Rubio bans Brazilian supreme court justice and other officials over ‘witch hunt’ against Bolsonaro
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced on Friday that he has barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for his role in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.
Rubio described the investigation of Bolsonaro as a “political witch hunt” and called the judge’s effort to have social media posts supporting Bolsonaro removed, including in the US, as “a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans”.
“I have therefore ordered visa revocations for Moraes and his allies on the court, as well as their immediate family members effective immediately”, Rubio wrote.
Rubio’s action to punish the judge came hours after Brazil’s supreme court issued new restrictions on Bolsonaro. The Brazilian daily Folha De S Paulo reports that the court order Bolsonaro to wear an electronic ankle monitor while under house arrest and banned him from using social media and from contacting his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a federal congressman who has taken a leave of absence to live in the US and lobby the Trump administration to intervene on his father’s behalf.
Eduardo Bolsonaro has taken credit for convincing Donald Trump to put a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil to the US as punishment for the prosecution of the former Brazilian president who was also banned from running for office after his supporters stormed Brazil’s capital in an attempt to overturn his election loss.
Key events
As we all parse Donald Trump’s claims in a lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, a federal judge in Manhattan just dismissed the president’s nearly $50 million lawsuit against Bob Woodward for publishing audio from interviews with Trump in the audiobook version of Woodward’s 2020 book Rage.
The decision by US district judge Paul Gardephe was a victory for Woodward, his publisher Simon & Schuster and its former owner Paramount Global.
Woodward interviewed Trump 19 times between December 2019 and August 2020, and about 20% of the book came from the interviews.
The book was released in September 2020, while an audiobook, called The Trump Tapes, which also included Woodward’s commentary, was released in October 2022.
In a 59-page decision dismissing the suit, Gardephe said Trump did not plausibly allege that he and Woodward intended to be joint authors of The Trump Tapes.
Rubio bans Brazilian supreme court justice and other officials over ‘witch hunt’ against Bolsonaro
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced on Friday that he has barred Brazilian supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes from the United States in retaliation for his role in the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro, the former president of Brazil who has been charged for his role in allegedly leading an attempted coup following his loss in the 2022 election.
Rubio described the investigation of Bolsonaro as a “political witch hunt” and called the judge’s effort to have social media posts supporting Bolsonaro removed, including in the US, as “a persecution and censorship complex so sweeping that it not only violates basic rights of Brazilians, but also extends beyond Brazil’s shores to target Americans”.
“I have therefore ordered visa revocations for Moraes and his allies on the court, as well as their immediate family members effective immediately”, Rubio wrote.
Rubio’s action to punish the judge came hours after Brazil’s supreme court issued new restrictions on Bolsonaro. The Brazilian daily Folha De S Paulo reports that the court order Bolsonaro to wear an electronic ankle monitor while under house arrest and banned him from using social media and from contacting his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a federal congressman who has taken a leave of absence to live in the US and lobby the Trump administration to intervene on his father’s behalf.
Eduardo Bolsonaro has taken credit for convincing Donald Trump to put a 50% tariff on imports from Brazil to the US as punishment for the prosecution of the former Brazilian president who was also banned from running for office after his supporters stormed Brazil’s capital in an attempt to overturn his election loss.
Trump says 10 hostages will be released from Gaza ‘very shortly’
Donald Trump told Republican senators at a White House dinner on Friday night that 10 hostages still being held in Gaza would be released “very shortly”.
“We hope to have that finished pretty quickly” Trump said before praising his envoy, Steve Witkoff as “fantastic”.
Trump’s comments came in a rambling set of remarks that lasted 18 minutes, and included boasting about that his victory in the 2024 presidential election was, in terms of countries won, “a landslide”.
Read the full text of Trump’s $10bn lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters
Here is the full text of the lawsuit Donald Trump filed in federal court in Miami on Friday, in which the president calls the Wall Street Journal’s report that he sent Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender, a lewd birthday letter in 2002 “false and defamatory” and demands at least $10bn in damages and court costs from Rupert Murdoch, two Wall Street Journal reporters, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and related corporate entities.
