Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:
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Federal prosecutors reportedly tried, and failed, to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday over a social media video they recorded to remind service members in the military and intelligence community that they are not required to follow illegal orders.
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Donald Trump’s sudden turn against a new, publicly owned bridge being constructed to connect Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario came right after a Republican donor who owns a private, rival bridge met with Trump’s commerce secretary, the New York Times reports.
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Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, and the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, have taken on the daunting task of trying to explain to Trump that the reasons he cited for threatening to block the opening of a new bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan are entirely untrue.
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In an appearance on the rightwing channel Real America’s Voice, a Republican congressman from Missouri, Mark Alford, said “we are still investigating” the lyrics of a song performed in Spanish by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny during his Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday.
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As the US supreme court prepares to rule on whether Trump does have the power to impose tariffs on foreign imports, to address a self-declared economic emergency, the president confirmed in an interview that he sets tariff rates based, in part, on his own feelings about the leaders of other nations.
Key events
Trump supporters struggle to reframe damning evidence Trump knew of Epstein’s crimes
Trump supporters have been scrambling to put a positive spin on the news that, as the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown first reported on Monday, a former Palm Beach police chief told the FBI in 2019 that Donald Trump called him in July 2006, when Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest for sex crimes was in the newspapers, to say: “Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this”.
Although that statement directly contradict the president’s claim in 2019 that he “had no idea” about Epstein’s crimes, Trump supporters, including the new hosts of the Charlie Kirk podcast, claimed on Tuesday that it meant Trump had been something like a whistleblower.
This led an exasperated Brown, whose reporting for the Herald in 2017 and 2018 led to the federal prosecutions of Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to explain on social media: “To make clear: when Trump called the chief, it was after the Epstein story became public — when Epstein was arrested. Palm beach police had been investigating the case since 2005.”
The retired Palm Beach police chief, Michael Reiter confirmed to Brown that a partially redacted document in the Epstein files posted online by the justice department was an account of a 2019 FBI interview with him in which he described the call from Trump.
As Trump’s fans struggled to smooth out the contradictions in his ever-shifting story about what he knew when of the sex crimes carried out by the man he socialized with for most of two decades, they also had to confront the fact that Trump told the police chief in 2006 that Maxwell was “evil”, but then said in 2020, after Maxwell’s arrest, when asked at a news conference if he expected her “to turn in powerful men”, “I just wish her well”.
Federal prosecutors reportedly tried, and failed, to secure criminal charges against six Democratic lawmakers over social media video
The US attorney’s office in Washington DC, led by the former Fox News commentator Jeanine Pirro, reportedly tried, and failed, to convince a grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers on Tuesday over a social media video they recorded to remind service members in the military and intelligence community that they are not required to follow illegal orders.
According to reporting from NBC News and the New York Times, federal prosecutors tried to charge the six lawmakers, all of whom previously served in the military or intelligence agencies, with violating a law that makes it a crime to “to interfere with, impair, or influence the loyalty, morale, or discipline of the military or naval forces of the United States”.
Two of the lawmakers, senators Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, posted statements denouncing the effort to prosecute them for simply reminding active-duty members of the military and intelligence services of their Constitutional obligation to not break the law.
“This is an outrageous abuse of power by Donald Trump and his lackies,” Kelly said. “It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to censure me and threaten to demote me, now it appears they tried to have me charged with a crime — all because of something I said that they didn’t like. That’s not the way things work in America. Donald Trump wants every American to be too scared to speak out against him. The most patriotic thing any of us can do is not back down.”
“Today, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro attempted to persuade a Grand Jury to indict me,” Slotkin said. “This was in response to me organizing a 90-second video that simply quoted the law. Pirro did this at the direction of President Trump, who said repeatedly that I should be investigated, arrested, and hanged for sedition. Today, it was a grand jury of anonymous American citizens who upheld the rule of law and determined this case should not proceed. Hopefully, this ends this politicized investigation for good.”
The other lawmakers, all serving in the House, are: Chris Deluzio, a Navy veteran; Maggie Goodlander, a former Navy reservist; Chrissy Houlahan, a former Air Force officer; and Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger.
The lawmakers recorded their video message as concern spread over the Trump administration’s assertion that the extrajudicial killing of suspected drug smugglers by the military was justified by the laws of combat, arguing that drug smugglers are “narco-terrorists” at war with the United States.
After the video was released, it was revealed that the very first boat attack, in September, involved a deliberate follow-on strike to kill wounded survivors clinging to wreckage. Ttat attack was described by legal experts as a textbook war crime.
