The Dictatorship
Stock market sends a message to Trump on Greenland
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) — Investors appeared to have gotten through to President Donald Trump about the risk posed by his designs for Greenland with a message he wasn’t hearing from European leaders: Threatening allies with tariffs and land seizure isn’t exactly the type of policy that generates confidence in the global economy.
Trump on Wednesday backed off his threat to slap punishing tariffs on eight European allies for opposing his insistence on acquiring Greenland from longtime ally Denmark after the plan spooked Wall Street by sparking serious talk within NATO about a fundamental rupture to the transatlantic military alliance that’s been a linchpin of post-World War II security.
Markets had seen their biggest losses since October as Trump prepared to travel to DavosSwitzerland, to give a keynote address to leaders and the global elite at the World Economic Forum.
Trump grumbled about what he called a stock market “dip” with some annoyance during the speech, complaining the market gyrations happened despite the U.S. “giving NATO and European nations trillions and trillions of dollars in defense.”
But during that speech, he made his first abrupt shift in position for the day: He took off the table the option of using military force to take over Greenland.
“I won’t do that. OK?” Trump told the packed conference room.
Then, hours later, Trump announced he was retreating from the tariffs altogether after he said he had come to terms with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte on a “framework” on Greenland that “gets us everything we needed to get” if the agreement is consummated.
Trump promptly took to financial network CNBC just before Wall Street trading ended for the day, boasting that the framework was “going to be a very good deal for the United States” and allies.
He downplayed the role that the jittery market played on his decision on tariffs. “No, we took that off because it looks like we have pretty much a concept of a deal,” Trump said.
Trump didn’t offer details on the terms of that framework. But the S&P 500 rallied 1.2% after his remarks, recovering about half the ground it had lost a day earlier. The Dow Jones Industrial Average also rose 1.2%, as did the Nasdaq Composite.
A concept of a deal, without many details
After the retreat, Denmark’s foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen cautiously offered that “the day is ending on a better note than it began” but said the details of the agreement still need to be worked out.
One idea NATO members have discussed as part of the compromise would see Denmark and the alliance working with the U.S. to build out more U.S. bases in Greenland, according to a European official familiar with the matter but not authorized to comment publicly. The official said it was not immediately clear if that idea was included in the contours of the framework that Trump and Rutte discussed on the sidelines of Davos on Wednesday.
Rutte in an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday evening gave little hint about what precisely he and Trump agreed to.
“We agreed that he’s right, and he’s right that collectively we have to protect the Arctic regions,” Rutte said. “But also, of course, the U.S. continue its conversations with Greenland and Denmark when it comes to how can we make sure that the Russians and China will not gain access to the economy or a military sense of Greenland.”
It wasn’t just the financial markets that were telling Trump to rethink the tariffs and tough rhetoric toward allies.
A number of U.S. officials had also been concerned about Trump’s hardline stance and bellicose language toward Greenland, Denmark and other NATO allies because they feared it could harm other foreign policy goals.
These officials thought the fixation on Greenland and Trump’s earlier comments suggesting that the potential splintering of NATO was a cost he might be willing to pay were complicating the president’s effort to form the Board of Peacewhich he’s expected to spotlight Thursday in Davos. The U.S. officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss concerns being floated inside the administration.
Many European countries, which were already skeptical of the proposed board’s broad global mandate, had reacted even more negatively to the concept after Trump’s tariff threat. The board, which was born from Trump’s 20-point plan to end the Israel-Hamas warwas initially envisioned as a small group of world leaders overseeing the Gaza ceasefire but has morphed into something far more ambitious.
A few European nations have even declined their invitations.
“The interpretation that European leaders are going to take from this is that actually standing up and being firm defused the crisis,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Trump is acting like a bully, and the only way that we’re going to have a stable relationship is if we push back.”
But Matthew Kroenig, vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, countered that the idea that Trump would seize Greenland seemed more like a bluff all along — and one that may have worked.
“Most of the world was freaking out over these threats,” Kroenig said. But he he noted there are some downsides to that negotiating style.
For one, it drove the prime minister of Canada, a close U.S. ally, to propose that smaller countries unite against aggressive superpowers.