The extraordinary dollar amount demanded by Trump is identical to what he asked of CBS when he filed suit on the eve of the 2024 election alleging that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris was edited in a misleading way to cast her in a positive light and amounted to “election interference”.
Although the raw video of the interview released later by CBS showed that the editing had been routine, although the outlet made the odd decision to use two different parts of one answer from Harris on different programs, the network’s parent company, Paramount, agreed to pay Trump $16m to drop that suit.
Robert Tait
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, has called for Barack Obama and former senior US national security officials to be prosecuted after accusing them of a “treasonous conspiracy” intended to show that Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election win was due to Russian interference.
She said Obama and senior officials in his administration had “[laid] the groundwork for … a years-long coup” against Trump after his victory over Hillary Clinton by “manufacturing intelligence” to suggest that Russia had tried to influence the election. That included using a dossier prepared by a British intelligence analyst, Christopher Steele, that they knew to be unreliable, Gabbard claimed.
The post-election intelligence estimates contrasted with findings reached before the election, which indicated that Russia probably was not trying to interfere.
In extraordinary comments calling for prosecutions, she added: “The information we are releasing today clearly shows there was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government.
Epstein case ‘a matter of public concern’, Pam Bondi says in motion to unseal 2019 grand jury transcripts
In a formal request asking a federal judge to unseal grand jury transcripts from the 2019 investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender and longtime associate of Donald Trump, US attorney general Pam Bondi calls the case “a matter of public concern”.
In the motion, filed on Friday in a Manhattan federal court, Bondi, and her deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer for Trump, write that the request was prompted by the uproar following the justice department’s 6 July memo “describing an exhaustive review undertaken of investigative holdings relating to Jeffrey Epstein” which was undertaken with the FBI “to determine whether evidence existed that could predicate an investigation into uncharged third parties.” The memo concluded that there was no such evidence existed.
“Since July 6, 2025, there has been extensive public interest in the basis for the Memorandum’s conclusions”, Bondi and Blanche write. “While the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation continue to adhere to the conclusions reached in the Memorandum, transparency to the American public is of the utmost importance to this Administration. Given the public interest in the investigative work conducted by the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation into Epstein, the Department of Justice moves the Court to unseal the underlying grand jury transcripts in United States v. Epstein, subject to appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information.”
They add that the justice department will work with prosecutors in Manhattan, where the grand jury testimony was taken, “to make appropriate redactions of victim-related information and other personal identifying information prior to releasing the transcripts. Transparency in this process will not be at the expense of our obligation under the law to protect victims.”
“Public officials, lawmakers, pundits, and ordinary citizens remain deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter” they argue later in the motion. “Indeed, other jurists have released grand jury transcripts after concluding that Epstein’s case qualifies as a matter of public concern.”
“After all, Jeffrey Epstein is ‘the most infamous pedophile in American history’” according to previous filings, and the “facts surrounding Epstein’s case ‘tell a tale of national disgrace.’”
Trump’s justice department asks Manhattan federal court to unseal Epstein grand jury transcripts
Acting at Donald Trump’s direction, the justice department filed a motion in a Manhattan federal court on Friday, asking a judge to unseal grand jury testimony transcripts from the federal sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender.
The move to share some but not all of the files related to Epstein come after fevered speculation about Trump’s connections to Epstein, who was arrested and charged in 2019 and then found dead in his Manhattan jail cell.
Releasing the transcripts, however, will not satisfy even some supporters of the president who want to see him release all of the files from the federal investigation into Epstein, including a rumored list of powerful men alleged to have had sex with minors Epstein trafficked, and other documents.
The move comes after Trump filed a libel suit in Miami on Friday accusing two Wall Street Journal reporters, and Rupert Murdoch and his companies, of defaming him by reporting that one of the documents examined by prosecutors was a “bawdy” letter from Trump to Epstein in 2003, three years before Epstein was first indicted.
In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty in state court in Florida to two felony charges, including soliciting a minor, in exchange for a deal in which he avoided federal charges.
Over a decade later, in 2019, the federal investigation into Epstein was revived and he was charged by Geoffrey Berman, the US attorney for the southern district of New York, of having “sexually exploited and abused dozens of underage girls by enticing them to engage in sex acts with him in exchange for money” between 2002 and 2005 in both New York and Palm Beach.
