Documents show Epstein texted with House Democrat during 2019 hearing, report says – live updates

12.55am GMT Trump refuses to rule out pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell Donald Trump just took questions from reporters for the first time since Monday, and refused to rule out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell, his former associate who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2022, for her role in a scheme to sexually exploit and abuse multiple minor girls with Jeffrey Epstein over the course of a decade. Maxwell is reportedly preparing to ask Trump to commute her sentence, and was recently moved to a low-security prison camp after she told the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, that she had never seen Trump do anything inappropriate during their years of friendship. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Friday night, Trump was asked: “Have you ruled out a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell?” “I haven’t even thought about it,” Trump replied. “I mean, I haven’t thought about for months. Maybe I haven’t thought about it at all, you’re just asking me a question.” “Why can’t you rule it out?” the reporter followed up. “I don’t talk about that. I don’t rule it in or out, I don’t even think about it,” Trump answered. In 2020, when Maxwell was arrested, Trump was asked if he expected her to “turn in powerful men” during a White House briefing. “I don’t know, I really haven’t been following it too much. I just wish her well”, the president said. “I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well.” In one of the emails from Epstein released this week, sent to the write Michael Wolff in 2019, the late sex offender said, of Trump, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”. As he struggled to explain his long friendship with Epstein, Trump said earlier this year that he had asked Epstein to stop recruiting young women from the Mar-a-Lago spa, including Virginia Giuffre, who was hired away from Trump’s club by Maxwell. The newly released email from Epstein suggests that it was Maxwell, not Epstein, that Trump asked to stop using his club as a place to recruit girls. 12.41am GMT The United States carried out a lethal strike on Monday against a vessel in the Caribbean Sea that US officials say was operated by a “designated terrorist organization”, according to a post on X by the US Southern Command. According to the post, four men aboard the vessel were killed. “Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was involved in illicit narcotics smuggling, transiting along a known narco-trafficking route, and carrying narcotics,” reads the post. The strike comes a day after defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced a new operation called “Southern Spear” to target “narco-terrorists” in the western hemisphere. It’s the latest escalation in the military buildup between the US and Venezuela. Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has announced what he called a “massive deployment” of land, sea, air, river and missile forces, as well as civilian militia, to counter the US naval presence off his country’s coast. Updated at 12.59am GMT 12.18am GMT The Trump administration appealed today a ruling from a federal judge in Oregon that barred it from deploying the national guard in Portland. The appeal comes after district court judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, ruled a week ago that there was no evidence of widespread violence to justify federal intervention. She found that protests near Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility were “predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence”. The administration criticized the decision and said the troops were needed to protect federal personnel and property in a city that Trump has described as “war ravaged”. “The district court’s ruling made it clear that this administration must be accountable to the truth and to the rule of law,” Oregon attorney general Dan Rayfield said in response to the administration’s appeal in an email to the Associated Press. “We will keep defending Oregon values and standing up for our state’s authority to make decisions grounded in evidence and common sense.” Updated at 12.39am GMT 12.10am GMT Trump refuses to answer reporter questions on Epstein or Venezuela as he leaves the White House According to the White House pool reporter, Donald Trump again refused to answer any questions from the media when he emerged from the Oval Office on Friday evening and left for a weekend in Florida. Trump did not respond to shouted questions about possible US military strikes on Venezuela, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or other topics. In an unusual move, the former TV gameshow host has not taken any questions from reporters since emails from Epstein about him were released on Tuesday morning. Updated at 12.11am GMT 12.03am GMT Documents show Jeffrey Epstein texted with House member during 2019 testimony from Michael Cohen – report Documents provided to Congress this week by the estate of Jeffrey Epstein include transcripts of text messages that appear to show the late sex offender was in direct contact with a member of the House during a 2019 congressional hearing with Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former fixer, the Washington Post reports. Although the identity of the person Epstein was texting with as the February 2019 hearing unfolded is not revealed in the transcripts, an analysis by the Post suggests that it was Stacey Plaskett, a Democrat who represents the US Virgin Islands as its nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives. By matching time-stamps on the text messages with video of the hearing, the news outlet identified Plaskett as the lawmaker Epstein was messaging with during the hearing. At 10.41am on the day of the hearing, for instance, Epstein texted to the person: “Are you chewing”. One minute before, a live television feed of the