(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump on Wednesday sent a message to Russian President Vladimir Putin telling him to make a deal now to end the war in Ukraine, threatening economic consequences if he doesn’t.
“It’s time to ‘MAKE A DEAL.’ NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!” Trump wrote in a new social media post.
Trump indicated that if a deal isn’t made quickly, he would place high levels of taxes, tariffs and sanctions on Russia.
“Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT’S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don’t make a “deal,” and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries,” Trump said.
Trump then threatened that it can be done “the easy way, or the hard way.”
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday night, Trump indicated he’d be speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin in person.
“I’ll be meeting with President Putin,” Trump said, but didn’t say when that might happen.
Trump also indicated that Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy was willing to come to the negotiating table, but is unsure if Putin would, too.
“He told me he wants to make a deal. He wants to make — Zelenskyy wants to make a deal. I don’t know if Putin does,” Trump said.
During the ABC News debate in September, Trump claimed he would settle the war between Russia and Ukraine before he got into office.
At one point, he had also signaled that the war would be over within 24 hours of becoming president.
(WASHINGTON) — An attorney representing two women who testified before the House Ethics Committee told ABC News in an exclusive interview former Rep. Matt Gaetz paid both his adults clients for sex.
Florida attorney Joel Leppard told ABC News’ Juju Chang that one of his clients also witnessed Gaetz having sex with a third woman — who was then 17 years old — at a house party in Florida.
“She testified [that] in July of 2017, at this house party, she was walking out to the pool area, and she looked to her right, and she saw Representative Gaetz having sex with her friend, who was 17,” Leppard said.
The Justice Department spent years probing the allegations against Gaetz, including allegations of obstruction of justice, before informing Gaetz last year that it would not bring charges. Gaetz has long denied any wrongdoing related to the allegations investigated during Justice Department probe.
“Matt Gaetz will be the next Attorney General. He’s the right man for the job and will end the weaponization of our justice system. These are baseless allegations intended to derail the second Trump administration. The Biden Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years and cleared him of wrongdoing. The only people who went to prison over these allegations were those lying about Matt Gaetz,” Alex Pfeiffer, Trump transition spokesman said.
Leppard, who has called for the House Ethics Committee to release its report amid Gaetz’s nomination to serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s attorney general, told ABC News that the former congressman paid both of his clients for sex using Venmo.
“Just to be clear, both of your clients testified that they were paid by Representative Gaetz to have sex?” Chang asked.
“That’s correct. The House was very clear about that and went through each. They essentially put the Venmo payments on the screen and asked about them. And my clients repeatedly testified, ‘What was this payment for?’ ‘That was for sex,'” Leppard said.
Leppard’s interview with ABC News comes days after he publicly called for the House Ethics Committee to be released.
“As the Senate considers former Rep. Gaetz’s nomination for attorney general, several questions demand answers,” Leppard said. “What if multiple credible witnesses provided evidence of behavior that would constitute serious criminal violations?”
The House Ethics Committee is expected to meet on Wednesday and discuss its report of Rep. Matt Gaetz and potentially vote on its release despite the fact that the investigation ended when Gaetz resigned from the House, multiple sources tell ABC News.
The news comes after the attorney on Friday first told ABC News that one of his clients had witnessed Gaetz have sex with a minor amid mounting pressure on the House Ethics Committee to release its report on its probe into the Florida congressman.
The two witnesses, who ABC News is not naming, both allegedly attended parties with the congressman and testified in both the federal and House Ethics investigations.
Gaetz’s one-time friend Joel Greenberg is currently serving an 11-year prison sentence after reaching a deal with prosecutors in May 2021 in which he pleaded guilty to multiple federal crimes including sex trafficking of a woman when she was a minor and introducing her to other “adult men” who also had sex with her when she was underage
Attorney John Clune, who represents the former minor at the center of the probe, called for the release of the Ethics Committee’s report on Thursday.
“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as Attorney General is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events. We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses,” Clune said in a statement.
