Key events
Closing summary
We are wrapping up our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but will return on Monday. Here are the latest developments:
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The attorney general, Pam Bondi, said that she is “deploying DOJ agents to ICE facilities—and wherever ICE comes under siege—to safeguard federal agents, protect federal property, and immediately arrest all individuals engaged in any federal crime.”
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Donald Trump posted a lengthy screed on social media in which he demanded that Microsoft fire its head of global affairs, Lisa Monaco. As deputy attorney general, Monaco had overseen criminal investigations of Trump’s effort to stay in office after losing the 2020 election and the Capitol riot on January 6 2021.
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Oregon lawmakers rejected Trump’s characterization of Portland as a scene of non-stop anarchy in dire need of federal troops as “a fable”.
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The FBI has fired about 20 agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, AP reports.
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Asked by CNN to reflect on Trump’s second term so far, Kamala Harris replied: “It’s painful to see. I mean, what’s happening with Comey: Are you fucking kidding me? The United States Department of Justice?”
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The US supreme court on Friday extended an order that permits the Trump administration to not spend more than $4bn in congressionally appropriated foreign aid money that it is seeking to cancel.
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After the indictment of James Comey, the president told reporters that he hopes “more” political adversaries will be prosecuted.
Oregon lawmakers reject Trump’s claims about Portland as ‘a fable’ intended to justify deploying troops
Both of Oregon’s senators and three of its representatives in Congress rejected Donald Trump’s latest false claims about mass anarchy in the city of Portland as a fiction intended to justify the unnecessary deployment of federal troops as part of an “authoritarian” crackdown.
Speaking at a federal building in downtown Portland after oversight visits to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facilities in the state, Ron Wyden, a Democratic senator, told reporters: “It’s important to recognize that the president’s argument is a fable, it does not resemble the truth.”
“If he watches a TV show in the morning and he see Portland mentioned, he says it’s a terrible place,” Wyden added.
During an Oval Office event to announce that the administration intends to investigate and disrupt what it claims is “organized political violence” funded by left-wing groups, Trump made several wild claims about Portland, which was a center of protests in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, but life has long since returned to normal and barriers around the federal courthouse and police headquarters downtown have been removed.
The president, however, apparently deceived by conservative outlets hyping video of a handful of protesters gathered outside an Ice facility in an outlying, residential neighborhood, insisted that the city has been in non-stop “anarchy” since 2020, and is barely livable.
“Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there, it’s amazing. But it’s anarchy out there,” the president said.
“You go out to Portland and you see what’s happening in Portland, this is like, nobody’s ever seen anything like it, every night, and this has gone on for years, they just burn the place down and you know the shop owners, most of them have left, but the few shops that are open, they just use plywood, just like 3/4 inch plywood, they don’t put store fronts in because they know it’s going to be burned down,” Trump insisted, falsely.
Describing the small number of protesters who have gathered outside an Ice facility that has been illegally used for detentions in a residential southwest neighborhood, Trump claimed, without evidence: “These are professional agitators, these are bad people and they’re paid a lot of money by rich people.”
“But we’re going to get out there and we’re gonna do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that,” the president said.
“These aren’t your protesters that make the sign in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it,” the president added. “These are professional anarchists and agitators, and they get hired by wealthy people.”
At Friday’s news conference, congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said: “This proclaimed ‘war on Antifa’ is completely a fallacy. Antifa is an ideology, it is not a group, and so we’re extremely concerned with what he’s going to try to do with that pronouncement.”
“Donald Trump does not care about safety. If he cared about safety he would not have released 1,600 convicted insurrectionists into the streets. He cares about control and authoritarianism,” she added. “Portland does not need the military. We do not want them, we do not need them, we do not welcome them to come here under his orders.”
At the same news conference, Jeff Merkley, Oregon’s other Democratic senator, pointed out that when they visited the Ice facility this week, there were no protesters present at all. He also disputed the notion “that Trump is trying to make a rational point based on evidence.”
“That is not correct. He is trying to project an image to justify forces that he can roll in to create chaos and then justify further authoritarian actions,” the senator added.
He also drew attention to video evidence from the local newspaper, the Oregonian, which showed that a recent clash between federal agents and a small number of protesters outside the facility had been entirely due to violence by the agents against the protesters, who remained peaceful.
Attorney general says she is deploying federal agents to guard Ice facilities
The attorney general, Pam Bondi, said on Friday that she is “deploying DOJ agents to ICE facilities—and wherever ICE comes under siege—to safeguard federal agents, protect federal property, and immediately arrest all individuals engaged in any federal crime.”
In her statement, posted on social media, Bondi added that she is responding to Donald Trump’s designation of certain forms of protest against immigration enforcement as acts of “terrorism” by instructing the FBI’s “Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country to disrupt and investigate all entities and individuals engaged in acts of domestic terrorism, including the repeated acts of violence and obstruction against federal agents.”
“The Department of Justice,” Bondi said, “will seek the most serious available charges against all participants in these criminal mobs, including conspiracy offenses, assault offenses, civil disorder offenses, and terrorism offenses.”
FBI reportedly fires agents photographed kneeling during 2020 racial justice protest in Washington
The FBI has fired about 20 agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers prompted nationwide protests, three people familiar with the matter told the Associated Press.
The bureau had first reassigned the agents last spring but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with The Associated Press.
The number of FBI employees fired was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20.
Jean-Frederic Dufour, the chief executive of Rolex, admitted in a letter to Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, that Donald Trump did bring up tariffs on Swiss imports, but only “in jest”, when he was a guest of the exclusive watchmaker during the US Open tennis final.
