GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene hits back at Trump: ‘I’ve never owed him anything’
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks during a news conference with Rep. Ro Khanna, Rep. Thomas Massie and Jeffrey Epstein abuse survivors on the Epstein Files Transparency Act outside the U.S. Capitol, November 18, 2025 in Washington. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene hit back at President Donald Trump on Tuesday at a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol alongside women victimized by late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump withdrew his support for Greene, one of his staunchest allies, over the weekend after she criticized him and his administration for their handling of the Epstein investigation, along with other matters.
“I was called a traitor by a man that I fought for five, no, actually, six years for, and I gave him my loyalty for free,” Greene said, referencing a social media post from Trump over the weekend where he called her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene.”
“I won my first election without his endorsement, beating eight men in a primary, and I’ve never owed him anything, but I fought for him, for the policies and for America first, and he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition.”
Greene appeared to insinuate on Tuesday that Trump was the “traitor.”
“Let me tell you what a traitor is. A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America and Americans like the women standing behind me now,” Greene continued.
The comments came ahead of Tuesday’s House vote on a bill to force the Justice Department to release all files related to Epstein, an effort Trump opposed for months before suddenly reversing himself as it became clear enough Republicans would vote in favor.
At the press conference with Epstein survivors outside the Capitol, Greene was praised by the bill’s co-sponsors Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Rep. Thomas Massie as well as several survivors.
“When Ro and I started this effort, most discharge petitions never make it, maybe only 4%, so we had long odds, but we had some brave women on the Republican side. My colleague, Marjorie Taylor Greene, is one of them who’s here with us today. You cannot even imagine the consequences that they have suffered,” Massie said.
Survivor Haley Robson, in her remarks, said if Greene ever decided to read names of people connected to Epstein on the House floor, she would stand with her and hold her hand.
Greene on Tuesday was asked if she takes Trump at his word after he said on Monday he would sign the bill to release the Epstein files if it reaches his desk, and if she has confidence these files will be released.
“I only take people’s actions seriously, no longer words,” Greene said.
“I’ll tell you, because I’m — I wasn’t a Johnny-come-lately to the MAGA train. I was Day 1 [in] 2015. And there’s a big difference in those Americans and those that decided to support President Trump later on,” Greene said.
Greene said “watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart.”
(WASHINGTON) — The government shutdown on Wednesday entered its 36th day, officially becoming the longest shutdown in U.S. history.
That means the two longest shutdowns in American politics have occurred under President Donald Trump, with the previous 35-day record having been set during his first term in 2019.
There’s been little movement on Capitol Hill over the past five weeks as Republicans and Democrats blame one another for the stalemate. Democrats are keeping up their demand for an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies, while Trump and Republicans say they won’t negotiate until the government is reopened.
Meanwhile, the impact on Americans is growing more painful by the day.
The 42 million Americans who rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits are left vulnerable after funding lapsed and the administration committed to only partial payments.
ACA recipients saw their health insurance premiums spike as open enrollment began on Nov. 1, in some cases as much as 300%.
Airports across the country are experiencing delays amid staffing shortages, with thousands of air traffic controllers working without pay. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned “mass chaos” could be in store and some airspace might have to be closed if the shutdown continues.
How we got here Here are key moments from the shutdown so far.
Oct. 1: The federal government shut down at 12:01 a.m. after Republican and Democratic proposals that would have funded the government failed in the Senate at the eleventh hour. The Democrat bill included extensions for health care subsidies under the ACA while the Republican bill would have funded the government at current levels until Nov. 1.
Oct. 10: The Trump administration begins to layoff thousands of federal workers. Agencies impacted include the Commerce, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security and Treasury departments. Among those fired are substance abuse and mental health services employees, special education staff and more.
Oct. 14: Two weeks into the shutdown with virtually no progress, House Speaker Mike Johnson predicts they are headed toward “one of the longest shutdowns in American history.” The House has remained out of session the entire shutdown after Republican members passed a clean, seven-week funding bill in mid-September.
Oct. 15: The Pentagon says that troops have been paid and will not miss a paycheck due to the shutdown. The military did this by moving $8 billion from existing funds.
