Trump and Powell clash on camera over Federal Reserve renovation cost
Donald Trump just attempted to ambush Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, during his site visit to inspect the renovation of the central bank’s historic headquarters in Washington.
When Trump paused before reporters to make a statement, he beckoned Powell over to stand next to him on camera. The president then claimed that the total cost of the renovations to the Federal Reserve buildings was $3.1bn, a higher figure than had previously been reported.
As Trump made this claim, Powell nodded his head no, to signal his disagreement.
“I’m not aware of that,” Powell said. “I haven’t heard that from anybody at the Fed.”
Trump insisted that this new figure “just came out” and removed papers from his coat, as apparent proof, and handed them to Powell.
“This came from us?” Powell asked.
After Trump said that the new figures had come from his people, Powell discovered why the figure for the renovation was suddenly much larger. “You included a third building,” he said.
Trump insisted that the third building was part of the total cost of the renovation he has accused Powell of mismanaging in an effort to find some cause to remove the independent Fed chairman who has refused to lower interest rates at the president’s request.
The third building Trump suddenly claimed is part of the renovation, Powell explained, “was built five years ago. It’s not new.”
Trump was flanked by his staunch ally, Republican senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, who also suggested that the renovations had gone too far over budget.
Powell, asked if they expected any further cost overruns, replied, “Don’t expect them” but said that the independent central bank was “ready for them” if necessary.
Trump then called on a friendly reporter, who asked him what, as a builder, he “would do with a project manager who is over budget”.
“Generally speaking, ”Trump said, “I’d fire him.”
As Trump, Powell and Scott stepped away from the media to continue the tour, Trump said that there is something that Powell could do to assuage his concerns about the cost of the renovations. “I’d love him to lower interest rates,” he said.
Powell has asserted, repeatedly, that the president does not have the power to fire him, as the head of an independent agency, and that decisions on interest rates must be immune to political pressure.
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Donald Trump tried and failed to ambush Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, during an on-camera exchange as the president inspected the renovation of the central bank’s historic headquarters in Washington.
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The US supreme court temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that would have significantly limited the power of the Voting Rights Act and only allowed the Justice Department to file claims under the landmark civil rights law.
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Trump’s hand-picked chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, announced that “the FCC approved Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount”.
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Deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s criminal defense lawyer just last year, wrote that after meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, a former socialite who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom and sexually abuse girls, he intends to spend more time interviewing her on Friday.
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A leather-bound book of birthday greetings presented to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 included messages from about 20 associates listed as “Friends”, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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As Trump continues to insist that a letter and drawing attributed to him by the Wall Street Journal in leather-bound book of birthday greetings presented to Epstein in 2003 is “fake”, the New York Times reports that Trump’s name appears in a list of contributors to the book it has reviewed.
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Greg Kelly, a host on the partisan, pro-Trump network Newsmax told his viewers on Wednesday night that Maxwell “just might be a victim”.
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Greg Kelly, a host on the partisan, pro-Trump network Newsmax told his viewers on Wednesday night that Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom and sexually abuse girls, “just might be a victim”.
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“There was a rush to judgment”, Kelly said. “All right, granted, she hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, and I know that’s apparently not good, but she’s in jail. For how long now? 20 years.”
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Kelly then introduced comments from Alan Dershowitz, who told another Newsmax host that Maxwell should not be in jail.
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Dershowitz, Kelly did not note, was an associate of Epstein’s who, according to a Wall Street Journal report, contributed to a leather-bound album of birthday greetings assembled by Maxwell in 2003.
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“She deserves to be out”, Kelly told his viewers. “And maybe she never deserved to be in there in the first place. Now, how could you say such a thing? I mean, these are perverts. These are child molesters. We’ve heard that from whom? From the media, from prosecutors. Prosecutors prosecuted President Trump over nothing. I don’t know, but I’m skeptical of everything and everybody these days. And you should be too.”
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He went on to suggest that the fact that Maxwell was prosecuted by James Comey’s daughter was, in itself, enough for a commutation of her sentence.