hearing had cut to Plaskett, as she appeared to be chewing. “Not any more,” the person replied to Epstein. “Chewing interior of my mouth. Bad habit from middle school.” Later, Epstein appeared to offer advice about questions Cohen could be asked. “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” Epstein texted at 12.25pm. “Cohen brought up RONA - keeper of the secrets,” misspelling the first name of Trump’s former executive assistant Rhona Graff. “RONA??” the person responded at 2.25pm. “Quick I’m up next is that an acronym.” Three minutes later, when Plaskett began her questioning of Cohen, she asked who “Mr Weisenberg” and “Miss Rona” was and if there were “other people that we should be meeting with?” “So Allen Weisselberg is the chief financial officer in The Trump Organization,” Cohen replied. Plaskett jumped in to say: “You’ve got to quickly give us as many names as you can so we can get to them. Is Miss Rona, what is Miss Rona’s position?” “Rhona Graff is the — Mr. Trump’s executive assistant.” Asked by Plaskett if she would be able to corroborate Cohen’s testimony, he said yes. “Her office is directly next to his, and she’s involved in a lot that went on.” Plaskett, who was the first nonvoting delegate to the House to serve as an impeachment manager, during Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate in 2021, declined to comment when reached by the Post. Her chief of staff told the paper she was “not in a position to confirm or not” whether the congresswoman was texting with Epstein during the hearing. Updated at 12.32am GMT 10.54pm GMT Democrats react to reports that Trump is discussing plans to bomb Venezuela by invoking Wag the Dog After the Washington Post reported on Friday that Donald Trump was briefed for a second straight day on possible options for military strikes in Venezuela, some Democrats compared the situation to the 1997 film Wag the Dog, suggesting that the president might be ready to go to war as a distraction from his frantic attempts to cover up his long association with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In the film, a fictional president’s spin doctor, played by Robert De Niro brings in a Hollywood producer, played by Dustin Hoffman, to stage a fictional war with Albania to take the public’s mind off a presidential sex scandal. The trailer for the 1997 comedy Wag the Dog. A year after the film came out, Republicans invoked it to suggest that Bill Clinton had fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a training camp in Afghanistan associated with Osama bin Laden to distract from his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Those 20 August 1998 strikes were launched two weeks after al-Qaida had killed 224 people in bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but also just three days after Clinton had admitted to an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky. A chorus of Republicans quickly accused Clinton of trying to create a foreign crisis to distract attention away from the sex scandal, and the accusation was reflected on the banners and signs of protesters in Washington and Khartoum, including marchers in the Sudanese capital who held up a large, handmade sign with an image of Lewinsky emblazoned with the slogan: “No War for Monika.” At a Pentagon news conference after the strikes aimed at the then relatively unknown bin Laden, one reporter asked Clinton’s defense secretary, William Cohen, about suggestions that the timing of the attack bore “a striking resemblance to Wag the Dog”. “The only motivation driving this action today was our absolute obligation to protect the American people from terrorist activities,” Cohen replied. “That is the sole motivation.” “I don’t think any president, regardless of party, would ever take military action to distract from personal problems,” Dee Dee Myers, Clinton’s former press secretary, told Jay Leno that week in an appearance on The Tonight Show. “Most of the Congress, most of the American people I think, will say: ‘I don’t believe that our president, regardless of how bad things are, would do that.’” The fact that the fictional enemy in the 1990s film is Albania resonates in some way with contemporary politics, given that Trump recently boasted that he had resolved a war between Albania and Azerbaijan, confusing the Balkan country with Armenia. Days later, the president of Albania was caught on camera demanding an apology from the president of France, “because you didn’t congratulate us on the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan”. The president of Azerbajan, standing next to the two men, then broke out laughing. Updated at 11.52pm GMT 10.19pm GMT Marjorie Taylor Greene refuses to relent on criticism of Trump – report Speaking to NBC News, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Maga congresswoman from Georgia who has been critical of Donald Trump’s focus on foreign policy, and his effort to block the release of the Epstein files, said that she is not swayed by the president’s recent claim that she has “lost her way”. “I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” Trump said on Monday after he welcomed Syria’s new president, the former al-Qaida militant Ahmad al-Sharaa, to the Oval Office. “I guess she’s got some kind of an act going,” he added. Asked about Trump’s criticism of her, Greene told the broadcaster: “I’m America First, America Only. Hardcore.” She also said that she had not spoken with the president recently. “No, I haven’t talked to him. 100% haven’t changed,” Greene said. The break in communications between Trump and Greene comes amid reports that his White House has been applying pressure on two other Republican congresswomen, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace, who, like Greene, signed a petition to force a vote on the release of files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender Trump socialized with for more than a decade. All three Trump loyalists have publicly refused to withdraw their signatures. While Trump