Lawmakers tried Monday to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, but the former girlfriend and confidante of Jeffrey Epstein invoked her Fifth Amendment rights to avoid answering questions that would be incriminating.
Maxwell was questioned during a video call to the federal prison camp in Texas where she’s serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. She’s come under new scrutiny as lawmakers try to investigate how Epstein, a well-connected financier, was able to sexually abuse underage girls for years.
The deposition came on the same day that the Department of Justice has begun allowing members of Congress to review unredacted files related to Epstein files, according to a letter that was sent to lawmakers. The ltter, obtained by The Associated Press, says they can come to the Justice Department with 24 hours notice and review the more than 3 million files without redactions. They can't bring anyone with them, and can take notes but not make electronic copies.
The Latest:
White House defers to past comments on potential Maxwell pardon
Asked Monday about the offer from Maxwell’s lawyer to testify in exchange for clemency, the White House pointed to previous remarks from the president that indicated the prospect of a pardon was not on his radar.
In November, Trump said during an exchange with reporters that he had not thought about a pardon for Maxwell, who was sentenced to two decades in prison for sex trafficking.
Similarly, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that same month that a pardon is “not something he’s talking about or even thinking about at this moment in time.”
“I can assure you of that,” Leavitt said at the time.
Trump administration dropping Bannon case
The Justice Department is moving to drop the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s longtime ally Steve Bannon as he appeals his conviction.
Bannon served four months in prison for defying a subpoena from the House committee that investigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
His lawyers have argued that he wasn’t trying to willfully defy the subpoena but only wanted to avoid running afoul of executive privilege claims raised by Trump.
An appeals court upheld his contempt of Congress conviction. Bannon is now appealing to the Supreme Court.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the high court Monday to toss out the appeals court decision and send the case back to a lower court where it can be dismissed.
Fact Focus: Boy who appeared in Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl show is not the 5-year-old detained by ICE in Minneapolis
Social media users incorrectly identified a small boy who was part of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday as Liam Conejo Ramos, the 5-year-old who, along with his father, was detained by immigration officials in Minnesota and held at an ICE facility in Texas.
The boy was actually Lincoln Fox Ramadan, a child actor from Costa Mesa, California, who is also 5 years old, according to his Instagram profile.
After Bad Bunny finished his song "NUEVAYoL," cameras showed Lincoln watching Bad Bunny accepting his Grammy for album of the year last week. The artist then walks over and hands Lincoln what appears to be a Grammy.
Feds say they aren’t trying to rush 5-year-old Liam and his father out of the US
Images of Liam Conejo Ramos wearing a bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack surrounded by immigration officers in Minneapolis stirred outrage over the crackdown.
Their lawyer, Danielle Molliver, told the New York Times that the government was attempting to end the father’s asylum case and speed their deportation proceedings as a possibly “retaliatory” move.
But Department of Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that “they are not in expedited removal,” and “there is nothing retaliatory about enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.”
The boy and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, who originally is from Ecuador, were released from a Texas detention center on a judge's order and returned to Minnesota. Their lawyer said he crossed the border legally using the CBP One app and that his pending asylum claim allows him to stay.
Maxwell offers testimony to absolve both Clinton and Trump
An attorney for Maxwell told lawmakers that she would be willing to testify that neither President Donald Trump nor former President Bill Clinton were culpable for wrongdoing in their relationships with Epstein, according to both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who exited a closed-door deposition with Maxwell.
Democrats argued that Maxwell’s assertion was an appeal to Trump to end her prison sentence. “It’s very clear she’s campaigning for clemency,” said Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat.
Maxwell has been seeking to have her conviction overturned, arguing that she was wrongfully convicted. The Supreme Court rejected her appeal but she has asked a federal judge in New York to consider what her attorneys describe as “substantial new evidence” that her trial was spoiled by constitutional violations.
The Republican chair of the committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, said it was “very disappointing” that Maxwell declined to participate in the deposition.