Oct. 24: More than 500,000 federal employees miss their first full paycheck. Just days later, the president of the country’s largest union representing federal workers called on lawmakers to pass a short-term spending bill to end the shutdown, a statement seized on by Republicans to ramp up pressure on Democrats.
Oct. 30: President Trump, back from a weeklong trip to Asia, reinserts himself in the shutdown drama by calling on Senate Republicans to eliminate the filibuster and unilaterally reopen the government. But his call is quickly rebuffed by Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
Nov. 1: Funds run dry for SNAP benefits, leaving 42 million Americans vulnerable. (The Trump administration, after being ordered to do so by a federal judge, later says it will dip into contingency funds for benefits but those payments will only be partial ones.) Plus, open enrollment begins for Affordable Care Act recipients with prices for insurance premiums skyrocketing next year.
Nov. 4: The Senate fails for the 14th time to advance a clean, short-term funding bill. The record is tied for longest-shutdown in history.
What’s next? A major question going forward is whether Trump will get more personally involved in trying to bring the shutdown to an end.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked that question on Tuesday, said Trump’s “making his position on it quite clear” as she reiterated his call for Republicans to nuke the filibuster. Thune has said he doesn’t believe enough Senate Republicans will go for changing the traditional Senate rule.
All Senate Republicans have been invited to the White House for a breakfast tomorrow morning, a White House official and two Congressional aides confirmed to ABC News.
Behind the scenes, a small bipartisan group of rank-and-file senators are in conversation to try to find a way out of this shutdown. Some Senate Republicans told ABC News Senior Political Correspondent Rachel Scott they believed they could get some more moderate Democrats to their side after Tuesday’s elections — though Senate Democrats haven’t said as much.
The talking points made by leaders all shutdown long continued on Tuesday.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in floor remarks on Tuesday, said there deserves to be a “serious negotiation” on health care and that Democrats “are going to keep pushing to get these tax credits extended.”
Thune said he hopes this is the week that Democrats “come to their senses” and vote to reopen the government. The Senate leader said he was “still at a loss as to what it is exactly they’re trying to get out of this.”
In the meantime, the clock is running out on the short-term funding measure that was passed by the House and put up 14 times by the Senate, as it would only fund the government until Nov. 21. Thune has said the date would have to be changed, adding in a new question of what the new date would be.
Mike Johnson speaks with ABC News, Oct. 1, 2025, following a government shutdown. (ABC News)
(WASHINGTON) — A day after President Donald Trump told top-ranking generals and admirals that the U.S. is fighting a “war from within,” Speaker Mike Johnson said the president’s comments show his ability to “take crime seriously,” whereas House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the remarks were “disturbing.”
The two politicians spoke on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday about the president’s statements along with the government shutdown, which took effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday.
While Johnson said he had not heard Trump’s remarks on Tuesday — as he was “a little busy” — he said the president “takes crime seriously.” Johnson also said Trump’s comments about violence in American cities were “cherry-picked out of a long speech.”
Trump said Tuesday that the military’s job is not only to protect the United States from threats abroad, but also what he repeatedly referred to as a domestic enemy in American cities.
“It’s a war from within,” the president said to the room of high-ranking military generals who flew from across the globe to Quantico, Virginia. “We’re under invasion from within,” Trump said.
Trump talked about his efforts to increase the use of the U.S. military in American cities. Trump claimed Democratic-run cities, such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, are in “bad shape,” and that he threatened to “straighten them out, one by one.”
“I told Pete [Hegseth] we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard,” he said.
When asked if using military troops in American cities was appropriate, Johnson said, “I don’t serve on the Pentagon, I run the House of Representatives.”
Johnson then said that Trump has “cleaned up the crime problem” in Washington, D.C., after he mobilized the D.C. National Guard in August.
Jeffries said the president’s comment was a “deeply disturbing statement,” saying that we need “presidential leadership that brings people together instead of tearing us apart.”
“A single American should never be viewed as an ‘enemy from within’ or as target practice for the American military,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries told “GMA” that the Americans have “rejected the deployment and occupation of American cities and towns and counties with American military troops.”
“We have the finest military in the world and they should be used to keep us safe from external enemies,” Jeffries added.