has angled for a Nobel peace prize, when not ordering the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites and suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers, Greene is not impressed. “No one cares about the foreign countries. No one cares about the never-ending amount of foreign leaders coming to the White House every single week,” Greene told NBC News. “We didn’t elect the president to go out there and travel the world and end the foreign wars,” Greene said. “We elected the president to stop sending tax dollars and weapons for the foreign wars – to completely not engage anymore. Watching the foreign leaders come to the White House through a revolving door is not helping Americans.” Updated at 11.49pm GMT 9.42pm GMT Trump pulls pick for top IRS lawyer 24 hours after racist podcaster Laura Loomer attacked nominee Donald Trump announced on Friday that he is “withdrawing the nomination of Donald Korb” to be the Internal Revenue Service’s top lawyer, days before Korb was expected to be confirmed by the Senate. The president cited no reason for suddenly abandoning Korb in a brief post on his social media platform, but the reversal came just 24 hours after Laura Loomer, a far-right podcaster who holds unusual sway over Trump’s personnel decisions, posted a thread on X attacking Korb for supposedly “supporting Democrats and anti-Trump RINOs” and demanded that his nomination “should immediately be revoked”. Loomer, a racist conspiracy theorist whose closeness to Trump alarmed some of his allies in the run-up to the 2024 election, immediately took credit, telling her 1.8 million followers on X (a website she was banned from before it was bought by Elon Musk) that Korb was “Loomered”. As the author and double Pulitzer winner James Risen wrote in an assessment of Loomer’s informal role earlier this year, after she met with Trump in the Oval Office and handed him a list of people on the staff of the national security council that she believed were not loyal enough to Trump, leading to six of them being fired: Loomer’s power in the Trump administration is ill-defined. Her many critics say she has just been taking credit for moves that Trump was already planning. But Trump himself has said he takes her seriously, so it may be more accurate to describe her as Trump’s de facto national security adviser. Updated at 10.09pm GMT 8.58pm GMT My colleague, Lucy Campbell, notes that today’s decision to investigate several of the president’s political adversaries represents an apparent departure from a July memo issued by the justice department and the FBI, which stated officials had found nothing in the Epstein files that warranted the opening of further inquiries. Investigators “did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties”, the memo said. 8.52pm GMT Here's a recap of the day so far Donald Trump directed the justice department to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with several prominent Democrats, including former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Larry Summers, and donor and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman. The president’s move, to focus on his rivals’ affiliations and relationships with Epstein, is seemingly his latest effort to distance himself from the renewed focus on his own relationship with the disgraced financier following the latest tranche of documents released by the House oversight committee. Trump went on to claim, baselessly, that the release of emails where Epstein said that the president “spent hours” at the late sex-offenders house, and that he “knew about the girls” was just “another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats”. In response, attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation at the behest of the president. Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”. Donald Trump has agreed to slash US tariffs on Switzerland to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters. The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms. In return, Switzerland will reduce tariffs “on a range of US products”, the statement said. “In addition to all industrial products, fish and seafood, this includes agricultural products from the US that Switzerland considers non-sensitive.” The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a rare condemnation of president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and advocated for “meaningful immigration reform”. In a special message, the first of its kind in 12 years, the bishops said that “we are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools.” In response, White House border czar, Tom Homan, hit back. “The Catholic church is wrong, I’m sorry. I’m a lifelong Catholic,” he said. “I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic church in my opinion.” 8.06pm GMT Bondi assigns prosecutor to lead investigation into Trump adversaries over Epstein ties Attorney general Pam Bondi announced today that she has assigned Jay Clayton, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, to lead the investigation into Donald Trump’s political adversaries and their ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Earlier, Trump called the latest release of emails that renewed focus on the president’s relationship with the late sex-offender a “hoax”, and directed the justice department to launch a probe into former president Bill Clinton, Democratic donor and entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, and former treasury secretary Larry Summers (who served under Clinton). “This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” the president wrote on Truth Social earlier. Bondi described Clayton, who previously served as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first administration, as “one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country”. She added: “As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.” Updated at 8.46pm GMT 7.55pm GMT Oversight investigation has Trump 'panicked' and 'desperate' says top committee Democrat Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, has responded to Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the ongoing Epstein investigation – which included the release of three emails this week where Epstein said that the president “knew about the girls” and “spent hours” at his home – is a “hoax” and “Russia scam”. “Our Oversight investigation has Donald Trump panicked and desperate,” Garcia said. “He is trying to deflect from serious new questions we have about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.” He added: The President has not explained why he won’t release the files to the American people. Or why sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a cushy low-security prison after her interview with Trump’s former personal lawyer. 