Karoline Leavitt Can’t Explain Why Trump Is So Optimistic About Putin

On Monday, President Donald Trump was caught on a hot mic saying that he thought Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to make a deal “for him,” to end the war on Ukraine. 

When a reporter asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday what led Trump to that conclusion, she offered a meandering nonanswer. 

‘Well, the president has learned a lot, which is part of the reason he opened up this dialogue,” Leavitt responded. “The previous administration who oversaw the beginning of this war refused to talk, and President Trump has always said ‘in order to learn, in order to move the ball forward with diplomacy and towards peace, you have to have open dialogue. And so that’s why the president has had several conversations by phone, and of course an in-person meeting last Friday with President Putin … he’s understanding what both sides want, what both sides are going to have to give up. And he has always said, ‘in order to get a good deal, both sides are going to have to walk away a little bit unhappy.” 

In short, Leavitt once again entirely avoided answering a very direct question. 

Putin has not significantly changed his behavior or goals recently, as far as we can tell. And he has consistently shirked the idea of a ceasefire, while continuing to batter Ukraine and encroach upon more of its territory. Any “deal” that happens under these circumstances would only leave one side “unhappy.”   

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was forced Tuesday to walk back Donald Trump’s claim that he had gotten Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Delivering a readout at a White House press briefing, Leavitt claimed that Putin had “agreed to begin the next phase of the peace process, a meeting between President Putin and President Zelenskiy” during a phone call with Trump the day before. Trump had made similar claims himself on Monday.

But when one reporter pointed out that Moscow hadn’t voiced any such commitment, Leavitt was left to explain that the Trump administration was still working to secure the second summit.

“The Kremlin seemed to indicate that Putin did not firmly agree to a bilateral. Did he agree to have a sit-down with just Zelenskiy on the phone yesterday?” asked a reporter.

“I can assure you that the U.S. government and the Trump administration is working with both Russia and Ukraine to make that bilateral happen as we speak,” Leavitt replied, before quickly moving on.

The Kremlin was quick to dump cold water on Trump’s meager wins from his meeting with European leaders this week. Following Putin and Trump’s purportedly productive conversation, Moscow released a statement claiming that the leaders had merely discussed “the idea of raising the level of Russian and Ukrainian representation in the negotiations,” and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also refused to commit to a meeting.

Trump said Monday that he “sort of” set up a meeting between the two leaders but added that ultimately, “they’re the ones that have to call the shots.” Still, the president hopes that a bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelenskiy would be followed by a trilateral meeting, this time including himself.

New court records indicate that the high-profile arrest of Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in May was a top-down directive from the Trump administration.

President Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche reportedly
ordered the arrest personally.

Baraka was arrested on May 9, as he and other New Jersey lawmakers, including Representative LaMonica McIver, attempted to conduct oversight at an ICE facility. Baraka and company received mixed messages from the agents there: The mayor was reportedly invited onto the property, left when he was requested to do so, but was nonetheless arrested, in a chaotic event, for trespassing.

McIver is fighting assault charges related to the incident, which she claims are politically motivated. The Newark mayor’s case, on the other hand, was dismissed in May.

But a question remained: Had the order for Baraka’s arrest come down from on high? The answer—apparently, yes—came in a filing by McIver’s defense team, citing “video evidence” produced by the government in discovery, which was first reported by Politico Tuesday.

At 2:37 p.m. on the day of the incident, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent at the facility reportedly took a phone call, “then immediately announced that Mayor Baraka, and anyone who was not a Member of Congress, must leave or be arrested.” The agent told the mayor to leave, and he complied.

The lawmakers eventually came to believe they would, in fact, be permitted to conduct oversight. But minutes later, the HSI agent had another phone call, in which he told his interlocutor: “I am arresting the mayor.… Even though he stepped out, I am going to put him in cuffs.”

Turning to his fellow federal officers, the agent declared, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States. Anyone that gets in our way, I need you guys to give me a perimeter so I can cuff him.”

