Trump’s Justice Department launches sweeping cuts targeting Jan. 6 prosecutors, FBI agents

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters is seen in Washington on Dec. 7, 2024. (AP file photo)
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Updated 01 February 2025
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Trump’s Justice Department launches sweeping cuts targeting Jan. 6 prosecutors, FBI agents

  • Department reviews all who worked on Jan. 6 cases
  • FBI officials in major cities are ordered to quit
  • FBI agents group says hundreds could be affected

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump’s administration launched a sweeping round of cuts at the Justice Department on Friday that appeared to focus on FBI agents and others who worked on cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the US Capitol.
The shakeup, detailed in two memos seen by Reuters and by three sources familiar with the matter, is the Trump administration’s latest move to remake the US criminal justice system since he returned to the presidency last week. A group representing FBI agents issued a rare public warning of the potential for hundreds of firings at the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

The new administration already has fired more than a dozen prosecutors who pursued criminal charges against Trump in two cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith that have been dismissed. It also has paused all civil rights and environmental litigation and ordered criminal investigations of state and local officials who interfere with his hard-line immigration initiatives.
Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove on Thursday told the top federal prosecutors in each state to compile a list of all prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the investigation of the Capitol riot, which was the largest Justice Department probe in modern US history, two sources briefed on the matter said.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity.
The FBI was ordered to provide by Tuesday a list of all employees who worked on a 2024 criminal case brought by the Justice Department against leaders of the Hamas militant group, according to a memo seen by Reuters. A source briefed on the matter also said the FBI was asked to provide a list of employees who worked on the two Trump cases brought by Smith.
That memo ordered eight FBI officials to resign or be fired, saying that their participation in the Jan. 6 cases represented part of what Trump has called the “weaponization” of government.
In a statement on Friday, the FBI Agents Association, a membership group of more than 14,000 active and former FBI agents, called the moves “outrageous.”
“Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the bureau’s ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats and will ultimately risk setting up the bureau and its new leadership for failure,” the association added.
The staff cuts are hitting career FBI officials and prosecutors in nonpartisan roles who typically remain in their posts from administration to administration. The bureau has a history of political independence and is responsible for highly sensitive investigations involving counterterrorism, public corruption and cybersecurity.
In his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20, Trump granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged with storming the Capitol in a failed bid to block Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed top federal prosecutor in Washington, has since launched an inquiry into the use of a felony obstruction charge in prosecutions of people accused of taking part in the Jan. 6 attack.

Major cities targetted
At least five top FBI officials in major US cities — Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, New Orleans and Las Vegas — were ordered to resign or be fired, one of the sources said. Another source said that a sixth senior FBI official, in Los Angeles, was given a similar order.
Another five top officials in FBI headquarters were ordered to leave or face termination earlier in the week, another source told Reuters.
FBI and Justice Department officials declined to comment on the various moves.
“What we are seeing is a raw, unfiltered exercise of presidential authority to purge the government of anyone who put the Constitution first, instead of adherence or loyalty to Donald Trump,” said Bradley Moss, an attorney who represents federal employees.
“At a time when we are facing a multitude of threats to the homeland ... it is deeply alarming that the Trump administration appears to be purging dozens of the most experienced agents who are our nation’s first line of defense,” Democratic US Senator Mark Warner said in a statement. Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to lead the FBI, told a US Senate panel on Thursday during his confirmation hearing that he would protect the bureau’s 37,000 employees against “political retribution” if he were confirmed. The same day, the Justice Department said it was investigating the release by an upstate New York sheriff’s office of an immigrant living in the US illegally. This appears to be its first use of a new policy to criminally investigate state and local officials who do not comply with Trump’s directives.
Bove, in a separate Friday memo seen by Reuters, ordered the firings of all prosecutors who had been hired on a probationary basis to work on Jan. 6-related cases, noting that Trump characterized their work as “a grave national injustice.”
About 20 people were fired as a result of that order, according to a source familiar with the move.
Bove also accused the Biden administration of rushing to convert the status of probationary prosecutors to permanent status after Trump won the election in a bid to save their jobs.