7.43pm GMT NIH employee says she was put on leave for criticizing Trump administration during the shutdown Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), said that she was put on non-disciplinary administrative leave for “speaking up in my personal capacity” about the “harms that I have been witnessing” inside the agency. In a video posted to TikTok on Thursday, Norton said that being put on leave was “designed to scare and silence me. It was designed to scare and silence my colleagues, and it was designed to scare and silence everyone.” According to Stat News, Norton was also one of the organizers of the “Bethesda Declaration” letter signed by hundreds of NIH staffers, calling on director Jay Bhattacharya to listen to their concerns about the direction of the agency. 7.10pm GMT Given that the president has no public events or meetings scheduled today, a White House official tells the press pool that Donald Trump “held calls with Thailand and Cambodia in an effort to mediate the most recent conflict” and “engaged with Malaysia as well to help end the violence”. 7.05pm GMT North Carolina sheriff confirms that Charlotte immigration operation is set to take place Federal immigration agents will conduct their next major operation in Charlotte, according to the county’s sheriff. In a statement on Thursday, Garry McFadden confirmed that his office was “contacted by two separate federal officials confirming that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) personnel will be arriving in the Charlotte area as early as this Saturday or the beginning of next week”. The sheriff added: “At this time, specific details regarding the federal operation have not been disclosed and the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) has not been requested to assist with or participate in any enforcement actions.” In an interview with NPR this week, McFadden said “we cannot control what is going to go on. We just have to better understand it and be prepared to respond and react.” 6.25pm GMT Border czar hits back at Catholic bishops condemnation of Trump immigration agenda Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, has hit back against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, after they issued a rare condemnation of the administration’s immigration agenda. “Secure borders save lives, and I wish the Catholic church would understand that,” Homan said, speaking to reporters outside the White House today. “So the Catholic church is wrong, I’m sorry. I’m a lifelong Catholic … I think they need to spend time fixing the Catholic church in my opinion.” The border czar declined to comment on whether options for land strikes in Venezuela had been presented to Trump, or whether ICE agents would soon be conducting their next major operation in Charlotte, North Carolina. Updated at 6.40pm GMT 5.59pm GMT Further to my last post on the announcement of a framework agreement, the White House has said in a statement that the US, Switzerland and Liechtenstein aim to conclude negotiations to finalize their trade deal by the first quarter of 2026. Of the $200bn pledged Swiss investments in the United States, at least $67bn will come in 2026, it said, adding that the investments will target a range of sectors including pharmaceuticals, medical devices, aerospace and gold manufacturing. 5.34pm GMT US tariffs on Swiss goods cut to 15% in deal struck with Trump administration Earlier we reported that US trade representative Jamieson Greer said that the US has “essentially reached a deal with Switzerland”, after the country was hit with a 39% tariff on Swiss exports to the US. My colleague Callum Jones reports that Donald Trump has agreed to slash US tariffs on Switzerland to 15% as part of a new trade pact, lowering duties that strained economic ties and hit Swiss exporters. The two countries have signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding”, the Swiss government announced, following bilateral talks in Washington and intense lobbying by Swiss firms. The Trump administration agreed to limit US tariffs on Switzerland and Liechtenstein “to a maximum of 15%” under the deal, according to a statement from the Swiss government. This brings US tariffs on Switzerland in line with those on the European Union – allowing Swiss exporters the same treatment as rivals in neighboring countries. In return, Switzerland will reduce tariffs “on a range of US products”, the statement said. “In addition to all industrial products, fish and seafood, this includes agricultural products from the US that Switzerland considers non-sensitive.” Swiss officials also committed to granting a series of quotas for US goods that can be exported to Switzerland on a duty-free basis, including 500 tonnes of beef, 1,000 tonnes of bison meat and 1,500 tonnes of poultry. “The date for implementing these market access concessions will be coordinated with the US to ensure that customs duties are reduced at the same time,” the statement said. Related: US tariffs on Swiss goods cut to 15% in deal struck with Trump administration Updated at 5.36pm GMT 5.28pm GMT Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers’s exchanges depict relationship as confidants, emails reveal A series of exchanges