Martin Pengelly

Prince Andrew's biographer flags Trump links 'clearly taken out' of Epstein files

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s connections with the former Prince Andrew are “very close,” a biographer of the disgraced British royal said, rejecting Trump’s denials and saying evidence of the relationship had been taken out of files relating to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

“The connections with Trump are very close,” Andrew Lownie said. “I mean, clearly this stuff's been taken out of the released papers, but Andrew and Trump had a very close relationship.

“Same interest in golf, making money, in women, there are lots of crossovers between them and lots of ‘locker room discussions’ going on. I mean, when Trump says he doesn't know who Andrew is, there are plenty of pictures of the two of them together. That kind of says everything.”

Lownie, author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, was speaking to the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on their podcast, The Court of History.

The Epstein files scandal has lingered since 2019, when the financier and convicted sex offender was found dead in a New York jail cell, where he awaited trial on charges of trafficking underage girls for sex. Officials deemed the case a suicide.

Seven years on, with Trump back in power, the president's once-close links to Epstein remain the subject of intense controversy, reporting and speculation.

In 2019, in the aftermath of Epstein’s death, Trump responded to controversy then engulfing Andrew over his own Epstein ties by saying: “I don’t know Prince Andrew, but it’s a tough story. I don’t know him, no.”

That was swiftly disproved.

Lownie continued: “There are also pictures when Andrew was deputed to take care of him on one of Trump's visits to London. There are various things with golf courses in Scotland, visits in New York. I mean, there's a whole panoply of links between the two of them.”

Trump denies wrongdoing in connection to Epstein, amid a blizzard of allegations arising from mentions in the released files and other reporting. The DOJ has released millions of files relating to Epstein, redacted to varying degrees, but also said it will not make further releases — a stance widely seen as meant to protect the president.

Andrew has not had such powerful protection.

In 2022, he paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to end a sexual assault case brought by Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein accuser with whom the then prince was famously photographed, and who killed herself last year. The settlement made no admission of guilt, and Andrew continues to vehemently deny wrongdoing.

Nonetheless, continuing revelations about Andrew’s friendship with Epstein have cost him his royal titles and roles. The latest Epstein files release, last Friday, contained new pictures of the then prince in compromising positions.

On The Court of History, Lownie switched to a potentially sensitive topic regarding Melania Trump, President Trump’s third wife, describing and defending “the claim that I had in the book, which [Harper] Collins took out after they were threatened with a lawsuit, though it is true, that Melania was introduced to Trump through Epstein.

“That's a claim from Epstein, and it's [in] inverted commas,” Lownie said, noting that the Trump biographer Michael Wolff has also reported the claim.

Melania Trump threatened to sue Wolff for $1 billion over the claim. In response, Wolff filed his own lawsuit, alleging intimidation.

Lownie said: “We can't always believe everything that Epstein said, but this comes from interviews that he did in 2007 for a documentary, and there's no reason for him to have lied to the documentary maker. They built a good relationship.”

Blumenthal noted that in the latest Epstein files release, “Melania had written to Ghislaine [Maxwell, Epstein’s partner, now serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking] a letter praising her and calling her ‘sweet pea.’ So clearly [she] is very close to Ghislaine and Epstein and Andrew.”

Delving deeper into the Epstein web, Lownie said: “Yes, I mean, they're all interconnected. I mean, that's one of the fascinating things.

“You know, Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador in Washington, is very much in the news because of associations with Epstein, taking money from Epstein.”

Scandal over Mandelson’s links to Epstein has engulfed the British government, fueling questions about what Prime Minister Keir Starmer knew when he appointed Mandelson ambassador to Washington last year.

Lownie said: “What we forget is that Mandelson and Andrew were the two witnesses at Lynn Forester and Evelyn de Rothschild’s wedding.

“Lynn Forester was a great friend of Epstein, often on [Epstein’s private plane, known as] the Lolita Express, and she's part of this whole thing.”

Late last year, Forester told the New York Times she “cut ties with [Epstein] in 2000, after he deceived her on a property transaction,” adding: “I was a very small part of Epstein’s life, and he was a blip on mine.”

Lownie continued: “Mandelson was the man who pushed Andrew as the [UK] trade envoy in 2001, so they were both patrons of a children's charity, extraordinarily. So, you know, they're all interconnected.

“Of course, Mandelson has very close connections with various Russian oligarchs as well.

“And in fact, I've seen FBI documents talking about Andrew basically as a Russian intelligence case, he's involved with networks for money laundering and sex trafficking, which connected with Russian intelligence.”

Trump's links to Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, are also the source of constant media attention.

Blumenthal asked Lownie: “In your book, you mentioned Anna Malova, who was a Miss Russia [and finalist in Miss Universe when Trump owned the pageant] and you mentioned she was a friend of Trump and was also trafficked to Andrew.”

Flight logs show Malova, then 27, Andrew and Maxwell aboard a flight on Epstein's jet in February 1999. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing on the flight.

Lownie said: “Yes, yes. I mean, you know, the connections with Trump are very close.”

Top Dem rejects calls to abolish ICE but insists party will secure reform and control

WASHINGTON — Some Americans digging out from ferocious winter storms are more concerned about Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents abusing power than with their own plight, a senior member of Congress said.

“In my district, you know, we had a bad ice storm,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told Raw Story on the Capitol steps on a sunny if frigid Tuesday.

“As I talk to local officials about getting the utilities back on and making sure there's warming centers available and all that, in the midst of that, they talk about ICE. ‘What y'all gonna do about ICE?’”

In the wake of two deadly shootings by federal agents in Minneapolis, many Democrats say ICE should be abolished.

As the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, Thompson won’t go that far. But the 17-term congressman does say ICE needs a total overhaul.

‘Agency out of control’

Founded in 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, the House Homeland Security Committee was intended to be temporary. But it was made permanent in 2005, with Thompson its first ranking member. When Democrats held the Hill, Thompson spent four years as chair.

The Department of Homeland Security oversees ICE and other immigration agencies involved in arrests, clashes and protests in Minneapolis over the last month.

Thompson, 78, tends to be more moderate than the new breed of progressive Democratic bomb-throwers, but after Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both 37, were killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, the congressman said his constituents were keeping the pressure up for action.

“So what they see is not who they believe this country is about. And because of that, they just said, ‘What are y'all gonna do?’” Thompson told Raw Story.

“Democrats are at a real moment where we have an opportunity to show people that we want to do what's right, rather than just being perceived as inside-the-Beltway politicians.”

Polls reveal increasing public rejection of the Trump administration's hardline anti-migrant tactics, and many Democrats feel the wind in their sails.

In Congress, the killings have prompted heated negotiations on DHS reform.

Democrats first refused to rubber-stamp funding for the department, prompting a partial government shutdown.

On Tuesday, amid drama as the House voted to send a funding measure to President Donald Trump to be signed, Thompson told Raw Story issues requiring action included “the training component, you got the fact that [ICE] are breaking into schools, houses of worship, [the lack of] judicial warrants [for searches], masks.”

Democrats want agents to operate without covering their faces, to carry identification and to wear body cameras — the last a step Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said will happen in Minneapolis.

“I mean the excuse they use for masks doesn't hold water, because if it was law enforcement, that doesn't walk around with a mask,” Thompson said.

“I think this is a real moment for Congress to really rein in an agency that's out of control.”

He’s far from alone.

“This is a historic moment, folks,” Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) lectured a gaggle of reporters on the Capitol steps.

“Americans are being shot and killed. Journalists like you are being arrested. This is in violation of our First Amendment guarantees.

“They were put in there by the very first Congress of the United States because some were worried that … individuals didn't have enough protections within the Constitution.

