In Thursday’s letter, Trump mentioned the fentanyl issue, one of his original reasons for tariffing America’s northern neighbor. However, it’s unclear the extent to which Canada is responsible for enabling the drug to reach America.

“If Canada works with me to stop the flow of Fentanyl, we will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter. These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country,” Trump said in the letter.

He also claimed Canada has non-tariff barriers that are contributing to the trade deficit the US runs with it.

“You will never be disappointed with The United States of America,” Trump added, a line which he’s included in all his letters to heads of state this week.

The announcement comes near the anniversary of the shooting at Donald J. Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pa.

The Secret Service said on Thursday that it was suspending six agents involved in securing the site of a campaign rally where a gunman tried to assassinate Donald J. Trump last summer.

The suspensions range from 10 to 42 days, without pay, the agency said in a statement just days before the first anniversary of the shooting. It did not give a sense of timing for the suspensions or name the agents, citing privacy law. All six had been placed on restricted duty after the rally while the agency conducted an internal review.

The Secret Service came under intense scrutiny after a 20-year-old gunman was able to fire several shots at Mr. Trump while he spoke onstage at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024. A volunteer firefighter in the crowd that day, Corey Comperatore, was killed and two other attendees were injured. The gunman was killed by the Secret Service.

It was the first assassination attempt since 1981 to wound a current or former president — a bullet grazed Mr. Trump’s ear. There were immediate demands for changes at the Secret Service, and the agency’s competency was called into question.

Multiple inquiries into the failures, including from Congress, came to similar conclusions and led to dozens of recommendations to change systemic problems. In the midst of the scrutiny, there was a second attempt on Mr. Trump’s life. While Mr. Trump golfed in Florida in September, agents shot at a suspect who was hiding near the outer edge of the course.

But the sense of urgency to address the issues at the Secret Service dissipated after Election Day. The lawmakers who demanded accountability and changes have said very little publicly about the agency since Mr. Trump returned to the Oval Office.

Former senior officials at the Secret Service were privately critical that the punishments were not severe enough. And the announcement revived deep internal frustrations that the blame for the failures at the Butler rally fell largely on agents who worked in its Pittsburgh office and not the senior agents on Mr. Trump’s personal detail.

A young junior agent who was on Mr. Trump’s personal detail at the time received the longest suspension, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to discuss personnel matters. That agent is also the only member of Mr. Trump’s personal detail to receive a suspension.

In a statement on Thursday, the agency’s director, Sean M. Curran, reflected on the events in Butler and the organizational changes underway at the agency that he said were happening behind the scenes.

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“I have kept my experience on July 13 top of mind, and the agency has taken many steps to ensure such an event can never be repeated in the future,” Mr. Curran said.

At the time of the Butler shooting, Mr. Curran was the lead agent on Mr. Trump’s personal security detail and one of the agents who lunged to Mr. Trump’s side to shelter him after shots were fired. In January, Mr. Trump made him the agency’s director.

The agency on Thursday said that nearly half of the 46 congressional recommendations it received were already in place; 16 were in progress; and nine were handed off to “non-Secret Service stakeholders.”

One of the changes the agency noted it had implemented was a new policy to ensure that agents understand who is in charge of security operations for events like the campaign rally in Butler.

A glaring failure identified in the spate of reviews was a lack of accountability and blurred lines about who was in charge that day. Security for the event was a joint responsibility between Mr. Trump’s personal security detail and agents in the Secret Service’s Pittsburgh field office. Reviews found that agents did not adequately communicate with one another or with the local law enforcement officials who helped support the operation.

Another recommendation was to make significant changes in leadership at the Secret Service. The reviews pointed to problems with hiring and retention that go back decades, and the agency was in need of a fresh group of leaders, including some from the private sector.

The agency’s director at the time, Kimberly A. Cheatle, resigned shortly after the Butler shooting. Her deputy, Ronald L. Rowe, became the acting head of the agency. He left earlier this year.

In addition to Mr. Curran, there have been other changes at the top. Mr. Curran brought back two former agents to fill leadership positions, Tyler McQuiston as his chief of staff and Matthew C. Quinn to be the deputy director. Richard A. Giuditta Jr., a private business lawyer, is now the agency’s chief counsel.

Current and former agents have questioned whether Mr. Curran and his team have the experience to run the Secret Service. Mr. Curran, Mr. McQuiston and Mr. Quinn have not held senior positions at the agency’s headquarters, as has been the common path for previous directors and top officials. And Mr. Giuditta has no experience working with a large law enforcement agency.

The lengths of the punishments announced on Thursday were shorter than what the agency initially proposed, according to one of the lawyers representing several of the agents.

