u/WhoIsJolyonWest

More than any other U.S. president in decades, Donald Trump has aggressively pursued military interventions in Latin America.

On Jan. 3, 2026, U.S. special forces capturedVenezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on charges of narco-terrorism. In the months before the operation, U.S. Southern Command began targeting small, fast-moving boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The death toll from the continuing war on these alleged narco-terrorists has risen to over 200 people.

At the heart of these events is the Trump administration’s stated goal of combating drug trafficking organizations. The White House and State Department have designated a plethora of guerrilla groups, drug cartels, gangs and criminal enterprises as “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Washington has also expanded security ties with Ecuador and El Salvador, which are led by right-wing Trump allies. At the same time, the administration has pressured left-wing governments in Colombia, Guatemala, Brazil and Mexico to join the U.S. war on drugs or else risk Trump’s wrath.

When it comes to opening legal avenues for the application of armed force, the narco-terrorism label is useful. Indeed, it is how the Trump administration justified Operation Absolute Resolve to capture and indict Maduro. Yet Trump’s decision to pardon a right-wing ally – former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández – who was convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking and related weapons offenses, appeared to some observers to be “at odds with Trump’s war on drugs.”

The history of that war on drugs, however, especially during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, shows that the narco-terrorism label has always been politicized. My research on Reagan and the drug war suggests that the nebulousness of the concept aided U.S. policymakers in achieving fundamentally anti-communist and anti-leftist political objectives.

Shining Path and the roots of narco-terrorism
Peruvian President Fernando Belaúnde Terry first coined the term narco-terrorism in 1982 to describe the infiltration of Sendero Luminoso – or Shining Path – guerrillas into the drug trade.
An ultraradical offshoot of the Peruvian Communist Party, Shining Path was one of the most vicious insurgencies in Latin America. A truth and reconciliation commission later attributed at least half of the 70,000 conflict-related deaths and disappearances to the Maoist guerrillas in their campaign to overthrow the “bourgeois” democratic government.

After the Peruvian army chased the guerrillas out of their home base in Ayacucho in the southern Andes, they moved north to the upper Huallaga Valley, the source of over half the world’s cocaine supply at the time.

The Peruvian police, together with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, created special counternarcotics units focused on crop eradication in the upper Huallaga. This strategy sought to reduce the supply of cocaine by eliminating its source, the coca plant. Peasant growers’ resistance to these operations fueled the Shining Path insurgency by providing recruits and creating an opening for the guerrillas to interpose themselves between the farmers and the police.

With the Cold War drawing to a close, a militarized drug war expanded under the administration of George H.W. Bush. As the federal counternarcotics budget nearly doubled, U.S. officials pressured the Peruvians to militarize their counternarcotics efforts, too. But it wasn’t until the Peruvian armed forces pursued a tacit truce with the traffickers that they were able to locate and capture Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán in September 1992 and dismantle the insurgency.

The Peruvian counterinsurgency succeeded due to a strategy that deliberately cut ties between the guerrillas and the drug traffickers. Essentially, the armed forces of Peru took control of the drug trade from the leftist guerrillas. U.S. anti-narcotics officials, together with their Peruvian police colleagues, were less than thrilled with this strategy – as were the tens of thousands of people who were caught in the crossfire. But for myriad U.S. defense officials more interested in defeating Shining Path than stemming the tide of drugs, the narco-terrorism label had facilitated a clear success – and drafted a valuable blueprint.

Colombia and the ‘narco-guerrilla connection’
The incident that indelibly linked the drug cartels and the communist guerrillas in the U.S. concept of narco-terrorism was the November 1985 M-19 siege of the Colombian Palace of Justice, the country’s supreme court. The M-19, or 19th of April movement, so named for a disputed election, had as a main objective to establish socialism in Colombia. The guerrillas took the high court hostage and intended to subject the then-president to a trial. The resulting clash with the military left nearly 100 people dead, including soldiers, guerrillas and 11 of the justices.

Allegations surfaced that Pablo Escobar, head of the notorious Medellín cartel, had paid M-19 for the raid. The guerrillas had apparently stolen hundreds of documents, including U.S. extradition requests for Escobar. Though this motive is still disputed – and even the U.S. ambassador in Bogotá emphasized that the “narco-guerrilla connection” had not been proven – the shocking event hardened U.S. public opinion against the new threat of narco-terrorism.

In April 1986 the Reagan administration issued National Security Decision Directive 221, officially linking counternarcotics and counterinsurgency in U.S. foreign policy. The declaration of drugs as a national security threat widened the scope of U.S. involvement in the Colombian counterinsurgency against entrenched communist guerrilla groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army.

That cooperation continues to the present day, though it is currently jeopardized by hostility between Trump and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, himself a former member of M-19.

The selective application of trafficking claims
The narco-terrorism label was selectively applied not only to left-wing guerrillas but to the two communist governments in Latin America. The Reagan administration seized upon allegations of Nicaraguan and Cuban drug trafficking to influence U.S. public opinion at a time when the American people worried about becoming bogged down in another Vietnam-style quagmire.

Vietnam had shattered the foreign policy consensus around the containment of Soviet communism, but the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic created a powerful new rationale for U.S. intervention. After Congress, citing human rights concerns, restricted aid to the anti-communist Contra forces fighting Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, Reagan publicly accused the Sandinistas of drug trafficking.

The only evidence produced to support the charge was likely obtained as the result of a joint DEA-CIA sting operation involving Barry Seal, an American drug smuggler turned DEA informant later played by Tom Cruise in the Hollywood cinematic version of the sordid tale, “American Made.” Questions arose as to whether the Nicaraguan trafficker identified by the sting was even linked to anyone in the Sandinista government.

At the same time, the Reagan administration ignored allegations that the Contras themselves were smuggling cocaine into the U.S. Indeed, a Senate investigation spearheaded by U.S. Sen. John Kerry revealed that administration officials had repeatedly ignored or obstructed evidence of Contra drug trafficking. The CIA’s inspector general found that the agency had received but neglected to verify similar allegations.

These activities were tolerated because they raised money for a cause that Reagan and his supporters viewed as righteous. The Contras were seen as “freedom fighters” struggling to liberate Nicaragua from communism.

Coming full circle
Then, as now, Washington policymakers pursued a regional approach designed to strengthen security cooperation and bolster the military capabilities of allied nations.

In March 2026 the Trump administration created the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, or Shield of the Americas, a security alliance to stop illegal immigration, Russian and Chinese interference, and “narco-terrorist gangs and cartels.” In his remarks at the March 7 opening summit, Trump insisted that “the only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power (of) our militaries.”

Then, as now, this collaboration appears to be aimed at the leftist and communist governments in the Western Hemisphere.
In many cases, the drug framing is an explicit rationale for action. That was most recently on display with the U.S. designation of the two largest criminal gangs in Brazil as foreign terrorist organizations, leading Brazilian officials of the leftist Lula government to warn that any pretext for intervention would be “unacceptable.”

In other cases the administration’s argument is broader. The ratcheting up of military maneuvers, rhetoric and sanctions against Cuba – including declaring the island nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to U.S. security – has led many to speculate that Cuba is the next target of regime change.

While the narco-terrorism label may be applied selectively depending on the case, the result remains the fulfillment of anti-communist political objectives dating back to the Cold War.

On a clear morning in November 1991, Robert Maxwell's huge naked body was found floating face up in the chilly Atlantic waters off the Canary Islands. A day earlier, the crew of Maxwell's yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, had reported the Czech-born British publisher missing.

The death touched off a flurry of media suspicions about how Maxwell had died. Had the flamboyant autocrat who hobnobbed with the great and powerful fallen overboard? Had he committed suicide because of a rising financial crisis that was about to overwhelm his media empire? Or had he been murdered, either by a crew member or by commandos who slipped aboard his yacht?

The autopsy ruled out death by drowning, due to the absence of water in Maxwell's lungs, and settled on heart failure. There were also some bruises on his body and a muscle tear in his shoulder. Without the exact cause of death clarified, Maxwell's body was flown to Jerusalem for burial on the historic Mount of Olives.