“Are we going to walk away from the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights today? This Congress will be held to account. Republicans will be held to account as Americans are shot and killed on the street, as Little Liam [Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old from Minnesota] is taken [and later released].

“Children in this country are fearful they are going to be taken by authorities in America.

“We are at an incredibly historic moment. We either uphold this Constitution and call out the criminal, lawless behavior of this President and his administration or we could be doomed.”

‘ICE has a purpose’

Noem remains under pressure, after responding to both Minneapolis killings by accusing the victims of acting with criminal intent.

Those killings have led to calls to abolish ICE, which Thompson rejects.

“No, ICE has a purpose,” he told Raw Story. “But you got to fix it. Overall, it has to stand the same scrutiny of any other federal law enforcement agents. You know, nothing special.”

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) asks a question in a House hearing. REUTERS/Anna Rose Layden

Thompson’s losing any faith he might have retained in Noem, a former House colleague, given her responses to the killings of Good and Pretti.

“There was no substantive investigation that would have led her to believe that position in both killings,” Thompson said.

Protocol, Thompson said, would have been for the secretary to simply launch an independent investigation. It’s not that hard to do, Thompson said.

Animated, Thompson said Noem should’ve said: “It's still under investigation. The officers involved have been placed on administrative leave … and because it's us, we're gonna bring somebody else in to investigate.”

Noting the agents were not immediately placed on administrative leave, Thompson continued: “I've been a mayor. I've been a county commissioner, and every time there was one law enforcement agency involved in … an automobile accident, whatever, [we] pause[d] to give the public confidence that it will be looked at in a fair and impartial manner.

“You bring somebody else in. But [the Trump administration didn’t] even let anybody come.”

Like most Democrats, Thompson fears the President is setting up a two-tier legal system, one for liberal protesters, another for his MAGA base.

But, Thompson said, “You figure like this. You got 3,000 ICE agents in Minneapolis, right? You got 100,000 immigrants. You got 2 million-plus in Texas, and you don't have that many ICE, right? You got a million-plus [immigrants] in Florida. You don't have that many.

“So look at the waste of resources that you focus on, because you're making ICE out as a political targeting agency rather than an immigration enforcement agency. And people get that.”

'Eleven years of this': Swing-seat Republican shrugs off Trump’s Davos 'pandemonium'

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s erratic behavior on the world stage — threatening to seize Greenland from Denmark, making rambling speeches and attacking key NATO allies at Davos — was just business as usual, a prominent moderate Republican insisted.

“Eleven years of this, have people not figured it out?” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) told Raw Story at the Capitol.

The U.S. will benefit “if the end result is that he gets greater access, increased military presence” in Greenland, Lawler said, bemoaning the media’s “pandemonium” coverage of a head-spinning week.

President Trump first told Norway’s prime minister he wanted to buy or seize Greenland, in part because the Nobel Committee passed him over for the Peace Prize he so covets, even though the committee is completely independent from the Scandinavian country’s government.

Then, at the 56th World Economic Forum in Switzerland, President Trump saw Canadian PM Mark Carney win rave reviews for a pointed speech about the need for mid-sized countries to work together and not rely on America in the wake of the tariff-fueled trade wars Trump’s waged across the globe.

In stark contrast to the clarity offered by the leader of America’s northern neighbor, Trump’s own remarks in Davos saw him continually confuse Greenland with Iceland; promise not to use force to seize the former but insist he wants to take it regardless; say he and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte had worked out the “framework of a future deal” for increased U.S. access to Greenland; and then abuse NATO allies whose troops fought alongside the U.S. in its post-9/11 wars.

"We've never needed them," Trump told Fox News, adding: "We have never really asked anything of them.

"They'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines."

Just in the case of the United Kingdom, 457 British troops were killed in Afghanistan and another 179 in Iraq, while waging former President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror.”

Denmark lost 43 service members in Afghanistan and eight in Iraq.

‘Permanent damage’

Now that 2026 is here, November’s midterm elections are starting to engulf everything in Washington, especially for endangered Republicans like Lawler who have tried to create distance from Trump without enraging his MAGA base.

While Lawler and others in the GOP straddle that Trumpian tightrope, Democrats insist they won’t let them off the hook for letting Trump embarrass America on the world stage.

“Trump's craziness has done permanent damage,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-PA) told Raw Story.

Boyle, who serves on NATO’s Parliamentary Assembly — a body comprised of 281 parliamentarians from 32 countries — is visiting the organization in Brussels next month. He expects to perform damage control.

“This is doing permanent damage,” he stressed.

In the wake of Trump’s gaffes in Switzerland, Boyle got started on international diplomacy early, after American allies freaked out and blew up his phone throughout the week.

‘President was a draft dodger’

Other members of Congress have also been trying to clean up the president’s international messes, many of which predated the Davos disaster.

Last week, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) “spent time with the representative from Greenland and the Danish Ambassador.”

“I think [Trump’s] staff didn't inform him of our relationships with Greenland and Denmark,” Kaptur told Raw Story this week.

The midwestern progressive is embarrassed that President Trump threatens allies with U.S. military might, despite what she dismissed as his own lackluster record on military matters.

“Well, the President was a draft dodger,” the Congresswoman said, “so, yeah, I don't really think he has a sense of the military. I think he views it as his police force.”

Trump, 79, obtained five draft deferments during the Vietnam War, four for academic reasons and one due to a claim to have bone spurs in his heels.

Infamously, in 2015 and 2016, during his first run for president, he stoked controversy by deriding Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, a decorated war hero, for having been captured by Vietnamese forces.

"He's a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said. “I like people that weren't captured.”

Perhaps more infamously still, Trump once told shock jock Howard Stern that avoiding sexually transmitted diseases while dating in New York had been his “own personal Vietnam.”

“I feel like a great and very brave soldier,” he said.

'It's terror at this point': Explosive warning as Trump weighs nuclear option in Minnesota

WASHINGTON – As Vice President JD Vance prepared to visit Minneapolis on Thursday, a prominent Democratic congresswoman, herself a top target of Donald Trump’s racially tinged attacks, railed against federal immigration agents deploying “horrifying” and “terrifying” tactics in her home city.

“It’s occupation … it’s terror at this point,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told Raw Story.

Omar was speaking at the Capitol on a day of drama around the passage of new funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which houses agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

Agents of ICE and other DHS bodies have been running amok in Minneapolis and other parts of Minnesota as the Trump administration implements its brutal immigration agenda.

On Jan. 7, in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen and mother of three who was observing federal operations.

Trump, Vance, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and other senior officials immediately attacked Good and praised the agent who killed her, Jonathan Ross.

Federal agencies refused co-operation with state and local investigators as fears spread that Good’s killing would be covered up, her killer not brought to justice.

Amid rising protests in Minneapolis, there has been another shooting, wounding a man in the leg, and multiple instances of protesters met with violence by federal agents.

The Trump administration has launched investigations into local Democratic leaders, including Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

Trump has also floated invoking the Insurrection Act, a rarely used measure that allows the president to deploy regular army troops to deal with civil unrest.

Vance was due to speak in Minnesota on Thursday evening. The administration said he would “reinforce the White House’s unwavering support for federal immigration officials,” hold a roundtable discussion with community leaders, and stage a news conference.

Raw Story asked Omar if she was worried that Vance’s visit risked “tossing gasoline on an already burning fire?”

“Minnesotans have been very level-headed in their approach,” Omar said. “They understand the stakes, and they are not taking the bait in escalating this in any kind of way that would jeopardize the safety of their neighbors.”

In another high-profile incident in Minneapolis, federal agents recently took into custody a 5-year-old boy, seeking to gain access to family members.

