Trump’s chief of staff suggests real goal of US boat strikes is to topple Venezuela’s Maduro – as it happened

Our live coverage of Donald Trump’s second presidency is wrapping up. We’ll be back on Wednesday. Here are the latest developments:

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  Donald Trump has ordered “a total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela, ramping up pressure on the country’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro. The move comes amid an escalating campaign by the Trump administration against Maduro that has included a ramped-up military presence in the region and more than two dozen military strikes on vessels in the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, which have killed dozens of people. Here’s more.

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  Trump signed a proclamation that further restricts and limits the entry of foreign nationals to the United States, the White House said. The US has imposed full restrictions and entry limitations on nationals from five countries – Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, and Syria – in addition to the initial list of 12 countries. Full restrictions have also been imposed on individuals holding Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents, the White House said. More here.

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  Trump believes “there’s nothing he can’t do, nothing, zero” as US president, the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, said in a rare interview that shines an unvarnished spotlight on his second administration. Speaking to Vanity Fair, Wiles described Trump – who is teetotal – as having “an alcoholic’s personality”, an insight she ascribed to her relationship with her late father, the broadcaster and NFL star Pat Summerall, who had alcoholism. “High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” Wiles said in a series of 11 interviews she gave to the author Chris Whipple. The Guardian’s Robert Tait brings us the full story.

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  The BBC is preparing to argue Trump’s $10bn court case against it should be dismissed, arguing it has no case to answer over the US president’s claims he was defamed by an episode of Panorama. The development comes after Trump filed a 33-page complaint to a Florida court on Monday, accusing the broadcaster of “a false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory and malicious depiction” of the president in the documentary. More here.

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  The Pentagon will not make public the full video of a September attack in the Caribbean that killed two individuals as they were clinging to the wreckage of a burning boat, Pete Hegseth said on Tuesday. The strike has been the most controversial development in Trump’s campaign against Venezuela, which has seen US forces blow up vessels alleged to be transporting narcotics from the South American country to the United States, seize an oil tanker and threaten further military action against the president, Nicolás Maduro. Legal experts have raised concerns that US forces may have committed a war crime by killing the survivors of an initial air strike on 2 September, and that the campaign is illegal. More here.

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  US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences. Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act. Here’s the full story by David Smith.

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President Donald Trump said he is ordering a full blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela.

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“The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” reads the post on Truth Social.

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He added: “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.”

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The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided to remove the well-established recommendation that all newborns in the country receive a hepatitis B vaccine.

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The CDC now recommends a birth dose of the vaccine only for babies whose mothers test positive for hepatitis B infection, and in cases where the mother’s status is unknown.

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“Individual-based decision-making, referred to on the CDC immunization schedule as shared clinical decision-making, means that parents and health care providers should consider vaccine benefits, vaccine risks, and infection risks, and that parents consult with their health care provider and decide when or if their child will begin the hepatitis B vaccine series,” reads a statement released today by the CDC.

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Many medical and public health leaders have denounced the new recommendation, with groups such as the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly recommending that all infants receive the vaccine within 24 hours of birth.

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Last week, Ronald G Nahass, president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America, said that this recommendation “ignores established science.”

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“This will result in more disease, more suffering, more confusion and yes, less trust,” he added.

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Donald Trump has signed a proclamation further restricting and limiting the entry of foreign nationals to the United States, the White House announced today, with a particular emphasis on African countries.

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Per today’s announcement, the US has imposed full restrictions and entry limitations on nationals from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan, and Syria – in addition to the initial list of 12 countries (see below).

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Full restrictions have also been imposed on individuals holding Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents, as well as Laos and Sierra Leone, which were both previously partially restricted.

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The White House said it was also adding partial restrictions on an additional 15 countries, most of them in Africa: Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominica, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

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The proclamation also continues the previously imposed full restrictions on nationals from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen; and continues partial restrictions on nationals from Burundi, Cuba, Togo, and Venezuela.

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  Revelations from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in a series of remarkably unguarded interviews with Vanity Fair caused quite a stir today. Among the key tidbits were Wiles directly contradicting the official administration line when she said that Trump’s real goal in striking alleged drug boats in the Caribbean is indeed regime change in Venezuela, not the so-called “war on drugs”. She also said that Trump was “wrong” to tie former president Bill Clinton to Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal activity. And while she doesn’t think Trump is on a retribution tour, she conceded that the case of Letitia James “might be the one retribution”. “When there’s an opportunity [for score settling], he will go for it,” she said of the president.

