Donald Trump is remaking the traditional boundaries of Washington, unleashing unprecedented executive orders and daring anyone to stop him.
Here's the latest:
Trump grants clemency to second Washington police officer involved in deadly chase
Shortly after announcing the pardon for former Washington Metropolitan Police Department Lt. Andrew Zabavsky, the White House said Trump had also granted clemency to Terrence Sutton for his involvement in the killing of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown.
Sutton was sentenced to five years and six months in prison for a second-degree murder conviction for his involvement in the deadly chase of the young man and a subsequent cover-up. The case had ignited protests in the nation’s capital.
On the night of Oct. 23, 2020, Sutton drove an undercover police car to chase Hylton-Brown, who was riding an electric moped on a sidewalk without a helmet. Zabavsky was riding in a marked police vehicle.
The chase lasted nearly three minutes and spanned 10 city blocks, running through stop signs and going the wrong way up a one-way street. Sutton turned off his vehicle’s emergency lights and sirens and accelerated just before an oncoming car struck Hylton-Brown, tossing his body into the air. He never regained consciousness before he died.
RFK Jr. confirmation hearing scheduled
The Senate has scheduled the first of two confirmation hearings for controversial Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for next week.
The anti-vaccine health guru from the famous political family will appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Jan. 29 as senators vet his qualifications to lead the country’s health agency at a time where concerns for another pandemic remain high.
He’s still facing a mix of support, curiosity, skepticism and downright rejection among lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who will be asked to confirm him to Trump’s Cabinet.
Trump says he is redesignating Yemen Houthis as a terrorist organization
The White House says Trump has issued an executive order that sets in motion a process for redesignating the Houthis as a foreign terrorist organization.
Trump’s administration designated the Houthis as global terrorists and a foreign terrorist organization in one of his last acts in office in 2021. But President Joe Biden reversed course early on, at the time citing the humanitarian threat that the sanctions posed to ordinary Yemenis.
The Houthis have attacked U.S. military and commercial vessels in the Red Sea following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel.
Family outraged after man convicted in Connecticut killings gets clemency from Biden in drug case
Relatives of an 8-year-old boy and his mother who were murdered by a Connecticut drug gang are outraged that a man convicted in the killings was one of nearly 2,500 people whose drug-related prison sentences were commuted by former President Joe Biden in his last days in office.
Adrian Peeler served a 20-year state prison sentence for murder conspiracy in the 1999 shootings of Leroy “B.J.” Brown and his mother, Karen Clarke, in Bridgeport. In December 2021, Peeler finished his state sentence but began serving a 15-year term in federal prison for dealing large amounts of crack cocaine.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat who was the state’s attorney general when the two were killed, said “someone dropped the ball” in Peeler’s clemency. Messages left for former White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre haven’t been returned.
▶Read more about the case
Trump pardons Washington police officer sentenced for role in a deadly chase
President Donald Trump has pardoned a Washington police officer who was sentenced to four years in prison for his role in the deadly chase of a man on a moped and the subsequent cover-up.
Trump on Wednesday issued a full pardon for former Metropolitan Police Department lieutenant Andrew Zabavsky, who was sentenced in September in the case stemming from the 2020 death of 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown.
Zabavsky was sentenced to four years behind bars for conspiring with another officer Terence Sutton, to hide the reckless pursuit of Hylton-Brown.
It was not clear whether Trump planned to grant a reprieve to Sutton as well, as he had indicated he would on Tuesday.
The White House did not immediately respond to a message about clemency for Sutton, who was sentenced to five years and six months for a murder conviction in the case.
Lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s immigration policies are piling up
The American Civil Liberties Union have sued to overturn fast-track deportations after the Trump administration announced it was expanding powers of immigration agents to deport people without a hearing before an immigration judge.
“Expedited removal” authority has been applied to people stopped at the border since 2004. Trump is expanding it nationwide for anyone in the country up to two years.
The lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington says people can wrongly be deported if they don’t have documents on them showing they have been in the United States continuously for more than two years. They can seek asylum, but the ACLU says that requires a screening interview it deems inadequate.
Head of the Co
nsumer Financial Protection Bureau still waiting to see if he has a job
The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, has been waiting for a phone call, letter, email, text — anything, really — from the Trump administration that might say if he’s getting fired.