“It's one of the most horrifying stories to come out of Minnesota,” Omar told Raw Story. “I mean, to have this child be used in a way to coerce others to come out is really terrifying. And you know, we've heard that they took him and his father to San Antonio [in Texas] before they took them to a more permanent place.”

“Does that show that they are escalating tactics?” Raw Story asked.

“They are,” Omar said. "It's an occupation, I think is a light word to use. It's terror at this point. I think they have a desperate need to show that they are able to do something there.”

Omar was born in Somalia and emigrated to the U.S. — making her a prime target for frequent racist attacks from the right, including from Vance and Trump.

Trump has said Omar should be jailed or deported.

Right-wing invective about Somali Americans and cases of childcare benefit fraud in Minnesota have added fuel to Trump’s attacks.

Omar said: “Obviously, the Somalis are not in the crossfire of [the ICE raids] because, you know, nearly 60 percent of Somalis in Minnesota are US-born. Almost 99 percent of us are citizens. So when they couldn't find Somalis, I think they're taking their anger out on the Latino and Asian community, and it is, like I said, pure terror.”

On Thursday, the House was considering a new funding measure for the Department of Homeland Security. If it does not pass, the House will risk another government shutdown, just two months after the end of the longest such funding pause in history.

Omar said: “The alternative is finding a way to pass legislation that reins in the terror that ICE and Border Patrol is causing in our communities. They have no business being in American cities. Their mission has been to occupy, to terrorize and to intimidate communities.”

Speaking of her Minneapolis constituency, she said, “I have businesses that are reporting severe losses. It is unjustifiable to shoot an American citizen in the face, to have masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, asking American citizens for their papers.

“And this is not just happening in Minneapolis, it's happening across Minnesota, and we cannot normalize this terror that our communities are feeling, and we have to take a stand.”

Omar called the DHS funding bill “a joke” and said, “Real accountability means that they follow what the laws of this country are, and they are moving the goal post every single minute.

“They have authorized for ICE agents to go into people's homes, violating the Fourth Amendment without a judicial warrant. You can now live with federal agents that are deputized by our government constantly violating the Constitution.”

Nonetheless, most observers said the DHS funding measure would pass, with swing-state Democrats likely to support Republicans in voting for the bill.

'Slanderous:' White House lashes out at doctor who says they believe Trump 'had a stroke'

Responding to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s abuse of a doctor who said he thinks President Donald Trump suffered a stroke, the former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, whose podcast surfaced the claims, demanded release of the president’s full medical records.

“The simple way to clear all this up is to release all of Trump’s medical records including his MRI,” Blumenthal told Raw Story.

Amid widespread speculation about Trump’s health, the 79-year-old president recently told reporters he had an MRI, then said it was actually a CT scan.

Those remarks sprang back into the public square this week, after Professor Bruce Davidson, of Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, spoke to Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, co-hosts of the Court of History podcast.

Davidson said: “My impression is President Trump has had a stroke, and I think there's several lines of evidence supporting that. I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body."

Davidson believes Trump suffered a stroke “six months ago or more, earlier in 2025.”

“There's video of him shuffling his feet, which is not what we'd seen him [doing], striding on the golf course … previously,” Davidson said. “We've seen him holding his right hand in his left, cradling. And earlier in the year, in 2025, he was garbling words, which he didn't do previously, and which he's improved upon more recently.

“And he's also had marked episodes that have been noticed of daytime, excessive sleepiness, — medical term, hypersomnolence — which is characteristic of many patients after they've had a stroke.

“… Most recently, there was video of him walking down the stairs from Air Force One, holding the banister with his left hand, although he's right-handed, and all of this is consistent with having had a stroke on the left side of his brain.

“A stroke is an area of infarction. It's an area of dead tissue."

Trump and the White House have repeatedly said Trump is in good health. Leavitt addressed Davidson’s remarks in statements to the Daily Beast.

“As the president’s physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, has made clear time and again — and as the American people see with their own eyes every single day — President Trump remains in excellent overall health,” Leavitt said.

“President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people.

“Pushing these fake and desperate narratives now about President Trump is why Americans’ trust in the media just fell to a new all-time low.”

Leavitt also attacked Davidson, saying: “These allegations are absolute bulls--t and perhaps even slanderous. The individual making this false claim is a left-wing nutjob and Democrat activist.”

Speaking to Raw Story, Blumenthal said: “The Trump White House should release all of the records that Trump bodyguard Keith Schiller stole from Dr Harold Bornstein, who called the episode ‘a rape.’ One should assume that Trump still has those records.”

In 2018, Harold Bornstein, a New York doctor, told NBC News “he felt ‘raped, frightened and sad’ when Schiller and another ‘large man’ came to his office to collect Trump's records on the morning of Feb. 3, 2017,” at the start of Trump’s first term.

Bornstein had told reporters he prescribed Trump hair-growth medicine. A Trump representative called the records handover “peaceful, cooperative and cordial.”

Blumenthal, senior advisor to Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001, also took aim at Leavitt.

“Instead of spewing invective in imitation of her boss, she should do everything that she can to provide the press and the public with the actual records, if she cares at all about her credibility,” Blumenthal said.

Now 79, Trump is the oldest president ever to assume office. Instances of him appearing to sleep during events or garbling sentences, and heavy bruising on his hands, have been widely reported. Trump has in turn discussed his health.

This month, he told the Wall Street Journal the bruising was caused by taking aspirin: "They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don't want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?"

Davidson said: "The instruction to take one full aspirin, 325 milligrams daily, is solely, only for prevention of recurrent repeat stroke after partial 50 percent or more blockage, occlusion of a large vessel in the brain. It's not recommended for anything for the heart, and we were told that President Trump's chest CT scan was … fine."

Of Trump’s remarks about CTs and MRIs, Davidson said: "A CT scan of the chest takes three or four minutes, and when you add the abdomen, that's another three or four minutes. An MRI is what we use to most carefully image the brain.

“You can image the brain pretty well with a CT scan, and that's emergency imaging of the brain, because it's more available, but an MRI gives you far more detail, and an MRI takes a minimum of 20 minutes, and they put this over your head, and it's extremely noisy, it's a banging sound, and they put headphones to block the sounds. So there is no mistaking an MRI for a CT.”

Davidson said he did not think Trump was suffering from dementia, as some have speculated as the president boasts about passing cognitive tests. Nor did Davidson think the 25th Amendment should be invoked, to remove Trump from office on grounds of incapacity.

But he said he detected evidence of a stroke in Trump’s increasingly brash and autocratic behavior.

“It is common after strokes for people to behave, as some people say, more like they were beforehand. So if President Trump had a brash personality, I think everyone would say, long ago, he appears to have become even more so."

Medical expert claims Trump had a stroke — and Air Force One stairs video tells the story

Donald Trump has had a stroke, a prominent clinical professor of medicine said, listing evidence he said he saw in the president's behavior.

"My impression is that President Trump has had a stroke, and I think there's several lines of evidence supporting that," said Professor Bruce Davidson, of Washington State University Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine, in Spokane, Washington. "I think his stroke was on the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body."

Davidson was speaking to the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on their podcast, The Court of History.

Now 79, Trump is the oldest president ever to assume office. Speculation over his health has been a persistent feature of his second term. Physical slips have been noted, as have occurrences in which Trump has appeared to sleep during daytime events. Slurred speech and difficulty forming sentences have been widely remarked upon.

Trump regularly claims to be in excellent mental and physical health — claims backed up by White House statements.

On The Court of History, Davidson was asked what formed his belief about the president's health.

