Category: Washington Post

A federal judge in Florida blocked public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s extensive report on the classified-documents case against President Donald Trump — a resounding victory for Trump’s efforts to block public viewing of what probably would be damaging details about his retention of classified materials after he left the White House in 2021.

The decision Monday morning from U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon resulted from litigation that has dragged on for more than a year in her courtroom. Cannon ruled that releasing the special counsel report could violate grand jury secrecy rules and could result in impugning the presumption of innocence for Trump and his co-defendants in a case that did not result in guilty verdicts.

The ruling can be appealed. Although Trump and the Justice Department both opposed the public release of the report, First Amendment advocacy groups and media outlets pushed in Cannon’s court for release.

Smith charged Trump in 2023 with 40 counts of illegally retaining classified defense information and obstructing government efforts to retrieve the materials. Two of Trump’s personal aides were charged with obstruction alongside him.

Cannon dismissed those charges in a decision that broke with legal precedent, ruling that Smith was unlawfully appointed and therefore had no authority to bring charges. Her decision did not touch on the merits of the case, which Trump aides at the time believed was the strongest of the criminal cases against Trump that were brought during the Biden administration.

Smith appealed the ruling but dropped the appeal after Trump won the 2024 presidential election, citing federal regulations that say a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.

In her Monday ruling, Cannon lambasted Smith for compiling the report even though she dismissed the charges in 2024. Using the discovery in the case to complete the report amounted to circumventing her ruling, she said.

In the final days before Trump took office, Smith submitted the final report to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland did not push to release it because, at the time, an appeal of Cannon’s dismissal order was still pending as the Justice Department tried to resurrect the case against Trump’s two co-defendants.

“To say this chronology represents, at a minimum, a concerning breach of the spirit of the Dismissal Order is an understatement, if not an outright violation of it,” Cannon wrote.

“The Court need not countenance this brazen stratagem or effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order,” she continued.

Garland made public the first volume of Smith’s report, which detailed the case that prosecutors built against Trump over his alleged attempts to obstruct the 2020 election results. For 137 pages, Smith detailed the incriminating evidence he says he collected against Trump over his two-year investigation and said he was confident that he had ample evidence to obtain a conviction in court.

That case also never made it to trial, with the Justice Department asking a judge to dismiss it in the final weeks before Trump took office for his second term.

The second volume of the special counsel report was expected to similarly detail the incriminating evidence Smith collected against Trump and reveal what would have been the special counsel’s strategy at court.

Prosecutors already said that some of the documents found in the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home and private club, contained information about top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials were kept in the dark about them.

Trump and his attorneys first asked Cannon to block the release of the report before he was inaugurated for his second term. Cannon temporarily blocked the release on Jan. 7, 2025 — about two weeks before Trump took office.

Once Trump regained the presidency, the Justice Department said it opposed releasing the report. Trump, in his personal capacity, also filed requests in Cannon’s court to block the release.

Smith has testified to Congress in recent months about his cases against Trump. He has said that he is limited in what he can reveal, in part because of Cannon’s prohibition on releasing the report.

It is common practice for special counsels to release reports even if their investigations do not result in guilty verdicts.

Special counsel Robert K. Hur, for example, released a report in 2024 detailing his investigation into whether President Joe Biden unlawfully retained classified materials after his vice presidency. The damaging report explained why Hur opted against charging Biden.

Cannon attempted to differentiate the release of Smith’s report from other cases, saying that there was no precedent for releasing a report in a case in which the charges have been dismissed and the defendants maintain their innocence.

Trump’s request to dismiss the case on the grounds that Smith was unlawfully appointed was considered a long shot when he filed it, and Cannon’s ruling was unexpected and unusual.

“The Court strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt, at least not in a situation like this one, where the defendants contested the charges from the outset and still proclaim their innocence,” Cannon wrote.

One of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence firms is negotiating whether it can continue to work with the military, according to people familiar with the discussions, after Pentagon officials called their once-close relationship into question in the wake of January’s raid to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Anthropic’s Claude model is one of a handful of leading AI systems that the Pentagon is using to rapidly build its capabilities in cyberwarfare, improve the performance of its autonomous weapons systems, and increase the efficiency of its personnel.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s team has insisted in recent weeks that the military must have the freedom to use the powerful tools as it sees fit. Officials say other leading AI firms have gone along with the demand. ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI have agreed to allow the Pentagon to use their systems for “all lawful purposes” on unclassified networks, a Defense official said, and are working on agreements for classified networks. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

The companies did not respond to requests for comment.