But besides the mystery of how the eccentric media baron died, Maxwell's demise opened his worldwide publishing empire to new scrutiny. During his life, Maxwell had kept critics at bay with lawsuits under Britain's tough libel statutes, but his death changed that. Auditors found that Maxwell had plundered pension funds and committed widespread financial fraud.

Cold War Labyrinth
On still another level, Maxwell was a lead into the dark national security labyrinth of the Cold War. In those shadowy corners, Maxwell, a Jew who had escaped the Holocaust, had made his remarkable career as an entrepreneur who could slip from one side of the Iron Curtain to the other.

Always, too, he had mixed journalism and diplomacy. While obtaining lucrative rights to Communist scientific tracts, he also published fawning biographies of Eastern Europe's dismal leaders. His coziness with Moscow brought him under FBI investigation as a possible Russian spy.

Yet, during the Reagan-Bush era, Maxwell also worked closely with Israel and hired prominent American conservatives, such as former Sen. John Tower, one of George Bush's closest allies. At the Cold War's end, Maxwell was the man on the phone advising Boris Yeltsin how to thwart a hard-line Communist coup and passing messages to Bush's national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft.

This larger Maxwell mystery is the subject of a new book published recently in England. Written by Russell Davies and entitled Foreign Body: The Secret Life of Robert Maxwell, (Bloomsbury), the volume is a contribution to recent American history, too, particularly because it tests the credibility of one of the most intriguing witnesses of the Reagan-Bush era, a former Israeli military intelligence official named Ari Ben-Menashe.

Ben-Menashe surfaced publicly in 1990 (after his arrest in the United States for trying to sell C-130 cargo planes to Iran). Among other charges, the Iranian-born Israeli fingered Maxwell and one of his editors at the Mirror newspapers as agents who assisted in brokering Israeli arms shipments from the East Bloc to a variety of international destinations, including Iran. In Ben-Menashe's account, Maxwell was a central player in building secret Israeli diplomatic and intelligence ties to Moscow.

Ben-Menashe also implicated Tower as a collaborator in Maxwell's curious diplomatic/publishing network. And the Israeli accused CIA official Robert Gates and President Bush of participating in secret Middle East arms deals dating back to the Reagan-Carter campaign in 1980. Most startling, Ben-Menashe claimed to have witnessed Gates and Bush in secret negotiations with Iranians to undermine President Carter's efforts to free 52 American hostages held by Iran in 1980.

By all accounts, however, Ben-Menashe was a controversial witness. When he leveled his charges in interviews with journalists and congressional investigators, his claims were greeted with widespread denials and derision. His accounts of secret missions by Tower, Gates, Bush and Maxwell sounded like the overworked imagination of a bad spy novelist. For its part, Israel's Likud government denied that Ben-Menashe had even worked for its military intelligence services.

But in 1990, Ben-Menashe produced letters of reference that proved his employment from 1977-87 in an office of Israeli military intelligence. Confronted with the letters, the Israelis changed their story, acknowledging Ben-Menashe's work but insisting that he was only a low-level translator who never traveled on government business.

That new line of defense was embraced by Republicans and conservatives in the news media who trashed not only Ben-Menashe but anyone who dared take his stories seriously. But the new Israeli story had problems, too. Even Israeli intelligence officials admitted privately that Ben-Menashe was a bigger player than the government was letting on.

Swaggering Witness
Still, Ben-Menashe was a swaggering character who promised more to investigators than he delivered. His allegations against Bush and Gates also faced their emphatic denials. (Tower, who headed President Reagan's internal investigation of the Iran-contra affair, died in a plane crash in April 1991. At the time of his death, Tower was working for Maxwell's Pergamon-Brassey publishing house for a reported $200,000 salary.)

Ben-Menashe's credibility sank further when he leveled charges about Maxwell's supposed intelligence work for Israel. Ben-Menashe claimed that Maxwell and his dapper foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, arranged arms shipments and assisted Israel in discrediting Mordecai Vanunu when that renegade Israeli scientist tried to disclose details about Israel's secret nuclear weapons program.

When investigative reporter Seymour Hersh included Ben-Menashe's claims about Maxwell and Davies in The Samson Option, Maxwell and Davies sued Hersh and his British publisher. Journalists in London, like their counterparts in Washington, joined in mocking Ben-Menashe and shaking their heads about Hersh's gullibility.

But a crack developed in the Maxwell-Davies front when Davies's former girl friend supplied documents that corroborated some of Ben-Menashe's arms trafficking claims. One document recounted a Davies trip to Ohio, which the editor promptly denied ever making. However, when the Ohio trip was confirmed, the Mirror dismissed Davies on Oct. 28, 1991.

Behind the scenes, Maxwell saw fissures in his financial empire as well. Amid the growing crisis, Maxwell set sail from Gibraltar on Oct. 31, 1991. Two days later, sometime in the pre-dawn hours, Maxwell disappeared over the side.

After Maxwell's death, the Mirror newspapers settled the suit against Hersh by acknowledging the accuracy of the claims in The Samson Option and paying Hersh a sum of money.

Though the new book, Foreign Body, joins in criticizing Ben-Menashe's style, the book confirms much of his substance, about Maxwell. The book bolsters Ben-Menashe's claim, for instance, that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir used Maxwell to help forge a diplomatic relationship with Moscow. Shamir's strategy, Ben-Menashe said, had the dual purposes of increasing emigration of Soviet Jews and of reducing Soviet hostility toward the Jewish state. For that purpose, Maxwell made a perfect agent, author Russell Davies agreed.

(In a 1993 interview, Shamir was asked about the honor of burying Maxwell on the Mount of Olives and whether that did not confirm some special service to Israel. Shamir, who attended the funeral, wryly answered that Maxwell "didn't seem to be enjoying himself.")

Russell Davies writes that Maxwell's end most likely resulted from his growing status as a liability to the powerful interests which he had served as a conduit for money, arms and information. Maxwell had accumulated too many secrets and had the means to damage too many people.

Maxwell's "time was called," Russell Davies concludes, "in all probability by an international committee of those who had used him, but did not care to hear him tell the world how much."

A former beauty queen who alleges Donald Trump groped her at a 1993 pageant has claimed the president's first wife, Ivana, funneled young women into Jeffrey Epstein's orbit the same way Ghislaine Maxwell did, in the final part of an exclusive three-part interview with the Daily Beast's new Substack, PunchUp.

Beatrice Keul, 55, alleges Ivana Trump operated as a reassuring presence at high-end events where Epstein's circle could scout and later isolate women.

"Ivana played a major role in this whole cosmos, bringing in women in the same way as Maxwell," the former Miss Switzerland and Miss Europe contestant told PunchUp.

"Was Maxwell a madam or an enabler? However you would describe her, Ivana was the same."

PunchUp says it has not independently verified the claims about Ivana and has seen no evidence she knew of or took part in any crimes.

Ivana—mother to Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric—died in 2022 at the age of 73. She was never charged with any Epstein-related offense.

PunchUp previously reported Keul's claims that Trump, then 47, assaulted her at his Donald J. Trump American Dream Pageant when she was a 23-year-old banking executive and model, and threatened her if she spoke out. She has also claimed that Epstein told her she was his intended "prey."

Trump has denied all allegations of assault or harassment, calling them "unequivocally false" and insisting he has "never met" some of his accusers.

The White House said Trump "has been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein."

Maxwell, convicted in 2021 of recruiting and abusing girls, is serving 20 years in prison. PunchUp contacted Maxwell's representatives, who did not respond.

**The question before us in California is not complicated. Are we going to stand with the three million people—our friends and neighbors—about to lose their health care, or with the billionaire class that would rather we looked away?**

There are more billionaires in my district and the surrounding area than almost any other Member of Congress. Within fifty miles of my district sits [nearly a third of the entire American stock market—over $20 trillion in value—and five companies worth more than a trillion dollars each](https://www.commondreams.org/news/khanna-tech-oligarchs#:\~:text=%E2%80%9CMy%20district%20is%20%2418%20trillion%2C%20nearly%20one%2Dthird%20of%20the%20US%20stock%20market%20in%20a%2050%2Dmile%20radius.%20We%20have%20five%20companies%20with%20a%20market%20cap%20over%20%241%20trillion%2C%E2%80%9D%20Khanna%20said.%20%E2%80%9CIf%20I%20can%20stand%20up%20for%20a%20billionaire%20tax%2C%20this%20is%20not%20a%20hard%20position%20for%20434%20other%20%5BHouse%5D%20members%20or%20100%20senators.%E2%80%9D). For years, I have fought for *fairness* in our tax policy. If America has been good to you, you must do good for America.

