Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Thursday. Here are the latest developments:
Donald Trump quietly signed the Epstein Transparency Act into law, which requires the release of justice department investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for over 15 years.
Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York City, confirmed on Wednesday that he will meet with Trump.
A federal grand jury indicted Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democratic congressperson from Florida, on charges accusing her of stealing $5m in federal disaster funds and using some of the money to aid her 2021 campaign.
The House ethics committee opened an investigation into numerous charges of misconduct against Cory Mills, a Republican congressman from Florida.
All 200 members of the Oregon national guard called into service in September by Trump to combat the imaginary threat from anti-ICE protesters in Portland, have now received a verbal demobilization order.
Lindsey Halligan, the president’s handpicked choice for interim US attorney for the eastern district of Virginia, and another prosecutor acknowledged that the entire grand jury never saw the final indictment against James Comey.
According to Epstein's email, Trump asked Maxwell, not him, 'to stop' recruiting girls from Mar-a-Lago
Eight months before his death in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein said in an email to the writer Michael Wolff that Donald Trump’s claim to have known nothing about Epstein having sex with underage girls before his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor was a lie.
In the email, which begins with a heavily redacted mention of one of the victims and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, Epstein wrote: “Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever.”
“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop”, Epstein added, in apparent reference to a conversation between Trump and Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Earlier this year, Trump told reporters that his break with Epstein had been prompted by his displeasure that his friend had been recruiting girls that worked in the spa at Mar-a-Lago.
““He hired help, and I said ‘Don’t ever do that again’. He stole people that worked for me. I said, ‘Don’t ever do that again’. He did it again and I threw him out of the place,” Trump said in July, during a visit to his Scottish golf course.
On the flight back to Washington from Scotland, one reporter asked Trump if “the workers that were taken from you, were some of them young women?” Trump replied: “The answer is yes; they were. People that worked in the spa”.
Another reporter then asked if Trump one of the people he was referring to was Virginia Giuffre, who said in a legal complaint that she was hired away from the Mar-a-Lago spa by Maxwell in 2000, when she was 16, to give Epstein massages. Giuffre, who died this year, alleged in her complaint that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including then Prince Andrew.
Trump replied: “I think so, I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her”.
But Epstein’s email contradicts that account, since he told Wolff that Trump asked Maxwell, not him, “to stop”, presumably a reference to her role in hiring girls away from Mar-a-Lago for the pair to abuse.
That detail could have a bearing on what comes next in the Epstein saga for Trump: a request for clemency from Maxwell, in the form of either a commutation or a pardon.
While Trump has previously claimed to have barely known Maxwell, and known nothing of Epstein’s crimes, if he did ask Maxwell to stop recruiting underage girls away from Mar-a-Lago, that might suggest that he was less oblivious then than he claims now.
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