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  Also in those interviews, Wiles said that Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality”; JD Vance “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade” and his conversion to Trumpism was “sort of political” when he was running for the Senate; and attorney general Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” her early handling of the Epstein files.

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  There were also striking comments about Elon Musk’s ketamine use and his dismantling of USAID, the latter of which Wiles said left her “initially aghast”. Wiles also disclosed that she had warned Trump against pardoning the most violent participants in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and pressed him to delay his decision on sweeping trade tariffs, but was unable to change his mind in either case. “The tariff decision has been more painful than I expected,” she said.

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  Naturally, Wiles slammed the Vanity Fair stories as a “disingenuously framed hit piece”, claiming that a lot of what she said was taken out of context. Meanwhile members of the Trump administration, including Vance and Bondi, presented a united front, rallying around her on social media to express their support and vouch for her loyalty.

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  Trump has also reportedly stood by Wiles. He told the New York Post that he has a “possessive and addictive type personality” and didn’t take offence at her choice of words. “I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair — but she’s done a fantastic job,” he said. “I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided.”

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  Elsewhere, Pete Hegseth said the defense department will not publicly release unedited video of the controversial 2 September double-tap boat strike that killed two survivors from an earlier attack on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Caribbean. “Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth said. He said members of the House and Senate armed services committees would be allowed to review the footage; however, he made no commitment to sharing it with the full Congress, despite a defense policy bill calling for its release.

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  Unemployment climbed to 4.6% in November, the highest it’s been in almost four years, and the economy gained 64,000 jobs that month after losing 105,000 in October amid the federal government shutdown, according to delayed figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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  And on that note, Trump will be giving a national address from the White House at 9pm ET tomorrow. According to press secretary Karoline Leavitt, the president will be talking “about all of his historic accomplishments over the past year” and possibly “teasing some policy that will be coming in the new year as well”. There’s still time to clear your diary.

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Donald Trump has told the New York Post that he supports Susie Wiles after the publication of interviews in Vanity Fair in which the White House chief of staff said the president “has an alcoholic’s personality”.

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“I didn’t read it, but I don’t read Vanity Fair — but she’s done a fantastic job,” Trump told the Post. “I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided.”

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He said that he has a “possessive and addictive type personality” and that he wasn’t offended by Wiles’s word choice. He added:

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If anybody knows the interviewer, and if they know Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair is a totally — it’s lost its way. It’s also lost its readers, as you know. No, she’s fantastic.

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Donald Trump has just posted a cryptic announcement on his Truth Social platform that he will be giving a national address from the White House at 9pm ET tomorrow. He didn’t give further details.

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My Fellow Americans: I will be giving an ADDRESS TO THE NATION tomorrow night, LIVE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, at 9 P.M. EST. I look forward to “seeing” you then. It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!

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Earlier this morning, Donald Trump’s administration argued in a court filing that the president’s White House ballroom construction project must continue for reasons of national security.

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The filing came in response to a lawsuit filed three days earlier by the National Trust for Historic Preservation asking a federal judge to halt the ballroom project until it goes through multiple independent reviews and wins approval from Congress.

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In its filing, the administration included a declaration from the deputy director of the US Secret Service saying more work on the site of the former White House East Wing is still needed to meet the agency’s “safety and security requirements”. The administration has offered to share classified details with the judge in an in-person setting without the plaintiffs present.

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The government’s response to the lawsuit offers the most comprehensive look yet at the ballroom construction project, including a window into how it was so swiftly approved by the Trump administration bureaucracy and its expanding scope.

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The filings assert that final plans for the ballroom have yet to be completed despite the continuing demolition and other work to prepare the site for construction. Below-ground work on the site continues, wrote John Stanwich, the National Park Service’s liaison to the White House – and work on the foundations is set to begin in January. Above-ground construction “is not anticipated to begin until April 2026, at the earliest”, he wrote.

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Democrats are condemning two Republican members of Congress who said, in the wake of the mass shooting in Australia, that the US should ban Muslims from the country and kick out those who already live here.