There are 938 billionaires in America. [Together they are worth $8.2 trillion.](https://inequality.org/article/billionaire-wealth-concentration-is-even-worse-than-you-imagine/) The bill [I wrote with Bernie Sanders](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-and-khanna-introduce-legislation-to-tax-billionaire-wealth-and-invest-in-working-families/) asks them for 5 percent every year.

This is a simple tax on wealth. Every year, this tax evaluates the total value of a billionaire’s holdings, their stock, their companies, their real estate, and taxes 5 percent of it. Not their income, which they have arranged to be almost nothing. The wealth itself. The same way a family pays property tax on a house whether or not they sell it. We conduct this assessment on individual’s estates already when they die.

This billionaire wealth tax will raise **$4.4 trillion over a decade**. This is enough to establish a $60,000 salary floor for every public school teacher in America, cap child care at 7 percent of a family’s income, and restore the $1 trillion stripped from [Medicaid](https://www.commondreams.org/tag/medicaid) and the ACA, with a $3,000 check left over for every household under $150,000.

**The California Fight**
California legislators have proposed a *state* tax to target similar excessive wealth. A proposition on the November ballot would [levy a](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/26/opinion/wealth-tax-california-billionaire.html) [*one-time*](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/26/opinion/wealth-tax-california-billionaire.html) [5 percent tax on the wealth of the state’s 250 billionaires](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/05/26/opinion/wealth-tax-california-billionaire.html). Accrued over 5 years, it would [raise $100 billion](https://itep.org/expert-report-on-the-california-2026-billionaire-tax-revenue-economic-and-constitutional-analysis/) to save health care for 3 million Californians. [I am backing it.](https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/california-oligarchs-wealth-tax-silicon-valley/)

Opposing these landmark taxes, Governor Newsom has suggested a “minimum income tax”. The [focus of this tax is billionaires’](https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinnewsom/p/its-time-for-a-national-billionaires?r=4coaor&utm\_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm\_medium=web) [*reported income*](https://open.substack.com/pub/gavinnewsom/p/its-time-for-a-national-billionaires?r=4coaor&utm\_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm\_medium=web), as well as the loans they take out to live on. [An income tax, not a wealth tax.](https://x.com/davidsirota/status/2070506028492616176?s=20) That is the problem. Newsom goes after that income, but billionaires have very little. Most take no salary at all. They borrow against their stock, live on the loans, and pass the fortune to their [children](https://www.commondreams.org/tag/children) without ever selling a share. The wealth underneath goes untouched.

Bernie and I tax the wealth itself, and our bill raises $4.4 trillion. Newsom’s tax on these borrowed assets only raises 1/44th of that. That’s why the tech oligarchs support Newsom’s proposal. They hope they can trick folks into [making the issue go away](https://www.businessinsider.com/business-leaders-react-to-california-wealth-tax-proposal-2025-12#garry-tan-11).

Same billionaires, forty-four times the revenue from Bernie and I’s proposal compared to Newsom’s.
Tax what they own, not what they report.

**No Capital Flight**
I was criticized for the bill, as well as my support of California’s proposed Billionaire Tax. Many said that the wealth flight from California would devastate our economy. They were wrong. In Q1 of 2026, [California received more venture capital investment than the rest of the country](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-04-28/is-california-a-harbinger-of-the-ai-job-disruption?embedded-checkout=true) [*combined*](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-04-28/is-california-a-harbinger-of-the-ai-job-disruption?embedded-checkout=true). Then the billionaires [spent millions propping up my primary challenger.](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/ro-khanna-california-wealth-tax.html) He received 6 percent of the vote.

**Tax over $50 million**
And the tax should not stop at billionaires, it must reach centimillionaires. The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up, and one already does. Every year it has been introduced, [I have cosponsored the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/8085/cosponsors). It starts at $50 million: 2 percent a year on wealth above that line, And [it reaches the money inside irrevocable trusts, taxed to the grantor who set them up](https://jayapal.house.gov/2026/03/26/jayapal-warren-boyle-45-lawmakers-renew-push-for-wealth-tax-on-ultra-millionaires-and-billionaires/). Moving a fortune into a trust should not take it off the books from a wealth tax.

**Wealth Taxes are the Moral Test of Our Time**
Supporters are right to call the fight in California the reverse Proposition 13 of our generation. In 1978, California voted for Prop 13 to cap property taxes, and that anti-tax revolt carried [Ronald Reagan](https://www.commondreams.org/tag/ronald-reagan) to the presidency two years later. This is that revolt in reverse: instead of capping taxes on property, we are taxing the extreme wealth at the top. This is a philosophical fight, and California is the test case for the nation.

So the question is not complicated. Are we going to stand with the three million Californians about to lose their health care, or with the billionaire class that would rather we looked away? Are we the party of working people, or just the party of the donor class? Are we going to return to the party of FDR, or keep telling ourselves we need to do what the donors want?

Are we willing to tax extreme wealth, or only willing to talk about it?

I know my answer. We cannot have a nation where 938 people grow $1.5 trillion richer in a year while a teacher in my district takes a second job to cover rent.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) declined Thursday to release additional unredacted records from its investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling a federal judge that it has already adequately complied with the law.
The DOJ’s response came in the final hours of a court-ordered deadline to remove redactions in at least a dozen documents or “show cause” why it could not.

Those documents included “at least eight email exchanges with Mr. Epstein regarding a ‘torture video’ and sexual activity with young women, including minors” and interviews with a woman who claims she was abused by President Trump as a minor.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche,through his attorneys, told District Judge Emmet Sullivan that his department has “devoted incredible time and resources” to reviewing more than 6 million documents in connection with the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA).
“As will become apparent, it would contravene the settled application of the EFTA for the Department to produce unredacted versions of many of the records at issue, and nothing requires that result,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward wrote.
The filing pointed to exemptions in the law that allowed the DOJ to withhold or redact records that contained victims’ identities and information that could jeopardize a federal investigation, among a few other exceptions.  
Woodward noted that senders and recipients were concealed in several of the emails because they included the names of victims and others contained private email addresses.
“One of the complicating aspects of administering the EFTA is that many communications written by victims, without context, can appear disturbing on their face,” he wrote. “Consistent with that statutory authority, the Department has sought to prevent victim PII from becoming public even in instances where the victims eventually became complicit or engaged in reprehensible activity or communications.”

Woodward also claimed that redactions in a draft indictment from the Southern District of Florida were present in the original file and the department “has not been able to locate an unredacted version” of the photocopy.
As for a set of FBI interview notes, Woodward said those could not be produced because of “technical limitations” in ensuring that handwritten materials are free from private victim information.  
The Justice Department argued that it should not be forced to release any further records to the public but offered to share additional details with the judge in closed-door proceedings. It also asked for a 60-day extension so that the solicitor general can consider a possible appeal, if further action is demanded.

The filing comes in a lawsuit from attorney and independent journalist Katie Phang, in which she alleged that the DOJ has violated the transparency law by withholding information.
Blanche has repeatedly defended the administration’s handling and rollout of the files in the face of strong bipartisan backlash.

Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence and the West on Tuesday, accusing Pope Leo XIV of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for AI regulation. In his remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, he also warned of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the United States’ Democratic Party.

Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, was an early supporter of President Donald Trump in Silicon Valley. He also helped launch Vice President JD Vance’s career: Vance worked at Mithril Capital, an investment firm Thiel co-founded, before Thiel backed his transition into politics. He delivered his remarks at a nonrecorded panel alongside the political scientist Francis Fukuyama. Reporters were allowed to take notes on the proceedings.

The Vatican, AI, and world domination
During the event, Thiel took direct aim at the Vatican, accusing Pope Leo XIV — the first pope from the United States — of unintentionally advancing Chinese interests by pushing for stronger international oversight of artificial intelligence.

In May, Leo used his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), to declare that artificial intelligence “must be disarmed” and call for greater international regulation of the technology.