But Anthropic — which has sought to position itself as the most safety-minded of the companies — has corporate principles that may keep it from giving the Pentagon carte blanche. Unlike many traditional weapons, powerful AI systems can be deployed in many ways not foreseen by their designers, and the dispute has raised questions about who should have the final say over their use by the military. While Anthropic has not said exactly what its qualms are with the Pentagon’s demands, its chief executive has recently warned of the dangers of autonomous weapons and AI-powered mass surveillance.

In a statement to the Washington Post, Anthropic said it is “committed to using frontier AI in support of U.S. national security.”

“Claude is used for a wide variety of intelligence-related use cases across the government, including the [Defense Department], in line with our Usage Policy,” Anthropic said. “We are having productive conversations, in good faith, with [the Defense Department] on how to continue that work and get these complex issues right.”

Until recent weeks Anthropic had been in an enviable position, with a $200 million contract and its technology uniquely approved for use within the Pentagon’s classified networks. That quickly began to change, Trump administration officials say, following Anthropic’s response to its recent use by the Pentagon in the Maduro operation.

Technology developed by defense firm Palantir and Anthropic’s Claude were used in preparation for the Jan. 3 raid, according a person familiar with the assault, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share confidential details about the operation. During the raid, scores of Maduro’s security guards and Venezuelan service members were killed.

After the attack, a senior defense official said, an executive from Anthropic discussed the raid with an executive at Palantir, asking whether Anthropic’s tools had been used. The Palantir executive relayed the question to the Defense Department, saying it implied that Anthropic might have disapproved of how Claude had been used, the official said. That prompted department leaders to call into doubt whether the company could be fully relied on.

“They expressed concern over the Maduro raid, which is a huge problem for the department,” one administration official said.

However, Anthropic said it had not discussed any specific operations with the Defense Department nor “discussed this with, or expressed concerns to, any industry partners outside of routine discussions on strictly technical matters.”

The dispute appears to run deeper than any questions over the attack on Venezuela. Hegseth sees AI dominance as a must-have capability and his directives have pressed the military to move fast to embrace the technology. In January, he said that “speed wins” in an AI-driven future, and he has ordered the Pentagon to unblock data for AI to train, while pushing the department to move from “campaign planning to kill chain execution.”

“We must approach risk tradeoffs, ‘equities,’ and other subjective questions as if we were at war,” Hegseth wrote in the January 2026 directive.

Just over two weeks after Hegseth’s directive came down, Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder and chief executive, published an essay sketching a potential dystopia in which AI empowers a new generation of unstoppable weapons and surveillance tools.

“We should worry about them in the hands of autocracies, but also worry that because they are so powerful, with so little accountability, there is a greatly increased risk of democratic governments turning them against their own people to seize power,” Amodei wrote about swarms of AI-enabled drones.

Such weaponry is likely still many years away, but failing to reach an agreement could quickly have far-reaching consequences for the company.

The Pentagon has suggested that it could be branded a “supply chain risk,” something that would not only impact Anthropic, but any firm that uses the company’s AI. The designation has typically been aimed at Chinese and Russian companies.

“We may require that all our vendors and contractors certify that they don’t use any Anthropic model,” a defense official told the Post.

In the past, firms have been able to have riders in their contracts with the Pentagon indemnifying them from liability if their technology is used in an unlawful way and allowing them to bind the government to only use the technology for lawful purposes.

But it may be unreasonable for firms contracting with the Pentagon to try to set limitations on how their rapidly evolving technology can be applied, said Frank Kendall, who served as Air Force secretary during the Biden administration and oversaw its development of a fleet of autonomous warplanes.

“The military’s function is the application of violence, and if you’re going to give anything to the Defense Department, it’s likely going to be used to help kill people,” Kendall said.

The administration has held that its actions — which also include U.S. strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, its deployment of active duty troops on U.S. soil, and its decision to use lethal force in Minneapolis, killing two U.S. citizens — have been lawful. But the Trump administration has also fired many of the independent military and Justice Department lawyers who would have had the ability to challenge the legality of those usages.

