Trump greenlights Putin sit-down, even if Russian leader does not meet with Zelenskyy
WASHINGTON − President Donald Trump said he's willing to meet with Vladimir Putin, regardless of whether the Russian leader agrees to sit down with Ukraine's president to discuss an end to the war.
"No, he doesn't. No, no. They would like to meet with me, and I'll do whatever I can to stop the killing," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
The potential summit next week between Trump and Putin had hit a snag over Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's possible inclusion, prior to Trump's Aug. 7 declaration.
More: Top Trump aide accuses India of financing Russia's war in Ukraine
An aide to Putin said the Russian government agreed to and was preparing for a bilateral meeting with Trump. But a White House official stipulated that Putin must first agree to meet with Zelenskyy before a Trump sit-down can take place.
Putin told reporters on Aug. 7 that he had "no objection" to meeting with Zelenskyy "in principle." Still, "certain conditions must be in place first. Unfortunately, we are still far from that point," the Russian leader said.
Zelenskyy declared on social media: "Ukraine is not afraid of meetings and expects the same brave approach from the Russian side."
More: Russia claims capture of Chasiv Yar in eastern Ukraine after 16-month battle
The back-and-forth came after Trump special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Russian leaders in Moscow ahead of an Aug. 8 deadline for Putin's government to strike a peace deal with Ukraine or be hit with stiffer sanctions from the United States.
Both nations described the conversations as constructive, though no immediate progress toward a peace deal appeared to be made.
An initial round of economic punishments in the form of higher tariffs on India, a major purchaser of Russian oil, were announced this week, and U.S. officials have said more sanctions are on their way.
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Aug. 7 that it would be up to Putin. "We're going to see what he has to say. It's going to be up to him. Very disappointed," Trump said of the sanctions deadline.
Trump said on an Aug. 6 call with European leaders that he intended to meet both Putin and Zelenskyy, the the New York Times reported. Zelenskyy said he was also on the phone. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte and Vice President JD Vance also participated in the call, sources familiar with the conversation said.
Trump told reporters during an Aug. 6 event with Apple's CEO at the White House that "there's a very good prospect" Putin and Zelenskyy would agree to a summit.
"I've been disappointed before with this one," Trump said.
The last U.S. leader to meet with Putin was former President Joe Biden during a 2021 summit in Switzerland. Trump and Putin met in Finland in 2018. Both meetings took place before Russia war launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
No location has been set for the potential upcoming summit between Putin and Trump. Putin said on Aug. 7 that the United Arab Emirates had offered to host.
Turkey hosted a previous round of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine that Zelenskyy challenged Putin to show up to in person in May. Trump said he'd come, too, if he thought it would help. None of the leaders ended up attending.
The Kremlin said on Aug. 7 that while Witkoff mentioned a trilateral summit with Trump and Zelenskyy, "there was no specific discussion on this topic."
"Our suggestion primarily focuses on preparing for a bilateral meeting with Donald Trump. It is our belief that ensuring this meeting is a success and yields tangible results is what matters most," Putin aide Yury Ushako said.
The State Department referred questions to the White House. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a Fox Business interview on Aug. 6 that if talks progressed, an opportunity would hopefully "present itself very soon" for Trump to meet Putin and Zelenskyy "in the near future."
"There's still many impediments to overcome," he said after Witkoff's Moscow meetings.
More: Ukraine arrests air force officer for spying on Western-supplied fighter jets
Zelenskyy urged the U.S. and Europe to keep the pressure on Moscow.
"The near future must show what the consequences will be if Russia continues to drag out the war and disrupt constructive efforts," he said in an X post after a call with French President Emmanuel Macron.
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Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq edge higher as Wall Street eyes Trump moves on Fed
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Advocacy group sues Justice Department and FBI for access to Epstein records
WASHINGTON (AP) — An advocacy group sued the Justice Department and the FBI on Friday for records detailing their handling of the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The legal organization Democracy Forward is seeking records related to senior administration officials' communication about Epstein documents and any regarding correspondence between Epstein and President Donald Trump. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, appears to the be first of its kind. The group says it submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the records related to communications about the case in late July that have not yet been fulfilled. 'The court should intervene urgently to ensure the public has access to the information they need about this extraordinary situation,' said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of the Democratic-aligned group, in a statement. The federal government often shields records related to criminal investigations from public view. Democracy Forward has filed dozens of lawsuits against Trump's Republican administration, challenging a wide range of its policies and the president's executive orders. The case has been subject to heightened public focus since the Justice Department said last month it would not release additional documents from the case. The decision sparked frustration and anger among online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and elements of Trump's base who had hoped to see proof of a government cover-up. The Trump administration has sought to unseal grand jury transcripts, though that has been denied by a judge in Florida. U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg in West Palm Beach said the request to release grand jury documents from 2005 and 2007 did not meet any of the extraordinary exceptions under federal law that could make them public. A similar request for the work of a different grand jury is pending in New York. The House Oversight Committee has also subpoenaed the Justice Department for files on the investigation, part of a congressional probe that lawmakers believe may show links to Trump and other former top officials. Since Epstein's 2019 death in a New York jail cell as he awaited trial for sex trafficking charges, conservative conspiracists have stoked theories about what information investigators gathered on Epstein and who else knew about his sexual abuse of teenage girls. Trump has denied prior knowledge of Epstein's crimes and claimed he cut off their relationship long ago, and he has repeatedly tried to move past the Justice Department's decision not to release a full accounting of the investigation. But lawmakers from both major political parties have refused to let it go.