Because the pope’s message could influence some Americans, but is unlikely to be heeded by people in China, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatened to slow down only one side of the “race between the US and China” to advance AI.
In his own view, Thiel said, that means Leo is “working for the Chinese Communists.” The Aspen audience received his characterization of the pope as a Chinese agent with laughter.

The Vatican did not respond to a request for comment.

Friction between the tech billionaire and the Vatican is not new. In March, Thiel gave an invitation-only lecture series on the Antichrist in Rome, just blocks away from the Holy See. The lectures reportedly unnerved the Vatican and prompted two Catholic universities to publicly state that they were not involved in hosting the events.

Thiel has argued that the Antichrist could manifest not as an individual but as a world government that seizes power by promising to protect humanity against existential threats such as AI or global warming.

The end of history
Thiel and Fukuyama’s discussion, entitled “Humanity at the End of History,” marked a notable departure from the last time the pair debated 14 years ago.

In 2012, the two focused largely on the causes of what Thiel sees as “technological stagnation,” debating income inequality, the failures of clean energy technology, and the gridlock of US infrastructure projects like high-speed rail.
But while their previous talk centered on economic questions, this time, the pair framed the broader fate of Western democracy in more drastic terms.

Fukuyama is known for his “End of History” thesis, in which he proposed that, after the Cold War, liberal democracy might represent the final form of government. During the Aspen panel, Fukuyama argued that the greatest danger is abandoning institutions that have sustained democracy.

Thiel countered this by arguing that those institutions themselves have become engines of paralysis, and that decades of technological stagnation have pushed Western politics toward greater instability: “The weird ways that politics has gone haywire is telling me something very deep.”

Thiel’s political views have drawn criticism from some writers and thinkers, who say his distrust in democratic institutions and enthusiasm for elite-led governance amount to a form of “techno-authoritarianism.”

A democratic-socialist ‘takeover’
Responding to Fukuyama’s argument that, despite growing extremism, liberal democracy remains humanity’s best political system, Thiel warned that far-left forces are increasingly dominating American politics.

“I think there’s going to be a democratic-socialist takeover of the Democratic Party,” Thiel said.

His comments come as self-identified democratic socialists have gained influence within the Democratic Party, most notably with last year’s election of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, followed this year by a series of victories by democratic socialist candidates in mayoral and congressional primaries.

“The Republican Party doesn’t matter that much. It’s the less important one,” Thiel said. “When the Democratic Party goes, this country is over.”

The tyranny of the law
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the United States’ adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Thiel also argued that the American Revolution has been fundamentally misunderstood.

“There are all these anti-Trump protests: we don’t want kings, we want rule of law,” Thiel said. He framed the American Revolution not as a campaign against King George III, but as a revolt against an all-powerful British parliament, whose lawmakers exercised “totalitarian” control.

In Thiel’s telling, the US Constitution was designed as a corrective to Britain’s “tyrannical rule of lawyers,” with a presidency, he said, built to be “more powerful than King George III.”

He contrasted the United States’s constitutional system with that of today’s European Union, which he described as a stagnant, rule-bound bureaucracy, under which people are “NPCs” — non-player characters in video games — with no power to make decisions.

“The EU is rule of law,” Thiel said. “It is like bad AI.”

Palantir and the Deep State
Thiel spoke about Palantir, the software company he co-founded, and its close contracting relationship with US federal agencies including the Pentagon and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Despite doing billions of dollars of business with the national security establishment, the company is “not joined at the hip” with the “US deep state,” Thiel said. He called the company’s leaders “loyal-dissident-type people” and said that neither he nor Palantir’s current CEO, Alex Karp, hold government security clearances. Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.

The formidable influence wielded by tech companies, Thiel said, is “one of the things that’s really healthy about the US,” because it means “the power centers are distributed in this country.”

As an example of the multiple power centers, he offered an unsupported conspiratorial claim that the AI firm Anthropic — a “woke liberal company” that he credited with “winning the AI race” — would “rig the elections in 2028” in support of Democrats. Anthropic, Thiel said, would use its industry-leading AI models to “completely outwit” any ideological efforts Elon Musk might make in the opposite direction through X.

Anthropic declined to comment, pointing instead to one of its recent blog posts on election integrity and political bias.

Despite his own right-wing libertarian politics, Thiel said he preferred the idea of the US having competing power centers to a situation like “Rome or Russia,” since “you don’t want this whole thing to be fused in DC.”

Thiel also discussed Palantir’s name, which was inspired by the magical seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s *“*The Lord of the Rings.” Critics have noted that characters who try to use the powers of the palantír end up being manipulated by the story’s archvillain, Sauron.

Thiel argued that those people misunderstand Tolkien’s story. “Toward the end, it gets used by the good guys,” Thiel said. The hero and king-to-be, Aragorn, uses a palantír to confront Sauron, showing him he now possesses the reforged sword of his ancestors.
(Sauron then misinterprets this intelligence, leading him to make a fatal strategic blunder.)

“Anybody who tells you a different story of Tolkien,” Thiel said, “doesn’t even know what they’re talking about, on the level of literature.”

WASHINGTON, July 2 (Reuters) - When the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling defending the Federal Reserve from political interference, it not only prevented President Donald Trump from firing one of the ⁠central bank's ⁠governors, it also highlighted growing unease among the justices about the use of their ever-expanding emergency docket.

Three ⁠of the four conservative justices who dissented in Monday's ruling involving the Fed's Lisa Cook also criticized the five justices who were in the majority for making such a consequential decision using the court's procedure designed for emergencies — and short-circuiting lower courts in the process. 

That prompted Chief Justice John Roberts to defend the landmark action using this pathway in the Cook case as a matter of "prudence" on which people can disagree. Roberts authored the 5-4 ruling, joined by fellow conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the court's three liberal justices.

Critics for years have raised concerns about the court's increasing willingness to decide major issues using the emergency docket — also called the "shadow docket" or "interim docket" — ‌saying it lacks transparency and accountability to the public, and gives short shrift to complex ‌and high-stakes legal disputes.

This docket lets the justices render decisions before lower courts have decided the legal merits of a case, generally bypassing the Supreme Court's regular procedures that involve extensive briefing, oral arguments, months of deliberation and lengthy written rulings. Emergency orders typically are made rapidly and often provide no explanation or rationale. 

Now another concern is emerging. As more and more emergency decisions usher in vast changes to ⁠the law, and even alter the court's own ⁠precedents, the justices appear divided over just how powerful this process is becoming, and how to wield it appropriately.

The justices completed their latest nine-month term on Tuesday and entered a summer recess. Their next term begins in October.

A TELLING RESPONSE
"What I find really telling is that Roberts felt he had to respond to it. He didn't have to. The opinion could have just decided the case," said Bradley University law professor Taraleigh Davis, an expert on the emergency docket, referring to the complaint by the dissenting justices.

"He felt the pressure of the complaint enough to put a principle on paper for the first time," Davis added. "And the principle he lands on, that it's a matter of prudence, is, honestly, pretty honest about the fact that there is no rule. There is no formula."
Formerly used only rarely, the court in recent years has transformed the emergency docket into a powerful force in American life, employing it to especially dramatic effect since Trump returned to office in January 2025. 

The court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, backed Trump in numerous emergency decisions that let him implement contentious policies impeded by lower courts while legal challenges continued to play out.

Its emergency decisions have let Trump fire federal employees, take control of independent agencies, ban transgender people from the military, proceed with aggressive immigration raids and deport migrants to countries where they have no ties, among other ⁠actions. 

The ⁠conservative justices have wielded this power in multiple ways, largely siding with ⁠Trump, a Reuters analysis has shown. 

Among the emergency actions during the latest term that court observers argue revised existing law, the justices allowed states to redraw the boundaries of U.S. House of Representatives districts in the hopes of benefiting Republicans in elections and weighed in on the rights of parents of transgender children.  

THE REBECCA SLAUGHTER CASE
Using the emergency docket, the court also boosted Trump's power to fire independent federal regulators, allowing him last September to remove Democratic Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Slaughter. ⁠It similarly let Trump fire other agency officials during its previous term. 