His continued presence on the job speaks to how Trump’s desire to move quickly in taking control of the government can lead to some oversights. It also reflects the challenge of fully merging Trump’s populism with his pro-business calls to cut regulations.
The CFPB has the ability, should Trump wish, to implement his promise of capping credit card fees. But some banks and companies say it’s too aggressive a regulator.
House gives final passage to immigrant detention bill, sending Trump the first law he can sign
The House on Wednesday gave final approval to a bill that requires the detainment of unauthorized migrants accused of theft and violent crimes, marking the first legislation that President Donald Trump can sign as Congress, with some bipartisan support, swiftly moved in line with his plans to crackdown on illegal immigration.
Passage of the Laken Riley Act, which was named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan man, shows just how sharply the political debate over immigration has shifted to the right following Trump’s election victory. Immigration policy has often been one of the most entrenched issues in Congress, but a crucial faction of politically vulnerable Democrats joined with Republicans to lift the strict proposal to passage on a 263-156 vote tally.
Still, the bill would require a massive ramp up in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s capabilities, but does not include any new funding.
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes visits Capitol Hill after Trump clemency
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, the far-right extremist group leader convicted of seditious conspiracy in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday after President Donald Trump commuted his 18-year prison sentence.
Rhodes’ appearance came the day after he was released from prison as a result of Trump’s order of clemency benefitting the more than 1,500 people charged with federal crimes in the Jan. 6 attack.
Rhodes was convicted in one of the most serious cases brought by the Justice Department over the riot that left more than 100 police officers injured.
Immigrant families worry about sending their kids to school amid Trump crackdown
As Trump cracks down on immigrants in the U.S. illegally, some families are wondering if it is safe to send their children to school.
In many districts, educators have sought to reassure immigrant parents that schools are safe places for their kids, despite the president’s campaign pledge to carry out mass deportations. But fears intensified for some when the Trump administration announced Tuesday it would allow federal immigration agencies to make arrests at schools, churches and hospitals.
“What has helped calm my nerves is knowing that the school stands with us and promised to inform us if it’s not safe at school,” said Carmen, an immigrant from Mexico who took her two grandchildren, ages 6 and 4, to school Wednesday in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spoke on condition that only her first name be used, out of fear she could be targeted by immigration officials.
▶Read more about how immigrant families are reacting
‘Drain the swamp’? Trump is instead canceling ethic rules
Trump took office eight years ago pledging to “drain the swamp” and end the domination of Washington influence peddlers.
Now, he’s opening his second term by rolling back prohibitions on executive branch employees accepting major gifts from lobbyists and ditching bans on lobbyists seeking executive branch jobs, or vice versa, for at least two years.
The new president also has been benefiting personally in the runup to his inauguration by launching a new cryptocurrency token that is soaring in value while his wife, first lady Melania Trump, has inked a deal to make a documentary with Amazon.
▶Read more about Trump’s actions
Trump administration has paused US resettlement of ‘Afghan allies,’ citing vetting
Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the new chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a military veteran, told the AP that the Trump administration had intentionally paused the planned U.S. arrival of more than 1,600 Afghans already cleared for resettlement in the United States.
Mast cited “questions about the vetting of these individuals.”
The Trump administration in its first days announced it was suspending overall U.S. refugee admissions for at least three months, while it considered whether to resume or end the program.
The pause includes the U.S. travel of remaining Afghans who worked alongside American soldiers during the two-decade U.S. war in Afghanistan as well as family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel.
“Not everybody that was in Afghanistan is somebody that we want to come to the United States of America," and “just because they necessarily claim something, that doesn’t make it true,” Mast said Wednesday. “So you know, for the administration and the purpose of being judicious, for our No. 1 responsibility, protecting Americans, there’s a pause on this until there’s an assurance that the proper vetting has taken place.”
White House says with 1,500 troops Trump is fulfilling a campaign pledge
“This is something President Trump campaigned on. The American people have been waiting for such a time as this--for our Department of Defense to actually implement homeland security seriously,” said Press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
U.S. officials confirmed earlier Wednesday that the Pentagon will begin deploying as many as 1,500 active duty troops to help secure the southern border in the coming days, putting in motion plans Trump laid out in executive orders shortly after he took office to crack down on immigration.
