Talk of the Town
(WASHINGTON) — A Pentagon watchdog concluded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth risked exposing classified information that could have endangered U.S. troops when he relayed details about a planned military strike in Yemen using the Signal commercial messaging app, according to a person who read the classified investigative report and another source with knowledge of the findings.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
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(WASHINGTON) — Steve Bannon hasn’t worked in the White House for years, but he played a pivotal, and previously unreported, role in the explosive meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy earlier this year that changed the course of U.S. policy toward Ukraine.
The story is first reported in an excerpt in The Atlantic magazine from ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl’s upcoming book, “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America.”
Karl reports on a meeting of Trump’s national security team shortly before Zelenskyy’s visit to Washington in February where Trump stopped the meeting and asked then-national security adviser Michael Waltz to “get Steve Bannon” on the phone.
“Hey, Steve, I’ve got the boys here,” Trump said. “I’m going to put you on speaker.”
Trump, keeping Bannon on speakerphone for half an hour, had the MAGA firebrand make his case to the national security team against the deal, and Zelenskyy, who he referred to as “that punk.”
“I f—— hate it,” Bannon said, arguing that the deal “ties us to Ukraine.”
“If that punk comes here, he’s going to want a security guarantee,” Bannon said of Zelenskyy to Trump and his top advisers. He told the group they “can’t trust Zelenskyy” or “any of the Europeans.”
The previously unreported conversation set the tone for Trump’s combative meeting in the Oval Office with Zelenskyy, which devolved into a tense shouting match in front of reporters and television cameras.
“You’re not acting at all thankful,” Trump said to the Ukrainian leader. “You’re gambling with World War III.”
Zelenskyy left the meeting early that afternoon, and the relationship between the United States and Ukraine was at an all-time low since the start of the conflict with Russia.
While their relationship recovered — Zelenskyy visited the White House this past week seeking more American military assistance — the moment underscored the volatile dynamic between the two leaders, and the abiding influence of Bannon over Trump’s thinking.
In “Retribution,” Karl also reports that Bannon managed to keep in touch with Trump and his camp discreetly from federal prison, while he served four months after he was found guilty of contempt of Congress.
Bannon developed a “coded” system that allowed his daughter and top aide to pass along messages to Trump via the limited email communications he was allowed in prison, which were subject to review by the Bureau of Prisons, according to the excerpt of Karl’s book in The Atlantic.
“Bannon claims that an investigative officer at Danbury — an official he described as ‘pure MAGA’ — had warned him that his communications were being reviewed by ‘Main Justice,’ otherwise known as the Biden administration,” Karl writes.
“So he developed a coded system to let ‘the girls’ know which messages were to be passed on to Trump or to those around him, in particular the aide Boris Epshteyn: “I had just a system to get to Boris, kind of in quasi-code, through [daughter Maureen] into [aide Grace Chong],’ he said. Was there literally a code word? ‘Well, we had — ‘ he began, before catching himself. I don’t — the Bureau of Prisons could go back through it. We had a way that they could get to him,'” Karl writes.
According to Karl, Bannon used the system to tell Trump campaign officials he thought they were making a “huge mistake” by trying to “reduce tensions” across the country after the July 2024 assassination attempt against then-candidate Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Editor’s note: Profanity included in the book has been altered for this account and some text has been edited for style. “Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign that Changed America,” by ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl, is being published Oct. 28 and is available for preorder at Penguin Random House.
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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday is expected to posthumously award conservative activist Charlie Kirk the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Kirk was fatally shot on Sept. 10 while speaking at Utah Valley University on the first stop of his The American Comeback Tour, which invited college students to debate hot-button issues.
Trump was the first to announce later that day that Kirk had died, and the next day said he would be be awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom as he hailed the Turning Point USA founder “a giant of his generation.”
The ceremony comes after Trump returned back to Washington in the early hours of Tuesday morning from a trip to the Middle East to celebrate a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that he helped broker.
Oct. 14 is Kirk’s birthday. He would have turned 32. The House and Senate previously approved a resolution to mark the date as a “National Day of Remembrance.”
Trump said last Friday that he was coming back from overseas for Kirk, who called “a friend of mine, a friend of all of us.”
“It’s the greatest honor,” Trump said of the award. “And Erika, his beautiful wife, is going to be here, and a lot of people are gonna be here.”