Dissenting in several of those decisions, liberal Justice Elena Kagan said a 1935 precedent of the court that had insulated federal regulators from such at-will firings by a president should have barred Trump's actions. Kagan asserted that the emergency docket should not be used to overrule precedent or revise existing law. 

On Monday, the court overruled that precedent — a decision that expands presidential powers — in a 6-3 ruling formally affirming the legality of Trump's move to fire Slaughter. 

It issued its ruling on the Fed's Cook on the same day. The court denied Trump's emergency request that it block decisions by lower courts preventing him from removing Cook based on unproven mortgage fraud allegations that she denies. But the court made clear that its decision did not rule out the possibility of Trump prevailing in his efforts to remove Cook in the future after the allegations are vetted.

No other president since the Fed's founding in 1913 ever tried to fire a Fed official. Trump's attempt threatened to undermine the Fed's cherished independence. 

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by fellow conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, wrote in dissent that the court should not have issued such a comprehensive ruling on ⁠Cook given that the case was at an early stage and that novel legal issues were involved. Alito noted that the dispute reached the Supreme Court on the emergency docket just 21 days after the litigation began last year. 

Those problems "counseled in ⁠favor of a light touch by this court," Alito wrote. 
Echoing this criticism, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in dissent, "While a modest approach would have been appropriate, the court chooses to go big. Its opinion sets precedent on a series of important issues, with implications that extend well beyond this case."

Roberts responded to the criticism, writing: "How much to say on our interim docket ... is not reducible to any mechanical formula; it is ultimately a matter of prudence, upon which reasonable minds can (and often do) disagree."

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that unlike in other consequential emergency-docket cases, the court spent more time considering this one and took the rare step of hearing oral arguments.

PARENTAL RIGHTS CASE
The complaints by the conservative dissenters mirrored those made by two of the court's liberal justices in another emergency docket decision called Mirabelli v. Bonta in March. 

In that case, the court blocked a series of California laws that can limit the sharing of information with parents about the gender identity of transgender public school students without the child's permission, siding with Christian parents who challenged these protections.

The ruling extended protections under the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment right to due process, recognizing the right of parents to receive this information. 

"These policies likely violate parents' rights to direct the upbringing and education of their children," the ruling stated. 

In dissent, Kagan, joined by fellow liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized the "terse, tonally dismissive ruling designed to conclusively resolve the dispute." Kagan wrote that it will be seen as a judgment on the legal merits, not an interim order, effecting a major development in U.S. law on a politically charged issue.

"Today's decision shows, not for the first time, how our emergency docket can malfunction," Kagan wrote.

'BROADER PROBLEMS'
"The problems with Mirabelli are illustrative of the broader problems of the court's use of its emergency docket to decide significant questions of constitutional law," Yale Law School professor Douglas NeJaime said. 

"Parties are denied the opportunity to fully brief and argue a case, lower courts are denied the opportunity to fully consider the ⁠merits in the first instance, and the law changes in ways that are not always clear and that leave state actors, lower courts, and ordinary Americans with an insufficient basis on which to move forward," NeJaime said. 

The rulings in the Cook and Mirabelli cases reflect the court's ongoing dilemma over how much explanation the justices should attach to emergency orders. Most emergency actions are bare-bones, limited to deciding a policy's status — enforceable or not — pending a challenge to its legality.

Barrett, part of the majority in the Mirabelli case, defended the ruling and the decision to offer legal rationale. 

"Interim applications routinely require the court to balance the lock-in risk of saying too much against the transparency cost of saying too little," Barrett wrote in a separate opinion.

Roberts, meanwhile, in the Cook ruling reminded Barrett and the other dissenters in that case of her statement in the Mirabelli case.
"It's not surprising there are internal disagreements on this, as it's a hard issue," George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin said. "It can be problematic to both say too much or to say too little."

Somin said the court cannot easily fix the problem.

"I would lean towards giving more explanation for decisions rather than less, and only using the shadow docket in cases where there is a very compelling reason," Somin said. "Of course, what counts as a compelling reason is likely to divide people with different ideologies and judicial philosophies."

Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, defeated Representative Diana DeGette on Tuesday in the Denver area, according to The Associated Press, in a show of force for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The triumph by Ms. Kiros unseats a 15-term incumbent and further propels the insurgent coalition that [swept a series of congressional contests](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/24/nyregion/new-york-primary-takeaways.html) last week in New York.

Ms. Kiros, an immigrant and first-time candidate, was born the year after Ms. DeGette, 68, took office. Her victory in the solidly Democratic district all but ensures her election in November.

A lawyer and doctoral student in public affairs, Ms. Kiros cast herself as a political outsider capable of addressing the affordability crisis that she argued the Democratic establishment had failed to resolve. Her opposition to U.S. support for Israel was also a cornerstone of her campaign and central to her political identity.

Her grass-roots campaign overcame a fund-raising advantage held by Ms. DeGette, who was helped by a last-minute influx of spending from outside groups. Early Wednesday, Ms. Kiros was leading by more than [five percentage points](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/us/elections/results-colorado-us-house-1-primary.html) with nearly 80 percent of votes counted.

In her campaign biography, Ms. Kiros highlighted the fact that the Manhattan law firm where she once worked had fired her in 2023 after she refused to take down [a letter](https://medium.com/@melatakiros/dear-us-law-firms-77ec63e838af) that raised questions about Israel’s historical legitimacy, defended pro-Palestinian campus protesters and challenged the firm’s response to activist law students.

She has faced criticism for declining to call antisemitic a fatal [firebombing attack](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/02/us/boulder-colorado-attack-what-we-know.html)in Boulder, Colo., on people who were marching in support of Israeli hostages.

Her victory “is part of a pattern of our democratic socialist politics resonating across the country,” said Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, of which Ms. Kiros is a member. “It just shows that Americans want politicians who are going to address the cost of living with universal policies that apply to everybody.”

If she prevails in November, as she is expected to do, Ms. Kiros will join a growing group of left-wing Democrats in Congress who want to see universal, single-payer health care, bans on corporate donations to political campaigns and an end to American support for Israel. Her campaign was bolstered by an endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

A longtime progressive, Ms. DeGette leads a powerful subcommittee overseeing health care and had said she would push to pass “Medicare for all” if Democrats retook the House. She campaigned heavily on her liberal credentials, running a TV ad that featured Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York praising her support of universal health care. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse anyone in the race.

But Ms. DeGette appeared to find herself increasingly at odds with her own district on issues including American support for Israel and the acceptance of corporate donations to her campaign.

Ms. DeGette in the past has called herself a “strong supporter” of Israel. Her campaign got a boost from late spending by outside groups, including some with connections to pro-Israel PACs. Ms. Kiros argued that those donations made her opponent beholden to special interests rather than to her own constituents.

Denver and its suburbs are far younger and more diverse than they were when Ms. DeGette first won the seat in 1996.

Texas Democrats spent their 3-day convention in Corpus Christi rallying party activists, training volunteers and making the case for Democratic policies and candidates across the state ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Thousands of people filled the stands of the Hilliard Center Arena in Corpus Christi for the Texas Democratic Convention’s closing rally Saturday, where Sen. Bernie Sanders made the final keynote speech.

https://youtu.be/XUHC9Yy74fU?is=B6sqakU5caz1W5oB

“We know that when we stand together as one people, the oligarchs and all of their money will never defeat it,” said Sanders, a Vermont Democrat. “Let’s go out and do it.”

His message was met with loud roars and cheers from the crowd, and it echoed one overall theme stressed by the party throughout their convention: The state’s Democratic leaders urged Texans to unite behind a common message and turn their energy into votes ahead of November’s consequential midterm elections.

Sander’s speech capped the three-day convention where democratic delegates, volunteers, and elected officials urged activists to organize for the 2026 elections. Candidates and party leaders argued that winning political power in the state is essential for protecting public education, expanding health care access and safeguarding rights they say are under attack — both in the Lone Star State and nationally.

Republicans have held every statewide elected office in Texas for more than three decades. Many of the state’s Democrats feel like this year is their best chance yet to retake at least some of those positions.

The convention in Corpus Christi included speeches from the state’s most notable Democrats, Dolores Huerta, U.S. Rep. Al Green from Houston, and several who are running at the local, state, and federal level both in and out of state.

