Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are some of the latest developments:
Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal’s report that he sent Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender he socialized with for at least 15 years, a birthday letter with a lewd drawing in 2003 focuses relentlessly on one fact: that the Journal did not publish an image of the letter. That’s because, according to the suit, “the letter was fake and nonexistent”.
The extraordinary dollar amount demanded by Trump is identical to what he asked of CBS when he filed suit on the eve of the 2024 election alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited in a misleading way to cast her in a positive light and amounted to “election interference”.
Dick Durbin, the senior Democrat on the senate judiciary committee wrote to attorney general Pam Bondi to ask about the work of the 1,000 FBI personnel who reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March. “My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin wrote. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he asked.
In a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump, Bondi called the case “a matter of public concern”.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.
Trump's lawsuit against Murdoch claims birthday letter to Epstein is both fake and does not exist
Donald Trump’s $10bn lawsuit over the Wall Street Journal’s report that he sent Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender he socialized with for at least 15 years, a birthday letter with a lewd drawing in 2003 focuses relentlessly on one fact: that the Journal did not publish an image of the letter.
The reason, according to the suit filed by Trump in federal court in Miami on Friday, is simple: “no authentic letter or drawing exists”.
While the Journal’s report states that the letter “was reviewed by the Journal” and was “among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein”, Trump and his defenders have seized on the fact that the newspaper did not publish an image of the letter to suggest, in public comments and the lawsuit, that the letter is either a forgery or does not even exist.
The text of the suit returns again and again to the apparent lack of physical evidence for the letter’s existence.
“Tellingly, the Article does not explain whether Defendants have obtained a copy of the letter, have seen it, have had it described to them, or any other circumstances that would otherwise lend credibility to the Article”, the suit claims. “That is because the supposed letter is a fake and the Defendants knew it when they chose to deliberately defame President Trump”.
Later, the suit makes the contradictory claim that Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper’s owner, and Robert Thomson, its parent company’s chief executive, chose to publish the report “after President Trump put them both on notice that the letter was fake and nonexistent”.
The Journal’s report is not clear about where, exactly, the letter its reporters reviewed was at the time, or is now, but if it was among the trove of approximately 100,000 records from the federal investigation of Epstein before he was charged in 2019, that would mean it is, or war, under the physical control of the Trump administration.
In a letter sent to the attorney general on Friday, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin wrote that approximately 1,000 FBI personnel, working on 24-hour shifts, had reviewed approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in March.
“My office was told that these personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned”, Durbin added. “What happened to the records mentioning President Trump once they were flagged?” he then asked.
