Hegseth announces military operation to remove ‘narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere’– as it happened

Perhaps eager to show that he is not, entirely, staying out of the public spotlight as questions about his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein spread, Donald Trump just posted his first “truths” of the day, a pair of posts on his social network urging his fans to buy new books by Fox News contributors who are also his fans.

Both posts has a pre-cooked air about them, since they were recommendations of books Trump had already recommended previously, and were both posted at the same time, 8:55pm in Washington.

First, Trump praised a book by the former FBI agent Nicole Parker. Parker, who visited Trump in the Oval Office on Monday, told Fox & Friends on Thursday morning: “James Comey single-handedly destroyed the agency that I loved.”

In the very same minute, he posted a second book recommendation, praising a book by the former wrestler Tyrus, a frequent guest on the Fox late-night show Gutfeld! that Trump had already recommended in September.

So, for Trump fans, Thursday was a day without new truths.

Donald Trump, the former gameshow host who normally loves being on television, has been unusually quiet and out of view since yesterday, when Democrats released emails from Jeffrey Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with Trump for over a decade, which seemed to undermine Trump’s claims that he knew nothing about his friend’s sexual exploitation of minors.

On Wednesday, Trump made only one public appearance, at which he signed the legislation to reopen the government, read a brief set of prepared remarks and took no questions from reporters.

On Thursday, Trump only appeared to sign an executive order to support an initiative by his wife, made a set of rambling remarks, in which he brought up plans to knock through a wall of the White House to connect it to his new ballroom, and again took no questions.

The White House just notified reporters that Trump’s schedule for Friday includes no public events at all before he departs the White House for a weekend in Florida, where he will spend Saturday and Sunday out of public view.

Adding to the impression of radio silence is the fact that, so far on Thursday, Trump has also posted nothing at all on his social media platform, Truth Social.

Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon asked a federal judge on Thursday to dismiss lawsuits accusing them of knowingly aiding Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking by providing banking services to the late convicted sex offender who socialized with Donald Trump for more than a decade, Reuters reports.

As Victoria Bekiempis reported for The Guardian last month, the lawsuits, filed by one of Epstein’s victims, a Florida woman known as Jane Doe, allege that these financial powerhouses illicitly enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking. The suits were filed by Sigrid McCawley, of Boies Schiller Flexner, and Brad Edwards of Edwards Henderson, who have long represented Epstein victims.

The suits accused the banks of knowingly ignoring a “plethora” of information about Epstein’s crimes because they valued profit over protecting victims.

Both lawsuits said the banks should have filed suspicious activity reports with the US Treasury Department, which could have helped law enforcement stop Epstein sooner.

But in a filing in Manhattan federal court, Bank of America said Doe alleged merely that it provided routine services to people who at the time had no known links to Epstein, and any suggestion it was more deeply involved was “threadbare and meritless.”

BNY Mellon, in a separate filing, called Doe’s allegations “razor-thin,” and included no claims that Epstein was ever a customer or dealt with anyone in particular.

Before we move past it, let’s pause for a moment to note that earlier on Thursday Donald Trump dropped a very strong hint that he intends to demolish at least part of the original exterior wall of the White House residence to link the historic building to his new ballroom.

During his remarks in the White House East Room, Trump turned and pointed to the golden drapes over the grand window that used to lead to the roof of the East Wing, before it was entirely demolished to make room for the ballroom.

“And right behind me by the way, in about two years from now, we’ll use a much bigger room,” Trump said. “It’ll be right here,” the president said, pointing at the large window in the center of the room, which was part of the original construction and was there when the second president, John Adams took up residence in the White House in 1800.

“It’ll be right here, this will be the entrance,” Trump said, waving his hand to show the contours of the new glass hallway he plans to build in place of the original window to connect the residence to the ballroom.

“That’s a knock-out panel, it’s called a knock-out,” Trump said, using a construction term for a removable section of a wall, designed during construction to be easily removed to allow for future expansion.

“It looks pretty nice right now, but gonna look a lot better in a little while,” the president said.

Trump’s description of the grand window that has stood for centuries, as historic presidential events unfolded in the East Room — including both Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy lying in state, Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act, Richard Nixon bidding farewell to his staff, Bill Clinton apologizing for his affair with Monica Lewinsky and Barack Obama announcing the killing of Osama bin Laden — as something designed to be knocked out was obviously false.

But the matter-of-fact description of his plan to knock a hole in the exterior wall of the White House also contradicts his own claim, in July, that his ballroom project “won’t interfere with the current building, it won’t be… It will be near it but not touching it. It pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”

Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency known to some around the president as “Little Trump”, accused a Democratic representative, Eric Swalwell, of mortgage fraud in a letter to the attorney general, Pam Bondi, on Wednesday, NBC News reports.

Pulte has previous made the same accusation against two prominent Democratic critics of Donald Trump – New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff, a California senator – and a Federal Reserve governor, Lisa Cook.

