Closing summary
This concludes out live coverage of the second Trump administration for the wek, but we will be back on Monday. Here are the latest developments:
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A CDC advisory panel voted to abandon the decades-old recommendation that all babies get vaccinated against hepatitis B within the first 24 hours of life, in a major win for health secretary and vaccine-skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr.
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Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, video shown to senators showed.
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The US admiral who directed an attack on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on 2 September told lawmakers this week that the small boat destroyed by the US military is a series of strikes was moving narcotics to a larger vessel bound for the South American nation of Suriname, not the United States, two sources with direct knowledge of the testimony told CNN.
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New video of a US coast guard mission to disable a boat used by suspected drug smugglers, and arrest the suspects at sea, raises doubt about why lethal strikes on similar boats by the Pentagon, of questionable legality, are even necessary.
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The man charged with planting two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.
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Adelita Grijalva, Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, said she was pepper-sprayed by an “aggressive” federal agent during an ICE raid outside a Mexican restaurant in Tucson. Her office released video to substantiate the claim.
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The White House intensified its online spat with Sabrina Carpenter on Friday by posting video of the pop star that had been altered to make it seem as if she told a Saturday Night Live cast member of Cuban/Dominican descent, Marcello Hernández, that she was going to arrest him for being “too illegal”. In the original clip, Carpenter said she had to arrest someone for “being too hot”.
Key events
US government video of drug smugglers being arrested by coast guard raises questions about need for lethal strikes by military
As the Pentagon presses ahead with a campaign of lethal strikes on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the US coast guard released video on Friday, of US forces disabling a boat with gunfire and arresting suspected smugglers, which suggests that lethal strikes might be unnecessary.
According to a report from Fox News, the coast guard video posted online Friday shows a sniper from the service’s Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron “utilizing disabling fire against a go-fast vessel as it completes a drug interdiction mission for Operation Pacific Viper.” The video also appears to show coast guard officers boarding the disabled boat and detaining the crew.
Over 20,000 pounds of cocaine seized by the crew of USCGC Cutter Munro — the largest at-sea interdiction in 18+ years.
Through #OperationPacificViper, @USCG has accelerated counter-narcotics operations across the Eastern Pacific and delivered historic results in the fight… pic.twitter.com/eQkCHeZDzW— U.S. Coast Guard (@USCG) December 5, 2025
According to homeland security, over 20,000 pounds of cocaine was seized in the mission which took place in the eastern Pacific, the same area where the Pentagon conducted a lethal strike this week, killing four suspected drug smugglers.
The fact that the coast guard is able to stop smugglers, and arrest them, raises questions about why the Pentagon’s legal strikes, which might be illegal, are necessary.
An earlier coast guard video, shared by homeland security in September, similarly showed the arrest of suspected traffickers with 5,500 pounds of cocaine northeast of the Galápagos Islands on 10 September, at the same time that the Pentagon was conducting a series of lethal strikes in the Caribbean.
CARTEL CRACKDOWN.
Operation Pacific Viper continues @USCG’s efforts to protect the Homeland, counter narco-terrorism and disrupt the Transnational Criminal Organizations and cartels seeking to produce and traffic illicit drugs into the United States. pic.twitter.com/OpI01rTOuh
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) September 18, 2025
Likewise, in May, another coast guard video shared online showed a small-boat crew interdicting a suspected drug-smuggling vessel while on patrol the eastern Pacific on 17 April. In that operation too, arrests were made, but no missiles were launched and the suspects were not killed.
A federal judge in San Francisco cast a skeptical eye on the Trump justice department’s argument at a hearing on Friday that Donald Trump should be allowed to keep members of the California national guard under federal control for as long as he likes.
Trump initially federalized more than 4,000 California national guard troops in June, in response to protests in Los Angeles against federal immigration raids, but that number dropped to several hundred by late October, with only about 100 troops remaining in the Los Angeles area now.
At the hearing, US district court judge Charles Breyer said, “like diamonds, it’s forever; that’s the position of the federal government”, according to Chris Geidner, a legal journalist who listened to the proceeding.
“No crisis lasts forever,” Breyer added. ”I think experience teaches us that crises come and crises go. That’s the way it works.”
He pressed justice department lawyer Eric Hamilton for evidence that state authorities were either unable or unwilling to help keep federal personnel and property in the area safe.
“Is every violent protest a rebellion?” Breyer asked.
The government lawyer suggested that the hurling of a pair of inert Molotov cocktail explosive devices at a federal building that houses immigration offices in LA this week meant that there is still “at least a danger of rebellion.”
California officials have asked Breyer to issue a preliminary injunction returning control of remaining California national guard troops in Los Angeles to the state. Breyer did not immediately rule. He previously ruled the administration’s deployment of the California national guard was illegal, before an appeals court stayed his temporary restraining order.
