Trump Goes to War With ICC to Shield Himself From Prosecution

The U.S. government is threatening new sanctions on the International Criminal Court unless it changes its founding document to guarantee that it won’t prosecute President Trump or other administration officials. 

Reuters, citing an unnamed White House official, reports that if the court doesn’t listen to American demands, including dropping investigations into war crimes by Israel in Gaza and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Trump administration could sanction more ICC officials, as well as the entire court. 

Republicans and Democrats alike have long attacked the court over its investigation into Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and those efforts only increased after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif last year. 

In March 2020, ICC prosecutors opened an investigation in Afghanistan that included possible crimes by the U.S. military. In 2021, the court deprioritized, but never closed, the investigation, and apparently the Trump administration is worried. 

“There is growing concern ... that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” the unnamed White House official told Reuters. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

Even under the Biden administration, the U.S. was hostile to the ICC, with Biden calling the arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu “outrageous,” even though Israel has killed at least 69,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023.  But so far, the ICC has resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S., rejecting American demands last week. 

The U.S. has already imposed sanctions against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as several of its judges, and, along with Israel, has challenged the court’s jurisdiction on non-member states. 

The U.S. is not a signatory or party to the Rome Statute that created the court in 2002, although many of its allies around the world are. Changing the document would require a two-thirds vote from all of the 125 countries that ratified the Rome Statue, which gives the ICC a mandate to prosecute individuals, including sitting heads of state, for crimes committed by them or under their command on the territory of a member state. Trump doesn’t want to be one of them. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson just unveiled Republicans’ plan to address spiking health care costs—and it’s a disaster. 

As Affordable Care Act tax credits are set to expire in just a few weeks, sending health care costs surging for more than 20 million Americans, Republican leadership presented several bullet points Wednesday on how they plan to lower premiums and give Americans better health options. 

Instead of subsidizing premiums for those on Affordable Care Act plans, Republicans proposed introducing Health Savings Accounts, Association Health Plans, and Choice Accounts. 

Americans who don’t get insurance through their employer would be given cash directly into an account, which would reportedly be paired with a high-deductible health plan, meaning higher insurance premiums would be replaced by higher out-of-pocket costs. 

Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. President Donald Trump has suggested that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. Republicans’ plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies and place it on individuals, so they can “feel like entrepreneurs,” according to Trump.

Republicans are also considering implementing cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that funding these reductions will increase the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034.

Another bullet point was controversial “provider-owned hospitals,” which are directly owned and operated by the doctors. The Federation of American Hospitals published a study earlier this year finding that physician-owned hospitals, which focus on a boutique selection of treatments and services, could be damaging to community hospitals, which typically treat patients using Medicare or Medicaid and therefore operate on razor-thin margins. More provider-owned hospitals could siphon away healthier, better-insured patients.

Another point was to codify the Trump administration’s rules to “fix the ACA,” though it’s not entirely clear what that would entail.  

There were some potentially good ideas buried within their list aimed at increasing price transparency. One was to reform pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, a class of middlemen who manage the supply chain of prescription drugs. Critics of PBMs have suggested that consolidation among these managers has contributed to decreased transparency and thwarted competitive pricing. 

Another idea was “site neutrality,” which means that patients would pay the same prices for the same services regardless of setting—though some critics have warned that would further reduce hospital revenues. 

Johnson told Republicans that they wouldn’t implement all 10 of the proposed bullet points and that caucus members should choose two or three to pursue, NOTUS reported.

While discussion was “cordial,” a source told NOTUS, there was “no consensus” at all.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday blocked President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to California, rejecting the notion that recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol amounted to rebellion.

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” Breyer wrote in his 35-page opinion.

This all started this summer, when Trump sent thousands of National Guards troops to Los Angeles in response to protests, against the wishes of Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Back in September, Judge Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s deployment of military troops in Los Angeles was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote then. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced.”

“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” he continued. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

The Trump administration has yet to respond to Breyer’s order. There are about 100 troops still left in Los Angeles.

President Donald Trump threatened to fire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—not over interest rates, as he did in November, but over something even less under Bessent’s control: putting people in jail.

As part of a longer rant Tuesday about how much better the country is now than it was under former President Joe Biden, Trump once again turned his ire on Somali immigrants.

“Biden and the radical-left Democrats turned Pennsylvania into a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of migrants from the most dysfunctional places on earth, like Somalia, and gave them billions and billions of your taxpayer dollars. But we didn’t really give it. It was stolen. And those people should go to jail! Jail!” the president yelled.

“And if they don’t go to jail? Scott Bessent is toast,” Trump said, laughing. “He’s toast.”

It should go without saying, but as the treasury secretary, Bessent notably does not have the power to put anyone in jail. The president’s nonsensical speech was like a Mad Libs game of his favorite talking points: Biden, Somalia, jail, Bessent.

Trump was likely referring to the fraud scandal in Minnesota—not Pennsylvania—where over the last five years, social services were defrauded out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Federal prosecutors allege that nearly all of the perpetrators came from Minnesota’s Somali community. So far, prosecutors have convicted 59 people. There are about 80,000 Somali Americans in Minnesota.

Though the justice system seems to be handling these crimes just fine without the help of Bessent, he has directed the U.S. Treasury to investigate allegations of fraud. (Though, notably, Bessent is reacting to an unproven report that tax dollars were diverted to support terrorist organizations, which there’s little evidence to support.)

Trump is using the scandal as an excuse not only to attack the entire Somali immigrant community but to continue to chip away at all immigrants’ rights in the U.S. Bessent posted on X in November that, at the direction of the president, the Treasury will work to cut off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants.

The Department of Defense didn’t have a plan to deal with survivors after launching its boat bombing campaign in the waters around Central America.

The New York Times reports that after a mid-October strike in the Caribbean Sea left two survivors in U.S. military custody, Pentagon lawyers asked their legal counterparts at the State Department if the pair could be sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had already sent numerous immigrants on shaky legal grounds.

Alarmed State Department lawyers quickly rejected that idea, and the two survivors ended up being sent to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. Later, on October 29, the Pentagon spoke with diplomats in the region regarding survivors from another strike, and decided that any that were rescued had to be sent back to their home countries or to a third county, but definitely not the U.S.

Why? The DOD wanted to avoid having any survivors in the U.S. legal system because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other U.S. officials would have to present evidence in court to justify the bombings. The Pentagon has already admitted that it doesn’t know who is on the alleged drug boats it is bombing, which is why it hasn’t tried to prosecute any survivors.

At least some of the people on those boats have been identified as fishermen, and defense officials have not convinced many members of Congress of the legality and justifications for the strikes. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticized them, especially after the revelation that the military bombed survivors of the first boat strike back in September, a possible war crime. Now it seems that Hegseth and the rest of the DOD want to avoid any legal responsibility.