Ghislaine Maxwell prepared to speak ‘unfiltered truth’ about Epstein if Trump grants clemency, lawyer says – live

A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction on Monday that blocks part of a new state law that bans federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces.

The senior district court judge, Christina Snyder, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, ruled that the ban on masks in California’s No Secret Police Act could not be enforced, but did allow the part of the law that requires federal officers to display ID to the public to be enforced.

California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings when the act was signed into law in September by the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. The state acted after high-profile raids last summer by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Los Angeles and other parts of California.

The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in November challenging the laws, arguing that they would threaten the safety of officers who are facing harassment, doxing, and violence and that they violated the constitution because the state is directly regulating the federal government.

Snyder said she issued the initial ruling because the mask ban as it was enacted did not also apply to state law enforcement authorities, discriminating against the federal government.

The ruling left open the possibility to future legislation banning federal agents from wearing masks if it applied to all law enforcement agencies, with Snyder writing “the Court finds that federal officers can perform their federal functions without wearing masks.” Her ruling will go into effect 19 February.

Turning Point Action, the political organization of the late far-right activist Charlie Kirk, has endorsed Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in the Republican primary for US Senate, over the sitting Republican senator, John Cornyn.

Paxton, who was impeached by the Republican-majority if the Texas House in 2023 over allegations of corruption, said that he was “honored” by the endorsement. “The movement that Charlie Kirk built has inspired millions, and I’m proud to be standing alongside Turning Point Action in carrying on the fight to save this country and defend our freedoms,” Paxton wrote on social media.

Some Republican donors in Texas are reportedly concerned that the far-right Paxton would be at risk of losing to the Democratic nominee, likely to be either Jasmine Crockett, the congresswoman, or James Talarico, a state representative.

Recent polling from the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs shows Paxton and Crockett leading the primary races, ahead of their more centrist rivals.

As Democrats prepare to force a vote in the US House this week on Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canada, the president posted a lengthy diatribe on his social media platform in which he threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.

Trump began his latest screed against the US’s second-largest trading partner by claiming that “everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades”.

The president also threatened to block the scheduled opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, built by a binational partnership that got approval during the Obama administration but began construction in 2018, when Trump was president.

“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve”, Trump wrote on Monday, using his idiosyncratic capitalization.

The cause of Trump’s rage at Canada appears to be a closer trading relationship with China negotiated by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, after Trump raised tariffs on Canadian imports. “China… will eat Canada alive”, Trump wrote.

To illustrate his point, Trump then added a particularly wild claim with no factual basis at all: “The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”

Trump’s bizarre claim that China would force Canada to give up its national pastime as part of a trade deal stunned many observers when they saw it in black and white on Monday, but Canadians have heard it before.

“Canada’s not doing well, they’re doing very poorly,” Trump said last month at the opening of his wife’s documentary about herself, in comments broadcast by Canada’s CTV. “You can’t look at China as the answer,” Trump added. “The first thing they’re going to do is say ‘You’re not allowed to play ice hockey anymore”.

In subsequent comments to reporters on Air Force One on 31 January, Trump said: “We don’t want China to take over Canada, and if they make the deal that he’s looking to make, China will take over Canada. And the first thing they’re going to do: end ice hockey.”

After privately viewing unredacted files from the federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein, the late child sex offender, Jamie Raskin, the senior Democrat on the House judiciary committee, accused the justice department, which blacked out the names of potential co-conspirators in the public release, of a cover up.

“I think that the Department of Justice has been in a cover-up mode for many months and has been trying to sweep the entire thing under the rug,” Raskin told Chad Pergram of Fox News and other reporters. “There’s no way you run a billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring with just two people committing crimes.”

After Raskin described seeing a redaction of an email in which Epstein had claimed that it was not true that he had ever been asked by Donald Trump to leave his Mar-a-Lago club, as Trump claimed last year, the Fox News correspondent asked him: “What did you see specific to President Trump or President Clinton, and were there specific redactions to them?”

Raskin replied: “Well I just gave you an example of one redaction related to President Trump; I did not see any redactions related to President Clinton.”

“We want all of the information to come out,” Raskin added. “And the only redactions should be the names of the victims and the identifying information. Unfortunately, they violated that precept by releasing the names of a lot of victims, which is either spectacular incompetence and sloppiness on their part or, as a lot of the survivors believe, a deliberate threat to other survivors who are thinking about coming forward, that they need to be careful because they can be exposed and have their personal information dragged through the mud as well.”