“The national guard is not the president’s traveling private army to deploy where he wants, when he wants, for as long as he wants, for any reason he wants, or no reason at all,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said after the hearing.
Suspected drug smugglers killed in September attack were moving drugs to Suriname, not US – report
The US admiral who directed an attack on suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean on 2 September told lawmakers this week that the small boat destroyed by the US military is a series of strikes was moving narcotics to a larger vessel bound for the South American nation of Suriname, not the United States, two sources with direct knowledge of the testimony told CNN.
That information seems to contradict the case made for the attack by Donald Trump when he wrote on social media, hours after the four strikes on the boat, including those that killed two survivors clinging to the wreckage: “The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”
As the former Pentagon lawyer Ryan Goodman points out, the testimony of Adm Frank Bradley, that the drugs were bound for Suriname, makes it unlikely that they were ultimately destined for the US.
“Suriname is a transit country for South American cocaine, the majority of which is likely destined for Europe,” according to the US state department’s 2025 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.
Witkoff and Kushner plan to continue talks with Ukrainian delegation in Florida on Saturday
Donald Trump’s advisers and Ukrainian officials plan to meet for a third day of talks on Saturday in Florida, after claiming to have made progress on sketching out a security framework for postwar Ukraine, should Russia agree to halt its invasion.
The officials, who met for a second day in Florida on Friday, issued a joint statement as Trump continues to press Ukraine and Russia to agree to a US-brokered proposal to end more than a decade of war, which intensified with Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
“Both parties agreed that real progress toward any agreement depends on Russia’s readiness to show serious commitment to long-term peace, including steps toward de-escalation and cessation of killings,” the statement said. “Parties also separately reviewed the future prosperity agenda which aims to support Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction, joint U.S.–Ukraine economic initiatives, and long-term recovery projects.”
The talks with Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s lead negotiator, were led by Trump’s former golf buddy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who holds no government role. The US envoys previously held talks at the Kremlin in Moscow with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Friday’s session, the sixth meeting over the past two weeks with hte Ukrainian delegation, took place at the Shell Bay Club in Hallandale Beach, Florida, a private golf and destination owned by Witkoff’s real estate company.
Previous diplomatic attempts to broker peace, including Trump’s face-to-face meeting with Putin in Alaska, have come to nothing. Officials largely have kept a lid on how the latest talks are going, though the initial 28-point plan developed by the US, apparently based on a Russian wishlist, was leaked.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said his nation’s delegation in Florida wanted to hear from the US side about the talks at the Kremlin.
Asked by the Indian journalist Geeta Mohan this week to describe that Kremlin meeting with the US envoys, Putin said: “I doubt it would interest you to hear about it as it lasted five hours. Frankly, even I grew weary of it. Five hours is too much.”
In the same interview, Putin also insisted that Russia “did not annex Crimea” from Ukraine in 2014, after the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, was driven from power in protests. “It was ours already”, the Russian president said of the Ukrainian territory his forces seized that year.
“We simply came to help people who didn’t want their lives or fate tied to those who staged a coup in Ukraine,” Putin said. “They said, ‘Ah ha, nationalist extremists took over in Kyiv’”.
White House deletes video Sabrina Carpenter called ‘evil and disgusting’, replaces it with another trolling her
The White House intensified its online spat with Sabrina Carpenter on Friday by posting video of the pop star that had been altered to make it seem as if she told a Saturday Night Live cast member of Cuban/Dominican descent, Marcello Hernández, that she was going to arrest him for being “too illegal”. In the original clip, Carpenter said she had to arrest someone for “being too hot”.
Earlier in the week, Carpenter had strongly objected to her music being used, without permission, in a previous White House video celebrating the arrest of people who protested ICE raids. The singer had replied to a White House post of the video set to her 2024 hit Juno’ by writing: “this video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”
After Carpenter’s comment was viewed over 140 million times, the White House deleted that video, only to replace it with the new video that altered dialogue from on part of the singer’s recent appearance on Saturday Night Live. The new video also celebrated ICE arrests and included the caption, above Carpenter’s image: “PSA: If you’re a criminal illegal, you WILL be arrested & deported.”
Adelita Grijalva, Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, said she was pepper-sprayed by an “aggressive” federal agent during an ICE raid outside a Mexican restaurant in Tucscon.
“I was here – this is the restaurant I come to literally once a week – and was sprayed in the face by a very aggressive agent, pushed around by others, when I was literally not being aggressive,” she said in a video after the incident. “I was asking for clarification, which is my right as a member of congress.”
Agents also sprayed members of the press and the representative’s staff, she said. “I just can only imagine if they are gonna treat me like that, how they are treating everybody else.”
Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that Grijalva was not pepper-sprayed.