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa said this election season “is the only fight that matters in 2026.” She said the results will answer a big question for Texans.

“Is this the Texas that is by and for the people? Or is this great state the billionaire’s world, and we just live here?” asked Hinojosa before the crowd during a nearly six-hour rally on Friday evening.

National Democrats tie Texas to nationwide political battles
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another convention keynote speaker, famed this year’s midterms as a pivotal choice for voters when it comes to the country’s priorities.

“This is not about left or right anymore. It’s about right or wrong.” Booker told the crowd of nearly 4,000 attendees. “Are we a nation where healthcare is a right or does it drive us to bankruptcy? Or are we a nation that believes that the gateway to democracy begins with public education and equal opportunity? Or are we closing it off by defunding our schools?”

Other speakers built on that message, arguing that winning elections — and holding political power — is the first step toward achieving the party’s shared goals. Last year’s Republican-led redistricting in Texas was a frequent example the Democrats pointed to.

Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat and member of the Tennessee Three, knows that struggle firsthand. Pearson was expelled from the Tennessee House in 2023 before being reinstated and is now running for Congress. But Texas’ mid-decade redistricting fight helped spark similar fights in several states, including Tennessee. In May, Tennessee’s Republican-dominated legislature redrew the state’s congressional districts. The seat Pearson is running for now leans Republican.

“They cracked our congressional district in Memphis into thirds to create three white majority districts,” Pearson told attendees. “They thought that would make us quit. They thought wrong.”
Pearson’s message resonated with many Texas Democrats, who spent much of the last year battling their own Republican-led redistricting effort.

Hinojosa and U.S. Senate nominee James Talarico were among the lawmakers who broke quorum in an unsuccessful attempt to stop Republicans from approving a new congressional map they argued diluted the voting power of communities of color.

Although Republicans ultimately approved the map, Democrats repeatedly pointed to the fight as evidence that organizing — even in defeat — can draw national attention and mobilize supporters.

Texas Democrats turn focus to policy fights at home
Hinojosa centered her Friday speech on public education, arguing Gov. Greg Abbott’s school voucher program has weakened Texas schools.

“Abbott devastated our schools when he passed his voucher scam, and he took six million dollars from an out-of-state billionaire dead set on defunding public education,” Hinojosa said. “As long as we have a governor who can be bought, we won’t have the Texas that we deserve.”

Others who spoke highlighted the lack of access to healthcare for rural Texans, affordability issues, and the need for change in leadership for the Lone Star State.
The final speech Friday night came from Talarico, who drew one of the convention’s loudest ovations. He used much of his time to highlight the long history of Texans resisting concentrated political power.

“That Texas state of mind resists any tyranny, whether it comes from dictators 200 years ago or billionaire mega donors today,” Talarico said.

He told the crowd that what Democrats are now fighting for isn’t just about Texas.

“There is something broken in America. Our economy is broken. Our political system is broken, even our relationships with each other feel broken,” Talarico said. “There is a deep hunger in this state and in this country for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, but a politics of love. A love that can heal what’s broken in America.”

Republicans make their presence felt outside convention
While Democrats listened to speeches or attended training in the convention center, Texas Republicans staged their own events outside it throughout the weekend.

Trucks carrying mobile LED billboards circled the arena, flashing Republican slogans and ads. GOP volunteers handed out free breakfast tacos wrapped in anti-Democrat messaging, and two longhorns were staged nearby beneath a banner reading “Don’t Buy The Bull.”

Most of the Democrat convention counterprogramming was organized by Radical Texas, a political group supporting Abbott and other Texas Republican candidates. The governor actively posted about their activities on his social media.

While Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker hosted a luncheon inside the convention center on Friday, three South Texas Republicans held a press conference down the street highlighting their own vision for the state.

“The Republicans, from the grassroots to the state officials to our governor to up and down the ballot are going to do everything they can to move the Texas economy forward,” said Rep. Todd Hunter, who represents the Corpus Christi area in the Texas House.

The local county GOP chapter also spent the weekend canvassing and hosted a breakfast that featured guest appearances from Abbott and Eric Flores, the Republican candidate running to represent Texas’ 34th Congressional District.

Democratic Party leaders spent much of the weekend reminding delegates that speeches alone won’t end Republicans’ three-decade hold on statewide office.

Now that the state convention is over, the next test begins as thousands of volunteers return home to register voters, knock on doors and campaign across Texas ahead of November.

President Trump had asked the justices to intervene after a jury found that he had sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined a request by President Trump to review a $5 million civil judgment against him after a jury found in 2023 that he sexually abused and defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll.

The announcement by the justices did not include any reasoning, and no public dissents were noted.
A second case that arose out of Ms. Carroll’s allegations also could be headed to the Supreme Court. In January 2024, a separate jury ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defaming her in 2019 after she accused him of a decades-old rape.

Lawyers for Mr. Trump have said they plan to askthat the justices also hear that case.

Still, Monday’s decision is a major blow to Mr. Trump and is most likely the end of his legal efforts to contest the jury verdict finding that he assaulted Ms. Carroll in the mid-1990s in a department store dressing room.

The Supreme Court’s announcement came after the court ruled in February that the president had overstepped his authority by issuing sweeping tariffs using emergency powers. That decision, which dealt a sharp blow to Mr. Trump’s economic and foreign policy strategy, drew sharp criticism from the president, who referred to the justices who voted against the tariffs as “fools and lap dogs” and a “disgrace to our nation.”

In response to the decision on Monday, Mr. Trump posted on social media, calling Ms. Carroll’s lawsuit “a Fake Case.” He added that he would “continue the fight against this Weaponization and Lawfare Case against me, including the ridiculous claim of Defamation, with all of my power and strength.”

In his post, Mr. Trump accused New York State of creating a law “for an instant speck of time, going back many decades, in order to wrongfully ‘nab’ me.” He was referring to a 2022 New York law that gave adults who claimed to have been sexually assaulted a one-year window to sue, even if the period for doing so under the statute of limitation had expired. Ms. Carroll, an ardent supporter of the law, sued after it was enacted.
Ms. Carroll, 82, writing on Substack, declared: “WE WON! THIS WIN IS FOR EVERY WOMAN IN THE WORLD!”

Her lawyer, Roberta A. Kaplan, said the decision “affirms once and for all the jury’s unanimous verdict that President Donald J. Trump sexually assaulted and defamed E. Jean Carroll. His multiple efforts to appeal that verdict have all failed, and today’s ruling ends his quest to avoid accountability for his actions.”

In May 2023, a federal jury in New York found the president liable for sexually abusing and defaming Ms. Carroll.

The jury agreed that Ms. Carroll, a former magazine writer, had sufficiently shown that Mr. Trump sexually abused her in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store when the two crossed paths in the 1990s. Further, the jury found that Mr. Trump had defamed Ms. Carroll by posting a statement on social media calling her case “a complete con job” and “a Hoax and a lie.” Throughout, Mr. Trump denied Ms. Carroll’s allegations.

Among other evidence, the jury heard claims by two women in addition to Ms. Carroll that Mr. Trump had assaulted them, and an excerpt from the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Mr. Trump can be heard bragging that he had a practice of grabbing and kissing women without consent.

After the verdict, Mr. Trump appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, asserting, among other things, that the trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, erred by allowing the evidence of the two women and the tape excerpt to be shown to the jury.

In December 2024, a three-judge appeals court panel upheld the jury’s verdict, finding that Mr. Trump failed to show that the evidence had harmed his rights to a fair trial.
Mr. Trump then asked the justices to weigh in and find that the trial court had erred.

In a brief to the court, lawyers for Mr. Trump described the evidence as “multiple decades-old, unverified and unrelated allegations.”

They also claimed that the appeals court had incorrectly applied the law and argued that the justices needed to step in because “if left uncorrected, these errors will recur in a host of future civil and criminal cases.”

Lawyers for Ms. Carroll asked the justices to reject the president’s petition.

They wrote that the Supreme Court “routinely declines” to take up cases “when the questions presented are irrelevant” to a verdict, “such is the case here.”

Cops told corporate security outfits that “challenges faced by the middle and lower classes” might spur attacks on wealthy CEOS.