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As Donald Trump continues to insist that a letter and drawing attributed to him by the Wall Street Journal in leather-bound book of birthday greetings presented to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 is “fake”, the New York Times reports that Trump’s name appears in a list of contributors to the book it has reviewed.
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The Times also published what it described as an image of the handwritten introduction to the book from Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who was later convicted of conspiring with him to recruit, groom and sexually abuse girls.
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The Times also published an image of a signed note to Epstein, “To Jeff – You are the greatest!” as an inscription in a copy of Trump’s book Trump: the Art of the Comeback that belonged to Epstein. The note, written in Trump’s distinctive handwriting and black Sharpie, was dated “Oct 97”, the month Trump’s book was first published.
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Trump wrote that book with Kate Bohner, a former investment banker and CNBC journalist who now runs a bespoke communications firm that lists “crisis management” as one of its specialities.
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A leather-bound book of birthday greetings presented to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 included messages from about 20 associates listed as “Friends”, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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According to the Journal, which is being sued by Trump over its initial report that he contributed a page with an imagined dialogue between “Donald” and “Jeffrey” and a sketch of a naked woman, about 60 people contributed to the birthday book, which had a table of contents that listed the contributions, organized into groups, including “Friends”, “Business”, “Science”, “Brooklyn” and “Family”.
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Mark Epstein, the late sex offender’s brother, told the Journal that he recalled the book, which included a note from him, being assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who was later convicted of conspiring with him to recruit, groom and sexually abuse girls.
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Mark Epstein told the Guardian in an interview on Thursday that if he had the opportunity he would ask Maxwell “what she and Jeffrey might have known what the dirt was on Donald Trump”.
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“Because Jeffrey said, he said he had dirt on Trump,” Mark Epstein added. “I don’t know what it was, but years ago he said he had dirt on Trump.”
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In his federal lawsuit, Trump called the letter attributed to him “fake and nonexistent”.
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“Several digital copies of the album have been created” the Journal reports. “Pages have been reviewed by justice department officials who investigated Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people familiar with the matter. The album is part of Epstein’s estate.”
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Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, who is now the deputy attorney general, met with Maxwell in federal prison on Friday and plans to meet her again on Saturday. Maxwell is trying to have her conviction overturned.
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Deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who was Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer just last year, wrote on social media that after meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, a former socialite who was convicted of conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to recruit, groom and sexually abuse girls, he intends to spend more time interviewing her in federal prison on Friday.
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“The Department of Justice will share additional information about what we learned at the appropriate time,” Blanche added.
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“We want to thank the deputy attorney general for being so professional with all of us and for taking the time to meet with us,” Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus told reporters after Thursday’s interview.
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According to Markus, Blanche “spent the full day and asked a lot of questions, and Ms Maxwell answered every single one”.
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Maxwell is seeking to have her conviction overturned.
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Blanche’s meetings with Maxwell come as the Trump administration tries to contain outrage over its decision to not release files from the federal investigation of the late sex offender, who socialized with Trump for more than a decade.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a former federal prosecutor, called Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell “very weird”, and asked “is he really going as [deputy attorney general] or is he going de facto as Trump’s personal criminal attorney, Tom Hagen style?”
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Tom Hagen was the family lawyer in the fictional Godfather series. In one memorable scene, he visited a former gangster in custody and convinced him to kill himself rather than testify against his former associates.
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As Whitehouse pointed out earlier on Thursday, Trump is suing the Wall Street Journal for reporting that he contributed a bawdy birthday message to Epstein in 2003 for a leather-bound book of birthday greetings from his associates that Maxwell reportedly assembled.
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“Maxwell is a likely witness in Trump’s lawsuit against the WSJ if she put the book together and obtained the Trump letter,” Whitehouse posted.
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Just last year, after Blanche defended Trump in court on criminal charges of making secret payments to a porn star during his 2016 campaign, he was a guest on Markus’s podcast.
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In an account of his first meeting with Trump, Blanche said: “We clicked. You know, he’s an enigma.”
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Donald Trump’s hand-picked chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, just announced that “the FCC approved Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount Global and its subsidiaries, including the ultimate parent company of the CBS network of owned and operated broadcast television stations, by granting a series of applications that transfer FCC licenses and authorizations.”