Later today, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, the Democrat and Republican who led the congressional push to release files from the federal investigations into Jeffrey Epstein will address the press after their private viewing of copies of the files without redactions.

In an episode of the Shawn Ryan Show podcast released on Monday, the California congressman told the former navy Seal: “There are obviously people who need to be prosecuted and investigated. They haven’t released the names of the co-conspirators still.”

“Every single person who is in those files who says, ‘I went to Epstein’s island’… or ‘I went to Epstein’s home and I know that there were young girls there’… any one of those people need to be investigated, they need to be hauled in front of Congress and they need to be held accountable,” Khanna told the conservative podcaster.

• Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime companion and accomplice, invoked her fifth amendment rights while appearing at a virtual deposition before the House oversight committee today. Her lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, later said that if the American public “truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened” his client would be prepared to “speak fully and honestly” if Donald Trump grants her clemency.

• Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle decried Maxwell’s refusal to answer questions. James Comer, the Republican chair of the oversight committee, called her appearance “very disappointing”. Meanwhile, ranking member Robert Garcia said that Maxwell’s silence appeared to be part of a “cover-up” by the White House.“Who is she protecting? And we need to know why she’s been given special treatment at a low security prison by the Trump Administration,” Garcia said.

• James Comer also did not rule out deposing commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, when speaking to reporters today. Lutnick is facing mounting calls from lawmakers to resign for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including a planned visit to the disgraced financier on his private island in 2012 – four years after Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in jail for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

• Congress is facing a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if doesn’t pass a full year funding bill by Friday. Lawmakers passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the department running until 13 February, while Democrats negotiate with GOP colleagues and the White House over further guardrails for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

James Comer, chair of the House oversight committee, did not rule out deposing commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, when speaking to reporters today.

Lutnick is facing mounting calls from lawmakers to resign for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, including a planned visit to the disgraced financier on his private island in 2012 – four years after Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in jail for soliciting a minor for prostitution.

On Monday, Comer noted that his committee is focused on the five upcoming depositions as part of their ongoing investigation into the handling of Epstein’s crimes. These include former president Bill Clinton and secretary of state Hillary Clinton. “We don’t want to do anything to jeopardize the five that we have on the book. So we’ll see what happens here, and we’ll move forward,” Comer added.

Lutnick said last year in a podcast interview that he had no relationship with Epstein after 2005. But email exchanges in the latest trove of documents released by the justice department show that the pair did exchange several emails and correspondence in the years following – often through assistants and intermediaries.

Earlier, we reported that Ghislaine Maxwell invoked her fifth amendment rights while appearing at a virtual deposition before the House oversight committee. Her lawyer, David Oscar Marcus, later said that if the American public “truly want to hear the unfiltered truth about what happened” his client would be prepared to “speak fully and honestly” if Donald Trump grants her clemency.

“Some may not like what they hear, but the truth matters,” Marcus added. “For example, both President Trump and President Clinton are innocent of any wrongdoing. Ms Maxwell alone can explain why, and the public is entitled to that explanation.”

After Maxwell refused to answer questions today, James Comer, the oversight committee’s Republican chair,  said that it was “very disappointing”.

“We had many questions to ask about the crimes she and Epstein committed, as well as questions about potential co-conspirators. We sincerely want to get to the truth to the American people, and justice for the survivors,” Comer added.

Three members of Congress say US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr lied during his Senate confirmation hearings in response to newly revealed emails that undermine his testimony that a trip he took to Samoa ahead of a deadly measles outbreak had “nothing to do with vaccines”.

The governor of Hawaii, a medical doctor who responded to the crisis, also spoke out – saying that the disclosure of the emails by the Guardian and the Associated Press show Kennedy misled the Senate and that he should step down.

Kennedy, a lawyer and longtime anti-vaccine activist before his appointment as health secretary, was asked about the trip several times during two days of confirmation hearings last year. He repeatedly denied that his reason for going there in June 2019 had anything to do with vaccines. But the records show staff at the US embassy and the United Nations wrote emails shortly before Kennedy’s visit saying he was visiting because of his concerns about vaccine safety.

Samoan officials later said Kennedy’s trip bolstered the credibility of anti-vaccine activists ahead of the measles outbreak that sickened thousands and killed 83 people, mostly children under the age of five.

