Hegseth and Rubio to brief members of Congress on boat strikes as questions mount – live | Trump administration
Hegseth and Rubio to brief members of Congress on boat strikes as questions mount
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog.
This morning we start with the news that president Donald Trump’s top Cabinet officials on national security, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, are due on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress amid investigations into US military vessel strikes in the Caribbean.
The briefing from the defense secretary and secretary of state comes as questions mount over the escalation of military force and deadly boat strikes in international waters near Venezuela. The Associated Press notes that lawmakers have been examining the 2 September attack as they sift through the rationale for a broader US military buildup in the region that increasingly appears pointed at Venezuela.
On Monday night, the US military said it attacked three more boats believed to have been smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people.
“We have thousands of troops and our largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean — but zero, zero explanation for what Trump is trying to accomplish,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.
Key events
Wiles also revealed that it was deputy attorney general Todd Blanche’s idea to go interview Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison and that Trump didn’t know that she would be transferred to a less restrictive facility following Blanche’s visit.
“The president was ticked,” she said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
Wiles says Trump was ‘wrong’ to accuse Bill Clinton of visiting Epstein’s island
Also on Epstein, Wiles told Vanity Fair she had read the documents. She acknowledged that Donald Trump is in them, adding: “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
Trump has accused former president Bill Clinton (without evidence) of visiting Epstein’s infamous private island. Asked about that, Wiles said, “There is no evidence” that those visits happened. And asked whether there was anything incriminating in the files about Clinton as Trump suggested, Wiles said: “The president was wrong about that.”
Pam Bondi ‘completely whiffed’ early handling of Epstein files, says Susie Wiles
On the Epstein files, Wiles said attorney general Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the affair, when she gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House in February.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
Vice-president JD Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade”, Wiles added. She said that Vance, along with FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, were the only ones in the administration that “really appreciated what a big deal this is” because “they lived in that world”.
‘When there’s an opportunity, he will go for it’: Trump’s chief of staff acknowledges ‘score settling’ behind prosecutions
Wiles also said she had told Donald Trump that his second term was not supposed to be a retribution tour.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said in an interview in March.
When that failed to materialize, she said in August: “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour.” But, she said, he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
Asked about New York attorney general Letitia James, Wiles replied: “Well, that might be the one retribution.” James won a massive civil court verdict against Trump for business fraud with a $450m penalty.
Asked whether she told Trump to back down, Wiles doubled down: “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money.” A reminder that an appeals court later threw out the monetary penalty, deeming it excessive, but upheld the core finding that Trump was liable for fraud.
On former FBI director James Comey, Wiles said:
I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.
I don’t think he [Trump] wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.
Last month a federal judge threw out both the Comey and James criminal cases brought by the Trump administration, concluding that the prosecutor had been appointed unlawfully.
Trump has ‘an alcoholic’s personality’, says top White House aide
Wiles, who grew up with a father who was addicted to alcohol, said in one interview:
Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.
She said Trump, who does not drink, has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Over the course of the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles has given a series of remarkably off-script interviews to Vanity Fair that have been published today.
Among the standout remarks made by Wiles are that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” and that she tried and failed to get him to end his “score settling” against his political enemies after 90 days in office; she calls JD Vance a conspiracy theorist and says his conversion from Trump critic to ally was “sort of political” as he was running for the Senate; and she says that attorney general Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the Epstein files.
There’s a lot to get through, so I’ll bring you more details shortly as I comb through the interviews.
FBI offers $50,000 reward for information leading arrest of Brown University shooter
The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the mass shooter at Brown University.
But new video clips released by the police still do not show the suspect’s face, marking another setback for the investigation. Indeed the Associated Press reports that questions are swirling about “campus security, the apparent lack of school video evidence and whether the focus on the person of interest gave the attacker more time to escape”.
FBI director Kash Patel found himself under fire again yesterday for rushing to social media to tout the agency’s work on tracking down that person of interest prematurely. That person was later released from custody hours later, and the shooter remains at large.
But don’t worry. While Rhode Island officials are hard at work on the manhunt, Patel will appear on Magaworld’s Katie Miller’s podcast aimed at conservative women with his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins today. Expect to have all your questions answered, including how do they make long-distance work and when is the engagement?
US lost 105,000 jobs in October and added 64,000 in November, according to delayed data
Michael Sainato
The US labor market grew by more than expected last month, recovering some of the damage inflicted by the federal government shutdown, according to official data.
An estimated 105,000 jobs were lost in October, and 64,000 were added in November, a highly-anticipated report showed today. Jobs growth was higher in November than anticipated by many economists, with a consensus forecast of some 40,000 jobs added.
But the headline unemployment rate continued to climb – and hit 4.6%, a four-year high, last month – amid apprehension around the strength of the US economy.