A LAW ENFORCEMENT intelligence hub in New Jersey fretted that the growing class divide in the U.S. could drive a wave of lone-wolf attacks on high-flying corporate executives, according to a report obtained by The Intercept.
The New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, one of the so-called fusion centers that serve as intelligence clearinghouses for cops, warned in a bulletin earlier this year that disaffected Americans were increasingly blaming society’s ills on rich people and corporate bigwigs.

The report specifically cited the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 — allegedly by Luigi Mangione — as an expression of anti-fat-cat rhetoric. To the analysts at the New Jersey fusion center, Thompson’s killing hinted at a larger trend.
“Public discourse increasingly attributes the challenges faced by the middle and lower classes to the actions and influence of wealthy corporate executives,” the fusion center memo says.

By warning corporate security outfits of the danger posed by average Americans who blame their problems on the actions of corporate executives, the report effectively dedicates public resources to securing a private system that has made the few extremely wealthy at the expense of the many.

“The report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting.”

Michael German, a former FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism and longtime critic of fusion centers, said that by warning CEOs of threats, the bulletin was effectively taking the side of the rich and powerful over ordinary people who are critical of inequality — a typical dynamic at fusion centers.

“The way it’s written, the report seems to be putting forth the view that that is an extremist viewpoint, rather than something that the state has some responsibility in correcting,” German said. “All the resources of the national network of fusion centers, which includes federal resources along with state and local resources, are devoted toward providing security information to private entities.”

Brian Thompson Murder
The “Quarterly Executive Threat Watch” bulletin warned corporate bodyguards to switch up the daily routines of execs, limit information on public engagements, and remove bosses’ personal information from the web. The report says bosses should “remain vigilant of lone offenders with personal grievances.”

“Following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the current political climate, there is a heightened threat environment surrounding corporate executives,” the report says.

“Online glorification of the murder of Brian Thompson and calls for violence are still apparent and further create a risk for a lone offender attack.”

A spokesperson for New Jersey’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, the agency that oversees the fusion center, did not respond to a request for comment.

Days after Thompson’s killing in late 2024, Mangione was arrested and charged with the murder, allegedly motivated by injustices in the healthcare system. The then-26-year-old quickly became a cause célèbre for a wide array of supporters and a bête noire of right-wing figures, including those at the Trump administration, who branded him as a violent extremist.
Mangione’s legal team declined to comment on the fusion center report, but has in the past decried attempts to tie him to unrelated acts of violence.

The report went on to cite a list of seemingly disparate incidents to highlight a possible surge in threats to the wealthy, including a satirical Christmas wishlist that called for sabotaging CEOs; a handful of 4chan posts calling for violence against executives at Netflix and elsewhere; a “far-left forum” calling for a campaign against people tied to a mining project in Michigan; and an act of vandalism by pro-Palestine activists at the home of a New York Times executive.

Another incident that made the list was the federal case against the so-called Turtle Island Liberation Front, a group of left-wing activists arrested last year whose alleged bomb plot appears to have been largely driven by a member of their group who was a longtime paid FBI informant.

“The problem with a lot of these fusion center reports is that they take a handful of incidents, not necessarily related to one another, and use them to justify and amplify these threats without any kind of analysis,” said German. “Rather than actually looking at data, their performance is measured by the number of reports they produce.”

Fusion Centers
Fusion centers, which bring together state and federal law enforcement agencies to share intelligence on potential terror threats, rose to prominence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The centers operate under state authority, often with grants from federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security.

While data on any terror plots actually foiled by fusion center operations is scant, they have been roundly criticized for compiling surveillance and data on protest movements, communities of color, student organizers, and, recently, critics of AI data centers.

New Jersey’s only fusion center, officially known as the New Jersey Regional Operations and Intelligence Center, has been criticized for operating outside the typical oversight to which most state agencies are subject.

A 2023 report by Rutgers Law School’s Center for Security, Race, and Rights warns of the potential for abuse in the New Jersey fusion center. The report cited the fusion center’s practice of drafting dossiers on “known troublemakers” and its reliance on so-called “intelligence-led policing,” a practice of surveilling and data collection that the American Civil Liberties Union has cited as a potential violation of the right to due process.

The Quarterly Executive Threat Watch, the bulletin that included the warning for CEOs, appears to be internally categorized as terrorism-related intelligence and was later disseminated by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer to recipients across the country. (CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Then there is the issue of the center’s shadowy public-private partnership. The New Jersey fusion center does not make public which private agencies or organizations it partners with, or to whom it disseminates reports.

“It’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible.”

The January report drew heavily on the work of SITE Intelligence, a for-profit firm that has come in for criticism because of its labeling Islamic charities as terror fronts and mistakenly identifying video game footage as terror propaganda.
Like its counterparts across the country, the New Jersey fusion center feeds its reports into a national network of public and private agencies dedicated to the gathering and dissemination of information about potential threats — a practice that frequently crosses the line into surveillance of political speech, according to German and other critics of fusion centers.

“There is a lack of public
accountability here,” German said. “Because they’re joint enterprises, it’s very ambiguous who is actually in charge and who is responsible for ensuring that the participants within these centers are acting in accordance with the law.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has brought to light a series of emails from the Health and Human Services (HHS), indicating potential interference by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Sanders, a key member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP), disclosed these emails on Thursday. The emails, provided by former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry, seem to reveal Kennedy exerting pressure on the CDC regarding its vaccine messaging.

The emails imply that Kennedy instructed the CDC's vaccine advisory panel to restrict vaccine availability, permitted researchers to access confidential data to back the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism, and modified public guidelines for COVID-19 vaccinations without CDC consultation.

Further emails show that Matthew Buckham, Kennedy's former chief of staff, discussed with ex-CDC Director Susan Monarez in August the necessity for a political review of significant CDC decisions. Less than a week later, Kennedy dismissed Monarez for not approving recommendations from the CDC's vaccine panel, as per Sanders.

An email shows a senior adviser to RFK Jr. sought guidance on removing vaccines from the Vaccines for Children program, which provides free immunizations to eligible children. Sanders also accused Kennedy of repeatedly misleading Congress about vaccine recommendations and public access to vaccines.

CDC did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comments.

CDC Cuts Face Growing Scrutiny
This revelation comes in the wake of the CDC's decision to halt testing for 27 infectious diseases, including COVID-19 and rabies, as part of agency downsizing under the HHS.

Since RFK Jr. became HHS secretary in February 2025, the CDC has undergone major downsizing and revised its COVID-19 vaccine and childhood immunization recommendations, drawing criticism from the American Academy of Pediatrics. Despite ending testing for certain diseases, the CDC would continue to provide information about them on its website.

Notably, President Donald Trump's proposed fiscal 2027 budget seeks a 12.5% cut to the Health Department as part of broader reductions in non-defense spending.

Furthermore, Kennedy faced criticism from Congress over proposed health budget cuts and changes in vaccine policy. During a heated hearing, Rep. Linda Sánchez criticized the CDC's decision to scale back pro-vaccine messaging amid measles outbreaks. Kennedy Jr. acknowledged that a child who died of measles in Texas "could possibly" have been saved by vaccination, but did not directly defend the policy.

An accused South American drug lord once hunted as one of the region's most-wanted fugitives has fired his American defense team, alleging in an extraordinary handwritten jailhouse letter to a federal judge that U.S. agents attempted to extort millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from him.

The allegations are contained in new court filings entered Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The documents show that Sebastián Marset, 34, fired his attorneys in Washington, D.C., and Miami, complaining to the judge that they “refused to report these facts or file motions” to remove the lead prosecutor overseeing his case.

Writing from the federal facility where he is awaiting trial, Marset claimed that two federal agents demanded he provide access to his cryptocurrency wallet, which holds an estimated $4 million. When he refused, Marset said, the agents called his mother on WhatsApp and demanded photos of a notebook containing the wallet's private cryptographic access keys. 

Marset wrote in the letter addressed to District Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. that “these messages are preserved and constitute direct written evidence of the extortive conduct.”

The heavily tattooed Uruguayan national, who previously ran narcotics operations in Paraguay, carried a $2 million U.S. government bounty before his capture. He now alleges his rights were systematically violated from the moment he was taken from his home in Bolivia on March 13 at 3 a.m. and immediately handed over to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, who flew him to the United States that same day.