The president and Erika Kirk shared a heartfelt moment on stage at Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, where tens of thousands of people gathered to pay tribute to Kirk, a key ally to Trump and a friend to many inside his administration.
The two hugged after Trump’s closing remarks and after Erika Kirk said she’d forgiven her husband’s killer.
Kirk was influential in building Trump’s movement and was particularly influential among young conservatives. But some of his comments on gun violence, LGBTQ issues, race and more drew criticism from liberals and others.
At his memorial service, Trump and other leading conservative figures embraced Kirk as a “martyr.”
“I know I speak for everyone here today when I say that none of us will ever forget Charlie Kirk, and neither now will history,” Trump said at the time. “Because while Charlie has been reunited with his creator in heaven, his voice on earth will let go through the generations, and his name will live forever in the eternal chronicle of America’s greatest patriots.”
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(WASHINGTON) — As voices across the political spectrum call to lower the temperature following the shooting death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Wednesday, many in the MAGA world are mourning his loss, with some enraged and escalating their rhetoric online.
Across social media, some of the most popular voices in the pro-Trump movement are calling for a crackdown on Democrats and for the Trump administration to take action in the aftermath of the killing.
In private, peers of Kirk say they are shocked and horrified by the shooting — with some MAGA influencers telling ABC News they may be hesitant to do public events in the future — but they are also equally angry and demanding consequences.
“This will be the real turning point,” one person told ABC News.
“The best way President Trump can reinforce Charlie’s legacy is by cracking down on the Left with the full force of the government,” said Laura Loomer in a post on X after Kirk’s death was announced.
“No mercy. Jail every single Leftist who makes a threat of political violence,” Loomer added.
In an earlier post, she wrote that “we must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has largely avoided politics in recent months, posted that “the Left is the party of murder” and added “if they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die.”
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo called for a J. Edgar Hoover–style campaign to target the “radical left.” Hoover, as head of the FBI, led a sweeping, controversial crackdown amid the civil rights movement through surveillance and other means to target political groups.
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos,” he wrote on X.
Pro-Trump influencer Joey Mannarino, who has over 600,000 followers on X, urged Trump to take an El Salvador–style approach — a reference to the country’s controversial campaign of mass arrests and suspended civil liberties, which drew accusations of authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
“Trump has to go full Bukele. Now. Fill the jails up with these terrorists,” Mannarino said.
Elsewhere, on Steve Bannon’s podcast, MAGA figure Jack Posobiec called for retribution.
“There’s never going to be another Charlie Kirk, but there’s never going to be another assassin to take out someone like the way they did because of what comes next will be swift, quick and it will be retribution,” Posobiec said.
One word in particular was echoed by leading voices in the MAGA movement: “War.”
Lone time Trump ally Bannon called Kirk’s death an assassination, remembering Kirk as a “warrior.”
“Charlie Kirk did not die,” Bannon said on his WarRoom show Wednesday, adding, “Charlie Kirk was assassinated today in Utah.”
In the conversation with Posobiec, Bannon said that his friend Kirk was a “casualty” whose life was taken in cold blood.
“Charlie Kirk is a casualty of the political war,” Bannon said. He also said, “We are at war in this country and you have to have steely resolve.”
Others echoed Bannon’s sentiment.
“THIS IS WAR,” the account Libs of TikTok posted on X after the shooting. The post has more than 78,000 likes.
Venture capitalist and Musk ally Shaun Maguire said in a post, “We’re not supposed to say this but the truth is we’re at War.”
And far-right radio host Alex Jones speaking in a video he posted on X declared, “we’re at war.”
Some prominent Republicans, however, called for an end to political violence on both sides of the political aisle.
Former President George Bush released a statement saying, “Violence and vitriol must be purged from the public square. Members of other political parties are not our enemies; they are our fellow citizens,” he wrote.
In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing, House Speaker Mike Johnson said during an appearance on Fox News “We have got to turn the heat down a little bit. We got to have civil discourse.” “That’s what’s so important for us to remember,” Johnson said. “We shouldn’t regard one another as enemies. We’re fellow Americans, and we should have vigorous debate, but it cannot lead to political violence. It’s just too much.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told CBS the day after the shooting, “we cannot let what happened yesterday be the norm.”
“Unfortunately, we’ve seen politics degrading where some people feel if they disagree with you politically, they’ve got to try to go and eliminate those people,” Scalise said. “That is not what America is. You know, we solve our differences at the ballot box.”
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