The woman, who is now in her 20s, according to sources, testified to the House Ethics Committee that the now-former Florida congressman had sex with her when she was 17 years old and he was in Congress, ABC News previously reported.
Gaetz faces an increasingly uphill nomination process in the Senate, with at least five Republican senators signaling skepticism that he could get enough support to be confirmed. President-elect Trump has repeatedly urged GOP leadership to bypass the traditional confirmation process through recess appointments, where Trump could appoint his cabinet while Congress is out of session.
(WASHINGTON) — Top officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security on Thursday drew bipartisan fire for declining to testify in public at a Senate hearing on “worldwide threats” and instead offering to testify in a classified setting.
Both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Homeland Security Committee expressed anger at what they called Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s “refusal” to testify in public.
“In a shocking departure from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s longstanding tradition of transparency and oversight of the threats facing our nation, for the first time in more than 15 years, the Homeland Security and FBI Director have refused to appear before the Committee to provide public testimony at our annual hearing on Threats to the Homeland,” Chairman Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, said in a statement.
Peters said it was “their choice” to not provide public testimony for the American people.
“Americans deserve transparency, public answers about the threats we face,” Peters said.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, went a step further and said he “looked forward to Director Wray’s resignation.”
“This is Mayorkas & Wray giving the middle finger to the American people,” he tweeted.
While it wasn’t immediately clear specifically why they declined to testify in public, a Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement that Mayorkas has appeared before Congress more than 30 times.
“DHS and the FBI have offered to the Committee a classified briefing to discuss the threats to the Homeland in detail, providing the Committee with the information it needs to conduct its work in the months ahead,” a the spokesperson said in a statement. “DHS and the FBI already have shared with the Committee and other Committees, and with the American public, extensive unclassified information about the current threat environment, including the recently published Homeland Threat Assessment.”
The FBI said in a statement they’ve “repeatedly” showed their commitment to being transparent with the American people.
“We remain committed to sharing information about the continuously evolving threat environment facing our nation and the extraordinary work the men and women of the FBI are doing — here at home and around the world — to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States,” according to an FBI statement. “FBI leaders have testified extensively in public settings about the current threat environment and believe the Committee would benefit most from further substantive discussions and additional information that can only be provided in a classified setting.”
(WASHINGTON) — President-elect Donald Trump has proposed a plan to eliminate the Department of Education to “send all education work and needs back to the states,” according to his Agenda47 policy platform.
According to education experts, an end to the Department of Education could leave billions of funds, scholarships, grants and more hanging in the balance for the millions of K-12 and college students attending schools in the U.S.
The DOE was established as a Cabinet-level agency in 1979 under then-President Jimmy Carter, but was initially created in the late 1800s to collect data on what is working effectively in education for policymakers and educators.
The education agency facilitated the expansion of federal support for schooling over the years. After World War II, the GI Bill expanded education assistance for war veterans. After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik into space, the agency led to the expansion of science, math and foreign language instruction in elementary and secondary schools and supported vocational-technical training.
In the 1960s and 1970s, anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts shaped the Department of Education’s mission to provide equal access to education nationwide. This led to the founding of Title I funding to reduce educational achievement gaps between low-income and rural students and non-low-income schools.
The DOE also holds schools accountable for enforcing non-discrimination laws like Title IX based on gender, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Americans with Disabilities Act based on disability and Title VI based on race.
Federal Student Aid, awarding more than $120 billion a year in grants, work-study funds, and low-interest loans to approximately 13 million students, is also backed by the Department of Education.
The Department also holds schools accountable under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires each state to provide data on subject performance, graduation rates, suspensions, absenteeism, teacher qualifications, and more.
The department states on its website that it does not develop school curricula, set requirements for enrollment and graduation, or establish or accredit schools or universities.
However, it has played a major role in school funding for decades, particularly as state investment in K-12 schools worsened amid the 2008 Great Recession.
According to the Education Law Center, U.S. students lost almost $600 billion from states’ disinvestment in their public schools in the decade following the Great Recession.
