Trump appears to confirm Bongino’s exit from FBI saying he ‘wants to go back to his show’
In the last few minutes Donald Trump appears to have confirmed reports that deputy FBI director Dan Bongino is leaving his role on the eve of the highly anticipated release of the Epstein files, telling reporters that Bongino wanted to go back to his podcast.
“Dan did a great job. I think he wants to go back to his show,” Trump said.
Key events
After the publication of those Vanity Fair interviews with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles yesterday, the Washington Post (paywall) has caught up with the photographer for the piece, Christopher Anderson. We couldn’t resist this anecdote he shared about Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s aggressive mass deportation agenda.
Anderson was asked, “Were there moments you missed? Anything that happened that’s on the cutting room floor?” He replied:
I don’t think there’s anything I missed that I wished I’d gotten. I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, ‘Should I smile or not smile?’ and I said, ‘How would you want to be portrayed?’ We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, ‘You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘You know, you do, too.’
Senate confirms private astronaut and Musk ally Jared Isaacman as Nasa chief
The Senate has confirmed billionaire private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become Trump’s Nasa administrator, placing an advocate of Mars missions and a former associate of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as the space agency’s 15th leader, Reuters reports.
Dan Newhouse, one of two remaining House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, will not seek re-election next year
Dan Newhouse – one of two remaining House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol – has announced that he will not be running for re-election in 2026.
“I am announcing today that I will not seek reelection to the U.S. House of Representatives,” Newhouse wrote in a statement shared on Twitter/X. “Serving the Fourth District of Washington has been the honor of my life, and this decision comes with no reservations or remorse, only gratitude for the tremendous opportunity to have represented my home state in Congress.”
Newhouse, 70, was one of ten pro-impeachment Republicans in the House; David Valadao of California is now the last one standing, and he has filed to run for re-election.
Newhouse represents a safe GOP seat, which he narrowly defended against a Trump-backed primary challenger last year. Trump has called him a “Weak and Pathetic RINO” (Republican in name only) who “voted to, for no reason, Impeach me”.
Johnson says Trump’s response to Reiner deaths was ‘not the way I would’ve done it’
Earlier, Mike Johnson said that Donald Trump’s response to the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner was “not the way I would’ve done it”. The House speaker told CNBC:
I don’t communicate the same way; I am my own person, and I speak from my voice. The president and I address issues differently sometimes. That’s not the way I would have done it; it’s not the way I have done it. That’s my comment on it. I don’t know what else I can say.
He called the couple’s deaths “an unspeakable family tragedy” that “speaks to the rampant evil and violence in our society of which there’s root causes of that that we try to address as well, but it’s ultimately a human heart issue”.
Trump was lambasted from both sides of the aisle on Monday after he blamed Reiner’s apparent killing on what he described as the acclaimed Hollywood director’s dislike of him. Celebrities and lawmakers condemned the president’s remarks as “petty” and “disgusting”.
In more unserious news, the White House has installed plaques along Donald Trump’s so-called “Presidential Walk of Fame” with less-than-flattering descriptions of his predecessors that read as though they could’ve been lifted straight from one of the president’s Truth Social posts, caps and all.
A plaque at the front of the the walkway outside the West Wing says it was “conceived, built, and dedicated” by Trump “as a tribute to past Presidents, good, bad and somewhere in the middle, who served our Country, and gave up so much in so doing”.
Indeed Trump’s plaque touts his 2024 victory following the “unprecedented Weaponization of Law Enforcement against him, as well as two assassination attempts”. It also claims that he has “delivered” on his promise to bring about the “Golden Age of America”, and parrots his usual claims about all the wars he’s ending, securing the border and deporting alleged gang members.
For Joe Biden, meanwhile, who doesn’t have a portrait like the other former presidents and is instead represented by a picture of an autopen, extracts from the plaque read:
Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President in American History. Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States, Biden oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.
But despite it all, President Trump would get Re-Elected in a Landslide and SAVE AMERICA!
The plaques also repeat Trump’s usual claims about inflation, renewable energy and immigration under the Biden administration.
For Barack Obama, extracts from his plaque read:
Barack Hussein Obama was the first Black President, a community organizer, one term Senator from Illinois, and one of the most divisive political figures in American History.
Obama also spied on the 2016 Presidential Campaign of Donald J. Trump, and presided over the Russia, Russia, Russia (?) Hoax, the worst political scandal in American History.
It also takes a dig at Obama for passing “the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act” and signing “the one-sided Paris Climate Accords”.
And while Bill Clinton’s plaque notes several policy achievements, Trump has taken the opportunity to point out his wife Hillary’s 2016 loss to Trump.
In 2016, President Clinton’s wife, Hillary, lost the Presidency to President Donald J. Trump!
A reminder that Jack Smith’s appearance at the Capitol this morning came after the committee’s Republican chair, Jim Jordan of Ohio, subpoenaed him for a closed-door deposition. Smith had requested a public hearing.
Speaking to reporters outside the interview room, Democratic lawmakers said Smith’s testimony should have been conducted in public.
Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the panel’s top Democrat, said a public hearing would have been “absolutely devastating to the president”.
“He’s answered every single question to the satisfaction of any reasonable-minded person in that room,” Raskin said of Smith, in comments reported by Reuters.
Democratic representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington said Smith told lawmakers that Trump’s conduct in seeking to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, could have been “catastrophic” for American democracy.
Smith tells lawmakers he could prove that Trump engaged in a ‘criminal scheme’ to overturn 2020 election
Further to that, Jack Smith told lawmakers his team had found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election and prevent the lawful transfer of power.
Trump also “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice” to keep secret his retention of classified documents found during an FBI search in Mar-a-Lago, Smith said.
Smith said he and his team found “powerful evidence that showed Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021, storing them at his social club, including in a bathroom and a ballroom where events and gatherings took place”.
Republican lawmakers have expressed outrage at disclosures from the DoJ that investigators sought information from a wide range of conservative organizations as part of the probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and also obtained limited cell phone data from at least eight Republican senators during the period around the US Capitol attack.
Smith has said his prosecutors followed DoJ policy and were not influenced by politics. According to the excerpts, he told lawmakers in his opening statement that the records were “relevant to complete a comprehensive investigation”.
January 6 was an attack on the structure of our democracy in which over 100 heroic law enforcement officers were assaulted. Over 160 individuals later pled guilty to assaulting police officers that day.
Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election. I didn’t choose those members; President Trump did.
Smith defends Trump probes in House testimony saying basis for prosecutions ‘rests entirely with Trump and his actions’
Former special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two now-dropped criminal cases against Donald Trump, defended his investigation before a House panel this morning, telling lawmakers that the basis for the prosecutions “rests entirely with President Trump and his actions”.
According to excerpts from his opening statement seen by the Guardian, Smith said:
The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts.
Smith gave private testimony to the Republican-controlled House judiciary committee following months of disclosures from Trump appointees at the justice department and Republican lawmakers intended to discredit Smith’s probe and bolster Trump’s claims that the cases were an abuse of the legal system.
A reminder that Smith and his team secured indictments in 2023, accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents following his first term in office and plotting to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Smith dropped both cases after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a DoJ policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat,” Smith told the committee.
I made my decisions in the investigation without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs, or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election. We took actions based on what the facts and the law required.
Justice department must release Epstein files by Friday or risk repercussions, says law’s co-sponsor
And in another headache for the GOP, representative Ro Khanna said on Wednesday morning that he’s giving the justice department the “benefit of the doubt” that it will make the Epstein files public by Friday – and warned there would be repercussions if it doesn’t.
Khanna, one of the sponsors of the law requiring the release of the investigative files relating to the late sex offender by 19 December, told NBC News that DoJ officials have not responded to requests for information about how and when the files will be made public.
But he noted the department had successfully moved to unseal grand jury records in the case, which he takes as an indication they’re trying to comply.
Until the 19th, let’s give some benefit of the doubt, given that they’ve been supporting these judicial rulings. And then we’ll see.
Under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, if the information is not made public by Friday then “the justice department officials would be breaking the law”, Khanna said.
While they likely would not face charges during this administration, “they could be subject to prosecution given the federal law, and the statute of limitations will likely run into a new administration”, the California Democrat said, meaning a future president could charge officials for not complying with the law.
They also “could be hauled in front of Congress, the oversight committee”, and “there could be federal lawsuits” over any inaction, he said.
Also speaking to CNN and echoing those sentiments, Mike Lawler of New York, another of the swing-district House Republicans that signed onto Hakeem Jeffries’s petition, said:
I represent my district. My district elected me … and my view is that I have a job to do on behalf of my constituents.
We exhausted every effort to find an agreement within our conference. If folks chose not to find a path forward, they left us with no option but to sign that three-year discharge. If they don’t want that to pass, then they should be working to find an alternative vehicle.
He added that Mike Johnson has a “very difficult job” and that while the speaker hasn’t been able to unify House Republicans behind a plan including ACA credit extensions, “my frustration is not at him”.
I’m here to do a job. I’m not here to be a potted plant or a vote just for leadership. I’m here to represent my constituents and get something done. This requires bipartisan compromise.
Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, of Pennsylvania, who was one of the Republicans to sign a discharge petition to force a vote on a Democratic-backed bill to extend the ACA tax credits for three years, has told CNN that he rebelled against his party leadership because “we have a job to do”.
I don’t want to say he (speaker Mike Johnson) didn’t take it seriously, but we just have a difference of opinion on something that’s very, very important to us, and, you know, we’ve all shared with him, we have a job to do and that’s to represent our people back home.
He said that whether or not Johnson scheduled a vote before the end of the week or in the new year was “a question for him”. He added:
We’ve done our job and gotten it across the 218 threshold. It’s coming for a vote. It’s going to pass.
Asked if the speaker has lost control of the House, the congressman said he “wouldn’t say that” but that he felt Johnson could’ve handled the situation differently.
“We’ll see what the Senate does. That’s really the next question,” he added.