He said, "I think the stroke was six months ago or more, earlier in 2025. There's video of him shuffling his feet, which is not what we'd seen him [doing], striding on the golf course … previously. We've seen him holding his right hand in his left, cradling. And earlier in the year, in 2025, he was garbling words, which he didn't do previously, and which he's improved upon more recently. And he's also had marked episodes that have been noticed of daytime, excessive sleepiness, — medical term, hypersomnolence — which is characteristic of many patients after they've had a stroke. … Most recently, there was video of him walking down the stairs from Air Force One, holding the banister with his left hand, although he's right-handed, and all of this is consistent with having had a stroke on the left side of his brain. A stroke is an area of infarction. It's an area of dead tissue."

Davidson also described behavior he said he thought showed Trump's psychological reaction to surviving a stroke.

"People who … have a stroke, it's a very serious, concerning, life-threatening, upsetting, scary thing, and people react in different ways," Davidson said. "Some people respond with humility, grateful to be alive and viewing life as precious. Others become, as they improve, positively euphoric, that, 'I was at the cliff of death, and now I'm back,' and and some view it as, 'That was my chance to die, and I didn't, and now I'm going to do everything I wanted to do, because the next one may be fatal."

The accelerating pace of Trump's policy announcements, military orders, demands for the prosecution of enemies, and attacks on political opponents has been noted around the world.

Referring to Trump's regular claims about his own health, Davidson said: "Another piece of evidence in favor of him having had a stroke is his telling us that he's taking a whole aspirin tablet, 325 milligrams daily."

Trump said that this month, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, about his health. Saying the aspirin had caused widely noted bruising on his hand, Trump told the Journal: "They say aspirin is good for thinning out the blood, and I don't want thick blood pouring through my heart. I want nice, thin blood pouring through my heart. Does that make sense?"

To Davidson, it did not.

"The instruction to take one full aspirin, 325 milligrams daily, is solely, only for prevention of recurrent repeat stroke after partial 50 percent or more blockage, occlusion of a large vessel in the brain," the doctor said. "It's not recommended for anything for the heart, and we were told that President Trump's chest CT scan was unremarkable, was fine."

Trump recently said he had an MRI, then said it was in fact a CT scan.

Davidson told Blumenthal and Wilentz: "A CT scan of the chest takes three or four minutes, and when you add the abdomen, that's another three or four minutes. An MRI is what we use to most carefully image the brain. You can image the brain pretty well with a CT scan, and that's emergency imaging of the brain, because it's more available, but an MRI gives you far more detail, and an MRI takes a minimum of 20 minutes, and they put this over your head, and it's extremely noisy, it's a banging sound, and they put headphones to block the sounds. So there is no mistaking an MRI for CT. And when President Trump said he had an MRI, he undoubtedly did. Now we do MRIs of the spine, of bone and joints. But that's not what he was talking about when he talked about cognitive testing. So I think it's, it's certainly clear that did not sound like a misspeaking, that he had an MRI of his brain and he had CT, surveillance, CAT scans of his chest and abdomen."

Blumenthal and Wilentz noted that presidents have suffered strokes in office — Woodrow Wilson's was hidden from the public, while Franklin D. Roosevelt died.

Trump has also regularly boasted about passing basic cognitive tests, adding to widespread speculation that the president could be suffering from dementia. Davidson did not think so.

"He doesn't, to me, behave demented," he said, adding: "It seems to me that with those New York Times questions recently and press conferences, he grasps the question and appropriately responds — or inappropriately, depending on your views — but he certainly handles the gist of the question. So I do not see dementia, for which I'm glad, but it is common after strokes for people to behave, as some people say, more like they were beforehand. So if President Trump had a brash personality, I think everyone would say, long ago, he appears to have become even more so."

Davidson said there would be no current reason to invoke the 25th Amendment because Trump appears functionally capable, at least from a superficial perspective. He emphasized that many people recover from strokes while retaining their judgment and ability to perform complex work, though such recovery typically requires support from trusted advisors, whether family or colleagues.

"I think there could be a way for President Trump to thread the needle," he said.

Davidson suggested Trump could navigate this situation by acknowledging a stroke without losing cognitive function, thus avoiding the need for temporary replacement. In this scenario, with proper support from advisors whom he heeds, along with attention to diet, medication, exercise, and intellectual engagement, Trump could continue serving as president despite the health event.

"There is no need to get all exercised about that issue. But I think it'd be good for the public to be informed. That's just the nature of my view of the way I was trained in elementary and junior high school about democracy," he said.

Bill and Hillary Clinton should testify over Epstein, top Dem says

WASHINGTON — Former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton should testify before a congressional committee about their links with Jeffrey Epstein, a senior Democratic senator told Raw Story.

“People get subpoenaed, they should show up,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) told Raw Story at the Capitol Wednesday.

The Clintons have rejected Republican attempts to force them to testify about links to Epstein, the late financier and sex offender, setting up a clash with Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee.

Earlier this week, lawyers for the Clintons released a lengthy letter rejecting the legal premise of Comer’s subpoena.

In their own blistering letter to Comer, the Clintons pointed out that the Department of Justice had not fully complied with a law mandating that it release all files related to investigations of Epstein.

“Comer should subpoena [the] DOJ,” Luján said, laughing.

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, a close ally of President Donald Trump, the DOJ is widely seen to be dragging its feet on the Epstein matter.

Trump’s once-close friendship with Epstein, a convicted sex trafficker who killed himself in prison in New York in 2019, is an enduring subject of fascination, reporting, gossip, and festering scandal.

“Look,” Luján said. “What Comer does, if he's gonna subpoena people, he should subpoena everyone that needs to be subpoenaed, and pull them in.

“And if he wants to make this look political, Comer is doing a pretty good job of that.

“But anyone involved in all of this Epstein bulls—, they should come in and they should fess up and the truth should be shared with the American people, right? No matter who they are, because everybody, because this was so bipartisan, everybody should do it. I mean, that's how I would describe it.”

The Epstein affair has indeed ensnared a number of prominent public figures. Bill Clinton has prominently featured in DOJ releases since Congress passed a law mandating such transparency. Trump’s name has also been shown to be in such Epstein files.

Trump has named the Clintons among liberal figures he says should be investigated in relation to Epstein.

Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, after theatrically displaying an empty chair during a supposed deposition of Bill Clinton, Comer said: “Jeffrey Epstein visited the White House 17 times while Bill Clinton was president.

“No one’s accusing Bill Clinton of anything, any wrongdoing. We just have questions.”

Comer also said he would charge the Clintons with contempt of Congress.

Speaking to the right-wing Real America’s Voice TV network, Comer said: "We expect the Clintons to come in, or I expect the Clintons to be met with the same fate that [Steve] Bannon and [Peter] Navarro were met with when the Democrats were in control.”

Bannon and Navarro, close Trump aides and advisers, both served prison time after refusing to answer subpoenas for testimony as part of investigations of the deadly January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump’s supporters.

Democrats rejected Comer’s threats as political posturing.

On Wednesday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), a target of Trump’s demands that his political enemies be prosecuted, told Raw Story Comer was not the only Republican in Congress working to Trump’s benefit in matters relating to Epstein.

“I think this is a political exercise by Jim Jordan,” Schiff said, referring to the Ohio Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee.

“I think they will lose in court if it's litigated. But I think this is designed to deflect attention from the president's withholding of all the Epstein files.”

'Out of control!' Top senators demand probe in scathing rebuke of ICE shooting

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators is calling for a full investigation into the shooting that left a U.S. citizen dead in Minneapolis on Wednesday.

A 37-year-old mother named Renee Good was gunned down by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross on Wednesday morning as Good was trying to leave an immigration raid in her car. Trump administration officials quickly labeled the act as "domestic terrorism," claiming Good incited officers and weaponized her car to take their lives.