Warren had written to the Rolex CEO to ask, given “the President’s record of doling out special treatment to CEOs who are able to woo him with flattery, payoffs, or both”, whether he had invited Trump to watch the match from the Rolex box shortly after high tariffs on goods from Switzerland were announced, “to curry favor with the President in an effort to secure special-interest exemptions for Rolex products”.
“President Trump, never one to miss a rhetorical opportunity, did ask in jest whether he would have been invited had it not been for the tariffs – a moment that brought a round of laughter all around,” Dufour told Warren in a letter sent on Thursday.
“Corruption is not a laughing matter,” Warren said in a statement on Friday. “While families are getting crushed by Trump’s chaotic tariffs, Donald Trump and his rich friends are laughing about tariffs in a fancy box sponsored by a luxury watch brand. How much more out of touch can Trump be?”
Kamala Harris on Comey indictment: ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’
The former vice-president, Kamala Harris, weighed in on the indictment of James Comey in blunt terms on Friday during an interview with CNN.
Asked to reflect on Trump’s second term so far, Harris replied: “It’s painful to see. I mean, what’s happening with Comey: Are you fucking kidding me? The United States Department of Justice?”
Laura Loomer takes credit for Trump’s effort to get Lisa Monaco fired by Microsoft
Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist and social media influencer who serves as an adviser to Donald Trump, has taken credit for the president demanding on Friday that Microsoft fire Lisa Monaco, the former deputy attorney general who coordinated investigations into Trump’s attempt to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
“After I alerted President Trump to the fact that [Microsoft] has hired Lisa Monaco to be their new President of Global Affairs, he has just called on Microsoft to terminate her employment,” Loomer wrote on X.
She then tagged the Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and asked him: “are you going to comply?”
When Loomer first drew attention to Monaco’s hiring by Microsoft in July, she also noted that Reid Hoffman, the billionaire LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor she described as a “Jeffrey Epstein associate” is “on the board of Microsoft.”
When Trump was asked on Thursday in the Oval Office to name some of the “wealthy people” he was accusing of hiring “professional agitators” to carry out political violence, he said: “I hear names of some pretty rich people that are radical-left people… I hear about a guy named Reid Hoffman.”
Pentagon prepares for possible military strikes on drug targets inside Venezuela – report
Days before hundreds of top US military commanders have been ordered to gather at a marine corps base in Virginia next week, Pentagon officials are preparing for possible strikes on suspected drug traffickers inside Venezuela in the coming weeks, NBC News reports, citing unnamed sources.
Critics of Donald Trump have already accused him of seeking to use military strikes against suspected drug traffickers off the coast of Venezuela in recent weeks as a distraction from the clamor over his administration’s decision not to release files from the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade.
If US strikes escalate to targets inside Venezuela, Democrats could echo the claims made by Republicans in 1998 when Bill Clinton fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a training camp in Afghanistan associated with Osama bin Laden.
Those 20 August 1998 strikes were launched two weeks after al-Qaida had killed 224 people in bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but also just three days after Clinton had admitted to an inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky.
A chorus of Republicans quickly accused Clinton of trying to create a foreign crisis to distract attention away from the sex scandal, and the accusation was reflected on the banners and signs of Sudanese protesters who marched in Khartoum that weekend holding up a large, handmade sign with an image of Lewinsky emblazoned with the slogan: “No War for Monika.”
At a Pentagon news conference after the strikes aimed at the then relatively unknown bin Laden, one reporter asked Clinton’s defense secretary, William Cohen, about suggestions that the timing of the attack bore “a striking resemblance to Wag the Dog”, the 1997 film about a White House that hires a Hollywood producer to create a fake war to divert the public from a sex scandal involving the president.
“The only motivation driving this action today was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities,” Cohen replied. “That is the sole motivation.”
“I don’t think any president, regardless of party, would ever take military action to distract from personal problems,” Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary, told Jay Leno that week in an appearance on the Tonight Show. “Most of the Congress, most of the American people I think, will say: ‘I don’t believe that our president, regardless of how bad things are, would do that.’”
Trump backs away from claim that deal to end the war in Gaza is close
Donald Trump appeared to admit on Friday evening that his optimism about a deal to end the war in Gaza, expressed on Friday morning, had been premature.
“I am pleased to report that we are having very inspired and productive discussions with the Middle Eastern Community concerning Gaza,” the president wrote on his personal social media platform, hours after Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told the United Nations that Israel’s military was “no done yet.”
“Intense negotiations have been going on for four days, and will continue for as long as necessary,” Trump added.
Hours earlier, as he left the White House to cheer on the American Ryder Cup golf team, Trump told reporters: “It’s looking like we have a deal on Gaza.”
“I think it’s a deal that will get the hostages back, it’s going to be a deal that will end the war,” he added. “It’s going to be peace. I think we have a deal.”
By nightfall in Washington however, Trump had retreated to merely claiming that there was “Enthusiasm for getting a Deal done”.
Lauren Aratani
Local TV conglomerate Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar Media Group said their ABC-affiliate stations will start airing Jimmy Kimmy Live! again on Friday night, ending their preempting of the show.
Sinclair and fellow station owner Nexstar had continued to preempt Kimmel’s late-night talkshow even after ABC had put Kimmel back on air.
Together, Sinclair and Nexstar’s preemption of the show left about 25% of TV viewers in the US unable to watch it, with the two companies owning 70 ABC-affiliate stations combined.