After Pulte made the allegation against Cook, which Trump tried to use a grounds to fire her, Reuters reported that Pulte’s father and stepmother had filed housing claims similar to hers.

“As the most vocal critic of Donald Trump over the last decade and as the only person who still has a surviving lawsuit against him, the only thing I am surprised about is that it took him this long to come after me,” Swalwell said in a statement. “Like James Comey and John Bolton, Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook, Letitia James and the dozens more to come — I refuse to live in fear in what was once the freest country in the world,” he added.

“Eric Swalwell is a principled legislator who served with distinction as an Impeachment Manager during the second impeachment of Donald J. Trump”, the House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in response to the report. “The so-called charges being contemplated against him are laughable.”

”Bill Pulte is nothing more than a malignant hack who is abdicating his responsibility to help everyday Americans afford a home, and is instead wasting taxpayer dollars on baseless investigations into Donald Trump’s perceived political enemies,” Jeffries added.

Like everyone else, we are trying to get more information on the meaning of the brief social media announcement, from the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, of what he called a new anti-trafficking military operation, “Operation Southern Spear”.

The former Fox weekend anchor’s social media accounts offered no clues, although he did share, from his personal account, defense department video of what he was up to earlier on Thursday: personally turning the screws to hang a new plaque on the outside the Pentagon that reads “Department of War”.

In a social media post, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, just announced “Operation Southern Spear”, a new military mission apparently signaling that the war on drugs could soon be an actual war.

“President Trump ordered action — and the Department of War is delivering. Today, I’m announcing Operation SOUTHERN SPEAR. Led by Joint Task Force Southern Spear and [US Southern Command],” Hegseth wrote on X.

This mission, he added, “defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people. The Western Hemisphere is America’s neighborhood – and we will protect it.”

He offered no other details, as strikes on suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and a massing of forces in the region have prompted widespread speculation that US military strikes on Venezuela are imminent.

The US Southern Command (Southcom) is the US military’s combatant command that encompasses 31 countries through South and Central America and the Caribbean.

Bizarrely, Hegseth’s announcement of the new operation on Thursday comes nearly 10 months after US Naval Forces Southern Command announced in January that “Operation Southern Spear … will start later this month” and would use “a heterogeneous mix of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) to support the detection and monitoring of illicit trafficking” in the Caribbean.

The US Department of the Interior announced on Thursday that it was rescinding a 2024 Bureau of Land Management rule limiting drilling for oil in an Alaska area that is the nation’s largest tract of undisturbed public land.

“By rescinding the 2024 rule, we are following the direction set by President Trump to unlock Alaska’s energy potential, create jobs for North Slope communities and strengthen American energy security,” Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, said in a statement. “This action restores common-sense management and ensures responsible development benefits both Alaska and the nation.”

According to the Alaska Wilderness League, the so-called National Petroleum Reserve is the largest single unit of public lands in the nation, spanning nearly 23m acres across Alaska’s western North Slope that was set aside in the 1920s as an emergency oil supply for the US navy.

It is home to millions of acres of wilderness with critical habitat for migratory birds, brown bears, caribou, polar bears, walrus and endangered beluga whales. The league notes that “Alaska Native communities that live in and around the reserve have maintained a subsistence lifestyle for thousands of years based on its living resources”.

While Donald Trump’s justice department has downplayed the possibility that other men were involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of teen girls, an email released on 12 November as part of the House oversight committee’s Epstein investigation shows an exchange between the late financier and an associate where they discuss “girls” and travel.

Epstein sent an email asking “what is your schedule?” on 23 July 2010 to an associate. The latter responded the next morning saying: “the other girl name is [redacted].” The Guardian is withholding the associate’s name, as attempts to identify and contact him were unsuccessful.

That afternoon, the associate also wrote: “Can you call me/ I am with tigrane he would like to meet you he is here with me in Ibiza/with 8 top girls he said he would like to build some thing with you/can you come to Ibiza we have a huge house or how can we orgnise this/ meeting even Jean Luc could doo a great biz also/ he has the most amizing top models on stand by I told him not to do any/deals with anybody before he meet with you.” The Guardian could not identify the figure referred to as “tigrane”.

“He stoped working with IMG and Trump wi here please call me and let me/ know what is your plans/ warmest regards” the associate wrote, apparently referring to Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and friend of Epstein.

Epstein wrote “i will be in paris tom000rw night” in the chain.

Read more:

As Donald Trump prepares to host Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, next week, Pentagon intelligence officials are warning that a deal to let US arms makers sell 48 F-35 fighter jets to the Saudis could give China access to the technology, the New York Times reports.

Pentagon officials told the paper that they fear “that F-35 technology could be compromised through Chinese espionage or China’s security partnership with Saudi Arabia”. The concerns were detailed in a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, a part of the defense department.

Three weeks after Trump, reluctantly, left office in 2021, US intelligence agencies concluded that the crown prince, known as MBS, “approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi” and noted “the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad”.

