Former inspector general calls for audit of Epstein files release to be conducted ‘without undue influence’
Mark Greenblatt, who was the inspector general for the US Interior Department before Donald Trump fired him in January, has released a statement calling for the Department of Justice’s office of the inspector general to carry out its audit of the justice department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act “without undue influence”.
Greenblatt, who was appointed as inspector general during Trump’s first term in 2019, investigated the clearing of Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Park outside the White House in 2020, for a photo op featuring the president holding up a Bible, and the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
In his statement, Greenblatt called the announcement of an audit of the partial release of documents from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender who socialized with Trump for nearly two decades, “an important and much needed development.”
“This is exactly the kind of independent oversight the American people expect, especially in a case involving powerful individuals, vulnerable victims, and deeply serious alleged crimes,” he continued. “When Congress mandates transparency, it is essential that agencies carry out that directive completely and without undue influence. This audit is a critical step in ensuring that the Department is meeting both the letter and the spirit of the law.”
He added:
It is critically important the audit is thorough and independent. This effort must examine not just what information has been released, but how decisions are made about what is withheld or redacted.
The American people deserve confidence that these judgments are being made fairly and without political considerations. Independent oversight is most important when public trust is on the line. A rigorous, fact-based review will help ensure accountability and reinforce confidence in the process.
The stakes here are clear: whether transparency laws will be enforced as intended and whether the public can have confidence that no one is beyond scrutiny.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here’s the latest:
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The Department of Justice announced an internal audit of its compliance with a law mandating the release files from the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender who socialized with Donald Trump for nearly two decades.
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The Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana, more than four months after Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to move it from schedule I to schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act.
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Trump, apparently abandoning his attempt to frighten Iran’s leaders into negotiating by channeling Richard Nixon’s “madman” theory, ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in his conflict with Iran.
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Trump has decided to invite wanted war criminal Vladimir Putin to the G-20 summit in December at Trump’s Doral golf resort, the Washington Post reports.
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Trump confirmed that the government is considering a plan to bail out or ‘“just buy” Spirit Airlines, but confused Barack Obama with Joe Biden, and Jet Blue with People Express, which has been defunct since 1987.
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India’s foreign ministry denounced comments from the rightwing US commentator Michael Savage, posted on social media by Trump, which argued against awarding birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants “from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet”.
Backlash in India to Trump amplifying screed against birthright citizenship that calls country a ‘hellhole’
On Thursday, India’s foreign ministry denounced comments from the rightwing US commentator Michael Savage, posted on social media by Donald Trump, which argued against awarding birthright citizenship to the US-born children of immigrants “from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet”.
Trump also shared video of the monologue from Savage.
India’s foreign ministry spokesman, Randhir Jaiswal, called the Savage remarks Trump promoted, “obviously uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste”.
By endorsing Savage’s diatribe against the American-born children of Chinese or Indian immigrants, whom he claimed are “coming here by airplane in the ninth month of their pregnancy” and have “almost no loyalty to this country”, Trump appears to have ignored the claim to citizenship of several people close to him.
Trump’s father, for instance, was born to a non-citizen immigrant mother who arrived in New York five months pregnant only because her husband was denied permission to resettle in Bavaria, as she wished, because he was accused of dodging military service and the family was ordered deported.
Trump’s mother, an immigrant from Scotland, was also not yet a citizen when she gave birth in the US to his two older siblings.
More recently, the current second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, was born to Indian immigrant parents in San Diego, making her a citizen under the 14th Amendment to the US constitution, which Trump has challenged through an executive order currently before the US supreme court.
Although Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, argued before the court that the order would not be applied retroactively, if it was to be upheld by the court (as seems unlikely), the citizenship of children born to non-citizen parents, even those on visas that give them a legal right to live in the US, could be cast into doubt.
A strict application of that order to repeal birthright citizenship could potentially be used to strip citizenship from not just the vice-president’s wife but also Trump’s 2024 rival, Kamala Harris, who was born in Oakland to parents on student visas.
Jeremy Barr
Dozens of protesters, including members of Congress, gathered along the National Mall on Thursday to protest an “intimate” dinner being held by Paramount Skydance chief executive David Ellison “in celebration of the First Amendment” and “honoring the Trump White House and CBS White House Correspondents”, and attended by Donald Trump.
