Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders press incoming CBS owner on ‘side deal’ with Trump and cancelling Colbert
Citing concerns over possible violations of bribery laws, senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden wrote on Monday to David Ellison, whose company Skydance is about to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck a “secret side deal” with Donald Trump in exchange for federal approval of the purchase, or played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show.
In their letter, the senators asked Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle and a friend of Trump, to reply to seven detailed questions, inquiring whether he was involved in any “quid-pro-quo arrangement” that could violate the law.
The questions about a possible secret side deal were prompted, in part, by Trump’s own claims, after he accepted $16m from Paramount to drop his lawsuit over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, that the deal was worth twice as much.
There have been recent reports that Ellison has been considering a possible role for the conservative journalist Bari Weiss in remaking CBS News.
Among the questions Ellison is asked to reply to by 4 August are:
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“Is there currently any arrangement under which you or Skydance will provide compensation, advertising, or promotional activities that in any way assist President Trump, his family, his presidential library, or other Administration officials?” the senators ask Ellison in the letter.
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“Have you personally discussed with President Trump, any of his family members, any Trump Administration officials, or presidential library fund personnel any matters related to the Paramount-Skydance transaction?”
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“Has Skydance agreed or have you personally agreed to make changes to Skydance’s content or Paramount’s or CBS’s content at the request of the Trump Administration, to facilitate approval of the transaction?”
Key events
Closing summary
We are pausing our live coverage of the second Trump administration here, at the end of an unusually quiet day. Here are some of the latest developments:
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Although he spent a rare day out of sight of the cameras, Donald Trump once again attacked Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman from Kentucky who has defied the president’s efforts to draw attention away from the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein files. “This is not a hoax” Massie told a reporter. “If it were a hoax a man wouldn’t have killed himself, and there wouldn’t be a woman in jail”.
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The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles.
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Citing concerns over possible violations of bribery laws, senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden wrote on Monday to David Ellison, whose company Skydance is about to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck a “secret side deal” with Trump in exchange for federal approval of the purchase, or played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s CBS show.
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A federal judge sentenced an ex-Kentucky police officer to nearly three years in prison for using excessive force during the 2020 deadly raid on Breonna Taylor’s home, declining a justice department recommendation that he be given no prison time.
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Three Democratic senators, Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal want Delta’s chief executive to explain the airline’s plan to shift away from listing set fares for flights to a ‘surveillance pricing’ model, in which each customer will be asked to pay the highest possible fare they are likely to agree to, based on an AI analysis of their personal data.
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White House border czar Tom Homan said that immigration officials will escalate operations in New York and other so-called sanctuary cities. “Sanctuary cities are now our priority,” Homan said. “We’re gonna flood the zone.” It was at least the thirteenth time Homan had threatened to “flood the zone” with federal immigration officers in a city run by Democratic elected officials since May.
As Trump stays out of sight, House Republicans pause legislative business to avoid talking about Epstein
Although he spent a rare day out of sight of the cameras on Monday, Donald Trump once again attacked Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman from Kentucky who has defied the president’s efforts to draw attention away from the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein files by introducing a petition that could compel their release.
Writing on social media, Trump insulted Massie, as “lazy, slow moving and totally disingenuous – a real loser”, and urged someone to run against him in next year’s Republican primary.
The president’s attack came as the House was essentially stalled by the Republican leadership’s determination not to push forward with any legislative business that could offer Democrats a chance to propose amendments on the Epstein files.
Earlier on Monday, Massie told the independent reporter Pablo Manríquez that Trump’s base was so interested in seeing what is in the files from the federal investigations of Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade, “because he promised it, his kids promised it, his attorney general promised it, his FBI director promised it.”
“This is not a hoax,” he added. “If it were a hoax a man wouldn’t have killed himself,” Massie said, pausing to indicate air quotes with his free hand. “And there wouldn’t be a woman in prison. This is not a hoax. They have more information than they have released, and that’s what the American people want to see.”
Later, Manu Raju of CNN asked Massie why he thinks the administration won’t release more information on Epstein.