“She was in the vicinity of someone who *was* pepper sprayed as they were obstructing and assaulting law enforcement,” she said in a statement, adding that two law enforcement officers were “seriously injured” by a “mob”. “Presenting one’s self as a ‘Member of Congress’ doesn’t give you the right to obstruct law enforcement.”
In a statement after the incident, Grijalva sharply criticized ICE.
“ICE is a lawless agency under this Administration – operating with no transparency, no accountability, and open disregard for basic due process.”
Advocacy group urges court to uphold birthright citizenship
With the supreme court set to decide the legality of Trump’s order to heavily restrict birthright citizenship, the immigration advocacy group Fwd.US described the administration’s actions as “unlawful and unconstitutional”.
“As the Supreme Court has decided to take up this case on the merits, the Court should and must be as clear as the Constitution: those born in the United States are citizens, and no president can overturn the Constitution by executive order,” Todd Schulte, the organization’s president, said in a statement.
“Birthright citizenship is a core part of what it means to be American, guaranteeing that all children born here are equal under the law. Unlawful efforts to take it away would create confusion, discrimination, and lasting harm to families and communities. None of this should be up for debate.”
Letitia James, the New York attorney general, called it “a fundamental right of our Constitution”.
“Constitutional rights are not subject to the whims of a president,” she said.
The judge presiding over California’s lawsuit against the Trump administration challenged the federal government’s authority and rationale for continuing to maintain command over the national guard troops it deployed to Los Angeles earlier this year.
The Trump administration federalized the state’s national guard in June, dispatching some 4,000 troops in response to protests in the city over immigration raids, despite opposition from the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. The state quickly filed a lawsuit, with Newsom calling the move unprecedented and illegal, and the case has been unfolding in the courts for months.
During a hearing in San Francisco on Friday, Judge Charles Breyer appeared skeptical, according to a report from the Associated Press. He argued the situation in Los Angeles had changed since the troops were first deployed, and questioned whether the administration could command the state’s national guard indefinitely.
“No crisis lasts forever,” he said. ”I think experience teaches us that crises come and crises go. That’s the way it works.”
California has asked the judge to issue a preliminary injunction in order to return control of the remaining national guard troops in Los Angeles to the state, but Breyer did not immediately rule. He has previously ruled that the deployment was illegal, and ruled the administration must return control of the troops to California, but a ruling by an appeals court panel put the decision on hold.
Lawmakers press Google and Apple to remove apps tracking immigration agents
The House committee on homeland security has asked Google and Apple to detail what steps they are taking to remove mobile applications that allow users to track federal immigration officers, Reuters reports.
In letters sent today to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple head Tim Cook, committee leaders singled out ICEBlock, an app previously used to monitor ICE agents, saying apps hosted on their app stores risk “jeopardizing the safety of DHS personnel”. Lawmakers requested a briefing by 12 December.
The letters urged Google and Apple to ensure these apps cannot be used to target officers or obstruct lawful immigration enforcement.
The committee noted that while free speech is protected, it does not extend to advocacy that incites imminent lawless action, referencing a landmark supreme court ruling.
Google and Apple did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.
The letters follow concerns from the Trump administration that these tools allow users to anonymously report and track the movements of federal agents, including those from ICE and Customs and Border Protection.
In October, Google said that ICEBlock was never available on Google’s Play Store and added it had removed similar apps due to policy violations. Apple also removed ICEBlock and other tracking apps from its App Store at the time.
Attorney general Pam Bondi said the apps “put ICE agents at risk just for doing their jobs”, while Apple cited violations of its policies against content that could harm individuals or groups. The removals followed a surge in downloads of ICEBlock, which had more than a million users before being pulled.
Judge approves release of grand jury transcripts from abandoned Epstein investigation in Florida
A federal judge has cleared the justice department to release transcripts of a grand jury investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls in Florida, a case that ultimately ended without any charges being filed against the sex offender.
US district judge Rodney Smith said a recently passed federal law ordering the release of records related to Epstein overrode the usual rules about grand jury secrecy.
The law signed in November by Donald Trump compels the justice department, FBI and federal prosecutors to release later this month the vast troves of material they have amassed during investigations into Epstein that date back at least two decades. Today’s court ruling dealt with the earliest known federal inquiry.
Transcripts of the grand jury proceedings from the aborted federal case in Florida could shed more light on federal prosecutors’ decision not to go forward with it. Records related to state grand jury proceedings have already been made public.
When the documents will be released is unknown. The justice department asked the court to unseal them so they could be released with other records required to be disclosed under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The justice department hasn’t set a timetable for when it plans to start releasing information, but the law set a deadline of 19 December.
The law also allows the justice department to withhold files that it says could jeopardize an active federal investigation. Files can also be withheld if they’re found to be classified or if they pertain to national defense or foreign policy.