“We navigated successfully to avoid more severe sanctions,” said Larry Berger, the lawyer. “And now we’re assessing what the next step is.”

The agents are allowed to appeal the punishments.

Upon his release, Khalil told reporters: “Although justice prevailed, it’s very long overdue and this shouldn’t have taken three months. I leave some incredible men behind me, over 1,000 people behind me, in a place where they shouldn’t have been.”

Asked by the Guardian to respond to allegations made by the Trump administration, which has fought for months to keep him detained, that his pro-Palestinian organizing constituted a national security threat, he said:

“Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this. That doesn’t mean there is a right person for this. There is no right person who should be detained for actually protesting a genocide.”

Khalil told reporters he was looking forward to returning home to spend time with his infant son, who was born while he was detained. “I can actually hug him,” Khalil said.

Khalil’s arrest was widely decried as a dangerous escalation in the Trump administration’s campaign against speech protected by the US constitution’s first amendment. Khalil has not been charged with a crime, and his deportation case is still continuing in immigration court.

Trump administration officials had accused Khalil of antisemitism and of pro-Hamas advocacy, although they did not provide evidence at any point during his arrest or detention.

In an emailed statement to the Associated Press, Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, called Khalil’s claim for $20m “absurd”, and accused him of “hateful behavior and rhetoric” that threatened Jewish students.

Khalil told the AP that the goal of his legal claim is to send a message that he will not be intimidated into silence.

“They are abusing their power because they think they are untouchable,” Khalil said. “Unless they feel there is some sort of accountability, it will continue to go unchecked.”

Khalil said he plans to share any settlement money with others targeted in Trump’s “failed” effort to suppress pro-Palestinian speech. In lieu of a settlement, he would also accept an official apology and changes to the administration’s deportation policies.

Trump to use presidential authority to send weapons to Ukraine, sources say

Trump on Tuesday said the U.S. would send more weapons to Ukraine to help the country defend itself against intensifying Russian advances.
The package could include defensive Patriot missiles and offensive medium-range rockets, but a decision on the exact equipment has not been made, the sources said. One of the people said this would happen at a meeting on Thursday.
So far, the Trump administration has only sent weapons authorized by former President Joe Biden, who was a staunch supporter of Kyiv. Presidential Drawdown Authority allows the president to draw from weapons stocks to help allies in an emergency.

The Pentagon and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Republican president’s stance on defending Ukraine has been inconsistent. At times he has criticized U.S. spending and spoken favorably of Russia but also sometimes has voiced support for Kyiv and disparaged the Kremlin.
The U.S. has $3.86 billion worth of Presidential Drawdown Authority for Ukraine remaining. The last drawdown was a $500 million award by Biden on January 9.

Ukraine’s top priorities are Patriot missile interceptors and GMLRS mobile rocket artillery which may be included in the package. The weapons could be on the front lines within days because stocks are positioned in Europe.
The Trump administration this month halted shipments of some critical weapons that were approved by Biden but some of those shipments have resumed.
Congress has approved nearly $175 billion of aid and military assistance for Ukraine and allied nations in the nearly 3-1/2 years since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington; Editing by Cynthia Osterman

The White House has seen its share of shady deals. Ulysses S. Grant’s brother-in-law used his family ties to engineer an insider-trading scheme that tanked the gold market. Warren Harding’s secretary of the interior secretly leased land to oil barons, who paid a fortune for his troubles. To bankroll Richard Nixon’s reelection, corporate executives sneaked suitcases full of cash into the capital.

But Americans have never witnessed anything like the corruption that President Donald Trump and his inner circle have perpetrated in recent months. Its brazenness, volume, and variety defy historical comparison, even in a country with a centuries-long history of graft—including, notably, Trump’s first four years in office. Indeed, his second term makes the financial scandals of his first—foreign regimes staying at Trump’s hotel in Washington, D.C.; the (aborted) plan to host the G7 at Trump’s hotel in Florida—seem quaint.

For instance, the bureau of population, refugees and migration, which previously helped facilitate legal immigration into the United States, would instead be reformed to include an office of remigration to facilitate deportations.

The officials declined to discuss plans for the RIFs, saying that they wanted the employees “to hear from the department first, just for their own dignity”.

The Fallout Is Growing on Trump’s Deals With Law Firms

The deals are looking worse and worse — for Trump and the law firms.

The Trump administration is on an unbroken losing streak in the courts — 0 for 4 — in its effort to defend President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting large law firms. And things could get worse — for Trump, and for the law firms that capitulated to him.