“I think it’s embarrassing to the intelligence community” Massie said. “It may be embarrassing to the President’s friends. I’m not particularly implicating the President himself. I don’t allege him of any wrongdoing, but I do believe that there are some things that need to be brought to the American public’s knowledge that have happened that will be embarrassing”.
Cecilia Nowell
A federal judge on Monday sentenced an ex-Kentucky police officer to nearly three years in prison for using excessive force during the 2020 deadly raid on Breonna Taylor’s home, declining a justice department recommendation that he be given no prison time.
Brett Hankison, who fired 10 shots during the raid but didn’t hit anyone, was the only officer on the scene charged in the Black woman’s death. He is the first person sentenced to prison in the case that rocked the city of Louisville and spawned weeks of street protests over police brutality five years ago.
Last week, the justice department recommended a one-day jail sentence and supervised release in Hankison’s case. In a sentencing memorandum, assistant attorney general for civil rights Harmeet K Dhillon and senior counsel Robert J Keenan said Hankison had suffered psychological stress from the legal battle.
The US district judge Rebecca Grady Jennings sentenced Hankison at a hearing on Monday afternoon. She said that no prison time “is not appropriate” for Hankison and said she was “startled” that there weren’t more people injured in the raid.
Read the full story here:
Democrats ask Delta to explain use of AI ‘surveillance pricing’ to charge customers as much as they are willing to pay
Three Democratic senators, Ruben Gallego, Mark Warner and Richard Blumenthal want Delta’s chief executive to explain the airline’s plan to shift away from listing set fares for flights to a ‘surveillance pricing’ model, in which each customer will be asked to pay the highest possible fare they are likely to agree to, based on an AI analysis of their personal data.
In their letter to Delta’s chief executive, Ed Bastian, the senators write: “Individualized pricing, or surveillance-based price setting, eliminates a fixed or static price in favor of prices that are tailored to an individual consumer’s willingness to pay. Delta’s current and planned individualized pricing practices not only present data privacy concerns, but will also likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain point’”.
The lawmakers note that consumers “have no way of knowing what data and personal information” will be used to set their fares. “Prices could be dictated not by supply and demand, but by individual need,” they add. “While Delta has stated that the airline will ‘maintain strict safeguards to ensure compliance with federal law,’ your company has not shared what those safeguards are or how you plan to protect American families against pricing discrimination in the evolving AI landscape.”
The letter cites research published by the Federal Trade Commission three days before Donald Trump retook office in January which said that a “surveillance pricing market study revealed that details like a person’s precise location or browser history can be frequently used to target individual consumers with different prices for the same goods and services”.
The senators mention that former FTC chair Lina Khan warned last year that airlines could, for instance, use AI to charge a higher fare to a passenger “because the company knows that they just had a death in the family and need to fly across the country”.
In a podcast interview last week, Khan said that “the Holy Grail for companies for a long time has been the ability to charge each person what their willingness to pay is”.
“So imagine a world in which you have a death in the family, you have to go home for a funeral, and they know that, through scraping your email that is announcing when the service is gonna be, they know you’re in a tight spot”, Khan said. “So you’re gonna be charged much more because of that.”
That new, algorithmically determined pricing comes as most airlines have either abandoned or severely limited bereavement fares, the formerly common practice of offering low-cost tickets to mourners required to fly at short notice due to the sudden death of a loved one.
King family appeals to public to read MLK files ‘with empathy, restraint, and respect’
Following the Trump administration’s release on Monday of 230,000 files related to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, two of his children have appealed to the public to engage with the documents “with empathy, restraint, and respect for our family’s continuing grief”.
The documents on the murder of the civil rights leader were posted on a government website as critics and supporters of Donald Trump continue to call for him to honor a different campaign promise: the release of files from federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender Trump socialized with for more than 15 years.
“The release of these files must be viewed within their full historical context,” Martin Luther King III and Dr Bernice A King write in a statement. “During our father’s lifetime, he was relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover through the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).”
“The intent of the government’s COINTELPRO campaign was not only to monitor, but to discredit, dismantle, and destroy Dr. King’s reputation and the broader American Civil Rights Movement” they continue. “These actions were not only invasions of privacy, but intentional assaults on the truth – undermining the dignity and freedoms of private citizens who fought for justice, designed to neutralize those who dared to challenge the status quo.”