Trump’s comments come after he ordered federal troops to Portland, Oregon, because of what he alleged were threats from domestic terrorists. The city’s mayor and the state’s governor both emphasized that they did not request the troops and objected to Trump’s action.
Attorney General Pam Bondi arrives to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill, October 7, 2025 in Washington. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) —President Donald Trump’s tightening grip over the Justice Department to target his political opponents and lawmakers’ increasing calls for the release of more files from federal investigations into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein took center stage at a contentious Senate hearing Tuesday for Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is the first time since July that Bondi has faced questions from lawmakers and follows a tumultuous summer for the department that included deployments of federal law enforcement to Democratic-run cities, a growing number of investigations announced into Trump’s political foes and the controversial indictment of former FBI Director James Comey.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley kicked off the hearing with extensive remarks seeking to highlight instances of what Republicans have labeled “weaponization” of the Justice Department under the Biden Administration, citing selective disclosures by FBI Director Kash Patel of the investigation into President Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss.
“These are indefensible acts,” Grassley said. “This was a political phishing expedition to get Trump at all costs.”
Specifically, Grassley singled out a timely disclosure by the FBI on Monday that showed former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigators at one point sought limited phone toll records of several Republican senators around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
As part of his investigation, Smith extensively investigated Trump and his allies’ pressure campaign on lawmakers to block the certification of former President Joe Biden’s election win — including calls that were made to senators after the Capitol was breached by the pro-Trump mob.
There’s no indication that Republican senators were a target of Smith’s investigation, and the toll records sought by investigators would not include any information about the content of conversations they may have had.
“We’re pointing this all out because we can’t have this repeated in the United States,” Grassley said. “We want to end it right now, whether we have Republican or Democrat administrations.”
Grassley made no mention of recent directives from Trump to have the Justice Department act “now” to carry out prosecutions of his political foes, or other instances of alleged politicization during Bondi’s tenure that have led to scores of departures of longtime career officials who have sounded alarm about the department being used as a tool to enact political retribution.
Ranking Democratic member Dick Durbin said in his opening statement assailed the Trump administration for the conduct in Chicago, a city in which Durbin represents.
“As President Trump turns the full force of the federal government on Chicago and other American cities, the assault on the city I am proud to represent is just one example of how President Trump and Attorney General Bondi shut down justice at the Department of Justice, even before the president’s party controlling the white House, Senate and House of Representatives shut down the government,” Durbin said.
“The attorney general has systematically weaponized our nation’s leading law enforcement agency to protect President Trump and his allies and attack his opponents. And sadly, the American people. You have purged hundreds of senior career officials since you first appeared before us,” he added.
Durbin listed off the greatest hits for critics of Bondi’s Justice Department, not to include the closed investigation into Border Czar Tom Homan, the Eric Adams case being dropped, the hiring of a Jan. 6 defendant who attacked MPD officers, the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and the case against James Comey.
“What has taken place since Jan. 20, 2025, would make even President Nixon recoil. This is your legacy,” Durbin said.
Bondi pushed back against her critics and Democrats during the hearing. In her opening statement, she framed her tenure as the “end” of weaponization of law enforcement, while reinforcing her extensive efforts to enact President Trump’s agenda.
“We will work to earn that back every single day. We are returning to our core mission of fighting real crime. While there is more work to do, I believe in eight short months we have made tremendous progress towards those ends,” she said.
She also railed against judges who have ruled against the administration in the months since Trump took office, while highlighting the Justice Department’s string of victories at the Supreme Court.
“My attorneys have done incredible work advancing President Trump’s agenda and protecting the Executive Branch from judicial overreach,” she said.
Bondi continued to hit back at Durbin, who questioned her about the federal deployment to Illinois.
The attorney general taunted the senator about Chicago’s crime rate. Bondi said that Patel and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche were on their way to the city.
As ABC News first reported, the move to seek Comey’s indictment came over the objections of career prosecutors and followed Trump’s removal of his appointee to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, who expressed reservations about pursuing charges against Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, sources told ABC News.
Trump eventually installed a White House aide and former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan to lead the office and move forward with the case against Comey, and a grand jury narrowly voted to indict him on two counts of making false statements to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation — while declining to indict on a third false statements charge. Comey has denied wrongdoing and is set to appear Thursday in federal court for his arraignment.