Marset told the judge he was extradited through an “irregular rendition that violates international treaties.” He further claimed that upon arriving at Washington’s Dulles International Airport, his requests for a lawyer were ignored and he was subjected to an interrogation. The alleged kingpin added that authorities altered his official statements, recording his denials of guilt as admissions of acceptance.

The abrupt legal shakeup comes at a critical juncture for the prosecution. In court proceedings on April 1, prosecutors hinted at an upcoming superseding indictment that would augment existing charges, which currently only cover alleged money laundering through U.S. banks. While the active indictment refers repeatedly to Marset's drug trafficking activities, it does not yet formally charge him with narcotics trafficking itself.

A filing on Wednesday lists Washington, D.C., attorney Robert Feitel as Marset's new counsel. Feitel did not immediately respond to calls for comment. That same day, Marset's former attorneys—Eugene Rossi of Washington and Michael Padula of Miami—filed a formal request with Judge Alston to be removed from the case. Rossi, Padula, lead prosecutor Anthony Aminoff, and the media office for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia all did not return requests for comment.

Summary
Judge sets aside rule before its July 1 effective date
The rule would have narrowed eligibility for student loans for "professional degree" programs
Nursing, other groups challenged rule's implementation

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from implementing a new rule that would impose lower federal student loan limits ‌for people pursuing graduate degrees in nursing and other healthcare-related fields.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in Washington, D.C., late on Wednesday sided with eight trade organizations, including the American Association of Nurse Practitioners and the PA Education Association that sought to block the rule from taking effect on July 1.

Skye Perryman, whose liberal legal group Democracy Forward represented the plaintiffs, in a statement said the ruling would benefit students pursuing careers in nursing, public health, education, and marriage and family therapy.
"These ⁠are key services that the federal government should be supporting by welcoming those who wish to enter them, not creating barriers to vital support," she said.

The Education Department in a statement said it is reviewing the decision and will take "appropriate action." It has previously defended the caps as necessary to encourage universities to control costs.

The trade associations sued after the department published the rule on May 1 in order to implement new federal student loan caps the Republican-led Congress adopted in July 2025 when it passed President Donald Trump's tax and spending bill known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

That law scaled back a federal loan program for students pursuing graduate degrees, eliminating one type of loan that allowed students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance and imposing ‌new ⁠caps on another type of loan.

Under those new limits, borrowing for students enrolled in professional degree programs, such as law schools and medical schools, is capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 total while students pursuing other graduate degrees are limited to $20,500 per year and up to $100,000 overall.

The Education Department's rule altered an earlier regulatory definition of what constitutes a "professional degree" to cover only certain degrees in 11 fields, including law, medicine, dentistry ⁠and theology.

But Howell, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, said that when Congress enacted the 2025 law, it expressly adopted a longstanding regulatory definition for those degrees that the department had been using since 2007.

"By adopting the preexisting definition as it was in effect on ⁠a specific date, Congress removed any discretionary authority the Department may have had to narrow the definition for the purpose of determining federal loan caps," she wrote.

The judge said as a result, the rule ran afoul of the Administrative Procedure Act and had ⁠to be set aside before it could take effect.
But she declined to go even further by preventing the new loan caps from being enforced until a new rule is issued, saying she could not remedy the plaintiffs' "primary frustration" over the decision by Congress to eliminate uncapped borrowing.

Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Aurora Ellis

Donald Trump has told many stories and denied many others about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. But those questions center on Epstein’s actions and crimes, which Trump says he denounces and wasn’t a part of. The White House has moved heaven, earth, the truth and much else to protect Trump from what the Epstein files might tell us about him. But there is a larger question about what Trump makes of Epstein’s values. Does he reject them, or does he endorse and embrace them? Looking to his administration’s ties to Andrew Tate may be instructive.

According to Heidi Blake’s thorough investigation of Tate in the New Yorker earlier this month, the Trump administration intervened last year to buffer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from the consequences of their criminal charges in Romania. The Tate and Trump circles, she also reports, have overlapped at Mar-a-Lago.

She’s not the only one digging into the connections. A December New York Times report by Megan Twohey and Isabella Kwai quotes a text message by Tate, reviewed by the outlet, from January 2025: “I had word from The Trump admin that theyre on top of things. Ive been told ill be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami.” Two Trump sons, Don Jr and Barron, have reportedly cultivated friendshipswith Andrew, though the White House told the Times that it was not involved in the Tates’ legal matters, and the Tates’ lawyer said the outlet’s findings about Andrew and Barron were “fake news”.

It’s pointless to debate who’s worse, Epstein or Tate. Their monstrous misogyny echoes their respective eras. Epstein seemed a relic of the 1980s obsessed with clawing his way into elite circles and obsessed with recruiting and abusing pubescent to young adult women.

Tate on the other hand, came up through the 21st-century machinery of the manosphere, which is in turn largely a part of the internet and the powerful men who run it. But both seem to define masculinity through the dehumanization of women and girls. While he has called himself a misogynist before, Tate told Blake that his reputation as one was “completely unfair”.

A former mixed-martial arts fighter, Tate became, in his own words, a pimp, recruiting women by pursuing relationships with them and then allegedly coercing and manipulating them into webcam sex work and otherwise controlling them.

Blake reports that in 2014, as he realized his career as a kickboxer had limited financial possibilities, he moved on: “Webcam porn, now a multibillion-dollar industry, was then a nascent phenomenon, and Tate considered himself a pioneer,” she writes. Porn may be an inadequate description: a webcam worker performs live for remote customers, and the pressure to meet their demands is ongoing.

Blake describes how Tate exploited his first recruit, a 17-year-old, and “persuaded her to get a tattoo of a cobra down one side of her body and another reading ‘Tate Property’ above her crotch … Andrew said that more than thirty women had his name tattooed on their skin.”

The Tate brothers left the UK “after three British women accused Andrew of rape and strangulation”, Blake continues, and relocated to Romania, where they operated with impunity for almost a decade, building a webcam empire with women and girls who were recruited. According to messages from Andrew reviewed by the Times, some of them became essentially captive, prevented from leaving and punished and threatened, if they succeeded in doing so. At one point, 75 women were working for them.

But by the time of the Tate brothers’ arrest in Romania, Andrew’s primary income came not from women performing sex acts for webcams; it was videos of himself for a vast audience of boys and young men he was instructing in misogyny, exploitation and cartoonish versions of masculinity.

Their US lawyers said the two “have maintained their innocence, arguing the accusations against them are defamatory and false”.

His major platform was Rumble, in which Peter Thiel and JD Vance were new investors, and Rumble paid him lavishly as he posted his lessons in abuse, according to a confidential contract reviewed by Blake. (Rumble condemned human trafficking and sexual abuse and said allegations against him do not relate to content on its platform.) Buzzfeed reported thathe offered a course titled “Pimpin’ Hoes Degree” on his website from 2018 to 2022. Shortly after Trump returned to the White House, “under pressure from the U.S., Romania lifted the Tates’ travel ban,” the New Yorker reported.

While Epstein abused victims directly, the Tates were most impactful for how, their accusers say, they taught countless other males to abuse, exploit and dehumanize females

The Epstein affair is not over; in an excerpt from a forthcoming book, the New York Times reports on Situation-Room meetings last July reportedly led by Vance to try to cover up statements about Trump in the Epstein files. It includes this line: “The vice president said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse.”

While Epstein abused victims directly, the Tates were most impactful for how, their accusers say, they taught countless other males to abuse, exploit and dehumanize females. But, Blake reports, they did continue to brutalize women. Allegations of rape and strangulation recur in Blake’s account, all the way through charges by an American woman last year that Andrew Tate beat and choked her, which he denies. But “he has repeatedly advocated throttling women during sex as a way to assert masculine power,” states the New Yorker report.

There are many ways that Trump and his associates have told us that human rights and human life mean nothing to them, from the 2024 campaign lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio to the brutalities of masked ICE goons across the USA, to the dismantling of USAID, to the murder of civilians in small boats in the Caribbean to the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, to name only a few more dramatic examples. But who they are is shown not just by who they choose to harm. It’s shown by who the Trump family has sought to ally with and protect.