A judge had previously declined to release the grand jury records, citing the usual rules about grand jury secrecy, but Smith said the new federal law allowed public disclosure.
The justice department has separate requests pending for the release of grand jury records related to the sex trafficking cases against Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell in New York. The judges in those matters have said they plan to rule expeditiously.
Indiana House Republicans pass Trump-backed map, setting up high-stakes Senate fight
Indiana state House Republicans have passed a new state congressional map – at the behest of Donald Trump – that would likely gerrymander Democrats out of two congressional seats, advancing the legislation to the state Senate, where it is unclear if enough lawmakers will support its final passage.
Lawmakers in the Republican-majority House voted 57-41 in favor of the map, which splits the city of Indianapolis into four districts to help the GOP potentially win all nine Indiana congressional seats. While Trump and many other Republicans are celebrating the passage, the map faces its true test in the Senate, where many GOP lawmakers have opposed mid-decade redistricting.
Supreme court agrees to decide legality of Trump’s order to restrict birthright citizenship
The US supreme court has agreed to decide if Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship with an executive order is constitutional.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office in January that declared that children born to undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer be granted US citizenship automatically – seeking to upend a guarantee of US citizenship to anyone born on US soil that has been understood since 1898.
Legal challenges were prompt, with judges in Washington state, Maryland and Massachusetts freezing the policy for the whole country. The supreme court later sided with the Trump administration on technical grounds dealing with how the challenges to the policy were handled by lower courts through universal injunctions.
That ruling blunted the power of federal judges but did not resolve the legality of Trump’s directive. The ruling left open the possibility for courts to grant broad relief to states or to individual plaintiffs through class action lawsuits.
The supreme court didn’t announce a date to hear oral arguments but it will probably be in the next few months, with a decision handed down by the end of June.
The day so far
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A key CDC advisory panel voted to abandon the decades-old recommendation that all babies get vaccinated against hepatitis B within the first 24 hours of life, in a major win for health secretary and vaccine-sceptic Robert F Kennedy Jr. The 8-3 decision followed heated debate and three failed attempts at a vote. The advisers said that women who test negative for the virus should consult with their health care provider and decide “when or if” their child will be vaccinated at birth. They didn’t change the recommendation that newborns of mothers known to be infected or whose status is unknown be innoculated. The shift will only got into effect if approved by the CDC and is not expected to affect insurance coverage of the shots. Public health experts fear the change would lead to an increase in preventable infections in children. “Today is a defining moment for our country,” Michael Osterholm told the NYT. “We can no longer trust federal health authorities when it comes to vaccines.”
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The New Democrat Coalition, the largest House Democrat ideological caucus, called for Pete Hegseth to “resign immediately before his actions cost American lives”. It comes after the Pentagon’s inspector general’s report found he had endangered the lives of US service members by compromising sensitive military intelligence in a Signal group chat earlier this year. The coalition’s chair Brad Schneider and it’s national security working group chair Gil Cisneros issued a statement blasting Hegseth as “incompetent, reckless, and a threat to the lives of the men and women who serve in the armed forces”.
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Two men who survived a US airstrike on a suspected drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean clung to the wreckage for an hour before they were killed in a second attack, according a video of the episode shown to senators in Washington. The men were shirtless, unarmed and carried no visible radio or other communications equipment. They also appeared to have no idea what had just hit them, or that the US military was weighing whether to finish them off, two sources familiar with the recording told Reuters. The pair desperately tried to turn a severed section of the hull upright before they died. “The video follows them for about an hour as they tried to flip the boat back over. They couldn’t do it,” one source said.
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The man charged with planting two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican party headquarters the night before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, NBC News and CNN reported. He’s appeared in court this afternoon. The judge was expected to read Cole the charges he’s facing and inform him of his rights, and could also decide whether Cole should be detained for now or set conditions of his release while he awaits his next court date.
‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right
Jon Henley
Donald Trump’s administration has said Europe faces “civilisational erasure” within the next two decades as a result of migration and EU integration, arguing in a policy document that the US must “cultivate resistance” within the continent to “Europe’s current trajectory”.
Billed as “a roadmap to ensure America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history and the home of freedom on earth”, the US National Security Strategy makes explicit Washington’s support for Europe’s nationalist far-right parties.
The document, with a signed introduction by Trump, says Europe is in economic decline but its “real problems are even deeper”, including “activities of the EU that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition … and loss of national identities”.
The 33-page exposition of Trump’s “America First” worldview appears to espouse the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, saying several countries risk becoming “majority non-European” and Europe faces “the real and stark prospect of civilisational erasure”. It adds:
Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognisable in 20 years or less.
US policies must therefore include “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” as well as enabling Europe to “take primary responsibility for its own defence” and “opening European markets to US goods and services”.