“If you’re worried about this administration doing unlawful things, you should just not work with them,” Kendall said.

The Pentagon has been integrating AI into some of its weapons systems for years but never at the speed at which it is now. That’s partly driven by its competition with China and evolving threats like hypersonic missiles — where a human’s reaction time can be inadequate.

But there’s also been an emphasis on making sure AI’s unpredictable learning could be fenced in.

At Edwards Air Force Base in 2024, the Air Force flew its first AI fighter jet in dogfights — and the jet, an F-16 that carried the AI in a computer in the back, was already besting elite test pilots by shaving milliseconds off turns and maneuvers. Even then, there was a human in the loop, a test pilot inside the jet who could disengage the AI as needed — and the AI itself was kept in a system that was not connected to any networks. As the Air Force moved forward withe the AI, it said making sure the data it learned on was clean was the priority, to avoid security risks.

In 2023, the Biden administration instructed the Pentagon that any AI use in systems would require levels of review, anti-tamper mechanisms, and safeguards to ensure that humans would retain the decision on use of force.

That policy is still in force but will be reviewed as needed, the administration official told the Post.

As the U.S. Justice Department demurs from new inquiries linked to the Epstein files, the approach by European authorities stands in stark contrast. On the other side of the Atlantic, governments are promising to hold the wealthy, powerful, and politically connected to account.

Under public scrutiny, officials in Britain, France, Norway, and beyond have opened a flurry of investigations and independent commissions to look into evidence of potential crimes in more than 3 million files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that were released last month by congressional order. In three weeks, the revelations have prompted resignations, raids, and other legal actions, none more notable than the detention Thursday of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the younger brother of King Charles III, on suspicion of misconduct in office.

“Nobody is above the law,” British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on television shortly before the arrest.

Starmer delivered that statement even as the tide of accountability knocked at the door of 10 Downing Street. Communications made public in the files showed that Peter Mandelson, a former British ambassador to the United States selected by Starmer, maintained closer ties to Epstein than previously disclosed. Those revelations sparked a flurry of calls for Starmer’s resignation — including from within his own Labour Party.

The fallout in Britain comes as a former Norwegian prime minister, a former French minister, and other prominent figures on the continent face new investigations in what is fast shaping up to be a European exercise in accountability.

As the Trump administration has portrayed Europe as in decline, some observers see the European response as evidence of the relative robustness of the rule of law in the continent’s democracies, compared with the concentration of power in Trump’s America.

“In Norway and across Europe, the instinct has been transparency and formal investigations,” said Julie E. Stuestøl, a member of Norway’s parliament who serves on its justice committee. “In the U.S., it looks more like containment.”

She added, “The contrast is striking.”

Senior Democratic lawmakers in Washington are comparing the broad legal action across the Atlantic to the muted response in the United States.

“The DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files is a travesty,” Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) said in a post on X. “The White House press secretary says, ‘We are moving on.’ But, in France, the Paris prosecutor’s office just opened two investigations based on new leads from the released files. And in Britain, former prince Andrew has been arrested over ties to Epstein. When will there be justice in America?”

Some analysts point out that the Epstein case has roiled the United States for years while the impact in Europe has been more of a slow burn that ignited with the release of the latest files.

“One interpretation is that accountability still means something more in Europe than in America,” said Nathalie Tocci, director of the Rome-based Institute for International Affairs. “A less generous interpretation is that it is a newer shock in Europe than in the U.S.”

The disclosures shook the country “to its core,” said Stuestøl, the Norwegian lawmaker whose party advocated for an independent commission. “People are tired of elites protecting elites behind closed doors,” which has made objections to the proposal untenable, she said.

Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to two charges of soliciting prostitution, including one involving a minor. He was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019 and died in federal custody later that year. His death was ruled a suicide. Judges and lawmakers say that over decades, Epstein abused, trafficked and molested scores of girls, many of whom have come forward in court and in other public forums.

Some prominent figures in the United States have resigned from their jobs or lost business after the documents revealed their relationships with Epstein, but none is known to have faced criminal charges. In Washington, efforts to hold people accountable for their involvement with Epstein have at times also fallen along partisan lines.