The murdered civil rights leader’s children also write that they believe that their father was killed as part of a conspiracy that involved “unnamed co-conspirators, including government agencies”.
“While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods,” they add. “We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the movement. Those who promote the fruit of the FBI’s surveillance will unknowingly align themselves with an ongoing campaign to degrade our father and the Civil Rights Movement.”
Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders press incoming CBS owner on ‘side deal’ with Trump and cancelling Colbert
Citing concerns over possible violations of bribery laws, senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden wrote on Monday to David Ellison, whose company Skydance is about to buy CBS owner Paramount, to ask if he struck a “secret side deal” with Donald Trump in exchange for federal approval of the purchase, or played any part in the decision to cancel Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night CBS show.
In their letter, the senators asked Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison is the co-founder of Oracle and a friend of Trump, to reply to seven detailed questions, inquiring whether he was involved in any “quid-pro-quo arrangement” that could violate the law.
The questions about a possible secret side deal were prompted, in part, by Trump’s own claims, after he accepted $16m from Paramount to drop his lawsuit over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris last year, that the deal was worth twice as much.
There have been recent reports that Ellison has been considering a possible role for the conservative journalist Bari Weiss in remaking CBS News.
Among the questions Ellison is asked to reply to by 4 August are:
-
“Is there currently any arrangement under which you or Skydance will provide compensation, advertising, or promotional activities that in any way assist President Trump, his family, his presidential library, or other Administration officials?” the senators ask Ellison in the letter.
-
“Have you personally discussed with President Trump, any of his family members, any Trump Administration officials, or presidential library fund personnel any matters related to the Paramount-Skydance transaction?”
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“Has Skydance agreed or have you personally agreed to make changes to Skydance’s content or Paramount’s or CBS’s content at the request of the Trump Administration, to facilitate approval of the transaction?”
Pentagon withdraws all 700 marines from Los Angeles
The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, confirmed to the Guardian on Monday that the entire deployment of 700 active-duty US marines is being withdrawn from Los Angeles.
The redeployment of the marines comes after 2,000 national guard troops were withdrawn from the city last week. The troops were sent to the city last month by the federal government after violence broke out on the fringes on protests against immigration enforcement sweeps in LA.
According to Parnell, the deployment of the marines, which state and city officials called unnecessary and provocative at a time when protests against immigration raids were already under control, had achieved it aim.
“With stability returning to Los Angeles, the Secretary has directed the redeployment of the 700 Marines whose presence sent a clear message: lawlessness will not be tolerated,” Parnell said in a written statement. “Their rapid response, unwavering discipline, and unmistakable presence were instrumental in restoring order and upholding the rule of law. We’re deeply grateful for their service, and for the strength and professionalism they brought to this mission.”
Democrats this afternoon are forcing another vote to push for the release of Jeffrey Epstein-related documents, further placing pressure on Republican lawmakers, according to a report from Politico.
The Democratic lawmakers are planning to offer Republican representative Thomas Massie’s bill as an amendment during a rules committee meeting Monday afternoon. Massie’s bill, a bipartisan effort, seeks to push for the release of Epstein-related documents.
On Monday, Politico also reported that the Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson does not have plans to put forward a Republican-led alternative Epstein bill before August’s recess break.
The White House is removing the Wall Street Journal from the group of reporters covering Trump’s trip to Scotland, Politico reports.
The Wall Street Journal’s removal from this upcoming weekend’s press pool follows the paper’s report that alleged Trump wrote a sexually suggestive letter to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Trump has sued the paper and its owners for its report, demanding $10bn.
“Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct, they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Politico. “Every news organization in the entire world wishes to cover President Trump, and the White House has taken significant steps to include as many voices as possible.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump wrote a “bawdy” note to Epstein for his 2003 birthday.
The Trump administration has flouted court orders in just over one-third of the lawsuits filed against its policies, a Washington Post analysis found. The Post’s analysis says it suggests a “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system” by the White House.
A number of plaintiffs that have sued the Trump administration say that agencies and officials are ignoring rulings, providing false information, failing to turn over evidence and quietly acting in defiance of court rulings.