It has been several months since the first major law firm brokered a deal with Trump to get out from under an executive order penalizing the firm for conducting work or hiring lawyers that the White House disfavors. Eight firms followed that precedent in order to avoid becoming targeted themselves, ultimately committing a combined total of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services to largely unspecified initiatives supported by the Trump administration. Four firms refused to buckle and successfully challenged the orders targeting them in federal district court in Washington, D.C.

Trump may see the episode as a political win, at least in the short term. He has publicly boasted about the deals for months and repeatedly said that he will put the settling firms to work for the administration. But there is no publicly available evidence that this has actually happened. Privately, representatives for three of the settling firms (who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters) told me that they have not received any instructions or input from the White House on pro bono matters to take on.

The Justice Department declined to comment in response to a question about whether the department reached out to any of the settling firms to do pro bonowork on behalf of the government. The White House also declined to comment.

That does not mean the firms who made deals with Trump are in the clear. The Trump administration could always change course.

On top of that, if Democrats retake the House or Senate next year, the firms could find themselves in the crosshairs of lawmakers who have already posed sharp questions directly to the firms about the legality of their deals and the circumstances that led to them. A few subpoenas could divulge even more sensitive and embarrassing details for the firms.

It’s hard to predict exactly how this surprising subplot in Trump’s second term ultimately ends, except that it is only likely to get messier, particularly if — or perhaps when — Trump decides to put the firms to work.

When the White House struck its first deal, Brad Karp — the chairman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison — defended it by claiming that the firm had no choice because the order posed an “existential” threat to the firm and “could easily have destroyed” it.

This did not make much sense at the time given the fact that Paul, Weiss is one of the most profitable law firms in the world, but the defense now appears to have been rendered practically nonsensical by the fact that the four firms that challenged the Trump administration have not remotely gone out of business.

As a lawyer at one of those firms, who was granted anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press, put it to me recently, “I’m pleased to confirm that [our firm] continues to exist — and flourish!”

The backlash to the deals in the legal profession has also been real. Some in-house client lawyers who are unhappy with the deals have reportedly been moving work away from the settling firms to the firms that went to court. Some students at the nation’s top law schools are steering clear of the settling firms, an embarrassment for firms that like to claim that they have the highest professional standards and best lawyers in the business.

Senior lawyers have also felt compelled to leave several of the settling firms. At Paul, Weiss, at least 10 litigation partners have departed, including Karen Dunn, a prominent Democratic lawyer who oversaw Kamala Harris’ debate prep last year.

Dunn had been in the running to succeed Karp as chair of the firm, a job likely worth tens of millions of dollars a year. The New York Times reported she supported the deal with the Trump White House and helped whip up support among other attorneys, though a spokesperson for Dunn and her new firm vigorously denied that was the case. Regardless, her decision to leave despite all that is further evidence that the decision to cut a deal had become professionally and politically toxic in a way that many did not anticipate — particularly for a firm that has long held itself out as an institution committed to liberal values. (As a former attorney at Paul, Weiss, I can attest that this commitment is very dubious indeed.)

If you want to be a White House counsel or a lawyer with a major position in a future Democratic administration, having Paul, Weiss on your resume may now be a liability for the foreseeable future. Case in point: Neera Tanden, one of the Democratic Party’s most prominent officials, said in a social media post in May that “Paul Weiss’ actions will live in infamy.”

The settling firms have even appeared to incur blowback from the judiciary.

When Beryl Howell, the judge presiding over the challenge from the law firm Perkins Coie, ruled against the Trump administration, she dropped a footnote dripping with contempt that quickly made the rounds among legal observers. “If the founding history of this country is any guide,” Howell wrote, “those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.”

For his part, Karp — who once positioned himself as a legal power broker within the Democratic Party but is now blamed for creating a template for surrender that other firms followed — risks becoming the Baghdad Bob of Big Law in his efforts to defend the deal.

In addition to the over-the-top claim that the firm’s deal with the White House was an “existential” necessity, he recently told a gathering of the firm’s lawyers that it “has never been healthier” and that the first wave of departing lawyers was no big deal because the lawyers constituted a “siloed unit” at Paul, Weiss, a highly questionable claim. In any event, prominent lawyers across the litigation department have continued to leave the firm as recently as this week.

In fact, Paul, Weiss and the other settling firms may also have long-term legal exposure under federal law and professional rules of conduct, at least in theory.

The deal that Paul, Weiss struck appears to implicate a variety of federal and state public corruption statutes, including federal bribery and extortion charges. That is what happens when you agree to give a public official tens of millions of dollars in value in exchange for official actions that benefit you — in this case, an executive order that rescinds a prior executive order and the restoration of federal security clearances, among other accommodations. (The legal situation is plausibly different for the firms that entered into follow-on settlements, who have a stronger claim to having been the victims of an extortion effort.)