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According to Carr, Skydance, whose founder is David Ellison, son of the pro-Trump tech billionaire Larry Ellison, “has made written commitments” to ensure that the new company’s news and entertainment programming will address conservative grievances that CBS News reporting is biased against them and the new owners will stop all efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Skydance also agreed to appoint an ombudsman to “evaluate complaints of bias” who will report to the president of New Paramount and serve for at least two years.
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“Approving this transaction will unleash the investment of $1.5 billion into Paramount, bolstering all aspects of its operations, including broadcast”, Carr added in his statement.
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That is precisely the amount of money Paramount agreed to pay the creators of South Park earlier this week for global streaming rights over the next five years.
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The first episode of the satirical animated series, broadcast on Wednesday and now streaming on the Paramount+ app, mocked Donald Trump as a whiny, would-be autocrat with small genitalia in bed with Satan. It also featured thinly veiled criticism of the company for paying Trump $16 million to drop his claim that the routine editing of CBS interview with Kamala Harris last year was unfair to him, and for canceling Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night show.
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The South Park episode ended by ridiculing reports that the new Paramount owners had agreed to give Trump $20 million of public service announcement and advertising for free. The episode concluded with a mock public service announcement, ostensibly in favor of Trump, that pictured him naked with a miniature, talking penis. “Trump, his penis is teeny-tiny”, a narrator intones, “but his love for us is large”.
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The US supreme court temporarily blocked a lower court ruling that would have significantly limited the power of the Voting Rights Act and only allowed the Justice Department to file claims under the landmark civil rights law.
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The decision arose from a dispute over state legislative districts in North Dakota. In 2022, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe, as well as individual members, sued the state, alleging they had diminished their voting power by “cracking and packing” them into a limited number of districts.
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The lawsuit alleged that the redrawn districts would dilute the voting strength of Native Americans in the state in violation of section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, by giving them a chance to elect the candidate of their choice in just one district in northeastern North Dakota, instead of two.
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A district court judge sided with the plaintiffs in 2023 and ordered new maps.
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The US court of Appeals for the 8th circuit, which includes Arkansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota, overturned that ruling earlier this year. It said private parties – including individual voters and voting rights groups cannot bring claims under Section 2 of the law, which prohibits discriminatory voting practices. Such a ruling would essentially gut the law since private parties bring the vast majority of cases under Section 2.
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The justices indicated in an unsigned order that they are likely to take up a federal appeals court ruling that would eliminate the most common path people and civil rights groups use to sue under a key provision of the 60-year-old Voting Rights Act.
n The case could be argued as early as 2026 and decided by next summer.
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Three of the court’s conservative justices, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito, said they would have allowed the ruling from the 8th circuit to remain in effect.
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“We are relieved that Native voters in North Dakota retain the ability to protect ourselves from discrimination at the polls. Our fight for the rights of our citizens continues. The map enacted by the North Dakota legislature unlawfully dilutes the votes of Native voters, and it cannot be allowed to stand”, Jamie Azure, chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, said in a statement.
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It was long considered a settled matter that Congress gave private parties the ability to bring claims under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was passed in 1965. But in a concurring opinion in 2021, Gorsuch invited litigants to bring a case to the court challenging that presumption.
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“Our cases have assumed – without deciding – that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 furnishes an implied cause of action under §2,” he wrote in 2021. “Lower courts have treated this as an open question … Because no party argues that the plaintiffs lack a cause of action here, and because the existence (or not) of a cause of action does not go to a court’s subject-matter jurisdiction … this Court need not and does not address that issue today.”
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Shortly after that decision, a judge in Arkansas dismissed a Section 2 case, saying that private plaintiffs could not bring section 2 claims.
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The Campaign Legal Center, which filed the suit with the Native American Rights Fund and other partners, welcomed the stay for “leaving in place fair maps for Native American voters while the cases progresses before the supreme court.”
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“To make this decision permanent, Campaign Legal Center will be filing a cert petition to formally request that the supreme court hear this case during their next term,” the nonpartisan, legal nonprofit wrote.
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