Homeland Security blocking Harvard’s ability to enroll international students

Updated 15 sec ago
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Homeland Security blocking Harvard’s ability to enroll international students

  • Kristi Noem: ‘This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus’

US President Donald Trump’s administration has revoked Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered the department to terminate the Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification, the department said in a statement.
The move means Harvard can no longer enroll international students and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status, it said.
“This administration is holding Harvard accountable for fostering violence, antisemitism, and coordinating with the Chinese Communist Party on its campus,” Noem said. “It is a privilege, not a right, for universities to enroll foreign students and benefit from their higher tuition payments to help pad their multibillion-dollar endowments.”
Harvard University and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.


No new direct Russia-Ukraine peace talks are scheduled, Kremlin says

Updated 22 May 2025
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No new direct Russia-Ukraine peace talks are scheduled, Kremlin says

  • “There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said
  • The major prisoner swap is a “quite laborious process” that “requires some time”

MOSCOW: Russia and Ukraine have no direct peace talks scheduled, the Kremlin said Thursday, nearly a week after their first face-to-face session since shortly after Moscow’s invasion in 2022 and days after US President Donald Trump said they would start ceasefire negotiations “immediately.”

“There is no concrete agreement about the next meetings,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. “They are yet to be agreed upon.”

During two hours of talks in Istanbul on May 16, Kyiv and Moscow agreed to exchange 1,000 prisoners of war each, in what would be their biggest such swap. Apart from that step, the meeting delivered no significant breakthrough.

Several months of intensified US and European pressure on the two sides to accept a ceasefire and negotiate a settlement have yielded little progress. Meanwhile, Russia is readying a summer offensive to capture more Ukrainian land, Ukrainian government and military analysts say.

Putin’s proposals
Russian President Vladimir Putin said earlier this week that Moscow would “propose and is ready to work with” Ukraine on a “memorandum” outlining the framework for “a possible future peace treaty.”

Putin has effectively rejected a 30-day ceasefire proposal that Ukraine has accepted. He has linked the possibility to a halt in Ukraine’s mobilization effort and a freeze on Western arms shipments to Kyiv as part of a comprehensive settlement.

European leaders have accused Putin of dragging his feet in peace efforts while he tries to press his bigger army’s battlefield initiative and capture more Ukrainian land.

The major prisoner swap is a “quite laborious process” that “requires some time,” Peskov said.

But he added: “The work is continuing at a quick pace, everybody is interested in doing it quickly.”

Peskov told Russia’s Interfax news agency that Moscow had provided Kyiv with a list of prisoners it wants released. “We have not yet received a counter list from Kyiv. We are waiting,” he told Interfax.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Thursday that preparations are underway for the potential prisoner exchange, which he described as “perhaps the only real result” of the talks in Turkiye.

Peskov disputed a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal that Trump told European leaders after his phone call with Putin on Monday that the Russian leader wasn’t interested in talks because he thinks that Moscow is winning.

“We know what Trump told Putin, we don’t know what Trump told the Europeans. We know President Trump’s official statement,” Peskov said. “What we know contrasts with what was written in the article you mentioned.”

Russian capital targeted by drones for the second night

Apart from the continuing war of attrition along the roughly 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, which has killed tens of thousands of troops on both sides, Russia and Ukraine have been firing dozens of long-range drones at each other’s territory almost daily.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said it shot down 105 Ukrainian drones overnight, including 35 over the Moscow region. It was the second straight night that Kyiv’s forces have targeted the Russian capital.

More than 160 flights were delayed at three of Moscow’s four main airports, the city’s transport prosecutor said, as officials grounded planes citing concerns for passenger safety.

The attack prompted some regions to turn off mobile Internet signals, including the Oryol region southwest of Moscow, which was targeted heavily Wednesday.

The Defense Ministry claimed it downed 485 Ukrainian drones over several regions and the Black Sea between late Tuesday and early Thursday, including 63 over the Moscow region, in one of the biggest drone attacks.

It was not possible to verify the numbers.

Russia seeks a buffer zone on the border

Meanwhile, the Ukrainian air force said Russia launched 128 drones overnight. Among the targets were Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, damaging an industrial facility, power lines, and several private homes, regional Gov. Serhii Lysak said on Telegram.

In Kyiv, debris from a Russian drone fell onto the grounds of a school in the capital’s Darnytskyi district, according to Tymur Tkachenko, head of the Kyiv City Military Administration. No injuries were reported.

Ukrainian shelling in Russia’s Kursk region killed a 50-year-old man and injured two others, acting regional Gov. Alexander Khinshtein said Thursday.