between child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, showing a relationship as confidantes emerged among the emails released by Republican legislators this week. The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed the two men sharing personal – and sometimes unseemly – views about politics and relationships. “I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.” At the time, Harvard was wrestling with an admissions debate after a formerly incarcerated woman’s admission to a PhD program. Summers, a former president of the university who lost his position in a scandal after making sexist comments about female academics, went on to say in the email to Epstein: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.” After the Wall Street Journal revealed a previous tranche of emails between Epstein and Summers in a 2023 piece, a spokesperson for Summers told the paper that he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his conviction”. In the massive trove of 20,000 emails from the Epstein estate released by Republican lawmakers this week are documents that show that Summers maintained congenial contact with the convicted child sex trafficker well into 2019, with the last email exchange occurring only months before Epstein’s arrest. Trump wrote on Truth Social today that he would be asking the DOJ and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Summers, among other prominent Democrats and business leaders. In the emails, Summers and Epstein discuss politics – particularly Summers’ contempt for Trump – as well as the details of philanthropic social networking – and women. Summers, 70, confided in Epstein in a 2019 exchange about his romantic gestures toward an unnamed woman, and being rebuffed. “shes smart. making you pay for past errors,” Epstein wrote in an exchange on 16 March. “ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.” Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson on Wednesday. “I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.” Related: Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers’s exchanges depict relationship as confidants, emails reveal Updated at 5.30pm GMT 5.04pm GMT The only remaining criminal case against Donald Trump has been revived after the head of Georgia’s prosecutor’s council appointed himself to replace Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, who was removed from the election interference case in September. Pete Skandalakis, a Republican and the executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia, the state body that provides legal training and is often charged to mitigate prosecutorial conflicts, wrote in a statement on Friday that he would be taking over for Willis. A grand jury in Atlanta indicted Trump and 18 others in August 2023, using the state’s anti-racketeering law to accuse them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally overturn Trump’s narrow 2020 loss to Joe Biden in Georgia. The alleged scheme included Trump’s call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, urging him to help find enough votes to beat Biden. The case remains the only criminal prosecution of Trump remaining, but it has been on life support after Willis was disqualified by the Georgia supreme court, which ruled that her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, revealed in dramatic court filings in January 2024, created an impermissible appearance of a conflict of interest. Four people have pleaded guilty. Trump and the others have pleaded not guilty. While president, Trump is protected from state-level prosecutions, but the other 14 remaining defendants are still subject to prosecution. “The filing of this appointment reflects my inability to secure another conflict prosecutor to assume responsibility for this case,” Skandalakis said. “Several prosecutors were contacted and, while all were respectful and professional, each declined the appointment.” Related: Georgia prosecutor to take over last remaining criminal case against Trump Updated at 5.04pm GMT 4.40pm GMT Trump’s move, to focus on his rivals’ affiliations and relationships with Epstein, is seemingly his latest effort to distance himself from the renewed focus on his own relationship with the disgraced financier, who died by suicide in federal prison in 2019, and the extent to which he was aware of his conduct. Updated at 4.45pm GMT 4.26pm GMT Trump says he will direct attorney general to investigate Epstein's involvement with Bill Clinton, Democratic donors and banks The president continued to post on Truth Social today, notably saying that he will direct attorney general Pam Bondi and the FBI to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s “involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, JPMorganChase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him”. Trump went on to claim, baselessly, that this is “another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats”. Flight logs state that former president Bill Clinton travelled on Epstein’s private jet several times. According to several emails from Epstein, released by the House oversight committee, Clinton never visited his private island. Meanwhile, Reid Hoffman – the longtime Democratic donor and venture capitalist – has said he engaged with Epstein in a fundraising capacity for the Massachussets Institute of Technology. Larry Summers, former treasury secretary under Clinton, was a friend of Epstein’s and several emails between the two appear in the committee’s most recent release. In the tranche of documents published this week, Epstein said that Donald Trump “spent hours” at Epstein’s home with one of his victims in an email to co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The president has maintained the correspondence released by House Democrats was part of the ongoing “hoax” around Epstein, and simply a deflection from their performance during the government shutdown. Updated at 4.31pm GMT 3.45pm GMT GOP senators disavow funding bill provision that allows