Ghislaine Maxwell Transferred After Talk With Trump Lawyer to Minimum Security Cabin Park w/ 2 Guardians
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Where Things Stand
Maxwell moved: Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, was moved to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, her lawyer said. Her relocation, from a federal prison in Tallahassee, Fla., came about a week after she was interviewed by a top Justice Department official about the Epstein case. Read more ›
Nuclear threat: President Trump, in a rare threat of nuclear escalation, said on social media that he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “the appropriate regions” after online threats from Russia’s former president, Dmitri Medvedev, a close ally of the country’s longtime leader Vladimir V. Putin. “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences,” Mr. Trump wrote. Read more ›
Deportation ruling: Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who were paroled into the United States will be allowed to remain in the country while their legal case plays out, a federal judge ruled Friday. President Trump has sought to end their protected status since the first day of his second term.
President Trump called White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a star and commented on her looks, saying, “It’s that face. It’s that brain. It’s those lips. The way they move, they move like she’s a machine gun,” he said. Leavitt, 27, was present for the interview.
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A federal judge in New York declined in a ruling on Friday to order the Trump administration to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in terminated funding that had been awarded to research institutions by the National Science Foundation.
The ruling came in a lawsuit filed in May in which a coalition of 16 states argued that the grants were critical to maintaining the United States as a leader in science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, subjects, and that the cuts were “in complete derogation of the policies and priorities set by Congress.” Appeals court allows Trump order that would end right to collective bargaining for federal workers.
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A federal appeals court on Friday allowed President Trump to move forward with an order instructing a broad swath of government agencies to end collective bargaining with federal unions.
The ruling authorizes a component of Mr. Trump’s sweeping effort to assert more control over the federal work force to move forward, for now, while the case plays out in court. Aug. 1, 2025, 8:37 p.m. ET
Asked what will happen after Trump’s shortened deadline for Russia to make peace with Ukraine, Trumps says, “we’ll put sanctions on and he’s pretty good with sanctions, he knows how to avoid sanctions.” It’s the second day in a row Trump previewed the economic penalties to come against Russia. But Trump has also in recent days expressed doubt that the sanctions will sway Putin.
Reporting from the Capitol
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The Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed the first of its spending bills for the coming year, with bipartisan approval of measures to fund military construction projects, veterans and agriculture programs and legislative branch agencies.
But the broad agreement over the $488 billion package of bills, typically the least controversial of the annual federal spending measures, masked a bitter fight in Congress over how to fund the government past a Sept. 30 shutdown deadline. Aug. 1, 2025, 8:32 p.m. ET
Asked about his deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump said, “I think he probably wanted to know, just to get a feel of it because we’d like to release everything but we don’t want people to be hurt that shouldn’t be hurt,” Trump said. “I would assume that’s why he was there.” She has now been moved to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, her lawyer said today.
Asked if he would pardon George Santos, Trump said “he lied like hell,” before adding, “he was 100 percent for Trump.” “His vote was solid,” Trump added. Without specifying who he is referring to, Trump then said “they” have spoken to him about pardoning Combs but not “the two.” The other two would seem to be a reference to the other two people the Newsmax reporter asked about: George Santos and Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein.
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The air traffic controllers on duty at Ronald Reagan National Airport on the night that a Black Hawk helicopter crashed into a commercial jet, killing 67 people, were never tested to determine if any of them had alcohol in their system at the time of the accident. And it took 18 hours before they were tested for drugs.
That was a break with the Federal Aviation Administration’s rules, witnesses told the National Transportation Safety Board during three days of public hearings into the Jan. 29 crash, noting that drug and alcohol testing should happen within two hours of a death or an incident that requires medical treatment off-site or causes substantial damage. The tests should never have happened more than eight hours after the accident, which occurred just before 8:48 p.m.
Trump does not give a definitive answer when asked if he would pardon Sean Combs for his conviction on prostitution-related charges. But in a sign of his transactional nature, Trump said, “I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great, and he seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t know him well. But when I ran for office, he was very hostile.” Trump added, “I don’t know. It makes it more difficult to do.”
Trump is once again casting doubt on the job numbers released today and defending his decision to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “We had some difficulties with her and there have been a lot of questions and we fired her because we didn’t believe the numbers today,” the president tells Newsmax.
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“I would remove him in a heartbeat, but they say it would disturb the market,” President Trump says when asked by a Newsmax reporter why he won’t remove Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve. Trump sat with the conservative outlet for an interview that is airing tonight.
