BURSTMove comes as president finally says he will seek release of grand jury testimony over case
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics where, after days of resistance and trying to play down the story, Donald Trump has directed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to seek the release of grand jury testimony related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case.
The president said on Truth Social he had authorised the justice department to seek the public release of the materials, citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
The US’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed president Donald Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid early on Friday, sending it to the White House to be signed into law. The chamber voted 216 to 213 in favour of the funding cut package.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been cancelled and will end in May 2026 after a 33-year run, the network CBS announced. The news comes days after Colbert criticised the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a lawsuit with Trump for $16m (£12m) over the US president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with the then presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Five migrants deported by the US to the small southern African country of Eswatini, under the Trump administration’s third-country programme, will be held in solitary confinement for an undetermined time, an Eswatini government spokesperson has said. The spokesperson said a UN agency will repatriate five men to their home countries, but the agency said on Thursday that it had not been contacted. The men, who the US says were convicted of serious crimes and were in the US illegally, are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen and Laos.
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