Since Trump took office, there has been a battle between the White House and the judiciary, during which officials have defied numerous court orders. Trump administration officials have repeatedly criticized federal judges as “activist judges.”
According to the Post, despite judges appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents agreeing that the administration is flouting court orders, “none have taken punitive action to try to force compliance.”
The Post analyzed 337 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration since January. Courts have ruled in 165 of the lawsuits. And the Post found that the Trump administration is accused of defying court orders in 57 of those cases.
Trump administration officials: suspects accused of shooting customs officer were undocumented
Robert Tait
Two suspects are in custody for the alleged shooting and wounding of a customs officer in New York, officials said on Monday, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports.
During a press conference on Monday, homeland security secretary Krsiti Noem and Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, also said the episode was a direct result of New York’s sanctuary city policies and the approach to border security under Joe Biden’s presidency.
On Saturday night, an off-duty customs officer was shot and wounded during an apparent attempted robbery. The officer was not in uniform at the time and police said there was indication he was targeted because of his occupation.
A suspect in the incident, Miguel Francisco Mora Nunez, was later taken into custody after turning up at a hospital in the Bronx with gunshot wounds to the leg and groin.
During Monday’s press conference, Noem also focused on the profile of Nunez, who she said had been arrested four times since entering the US illegally in 2023. She also discussed the profile of his accomplice, Christhian Aybar-Berroa, saying he had “entered the country illegally in 2022 under the Biden Administration and was ordered for final removal in 2023 by an immigration judge.”
“There’s absolutely zero reason that someone who has scum of the earth like this should be running loose on the streets of New York City,” Noem said, referring to Nunez. “Arrested four different times in New York City and because of the mayor’s policies and was released back to do harm to people and to individuals living in the city. Make no mistake, this officer is in the hospital today, fighting for his life because of the policies of the mayor of the city and the city council and the people that were in charge of keeping the public safe.”
Homan said “sanctuary cities are cities for criminals.” He said the administration would “flood the zone” with immigration, customs and enforcement (Ice) officials to detain undocumented people in sanctuary cities.
“What we’re going to do [is deploy] more agents in New York City to look for that bad guy so sanctuary cities get exactly what they don’t want – more agents in the community and more agents in the worksite,” he said.
“I’m sick and tired of reading in the media every day how Ice is not doing what the Trump administration has promised, that we’re not arresting criminals, that most of the people we arrested are not criminals. I look at the numbers every day. The numbers I looked at [are] 130,000 arrests and 90,000 criminals. Do the math. That’s 70%.”
Noem blames ‘sanctuary city’ policies for customs officer shooting in New York
Robert Tait
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, has blamed the sanctuary city policies applied by Democratic mayors for the wounding of an off-duty Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officer in an attempted robbery, allegedly carried out by undocumented immigrants, one of whom was reportedly subject to a deportation order, the Guardian’s Robert Tait reports.
The 42-year-old officer sustained gunshot wounds to his face and arm after being attacked in a Manhattan park shortly before midnight on Saturday night.
He was shot after drawing his service weapon after being approached by two men on a scooter as he sat on a bench with a female companion. The officer was not in uniform at the time and police said there was indication he was targeted because of his occupation.
At a news conference on Monday, Noem, flanked by Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, and several law enforcement officials, said the episode was a direct result of the sanctuary city policy adopted by New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, as well as the approach to border security adopted during Joe Biden’s presidency. Noem also criticized Adams during the conference.
Noem’s criticism of Adams came despite widespread reports of a deal made between the mayor and the Trump administration that involved New York giving greater cooperation than before on immigration. The agreement was reached around the same time that the justice department moved to dismiss federal corruption charges against Adams, although the mayor has insisted there was no quid pro quo.
Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles had also suffered crime waves, according to Noem, because their mayors and municipalities were “protecting criminals” by declaring them sanctuary cities, whereby local authorities give only limited cooperation with federal immigration enforcement agencies.
President Donald Trump has appointed Mike Rigas, a Bush-era official from the General Services Administration (GSA), as acting administrator of the agency, Politico reports.