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Conservative influencers accuse each other of not being racist enough
As President Trump's base begins to view him as a lame duck, a familiar dynamic is taking hold: Like gangs battling over physical turf, prominent Trump supporters are jockeying for a bigger slice of the MAGA influencer economy. The problem? Without any institutional gatekeeping, the only way to rise is to drag someone else down. Think of crabs in a bucket, but everyone is livestreaming. Enter Nick Fuentes: white nationalist, mascot to incels and professional radioactive embarrassment. You may remember him from that cursed Mar-a-Lago dinner with Trump and Kanye West — a meal that looked less like a political summit and more like the world's worst episode of 'Celebrity Rehab.' Lately, Fuentes has been venting his spleen at Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Vice President JD Vance — the golden children of the 'new New Righ,' and, in at least one case, a possible 2028 Republican presidential contender. Fuentes's tone is familiar: The bitter whine of a true believer watching the tourists cash in. In a recent podcast with Owens, Carlson (my former boss at The Daily Caller) dismissed Fuentes as a 'weird little gay kid in his basement in Chicago.' (For what it's worth, Fuentes says he's not gay, just involuntarily celibate — a distinction that seems to matter a lot to him.) Fuentes responded with his usual cocktail of resentment and delusional self-mythologizing. Tucker, he noted, is an heir to a TV dinner dynasty, a product of boarding schools and the offspring of a Reagan-era bureaucrat. 'Now he's going to be the spokesperson for all white America?' Fuentes scoffed. 'Now he's gonna roll up his sleeves [and act like], 'I just like to hunt and fish in my log cabin. I care about Klarna and credit card debt.'' Fuentes — never one to miss an opportunity for aggrieved autobiography — then proclaimed himself the real voice of disaffected white America. A 'precocious' college student, red-pilled by Trump, punished for asking the 'hard questions' about Israel years before Tucker and Owens got around to it. Picture Joan of Arc, but with a ring light. From there, the accusations flew: Carlson is allegedly a CIA brat (his father was a journalist and a diplomat, but that's the rumor they spread), a neocon plant (thanks to his stint at the Weekly Standard) and a phony populist who didn't 'discover' working-class politics until it polled well on YouTube. Even Richard Spencer — an embittered former poster boy and has-been of the alt-right — weighed in, accusing Carlson and company of playing footsie with white nationalism without the courage to actually own it. It's an updated version of the Southern Strategy, he said — skip the racial slurs, just talk about welfare queens and school buses. Owens got the Fuentes treatment, too. According to Fuentes, she parlayed her identity into a DEI sinecure at Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, married rich and now thinks she's the voice of Middle America. As for Vance, Fuentes dismissed him as a man who couldn't even marry a white, much less represent whites. 'He named his kid Vivek,' Fuentes said — as if naming a child something not pulled from a Confederate military roster was an act of betrayal. Ordinarily, this would be dismissed as garden-variety internet bile — petty, performative and deeply online. But some of these figures under attack are poised to inherit the right, provided they can strike the balance between MAGA street cred and polished respectability — a line the 'original' racists don't want to allow them to walk. The underlying grievance is that folks like Carlson, Owens and Vance aren't truly committed. They haven't suffered for the cause, haven't been canceled, deplatformed or disgraced. In other words, they haven't paid their dues. To them — Fuentes leads a group of white nationalist activists called Groypers — Tucker is stealing material from the ideological underground. Owens is an opportunist who packaged her politics for maximum virality. Vance is a convert who doesn't practice what he preaches. It's the old punk-rock grievance: we were here first, and now you're rich because you cleaned up a bit and added background vocals. I'm left wondering — do they have a point? To paraphrase a now-cliched expression: No, you do not, under any circumstances, 'gotta hand it to' Fuentes and Spencer. Still, there's a kind of logic that says authentically embracing the darkness is more 'honest' than winking at it. The ideologies peddled by Fuentes and Spencer are repugnant. Their whining is not noble, and their martyrdom is not real. But they have sniffed out a core truth about the MAGA movement: It is populated by rich kids cosplaying as working-class saviors (in between Fox News hits and Turning Point Action panels). What offends the out-and-proud racists is the feeling that the populist right has been taken over by influencers with soft hands and trust funds, who pretend that they speak for the broken white working class. But this isn't primarily a civil war over principles (as twisted as some of those principles may be) — it's brand warfare between the purists and the polished. The former are furious that the grift they helped build now belongs to better-looking influencers with more money and nicer lighting.