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Congressman Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, said he not only wants deportations of legal immigrants who are Muslim, but “citizenship revocations wherever possible” of Muslims.

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“This has to stop. Diversity is not our strength. Diversity has become suicidal,” Fine wrote on X on Monday. “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible. Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us. The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.”

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Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, said Islam is a “cult”, Muslims are “here to conquer” and that people needed to “stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers”.

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“We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America,” he wrote on X on Sunday.

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For the full story, click here:

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Pete Hegseth has said the defense department will not publicly release unedited video of the controversial 2 September double-tap boat strike that killed two survivors from an earlier attack on an alleged drug smuggling boat in the Carribean.

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According to the defense secretary, members of the House and Senate armed services committees would be allowed to review the footage; however, he made no commitment to sharing it with the full Congress, despite a defense policy bill calling for its release.

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“Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth said, in comments reported by the Associated Press.

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Hegseth made the remarks after closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill where he and other top national security officials defended the administration’s expanded use of military force in international waters near Venezuela.

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Hegseth arrives for a classified briefing for the House of Representatives on the situation in Venezuela at the Capitol this morning.”,”caption”:”Pete Hegseth arrives for a classified briefing for the House of Representatives on the situation in Venezuela at the Capitol this morning.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters”}}],”attributes”:{“pinned”:false,”keyEvent”:true,”summary”:false},”blockCreatedOn”:1765905157000,”blockCreatedOnDisplay”:”12.12 EST”,”blockLastUpdated”:1765911938000,”blockLastUpdatedDisplay”:”14.05 EST”,”blockFirstPublished”:1765905448000,”blockFirstPublishedDisplay”:”12.17 EST”,”blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone”:”12.17″,”title”:”No plans to release unedited boat strike video to public, Hegseth says”,”contributors”:[],”primaryDateLine”:”Tue 16 Dec 2025 21.47 EST”,”secondaryDateLine”:”First published on Tue 16 Dec 2025 07.54 EST”},{“id”:”694188998f085301b168eba6″,”elements”:[{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Wiles also said of Trump’s Venezuela strategy:

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n

He wants to keep on blowing boats up until [president Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.

n

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The author notes that “Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change”.

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“So not a war on the cartels. It’s regime change,” Democratic senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to the article. “Either way, totally illegal and nonsensical.”

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Wiles also conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval.

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n

If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.

n

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Back to the interviews, Wiles called Elon Musk “an avowed Ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are”. “You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person,” she said.

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She was asked “what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao,” to which she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.”

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Furthermore, she said Musk’s demolition of USAID initially left her “aghast”. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” Wiles said.

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She said that Musk’s approach, which was “to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out”, was “not the way I would do it”. She recalled telling him, “You can’t just lock people out of their offices.”

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Musk was a disrupter, she said, “but no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”

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I’ll briefly interrupt to note that Susie Wiles is not happy with the Vanity Fair interviews published today, calling it “a disingenuously framed hit piece”.

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She wrote in an extremely rare post on X:

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n

The article published early this morning is a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.

n

Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.

n

The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade.

n

None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!

n

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Wiles in a cabinet meeting on 30 April.”,”caption”:”Susie Wiles in a cabinet meeting on 30 April.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP”}}],”attributes”:{“pinned”:false,”keyEvent”:true,”summary”:false},”blockCreatedOn”:1765900345000,”blockCreatedOnDisplay”:”10.52 EST”,”blockLastUpdated”:1765911770000,”blockLastUpdatedDisplay”:”14.02 EST”,”blockFirstPublished”:1765900591000,”blockFirstPublishedDisplay”:”10.56 EST”,”blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone”:”10.56″,”title”:”Susie Wiles slams her Vanity Fair interview as ‘a disingenuously framed hit piece'”,”contributors”:[],”primaryDateLine”:”Tue 16 Dec 2025 21.47 EST”,”secondaryDateLine”:”First published on Tue 16 Dec 2025 07.54 EST”},{“id”:”69417c0a8f085301b168ead1″,”elements”:[{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Also on Epstein, Wiles told Vanity Fair she had read the documents. She acknowledged that Donald Trump is in them, adding: “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”

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Trump has accused former president Bill Clinton (without evidence) of visiting Epstein’s infamous private island. Asked about that, Wiles said, “There is no evidence” that those visits happened. And asked whether there was anything incriminating in the files about Clinton as Trump suggested, Wiles said: “The president was wrong about that.”