Videos taken during the event, as well as interviews with witnesses and Good's ex-husband, all contradict the Trump administration's version of the story.

The shooting outraged some lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) said it was the latest example that the agency has become ungovernable.

"I want to be very clear about this: ICE is out of control!" Rosen told Raw Story.

She added that the ICE agent who shot Good put the public in danger by not disabling the vehicle first. Videos show Good's car careening toward a nearby parked vehicle after the fatal shooting.

Law enforcement experts have also pointed out that the Department of Homeland Security policy prohibits officers from shooting at moving vehicles. Good was driving away from the scene when the fatal shots were fired.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) told Raw Story that the FBI needs to conduct a full investigation of the scene. He also pushed back on assertions that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had "made a judgment" in the case, even though she said at a press conference on Wednesday that the shooting was an "attempt to kill or to cause bodily harm to agents, an act of domestic terrorism."

"She said we're going to wait until the FBI gets an investigation," Grassley said. "She's going to say the FBI is going to investigate."

Other top Democratic Senators like Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Dick Durbin of Illinois expressed outrage over the shooting.

Durbin noted that holding ICE accountable will be difficult because Noem, the Cabinet secretary who oversees the agency, "thinks she's above the law."

"She doesn't care," Durbin told Raw Story.

'Cocksure boor' Trump's disastrous gamble predicted in long-forgotten memoir

Foreign leaders seeking to cope with Donald Trump should not shower the U.S. president with flattery and gold gifts, a former British defense secretary said: they should read a near-forgotten 1991 book that describes Trump as a “cocksure boor who pays precious little attention to detail” and a “a lad who literally grew too big for his britches.”

“You only have to meet people, do the job, read the room to realize that sucking up to Donald Trump, giving him gold watches from Switzerland, doesn't work,” said Sir Ben Wallace, British defense secretary from 2019 to 2023, referring to a common tactic among world leaders regarding the U.S. president.

“There's an amazing book called Trumped! written in 1991 by one of his casino bosses from Atlantic City. It's one of the best reads you can read, because it's not written [as] a sort of kiss-and-tell, ‘I knew the president.’

“… And in there, right in the middle of it, is Trump's obsession with wearing a suit, for example. It goes way back, right? If we'd had good quality advice to people like Zelensky, we would have known that those are the sort of things that touch [Trump] off.”

Speaking on the One Decision podcast, which he co-hosts, Wallace was referring to an incident in February last year when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was harangued in the Oval Office by Trump and Vice President JD Vance, in part for not wearing a suit as he sought continued U.S. aid against Russian invaders.

A year on, the U.K. is among countries attempting to cope with Trump in the aftermath of a U.S. raid on Caracas that resulted in the seizure and removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, and amid Trump’s renewed threats to forcibly take Greenland, which is governed by Denmark, another NATO member.

Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump — His Cunning Rise and Spectacular Fall, by John R. O’Donnell, was published in 1991, when Trump was a New York property magnate subject to high-profile business reverses.

Few then predicted a Trump presidency, let alone a concerted attempt to wreck the post-war international order.

O’Donnell’s portrait is not flattering, revealing now familiar character traits including germaphobia, crudity, racism and cheapness.

One contemporary review described an “evenhanded, knowledgeable account” of “a decidedly dull boy whose life story could as easily have been subtitled ‘The Banality of Narcissism.’”

Kirkus continued: “Trump emerges as a cocksure boor who pays precious little attention to detail and pins the blame for his own misjudgments on subordinates. While he seems surprisingly dumb when it comes to weighing a deal's downside risks against its potential rewards, he apparently suffers from near-terminal overconfidence.”

Wallace’s podcast conversation touched on similar themes.

Speaking to Wallace and co-host Kate McCann, a reporter, Philip Gordon, once national security adviser to former vice president Kamala Harris, said he had “sympathy for the dilemmas of the European situation.

“They are dependent on the United States. They're worried about Trump retribution. They're pleading with him to try to stand with them on Ukraine because they fear that without the United States, they're really vulnerable to Russia and not strong enough.

“They're divided. You have some countries willing and ready to really criticize the United States for violating international law and others not. So I understand it and I get it. But the bottom line is, yes, Europe looks irrelevant in this situation. Collectively, I think this has been a trend in the first year of Trump foreign policy.

“Europeans trying to preserve support from the United States through flattery and nice words for Trump and hoping that if they're nice to him and they don't offend him, he'll support them. And each time he just responds to that, again, with contempt.”

Gordon also discussed working for President Barack Obama, who he said “was often accused of thinking things through too much.

“We [thought] about Syria and he would be, second-order effect, third-order, fourth. And … in high levels of government, you can be paralyzed if you worry about everything that could happen because lots of things can happen and you have to be sometimes decisive and take risks.

“But if Obama was guilty of thinking a little bit too much about second-, third- and fourth-order effects, Trump is guilty of not seeming to think about them at all.

“And I think that's what this is in Venezuela. Even when he first started saying, ‘Maduro has to go, we're putting an armada in place,’ I don't think he … was inclined to intervene. And then Maduro pissed him off by dancing and rejecting him and making fun of him and he decided to do it. I think that's where we are now too. But that's the big risk: they don't have a good answer to what next if Plan A doesn't work.”

On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Democratic senators told Raw Story they feared such an outcome in Venezuela, for now still led by the Maduro regime, if without its figurehead.

According to Gordon, Trump’s Plan A “is to hope that, Okay, they got Maduro, maybe his cronies will be so afraid of the next wave of intervention that they'll do a deal and they'll pay back U.S. oil majors for money they owe them, they'll give them opportunities to invest in Venezuela, and they'll, as Trump says, do what he says.

“So that's the best-case scenario, but the worst case and arguably even more likely case is that they don't … you have the security services, the corrupt ministers of defense and interior, the gangs, the Cubans, the Russians, the Chinese, and they will have every interest in not doing that.

“And I don't think Trump has an answer to that question … Because, we're not there. When Trump says we're running Venezuela, we're not because we're not there. It's all just based on the hope that the fear of Donald Trump will lead them to do our bidding. That's just really risky.

“… If Plan A doesn't work, I don't think he knows what Plan B is. And if Plan B is to have to use force and actually go into Venezuela and do this ourselves, then we run into the same sorts of post-regime challenges that we've seen in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Libya, and it usually doesn't go well for the United States.”

‘What the hell are you hiding from?’ Trump and Rubio under fire over secret briefings

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are “hid[ing] in a box somewhere” to avoid public accountability over their armed intervention in Venezuela and extraction of President Nicolás Maduro, a prominent Democratic senator charged, after a closed-door briefing Wednesday.

“The Trump administration chooses to post as many videos as they want publicly to make their point, but they don't want to face the American people with an unclassified briefing,” Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) told Raw Story at the Capitol.

“Why the hell is the Trump administration scared to face the American people in an open setting, before the Senate, before the House? I don't understand that.

“They keep wanting to hide in a box somewhere. I don't get it. We can't talk about any of this because it's all in a classified setting, but the Department of Justice is doing it all under a sealed, classified setting.

“Show the American people. What the hell are you hiding from?”

On Wednesday, Rubio, a former Florida U.S. senator, led briefings on Capitol Hill, accompanied by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“I don't think that Secretary Rubio has been honest with the American people about a lot of things. Sadly, I think highly of Secretary Rubio, and it's disappointing to see how he chooses to engage with the American people,” Luján said.

“There needs to be an unclassified hearing so that all these questions can be asked and answered.”