Senate intelligence committee Democrat wants to know why Tulsi Gabbard was at Georgia elections office
After the FBI search warrant affidavit for its raid an elections office in Fulton County, Georgia was released on Tuesday, showing that it was based in part of debunked conspiracy theories, Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice-chair of the Senate intelligence committee, is demanding an explanation as to why Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was present.
“The newly unsealed affidavit shows this search originated from the frivolous claims of Kurt Olsen, an attorney who traffics in debunked falsehoods about the 2020 election. It also makes clear there was no foreign intelligence nexus,” Warner said in a statement. “So why was the Director of National Intelligence there?”
“When the nation’s top intelligence official inserts herself into a matter with no connection to a foreign threat, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the objective was political – namely, getting back into Donald Trump’s good graces – and that her presence was meant to lay the groundwork for baseless claims of foreign interference,” warner added. “Americans should be deeply concerned about what someone with sweeping authority over the country’s intelligence apparatus might do to achieve that.”
Warner, joined by Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, also called on Gabbard to “immediately schedule an Intelligence Community briefing for senators on election security concerns”, and to explain her presence at the Georgia raid, which they said would “further perpetuate the repeatedly disproven lie that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Sam Levine
The FBI’s rationale behind raiding the Fulton county election office in Georgia last month was based on debunked claims from election deniers and came after a referral from a White House lawyer who tried to overturn the 2020 election, a search warrant affidavit unsealed on Tuesday reveals.
The warrant offers the first insight for the basis for the FBI’s 28 January raid on the Fulton county election office. FBI officials seized nearly 700 boxes of election materials in the raid.
The FBI’s investigation “originated” from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen, an attorney who sought to overturn the 2020 election and contacted justice department officials to urge them to file a motion at the US supreme court to nullify the election. Olsen began working at the White House last year to investigate election integrity problems.
The FBI’s witnesses in the investigation include a cadre of conservative activists who have been hounding state officials with claims of wrongdoing in Fulton county for years. Many of their claims have been investigated by state officials and debunked.
Other witnesses include two Trump-aligned members of the Georgia state election board whom Trump publicly praised as “pit bulls” at a 2024 rally. Those two members are Janice Johnston and Janelle King, who is married to Kelvin King, a current candidate for Georgia secretary of state.
“Seizure of the election records would corroborate the analysis that evinces that election records were destroyed and or the tabulation of votes included materially false votes, either through duplicated scanning of specific ballots, interjection of pristine ballots, or other methods described above,” Hugh Raymond Evans, an FBI special agent, wrote in the affidavit.
Canadian officials try fact-checking Trump on false claims about Windsor-Detroit bridge
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, and the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, have taken on the daunting task of trying to explain to Donald Trump that the reasons he cited for threatening to block the opening of a new bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan are entirely untrue.
Trump’s sudden reversal on the Gordie Howe International Bridge, announced in a social media diatribe on Monday, baffled Canadian officials since the president had endorsed the infrastructure project, which is being paid for by Canada, in 2017, and even signed legislation in 2020 to fund customs and border protection screening systems on the US side.
Carney told reporters that he spoke to Trump on Tuesday about the bridge, “I explained that Canada paid for the construction of bridge, $4bn, that the ownership is shared between the state of Michigan and the government of Canada, and that in the construction of the bridge, obviously there’s Canadian steel, Canadian workers, but also, US steel, US workers that were involved.”
“This is a great example of co-operation between our countries, look forward to its opening,” Carney said he told Trump. “And what is particularly important, of course, is the commerce and the tourism and the voyages of Canadians and Americans that will go across that bridge.”
In his tirade against the bridge late Monday, Trump had wrongly claimed that there was “virtually no U.S. content” used in the construction and said Canada owns “both the Canada and the United States side”.
The bridge is, as Carney said, actually publicly owned by both Canada and Michigan.
In an appearance on CBS News on Tuesday, Ford, the Ontario premier, expressed surprise that Trump had turned against a project he supported during his first term, before construction began. “He was all in favor of it,” Ford noted, accurately.
Blocking the bridge from opening this year, Ford said, “is going to hurt the economy in Michigan, it’ll hurt Ontario, and this is all about politics, it’s not about fact… And it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t have the facts, and I’d be more than happy to give the facts.”
Ford then referenced what he called false claims made at a news conference on Tuesday by Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt. “I heard a little thing from Karoline there and unfortunately his spokesperson doesn’t have the facts either.”