While sources told ABC News that leadership at the DOJ expressed reservations about pursuing the case, Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel went on to publicly cheer news of Comey’s indictment in news interviews and social media posts.
The next week, the administration moved to fire a top national security prosecutor in the office, Michael Ben’Ary, over a misleading social media post that falsely suggested he was among the prosecutors who resisted charging Comey.
Ben’Ary was leading a major case against one of the alleged plotters of the Abbey Gate bombing during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In a scathing departure letter, Ben’Ary set his sights squarely on the Justice Department’s leadership and labeled his removal as just one in a series of recent moves taken to root out career officials for political reasons at the expense of the nation’s security.
“This example highlights the most troubling aspect of the current operations of the Department of Justice: the leadership is more concerned with punishing the President’s perceived enemies than they are with protecting our national security,” Ben’Ary wrote. “Justice for Americans killed and injured by our enemies should not be contingent on what someone in the Department of Justice sees in their social media feed that day.”
The DOJ declined to comment when asked about Ben’Ary’s letter.
Those actions have caused unprecedented turmoil at the Eastern District, which oversees some of the nation’s most sensitive national security, terrorism and espionage investigations.
Current and former officials say that turmoil has reverberated further across the Justice Department’s workforce around the country, with attorneys concerned they’ll face professional repercussions if they resist taking part in politicized investigations or prosecutions.
On Monday, nearly 300 DOJ employees who left the department since Trump’s inauguration released a letter on the eve of Bondi’s hearing describing her leadership as “appalling” in its treatment of the career workforce and the elimination of longstanding norms of independence from the White House.
“We call on Congress to exercise its oversight responsibilities far more vigorously,” the former employees said. “Members in both chambers and on both sides of the aisle must provide a meaningful check on the abuses we’re witnessing. And we call on all Americans — whose safety, prosperity, and rights depend on a strong DOJ — to speak out against its destruction.”
The DOJ declined to comment on the letter.
Bondi will likely also face heavy scrutiny over conflicting statements out of the administration on the Epstein files, after the Justice Department and FBI said in a July letter that no further releases were warranted and that there was no evidence suggesting others participated or enabled Epstein’s abuse of minor girls.
Democrats have accused the administration of seeking to cover up any mentions of Trump or high-profile appointees who had past associations with Epstein, which the administration has denied.
Trump and Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking young girls and women, were friends in the 1990s but the president said the relationship soured after Epstein poached some employees from Trump’s Florida club after he explicitly warned him not to do so.
An effort underway in the House of Representatives to hold a vote on a measure that would demand the administration release the entirety of the files has been put on hold after Speaker Mike Johnson sent the House home amid the ongoing government shutdown.
The recent rise in acts of political violence will also likely be a central focus of questions for Bondi. Trump has recently ordered the department to ramp up investigations into so-called “radical left” organizations that he and other senior White House officials have alleged, without providing evidence, as helping to fund perpetrators who have attacked federal law enforcement officials dispatched around the country.
Just days after Trump’s comments, a senior official in the Justice Department ordered several U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country to prepare to open sweeping criminal investigations in to the Open Society Foundations founded by billionaire George Soros, naming criminal statutes ranging from robbery, material support for terrorism and racketeering, ABC News previously confirmed.
In a statement, the Open Society Foundations called the accusations “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with and undermine the First Amendment right to free speech.”
In her most recent appearances before the House and Senate in late June, Bondi sought to brush off pointed questions from Democrats by repeatedly deflecting to crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in their states and districts that were among the briefing materials she brought with her to the hearings.
She has also dismissed any characterization of the Justice Department appearing to work in lockstep with the White House as “politicization” of law enforcement. Bondi and other senior DOJ officials have instead argued that the two federal cases brought against Trump by a special counsel under the Biden Administration represented a far more egregious example of weaponization, echoing grievances leveled at the department by Trump.
“Whether you’re a former FBI director, whether you’re a former head of an intel community, whether you are a current state and local elected official, whether you are a billionaire funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office — everything is on the table,” Bondi said in a Fox News appearance last month. “We will investigate and will end the weaponization — no longer will there be a two-tier system of justice.”