Trump’s outrage over the report that suggests he sent Epstein a lewd birthday letter in 2003 is likely connected to the fact that this was during the period that Epstein was accused of committing the crimes he was later charged with.
Trump was known to have socialized with Epstein before his arrest and publicly called him a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”, in an interview with New York magazine in 2002.
Trump files libel suit against Wall Street Journal reporters, Murdoch and companies over report on letter to Epstein
Donald Trump filed a lawsuit on Friday against Dow Jones, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and two Wall Street Journal reporters, raising claims under federal libel law, court records show.
Reuters reports that a copy of the complaint was not immediately available. The case was filed in Miami federal court.
The day so far
The White House is attempting to press ahead with other business but US politics remains consumed on Friday with Donald Trump’s desperate effort to deflect attention away from his administration’s decision to not release files from the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who was friends with the future president before he was first indicted. Here are some of the day’s developments in that story, and the US government, so far:
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House Republicans passed Trump’s funding cut proposal just after midnight on Friday – clawing back nearly $8bn in federal funding for foreign aid and $1.1bn in support for public broadcasting. The 216-213 vote, with two Republicans, Mike Turner of Ohio and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, opposing the package alongside all Democrats, could have been a tie but for the fact that three Democrats elected in November have already died.
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Trump began his day by arguing on his social media platform that it was impossible that a ‘bawdy letter’ to Epstein from Trump was in the justice department files since Democrats would have revealed it when they were in control of the justice department. “If there was a ‘smoking gun’ on Epstein, why didn’t the Dems, who controlled the ‘files’ for four years, and had Garland and Comey in charge, use it? BECAUSE THEY HAD NOTHING!!!” Trump posted. His argument is flawed, however, since: a. Democrats like the former attorney general Merrick Garland are defenders of the norm that the justice department should be apolitical, and investigative files in cases that do not go to trial are supposed to remain secret; and b. James Comey, a Republican, not a Democrat, was fired as FBI director by Trump two years before the justice department arrested and charged Epstein.
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Steve Bannon has said that the Wall Street Journal story about the birthday letter bearing Trump’s name has united the president’s supporters behind him.
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Democrats are questioning the timing of CBS’s announcement that it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, days after Colbert criticized the network’s parent company Paramount for settling a $16m lawsuit with Trump.
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The head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency visited Washington this week as Israel seeks the Trump administration’s help in ethnically cleansing Gaza of its Palestinian population, Axios reported, citing two unnamed sources.
‘Public deserves to know’ if CBS’s cancellation of Colbert show was for political reasons, demand Democrats
Democrats are questioning the timing of CBS’s announcement that it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, days after Colbert criticized the network’s parent company Paramount for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump.
Colbert panned Paramount for settling with Trump over the president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with the then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. He called the settlement, which coincided with Paramount seeking approval from the US Federal Communications Commission for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media (a company ran by David Ellison, son of close Trump ally Larry Ellison), “a big fat bribe”.
That sentiment was echoed by senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, who wrote on X that the settlement “looks like bribery”. Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington said: “People deserve to know if this is a politically motivated attack on free speech.”
Independent senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, also suggested that CBS’s announcement that the show would end in May 2026 was no coincidence. “CBS’s billionaire owners pay Trump $16m to settle a bogus lawsuit while trying to sell the network to Skydance,” he said. “Stephen Colbert, an extraordinary talent and the most popular late night host, slams the deal. Days later, he’s fired. Do I think this is a coincidence? NO.”
And senator Adam Schiff, of California, who was a guest on Colbert’s show last night, demanded more answers as to whether the show was canceled for political reasons. “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know,” he wrote on X.
Celebrities have been expressing similar feelings around the timing of Colbert getting the axe. Actor John Cusack shared a clip of Colbert on social media and wrote: “He’s not groveling enough to American fascism – Larry Ellison needs his tax cuts – doesn’t need comedians reminding people they are not cattle.”
Severance actor Adam Scott called it “absolute bullshit” and Jamie Lee Curtis, asked for her thoughts during a red carpet interview, said “it’s bad” and that “they’re trying to silence people”.