‘Very proud of our military’

After months of pressure on Venezuela, including lethal strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats, U.S. forces swooped into Caracas Saturday, seizing President Maduro and his wife before transporting them to New York to face narcotics and weapons charges.

President Trump has hailed the operation as an unqualified success and repeatedly trumpeted favorable U.S. deals concerning Venezuela’s huge oil reserves.

Most Democrats and a handful of Republicans had already criticized the administration for bombing boats without congressional approval. Those critical voices have only gotten louder in recent days, because, once again, Congress was not notified before the Caracas operation.

The briefing from Rubio and Hegseth confirmed “everything that's been out in the general sense,” said Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), also noting previous Democratic opposition to Maduro staying in power.

Asked about confusion over whether the U.S. is “running” Venezuela, as President Trump has said, or if the decapitated but standing Maduro regime is in charge, as seems the case, Fetterman said: “Plans are out, and now it's an evolving situation.

“Of course, there are concerns. Obviously.”

Veteran Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) voiced similar concerns.

“I think some of their justifications remain the same as the previous briefing,” she told Raw Story, referring to a session late last year about the strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats.

“They're claiming that it was not about regime change.

“We have more questions. And then we requested that they tell us when we can have public briefings, and they wouldn't answer that question.”

“Should that have been covered?” Raw Story asked.

“Yeah,” Duckworth said.

‘Totally America First’

A daring raid on a foreign capital to extract a president and his wife might seem contrary to the principles of “America First” — Trump’s tried and tested campaign slogan regarding avoiding foreign entanglements.

But Republicans emerging from Wednesday’s briefing backed the administration.

“It’s totally ‘America First,’” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) told Raw Story. “Stopping drugs flowing into our country and holding [Venezuela] accountable for it is totally America First.”

Democrats and other critics point out that Venezuela has no role in the international flow of fentanyl, the chief cause of drug deaths in the U.S., and a negligible part in the flow to American shores of cocaine and other drugs.

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said Democrats were “always going to have their opinion about stuff because of their hatred towards President Trump.”

Asked if he was personally “behind this effort” and thought it would be “easily wrapped up down there, no boots on the ground,” Mullin said simply: “There's no boots on the ground.”

Nor has there yet been a change of regime in Caracas. Nonetheless, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) seemed to welcome that prospect.

“There'll be a new government one day, and there'll be a lot of business activity between the United States and Venezuela that didn't exist before this,” Graham, a prominent foreign policy hawk, told Raw Story.

Asked if he was open to similar U.S. intervention in Colombia, about whose leftist government Trump has made ominous remarks, Graham did not answer, instead seeking the sanctuary of a senators-only elevator.

'It's just strange': GOP senator baffled by party's urge to jump off health-care cliff

WASHINGTON — Republican leaders’ refusal to consider extending Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at year’s end is weird, according to at least one senior GOP senator, after the issue erupted and fueled high drama in the House this week.

“It's just strange,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who sits on the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, told congressional reporters.

“We had the vote last week, and … now the House passed [its own measure], and we're going to have a vote, and of course, that’s not going to go anywhere.

“There could have been a one-year extension. Maybe there was a chance to have enough votes … we need 60 votes here. I want to vote on something that can actually pass, and I don't know why that's not our plan.”

No one really knows what Republicans’ plan is — other than to craft a plan.

While swing-state Republicans have been freaking out — especially the four endangered moderates who crossed Speaker Mike Johnson when they formally crossed party lines Wednesday — GOP leaders have, basically, shrugged off widespread fears of Obamacare subsidies expiring on New Years, leaving millions of Americans bracing for brutal rate hikes.

Most Republicans remain unmoved, even after Democrats have successfully raised alarm bells about the unaffordable rate hikes for months, including by using the issue as fuel for the longest government shutdown in history.

Just last week, the GOP-led Senate failed to pass dueling health-care bills. In response to a Democratic measure to extend COVID-era insurance subsidies another three years, rank-and-file Republicans cobbled together a last-minute measure aimed at promoting health savings accounts over Obamacare exchanges.

Both failed by a vote of 51-48 in the chamber where 60 votes are needed to pass most bills.

Then the four moderate House Republicans dramatically crossed the aisle, joining a Democratic-led discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic measure that would extend subsidies for three years.

Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Mike Lawler (R-NY) , Rob Bresnahan (R-PA) and Ryan Mackenzie (R-PA) were the members who chose to cross Speaker Johnson, underlining the Louisianan’s lack of control of his party ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring health-care credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement.

“Our only request was a floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected ... Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”

The Democratic proposal will now get a vote in the new year — but only after subsidies lapse.

Observers noted that in July, three of the four Republican rebels voted for the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the GOP budget measure which contained massive cuts to spending on Medicaid, another key health-care resource for millions of Americans. Fitzpatrick said no then too.

This week, the picture grew more confusing still, as a separate House GOP health bill passed.

Seen as barely even a bandaid, as it doesn’t address the expiring subsidies, it has no chance of gaining 60 votes in the Senate, according to South Dakota Sen. Rounds.

‘24 million people’

Gridlock aside, it seems most everyone on Capitol Hill loves a bit of political drama — even at the end of a year of relentless chaos.

“This is huge,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) marveled to Raw Story after learning that a fourth Republican had signed off on the discharge petition.

“This is, like, huge for my district.”

The member of the progressive “Squad” of lawmakers was far from alone.

“I think it's a big victory, and it's a victory for the American people,” former House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) told Raw Story.

“We need to pass that, put it over in the Senate and see whether they have the courage to do what's right.”

Securing a House vote does nothing to dislodge Republicans on the other side of the Capitol, though.

And Senate Majority Leader John Thune is insulated from House rules, including on discharge petitions.

There are Senate Republicans who like their moderate House colleagues fear the electoral repercussions of failing to extend subsidies, but nowhere near enough to buck leaders and secure an extension.

Still, with the 2026 midterms just around the corner, Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-MD) and other Democrats are celebrating the four Republican moderates’ decision to buck Speaker Johnson and force a vote on extending health insurance subsidies.

Like Sen. Rounds, Ivey also marveled at the larger GOP’s continued opposition to helping so many Americans, however dire their need.

Despite “24 million people” facing a financial cliff when ACA subsidies expire, Ivey told Raw Story, “Republican leaders weren't listening to that.

“I don't know what they were listening to. I just don't understand what they're doing, and in the Senate they’re saying they’re not going to move something forward anyway.

“So I'm like, ‘Worst of all possible worlds, from a Republican standpoint.’

“We hit 218 so we got the votes to move [the discharge petition], but they don't want to bring it to the floor, and then the Senate Republicans want to block it. It's crazy.”

‘Poor babies’: Top Senate Republican mocks Dems fuming that Trump misled Congress

WASHINGTON — Even as Democrats accuse the Trump administration of misleading Congress in the wake of the president’s announcement of an oil tanker blockade on Venezuela, Republicans are dismissing Democrats’ — and some Republicans’ — fears.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, one senior GOP senator went so far as to mock Democrats for speaking up.

“Poor babies,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told Raw Story.

Asked if he had been surprised by Trump’s announcement on Tuesday night, as senior Democrats complain they were, Cornyn said: “Not really.

“I mean [Venezuelan oil] is the lifeline for Iran and to some extent, for China, and an outlet for Russia to continue to be able to sell oil and finance its war machine against Ukraine. So I think it's not a surprise from that standpoint.”

Cornyn is a member of the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Relations committees.

Raw Story said, “Your Democratic colleagues are saying they wish [Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth and [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio would have focused on this yesterday, and they kind of feel deceived or misled a little bit.”

Rubio and Hegseth briefed both chambers of Congress during the day on Tuesday about controversial U.S. strikes on boats alleged to be carrying drugs in the Caribbean Sea.

