Trump names Karoline Leavitt as White House press secretary – as it happened | Trump administration

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Here are the key developments from the last few hours:

• Donald Trump named Karoline Leavitt as his pick for White House press secretary. Leavitt, who would be the youngest White House press secretary in history, was the Trump campaign’s national press secretary and served as assistant press secretary during his last administration. “Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator,” Trump said in a statement.

• Donald Trump said in a statement that he will appoint Doug Burgum as both interior secretary and the head of a new National Energy Council. Trump announced that the North Dakota governor would head up the department that handles oil and gas drilling on federal lands, rattling environmentalists who fear Burgum will pursue policies that will exacerbate the climate crisis.

• The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, said he is against the ethics committee releasing its report into drug use and sexual misconduct by Matt Gaetz, the former representative nominated by Donald Trump to serve as attorney general.

• Donald Trump has appointed his campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung as the next White House communications director.

• Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary nominee, was reportedly involved in a sexual assault investigation in 2017 – a surprise to Trump’s transition team – but no charges were filed.

• Dick Durbin, the outgoing Senate judiciary committee chair, warned that Trump’s justice department will use its powers to “seek vengeance”.

• Mike Pence came out against Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the health department, citing the nominee’s support for abortion.

• Scott Bessent, a hedge fund founder, and Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, are reportedly in the running to head up the treasury.

Rudy Giuliani surrendered a Mercedes-Benz, watches and a ring on Friday to two Georgia election workers who successfully sued him for defamation, according to PoliticoO.

The former New York City mayor is still refusing to turn over other property to comply with a $148m judgment against him.

The car and other valuables are the first pieces of property, aside from access to his New York City apartment, Giuliani has been forced to hand over to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who won the $148m defamation verdict against him in 2023.

Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Matt Gaetz was an “absurd” choice for Donald Trump’s attorney general, during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper:

This is an absurd choice given that he has been outwardly under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, and then he resigned right before the report is to be released on charges of everything and allegations of sex trafficking and illicit drug use, and it appears as though a number of House members on both sides of the aisle has information about this.

Justin Trudeau recalled that the last time Donald Trump took office, he pledged to rip up the North American Free Trade Agreement, according to Reuters.

Trudeau made these comments among leaders of Pacific rim countries including the US and China on Friday, as they gathered in Peru for an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

Instead, Canada’s prime minister said, the nations worked hard to find ways to forge new terms, known as the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, that served as proof trade can be beneficial to all parties.

“It wasn’t easy. And nothing is going to be easy this time,” Trudeau said. “Little secret: there is no American administration that is automatically easy for a Canadian government. They take a very robust look at their own interests, and Canada adjusts.”

Karoline Leavitt, who would be the youngest White House press secretary in history, ran for election to the US House to represent New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district in 2022, losing in the general election, according to Iowa State University’s Archives of Women’s Political Communication.

Leavitt graduated from Saint Anselm College in the state in 2019, earning a degree in politics and communication. As a student during the 2016 election, she began working for Fox News. After graduating, she worked for Donald Trump and served as a presidential writer and assistant press secretary in the press office.

In June, CNN abruptly ended a live interview with Leavitt after she criticized the network’s debate moderators, Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, both of whom had hosted the debate between Trump and Joe Biden in Atlanta.

Leavitt described the debate as a “hostile environment on this very network” and accused the moderators of having a biased history with Trump. This led to a heated exchange with CNN presenter Kasie Hunt.

Karoline Leavitt was the Trump campaign’s national press secretary and served as assistant press secretary during his last administration.

“Karoline is smart, tough, and has proven to be a highly effective communicator,” Trump said in a statement. “I have the utmost confidence she will excel at the podium, and help deliver our message to the American People as we, Make America Great Again.”

Donald Trump’s nomination of North Dakota’s Republican governor, Doug Burgum, as the interior secretary has prompted swift backlash from environmental advocacy groups alarmed at the incoming administration’s plans to use federal lands for oil and gas drilling.

Trump also announced in a statement on Friday his intention to make Burgum chair of a National Energy Council he intends to form to “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE” and to focus on “the battle for AI superiority”.