That intelligence assessment prompted then president Joe Biden to keep his distance from the Saudi leader during his first months in office, before dismaying human rights advocates by softening that stance later in his term, initially with a friendly fist-bump instead of a handshake. the crown prince to . Trump, in marked contrast, has warmly embraced the crown prince. During his visit to the Middle East in May, Trump effusively praised the crown prince in public remarks.

My colleagues, Tara Conlan and Michael Savage, report that the BBC has apologised to Donald Trump over the editing of a Panorama that led to the resignation of its director general, Tim Davie, and the BBC News chief, Deborah Turness.

However, the corporation has rejected his demands for compensation, after lawyers for Trump threatened to sue for $1bn in damages unless the BBC issued a retraction, apologised and settled with him.

The BBC has also agreed not to show the edition of Panorama again.

“Lawyers for the BBC have written to president Trump’s legal team in response to a letter received on Sunday,” a BBC spokesperson said.

“BBC chair Samir Shah has separately sent a personal letter to the White House making clear to President Trump that he and the corporation are sorry for the edit of the president’s speech on 6 January 2021, which featured in the program.

“The BBC has no plans to rebroadcast the documentary Trump: A Second Chance? On any BBC platforms. While the BBC sincerely regrets the manner in which the video clip was edited, we strongly disagree there is a basis for a defamation claim.”

• The Trump administration is suing California governor Gavin Newsom after the state adopted new congressional maps last week. The justice department joined a lawsuit, brought by California Republicans, to block the new boundaries that voters overwhelmingly approved through Proposition 50 – a ballot initiative that would give Democrats in the Golden state five more seats in the House ahead of the 2026 midterms. This was the governor’s response to the redistricting battle that started in Texas, when the state’s GOP-run legislature gerrymandered their own map.

• The federal government reopened today, after a record-breaking shutdown that lasted almost 43 days. Several agencies called their employees back to work, and the administration expects back pay to be issued to furloughed employees by early next week. Earlier, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that the shutdown cost “$15bn a week”, and cited an estimate that 60,000 non-federal workers lost their jobs.

• The White House remains on defense after a trove of documents from the Epstein estate seemed to suggest that Donald Trump knew about the late-financier’s conduct. Press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said that the latest tranche of emails – one of which said that Trump “spent hours” at Epstein’s home, and another which said the president “knew about the girls” – is part of a Democratic “hoax’ to distract “from the President’s wins”.

• A federal judge in Virginia said she would rule by Thanksgiving in a case brought by former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James – that alleges the prosecutor who indicted them was unlawfully appointed. Attorneys for the former FBI director and New York attorney general claim that Lindsey Halligan, who Donald Trump handpicked to be the new US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was illegally installed because her role in office exceeds the 120-day for a role to filled by an interim appointee without confirmation from the Senate.

• John Fetterman, the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, has been hospitalized after a fall during an early morning walk. According to his spokesperson, “out of an abundance of caution” he was “transported to a hospital in Pittsburgh”. Fetterman was one of the lawmakers in the Democratic caucus who split from the party to vote for the bill to reopen the federal government. “Upon evaluation, it was established he had a ventricular fibrillation flare-up that led to Senator Fetterman feeling light-headed, falling to the ground and hitting his face with minor injuries,” his spokesperson added.

The Trump administration is suing California governor Gavin Newsom after the state adopted new congressional maps last week.

The justice department is attempting to block the new boundaries, that voters overwhelmingly approved through Proposition 50 – the ballot initiative that would give Democrats in the Golden state five more seats in the House ahead of the 2026 midterms. This move was a response to the redistricting battle that started in Texas, when the state’s GOP-run legislature gerrymandered their own maps.

Attorney general Pam Bondi called the governor’s effort a “power grab”.

“Newsom should be concerned about keeping Californians safe and shutting down Antifa violence, not rigging his state for political gain,” she added.

Donald Trump signed his latest executive order today, but left the East Room of the White House without taking any questions from reporters.

After the first lady handed the podium over to Donald Trump, he praised his wife’s introduction.

“I think it’s very good, especially for someone that speaks five languages at least. I think that’s pretty amazing. I couldn’t do it,” he said.

Right now, we’re hearing from first lady Melania Trump as the president prepares to sign an executive order to help foster children access employment and education opportunities as they age out of the system.

“This executive order, fostering the future for American children and families, gives me tremendous pride. It is both empathetic and strategic. It will certainly be impactful,” she said.

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia said she would rule by Thanksgiving in a case brought by James Comey and Letitia James – that alleges the prosecutor charging them was unlawfully appointed. During today’s hearing, judge Cameron Currie did not issue a decision during the hour-long court hearing, but said she would probably rule by the end of the month.

Attorneys for the former FBI director and New York attorney general claim that Lindsey Halligan, who Donald Trump handpicked to be the new US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, was illegally installed because her role in office exceeds the 120-day for a role to filled by an interim appointee without confirmation from the Senate. Her predecessor, Erik Siebert, was also a temporary US attorney before he resigned from his position, stating he found insufficient evidence to prosecute Trump’s political enemies.