Paramount has faced criticism for the dinner, which has been seen by some as illustrative of the cozy relationship between the Ellisons and the White House – right as the Trump administration is weighing whether to approve the company’s $110bn merger with CNN parent company WarnerBros Discovery. The dinner comes before Saturday’s White House correspondents’ dinner, which Trump will attend. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is expected to sit at one of the many tables bought by CBS News for the event.
Earlier Thursday, WBD shareholders voted “overwhelmingly” to approve the merger, which will still require approval from the Department of Justice and European regulators.
US representative Jamie Raskin, who has been vocal in his criticism of the Ellisons’ ownership of CBS News, referred to the event as “a lavish oligarch’s dinner for Donald Trump”.
Trump confirms government could ‘just buy’ Spirit Airlines, then confuses Obama with Biden and Jet Blue with People Express
Donald Trump confirmed that the government is considering a plan to bail out or ‘“just buy” Spirit Airlines, the troubled budget carrier that could be forced into liquidation by spiking jet fuel prices caused by his war with Iran.
Asked by a reporter if his administration was going to buy Spirit, an idea that was denounced by two Republican senators on Wednesday, Trump said: “we’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it- I think we just buy it.”
But before the president got around the answering the question, he took a little excursion, by first misstating who was president when Spirit’s proposed merger with Jet Blue was blocked by a federal judge in 2022, and then confusing Jet Blue with People Express, a carrier that went out of business in 1987.
“So Spirit is an airline that’s had some trouble,” Trump said. “They were going to merge with People Express or one of them a number of years ago and Barack Hussein Obama decided it was a bad idea. How did that work out? It was out bad for both of them. That would have been a natural merger.”
To untangle Trump’s confusion: Joe Biden was president in 2022, not Barack Obama; a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan blocked Spirit’s merger with Jet Blue, not People Express, which stopped operating 22 years before Obama became president.
In 1988, the year after People Express went defunct, Trump launched a failed airline of his own, the Trump Shuttle, which flew between New York, Boston and Washington DC for two years before going our of business in 1990, when jet fuel prices spiked after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Earlier in the White House event on Thursday, as the ambassadors of Lebanon and Israel looked on, Trump responded to a question from a Lebanese reporter on the role of Saudi Arabia in the byzantine politics of Lebanon by praising the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman and then pivoting into a sharply partisan attack on his Democratic predecessors.
“We’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said, repeating something he claims the Saudi prince told him last year. “We suffered years of abuse by people that were grossly incompetent, like Biden, like Obama. Obama was incompetent. He was a great divider,” Trump said.
Trump discusses Los Angeles wildfire recovery with city’s Democratic mayor Karen Bass
Donald Trump posted a photograph of himself meeting the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, in the Oval Office on Thursday on his social media platform.
According to Trump, he met Bass and Kathryn Barger, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors “to discuss the progress made on the horrific fires that ravaged Los Angeles, and the surrounding area.”
After giving himself a large helping of credit for that progress, Trump criticized banks, and suggested that his administration “will be looking into their actions,” and singled out Wells Fargo. “The Banks must treat those people, who so horribly lost their Homes in this tragic fire, very fairly and well,” Trump wrote.
Bass and Barger issued a joint statement on the meeting, which was illustrated, but only on the website of Barger, a Republican, by a photograph of them smiling as they stood on either side of a seated Trump. The two LA leaders said:
“This afternoon, we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything. We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds, as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe – and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on LA families.
“Our job is to fight for our communities. When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
Former inspector general calls for audit of Epstein files release to be conducted ‘without undue influence’
Mark Greenblatt, who was the inspector general for the US Interior Department before Donald Trump fired him in January, has released a statement calling for the Department of Justice’s office of the inspector general to carry out its audit of the justice department’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act “without undue influence”.
Greenblatt, who was appointed as inspector general during Trump’s first term in 2019, investigated the clearing of Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Park outside the White House in 2020, for a photo op featuring the president holding up a Bible, and the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
In his statement, Greenblatt called the announcement of an audit of the partial release of documents from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender who socialized with Trump for nearly two decades, “an important and much needed development.”
“This is exactly the kind of independent oversight the American people expect, especially in a case involving powerful individuals, vulnerable victims, and deeply serious alleged crimes,” he continued. “When Congress mandates transparency, it is essential that agencies carry out that directive completely and without undue influence. This audit is a critical step in ensuring that the Department is meeting both the letter and the spirit of the law.”