The new reporting comes after a year in which Kennedy has used his power as health secretary to remake federal vaccine recommendations and policies to align with his anti-vaccine views and to sow doubts about vaccine safety. Meanwhile, measles has gained a foothold in communities across the US.

In a letter sent to the House oversight committee before Ghislaine Maxwell’s deposition, a group of Jeffrey Epstein survivors, including several Jane Does and family members of the late Virginia Giuffre, urged lawmakers to be skeptical of any information she provided (of course, as we’ve been reporting she ended up providing none).

We urge the Committee to approach Ms Maxwell’s testimony with the utmost skepticism, to rigorously scrutinize any claims she makes, and to ensure that this process does not become another vehicle through which survivors are harmed or silenced. Truth, accountability, and transparency must be the priority – not the rehabilitation of a convicted trafficker’s narrative.

In the letter, the group criticized Maxwell’s refusal to identify “the many powerful men” involved in Epstein’s trafficking network and her refusal to “meaningfully cooperate” with law enforcement. They also slammed the decision to transfer Maxwell to a low-security prison last year, a move they said “appears to be preferential treatment”.

Ms Maxwell was not a peripheral figure. She was a central and indispensable architect of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise. Despite this, she has refused to meaningfully cooperate with law enforcement or provide credible, complete information about the scope of the trafficking network.

They added:

Any attempt to grant Ghislaine Maxwell leniency, whether through sentencing relief, special treatment or credibility afforded to her testimony, would be catastrophic for survivors.

Democrats have condemned Maxwell invoking her right to silence and refusal to answer any questions. California Democrat Ro Khanna posted on X:

Here is my conclusion after sitting through Maxwell’s deposition with her refusing to answer a single question about the men who raped underage girls, saying she would only do so for clemency. She must immediately be sent back to the maximum security prison where she belongs.

Representative Suhas Subramanyam, of Virginia, said:

She is campaigning over and over again to get that pardon from President Trump, and this president has not ruled it out. And so that is why she is continuing to not cooperate with our investigation.

Meanwhile New Mexico Democrat Melanie Stansbury said Maxwell’s decision to not answer questions was “an effort to essentially try to secure her pardon by keeping her mouth shut, and we will not allow this silence to stand”.

Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, issued a sharp rebuke following Ghislaine Maxwell’s virtual deposition earlier today.

Maxwell, a convicted co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, invoked the fifth amendment and “provided no information about the men who raped and trafficked women and girls”, according to Garcia.

“After months of defying our subpoena, Ghislaine Maxwell finally appeared before the oversight committee and said nothing,” he added in a statement.

“Who is she protecting? And we need to know why she’s been given special treatment at a low security prison by the Trump administration. We are going to end this White House cover-up.”

Bad Bunny’s treatment of Puerto Rico’s grid crisis in his Super Bowl performance has sparked social media conversation from scholars.

Toward the end of his performance, Bad Bunny performed his song “El Apagón,” which translates to “blackout.” Dancers playing workers hung from electric poles as the singer lambasted the energy instability facing Puerto Rico.

“The power lines moment was kinda extraordinary,” historian Adam Tooze said on X, formerly known as Twitter.

In 2016, a controversial Obama-era law created an oversight board to manage Puerto Rico’s longstanding debt crisis, which critics said infringed on the island’s economic autonomy. The board recommended that the island’s publicly owned electric grid be privatized, sparking fury from opponents.

The following year, the longest blackout in US history began in Puerto Rico in the wake of the deadly Hurricane Maria. Some residents, left without electricity for almost a year, were forced to learn electrical skills themselves, climbing up power lines in an attempt to rig up homemade solutions to the outage.

After the harrowing outage, the island’s then-governor announced he would indeed privatize the grid, selling it to Canadian company Luma Energy. Puerto Ricans were promised their energy woes were behind them, but more than 1 million were affected by power outages just days later, and blackouts have remained a persistent issue.

“Maldita sea, otro apagón,” Bad Bunny sang in “El Apagón” – “Damn, another blackout.”

A staunch opponent of grid privatization, the artist in 2024 spent hundreds of thousands on billboards criticizing Puerto Rico’s New Progressive Party for corruption and its links to Luma Energy.

Historian Greg Grandin called Bad Bunny “our social democratic moment’s answer to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s [neoliberal] Hamilton”, noting that Miranda, the composer, supported Promesa, though he later expressed opposition to harsh austerity measures implemented by the board.

Disgraced former congressman, George Santos, has also weighed in on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl performance.

