Trump news live: President-elect’s team responds to sordid police report on Cabinet pick Pete Hegseth

The woman who accused Pete Hegseth of sexual assault claims something may have been slipped in her drink before he took her phone and physically blocked her from leaving his room, according to a police report.

Hegseth, a Fox News host and former National Guard officer who was recently nominated by Donald Trump to be secretary of defense, was investigated for the alleged sexual assault in 2017 but no charges were filed.

The report, released by the city of Monterey, California, details an allegedly ‘very drunk’ Hegseth groping multiple woman at a hotel in the early morning hours of October 8, 2017, at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Hotel and Spa.

The alleged victim, then 30 years old, who asked to be referred to as Jane Doe, was having champagne with co-workers while on a business trip when things got ‘fuzzy’ and she suddenly ended up in a room with Hegseth.

Horrifying footage has emerged of what officials in Kyiv suspect were warheads from a Russian intercontinental ballistic missile or advanced long-range rocket raining down over Ukraine this morning.

Security cameras caught the moment several projectiles streaked through the night sky and triggered a series of violent explosions in the city of Dnipro where the manufacturing plants of state-owned aerospace and defence company Yuzmash are located.

The ferocity, speed and coordinated nature of the salvos suggested the explosions were caused by MIRVs (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles) carrying conventional explosives.

Such a punishing attack is seen as a retaliation by Moscow less than 24 hours after Ukraine reportedly struck targets in Russia’s Kursk region with British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles – though British Defence Secretary John Healey refused to acknowledge those claims.

Russian authorities have thus far refused to comment, but if an ICBM strike is confirmed it would be the first time such a weapon has ever been deployed in combat, representing a major escalation in the conflict.

Israel has blasted the International Criminal Court’s ‘absurd’ arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘dead’ Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri is also placed on the wanted list.

Along with Netanyahu, the ICC has also issued an arrest warrant for his former defence minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

In their decision to grant the warrants, the ICC judges said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians.

The warrant for Al-Masri lists charges of mass killings during the October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that triggered the Gaza war, including rape and the taking of hostages. The prosecution indicated it would continue to gather information with respect to his reported death.

ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Hamas-led attacks on Israel and the Israeli military response in Gaza.

Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza. Israel has said it killed Al-Masri, also known as Mohammed Deif, in an airstrike but Hamas has neither confirmed nor denied this.

Kellyanne Conway hit out at a liberal graduate student who questioned her record during President-Elect Donald Trump’s first term during a Harvard University discussion.

The former advisor to the president appeared at the Ivy League institution on Tuesday to discuss the 2024 presidential election and what challenges Trump may face in his second term.

But when audience members got a chance to ask Conway some questions, second-year Master of Public Policy student Jane Petersen took the opportunity to try to slam her for once claiming there were ‘alternative facts’ about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration.

‘I wanted to ask you a question about your job as White House spokesperson,’ Petersen began. ‘In that role, you said things that were pretty audacious [and] caused people to question things that they have seen with their own eyes.

‘I was always wondering whether it was a survival response in what seemed like what was a very chaotic White House, or was it a strategy? So was it strategy or was it survival? You know, all the bantering with journalists the alternative facts. Was it strategy or was it survival?’

Jill Biden’s teacher union on Wednesday slammed Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Linda McMahon as Education secretary, calling her ‘Betsy DeVos 2.0.’

McMahon is expected to undo all of the Biden administration’s initiatives when she takes over the U.S. Department of Education – which Trump has said he would like to do away with altogether – including narrowing its support of transgender athletes.

The former CEO of the WWE was a controversial choice on Trump’s part. Her experience is on the executive end – in the first Trump administration she headed the Small Business Association – and she has little experience with education.

The National Education Association, the union which the first lady belongs to as a community college professor, slammed McMahon’s appointment. It is the nation’s largest teachers union.

NEA President Becky Pringle said McMahon would be a new version of DeVos.

Donald Trump stunned Washington by plucking celebrities and prominent figures from cable television to fill his Cabinet and administration.

In doing so, he ignored more traditional candidates favored by the political establishment.

To say his picks rattled the capital would be an understatement. Some of them have more credentials on IMDb than they do years of government service.

The choices were perhaps not surprising given Trump’s history as a New York businessman who became a star of the television show The Apprentice. And he has long expressed admiration for those who look like they are from Hollywood ‘central casting’.

However, Trump’s break from the status quo is an important change from his first administration, when he picked many establishment candidates to fill major government roles.

This time, he watched TV clips of potential Cabinet members on monitors in a makeshift ‘situation room’ at Mar-a-Lago.

It appears to have been very important to him that those he chose are able to represent the administration well in live TV interviews, and are able to disrupt business as usual in Washington.

Nikki Haley blasted President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

She accused the former Democratic congresswoman turned Trump supporter of spreading Russian propaganda and called her a ‘Russian, Iranian, Syrian, Chinese sympathizer.’

The former South Carolina GOP governor gave her scathing review of the 78-year-old president-elect’s nominations for his Cabinet on her SiriusXM radio show ‘Nikki Haley Live.’

‘Everybody now loves that she is saying she’s now a Republican, but I have always said “let’s look at what they’ve said, what their actions are,”‘ Haley said of Gabbard.

Haley slammed the controversial nominee for going to Syria in 2017 to meet with dictator Bashar al-Assad for what Haley called a ‘photo op’ while he carried out atrocities against his own people.

Haley called it disgusting that Gabbard would question if it was the Syrian leader who was behind the chemical attacks in his country. She recalled giving a speech at the United Nations during Trump’s first term about the attacks on children.

The hosts of Morning Joe held their secret meeting with Donald Trump over fears the president-elect would allow Matt Gaetz to lead a probe into conspiracy theories surrounding the 2001 death of Joe Scarborough’s intern.

Scarborough and his co-host/wife Mika Brzezinski have faced a deluge of backlash after they revealed the Mar-a-Lago summit amid declining viewership on their beleaguered network.

Some called the recent Trump meeting a feeble attempt to bring in conservative viewers.

But the pair are reportedly ‘petrified of retribution and of Gaetz opening an investigation into Joe and the intern.’

‘That’s what this was about,’ a source told Puck about the motive. ‘It has nothing to do with ratings or Comcast. It’s all about fear of retribution and investigation,’

Since 2020, Trump has spread theories that Scarborough had an affair with intern Lori Klausutis and was responsible for her death.