He added:
It is critically important the audit is thorough and independent. This effort must examine not just what information has been released, but how decisions are made about what is withheld or redacted.
The American people deserve confidence that these judgments are being made fairly and without political considerations. Independent oversight is most important when public trust is on the line. A rigorous, fact-based review will help ensure accountability and reinforce confidence in the process.
The stakes here are clear: whether transparency laws will be enforced as intended and whether the public can have confidence that no one is beyond scrutiny.
Israel’s US-born ambassador, who met Lebanese counterpart in Oval Office, was part of extremist Jewish Defense League
As he attempts to wind down the regional war in the Middle East he kicked off in February by joining Israel in attacking Iran, Donald Trump just hosted the ambassadors of Lebanon and Israel in the Oval Office, and invited television cameras in to capture the foreign officials praising him.
The ambassadors agreed to extend a ceasefire in Lebanon, which has been bombarded and invaded by Israel as it seeks to degrade the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and Trump pledged to support the Lebanese government’s efforts to govern without the support of Hezbollah, which also has a political wing with significant support in the country.
As +972 magazine, an independent Israeli and Palestinian outlet, reported last year, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, was born and raised in the United States.
Leiter thanked Trump for bringing him together with the Lebanese ambassador and cast Israel’s objective as “liberating Lebanon” from what he called Hezbollah’s “occupation” of the country. Hezbollah is, however, a Lebanese movement which only came into being in 1982 in response to a previous invasion and occupation of Lebanon by Israel.
Before he emigrated to Israel at the age of 18, and joined the Israeli military, Leiter was, +972 reported, “a member of the far-right Jewish Defense League, a violent vigilante group founded by the extremist American rabbi Meir Kahane.”
After moving to Israel, the same publication noted, “Leiter joined Kach, the fascist political party and movement that Kahane had founded after his own immigration. Initially conceived as an international branch of the JDL, Kach eventually transformed into an authentic Israeli outfit that spawned its own political credo: Kahanism. Leiter was later nominated as a leader of the radical Jewish settlement in Hebron, before becoming a leader in the wider settler movement.”
In 1994, after another American immigrant to Israel who was also a Kach member and Kahane follower, Baruch Goldstein, murdered 29 Palestinians at a mosque in the West Bank city of Hebron, +972 explained, “both the Israeli and US governments classified Kach as a terrorist organization.”
The US removed Kach from its list of foreign terrorist organizations in 2022, during the Biden administration.
Lebanese ambassador to US thanks Trump and says he can help ‘make Lebanon great again’
During an Oval Office meeting on Thursday, Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, thanked Donald Trump for brokering a ceasefire to restrain Israel from bombing her country, and added a reference to Maga for good measure.
“I want to really say thank you to the United States, under your leadership, for all your effort to help and to support Lebanon,” she said. “And I think with your help, with your support, we can make Lebanon great again.”
Video of the comments was quickly shared on social media by the Trump White House.
Trump announces ceasefire in Lebanon to be extended by three weeks
Writing on his social media platform, Donald Trump just announced that the ceasefire “between Israel and Lebanon” will be extended by three weeks.
The president said that the extension was agreed after he hosted an Oval Office meeting with unnamed “High Ranking Representatives of Israel and Lebanon” that was attended by the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the US ambassadors to Israel and Lebanon.
Trump also wrote that the US “is going to work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah”, the Islamist militant and political group backed by Iran that Israel has blamed for its recent invasion and bombing of Lebanon.
“I look forward in the near future to hosting the Prime Minister of Israel, Bibi Netanyahu, and the President of Lebanon, Joseph Aoun,” Trump wrote.
Benjamin Netanyahu, is a frequent visitor to the Trump White House the president addresses by his nickname, Bibi. Netanyahu, who reportedly convinced the president to attack Iran during his last visit, has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in connection with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, but the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court and does not enforce its warrants.
Trump intends to invite wanted war criminal Vladimir Putin to G-20 in Miami – report
Having said for years that ejecting Russia from meetings of the world’s largest economic powers, over its annexation of Ukrainian territory in 2013, was a mistake, Donald Trump has reportedly decided to invite the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, to the Group of 20 leaders’ summit scheduled for December at Trump’s Doral golf resort in Miami, the Washington Post reports.
The Post, citing unnamed administration officials, reports:
In a statement, the State Department said that President Donald Trump “has been clear that Russia is welcome to attend all G-20 meetings as the United States focuses on delivering a successful and productive summit.”