“It’s been unnecessarily dramatic, costly and damaging, but all the damages so far are repairable,” added Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassador to Poland who is now a distinguished senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington.
That possibility, Fried noted, would be harder to achieve had Trump continued on the path with Greenland where he appeared to be heading.
—
AP writers Stan Choe in New York and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed reporting.
ByDavid Rohde
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says there is “no reason” to doubt a new report by five European nations that Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was killed in a Russian government prison with poison found in Latin American dart frogs.
A fatal toxin not found naturally in Russia — epibatidine — was “conclusively” discovered in samples of Navalny’s body by a joint investigation conducted by Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden, according to a joint statement by the nations on Saturday.
The toxin is only known to exist in poison dart frogs in Central and South America. One species, the phantasmal poison frog, contains a chemical that is 200 times more potent than morphine.
“It’s a troubling report,” Rubio told reporters at a news conference during a visit to Slovakia on Sunday. “We don’t have any reason to question it.”
It was not clear why the United States did not participate in the investigation of Navalny’s death. But the finding comes amid rising support in the Senate for a bill that would impose sweeping new sanctions against the government of Vladimir Putin, which has been opposed by the Trump administration.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, noted on the closing day of the Munich Security Conference, where Rubio received a standing ovationthat 84 out of 100 senators have signed on to co-sponsor the bill authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
“I don’t understand the reluctance to go after Vladimir Putin and what Russia is doing in Ukraine,” Shaheen told a group of reporters. “The failure by the United States to act has extended this war.”
Russian officials have repeatedly denied playing any role in the death of Navalny two years ago in a government-run penal colony in the Arctic. They called the new European report “a Western propaganda hoax,” according to Russia’s state news agency.
The report comes as U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kusher, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, are expected to meet with both Russian and Iranian officials on Tuesday in Geneva. The goal of the Russia talks is to reach a peace settlement in Ukraine by a June deadline the administration has set. (Witkoff and Kushner are also set to join a second round of nuclear talks with Iranian officials in Geneva on the same day.)
Critics of Trump, who promised to end the war days after returning to office, say Russia has not been seriously negotiating and is simply playing for time so it can gain ground on the battlefield. Democrats have also expressed concerns over reports that Witkoff has been negotiating business deals during peace talks with Kirill Dmitriev, a former Wall Street banker who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Dmitriev pitched $12 trillion in bilateral economic agreements with the U.S. It is unclear how such large deals could be achieved. The $12 trillion figure is about four times the size of Russia’s 2025 gross domestic product.
A European diplomat whose country has negotiated with Russia in the past told MS NOW that Moscow has repeatedly made such investment offers. But the business entities end up being largely Russian controlled. “They lure you in,” said the diplomat, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly.
Shaheen expressed skepticism as well.
“I’m concerned about all things Russian in this administration,” Shaheen said. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But I’m beginning to become one with respect to Putin and President Trump.”
David Rohde
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
A glove with DNA found near 84-year-old missing Nancy Guthrie’s home appears to match those worn by a masked person caught on surveillance footage, the FBI said Sunday.
“The FBI received preliminary results yesterday on 2/14 and are awaiting further testing,” the bureau said in a statement. “This process typically takes 24 hours from when the FBI receives DNA.”
The FBI said investigators collected “approximately 16 gloves in various areas near” Guthrie’s house in Tucson, Arizonawhere she was last seen on Jan. 31. Most of those gloves were “searchers’s gloves that they discarded in various areas when they searched the vicinity” but the glove with the “DNA profile recovered is different and appears to match the gloves of the subject in the surveillance video,” the FBI said.
“What we have is a lead here. The glove retrieved would need to have the victim’s DNA or some other forensic material to tie it to the home,” a law-enforcement source familiar with the investigation cautioned. “It must be connected to the home and victim. That would make the glove actual evidence, at this point it’s a lead. A good lead.”
The FBI said said the glove was found in a field approximately two miles from Guthrie’s house. The glove resembles the one on the hand of a person who was captured on porch camera video footage at the home of NBC “Today Show” host Savannah Guthrie’s mother the night she went missing.