them to sue government over phone records Several Republican senators have expressed disapproval about a provision tucked into the stopgap spending bill passed this week, which would allow lawmakers to sue the federal government because their phone records were subpoenaed in 2023 by the special counsel investigating Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. “There needs to be accountability for the Biden DOJ’s outrageous abuse of the separation of powers, but the right way to do that is through public hearings, tough oversight, including of the complicit telecomm companies, and prosecution where warranted,” said senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, one of the eight lawmakers whose phone data the FBI sought and obtained. For his part, House speaker Mike Johnson has pledged to repeal the provision next week, and many House Republicans are incensed about the language in the bill. “Interesting seeing my colleagues express outrage over this provision yet still vote for it when they could have been strong and not let the Senate jam the House,” said GOP member Greg Steube, who represents the Florida suncoast. “There was no reason this needed to be in the bill to reopen the government. The Senate used a crisis to pass an unethical provision and now the House is complicit.” 3.17pm GMT 'I have a country to run': Trump lambasts Democrats and some 'weak' Republicans while repeating claim that Epstein emails are a 'hoax' Donald Trump has claimed on social media that Democratic lawmakers are doing “everything in their withering power to push the Epstein Hoax again”. This comes after emails released this week by the House oversight committee seem to suggest that the president may have known about Jeffrey Epstein’s conduct. In his post on Truth Social a short while ago, Trump added that the latest batch of documents are being used to “deflect” from Democrats’ “bad policies and losses, specially the SHUTDOWN EMBARRASSMENT, where there party is in total disarray and has no idea what to do”. The president has yet to address the emails, or the wider record release, which included more than 20,000 pages. On Thursday, he took no questions from reporters at an executive order signing in the East Room. He has, however, been resolute about his stance online. White House officials have recapitulated his claims that the new information is merely a distraction. “Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” Trump wrote on Friday. “Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem! Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!” Updated at 3.20pm GMT 2.37pm GMT Americans should “raise hell” to protect US national parks through the “nightmare” of Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a former National Park Service director, amid alarm over the impact of the federal government shutdown. Jonathan Jarvis claimed the agency is now in the hands of a “bunch of ideologues” who would have no issue watching it “go down in flames” – and see parks from Yellowstone to Yosemite as potential “cash cows”, ripe for privatization. Jarvis, who led the NPS from 2009 to 2017, faced intense scrutiny, a five-hour grilling in Congress and calls for his resignation after closing all 401 national park sites during a previous shutdown, in October 2013. He was certain, despite the backlash, that it was the right thing to do: keeping them open with a skeleton staff would have put parks and their visitors at risk, his team concluded. Over the past month, hundreds of NPS veterans including Jarvis, 72, have watched aghast as most of the agency’s workers were furloughed during the longest shutdown in US history – while the Trump administration kept all national parks open. There have been consequences. A fire at Joshua Tree national park burned through about 72 acres. Yosemite faced a wave of illegal Base jumping. Yellowstone grappled with bear jams. Vandalism included graffiti in Arches national park. A stone wall at Gettysburg national military park was damaged. Trash started to gather at various sites. Thousands of NPS workers are typically around to guide visitors safely through parks, point them in the right direction, swiftly rescue them from danger, keep traffic moving, monitor wildlife and protect the landscape. “You take all of that away – all of those employees – you basically are, on one hand, creating unsafe conditions for the visitor,” Jarvis said, adding: “And you’re putting basically these irreplaceable resources at risk.” Related: National parks facing ‘nightmare’ under Trump, warns ex-director of service Updated at 3.03pm GMT 2.16pm GMT Greer says US has 'essentially reached a deal' with Switzerland over steep tariff rate The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said that the US has “essentially reached a deal with Switzerland”, after the country was hit with a 39% tariff on Swiss exports to the US. “We’re really excited about that deal and what it means for American manufacturing,” Greer told CNBC today in an interview. Updated at 3.03pm GMT 2.08pm GMT Overnight, Russia launched an attack on Kyiv, using 430 drones and 18 missiles, my colleague Jakub Krupa reports. The offensive killed at least four people, and wounded dozens more. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attack was “deliberately calculated” and “aimed at causing maximum harm to people and civilian infrastructure”. Jakub is tracking the latest developments out of Europe today, and we’ll bring you the latest response from the Trump administration as it happens. Related: Germany accuses Putin of ‘contempt for humanity’ after massive overnight attack on Ukraine – Europe live 1.54pm GMT Trump reposted a Fox News segment on Truth Social a short while ago, with the caption “THE JEFFREY EPSTEIN HOAX”. In the clip, host Jesse Watters accuses Democrats of “launching a smear campaign disguised as a bombshell”, referring the tranche of emails released this week, which include correspondence from Epstein to his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, calling Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked” and noting that the president “spent hours” at Epstein’s home. Since House oversight Democrats released the emails, Trump has called them a “deflection” from the party’s performance during the record-breaking government shutdown. Updated at 2.20pm GMT 1.21pm GMT Donald Trump has no public events today, per his official schedule. The president is due to fly to Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Palm Beach, Florida at 6pm ET. There will be an opportunity for the press to ask him questions before he takes off and when he lands. He’ll stay in Florida through the weekend. 