Burgum, a former businessman, has been governor since 2016 of North Dakota, which is the third largest oil and natural gas producer in the country. Burgum, if confirmed by the Senate, would manage US federal lands including national parks and wildlife refuges, as well as oversee relations with 574 federally recognized Native American tribes.

Major concerns have loomed over the country’s wildlife refuges and public lands as Trump prepares to enter the White House for a second term. Throughout his campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly said “drill, baby, drill” and has vowed to carve up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska’s northern tundra for oil and gas drilling.

The Sierra Club, the country’s largest non-profit environmental organization, said: “It was climate skeptic Doug Burgum who helped arrange the Mar-a-Lago meeting with wealthy oil and gas executives where Donald Trump offered to overturn dozens of environmental rules and regulations in exchange for $1bn in campaign contributions.”

The Guardian’s Maya Yang and Maanvi Singh wrote all about it:

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida said that former representative Tulsi Gabbard, president-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national intelligence director, is “likely a Russian asset.”

“There’s no question I consider her someone who is likely a Russian asset,” Wasserman Schultz told MSNBC on Friday.

“Tulsi Gabbard is someone who has met with war criminals, violated the Department of State’s guidance and secretly, clandestinely went to Syria and met with [Syrian President Bashar al-]Assad, who gassed and attacked his own people with chemical weapons,” she said. “She’s considered to be, essentially, by most assessments, a Russian asset.”

Members of the Democratic National Committee are already bracing for a fight to reorder the primary contests in the next presidential election.

“The 2024 calendar will absolutely not be the calendar for 2028,” Nebraska state party chair Jane Kleeb told NBC News.

At least half a dozen DNC members, state chairs and DNC officials said there will be a full reexamination of the order of the states before the 2028 Democratic primary.

Whatever calendar is settled on is a major factor to those presidential primary contenders, who spend most of their time and resources in states like South Carolina and Nevada, which serve to winnow down the pack before moving on to Super Tuesday.

Donald Trump’s transition team has bypassed standard background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on some of the president-elect’s cabinet nominees, it has been reported, minimising the chances of them being rejected for Senate confirmation based on any past transgressions or conflicts of interest.

Such background checks – a longstanding tradition for incoming presidential nominations dating back decades to the early cold war – have instead been outsourced to private investigators.

The revelation, first reported by CNN, comes as shock waves reverberate in Washington from at least three of Trump’s proposed appointees: Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F Kennedy Jr for attorney general, director of national intelligence and health secretary, respectively.

Moves to cut out the FBI appear to be in line with a pre-election memo drafted by his legal advisers and fit with Trump’s enduring suspicion that the agency is part of what, without evidence, he believes to be a “deep state” machine within the federal government bent on undermining him.

The bureau’s checks, based on convention rather than legislation, are intended to review nominees’ track records for criminal histories, conflicts of interest or personal liabilities that might disqualify a candidate from being given security clearance.

Here’s more context:

Wall Street ended a turbulent week with its biggest weekly losses in more than two months, as post-election optimism faded.

The S&P 500 fell 1.3% on Friday and 2.1% for the week, while the Nasdaq declined 3.15% for the week. Early gains fueled by Donald Trump’s pro-business election win and a Federal Reserve rate cut gave way to concerns over slower future rate cuts and inflation risks.

Stocks in tech, healthcare and consumer-staples sectors slid, while vaccine makers dipped upon Trump’s nomination of Robert F Kennedy Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.

The FBI said that the racist text messages being sent to Black people across the country are now targeting high school students and Latino and LGBTQ+ communities.

“Some recipients reported being told they were selected for deportation or to report to a re-education camp,” reads a statement from the FBI released Friday. “The messages have also been reported as being received via email communication.”

In the wake of the presidential election, college students and working professionals have received mass texts from unrecognized phone numbers.

The hate-filled rhetoric has been reported in at least 30 states. People of color in states including Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Nevada, the DC area and elsewhere reported receiving the messages.

The messages were sent to Black adults and students, including to high schoolers in Massachusetts and New York, and students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Alabama State University and other schools, including ones across Ohio, Clemson University, the University of Alabama and Missouri State.

President Joe Biden praised the cooperation among South Korea, Japan and the US in countering what he described as North Korea’s “dangerous and destabilizing cooperation with Russia”, according to the Associated Press.