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On the Epstein files, Wiles said attorney general Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the affair, when she gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House in February.

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“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said. “First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”

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Vice-president JD Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade”, Wiles added. She said that Vance, along with FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, were the only ones in the administration that “really appreciated what a big deal this is” because “they lived in that world”.

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Wiles also said she had told Donald Trump that his second term was not supposed to be a retribution tour.

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“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said in an interview in March.

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When that failed to materialize, she said in August: “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour.” But, she said, he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”

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Asked about New York attorney general Letitia James, Wiles replied: “Well, that might be the one retribution.” James won a massive civil court verdict against Trump for business fraud with a $450m penalty.

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Asked whether she told Trump to back down, Wiles doubled down: “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money.” A reminder that an appeals court later threw out the monetary penalty, deeming it excessive, but upheld the core finding that Trump was liable for fraud.

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On former FBI director James Comey, Wiles said:

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n

I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.

n

I don’t think he [Trump] wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.

n

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Last month a federal judge threw out both the Comey and James criminal cases brought by the Trump administration, concluding that the prosecutor had been appointed unlawfully.

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Wiles, who grew up with a father who was addicted to alcohol, said in one interview:

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n

Some clinical psychologist that knows one million times more than I do will dispute what I’m going to say. But high-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities.

n

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She said Trump, who does not drink, has “an alcoholic’s personality” and “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”

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The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the mass shooter at Brown University.

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But new video clips released by the police still do not show the suspect’s face, marking another setback for the investigation. Indeed the Associated Press reports that questions are swirling about “campus security, the apparent lack of school video evidence and whether the focus on the person of interest gave the attacker more time to escape”.

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FBI director Kash Patel found himself under fire again yesterday for rushing to social media to tout the agency’s work on tracking down that person of interest prematurely. That person was later released from custody hours later, and the shooter remains at large.

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But don’t worry. While Rhode Island officials are hard at work on the manhunt, Patel will appear on Magaworld’s Katie Miller’s podcast aimed at conservative women with his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins today. Expect to have all your questions answered, including how do they make long-distance work and when is the engagement?

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The US labor market grew by more than expected last month, recovering some of the damage inflicted by the federal government shutdown, according to official data.

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An estimated 105,000 jobs were lost in October, and 64,000 were added in November, a highly-anticipated report showed today. Jobs growth was higher in November than anticipated by many economists, with a consensus forecast of some 40,000 jobs added.

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But the headline unemployment rate continued to climb – and hit 4.6%, a four-year high, last month – amid apprehension around the strength of the US economy.

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Previous estimates for overall jobs growth in August and September were also downgraded, from a drop of 4,000 to 26,000, and from growth of 119,000 to 108,000, respectively.

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The latest jobs numbers, typically released monthly, were delayed due to the government shutdown. Federal government jobs declined by 162,000 in October, and 6,000 in November.

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The figures arrive against a tumultuous background for the US’s economic data, once regarded as the gold standard in government data.

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The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that full October jobs data would not be released and November’s jobs data was delayed due to the 43-day federal government shutdown and questions have been raised about its accuracy.

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Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell warned last week that the data from the BLS should be treated with a “skeptical eye” while the hangover left from the shutdown works through the system.

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US congresswoman Ilhan Omar has warned that Donald Trump’s repeated personal attacks and dehumanising rhetoric are fuelling a climate of political violence that could have dangerous consequences.

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Speaking days after the president called for her to be thrown out of the country, Omar said Trump’s incendiary language reaches “the worst humans possible” and encourages them to act.

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“We’ve had people incarcerated for threatening to kill me,” she told the Guardian in an interview at her Washington office. “We have people that are being prosecuted right now for threatening to kill me and so it is something that does stay in the back of our minds. But I also worry about those people finding someone who looks like me in Minneapolis or across the country and thinking it is me and harming them.”