This revelation about Baraka’s arrest—which the federal judge who dismissed the case described as a “worrying misstep”—comes amid heightened concerns about the president weaponizing federal agents, including from ICE, against his political opponents.

The Department of Homeland Security blamed local officials in Maine for using the department’s federal database to determine the employment eligibility of a police officer who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, according to NBC News.  

ICE arrested Old Orchard Beach Police Department reserve Officer Jon Luke Evans late last month, shocking local law enforcement officials who had been told by the federal government that their colleague was permitted to work in the United States. ICE told the Associated Press Monday that Evans, who is originally from Jamaica, would be given the opportunity to voluntarily leave the country immediately. 

Evans has agreed to leave the United States.

As Donald Trump ramps up his purported crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital (and elsewhere), the removal of a law enforcement officer strikes a particularly ironic note—but Evans’s removal hits on yet another crucial issue. 

Old Orchard Beach had previously confirmed Evans’s immigration status by using E-Verify, DHS’s online system for employers to quickly certify whether a potential employee can legally work legally in the U.S. based on records at the Social Security Administration and DHS. 

But apparently that’s not good enough for the Trump administration. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin accused Old Orchard Beach of “reckless reliance” on her own department’s program, according to NBC News. Critics of the program had said that it’s easy to fool the E-Verify system with fake I-9 documents and stolen IDs. 

But employers have few alternatives to E-Verify. Nine states have even implemented laws requiring private-sector employers to use the fast and free program. Some opponents to the program have said that stricter enforcement could lead to discrimination and worker shortages. 

In the wake of Trump’s sweeping deportation scheme, employers who use E-Verify have not been spared from immigration raids. In June, a food-packaging company in Omaha saw more than half of its workforce arrested, though the employer said he’d used E-Verify to check the work status of all of his employees. 

DHS recently added a new tool to notify employers when someone’s employment authorization is revoked and must be reverified. If employees cannot provide new evidence of valid employment authorization, they will be terminated immediately. 

The Trump administration has been snatching delivery drivers off the street mid-order as part of its sweeping federal effort to make Washington, D.C. “safer,” as multiple residents have reported.

“Yesterday, my UberEats driver got arrested by ICE while he was delivering my food. I walked downstairs to pick it up and I noticed his location hadn’t changed in two or three minutes, and it was like two or three blocks away from my house,” said D.C. resident Tyler DeSue in a TikTok he posted on Sunday that went viral. “I stepped into the streets and I saw police lights … he was being questioned by eight or nine ICE officers.”

The officers claimed that they had pulled over the delivery driver—whose name is “Sidi” on the app—because his moped plates didn’t show up in their index, before conceding that there wasn’t a single issue with the vehicle. The driver’s first language was Arabic, and when they asked how he arrived in the United States, he struggled, and the ICE officers arrested him.

“He doesn’t understand what you’re saying bro, just use Google Translate on your phone, it takes two seconds,” DeSue can be heard saying on video as two officers confront the clearly distressed driver. Then they cuff and arrest him.

This is just one of many recent anecdotes, as residents who were told that the city would be cracking down on “violent crime” report they have observed several people being detained with no probable cause.

D.C. residents are reporting that they’re seeing fewer delivery drivers out and about, and Trump’s crackdown is also having a larger impact. The popular Irving Street corridor in D.C.’s Columbia Heights neighborhood, usually bustling with vendors and drivers, is now quiet. And restaurants across the city saw a 25 percent drop in reservations in the days immediately after Trump federalized the city’s police forces and deployed the FBI, DEA, HSI, ATF, and the National Guard—even as the president claimed business was booming.

“People who haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington D.C. in two years are going out to dinner,” he said on Monday. That was an outright lie.

This federal takeover was supposed to make residents feel safe. However, for many, it’s had the reverse effect.

“What I am seeing, personally, is widespread fear amongst community members,” Atenas Estrada, deputy program director for the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights told NBC Washington. “People [are], you know, making decisions or avoiding places that they perhaps would not otherwise avoid or leave.”