The active duty forces would join the roughly 2,500 U.S. National Guard and Reserve forces already there.
Trump is monitoring the shooting at a Nashville school
President Donald Trump and his team are monitoring the deadly shooting at a school in Nashville, Tennessee.
“The White House offers its heartfelt thoughts and prayers to those impacted by this senseless tragedy and thank the brave first responders responding to the incident.”
Police say a 17-year-old shooter killed a female student at the school before turning the gun on himself.
Musk questions feasibility of big AI project championed by Trump
Elon Musk has openly questioned the feasibility of a big AI project that Donald Trump championed in an unusual public break with the president.
Trump on Tuesday announced the AI joint venture -- the Stargate Project --planned to spend up to $500 billion over four years building data centers with the hope of securing U.S. leadership in the new technology. Trump promised to clear a regulatory path so the companies involved, Softbank, OpenAI, and Oracle, could move fast.
Musk slammed the deal in a public forum.
“They don’t have the money,” the Tesla CEO and self-described “first buddy” of the president posted on his social media platform X. “Softbank has well under $10B secured. I have that on good authority.”
Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI but has since split with its CEO, Sam Altman, suing the company and its leader for antitrust violations. He has since formed his own AI company, xAI.
Altman responded Wednesday to say Musk was “wrong, as you surely know” and inviting Musk to come visit the first site that is already under construction.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to travel to Washington to meet Trump in a few weeks
Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon said he believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will travel to Washington to meet newly elected President Donald Trump “in a few weeks.”
He told a briefing for invited reporters Wednesday: “I’m sure he would be one of the first foreign leaders invited to the White House.”
Danon said he expects their discussions to include the current ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza and the release of hostages taken during Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack in southern Israel.
Israel’s President Isaac Herzog will be coming to the United Nations on Monday to attend the U.N. commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking the Jan. 27, 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp 80 years ago, Danon said. He will meet with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres
Trump has issued a wide range of policy actions to reorient the U.S. government in his first days in office
His executive orders cover issues that range from trade, immigration and U.S. foreign aid to demographic diversity, civil rights and the hiring of federal workers. Some have an immediate policy impact. Others are more symbolic. And some already are being challenged by federal lawsuits.
▶Read more about Trump’s policy actions
Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski: ‘I strongly denounce’ Trump’s sweeping Jan. 6 pardons
In a post on X, Murkowski of Alaska said Capitol Police officers “are the backbone of Congress — every day they protect and serve the halls of democracy.”
“I strongly denounce the blanket pardons given to the violent offenders who assaulted these brave men and women in uniform,” Murkowski wrote.
Murkowski is one of a few Republicans who’ve criticized Trump’s pardons of more than 1,500 rioters who attacked the Capitol and interrupted the certification of former President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory. More than 200 pleaded guilty to assaulting police.
On Tuesday, Murkowski pointed to a police officer as she told reporters she fears “the message that is sent to these great men and women that stood by us.”
Judge says Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons ‘will not change the truth of what happened’
President Donald Trump’s mass pardons for rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol “will not change the truth of what happened” in the nation’s capital four years ago, a federal judge wrote Wednesday as she dismissed one of nearly 1,600 cases stemming from the attack by a mob of Trump supporters.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said evidence of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol is preserved through the “neutral lens” of riot videos, trial transcripts, jury verdicts and judicial opinions.
“Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies,” she wrote.
Kollar-Kotelly is one of more than 20 judges to handle the hundreds of cases produced by the largest investigation in the Justice Department’s history. She issued her written remarks in an order dismissing the case against Dominic Box, a Georgia man who was among the first group of rioters to enter the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
▶ Read more about the Jan. 6 pardons
Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller talks deportations and more at a Senate GOP lunch
Miller told GOP senators at their closed door luncheon at the Capitol about next steps — including the administration’s push to invoke so-called Title 42 authority to close down the U.S.-Mexico border to new arrivals, once they land on a legal rationale to support the action, senators said.
“We talked about some of the deportations, what would happen… what is the administration going to do next,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican.
Miller also described in more detail other Trump actions on domestic energy production, senators said.
