Closing summary
This is the end of our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Tuesday. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump threatened to block a new bridge connecting the US and Canada he supported in 2017 and made the bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a total ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.
The Miami Herald reported that one partially redacted Epstein files document includes an account of a 2006 phone call in which Trump told the Palm Beach police chief that “everyone has known” Jeffrey Epstein was abusing girls and Ghislaine Maxwell '“is evil”. Trump now says he had no idea Epstein was abusing girls and wishes Maxwell well.
An immigration judge rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said in a statement.
The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.
A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction that blocks part of a new state law that bans federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces.
Former Palm Beach police chief told FBI Trump called Ghislaine Maxwell 'evil' in 2006
As the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown first reported on Monday, Michael Reiter, the former Palm Beach police chief, told the FBI in 2019 that he got a call from Donald Trump in 2006 denouncing Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell after criminal sex charges were first made public.
Reiter confirmed to the Herald reporter 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.
“Thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump told Reiter, according to the FBI summary of an interview with the former police chief conducted in October 2019.
When Epstein was arrested in July 2019, Trump was asked by reporters if he had ben aware that the friend he socialized with for most of two decades had been molesting girls. “No, I had no idea,” Trump said then.
In 2020, when Maxwell was arrested, Trump was asked at a news conference if he expected her “to turn in powerful men”.
“I don’t know. I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump replied.
“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach,” he continued, referring to someone he socialized with for years. “But I wish her well, whatever it is.”
Reiter also told FBI agents that Trump had called Maxwell Epstein’s “operative”, and recalled Trump telling him “she is evil and to focus on her”, according to the FBI report.
Trump also told Reiter in 2006 that “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and Trump ‘got the hell out of there’”, according to the FBI interview summary.
Updated