Speaking before departing Washington for his property in Bedminster, N.J., President Trump was asked if he would block foreign donations to the fund to construct a new ballroom at the White House. Trump said he had not thought of it, but appeared to rule out foreign financing: “I’m not looking for that. You have very strong restrictions. And we go by the restrictions.”
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A federal judge in New York declined to order the Trump administration to reinstate hundreds of millions of dollars in terminated funding, awarded by the National Science Foundation, to universities across 16 states. In a 78-page opinion, the judge, who was appointed by President Trump, concluded that the 16 states who brought the lawsuit could simply pursue financial claims against the government through a law called the Tucker Act, which allows the federal government to be sued for monetary damages.
Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, said the panel would delay its planned deposition of Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, but that it would not grant her immunity to testify.
In a letter to Maxwell’s lawyers, Comer said the committee was willing to move her deposition, which had initially been scheduled for Aug. 11 at a federal prison in Tallahassee, Fla., until after Sept. 29, when the Supreme Court will consider at a private conference whether to review Maxwell’s appeal in her sex-trafficking case.
The letter did not address Maxwell’s transfer this week to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. But Comer said he would not accept Maxwell’s conditions that she would not testify without be a grant of immunity or without having the committee’s questions in advance.
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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting said Friday that it would shut down next year, effectively ending its half-century role as a backer of NPR, PBS, and local radio and TV stations across the United States.
The organization will continue to support public broadcasters through a transition period that will end in January, said Patricia Harrison, its president and chief executive, in a statement. 
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A federal judge in Washington barred the Trump administration on Friday from summarily removing hundreds of thousands of migrants who had been paroled into the United States after fleeing instability or violence in their home countries, blocking an aggressive push by the Department of Homeland Security to deport noncitizens.
The move came in a ruling by Judge Jia M. Cobb of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that blocked the administration’s termination of a Biden-era program that allowed migrants fleeing Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to stay in the United States for up to two years. The ruling halted, for now, the rapid removal of individuals paroled into the United States “at any time.”
The Trump administration had announced the end of the program in March. It has since issued a number of other directives authorizing expedited removals by immigration agents and suspended or terminated programs that had allowed various groups of noncitizens to enter the country on a temporary basis.
In her ruling, Judge Cobb said the case presented “a question of fair play,” expressing dismay at what she described as an already tenuous legal landscape shifting under migrants’ feet at the whim of the Trump administration. She noted recent efforts to step up detention and deportation quotas, leaving migrants subject to rapid deportation at the hands of immigration agents, often with little recourse to challenge their arrest or removal through normal channels.
“In a world of bad options, they played by the rules,” she wrote of the migrants admitted under the program. “Now, the Government has not only closed off those pathways for new arrivals but changed the game for parolees already here, restricting their ability to seek immigration relief and subjecting them to summary removal despite statutory law prohibiting the executive branch from doing so.”
Judge Cobb, a Biden appointee, also noted a marked rise in expedited removals after pressure from Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who in May demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement step up immigration arrests to 3,000 per day.
Judge Cobb took particular exception to the government’s use of expedited removal more generally, noting that it left people who might be seeking other avenues to stay in the country legally deprived of access to their families or lawyers.
She highlighted the experience of several of the individuals involved the lawsuit, who had sought to remain in the country legally since being admitted but had been arrested by ICE agents immediately upon leaving hearings in immigration court.
“This case’s underlying question, then, asks whether parolees who escaped oppression will have the chance to plead their case within a system of rules,” she wrote in a passage dotted with case references. “Or, alternatively, will they be summarily removed from a country that — as they are swept up at checkpoints and outside courtrooms, often by plainclothes officers without explanation or charges — may look to them more and more like the countries they tried to escape.”
“By design, the expedited removal process offers few opportunities to raise objections to eligibility for removal, or to get a neutral adjudicator’s eyes on such objections,” she added.
It was not fully clear exactly how many people were covered by the order, which Judge Cobb wrote applied to “individuals who have been, at any time, paroled into the United States at a point of entry.” As of last year, more than 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela had entered the country through the program, but many people were granted parole from other countries as well.
The ruling came after a federal judge in California blocked the administration on Thursday from pulling protections offered by another program, known as Temporary Protected Status, from around 60,000 migrants from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua. In that decision, Judge Trina L. Thompson of the Northern District of California stressed that many migrants reported facing persistent racism and xenophobia by the Trump administration this year.