JD Vance is visiting Armenia and Azerbaijan, seeking to advance Trump’s peace efforts
The vice president and his wife, Usha, landed Monday in Armenia — a country that no sitting U.S. vice president or president has visited before — seeking to advance a U.S.-brokered deal aimed at ending a decades-long conflict with Azerbaijan. They were greeted with a red carpet, an honor guard, and some roadside demonstrators, including one with a sign saying "Does Trump support Devils?"
The foreign ministers of both nations initialed a deal at the White House last August, but it remains unsigned by their leaders and unratified by their parliaments.
Both nations' presidents are on Trump's new Board of Peace, which Trump plans to convene in Washington this month.
The deal with the two former Soviet republics would create the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity, connecting Azerbaijan with its autonomous Nakhchivan exclave. The land bridge has been a sticking point in resolving a decades-long conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.
Mexico’s president echoes Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl message about American unity
Claudia Sheinbaum says it’s “very interesting” that Bad Bunny’s “message was about American unity of the American continent,” noting that he named all the South and North American countries, including Mexico and Canada along with the United States. And she said she agrees with the singer’s message, that the best antidote to hate is love.
Asked at her daily news briefing if she’d like a similar performance when Mexico, the United States and Canada open this year’s World Cup, she said that’s for FIFA to decide, but that “cooperation for development must be the foundation of the American continent’s unity.”
“If we want to strengthen America, because America is all one continent, it would have to be based on cooperation and (free) trade,” she said.
Sheinbaum has navigated a delicate relationship with the Trump administration, earning his compliments while working under his repeated threats of tariffs and military intervention.
US military in Indian Ocean boards an oil tanker it tracked from the Caribbean
The Pentagon said Monday that U.S. military forces boarded the sanctioned oil tanker. Video posted on X with the statement showed a helicopter landing on its deck.
The Pentagon did not say whether the ship was connected to Venezuela, which faces U.S. sanctions on its oil and relies on a shadow fleet of falsely flagged tankers to smuggle crude into global supply chains. However, the Aquila II was one of at least 16 tankers that departed the Venezuelan coast last month after U.S. forces captured then-President Nicolás Maduro, said Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com.
The U.S. did not say it had seized the ship, which the U.S. has done previously with at least seven other sanctioned oil tankers linked to Venezuela.
Ghislaine Maxwell declined to answer House questions, citing 5th Amendment rights
Lawmakers tried to depose the former girlfriend and confidante of Jeffrey Epstein on Monday, but she invoked 5th Amendment rights to avoid answering incriminating questions.
They spoke during a video call to the federal prison camp in Texas where she’s serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. She’s come under new scrutiny as lawmakers try to investigate how Epstein, a well-connected financier, was able to sexually abuse underage girls for years.
ACLU official says masked patrols streets are meant to terrify
“It is without precedent in modern American history,” said the American Civil Liberties Union’s Naureen Shah in Washington.
She said the idea of masked patrols seeking immigrants on city streets can leave people scared and confused about who they are encountering — which she suggested is part of the point.
“I think it’s calculated to terrify people,” she said. “I don’t think anybody viscerally feels like, OK, this is something we want to become a permanent fixture in our streets.”
Democrats and Republicans are divided over ICE masks
There seems to be little common ground over the issue in the debate over funding Homeland Security ahead of Friday's midnight deadline, when it faces a partial agency shutdown.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters at the Capitol that unmasking the federal agents is a "hard red line" in the negotiations ahead.
But Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said he just can't agree with Democrats on this point. "You know, there's a lot of vicious people out there, and they'll take a picture of your face, and the next thing you know, your children or your wife or your husband are being threatened at home," he said.
US Olympians face backlash over politics
President Trump slams Olympians for political remarks
Trump said it’s hard to cheer for American Olympians who are speaking out against his administration’s policies.
Asked at a news conference at the Milan Cortina Games how they feel representing the U.S. while ICE agents are detaining immigrants back home, freestyle skier Hunter Hess replied that he had mixed emotions: "If it aligns with my moral values, I feel like I'm representing it," Hess said. "Just because I'm wearing the flag doesn't mean I represent everything that's going on in the U.S."
“Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account.
The numbers show Trump’s Bad Bunny claims are not true
Trump, a former reality TV star and dominant social media presence, usually is in touch with ratings and what they mean in the world of entertainment, politics and sports. But his take on Bad Bunny is off. By a lot.
