Putin Dumps Cold Water on Trump’s Supposed Temporary Ukraine Ceasefire

You’ll never guess which country launched a massive attack just hours after President Donald Trump announced yet another supposed temporary ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.

Sitting at his desk in the Oval Office Monday, Trump repeated his claim that Russian President Vladimir Putin had “agreed” to pause Moscow’s repeated strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, as the temperatures in Europe dropped dangerously low.

“I asked him if he wouldn’t shoot for a period of one week, no missiles going into Kyiv or any other town, and he’s agreed to do it, so it’s something,” said Trump, the king of wishful thinking—or more just utter bullshit.

Trump had initially claimed there would be a weeklong ceasefire during a Cabinet meeting Thursday, sparking some confusion in Kyiv about when the pause would actually begin, or what it would entail. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov clarified that Russia had only agreed to pause strikes until February 1 “in order to create favorable conditions for negotiations,” which are set to resume Wednesday in Abu Dhabi.

That would mean Trump’s supposed weeklong ceasefire was only in effect for two days.

True to its word, Russia resumed strikes overnight Monday, launching 450 attack drones and more than 70 missiles, hitting power plants in at least six regions and leaving more than 1,000 residential buildings in Kyiv without power. So, as much as Trump would like to play-act like he has Putin’s ear, that’s clearly not the case.

“Taking advantage of the coldest days of winter to terrorize people is more important to Russia than turning to diplomacy,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X, early Tuesday.

Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said the attacks on “purely civilian” targets amounted to “another Russian crime against humanity.”

The FBI’s raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office last week confused local authorities and caused a dispute, despite the FBI possessing a judicial search warrant.

Body camera footage from Fulton County police reveals that officials at the Fulton County Election Hub and Operations Center were not clear on what was going on and expressed confusion about the warrant, which was shown to them on their phones instead of as a hard copy. FBI agents on camera told the officials that they were having computer problems and trying to get an updated warrant.

The agents said that when the first warrant was issued, they didn’t realize that the records they were seeking from the 2020 presidential election weren’t held by the county elections board, but by the clerk of court.

While local officials ultimately cooperated with the FBI, interactions were tense. The acting head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, Peter Ellis, said that he was letting county officials stay in the building during the search as a courtesy, but when county attorney Soo Jo said he was there to observe, another agent pushed back. The FBI said that the media and anyone taking video weren’t welcome inside.

“I want to remind you that this is a criminal search warrant and this location is kind of restricted at this point, respectfully,” an agent said at one point.

Agents also appeared willing to take the records by force if necessary. The Fulton County clerk of courts, Che Alexander, said that she was willing to unlock the storage areas where ballots were kept, but didn’t want to hand over records without knowing “what it is you’re looking for so you’re not taking other stuff.”

“They said they’ll break the lock and take ‘em,” Alexander told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

In the end, more than 650 ballots were taken by the agents to an undisclosed location. What they will be used for is unclear, as President Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen have all been debunked in court. But for some reason, he has tasked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard with the case, raising the question of whether Trump is attempting to create a pretext to take over future elections.

White House adviser and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is once again attacking the judicial branch after it ruined his plans to deport thousands of Haitian immigrants.

On Monday evening, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate Haitians’ temporary protected status, which was supposed to end on Tuesday night.

“An unelected judge has just ruled that elections, laws and borders don’t exist,” said Miller—perhaps the most powerful unelected individual in the country—in reaction to the judge’s ruling.

Miller was quickly rebuked.

“Nope. A judge who was nominated and confirmed according to the constitutional process just issued a ruling interpreting the law, holding that the administration was lawless,” writer David French replied. “If you disagree with the ruling, you can appeal. That’s how the law works.”

This isn’t the first time basic judicial oversight has caused Miller to throw a tantrum. Last April, as judges ruled against President Trump for suspending due process to deport people, Miller complained about the “rogue, radical left judiciary.” And when judges blocked Trump from sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, Miller went online and called the ruling “one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen.”

The shock, awe, and indignation Miller displays every time the judicial system does the whole “checks and balances” thing it’s known for only further affirms how little he cares about that process in the first place. He makes these statements because he knows there’s nothing he can really do to remove judges who simply won’t look away from Trump’s constitutional violations.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche couldn’t care less about exposing the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse. Don’t believe us? Listen for yourself.

During an interview on Fox News Monday, Blanche was asked to answer for the thousands of redaction errors in the Department of Justice’s latest release of more than three million pages of Epstein-related documents, which allegedly exposed the names of at least 100 survivors.

“These were reportedly women who were minors at the time, or haven’t come out publicly yet,” said Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “How did those names slip through?”