“I expected a little more energy and sassiness from Bad Bunny,” he wrote on X. “Lady Gaga was out of no where or simply the token white girl?”

A reminder that Santos, a Republican, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison after he pleaded guilty to identity theft and wire fraud. However, Donald Trump commuted Santos’s sentence last year.

“I speak fluent Spanish and I still can’t decipher what Bad Bunny says when he ‘sings’… lol but it does make you at least want to move your body and dance lol,” Santos added, in a series of comments about the half-time show watched by millions.

Tom Homan – the Trump administration’s “border czar” sent to Minnesota in January after federal agents fatally shot two US citizen protesters – warned last year that the government’s aggressive, widespread approach to immigration enforcement would cost it public support.

Homan made the observation in an interview with NBC in June for the forthcoming book Undue Process, by the network’s homeland security correspondent, analyzing the immigration policy of mass deportation that Donald Trump has pursued during his second presidency.

“I think the vast majority of the American people think criminal illegal aliens need to leave,” Homan told author Julia Ainsley, reported by NBC News on Monday. “And if we stick to that prioritization, I think we keep the faith of the American people.

“And I think the more we do that, the more the American people will support what President Trump’s doing. We got to do it and we’ve got to do it in a humane manner.”

Instead, the homeland security department (DHS) has rounded up hundreds of thousands of people, including US citizens, in an aggressive and often violent manner, prompting protests in numerous cities and punctuated by the shooting deaths in Minneapolis in January of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by immigration officers.

And figures released on Monday, reported by CBS, reveal that less than 14% of almost 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the first year of Trump’s second presidency had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses – discrediting the administration’s often repeated insistence it was targeting only “the worst of the worst”.

Current and former Trump officials echoed the president’s criticisim of Bad Bunny’s widely acclaimed Super Bowl performance.

Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division at the Department of Justice, wrote: “My mother: ‘who is this Bad Bunny?’ Don’t worry mom, we aren’t watching him.”

Podcast host Dan Bongino, who served for a short period as the deputy director of the FBI, wrote “Kid Rock > Sad Bunny” in reference to Turning Point USA’s counter programming during the half-time show.

Meanwhile, conservative activist Laura Loomer, agreed with Trump’s assessment of the performance, but went further. “Not a single white person or English translation at the Super Bowl,” she wrote. “This isn’t White enough for me. Cant even watch a Super Bowl anymore because immigrants have literally ruined everything.”

US senator Lisa Murkowski said “it hurts my heart” that the trust between Greenland and the US, built up since the second world war, has been broken by “just a few sentences and words”. This comes after Donald Trump’s insistence that the US should acquire the autonomous territory, against the will of its people, Denmark, and the rest of Nato.

Addressing Greenlandic people, the senator for Alaska appeared at a press conference alongside three other lawmakers who made the visit – Independent senator Angus King of Maine, and Democratic senators Gary Peters of Michigan, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

Speaking in Nuuk, the delegation appeared alongside Pipaluk Lynge and Erik Jensen, members of Greenland’s foreign and security policy committee, and the actor Viggo Mortensen, a vocal Donald Trump critic.

The visit, which saw them go to the US space base in Pituffik, meet with Greenlandic politicians and a helicopter tour of the Greenland ice sheet, comes after a US senatorial delegation visited Copenhagen last month.

“To the citizens of Greenland, it hurts my heart to know how much anxiety and worry you feel in these times of uncertainty,” Murkowski added. “In just a few sentences and words, the trust that has been built since the second world war has been eroded and degraded.”

The Republican senator added:

I want to remind you that regardless of what our president says, we have a big role in Congress. And I believe there is a common interest that we must work together on, and it begins and ends with respect and dialogue.

Congress is facing a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) if doesn’t pass a full year funding bill by Friday.

Lawmakers passed a stopgap funding bill to keep the department running until 13 February, while Democrats negotiate with GOP colleagues and the White House over further guardrails for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), amid the ongoing use of force by officers – which has resulted in the fatal shootings of two American citizens in Minneapolis.

Democrats argue that federal immigration enforcement officers are conducting indiscriminate raids, brutalizing people, and hiding their identities in the process. They have issued list of demands which include the need for judicial warrants, and for agents to not wear masks. Republicans, by and large, have pushed back – saying these are non-starters. Instead they have floated another short-term spending bill to extend negotiations in the midst of another policy impasse.

Democrats, however, seem deeply reluctant for another stopgap, and would favor a shutdown to make their points clear.