The move is seen as a further step by the White House to curb Elon Musk’s influence in the GSA, which is one of the federal agencies that Musk’s initiative, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) nearly fully controlled.
Rigas previously worked under the Trump administration as Deputy Secretary of State for management and resources. The former acting administrator was selected by a Musk ally to lead DOGE. The Rigas appointment is seen as a strategic move by the White House to rein in DOGE leadership.
Trump’s border czar says immigration officials to escalate operations in sanctuary cities
Border czar Tom Homan said Monday that immigration officials will escalate operations in New York and other so-called sanctuary cities.
“Sanctuary cities are now our priority,” Homan said. “We’re gonna flood the zone.”
Homan’s comments follow an attempted robbery and shooting of an armed, off-duty customs officer in Manhattan this weekend. The New York City Police Commissioner said the officer was not likely targeted due to his employment.
When two men approached the off-duty officer to rob him and a companion in a Manhattan park, the officer withdrew a gun and engaged in a shootout with one of the robbers. The robber was arrested after being taken to a hospital. The customs officer is recovering from gunshots.
Trump administration officials have said that so-called sanctuary policies were to blame for the shooting. New York and other cities have policies that limit local government cooperation in federal immigration matters.
Trump threatens to appeal judge’s decision in Harvard case for funding
President Donald Trump threatened to appeal a federal judge’s decision in Massachusetts amid the ongoing and escalating battle between his administration and Harvard University.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said that the federal judge hearing the case is a “TOTAL DISASTER” and that when “she rules against us, we will IMMEDIATELY appeal, and WIN.”
Massachusetts district judge Judge Allison Burroughs heard arguments from lawyers with Harvard and the federal government on Monday, in a case that may decide whether the Trump administration’s attempts to cut billions of dollars in university funding is legal. Burroughs has not yet ruled on Monday’s arguments.
In his Truth Social post, Trump also said Harvard is “anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America.”
Border Patrol agent: immigration officials not leaving LA until ‘mission is accomplished’
The US Border Patrol chief patrol agent for the El Centro Sector in southern California posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) saying that federal immigration officials “are not leaving” Los Angeles until “the mission is accomplished.”
“Better get used to us now because this is going to be normal very soon,” Gregory K. Bovino, the Border Patrol agent said in a video. “I don’t work for [Los Angeles mayor] Karen Bass, the federal government doesn’t work for Karen Bass.”
Border Patrol and other immigration officials have been conducting operations in Los Angeles to arrest, detain and deport undocumented immigrants. The operations gained widespread backlash in early June. Protests, opposing immigration arrests, engulfed certain areas of the city.
Texas’s Republican-led state legislature is pushing to redistrict the state in a way that would favor Republicans when electing House representatives, the Washington Post reports.
During the state’s special legislative session, beginning today, Trump is pushing for lawmakers to redistrict the state to add up to five more House districts.
National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an anti-gerrymandering group, threatened to file lawsuits to stop attempts to redistrict the state.
The special session was called by Texas’s state governor Greg Abbott after devastating floods in central Texas.
Four senators meet with Canadian PM ahead of 1 August trade deadline
Four US senators met with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney amid the looming 1 August deadline to strike a new trade and security deal.
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is being renegotiated and has faced strain from the Trump administration regarding a few key points, including lumber, digital services taxes and metal tariffs.
This is the second congressional delegation to visit the Canadian prime minister in the past three months, Politico reports.
Democratic senator Maria Cantwell, from Washington, is pushing for the Trump administration to bolster the US government’s weather disaster readiness, after recent tragic floods, hurricanes and wildfires, and as the administration seeks to slash resources.
This comes as the Trump administration is pushing to drastically reduce the budget for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The Trump administration is looking to cut the NOAA’s budget by 27%, a reduction of $2.2 billion.
In a letter, Sen. Cantwell made five recommendations. They include modernizing weather data collection, funding more research and modernizing alert systems.
“Communities across the United States are experiencing more frequent, intense, and costly flash floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, atmospheric rivers, landslides, heatwaves, and wildfires,” Cantwell wrote. “We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create the world’s best weather forecasting system that would provide Americans with much more detailed and customized alerts days instead of minutes ahead of a looming extreme weather event.”