President Donald Trump in November called on the Justice Department to examine the relationships between Epstein and several prominent Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton. Attorney General Pam Bondi tapped federal prosecutors in Manhattan to take on the job, but the Justice Department has not announced charges related to the inquiry.

“I can’t talk about any investigations, but I will say the following, which is that in July, the Department of Justice said that we had reviewed the files, the Epstein files, and there was nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash earlier this month. “The entire world can look at and see if we got it wrong.”

British authorities have not detailed the allegations against Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly known as Prince Andrew, whom police released Thursday night after officials searched two addresses in Norfolk and Berkshire. The new Epstein documents include photographs that appear to show Mountbatten-Windsor, who has denied any wrongdoing, crouched over a woman on a floor. They also indicate that he provided confidential government materials to Epstein at a time when the former prince was representing Britain as a trade envoy. The actions came months after he was stripped of his royal titles as a result of his ties to Epstein.

The British government is considering whether to introduce legislation that would remove Mountbatten-Windsor from the line of royal succession “regardless of the outcome of the police investigation,” the BBC reported Saturday, citing Defense Minister Luke Pollard. Mountbatten-Windsor is eighth in line to the throne.

Following the arrest, King Charles III issued a statement assuring the British public that the “the law must take its course” in the investigation of his brother.

“There is a great irony that in the year we are celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of the American republic, the British monarchy is one that gives us a lesson in democracy,” said Dominique Moisi, a senior analyst of international affairs for the Institut Montaigne, a Paris-based think tank.

Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre said he supports investigating the links between prominent Norwegians and Epstein. Like other European leaders, Støre is under pressure to respond to voter outrage over the documents, which have implicated a global network of celebrities and politicians.

“I think it has been quite shocking for people to get this insight into this world and the connection between people with power. And how it has affected people without power, who have been abused and subjected to assault,” Støre told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK.

Earlier this month, former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland was charged with aggravated corruption over Epstein links. Police have searched residences of Jagland, who formerly chaired the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Authorities also said they are investigating whether Jagland received gifts, travel, or loans tied to his positions, including as head of the Council of Europe, the continent’s highest human rights watchdog.

The moves against him came as it emerged that he had planned visits to Epstein’s homes in Paris and New York, and that Epstein had visited Jagland’s residence in Strasbourg, France. Jagland, who has denied criminal liability and said he would cooperate with authorities, could face up to 10 years in prison.

Also this month, Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul resigned in the face of corruption charges after Norwegian media reported that Epstein left her children millions of dollars in his will. Authorities are looking into Epstein’s links to Juul and her husband, who played a role in back-channel talks between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators that led to the Oslo accords. Juul has denied criminal liability.

Scandal hit the country’s stoic monarchy, too: Documents revealed that Norwegian Crown Princess Mette-Marit had stayed at an Epstein property in Palm Beach, Fla., and exchanged scores of messages with the disgraced financier. Her name appears repeatedly in the files, including after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting sex from a minor. The crown princess has expressed “deep regret” over her connection to Epstein.

Authorities in Latvia and Lithuania opened investigations into the possible trafficking of young women and girls by Epstein. In Slovakia, the documents brought down Miroslav Lajčák, the prime minister’s national security adviser, who resigned over email exchanges with Epstein.

In France, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced two new investigations related to the Epstein files, one focused on sex trafficking and the other on financial crimes. French authorities were already looking into former French culture minister Jack Lang and his daughter over allegations of tax fraud and receiving money from Epstein. That inquiry followed an investigation by French news outlet Mediapart, which detailed close ties to Epstein.

Beccuau is calling for yet-unknown victims of Epstein to come forward.

Trump administration officials have struggled to figure out how to increase U.S. military spending by a whopping $500 billion in their forthcoming budget, slowing the overall White House spending plan, four people familiar with the matter said.

President Donald Trump last month agreed to a roughly 50% funding boost sought by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, in the White House’s annual budget proposal. The idea ran into internal criticism from several other officials, including White House budget chief Russell Vought, who warned about its potential impact on the widening federal deficit, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reflect internal deliberations.

Since Trump agreed to the higher number, White House aides and defense officials have run into logistical challenges surrounding where to put the money, because the amount is so large, the people said. The White House is more than two weeks behind its statutory deadline to send its budget proposal to Congress, in part because it is unclear how precisely to spend the additional $500 billion, according to the people familiar with the matter.