Biden spoke at the start of a meeting in Peru on Friday with Yoon Suk Yeol, the South Korean president, and Shigeru Ishiba, the Japanese prime minister, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.

The talks came amid heightened concerns about North Korea’s growing military partnership with Russia and Pyongyang’s stepped-up cadence of ballistic missile tests.

Biden celebrated the partnership between Japan and South Korea, two countries that have historical enmity but that under Biden’s presidency are now tightening security and economic ties as their corner of the world becomes more complicated.

Biden noted that it would be his last meeting with them but that the trilateral partnership should be preserved for years to come.

“I’m proud of how far we’ve come,” Biden said. “Whatever the issue, we’ve taken it on together.”

The meeting comes as North Korea has deployed thousands of troops to Russia to help Moscow try to claw back land in the Kursk border region that Ukraine seized earlier this year.

Iran sent a message to the Biden administration in October stating it was not attempting to kill Donald Trump, aiming to reduce tensions with the US, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The message, delivered through an intermediary, followed a September warning from the Biden administration that any Iranian attempt to kill Trump, then a Republican presidential candidate, would be considered “an act of war”.

Since Trump’s election victory last week, some Iranian former officials, analysts and media figures have encouraged Tehran to engage with the president-elect and adopt a more cooperative stance, despite Trump allies’ promises to reintroduce a hardline approach against Iran.

The news comes the same week Elon Musk, whom Trump named as one of the heads of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, reportedly met with Iran’s UN ambassador to discuss how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States.

A former Virginia lawmaker has pleaded guilty to felony gun and drug charges and been sentenced to time already served in jail, according to the Associated Press.

Matt Fariss, who had served in the House of Delegates as a Republican since 2012 before running unsuccessfully last year as an independent, pleaded guilty Wednesday to meth possession and having a firearm while possessing an illegal drug, the Lynchburg News and Advance reported.

Judge Dennis Lee Hupp sentenced Fariss in Campbell circuit court to three years in prison and suspended all but 20 days, according to the News and Advance.

The appointment of a US health secretary with anti-vaccine views could cause deaths and have profound consequences around the world, global health experts fear.

Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick for the position, has a history of spreading misinformation on vaccines and questioning the science of HIV and Aids.

His nomination has been greeted with bemusement and alarm. One global health activist, speaking on background, said the move was akin to making the disgraced doctor Andrew Wakefield, who falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism, the UK’s health secretary.

Prof Sir Simon Wessely, a regius professor of psychiatry at King’s College London, said of the move: “That sound that you just heard was my jaw dropping, hitting the floor and rolling out of the door.”

Prof Sir Andrew Pollard, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, said there was real concern that Kennedy might use the platform “to pursue the same anti-science positions on life-saving public health interventions that he has advanced previously”.

He added: “If this makes families hesitate to immunise against the deadly diseases that threaten children, the consequence will be fatal for some.”

The Guardian’s Kat Lay and Kate Connolly explain what the latest appointment could mean:

After Donald Trump nominated him to lead the interior department and the new National Energy Council, Doug Burgum, North Dakota’s governor, wrote on X:

I’m deeply grateful to President @RealDonaldTrump for this amazing opportunity to serve the American people and achieve ENERGY DOMINANCE!

Expect that energy dominance to involve a lot of fossil fuels. Here’s more on what environmentalists fear Burgum as interior secretary could portend for fighting the climate crisis:

The Guardian’s Alice Herman has more on defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, who concerns experts for his adherence to a number of rightwing ideologies:

Extremism experts are sounding the alarm about Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense, whose writings and online presence reveal someone immersed in a culture of rightwing Christianity, political extremism and violent ideation.

The Fox & Friends host, who has served in the US army but has no experience in government, drew shock from Pentagon officials when Trump nominated him. Hegseth’s books on American culture and the military, his commentary on Fox and his frequent posts on social media showcase his far-right ideology. On these platforms, Hegseth telegraphs paranoia and anger toward “leftists”, an ultra-masculine Maga persona and apparent revulsion toward service members who do not fit his vision – including women.

“The thing that really worries me, is both the ideology of Christian nationalism and what that’s going to mean for the kind of policies he tries to put in place for the defense department,” said Thomas Lecaque, a historian focusing on religion and political violence.