“Well,” Cornyn said. “I was in this briefing and [Democrats] were asking questions about the strikes. They weren't asking about” the blockade.

Raw Story suggested that was because the Democrats didn’t know the blockade was coming.

“Poor babies,” Cornyn said. “They just need to open their eyes.”

Most Democrats’ eyes have long been wide open to President Trump’s moves to secure regime change in Venezuela.

The administration has implemented boat strikes that have now killed nearly 100, while Trump’s regular statements on the matter have accompanied reports of both a major U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and CIA covert action in Venezuela itself.

Most Democrats and some Republicans maintain Trump needs congressional approval for any action against the regime in Caracas, led by the left-wing authoritarian Nicolás Maduro.

On the House side of the Capitol on Wednesday, Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, told Raw Story: “We heard it again from the Chief of Staff, who said that these bombings won't stop until Maduro is out” — a reference to remarks from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in a bombshell Vanity Fair profile.

After Trump’s blockade announcement, Meeks said, it was clear Venezuela was “about oil. It's not about drugs. It's about taking oil.

“You know, I'm a former special narcotics prosecutor. If you really try to stop drugs, you don't take the little guy, kill them and then pardon the top guys and don't go after them at all.”

That was a reference to Trump’s recent pardon of a former Honduran president convicted of drug trafficking.

“You try to get the little guys to get you all the information that you can so that you can go after the big guys,” Meeks said, going on to condemn the “double tap killing” of two men on a boat hit by the U.S. on Sept. 2.

The two men survived the original strike but were killed with a second missile — by most observers’ standards, a war crime or plain murder.

Hegseth has vehemently denied the strike was illegal, while shifting responsibility to a senior military commander.

Meeks and other Democrats said they were not satisfied with Rubio and Hegseth’s briefings.

“That wasn’t a classified session,” Meeks said.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), a House Intelligence Committee member, said: “No one has gotten an intel briefing. So that's what we're owed.”

On the other side of the Capitol, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also lamented the absence of comprehensive briefings, telling Raw Story: “That just reflects the attitude [the Trump administration has] with Congress.

“If the Republican majority in Congress will allow it, they will continue to follow their agenda regardless.”

Among that Republican majority, not all opinions were as dismissive, or harsh, as Cornyn’s.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) voiced his continuing concern about the “double tap” boat strike.

Two months after the Sept. 2 killing, Paul said, when U.S. forces “saw people in the water, they're like, ‘Oh, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't kill helpless people in the water.’ And they plucked them out. And did they prosecute them? No, they sent them back to their country.

“There's so much that's inconsistent and wrong about this. With the video, every American should be able to see it. We should continue talking about it.”

Raw Story asked Paul for his view on Trump’s surprise announcement of an oil blockade.

“I’m opposed to it,” Paul said, bluntly.

'Trump tells the truth': House Republicans back racist attacks on Somalia, Omar and more

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump spoke the “unvarnished truth” when he openly complained about immigrants from “sh–hole” countries, one senior U.S. House Republican told Raw Story, amid outcry over the president’s spate of racist remarks.

“Trump tells the truth,” Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) said at the Capitol. “He tells unvarnished truth. I have no problem with what he's saying. He rallies the troops like no other.”

Asked what he thought about Trump being accused of being racist, Norman, 72, was unabashed: “People say what they want. This man has brought this country back in less than 11-and-a-half months.”

In a cabinet meeting last week, Trump, 79, attacked Somalian Americans in virulent terms, including calling Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading progressive, “garbage.”

This week, in a speech in Pennsylvania, Trump attacked Omar again. He also said he had “announced a permanent pause on third-world migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia, and many other countries.”

Answering a supporter’s shout of “sh–hole”, the president said: “I didn't say sh–hole, you did.”

But referring to a scandal from 2018, in his first term, he admitted it: “Remember I said that to the senators, they came in, the Democrats, they wanted to be bipartisan.

“So they came in and they said, ‘This is totally off the record. Nothing mentioned here. We want to be honest.’ Because our country was going to hell.

“And we had a meeting. And I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from sh–hole countries?’ Right? Why can't we have some people from Norway? Sweet and just a few. Let us have a few from Denmark, ‘Do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people. Do you mind?’

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they're good at is going after ships.”

Rep. Derrick van Orden (R-WI) knows a thing or two about ships, having been a Navy Seal. Telling Raw Story he had lived in Africa, specifically Djibouti, he backed Trump too.

Asked to respond to Trump’s “sh––hole countries” remarks, Van Orden said: “Listen.

“The President of the United States is in charge of foreign policy. And the President of the United States has affected more positive changes in foreign policy than any president in my lifetime, with maybe the exception of Reagan…

“So I have the utmost confidence in the President of the United States and [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio getting foreign policy in a way when it's a benefit to America.”

It fell to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), a former House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, to provide a more conventional GOP take on Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remarks.

“It's not a good message,” McCaul said, adding that “there are some who argue, ‘Hey, we did away with all of our soft diplomatic power’” thanks to Trump’s cost-cutting as well as his frequent racist invective.

McCaul said he was “briefed by Rubio's chief of staff yesterday about things we are doing to deal with soft power in a different model paradigm.”

“Is that hard when the president’s calling them ‘sh–hole nations’?” Raw Story pressed.

“He said that in the first term,” McCaul answered.

“But they denied it then and now he said it publicly,” Raw Story pressed again.

Choosing not to engage, McCaul continued to talk about ways to advance U.S. soft power despite crippling cuts to foreign aid via Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

‘Ignorance, racism, xenophobia’

Among Democrats, Rep. Omar lamented rising “ignorance, racism, xenophobia” and said Trump was more open in his second term about his use of racial invective because “he feels more comfortable being a racist.

“His base [is] basically raising money for a woman who gets fired for calling people the N word. What is there more to be surprised” about?

Rep. Ilhan Omar speaking in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Omar was referring to a high-profile story from Wisconsin, in which a woman employed by Cinnabon was filmed subjecting a Somali couple to brutal racist abuse.

Crystal Wilsey, 43, was fired but has since benefited from crowd-funding efforts.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) is one of the longest-serving Black members of Congress. That means that when it comes to Trump deploying racist language, he’s seen it all before.

“It's par for the course,” Thompson, 77, told Raw Story when asked about Trump’s “sh–hole countries” remark. “He lies on the regular.

“He has some kind of tendency to talk about countries and people of color … and he makes no bones about it. When he apologizes for insensitive statements, he comes right back and repeats.”

Raw Story cited a recent National Parks Service decision to drop free admission on holidays dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Juneteenth, but to provide it on Trump’s birthday.

“Why are you trying to erase things that people of color have contributed to just because you disagree with them?” Thompson asked, rhetorically.

‘It’s very frightening’

Unlike Thompson, first elected in 1993, Rep. Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ) is new to Congress, sworn in just last month.

“This can't be the new normal,” she said of Trump’s remarks. “That's what we're here for, fighting against it…

“I see it every day now, where people are openly discriminated against, people threatening their neighbors because they don’t like something that they're doing. It's very frightening.”

Proudly announcing herself as a “wife, daughter and sister of librarians,” Grijalva lamented “the dismantling of public education” through Republican attempts to ban books and change school courses to reflect a conservative view of U.S. history, particularly on grounds of race.

“Generations won't hear history,” Grijalva said, “because this administration is deciding that it hurts their feelings to talk about how oppressive they [white people] were and what we did too, right? Native American, indigenous people, I mean. We have to talk about that stuff.

“I'm very afraid, and I'm a mom with three kids. So [does] this country look like the one we grew up in? Right now it doesn't.”

