The BBC has hit President Trump with his third whammy in 24 hours—with the broadcast news organization this time renewing its demand for the release of records showing how Trump lost his “executive privilege” claims during former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into January 6.The BBC noted in a reply memorandum Wednesday that it has already sent multiple “requests to government agencies seeking to obtain the same evidence the Special Counsel gathered and described as ‘evidence establish[ing] that the violence [on January 6] was foreseeable to Mr. Trump, that he caused it, that it was beneficial to his plan to interfere with the certification, and that when it occurred, he made a conscious choice not to stop it and instead to leverage it for more delay.” But the Trump administration rejected those requests, claiming executive privilege. The BBC demanded more information on how Trump lost those same claims during Smith’s probe.“The government errs in characterizing the Executive Privilege Decisions as ‘information that might be incrementally helpful in litigating a potential future discovery dispute.’ Instead, unsealed decisions will likely be crucial to obtaining information that could be dispositive of President Trump’s lawsuit, as the BBC expects them to show that President Trump’s assertions of executive privilege have already been rejected,” the BBC wrote. “The Court should therefore further unseal the Executive Privilege Decisions and prevent the injustice that would arise from President Trump using already-rejected privilege claims to withhold such vital information.”This all stems from a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed last year against the BBC over a 2024 episode of Panorama that he claimed was defamatory because it spliced together sections of his January 6, 2021, speech, highlighting his call for supporters to “fight like hell,” while omitting his request for peaceful protest. If the BBC can prove that Trump was aware of the violence he was fomenting, his whole defamation case falls apart.On Tuesday, a judge allowed the BBC to move forward with subpoenas against Trump’s closest advisers and confidants—like family members, Stephen Miller, and Steve Bannon—to better determine what Trump’s actual goals were on January 6. The judge also ordered Trump to hand over his financial records, opening yet another lane of exposure against the president.
Financial disclosures reveal Trump’s CFPB pick advised companies accused of ripping off consumers — and if confirmed, he won’t recuse himself from overseeing them.
As the world focuses on the renewed U.S. war with Iran, Israel has killed nearly 60 Palestinians over the past week and moved to occupy close to 70 percent of Gaza.
Steve Hilton has lived many lives: a key strategist to former British Prime Minister David Cameron, a populist Fox News host, and — after renouncing his UK citizenship — the Republican nominee in California’s gubernatorial race.
The Trump administration has canceled millions of dollars’ worth of federal grants to organizations running teen pregnancy education programs nationwide, suggesting that the widely effective underage pregnancy prevention services were inappropriately promoting premarital sex.The funding did not align with the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health’s outlined priorities, according to a government fact sheet that specified the office would not support “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”One such organization interrogated by the assistant secretary—South Carolina nonprofit Fact Forward—was accused of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and promoting discussions that normalize “use of pornography,” according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.“That information was just not true,” Rena Dixon, who runs the group, told the Times. Dixon added that Fact Forward had never used the lessons or materials to which the assistant secretary referred. Other program directors that spoke with the Times also said that the government had distorted the materials they were using in order to make erroneous claims about their education plans. Several noted that the grants they won required them to use “courses from a federally approved list shown by research to be age-appropriate and effective,” according to the Times.The federal government first got involved in preventing teen pregnancy in 2010, allocating roughly $100 million to the cause and eventually creating the Office of Adolescent Health and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, or OAH.At the time, teen birth rates were already in decline, yet the program’s influence still caused rates to fall faster than ever. The government-funded programs advanced the waning trend by investing in proper sex education and increasing access to reproductive health care in communities suffering from disproportionately high rates of teen pregnancy. But Donald Trump and his allies have nonetheless abhorred the effort. Last month, a spokesperson for Health and Human Services revealed that the agency had canceled 53 out of 67 grants—totaling $68 million—alloted to the pregnancy prevention program. The impact was broad, affecting more than two dozen states across the country.It’s unclear if the effort will hold up in court. Trump took similar actions during his first term, suddenly canceling dozens of grants issued under the Obama-era program in 2017, though his efforts did not succeed.In April 2018, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—then a U.S. district judge—ruled that HHS had violated its own regulations by prematurely ending the grants without an adequate explanation, ordering the agency to restore the terminated funds.