“Yeah look, you’re right. I mean there—mistakes were made by, you have really hardworking lawyers that worked for the past 60 days,” Blanche stammered. “Think about this, though, you have pieces of paper that stack from the ground to two Eiffel Towers.

“We knew that there would be mistakes, we put that—I said that to the American people on Friday. Everything we did was to protect victims,” Blanche continued. “And what we’re talking about, by the way, is 0.002 percent—”

“But it matters to them, right?” Ingraham chided.

“It should matter to them, it matters to me too. Absolutely,” Blanche said.

The many excuses furnishing Blanche’s depraved attempt to downplay DOJ “mistakes” just don’t make sense.

The Trump administration had far longer than just 60 days to review the documents, as the DOJ supposedly began the process of declassifying documents related to the investigation over a year ago. The Epstein Files Transparency Act was also passed more than 60 days ago, and the DOJ then missed the deadline to release the documents, claiming that it needed more time to make redactions.

As for his claim that everything the DOJ did was to “protect victims,” it’s clear that the DOJ cared a lot more about protecting someone else. Nearly 40 nude photos of women, possibly underage, were mistakenly released uncensored, while an innocuous photo of President Donald Trump somehow was redacted.

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to upend temporary protected status for more than 350,000 Haitians.

In an unsparing 83-page decision issued late Monday, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., formally denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit that challenges the Department of Homeland Security’s attempts to terminate the TPS program entirely.

Reyes didn’t miss the opportunity to completely pick apart DHS and its leader, Secretary Kristi Noem, for doggedly pursuing a newfangled, anti-immigrant agenda even when it runs afoul of U.S. law.

Reyes noted that Noem does not have the authority to unravel TPS, which was created by Congress through the Immigration Act of 1990. The judge further determined that Noem’s arguments for ending the program were not only flawed but also fundamentally unacceptable since they failed to address the economic component of the program.

“She ignores altogether the billions Haitian TPS holders contribute to the economy,” Reyes wrote.

From the very first words of the ruling, Reyes frames Noem as the polar opposite of America’s first leader, George Washington, pitting one of her vitriolic tweets against a letter in which Washington insisted that the U.S. must receive “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.”

“Secretary Noem complains of strains unlawful immigrants place on our immigration-enforcement system. Her answer? Turn 352,959 lawful immigrants into unlawful immigrants overnight,” Reyes wrote. “She complains of strains to our economy. Her answer? Turn employed lawful immigrants who contribute billions in taxes into the legally unemployable.

“She complains of strains to our healthcare system. Her answer? Turn the insured into the uninsured,” the judge continued. “This approach is many things—in the public interest is not one of them.”

Ultimately, Reyes concluded, Noem does not have the law or facts on her side and, as a result, has done little more than “pound the table”—which, in this case, is the social media platform X.

“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants,” Reyes stated. “Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

Elon Musk’s lewd image generator on his X platform has gotten him into trouble in France.

Prosecutors in Paris have asked Musk, along with former X CEO Linda Yaccarino, to appear for questioning over the spread of deepfake pornography and antisemitic content on the social media platform. The summons came after the prosecutor’s cybercrime division, along with Europol and the cybercrime units of the French police, searched X’s offices in the city Tuesday.

X is under investigation for criminal offenses such as complicity in the possession and distribution of “child pornography images,” violating personal rights with its generation of “sexual deepfakes,” the denial of “crimes against humanity,” and allegedly extracting data fraudulently from an automated processing system, the prosecutor’s office said.

“The voluntary interviews with the managers should enable them to explain their position on the facts and, where applicable, the compliance measures envisaged,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. Yaccarino and Musk have been summoned to appear in Paris court the week of April 20.

While authorities in Paris have limited, if any, powers to compel Musk to appear in court, the move is a significant step against one of the world’s leading social media platforms. Musk has faced heavy criticism over X’s image-generation tool, which has allowed users to undress people using AI, even minors. X has also gained the reputation of being a haven for antisemitic content ever since Musk took over the platform. Could this be the first time Musk and X face accountability?

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro’s anti–Second Amendment declaration has left the Trump administration’s own base outraged.

“You bring a gun into the District [of Columbia], you mark my words: You’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district, and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else,” Pirro said on Monday, flying in the face of years of gun rights activism from Republicans and organizations like the NRA. “You bring a gun into this district, count on going to jail and hope you get your gun back. And that makes all the difference.”

Pirro’s statement caused a flurry of backlash from the right, as registered gun owners in America are over two times as likely to vote for Republicans.

“I bring a gun into the district every week, @USAttyPirro. I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others,” GOP Representative Greg Steube wrote on X. “Come and Take it!”