Trump stories involving Melania and the Mob were caught and killed: Ex-Trump lawyer

The New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow was correct when he said Donald Trump was involved in as many as 60 “catch and kill” operations during the 2016 presidential election in which Trump first won power, former Trump lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen said.

“I never actually added them up, but I wouldn't dispute what Ronan is saying,” Cohen told the Court of History podcast. “Every day, there was another story.”

Cohen said some stories that never saw the light of day concerned Trump and his third wife, Melania, while others concerned schemes such as Trump University or alleged connections to organized crime.

Trump entered the White House in 2017. In December 2018, Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for tax evasion, making false statements to a federally insured bank, and campaign finance violations. He also pled guilty to making false statements to Congress.

Cohen’s convictions arose from his role in paying the adult film star Stormy Daniels ($130,000) and Playboy model Karen McDougal ($150,000) “to ensure that they did not publicly disclose their alleged affairs with [Trump] in advance of the election”.

In 2019, Farrow published Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators.

The book concerns the tabloid newspaper practice of paying for then killing stories alleging sexual misconduct by powerful men, prominently including the now disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein.

Speaking to Late Show host Stephen Colbert, Farrow said he saw, for the first time "any journalist has seen it, a master list of all the historical dirt that was about Trump” in the archives of AMI, the National Enquirer publisher at the heart of the scandal.

Saying the list contained “about 60” stories, Farrow added: "Really the story here is that they made this list, that they were working with Trump, and that right before the election they actually shred a bunch of stuff on it. There's a shredding party.”

Trump vehemently denied (and denies) all wrongdoing, and has repeatedly called Cohen a “rat” and a “serial liar.”

In 2024 Trump was convicted in New York on 34 criminal counts arising from the payments to Daniels and McDougal.

The convictions did not stop him winning re-election, and he was subsequently sentenced to an unconditional discharge.

Having served his own sentence, Cohen became a prominent Trump critic, author and podcaster.

In an interview released late Friday, he appeared on the Court of History, hosted by the Clinton aide turned Lincoln biographer Sidney Blumenthal and the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz.

Asked if Farrow’s claim of “about 60” stories concerning Trump being subjected to “catch and kill” operations, Cohen said: “You know, I never actually added them up, but I wouldn't dispute what Ronan is saying. Every day, there was another story.

“In fact, sometimes the stories and the leaks were coming from people on the inside. I had never in my life seen more infighting, more backstabbing than what was going on during the … 2016 election.”

According to Cohen, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski was a major source of such leaks, ending up having to be “sh––canned” by Cohen and Donald Trump Jr “because [Donald] Trump wouldn’t do it.

“So my job, along with some other people as well, but mostly on me, was catching and killing these stories,” Cohen said.

Asked what such stories concerned, Cohen said: “They were all over the board. I mean, they … had to deal with him [Trump] and Melania, they dealt with him and [the fraudulent] Trump University, they dealt with him and Stormy, him and Karen McDougal, him and the Mob, him and Ivana [Trump’s late first wife].

“I mean, you name it. It’s the same way today. There is no one singular story that you could point to and say that's really bad for Trump. They're all bad for him.”

Cohen said the only stories he was involved with that involved payments to sources were those concerning Daniels and McDougal.

A story about a Trump Tower doorman being paid off because Trump had a child with his wife was not true, Cohen said, though AMI boss David Pecker nonetheless paid to catch and kill it.

“That was the problem, too,” Cohen said. “You were dealing with so many fake stories, which is, again, all it does is enhance Trump's accuracy. [He] keep[s] saying, ‘Fake news. They're out to get me. They're out to get me.’”

Cohen also said he read Farrow’s book in prison, because “that's the one nice thing about prison. You have a lot of free time. So, you know, somebody who's an avid reader … I got a chance to read 97 books, you know, in my 13 months there, you know, while learning how to weld and do other sort of manual labor things.”

Texas GOP senators dodge questions over ethics of Trump pardon for 'Blue Dog' bribery Dem

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), a conservative Democratic congressman facing bribery, money laundering and conspiracy charges, out of disinterested concern for the politicization of the Department of Justice under Joe Biden, Republican senator Ted Cruz claimed on Wednesday.

“The Constitution gives the pardon power exclusively to the President,” Cruz told Raw Story at the Capitol, when asked about the Cuellar pardon, which Trump announced on social media. “It's his decision how to exercise it.”

Raw Story asked if Cruz was worried, given the seriousness of the charges against Cuellar, that the Trump White House was nonetheless setting “a bad example for politicians writ large?”

“The Biden Department of Justice, sadly, was weaponized and politicized,” Cruz said. “And I think President Trump is rightly concerned about the politicization of the Department of Justice.”

Trump made the same claim in his statement announcing the Cuellar pardon.

In reality, Trump has been widely criticized for politicizing the Department of Justice himself, not least through direct public orders to Attorney General Pam Bondi to indict political enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump's use of the pardon power has also been widely criticized, from issuing pardons and other acts of clemency to more than 1,500 people charged in relation to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Congress to rewarding domestic and international allies — this week including a former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking, which Trump also claimed was a case of victimization under Joe Biden.

Cuellar has been in Congress since 2005. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston in May 2024, when Joe Biden was president.

According to the DoJ, Cuellar and his wife Imelda Cuellar “allegedly accepted approximately $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities: an oil and gas company wholly owned and controlled by the Government of Azerbaijan, and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.”

The DoJ alleged that the bribes were “laundered, pursuant to sham consulting contracts, through a series of front companies and middlemen into shell companies owned by Imelda Cuellar,” while “Congressman Cuellar allegedly agreed to use his office to influence U.S. foreign policy in favor of Azerbaijan …and to advise and pressure high-ranking U.S. Executive Branch officials regarding measures beneficial to the bank.”

The Cuellars denied wrongdoing.

Earlier this year it was widely reported that the DoJ had decided to move forward with the case, despite Trump indicating support for the Cuellars.

On Wednesday, announcing the pardon on Truth Social, Trump said he pardoned Cuellar because he had been victimized for “bravely [speaking] out against” the Biden administration on immigration policy.

After a rambling complaint about supposed Democratic bias at the Department of Justice during the Biden administration, Trump said: “Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight — Your nightmare is finally over!”

Before the Cuellar pardon became public, Michael Wolff, a leading Trump biographer, described how even the disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein worried about how Trump would use the pardon power.

"Jeffrey Epstein had a kind of riff about this,” Wolff told the Daily Beast, “because even before Trump became president, [Epstein] would talk about, 'If Donald became president and he had the pardon power ... Trump … often … talked about this in a kind of wide-eyed incredulity. 'I can pardon anyone. No one can do anything about it. If I pardon them. I have absolute power.'

"Epstein had focused on this and said … he loves showing the power that he has, and he said he would do it in a childlike way.”

Trump's relationship with Epstein remains the subject of a broiling Capitol Hill scandal, concerning the release of files related to Epstein's arrest and death in 2019.

At the Capitol on Wednesday, Raw Story also caught up with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

“What do you make of this full unconditional pardon of your colleague, Mr. Cuellar?” Raw Story asked.

“It's entirely within the President's prerogative and Congress doesn't have a role,” Cornyn said.

All presidential pardons are political.

Cornyn pointed to political realities, saying: “I've known Henry a long time and had a very productive working relationship. He's I guess one of the last of the 'Blue Dogs' that are quickly becoming extinct, Democrats that actually will work with Republicans.”

“What do you make of the charges against him?” Raw Story asked, listing bribery, money laundering and conspiracy.

“That's the Department of Justice,” Cornyn said. “I don't have anything to do with that.”