12.53pm GMT Russia said on Friday it remains open to the idea of a summit with the United States in Budapest if it is properly prepared and based on agreements reached at the previous meeting between presidents Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in Alaska. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said contacts between Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and US secretary of state Marco Rubio would continue if needed. The two sides announced the planned summit last month but Trump cancelled it soon afterwards, saying he did not want it to be a waste of time. 12.28pm GMT As the Trump administration and Texas governor Greg Abbott restrict free speech on college campuses, two professors at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) are suing the university for retaliation stemming from 2024 arrests at a peaceful campus protest. History professors Ben Wright and Rosemary Admiral argue they should not have been arrested in the first place at the 1 May 2024 demonstration, where they were standing between their students and heavily armed law enforcement. Following the arrest, the professors say their university engaged in retaliation by severely restricting their access to campus, vaguely ordering that classroom instruction and “employment/research related activities” were the only permissible reasons for them to show up at work. “UTD wrongly banned these plaintiffs from campus entirely at first, falsely claiming a court required that,” said the professors’ attorney, Christina Jump. “No court required that.” The professors’ 29-page complaint, filed in a district court in Texas, names UTD and the University of Texas system as defendants, as well as former UTD president Richard Benson, current president Prabhas Moghe, Abbott and Ken Paxton, the attorney general. In addition to allegations that the defendants violated their civil rights, the professors also claim violations of the fourth and first amendments, arguing that they were unlawfully arrested without probable cause and later faced retaliation for peacefully protesting. Related: Texas professors arrested at campus protest sue university, alleging retaliation 12.19pm GMT Trump puts intense pressure on Republicans to block release of Epstein files Donald Trump has cranked up his intense pressure campaign on congressional Republicans to oppose the full release of the justice department’s files related to Jeffrey Epstein, before a crucial and long-awaited House vote on the matter next week that scores of Republicans are slated to support. The belated swearing-in on Wednesday of the Democratic representative Adelita Grijalva – which the House speaker, Mike Johnson, had refused for almost two months during the government shutdown – brought the number of signatures on Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna’s discharge petition to the 218 needed to force a floor vote on legislation demanding the Department of Justice release all of its investigative files on Epstein within 30 days. It is expected that dozens of Republicans will vote for it, with the knowledge that their constituents want greater transparency about the affair and want them to hold the line. Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska, Tim Burchett of Tennessee and Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania have expressed they would do so. CNN reported that top officials summoned representative Lauren Boebert – one of four Republicans in the House who have signed the petition – to a meeting in the White House Situation Room with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, and FBI director, Kash Patel, to discuss her demand to release the files. Trump had also telephoned her early on Tuesday morning, a day before Grijalva was due to be sworn in and provide the crucial final signature. Trump also reached out to Representative Nancy Mace, another of the Republican caucus in the House who have signed the petition, but the two did not connect. Mace instead reportedly wrote the president a long explanation of her own personal experience as a survivor of sexual abuse and rape, and why it was impossible for her to change her position on the matter. She wrote on X that “the Epstein petition is deeply personal.” Those failed lobbying attempts from the White House came as Democrats on the House oversight committee released three damning new emails that suggest Trump knew about Epstein’s conduct, including one in which the convicted paedophile said “of course [Trump] knew about the girls”. Another email described Trump as a “dog that hasn’t barked” and said he had “spent hours” with one victim at Epstein’s house. The president’s team struck back, saying those documents had been cherrypicked, and Republican representatives followed up by releasing a much bigger trove of more than 20,000 files. Related: Trump puts intense pressure on Republicans to block release of Epstein files 12.03pm GMT The US approved the sale of fighter jet and other aircraft parts to Taiwan for $330 million on Thursday, marking the first such transaction since president Donald Trump took office in January, Reuters reported. “The proposed sale will improve the recipient’s capability to meet current and future threats by maintaining the operational readiness of the recipient’s fleet of F-16, C-130,” and other aircraft, the Pentagon said in a statement. Washington has formal diplomatic ties with Beijing, but maintains unofficial ties with Taiwan and is the island’s most important arms supplier. The United States is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself. Taiwan’s presidential office, noting the arms sale was the first announced by the current administration, thanked the US government for continuing the policy of regularized arms sales to Taiwan and supporting Taiwan in enhancing its self-defense capabilities and resilience. “The deepening of the Taiwan-US security partnership is an important cornerstone of peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region,” presidential office spokesperson Karen Kuo said in a statement. 