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Right-wing Trump ally Abelardo de la Espriella has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday's runoff presidential election in Colombia, defeating leftist Senator Iván Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro. De la Espriella ran a fearmongering, "tough-on-crime" campaign, promising to build mega-prisons inspired by El Salvador's authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, to bomb "narcoterrorist camps" and to abandon Petro's peace efforts. His reported victory is also a win for U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is waging an intensifying "war on drugs" across Latin America, targeting left-wing leaders like Petro with false allegations and threats of military intervention.
"De la Espriella clearly represents a criminal approach to politics: lying, propaganda, coordination and collusion with criminal narcotrafficking, restriction of rights, and money laundering," says longtime Colombian activist Manuel Rozental. With his victory, says Rozental, "We expect to have military operations and a U.S. intervention within the country. We expect to have human rights abuses. We expect to have militarization. And it's all for the extraction of resources and the link of drug trafficking to the U.S. government, U.S. interests and global mafia."
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After widespread bipartisan outcry, the Justice Department says it is permanently abandoning plans for a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund. Widely branded as a "slush fund," it was expected to reward President Donald Trump's supporters, including those who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The fund was announced in May as part of a settlement in Trump's personal lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax data. That case was recently reopened, after dozens of former federal judges filed a motion alleging that Trump's actions were "collusive." As Nancy Gertner, one of the judges who joined the motion, explains, "What happened in this case was, essentially, Trump was suing himself. There was no question that Trump was on both sides of the 'v.'" Gertner and her fellow judges are represented by attorney Matt Platkin, who says, "It is illegal for the president to ask for any IRS audit to be opened or closed. That is a federal crime."
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The Justice Department has reportedly launched a criminal investigation into the writer E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Donald Trump twice, for sexual abuse and defamation. According to CNN, The New York Times and other outlets, the investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in a deposition, even though a federal appeals court upheld the rulings in 2024.
In 2019, Carroll published a memoir describing an encounter in the 1990s when she says Trump sexually assaulted her in a department store. When Trump denied the account, Carroll sued him and won $5 million in damages, with a unanimous New York jury finding Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation. After Trump made disparaging remarks about Carroll, she sued him again and won a second defamation judgment for over $83 million. (She has yet to collect any money pending appeals by Trump.)
"The use of the Justice Department to go after E. Jean Carroll in this way is completely unprecedented," says law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer, who says the probe is part of an obvious "vendetta" by Trump. "It's frankly galling."
See our interview with director Ivy Meeropol about her documentary Ask E. Jean.
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"We have to fight like hell. Today, tomorrow and all the days after," she said.
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