The news that Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, had been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a lower-security prison camp in Texas, was met today with a furious reaction from two women who have accused Epstein and Maxwell of abusing them, Maria and Annie Farmer, and the family members of another, Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide this spring. “President Trump has sent a clear message today: Pedophiles deserve preferential treatment and their victims do not matter,” they said in a statement.
David E. Sanger reports on the White House and national security, and frequently writes on nuclear issues.
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President Trump said on his social media feed on Friday that he had “ordered two nuclear submarines” to be repositioned in response to online threats from Russia’s former president, Dmitri Medvedev, a rare case of potential nuclear escalation between the superpowers.
Mr. Trump said he had ordered the submarines “to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that.” He added: “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”
Mr. Medvedev, who often serves as something of an online attack dog for the Kremlin, had said in a social media post of his own on Thursday that Mr. Trump should picture the apocalyptic television series “The Walking Dead” and referred to the Soviet Union’s system for launching a last-ditch, automatic nuclear strike.
Because nuclear submarine movements are among the Pentagon’s most closely held tactical maneuvers, it will most likely prove impossible to know if Mr. Trump is truly repositioning the submarines, or just trying to make a point.
But in Mr. Trump’s sudden and escalating confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, it is the first time he has referenced the American nuclear arsenal, much less threatened to reposition it. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that he intends to impose new sanctions on Russia over its unwillingness to wind down its war in Ukraine, the latest step in his gradual shift toward a more antagonistic stance toward the Kremlin.
Mr. Trump said last month that he would give Russia 50 days to begin serious peace talks with Ukraine. The Russian response was to ramp up attacks, including one on Kyiv on Thursday night that killed more than 30 civilians.
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump said his deadline was being shortened to 10 to 12 days, and Thursday he said he had already decided to impose “secondary sanctions” on countries that buy Russian oil. That would include China, India and Turkey, all countries with which Mr. Trump has other ongoing negotiations.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin have talked repeatedly by phone or secure video since the president took office, but they have not met in person. It is a meeting Mr. Trump has said is vital, suggesting nothing on Ukraine would be resolved until the two men hashed it out between themselves. But his tone about Russia has hardened, and his position on sanctions has reversed, in recent weeks.
Still, such public flexing of nuclear muscles is rare even for Mr. Trump, who last made explicit nuclear threats to Kim Jong Un of North Korea early in his first term, in 2018. At that time he said his “nuclear button” was “much bigger and more powerful” than Mr. Kim’s. That exchange ultimately led to a diplomatic opening to Mr. Kim, three meetings between the two leaders — and a complete failure of the effort to get the North Korean leader to give up his nuclear arsenal, which is now larger than ever.
But Russia is a different case, and Mr. Trump has often talked about the fearsome power of nuclear weapons, something he contends he learned about from an uncle who was on the M.I.T. faculty. So while President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made threats about putting nuclear forces on alert during the opening days of the Ukraine war, and may have been preparing to use a tactical nuclear weapon in the fall of 2022 against a Ukrainian military base, the United States has never responded.
Mr. Medvedev is a good foil for Mr. Trump; he regularly issues threats against the United States, but is essentially powerless. Mr. Trump has referred to Mr. Medvedev’s martial-sounding statements several times in the past week. It is unclear, though, why Mr. Medvedev’s mix of hyperbole, threat and trolling got under Mr. Trump’s skin.
As Mr. Trump was leaving the White House on Friday, for a weekend in Bedminster, N.J., he was asked why he ordered a redeployment of submarines.
“We just have to be careful,” he said. “And a threat was made and we didn’t think it was appropriate, so I have to be very careful. So I do that on the basis of safety for our people. A threat was made by a former president of Russia, and we’re going to protect our people.”
It was not clear what kind of nuclear submarines to which Mr. Trump was referring, or how redeploying them would provide any significant additional protection. The United States has nuclear-powered attack submarines that search for targets, but it also has far larger, nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed submarines. Those don’t need to be repositioned; they can reach targets thousands of miles away. In fact, moving them can risk exposing their position.
Kingsley Wilson, the Pentagon press secretary, referred all questions about Mr. Trump’s statement to the White House. A senior Western military officer with experience in the world of submarine warfare said he was not sure what tactical actions may have taken place. But he said that because submarines operate so stealthily, Mr. Trump was free to declare he was taking action and the Russians would have to decide whether or not to believe him.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting.
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