“No formal invitations have been issued at this time, but Russia is a G-20 member and will be invited to attend ministerial meetings and the leaders’ summit,” said a senior administration official.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin in 2023, accusing him of responsibility for “the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation”. However, the United States is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court and does not enforce its warrants.
At the Group of 7 meeting in Canada last year, Trump brought up the issue of Russia’s exclusion, unprompted.
“The G-7 used to be the G-8. Barack Obama and a person named Trudeau didn’t want to have Russia in, and I would say that that was a mistake because I think you wouldn’t have a war right now,” Trump said.
“But it used to be the G-8 and now it’s, I guess, what’s that, nine years ago, eight years ago it switched over,” Trump said, incorrectly, of the expulsion of Russia in 2014 over its annexation of Crimea.
“They threw Russia out, which I claimed was a very big mistake, even though I wasn’t in politics then,” he added. “I was very loud about it. It was a mistake in that you spend so much time talking about Russia and he’s no longer at the table, so it makes life more complicated. But you wouldn’t have had the war.”
In fact, the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine by Russia, and Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine through the use of proxy forces that year, started the war.
Trump says he would not use a nuclear weapon against Iran
Donald Trump, apparently abandoning his attempt to frighten Iran’s leaders into negotiating by channeling Richard Nixon’s “madman theory, ruled out the use of nuclear weapons in the conflict with Iran in response to a reporter’s question on Thursday in the Oval Office.
Asked by a reporter during the event if his dark threats to end Iranian civilization meant that he would consider using a nuclear weapon, Trump said: “No.”
“No. We don’t need it. Why would I need it?” he continued before attacking the reporter for asking.
“Why would a stupid question like be asked?” Trump said.
“Why would I use a nuclear weapons when we’ve totally, in a very conventional way, decimated then without it?” the president added. “No, I wouldn’t use it. A nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.”
Video of Trump’s remarks was later posted on social media by the US state department and shared by the White House press secretary.
In the past, Trump has repeatedly expressed a horror of nuclear weapons, which he said stemmed from a warnings delivered by his uncle John, a longtime professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“My uncle used to tell me about nuclear before nuclear was nuclear,” Trump said during his 2016 campaign for the presidency.
“I hate nuclear more than any. My uncle was a professor was at MIT, used to tell me about nuclear,” Trump told Anderson Cooper during a CNN town hall event in 2016.
During the second world war, John Trump, then serving on the wartime National Defense Research Committee, was asked to analyze a batch of technical papers found in the New York hotel room of Nikola Tesla when the Serbian-American inventor died in 1943.
Before his death, Tesla had publicly claimed to have invented a so-called “death beam”, so John Trump was asked to evaluate the papers “for the purpose of determining if any ideas of significant value in the present United States war effort could be found”.
He reported that Tesla’s writings in the last years of his life “were primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character often concerned with the production and wireless transmission of power; but did not include new, sound, workable principles or methods for realizing such results.”
Trump boasts about 2019 speech in which he said US army ‘took over the airports’ in war of 1812
Donald Trump is now taking questions from reporters in the Oval Office, repeating his claims that the war in Iran is going well. He called a reporter who asked why the war is still going on “such a disgrace” and noted that the war had not yet lasted as long as the Vietnam war.
Minutes earlier, while showing off plans to renovate the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, the president made the odd decision to remind the public that he once gave a speech at the site, in the same location where Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famed “I have a dream” speech. As he has for years, Trump argued that he attracted a larger crowd for his speech, at a Fourth of July celebration in 2019, than the civil rights leader did in 1963.
Trump’s decision to bring up his 2019 speech was unusual because the most famous part of that Trump address was when, badly misreading remarks on a rain-soaked teleprompter, he gave a wildly inaccurate account of US military history.
After claiming that the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary war was “named after” George Washington in 1775, he went on to say that, during the War of 1812: “Our army manned the ampert, it ranned the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do”.
Trump falsely said he had more people attend a 4 July event in Washington, DC years ago, than Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1963 March on Washington.
“I actually had more people, but that’s OK,” Trump said. “They gave him a million people,” adding the “fake news” media only said 25,000 people attended his event.
A woman and her child who had hearing loss are present at President Donald Trump’s White House press conference.
According to Trump and the woman, Regeneron’s new medication addressing hearing loss helped the two-year-old child recover his hearing.
“It’s life changing,” the mother said.