Senior Pentagon officials have consulted with former senior defense officials as they grapple with the challenge, said one person familiar with the matter. Part of the discussion centers on how much emphasis should go into buying weapons the military already uses versus investing in high-end technologies, such as artificial intelligence, that the Pentagon envisions as part of its future.

The roughly $900 billion defense budget approved last year was the largest in U.S. history. While other nations have also increased their military spending, the United States already spends more on defense than the next nine countries combined, according to 2023 data from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank.

“I’m not surprised they’re having difficulty doing that,” said G. William Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “That’s an awful lot of money in one year.”

Spokespeople for the White House and the Defense Department declined to comment.

Trump, Hegseth, and many congressional Republicans have defended the proposed increase in the military budget as necessary to pay for an array of new priorities and confront foreign adversaries. Hegseth has said that the money would be spent “wisely” and that the larger budget would send “a message to the world.”

The forthcoming White House budget for fiscal 2027 will spell out the administration’s proposed spending levels across the government. It requires congressional approval to be enacted and faces long odds.

“This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe,” Trump said in a Truth Social post this month confirming his support for the $1.5 trillion budget number.

The Pentagon has been grappling with how to rapidly replenish expensive munitions that it has relied on heavily, including Tomahawk cruise missiles, Patriot missile-defense interceptors, and ship-launched munitions known as Standard Missile-6s, or SM-6s.

It also is wrestling with how to upgrade its Cold War-era nuclear weapons program with expensive next-generation systems like the B-21 bomber and the Columbia-class submarine. The aircraft, with an estimated cost of about $700 million each, is expected to replace the Air Force’s fleet of B-1 and B-2 bombers. The Columbia-class submarines are expected to cost at least $9 billion each.

Hegseth, upon taking office, directed each military service to look for budget reductions of 8%; the money could then be invested in other Pentagon priorities better aligned with Trump’s agenda. Hegseth bristled at the suggestion that such reprogramming should be considered cuts, saying he would be “reorienting” about $50 billion in defense spending that the Biden administration had planned.

More recently, Hegseth has called for “supercharging” the U.S. industrial base, seeking to speed up how quickly the military can field new weapons and other capabilities, in part by not relying as heavily on traditional defense contractors.

With such a significant jump in spending planned, it now appears that the Pentagon budget is detached from a new national defense strategy that Hegseth’s team released in January, said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. That strategy calls for the Pentagon to focus first on defense in the Western Hemisphere, with less emphasis on Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

It’s a “head-scratcher” that the Pentagon wants to spend so much money while also cutting back in those areas, Cancian said.

“If you’ve got a 50% budget increase, you don’t have to do any of that,” he said. “You’d be talking about all the new places you’d be making investments.”

The federal deficit, or the gap between what the government spent and what it collected in tax revenue, was $1.8 trillion last year. That number was down from the surges of red ink during the COVID years but up significantly from the standard deficit before the pandemic.

Vought, a deficit hawk, has long called for reducing federal spending while also supporting Trump’s general goal of rebuilding the American military. He was instrumental in securing additional funding for the military last year in the GOP’s tax bill, which bypassed the typical bipartisan process for setting military spending.

The increase in military spending alone would amount to one of the biggest federal programs. One Democratic plan to expand Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing benefits would cost $350 billion over the next decade, by comparison. If Congress were to spend an additional $500 billion every year on the military, the cost would be $5 trillion over the next decade. It is unclear if the Trump administration’s proposal is for an additional $500 billion just for next year, or $500 billion each year for a decade.

“I’m sure there are very difficult conversations happening right now. Obviously, it would have a huge impact,” said Charles Kieffer, who spent several decades across administrations in the White House Office of Management and Budget and working for Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “A 50% increase requires a completely different formulation for your priorities.”

Some experts in military spending panned the proposed increase as likely to increase fraud and waste. Julia Gledhill, a research analyst for the national security reform program at the nonpartisan Stimson Center, pointed to failed audits at the Pentagon and a lack of clear guardrails on much of the new military spending approved last year in the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which she said has been used like a “slush fund.”

“We don’t know what we’re already spending money on. We don’t have details on how the Pentagon is using its trillion-dollar budget,” Gledhill said. “How are you supposed to make educated, informed decisions about the military budget if you don’t know where it’s already going?”