Leavitt claimed that “the fact that Canada will control what crosses the Gordie Howie-Howe bridge and owns the land on both sides is unacceptable to the president.”
“Well, its totally inaccurate, word for word,” Ford said, noting that bridge traffic was determined by a binational agreement between the US and Canada. “And then saying that we control both sides of the bridge is just so far from the truth. Matter of fact, the interchange was built with Michigan workers, Michigan concrete, Michigan steel.”
“They need to get their facts straight,” Ford said, of Trump and his spokesperson.
“And by the way, they’re going to own, Michigan, the agreement is that they own 50% of the bridge, and Canadians paid for it,” Ford added.
Ford’s effort to educate Trump on the facts is an uphill struggle, particularly given that his regional government produced a television ad in October that used historical remarks by Ronald Reagan to argue that tariffs are a terrible idea. That ad enraged Trump, despite being entirely factual.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that the owner of a rival, private bridge, who stands to lose revenues to the new bridge, met with Trump’s commerce secretary on Monday, who then spoke with Trump before the president started sharing disinformation about the new, publicly owned bridge.
Trump’s turn against new US-Canada bridge reportedly came after owner of rival bridge met with Lutnick
Donald Trump’s sudden turn against a new, publicly owned bridge being constructed to connect Detroit, Michigan to Windsor, Ontario came right after a Republican donor who owns a private, rival bridge met with Trump’s commerce secretary, the New York Times reports.
Citing two officials briefed on the meeting, the Times reports that Matthew Moroun, the heir to a Detroit-based trucking fortune whose family has operated the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor for decades met with Trump’s embattled commerce secretary Howard Lutnick on Monday in Washington. Lutnick spent part of Monday testifying to Congress about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender, which were closer than he had previously stated.
After that meeting Moroun, Lutnick spoke with Trump by phone about the bridge, the officials told the Times.
Trump then issued his threat to block the bridge, in a hyperbolic post in which he also stated as fact the wild conspiracy theory that China would require Canadians to stop playing ice hockey as a condition of a China-Canada trade deal.
Mouron took over his family business in 2020, after his father, Matty Moroun died at 93. In his father’s obituary, the Detroit Free Press reported that the older Moroun’s “relentless efforts to defend his monopoly as owner of the only bridge crossing between Detroit and Windsor led to endless litigation in the U.S. and Canada. A Wayne County judge even threw Moroun in jail for contempt in 2012 for his failure to comply with the judge’s orders.”
Republican congressman says he is ‘still investigating’ Bad Bunny lyrics he could not understand
In an appearance on the rightwing channel Real America’s Voice on Tuesday, a Republican congressman from Missouri, Mark Alford, said “we are still investigating” the lyrics of a song performed in Spanish by the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny during his Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday.
“The lyrics, from what we have seen, from Bad Bunny are very disturbing,” Alford said, apparently referring to outrage stirred by a rightwing media personality, Megan Basham, who posted an English translation of explicit lyrics from the Spanish-language song Safaera without realizing that Bad Bunny had performed a cleaned-up version for the televised broadcast, which was also partially obscured by bleeps.
“If it holds true that, um… you know I don’t speak fluent Spanish, okay?” Alford continued. “I know how to ask where the bathroom is – but, these lyrics, if it is true what was said on national television, we have a lot of questions for the entities that broadcast this and we’ll be talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this.”
“This could be much worse than than the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, let’s put it that way,” Alford added.
“But at least that was a malfunction, I mean this was apparently intentional,” the host Gina Loudon, a former Trump campaign surrogate who once appeared on the reality show Wife Swap, said.
“This was intentional, yes” Alford said.
“And they could not have said this were it in English,” Loudon added, apparently also unaware that the explicit lyrics had not been heard on the broadcast, before calling the show “fully not understandable to English-speaking people”.
The host then praised Alford for his work – investigating things that did not happen. “Congressman Mark Alford, always on top of it,” Loudon said. “Thank you so much for being here.”
Nick Robins-Early
Jeffrey Epstein engineered an intimate relationship between a woman in his network and Kimbal Musk, who is the brother of Elon Musk and on the board of directors at Tesla, according to emails from the Department of Justice’s recent release of documents involving the convicted sex offender. The younger Musk and the woman were involved for around six months between 2012 and 2013, with Kimbal Musk describing them as “dating”.
In the lead up to Musk and the woman’s first meeting, Epstein and his longtime associate Boris Nikolic labored to set them up and bring her to a birthday party Musk was throwing – with Nikolic telling Epstein “please prepare [the woman] —;)”.