And while Trump is immune from criminal conduct stemming from official actions, that does not extend to the firms themselves.

It’s true that a subsequent Democratic administration will probably not investigate or prosecute any of the firms or the lawyers involved. But that assessment primarily reflects political considerations — as well as the recent history of a party populated by lawyers with demonstrably poor judgment in the area of legal accountability — not the law.

Setting aside the headlines and Trump’s public gloating, it’s hard to see what exactly the White House has gotten out of all this so far — at least in tangible terms.

The settling firms have insisted that they retain control over their pro bono work, and thus far, there has been no public indication that the White House has directed them even informally to take on any particular engagements.

Some of the firms do appear to be making subtle changes to their pro bono portfolios without hearing from the Trump administration. Not surprisingly, firms appear to be pulling back on pro bono immigration work. I also have heard that some conservative legal advocacy groups have fielded calls from lawyers at the settling firms about finding pro bono cases to partner on.

At this point, the risk of being put to work by the administration is the most potent near-term threat to the settling firms.

That shoe may or may not drop, but if the White House insists that they take on a case on behalf of the administration or its political agenda, the firms will be faced with the choice of caving (again) and incurring further political and reputational harms, or antagonizing the White House to the point that the administration goes back to issuing executive orders and sanctions targeting them.

This might be less dramatic than it sounds. If any of the deals were to fall apart in that way, the settling firms would — ironically perhaps — end up benefitting from the firms that refused to give in to the Trump administration. That’s because if they ultimately needed to mount their own challenges to the administration, they would likely point directly to the four decisions already rendered against the administration to back them up.

Those decisions have been swift and unsparing.

The principal evidence against the administration has been its own words — the executive orders and accompanying “fact sheets” released by the White House to justify them. Those documents have asserted a variety of grievances against the firms, from employing lawyers who criminally investigated Trump to implementing diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

As one district judge — a George W. Bush appointee — put it in a case involving WilmerHale, the executive order targeting the firm “is, on its face, retaliation for the firm’s protected speech.”

Suboptimal lawyering has been a recurring theme of the second Trump administration. Some experienced lawyers, for instance, believe that Emil Bove — the principal associate deputy attorney general and now a nominee to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit — could have dismissed the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams without creating a weeks-long public spectacle.

You could make the same argument about Trump’s legal broadsides against Big Law. Trump and the administration could have put themselves on stronger legal footing — or at least delayed the swift procession of adverse rulings — if they had said much less and opted for vaguer language in their public statements.

Instead, they said the quiet parts out loud, and the judges have been throwing that language right back at them.

As a result, the government’s odds in an appeal before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals are not particularly good. And if the administration loses there, it is unclear whether the Supreme Court would take the case or side with Trump on the merits. After all, the justices are all lawyers who should presumably be attuned to the serious professional concerns raised by Trump’s orders. (For what it’s worth, Chief Justice John Roberts’ wife happens to be a prominent law firm recruiter.)

There is a sense among some of the lawyers at the settling firms that this will all blow over. Trump and his administration got the political scalp they wanted, the thinking goes, but they are not particularly good at executing complex policy initiatives — like completing 90 trade deals in 90 days or finding a buyer for TikTok that will actually comply with the law that Trump decided to ignore after reentering office.

Democrats in Congress may confound that expectation if they win back power and opt for a fulsome investigation into the deals, potentially with subpoenas.

“The American people and the Congress deserve complete transparency into Trump’s assault on free speech, the right to counsel, due process and access to courts,” said House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is already conducting an investigation into the deals along with Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. “We also should know who stood up and who capitulated to Trump’s gangster moves to crush his opposition, co-opt all the lawyers and neutralize the courts. We’ll keep demanding answers until the truth is known.”

Still, Trump has not gone away empty-handed, even now.

For years, some prominent Big Law lawyers have tried to soften the industry’s image by positioning themselves as reliable allies of progressive initiatives like DEI policies and as principled litigators willing to oppose their own government. This has in large part been a marketing exercise — large law firms make their money by serving wealthy and powerful private interests and, to take just one example, racial and ethnic diversity among law firm equity partners remains truly abysmal — but Trump managed to blow up that image with the literal stroke of his pen.

The deals, in that sense, are just as important for their symbolism as their practical impact.

One of Trump’s skills in politics is his occasional ability to demonstrate the hollowness of his opponents’ stated convictions. He appears to have pulled that off yet again.