Contrary to Trump's statement suggestion that Bad Bunny has no appeal, the singer from the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico has been among the world's most popular artists for years. He was Spotify's most listened-to artist in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2025, eclipsing Taylor Swift -- another frequent target of the U.S. president -- with nearly 20 billion streams last year.
Last week, he took home album of the year at the 2026 Grammys for his "Debí Tirar Más Fotos," the first all-Spanish language album to win the top prize.
Trump calls Super Bowl halftime show ‘a slap in the face’
In a social media post Sunday night, the president said the Grammy-winning top-streaming megastar Bad Bunny “doesn’t represent our standards of Success, Creativity, or Excellence. Nobody understands a word this guy is saying, and the dancing is disgusting.”
Bad Bunny performed nearly entirely in Spanish, recreating his native Puerto Rico from sugar cane fields to a raucous wedding featuring Lady Gaga. And in a country where masked ICE agents are pulling people from their homes and neighborhoods, his patriotism was political:
He carried a football with “Together we are America,” written on the pigskin, and he wrapped up by leading a phalanx of dancers carrying the flags of many Latin American nations and Canada along with the Stars and Stripes, shouting “God Bless America — All of America!”
Behind him, a screen read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” repeating comments he made at the 2026 Grammys.
FBI concluded Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men, files show
The FBI pored over Jeffrey Epstein's bank records and emails. It searched his homes. It spent years interviewing his victims and examining his connections to some of the world's most influential people.
But while investigators collected ample proof that Epstein sexually abused underage girls, they found scant evidence the well-connected financier led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men, an Associated Press review of internal Justice Department records shows.
Videos and photos seized from Epstein’s homes in New York, Florida and the Virgin Islands didn’t depict victims being abused or implicate anyone else in his crimes, a prosecutor wrote in one 2025 memo.
An examination of Epstein’s financial records, including payments he made to entities linked to influential figures in academia, finance and global diplomacy, found no connection to criminal activity, said another internal memo in 2019.
While one Epstein victim made highly public claims that he “lent her” to his rich friends, agents couldn’t confirm that and found no other victims telling a similar story, the records said.
Masks emerge as symbol of Trump’s ICE crackdown and a flashpoint in Congress
Beyond the car windows being smashed, people tackled on city streets — or even a little child with a floppy bunny ears snowcap detained — the images of masked federal officers has become a flashpoint in the Trump administration's immigration enforcement operations.
Not in recent U.S. memory has an American policing operation so consistently masked its thousands of officers from the public, a development that the Department of Homeland Security believes is important to safeguard employees from online harassment. But experts warn masking serves another purpose, inciting fear in communities, and risks shattering norms, accountability and trust between the police and its citizenry.
Whether to ban the masks — or allow the masking to continue — has emerged as a central question in the debate in Congress over funding Homeland Security ahead of Friday's midnight deadline, when it faces a partial agency shutdown.
‘Take the vaccine, please,’ a top US health official says in an appeal as measles cases rise
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz listens as President Donald Trump speaks about TrumpRx in the South Court Auditorium in the Old Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
A leading U.S. health official on Sunday urged people to get inoculated against the measles at a time of outbreaks across several states and as the United States is at risk of losing its measles elimination status.
"Take the vaccine, please," said Dr. Mehmet Oz, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator whose boss has raised suspicion about the safety and importance of vaccines. "We have a solution for our problem."
Oz, a heart surgeon, defended some recently revised federal vaccine recommendations as well as past comments from President Donald Trump and the nation's health chief, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., about the efficacy of vaccines. From Oz, there was a clear message on the measles. "Not all illnesses are equally dangerous and not all people are equally susceptible to those illnesses," he told CNN's "State of the Union." "But measles is one you should get your vaccine."
An outbreak in South Carolina in the hundreds has surpassed the recorded case count in Texas' 2025 outbreak, and there is also one on the Utah-Arizona border. Multiple other states have had confirmed cases this year. The outbreaks have mostly impacted children and have come as infectious disease experts warn that rising public distrust of vaccines generally may be contributing to the spread of a disease once declared eradicated by public health officials.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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