Putin visited the Kursk region on Tuesday for the first time since Moscow claimed that it drove Ukrainian forces out of the area last month. Kyiv officials denied the claim.

“Despite the liberation of our territory, the border region is still subject to enemy attacks,” Khinshtein warned residents on Telegram. “It is still dangerous to be there.”

Putin has said Russian forces have orders to create a “security buffer zone” along the border.

That would help prevent Ukraine from striking areas inside Russia with artillery, Putin told a government meeting, but he gave no details of where the proposed buffer zone would be or how far it would stretch.

Putin said a year ago that a Russian offensive at the time aimed to create a buffer zone in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. That could have helped protect Russia’s Belgorod border region, where frequent Ukrainian attacks have embarrassed the Kremlin.


Malema, the radical politician in Trump’s South Africa video

Updated 22 May 2025
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Malema, the radical politician in Trump’s South Africa video

  • In a tense Oval Office meeting, Ramaphosa and his delegation distanced themselves from Malema’s rhetoric
  • Malema mocked the meeting at the White House on social media as ‘A group of older men meet in Washington to gossip about me’

JOHANNESBURG: A video projected by US President Donald Trump to support false claims of “persecution” of white South Africans prominently featured Julius Malema, a firebrand politician known for his radical rhetoric.

Trump ambushed President Cyril Ramaphosa with the 4:30-minute video shown in the Oval Office on Wednesday during talks at which South Africa wanted to salvage bilateral ties and push back on baseless claims from the United States about a “white genocide.”

Malema was the main character, seen in several clips wearing the red beret of his populist, marxist-inspired Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and chanting calls to “cut the throat of whiteness” as well as a controversial anti-apartheid song “Kill the Boer, kill the farmer.”

Trump falsely said he was a government official, insinuating his inflammatory slogans reflected an official policy against South Africa’s white minority.

But Malema, 33, is an opposition politician, leader of the anti-capitalist and anti-US EFF that he founded in 2013 after being thrown out of the youth league of the ruling African National Congress (ANC), where he was accused of fomenting divisions.

He portrays himself as the defender of society’s most disadvantaged and has attracted largely young supporters angry at the large social inequalities that exist in South Africa 30 years after the end of apartheid.

Renowned for its theatrics, his party gained prominence advocating radical reforms including land redistribution and nationalizing key economic sectors.

But the party only came fourth in last year’s elections, with 9.5 percent of the vote, and it has lost popularity since, with several of its top brass leaving to join a new party of former president Jacob Zuma, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK).

In the tense Oval Office meeting, Ramaphosa and his delegation distanced themselves from Malema’s rhetoric.
Agriculture Minister John Steenhuisen, a member of the center-right Democratic Alliance, told Trump he joined Ramaphosa’s multiparty coalition “precisely to keep these people out of power.”

“I’m the biggest target of that rabble-rouser,” businessman Johann Rupert told Trump.

The decades-old “Kill the Boer” rallying cry was born during the struggle against the brutal policies of white-minority rule, and its use since the end of apartheid in 1994 infuriates parties that represent white South Africans, with many attempting to get it banned.

A ban in 2010 was lifted after courts said it does not constitute hate speech and instead should be regarded in its historical context, and for the fact that it was being used by Malema only as a “provocative means of advancing his party’s political agenda.”

“But why wouldn’t you arrest that man?” Trump asked Ramaphosa Wednesday.

“In a Constitutional democracy... a person cannot be arrested when what they are doing is explicitly permitted in law,” political scientist Sandile Swana told AFP.

Although controversial, the vocal Malema was exerting the “fundamental rights of freedom of expression,” he said.

In the context of the anti-apartheid struggle, “Kill the Boer” had “nothing to do with the killing of a specific white man, but with the killing of the system of apartheid,” he said.

Malema mocked the meeting at the White House on social media as “A group of older men meet in Washington to gossip about me.”

The party later accused Ramaphosa of “betraying the struggle for land and dignity.”

“Surrounded by elites like Johann Rupert and John Steenhuisen, Ramaphosa denounced a liberation song upheld by South Africa’s highest courts and failed to defend the nation against the false narrative of white genocide,” it said.


