “one retribution,” an admission that would give James’s legal defense plenty of reason to toss his cases against her for eternity.

One official familiar with the administration’s new plan told CNN that the Weaponization Working Group is expected to start meeting “daily,” with the intent of producing results within the next two months.

Back in October, Bondi told lawmakers that ending the “weaponization of justice” would be a chief priority for the agency under her stewardship.

Justice Department officials declined to provide specifics on the daily meetings but told CNN that the “efforts of the Weaponization Working Group continue.”

“The Justice Department is actively looking into the areas outlined in Attorney General Bondi’s Day One memo,” the spokesperson said. “The Weaponization Working Group is diligently working to restore integrity to the Department of Justice and is utilizing resources across the entire agency to fulfill this effort.”

Donald Trump has said his immigration crackdown is targeting the “worst of the worst.” It’s finally clear who he means by that: Canadian professional hockey players.

Hockey journalist Luc Gélinas reported that the Montreal Canadiens, who play the Minnesota Wild on Monday night, have been told by management to stay inside their Minneapolis hotel at all times, take the team bus rather than walk to the stadium, and carry passports with them.

The cautiousness of the team comes as a result of the Trump administration’s violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. Operation Metro Surge has killed two residents and sparked nationwide protests.

The Canadiens traveled across the border on Sunday rather than Saturday in order to spend one less night in the United States. They will also wait until Tuesday morning to leave Minneapolis so they can avoid any nighttime disturbances in the city.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t be hosting the World Cup and the Olympics,” one Bluesky commenter wryly noted.

Hopefully, the Canadiens can forget about ICE when they get on the ice tonight.

If you believe the president’s word, then fear not: The White House is not planning to demolish the Kennedy Center during its summer renovation.

But if you tend to trust the evidence of history, you might have cause to be suspicious of whether the famed cultural institution will still be in one piece by the time Donald Trump is done with it.

A White House official told ABC News’s Hannah Demissie Monday that the administration has no intention of tearing down the Kennedy Center during its two-year remodeling project. Starting July 4, the performing arts space will close for two years in order to undergo “construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding,” Trump announced Sunday evening.

The sudden decision to reinvent the world-class arts institution comes just a month after Trump potentially broke the law in renaming the center to include his name, and after more than a year of canceled performances by a litany of artists who opposed the Trump administration’s agenda.

Meanwhile, Trump’s other government renovation projects have been constructed out of a web of lies. Back when his White House ballroom was first announced in July, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing.

Months later, his construction teams completely razed the FDR-era extension, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time, due to the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore; and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of its own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

Alex Pretti’s death was ruled a homicide Monday by the Hennepin County medical examiner.

In the medical examiner’s report, Pretti’s cause of death was listed as multiple gunshot wounds, and how the injury occurred was due to being “shot by law enforcement officer(s).” His manner of death was listed as “homicide.”

The 37-year-old ICU nurse was shot and killed by two Customs and Border Protection officers during a violent confrontation at a protest in Minneapolis last month.

Footage from the confrontation showed that Pretti was tackled to the ground by several federal agents, after he approached another protester who’d been sprayed with a chemical irritant. While beating Pretti, agents realized he was armed and took his firearm. Once they’d pinned Pretti to the ground, two federal officers shot him at least 10 times.

The medical examiner’s determination comes shortly after ProPublica uncovered the names of the officers who shot and killed Pretti: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.

CBP Commander Greg Bovino, who was recently removed from overseeing the Minnesota crackdown, refused to identify the officers. He told reporters they were still working the streets, just in another city. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security has since confirmed that the two had been placed on administrative leave, according to ProPublica.

Pretti’s senseless killing has sparked national outrage as Donald Trump’s federal immigration forces have killed a total of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in broad daylight. The Trump administration has blocked Minnesota officials from investigating residents’ killings by federal agents, hampering the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and opposed a federal judge’s order preventing them from tampering with evidence related to Pretti’s death.

This story has been updated.

The day after the FBI raided an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia, last week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard arranged a call between the agents on the scene and President Trump.

The New York Times reports that Gabbard called the president on her cell phone after the search, which was based on Trump’s false claims that the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia were rigged against him. Trump initially didn’t pick up, but called back minutes later to speak to the agents on speakerphone. He both thanked the agents and had questions for them.