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Omar in her office in Washington DC on 12 December.”,”caption”:”Ilhan Omar in her office in Washington DC on 12 December.”,”credit”:”Photograph: Caroline Gutman/The Guardian”}},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Trump made the remarks at a rally-style event last week in Pennsylvania, where supporters chanted “Send her back!” after the president pushed a baseless conspiracy theory that Somali-born Omar married her own brother to become a US citizen. The Democrat, who arrived in the US as a refugee aged 12 and became a citizen at 17, described Trump’s fixation as “vile” and an “unhealthy and creepy obsession”.

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The Minnesota congresswoman said the attacks followed a familiar pattern. “When things aren’t going well for him … cue the bigotry,” she said, accusing Trump of deflecting from his failure to address cost-of-living pressures. “It’s the same playbook and he just goes back to it; he doesn’t know anything else.”

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Across the pond today, Keir Starmer’s office has said that any legal action against the BBC was a matter for the broadcaster but the UK government supported its independence.

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It comes after Donald Trump finally filed his lawsuit demanding damages worth up to to $10bn for the way a BBC Panorama documentary – which aired over a year ago – edited a speech he gave to supporters on 6 January 2021 before they attacked the US Capitol.

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“Any legal action is a matter for the BBC itself. They’ve made clear they believe there’s no case around the broader point of defamation or libel, but that’s for them and their legal teams to engage with,” a spokesperson for the UK prime minister told reporters.

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“We will always defend the principle of a strong, independent BBC as a trusted, relied-upon national broadcaster, reporting without fear or favour. But as we’ve also consistently said, it’s vitally important that they act to maintain trust, correcting mistakes quickly when they occur.”

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My colleague Andrew Sparrow notes on our UK politics live blog: “Starmer has, up to now, done his best to avoid getting embroiled in this row, arguing that the BBC is operationally independent and that this is a matter for the corporation and the president to settle themselves. Although there were suggestions at one point that he and Trump would speak about the dispute, that does not seem to have happened. However, he may find it hard to remain uninvolved as this goes on. The lawsuit has been filed as there is evidence in other areas – trade policy, for example – that US-UK relations are no longer quite as warm as they were at the time of the state visit.”

“,”elementId”:”a2611ff7-5055-45c0-89b1-3ba0bc9ea3fc”},{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.RichLinkBlockElement”,”prefix”:”Related: “,”text”:”Richard Tice refuses to condemn Reform UK candidate who said David Lammy should ‘go home’ – UK politics live”,”elementId”:”0830a3f5-d1d0-4966-b1c4-4e408d3edd2b”,”role”:”thumbnail”,”url”:”https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2025/dec/16/donald-trump-bbc-lawsuit-keir-starmer-kemi-badenoch-reaction-latest-news-updates”}],”attributes”:{“pinned”:false,”keyEvent”:true,”summary”:false},”blockCreatedOn”:1765890354000,”blockCreatedOnDisplay”:”08.05 EST”,”blockLastUpdated”:1765890762000,”blockLastUpdatedDisplay”:”08.12 EST”,”blockFirstPublished”:1765890718000,”blockFirstPublishedDisplay”:”08.11 EST”,”blockFirstPublishedDisplayNoTimezone”:”08.11″,”title”:”Starmer says Trump legal action is a matter for the BBC”,”contributors”:[],”primaryDateLine”:”Tue 16 Dec 2025 21.47 EST”,”secondaryDateLine”:”First published on Tue 16 Dec 2025 07.54 EST”},{“id”:”694152598f085fc7033b4864″,”elements”:[{“_type”:”model.dotcomrendering.pageElements.TextBlockElement”,”html”:”

Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog.

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This morning we start with the news that president Donald Trump’s top Cabinet officials on national security, Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, are due on Capitol Hill to brief members of Congress amid investigations into US military vessel strikes in the Caribbean.

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The briefing from the defense secretary and secretary of state comes as questions mount over the escalation of military force and deadly boat strikes in international waters near Venezuela. The Associated Press notes that lawmakers have been examining the 2 September attack as they sift through the rationale for a broader US military buildup in the region that increasingly appears pointed at Venezuela.

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On Monday night, the US military said it attacked three more boats believed to have been smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people.

n “We have thousands of troops and our largest aircraft carrier in the Caribbean — but zero, zero explanation for what Trump is trying to accomplish,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer.

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