The Latest: Ghislaine Maxwell declines to answer questions in House deposition
Lawmakers tried Monday to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, but the former girlfriend and confidante of Jeffrey Epstein invoked her 5th Amendment rights to avoid answering questions that would be incriminating.
She 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 comes on the same day that the Department of Justice began allowing members of Congress to review unredacted files related to Epstein files, according to a letter that was sent to lawmakers.
President Donald Trump has lashed out at reporters raising questions about the Epstein files, demanding that the country “get onto something else,” but that’s highly unlikely. Many of the documents haven’t been released, and many of those now public were heavily redacted.
Republican Rep. James Comey, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, came under pressure to hold the Maxwell deposition as he pressed to enforce subpoenas on former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. After Comer threatened them with contempt of Congress charges, they both agreed to sit for depositions later this month.
The Latest:
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.