The supervisor of the FBI squad conducting the search, which mainly handles public corruption and civil rights abuses, mostly handled the call, the Times reports. One official told the publication that the call was only a minute long and was like a pep talk.

Trump reportedly personally ordered Gabbard to travel to Atlanta for the search, coordinating her efforts with Deputy FBI Director Andrew Bailey. Gabbard’s presence has drawn questions about why she was there, considering her job is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence. For the past few months, Gabbard has been leading an investigation into Trump’s 2020 election grievances.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, called out Gabbard’s presence at the raid, saying that if she believed that the raid in Georgia was connected to foreign intelligence, she was negligent in failing to notify Congress. If that wasn’t the case, Warner said, “she is once again demonstrating her utter lack of fitness for office that she holds by injecting the nonpartisan intelligence community she is supposed to be leading into a domestic political stunt designed to legitimize conspiracy theories that undermine our democracy.”

The fact that Gabbard made a direct phone call to Trump seems to vindicate Warner’s concerns and indicate that Trump is attempting to preemptively interfere in future elections. It is highly unprecedented for a sitting president to be this directly connected to any active case by the FBI or Justice Department, and Trump is already threatening to directly take over elections.

Attorneys representing victims of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein are appealing to federal court to get the federal government to take down millions of documents related to Epstein, saying that the government failed to properly redact victims’ information.

In a letter to New York federal judges Richard Berman and Paul Engelmayer, who are overseeing the cases of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, lawyers Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards requested an “immediate judicial intervention” over victims’ personal information being included in the newly released files.

“Within the past 48 hours, the undersigned alone has reported thousands of redaction failures on behalf of nearly 100 individual survivors whose lives have been turned upside down by DOJ’s latest release,” the letter states.

Henderson and Edwards, who represent over 200 alleged victims of Epstein, blasted the Justice Department for its failure, considering that protecting victims of Epstein is required by law.

“There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred—particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication,” Henderson and Edwards wrote.

“DOJ cannot plausibly characterize this as error, negligence, or bureaucratic failure. The task was straightforward: take the list of known victims and redact those names everywhere they appear,” the letter states. “When DOJ believed it was ready to publish, it needed only to type each victim’s name into its own search function. Any resulting hit should have been redacted before publication. Had DOJ done that, the harm would have been avoided.”

The lawyers mention multiple instances where victims’ names were left unredacted, including one minor’s name allegedly “revealed 20 times in a single document.” When those mistakes were flagged and told to the DOJ, the lawyers said, only three of the mentions were redacted, with the other 17 left untouched. In another instance, one email mentions 32 underage victims with only one of them redacted, while some FBI forms included in the file release left full names unredacted.

Some of the victims testified anonymously in the letter that they received death threats and harassment from the media since the files publicly identified them.

“The release of this information is not only profoundly distressing and retraumatizing, but it also places me and my child at potential physical risk,” one victim said.

The latest Epstein file release on Friday appears to be full of errors and negligent redacting. Nearly 40 nude photos of women, possibly underage, were mistakenly released unredacted, while an innocuous photo of President Trump speaking somehow was redacted. And the full batch of files has yet to be released, despite a legal deadline set six weeks ago. Is the DOJ taking the release of the Epstein files seriously?

The White House’s horrible, AI-doctored photograph of a Minnesota protester was used as evidence Monday that Donald Trump’s administration is acting in “nakedly obvious bad faith.”

In a four-page filing, attorney Jordan Kushner argued that the court should modify conditions for the release of his client, Nekima Levy-Armstrong, a civil rights attorney arrested at an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Kushner claimed that events that occurred after Levy-Armstrong’s arrest had “informed the Court of the government’s bad faith,” and had already influenced the court in declining to place restrictions on her co-defendants, who were released on January 30.

Among the list of incidents, Kushner included the White House’s X post featuring “an altered photo of Ms. Levy-Armstrong being arrested to make it falsely appear that she was crying and making her face darker.”

Kushner noted that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had posted the original photograph of his client being escorted in handcuffs by law enforcement. More recently, Attorney General Pam Bondi had posted names and mugshots of 16 other protesters, he added.