German finance minister optimistic that G7 can agree joint communique on Ukraine support

Updated 22 May 2025
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German finance minister optimistic that G7 can agree joint communique on Ukraine support

  • “I am very positive that we will also reach a joint communique,” Klingbeil said
  • If Russia is not prepared to enter into serious negotiations with Ukraine, “we will consider further sanctions“

BANFF, Canada: German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil on Thursday said he was optimistic that the Group of Seven advanced economies could agree a joint communique showing support for Ukraine, amid a rift between the US and the rest of the G7 on the issue.

Sources earlier said it was unclear whether the delegations at G7 finance ministers’ consultations in Canada could agree on joint language, with one European source saying that US officials wanted to delete language describing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “illegal.”

“I am very positive that we will also reach a joint communique,” Klingbeil said at a press conference in Banff, adding that if Russia is not prepared to enter into serious negotiations with Ukraine, “we will consider further sanctions.”

The EU and Britain this week announced new sanctions against Russia without waiting for Washington to join them, a day after President Donald Trump’s phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin brought about neither a ceasefire in Ukraine nor fresh US sanctions.

European leaders have been lobbying intensely for the Trump administration to join them in imposing new sanctions if Russia rejected a ceasefire.

Klingbeil said that G7 finance ministers and their Ukrainian counterpart had concluded in a meeting that the conflict was “a brutal war” initiated by Russian President Vladimir Putin and that support for Ukraine continued unabated.

“I am optimistic that in the end such formulations will also be included in the communique, but please wait for the exact wording, as I want to leave that to the Canadian presidency this afternoon,” he said.

TRADE SOLUTIONS

Klingbeil earlier on Wednesday met United States Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for a bilateral conversation and the two agreed to meet again in Washington.

“We have always discussed forward, how we can take steps together to find solutions,” Klingbeil said about the meeting, adding that Bessent’s invitation was a good sign.

Klingbeil warned, however, that if no agreement can be found with the United States on tariffs, “then we can expect turbulence on the markets again very quickly.”

The Trump administration has imposed a 25 percent tariff on US imports of steel, aluminum and cars, as well as a baseline 10 percent tariff on almost all countries, with additional “reciprocal” tariffs — making for a combined 20 percent in the EU’s case — lined up if negotiations during a 90-day pause fail.


France condemns Israeli minister’s accusations of inciting hatred

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar claimed that European governments were inciting hatred against his country. (File/AFP)
Updated 22 May 2025
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France condemns Israeli minister’s accusations of inciting hatred

  • “These are completely outrageous and completely unjustified remarks,” foreign ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine said

PARIS: France on Thursday dismissed claims by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar that European governments were inciting hatred against his country.
“These are completely outrageous and completely unjustified remarks,” foreign ministry spokesman Christophe Lemoine said.
“France has condemned, France condemns and France will continue to condemn, always and unequivocally, any act of anti-Semitism.”
In Washington on Wednesday, two Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead outside a Jewish museum by a gunman who shouted “free Palestine” as he was arrested.
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu led global condemnation of the attack, each of them blaming anti-Semitism.
Israel’s foreign minister said: “There is a direct line connecting anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli incitement to this murder.”
He added: “This incitement is also done by leaders and officials of many countries and international organizations, especially from Europe.”
Tensions have risen in recent days between Israel and European governments over Israel’s military offensive in Gaza and the plight of civilians in the territory.
Speaking in the southern French city of Nice, Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot reiterated that France had condemned the killing as “a horrific attack targeting Israeli diplomats.”
He said he had sent a message to his Israeli counterpart “to tell him how saddened I was by what had happened, how much I was thinking of the families of these diplomats but also of all their colleagues at the Israeli foreign ministry.”
“This blind violence is obviously unjustifiable,” he added.
“We deplore an explosion of anti-Semitic acts that we have seen on our territory in recent years, but we are fighting this explosion with the utmost determination,” he said.
France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau told police earlier Thursday to “step up surveillance at sites linked to the Jewish community.”
On Monday, the leaders of Britain, France and Canada condemned Israel’s “egregious actions” in Gaza and warned of joint action if it did not halt a heightened military offensive on the Palestinian territory.
Last week France’s President Emmanuel Macron accused Netanyahu of “unacceptable” behavior in holding up aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, where Israel is fighting to crush the militant group Hamas.
Netanyahu accused Macron of siding with a “murderous Islamist terrorist organization.”