“Jeffrey and Boris, many thanks for connecting me with [the woman],” Musk later emailed Epstein and Nikolic in October 2012 after a lunch at Epstein’s Manhattan apartment. “I believe you both played a role. :)”
Throughout Musk and the woman’s time together, she forwarded Epstein several of the personal messages Musk sent to her and asked Epstein for guidance on the relationship. There is nothing in the emails to suggest that Musk was aware of her backchannel correspondence with Epstein.
Through her lawyer, the woman has said in recent years that she was trapped, coerced and abused by Epstein while in his circle. The woman has not publicly told her story nor spoken about her relationship with Musk, and the Guardian has chosen not to publish her name. Her full name appears in the documents due to a faulty redaction, while other mentions in the emails match her first name and an itinerary of her travels with Musk that Epstein retained. Attempts to reach her and her lawyer did not receive any reply. A request for comment sent to Nikolic via his venture capital firm did not receive a reply. Nikolic, who was named as a backup executor of Epstein’s estate, has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein and previously said he did not consent to being named as an executor.
Around an hour after the Guardian sent Kimbal Musk a request for comment Monday for this article, he posted a statement on X about his relationship with Epstein and the woman. A spokesperson from his family office directed the Guardian to his post, but Musk did not respond to a detailed set of questions on his ties to Epstein. Musk has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
Trump confirms to Fox host that he sets tariff rates based on his own mood
As the US supreme court prepares to rule on whether Donald Trump does have the power to impose tariffs on foreign imports, to address a self-declared economic emergency, the president confirmed in an interview broadcast on Tuesday that he sets tariff rates based, in part, on his own feelings about the leaders of other nations.
Speaking to the Fox host Larry Kudlow, who was the director of the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term, Trump repeated a story he told at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month about why he raised tariffs on imports from Switzerland because the country’s female leader irritated him in a phone call.
“I had an incident with a very nice country, Switzerland,” Trump began. “I put on a 30% tariff, which is very low… and I got an emergency call from, I believe the prime minister of Switzerland.” The president was referring to. call from Switzerland’s president at the time, Karin Keller-Sutter.
“She was very aggressive, but nice, but very aggressive. ‘Sir, we are small country. We can’t do this, we can’t do this, we are a sm-’, I couldn’t get her off the phone,” Trump recalled.
“I said, ‘You may be a small country, but we have a $42 billion deficit with you,’ Trump recalled saying. In fact, the US goods trade deficit with Switzerland was $38.3 billion in 2024; but the US also had a services trade surplus of $29.7 billion with the country the same year.
“‘No, no, we are small country’, again and again and again,” Trump said Keller-Sutter, whose name he never used, told him. “I couldn’t get her off the phone. So it was a 30%, and I didn’t really like the way she talked to us, and so, instead of giving her a reduction, I raised it to 39%.”
Katie Porter says ‘pathetic’ Trump is cutting health funds for Californians ‘just because we didn’t vote for him’
Katie Porter, the former Democratic congresswoman who is running for California governor, attacked Donald Trump in response to a report from Bloomberg News that the administration is cutting public health grants from four states run by Democrats.
On Monday, Bloomberg News reported:
The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to cut hundreds of millions of dollars in public health grants to four Democratic states because they don’t align with the White House’s priorities, according to people familiar with the matter.
The agency is starting to slash the funding later this week with the goal of reaching about $600 million in cuts to California, Minnesota, Illinois and Colorado, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are not public.
In response to the news, Porter, the former frontrunner whose campaign has flagged since video of her losing her tempter with a reporter and an aide went viral last year, suggested that Californians need “a fighter” like her to deal with Trump.
“Donald Trump is systematically gutting public health funding for Californians—just because we didn’t vote for him,” Porter wrote on social media. “It’s pathetic and unbecoming of a leader. Our next governor needs to be a fighter who is unafraid to dish it back at Trump and protect these essential programs.”
“The CDC claims these grants undermine American values. I disagree,” she added. “Access to health care is an American value. Cutting funding for HIV prevention and support for LGBTQ+ seniors is a betrayal of the very people the government is sworn to protect. This is federal malpractice, plain and simple.”
“By abandoning these federal commitments, the CDC is leaving local governments holding the bag and shifting the bill onto California taxpayers. This can’t continue. As Governor, I’ll use every option on the table to fight back and limit Trump’s harm to Californians,” Porter pledged.
Since the clips of her ill-tempered exchanges were published, Porter has sought to frame her combative personality as an asset in the era of Trump. It remains to be seen whether California voters agree.