Trump’s perceived enemies worry about losing pensions, getting audited and paying steep legal bills
It’s not just criminal prosecutions that worry those who’ve crossed President Donald Trump. There are more prosaic kinds of retaliation: having difficulty renewing passports, getting audited by the IRS and losing federal pensions.
For the many people who’ve made an enemy of Trump, his return to the presidency this week sparked anxiety. Some are concerned they could go bankrupt trying to clear their names.
Less than 24 hours after taking office, Trump fired an opening shot, ordering the revocation of security clearances held by dozens of former intelligence officers he believes sided with Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign or have turned against him. The loss of such clearances can be costly for former officials who work for defense contractors and require ongoing access to classified information to do their private sector jobs.
“Anybody who ever disagrees with Trump has to worry about retribution,” said John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser and has become a vocal critic of the president. “It’s a pretty long list. I think there are a lot of people who are very worried.”
▶ Read more about Trump’s perceived enemies
Does ‘fetal personhood’ language in executive order offer clues on Trump’s abortion approach?
Abortion was largely absent from the stack of dozens of executive actions in Trump’s first days of office. This includes common abortion policy moves Republican presidents often make after taking office such as reinstating the global gag rule, which limits funding for family planning services, said Mary Ruth Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law.
But there still may be more to come in terms of actions on abortion, Ziegler said. And there have already been quieter moves, including slipping the phrase “at conception” into an executive order rolling back protections for transgender people. This language is reminiscent of “fetal personhood” laws passed in some conservative states that declare a fetus should have the same rights as a person.
While including the phrase won’t directly affect abortion rights, it may have an effect down the line in legal cases related to fetal personhood by “creating a precedent for anti-abortion groups to say, ‘Look how many places in the law already recognizes life as beginning at conception,’” Ziegler said.
The phrase may be the Trump administration’s attempt at “throwing a bone to abortion opponents” without directly affecting abortion policy — or it could prelude more consequential decisions to come, Ziegler said.
Trump’s threat of tariffs and sanctions on Russia over Ukraine likely to fall flat
President Donald Trump’s threat to impose stiff taxes, tariffs and sanctions on Russia if an agreement isn’t reached to end the war in Ukraine is likely fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin as virtually all Russian products are already prohibited from import into the United States and the country has faced many U.S. and European sanctions since the invasion began nearly three years ago.
In a post to his Truth Social site Wednesday, Trump urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to “settle now and stop this ridiculous war.”
He said he had no desire to hurt Russia and has a good relationship with Putin, but warned of penalties if the war isn’t stopped soon.
“If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries.”
The problem with the threat is that other than a small amount of fertilizer, animal feed and machinery, Russia currently exports almost no goods to the U.S. And, Russia is one of the world’s most heavily sanctioned nations. Many of those sanctions relate to Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion of Ukraine and were imposed by the Biden administration, but others predate Biden and some were imposed during Trump’s first term in office.
Leader of defense attorney anti-racism task force says DEI vital in criminal justice system
Kobie Flowers is a Washington, D.C., defense lawyer and co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Anti-Racism Task Force.
Flowers said diversity among lawyers is necessary in the criminal justice system. In an email, Flowers said anti-discrimination laws provide safeguards but “equal justice for all demands more than simply the absence of overt bias. DEI in the criminal defense bar isn’t just about compliance; it’s about cultivating a culture where every voice, regardless of background, is heard, valued, and empowered.”
Flowers said diversity fosters a deeper understanding of clients and helps in building a stronger criminal justice system. “DEI and similar programs are created to end discrimination. Ending discrimination is always the right thing to do in the criminal legal system, specifically, and our country, generally.”
In note, Joe Biden wishes the nation prosperity, peace and grace under Trump
The former president revealed his wish in a traditional note to his successor.
Fox News was first to report on the contents of the hand-written note. It says:
“Dear President Trump,
“As I take leave of this sacred office, I wish you and your family all the best in the next four years. The American people — and people around the world — look to this house for steadiness in the inevitable storms of history, and my prayer is that in the coming years will be a time of prosperity, peace, and grace for our nation. May God bless you and guide you as He has blessed and guided our beloved country since our founding.”
Fox News says it was signed, “Joe Biden 1/20/2025.”
The Associated Press