11.41am GMT Just 29% of Americans support US military killing drug suspects, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds Only 29% of Americans support using the US military to kill suspected drug traffickers without a judge or court being involved, a rebuke of President Donald Trump’s strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found. The six-day poll, which closed on Wednesday as Washington continued a military buildup around Latin America that has focused especially on Venezuela, showed 51% were opposed to the killings of drug suspects and the rest were unsure where they stood. In a sign of division within Trump’s party, 27% of Republicans in the poll opposed the practice, while 58% supported it, with the rest unsure. Three quarters of Democrats opposed the practice compared to one in 10 who supported it. The Trump administration has ordered at least 20 military strikes in recent months against suspected drug vessels in the Caribbean and off the Pacific coasts of Latin America, killing at least 79 people. Human rights groups including Amnesty International have condemned the strikes as illegal extrajudicial killings of civilians, and some US allies have expressed growing concerns that Washington may be violating international law. 11.23am GMT US Catholic bishops condemn Trump administration's immigration enforcement Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours. We start with news that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has issued a rare condemnation of president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and advocated for “meaningful immigration reform”. “We are troubled by threats against the sanctity of houses of worship and the special nature of hospitals and schools,” the bishops said in a special message, the first of its kind in 12 years. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration efforts, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The message echoes similar critiques made by Pope Leo, who has called for “deep reflection” about the way migrants are being treated in the US under Trump, Reuters reported. The Trump administration has advanced an aggressive immigration agenda since taking office earlier this year. Trump has rescinded policy that limited immigration arrests near sensitive locations, including churches, hospitals and schools, and deployed federal agents across the US to ramp up such arrests. In their message, the bishops expressed concern about what they described as “a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling” and immigration enforcement. They said they were saddened by the debate and vilification of migrants, and opposed “the indiscriminate mass deportation of people.” The bishops also raised concerns about conditions in detention centers, and what they called the arbitrary removal of legal status of some migrants. “We recognize that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good,” the bishops said. In other developments: Donald Trump is facing the prospect of a politically damaging congressional vote on releasing the Jeffery Epstein files after attempts to press two female members of Congress to withdraw their backing for it appeared to have failed. The reported refusal of Lauren Boebert, a Republican representative from Colorado, and Nancy Mace, from South Carolina, to remove their names from a discharge petition to force a vote leaves Trump exposed on an issue that carries the possibility of turning segments of his Maga base against him. The justice department on Thursday joined a lawsuit brought by California Republicans to block the state’s new congressional map, escalating a legal battle over a redistricting effort designed to give Democrats a better chance of retaking the House of Representatives next year. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, challenges the congressional map championed by Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, in response to a Republican gerrymander in Texas, sought by Donald Trump. The BBC has apologised to Donald Trump over the editing of a Panorama documentary that led to the resignation of its director general, Tim Davie, and the BBC News chief, Deborah Turness. However, the corporation has rejected his demands for compensation, after lawyers for Trump threatened to sue for $1bn (£760m) in damages unless the BBC issued a retraction, apologised and settled with him. James Comey, the former FBI director, and the New York attorney general, Letitia James, asked a federal judge on Thursday to drop the criminal charges against them, arguing that Donald Trump’s hand-picked US attorney, who obtained the indictments against them, was unlawfully appointed. The hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia in front of Judge Cameron Currie marked the first time a judge considered one of several efforts James and Comey have made to dismiss the indictments before trials. The Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell is the latest target of Trump’s retribution campaign against his critics, the congressman confirmed on Thursday. NBC News reports that Swalwell is facing a federal criminal investigation for alleged mortgage fraud, just as three other Democratic officials have faced in recent months. Updated at 12.16pm GMT