Previous estimates for overall jobs growth in August and September were also downgraded, from a drop of 4,000 to 26,000, and from growth of 119,000 to 108,000, respectively.
The latest jobs numbers, typically released monthly, were delayed due to the government shutdown. Federal government jobs declined by 162,000 in October, and 6,000 in November.
The figures arrive against a tumultuous background for the US’s economic data, once regarded as the gold standard in government data.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that full October jobs data would not be released and November’s jobs data was delayed due to the 43-day federal government shutdown and questions have been raised about its accuracy.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell warned last week that the data from the BLS should be treated with a “skeptical eye” while the hangover left from the shutdown works through the system.
Ilhan Omar says Trump’s repeated attacks fuel climate of political violence
David Smith
US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Donald Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences.
Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act.
“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she told the Guardian in an interview at her Washington office. “We have people that are being prosecuted right now for threatening to kill me and so it is something that does stay in the back of our minds. But I also worry about those people finding someone who looks like me in Minneapolis or across the country and thinking it is me and harming them.”
Trump made the remarks at a rally-style event last week in Pennsylvania, where supporters chanted “Send her back!” after the president pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that Somali-born Omar married her own brother to become a US citizen. The Democrat, who arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen at 17, described Trump’s fixation as “vile” and an “unhealthy and creepy obsession”.
The Minnesota congresswoman said the attacks followed a familiar pattern. “When things aren’t going well for him … cue the bigotry,” she said, accusing Trump of deflecting from his failure to address cost-of-living pressures. “It’s the same playbook and he just goes back to it; he doesn’t know anything else.”
Starmer says Trump legal action is a matter for the BBC
Across the pond today, Keir Starmer’s office has said that any legal action against the BBC was a matter for the broadcaster but the UK government supported its independence.
It comes after Donald Trump finally filed his lawsuit demanding damages worth up to to $10bn for the way a BBC Panorama documentary – which aired over a year ago – edited a speech he gave to supporters on 6 January 2021 before they attacked the US Capitol.
“Any legal action is a matter for the BBC itself. They’ve made clear they believe there’s no case around the broader point of defamation or libel, but that’s for them and their legal teams to engage with,” a spokesperson for the UK prime minister told reporters.
“We will always defend the principle of a strong, independent BBC as a trusted, relied-upon national broadcaster, reporting without fear or favour. But as we’ve also consistently said, it’s vitally important that they act to maintain trust, correcting mistakes quickly when they occur.”
My colleague Andrew Sparrow notes on our UK politics live blog: “Starmer has, up to now, done his best to avoid getting embroiled in this row, arguing that the BBC is operationally independent and that this is a matter for the corporation and the president to settle themselves. Although there were suggestions at one point that he and Trump would speak about the dispute, that does not seem to have happened. However, he may find it hard to remain uninvolved as this goes on. The lawsuit has been filed as there is evidence in other areas – trade policy, for example – that US-UK relations are no longer quite as warm as they were at the time of the state visit.”
On Monday night the US military said it launched a fresh round of deadly strikes on foreign vessels suspected of trafficking narcotics, killing eight people.
The US Southern Command posted footage of the strikes on social media on Monday, announcing it had hit three vessels in international waters.
“Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and were engaged in narco-trafficking,” US Southern Command said in a post on X.
The black-and-white footage showed the vessels moving through the water before being consumed by large explosions.
The closed-door congressional briefings with Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth come as the US is building up warships, flying fighter jets near Venezuelan airspace and seizing an oil tanker as part of its campaign against Nicolás Maduro, who has insisted the real purpose of the US military operations is to force him from office.
A reminder that the Trump administration has not sought any authorization from Congress for action against Venezuela. But lawmakers objecting to the military incursions are pushing war powers resolutions toward potential voting this week.
The administration’s exclusion of Congress has led to problematic military actions, experts told the Associated Press, particularly the strike that killed two people who had climbed on top of part of a boat that had been damaged in an initial attack.
Congress has received little information about why or how the US military was conducting a campaign that has destroyed more than 20 boats and killed at least 95 people.
Hegseth and Rubio to brief members of Congress on boat strikes as questions mount
Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog.
This morning we start with the news that president Donald Trump’s top Cabinet officials on national security, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, are due on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress amid investigations into US military vessel strikes in the Caribbean.
The briefing from the defense secretary and secretary of state comes as questions mount over the escalation of military force and deadly boat strikes in international waters near Venezuela. The Associated Press notes that lawmakers have been examining the 2 September attack as they sift through the rationale for a broader US military buildup in the region that increasingly appears pointed at Venezuela.
On Monday night, the US military said it attacked three more boats believed to have been smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people.
“We have thousands of troops and our largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean — but zero, zero explanation for what Trump is trying to accomplish,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.
