California governor Gavin Newsom is looking to thwart Donald Trump’s $1.776bn “anti-weaponization fund” by imposing a 100% tax on any payout received by state residents.
In May, the Department of Justice (DoJ) announced a fund to compensate alleged “victims of lawfare and weaponization”. It’s unclear who qualifies under this category.
The fund was the product of a settlement reached between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – the agency the president sued over his leaked tax returns.
Critics, including Newsom, have slammed the fund as a “boondoggle” designed to divert money to Trump’s allies. Speculation has swirled that its benefactors could include the individuals who were arrested in the 6 January 2021 siege of the US Capitol. The Trump administration has described the rioters as patriots and since pardoned many who were charged in relation to the attack.
“People who assault cops and overthrow democracy don’t deserve a taxpayer-funded payday,” Newsom wrote in a Wednesday post to X, after announcing his plan at a news conference.
Guatemala has agreed to conduct joint strikes with the United States against drug traffickers in its territory, the New York Times reported.
The move marks an escalation of US president Donald Trump’s crackdown on drug cartels operating out of Latin America.
Guatemalan president Bernardo Arevalo agreed to the strikes with US defense secretary Pete Hegseth in a call last week, the Times reported, quoting two people familiar with the talks.
The Central American nation has formally requested “cooperation in operations led by Guatemalan security forces against drug trafficking organizations” in a letter to Hegseth, Arevalo’s office told The Times.
The two officials told the newspaper that the United States and Guatemala had also agreed to “other military action” to target drugs gangs, without giving further details.
Trump refiles $10bn defamation suit against WSJ over report on Epstein ties
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Donald Trump has refiled a defamation lawsuit seeking at least $10bn in damages against the Wall Street Journal over its reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, after a judge threw out an earlier version over legal deficiencies.
The lawsuit is one of several that the president has brought in his personal capacity against news organizations, part of what critics say is a wider pressure campaign against the media.
The lawsuit claims that the Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper tarnished his reputation with an article describing a birthday card to deceased sex offender Epstein as bearing Trump’s signature.
Trump and his lawyers said the card is fake, even after it was released by lawmakers investigating Epstein’s case, Reuters reported. The president is seeking at least $10bn in damages, according to the amended lawsuit - the same amount he had previously sought.
“At the time of publication, Defendants recklessly disregarded whether the Defamatory Statements were true and/or they purposefully avoided the discovery of the truth,” lawyers for Trump wrote in the amended complaint.
It comes as the Trump administration opened a criminal investigation into E Jean Carroll, the writer who accused the president of sexual assault, according to news reports.
Prosecutors, the New York Times and CNN reported on Wednesday, are looking into whether Carroll, 82, committed perjury in a 2022 deposition during her civil lawsuits against Trump, in which she said she did not accept outside financial support for her legal battles.
In other developments:
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In a new interview with CBS News, Jill Biden, the former first lady, said that she was “frightened” as she watched her husband, then-president Joe Biden, freeze up during his disastrous 2024 debate against Donald Trump. Pressed to explain what happened, Jill Biden said: “I don’t know what happened. I mean as I watched it, I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke’. And it scared me to death.”
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Two House Democrats, Don Beyer of Virginia and Dina Titus of Nevada, announced that they plan to introduce a bill that would “explicitly prohibit construction of President Trump’s proposed ‘triumphal arch’ outside Arlington National Cemetery”.
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Cam Higby, a rightwing activist disguised as a pro-Palestinian activist, disrupted a news conference with the Democratic congressmen Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey.
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