In considering all the reasons to lighten the release restrictions placed on Levy Armstrong, Kushner asked the court to consider “the government’s nakedly obvious bad faith.”

A Brazilian influencer who openly backed President Trump’s hard-line immigration policies was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Saturday.

Junior Pena, whose Instagram account boasts almost half a million followers, was detained in New Jersey after missing a court hearing related to his own immigration status, a friend told the Brazilian Times.

Pena immigrated to the United States in 2009, according to The Guardian. He openly identifies as an immigrant on social media, and frequently shares stories of others who have come to the U.S. in search of a better life.

But he has also been outspoken in his support for Donald Trump, explicitly defending the president during his immigration clampdown.

After reports that Brazilians were among the many immigrants being detained and deported in Trump’s first week in office, Pena urged his followers to stay calm.

“Don’t panic, thinking they’re deporting everyone,” he said in Portuguese. “There’s a news report showing ICE arresting [people], which even includes Brazilians, but they’re all criminals. All criminals. Don’t believe just any influencer.”

Pena’s friends have now launched a fundraising campaign to cover the influencer’s legal fees and court expenses. The campaign hopes to raise $50,000.

Donald Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the Justice Department’s Friday public release of some three million pages from the sprawling investigation into child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The references include documents pertaining to Trump, his wife Melania, and their residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

The president’s name appears in an FBI tip sheet several times in abuse allegations, including one in which an unknown source accuses Trump of forcing one of Epstein’s victims, presumed to be 13 or 14 years old, to perform oral sex on him, “approximately 35 years ago” in New Jersey.

Other mentions are bizarre, such as a censored image that is very clearly of the president, sparking concerns about how far the DOJ actually went to conceal Trump’s connection to Epstein. The photograph came up in an exchange between Epstein and Trump’s first term chief strategist, Steve Bannon, though the widely circulated image was not incriminating in and of itself.

Meanwhile, the agency neglected to redact nude images of young women in the files, some of whom may have been teenagers at the time.

All in all, Trump was flagged in more than 5,300 files in the document cache, according to the Times.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN’s State of the Union Sunday that the DOJ reviewed the files last summer but did not find credible evidence against the president warranting further investigation.

“There’s a lot of correspondence, there’s a lot of emails, there’s a lot of photographs—there’s a lot of horrible photographs that appear to be taken by Mr. Epstein or people around him, but that doesn’t allow us necessarily to prosecute somebody,” Blanche said, noting that the public now has the opportunity to “see if we got it wrong.”

The Trump administration revealed on Friday that it would only release half of the Epstein files, blatantly violating the recently passed law that required the documents’ full release some six weeks ago and sparking concerns about a governmental cover-up.

Donald Trump’s botched takeover of the Kennedy Center is drawing criticism from America’s most prominent political family.

After a board of Trump loyalists voted to add Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center in December, the president announced on Sunday that the prestigious theater will shut down for two years for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding.”

The building will close on July 4 “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country,” Trump wrote.

That means that while the Kennedy Center served as America’s cultural center for over 50 years, the Trump–Kennedy Center will last a grand total of seven months before closing.

Many have speculated that the planned temporary closure is an attempt by Trump to save face after his decision to rename the building led to a sharp decline in ticket sales and multiple artists canceling shows.

After Trump’s announcement, Joe Kennedy III, a great-nephew of John F. Kennedy, wrote on social media: “While this trespass on the People’s will is painful, President Kennedy would remind us that it is not buildings that define the greatness of a nation. It is the actions of its people and its leaders. So, do not be distracted from what this Administration is actually trying to erase: our connection, our community, and our commitment to the rights of all.”

Maria Shriver, the daughter of JFK’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, mocked Trump in her own post, writing: “I’ve determined that due to this change in schedule, it’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s canceling… right?”

JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg similarly ripped into Trump. “Trump can take the Kennedy Center for himself,” Schlossberg wrote. “He can change the name, shut the doors, and demolish the building. He can try to kill JFK. But JFK is kept alive by us now rising up to remove Donald Trump, bring him to justice, and restore the freedoms generations fought for.”

Unsurprisingly, one Kennedy has taken a different stance: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s secretary of health and human services.

RFK Jr. said he had “bigger fish to fry” when asked about Trump renaming the building in December. He has not commented on the president’s announcement that the building will be shut down for two years.