“Jeanine Pirro threatening to arrest people for carrying in DC, even if they are law-abiding and licensed, shows how broken and out of touch these gun laws are. Unacceptable and intolerable comments by a sitting US attorney,” the National Association for Gun Rights wrote on X. “This is why we need Real Constitutional Carry nationwide. Bureaucrats act like the 2A does not exist and brag about jailing people for exercising their rights.”

The blowback continued.

“Concealed Carry Permit holders are statistically some of the most law abiding citizens in society—even more law abiding than police,” Gun Owners of America commented. “We ARE NOT the problem.”

Pirro’s comments are particularly confusing due to her recent support for less restrictive gun laws in the district. Just last summer, the Trump administration attempted to loosen concealed carry laws. And in December, the DOJ sued the D.C. government on the grounds that its gun restrictions violated the very Second Amendment Pirro is now attacking.

“The GOP Leadership is doing everything it can to keep second amendment voters from showing up in November,” said conservative commentator Erick Erickson.

Donald Trump is now demanding $1 billion from Harvard after The New York Times reported he’d backed down from a request for the university to pay his administration off.

For a moment, it appeared that Trump’s extortion scheme had failed at Harvard. Six other elite schools agreed last year to settle civil rights investigations and regain federal funding by adopting Trump’s authoritarian “compact” on school policy and by signing checks that amounted to millions of dollars to the U.S. Treasury. Harvard, however, refused to settle, though it has faced a whopping 13 investigations by 10 federal agencies in the past year alone. 

Just hours after the Times reported that anonymous Trump officials and Harvard officials had both quietly accepted that the Ivy League institution wouldn’t pay the president’s ransom, Trump attacked Harvard and the Times—and issued a furious new demand. 

“Strongly Antisemitic Harvard University has been feeding a lot of ‘nonsense’ to The Failing New York Times,” Trump wrote in a lengthy post late Monday night. “Harvard has been, for a long time, behaving very badly!

“This should be a Criminal, not Civil, event, and Harvard will have to live with the consequences of their wrongdoings,” Trump wrote, adding: “We are now seeking One Billion Dollars in damages, and want nothing further to do, into the future, with Harvard University.”

In a second post, Trump tried to dictate corrections to the original Times story.

“The Failing New York Times story was completely wrong concerning Harvard University. I hereby demand that the morons that run (into the ground!) the Times’  change their story, immediately,” he wrote. 

He posted yet again Tuesday morning, clearly frustrated that his changes had not been immediately adopted. 

“Why hasn’t the Fake News New York Times adjusted its phony article on the corruption and antisemitism which has taken place at Harvard,” he wrote. “They never call for facts, or factchecks, because the Times’ is a corrupt, unprincipled, and pathetic vehicle of the Left.”

The Trump administration is running out of excuses to explain away the president’s relationship with deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fox News Monday evening that pretty much everyone who partied with the “pedophile island” operator was off the hook. But in a pitiful attempt to brush off public backlash to the thousands of times that Donald Trump’s name was mentioned in the Justice Department’s latest release of the Epstein files, Blanche practically resorted to gaslighting.

“Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged with relations with minors will be prosecuted?” asked host Laura Ingraham.

“I’ll never say no,” Blanche said. “And we will always investigate evidence of misconduct.

“But as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. It’s not a crime to email with Mr. Epstein. Some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand, that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”

“It didn’t look like that was all that was going on in some of those photos,” pressed Ingraham. “I mean, if the photos could speak, some of them look pretty bad.”

“That’s right, and unfortunately photos can’t speak, and so we need witnesses,” Blanche responded.

Trump was mentioned more than 38,000 times in the latest batch of Epstein files, according to a New York Times review of the DOJ’s Friday document dump, which consisted of some three million previously unseen pages.

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

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

New hires at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are complaining that they haven’t yet received the massive bonuses promised to them for agreeing to brutally arrest immigrants.

In multiple Reddit posts reviewed by the International Business Times UK, federal immigration agents complained that they’d yet to see their signing bonuses materialize. Others complained that when their bonus arrived, it was only a few thousand dollars after taxes. One person claimed that they were unable to cover medical costs for their sick child due to an insurance coverage gap.

The Trump administration had promised a payout of up to $50,000 for anyone who joined the ranks of so-called homeland defenders.

Following a massive recruitment push, the Department of Homeland Security has boasted an incoming class of 12,000 new ICE agents, putting a clear strain on the agency, which received more than 220,000 applications. One administration official previously said DHS’s hiring influx had caused a “shit show” at ICE.

Meanwhile, morale among ICE agents is already plummeting after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse attending a protest in Minnesota. In addition to being roundly hated by the public they spend their work days terrorizing, ICE agents are also complaining of long working hours and high arrest quotas.