The complicated nature of a department closure includes administering the billions of DOE funds directly to the individual states, according to higher education expert Clare McCann. McCann said doling out the money is something skilled employees at the DOE would be equipped to do.
“There’s a reason the Department of Education was created and it was to have this kind of in-house expertise and policy background on these [education] issues,” McCann told ABC News, adding, “The civil servants who work at the Department of Education are true experts in the field.”
Education Analyst Neal McCluskey at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues that dismantling the department could be as simple as giving states the funding, but allowing them to decide how it’s administered.
“What I’ve seen most often, and I’ve written about myself, is you could, for instance, take all the K-12 money, Title One, IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] etc. — You would, of course, have to change the law, but one of the things you could do is block grant it; You’d say, ‘we’re going to fund these things, but we’re going to give it to the state so they can decide how it’s administered,'” he told ABC News.
Some education experts like Wendy A. Paterson, a professor and dean at Buffalo State University’s School of Education, told ABC News in an interview that she “could not see how serving families and children under the offices of the Department of Education could continue” without a federal department.
Paterson said that if funding itself is changed, it will likely worsen the national teacher shortage and impact the targeted communities the Department of Education specializes in — including low-income, disabled or FAFSA-seeking students.
“There’s an intimate relationship between our schools and the society that we create and that we pass along to our children, and it’s that important,” said Paterson. “So if we don’t have a federal organization that acknowledges the importance of schools and post-secondary education and the right of all children to have access to education, what are we saying about democracy?”
Why does Trump want to get rid of the Department of Education?
In a 2023 statement on his plans for schools, Donald Trump said that “one thing I’ll be doing very early in the administration is closing up the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., and sending all education and education work and needs back to the states.”
“We want them to run the education of our children because they’ll do a much better job of it,” said Trump.
Trump’s Agenda47 does not state how the dismantling of the department would impact the programs the Department of Education runs.
However, on the campaign trail, in interviews with Elon Musk and on “Fox & Friends,” Trump has repeatedly said he wants to shutter the agency and instead choose one education department official for his Cabinet, aligning with Trump’s goals of dismantling “government bureaucracy” and restructuring the government agencies for more efficiency.
Several prominent conservatives and Republican figures have similarly proposed department closures over the years, including Ronald Reagan, Vivek Ramaswamy, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
McCluskey said in a recent essay that the department is “unconstitutional,” arguing that it exerts too much power over schools above local and state entities.
House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx has also argued that it’s not a constitutional requirement to have such a department: “I can’t find the word education in there [the Constitution] as one of the duties and responsibilities of Congress or the federal government,” Rep. Foxx, R-North Carolina, told ABC News.
Is it possible to eliminate it?
While possible in theory, education policy experts who spoke with ABC News suggest that would be an extremely chaotic – and unrealistic — task on Jan. 20, 2025, Inauguration Day.
The bold initiative won’t happen immediately, but McCluskey told ABC News it could be done through Congress.
“The Department of Education was created through legislation,” McCluskey told ABC News. “Legislation comes through Congress. If you want to take the Department of Education apart, you have to do that through legislation,” McCluskey added.
At this point, without congressional approval, McCluskey said the campaign trail messaging by the president-elect has no standing.
“I think that what is said on the campaigns and what actually is done have to often be two different things because, in campaigns, politicians say a lot of things that make it seem like it’s easy to do what they want to do,” McCluskey said.
“No president can just fire everybody in the Department of Education and have one person administer those programs,” he added.
Trump’s education policy
Trump, however, does list several federal policies he hopes to implement in schools nationwide. This includes instructing a future education department to cease programs that he claims “promote the concept of sex and gender transition, at any age” as well as punish teachers or schools who do so.
He hopes to create a credentialing body to certify teachers “who embrace patriotic values and support the American way of life,” though he does not further elaborate on what that consists of.
He also would prevent Title IX from allowing transgender women to compete in sports. He said he will create funding preferences and favorable treatment for states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure and adopt merit pay for educators for grades K-12 and allow parents to vote for principals.