The agency said it is awaiting quality control and official confirmation before putting the individual’s profile into the bureau’s national database, which could take up to 24 hours.
The FBI has described the man captured in photographs and on video as approximately 5’9”-5’10” with an average build. In addition to gloves, he was also seen wearing a ski mask and a black, 25-liter “Ozark Trail Hiker Pack” backpack. The agency on Thursday increased its reward for any information leading to an arrest and conviction of anyone involved in Guthrie’s disappearance to $100,000.
Guthrie was reported missing by her family on Feb. 1. Sheriff’s deputies also found blood on the front porch that was later confirmed to belong to the network host’s mother. Guthrie’s children, including Savannah, have posted several videos pleading for their mother’s release, agreeing to pay any ransom demanded and asking for help from the public.
Alex Tabet, Marc Santia and Ken Dilanian contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., co-author of the Epstein Files Transparency Acton Sunday slammed what he called Donald Trump’s “Epstein administration” for not fulfilling its legal obligation to release all government documents related to the late convicted sex offender.
Massie cited a Justice Department letter sent to Congress on Saturday defending its redactions made to the newly released final batch of Epstein documents. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” show, the GOP congressman noted the DOJ letter, signed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, cited “deliberative-process privilege” as a reason for withholding certain records.
“The privileges that applied to the withheld records were deliberative-process privilege, work-product privilege, and attorney-client privilege.,” the Feb. 14 DOJ letter said. The letter listed the names of more than 300 people, many of whom had no direct dealings with Epstein and have long been dead, including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Ronald Reagan.
Other names include President Donald Trump, former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick — who was grilled before Congress last week over his association with Epstein — Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. None of the people listed have been accused of criminal wrongdoing with regard to Epstein’s actions.
Rep. Ro Khanna, the California Democrat who co-authored the Epstein bill, also criticized the DOJ letter regarding its redactions.
“The DOJ is once again purposefully muddying the waters on who was a predator and who was mentioned in an email,” Khanna said on X. “To have Janis Joplin, who died when Epstein was 17, in the same list as Larry Nassar, who went to prison for the sexual abuse of hundreds of young women and child pornography, with no clarification of how either was mentioned in the files is absurd.” (The Justice Department announced in December that a letter released in a tranche of Epstein files purportedly from Epstein to Nassar, the convicted Olympic gymnastics coach, was a fake.)
Massie objected to the DOJ’s claim of privilege in withholding certain Epstein documents because, he said, the Justice Department “must release internal memos and notes and emails” related to investigative and prosecutorial decisions regarding the Epstein matter.
“It’s important they follow that because then we could find out why they didn’t prosecute Leslie Wexner,” he told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. A legal representative for Wexner said in a statement that the assistant U.S. Attorney in charge of the Epstein investigation “stated at the time that Mr. Wexner was neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect” and that “Mr. Wexner cooperated fully by providing background information on Epstein and was never contacted again.”
Massie accused the Justice Department of taking down documents before members of Congress were able to review them in their unredacted forms. “We want to be able to look at all these files,” he said. Lawmakers have also been subject to apparent surveillance while reviewing Epstein documents in a private room at the Justice Department.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, echoed calls for answers about who was involved in the trafficking of girls and women besides convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
“We have questions for President Trump, and I think the broader issue here is why wasn’t this investigated when these accusations and these stories actually were heard by the FBI years ago?” Garcia said in a Sunday interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” show. “Where was the investigation? Where was the DOJ? And this, by the way, is an issue not just in Republican administrations, but also ones led by Democrats. We have to get answers.”
The Justice Department, in its letter to the Republican chairmen and ranking Democrats of House and Senate Judiciary Committees, said no records were withheld or redacted “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
Several of those listed have faced backlashincluding ex-prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was stripped of his royal titlesevicted from Windsor Castle and faces a potential investigation in the U.K.
The DOJ said the lengthy list of high-profile names included in its letter includes “all government officials and politically exposed persons.” But the letter does not differentiate between people mentioned in news stories who likely had little or no connection to Epstein and those who were shown to have communicated with Epstein, Maxwell and other associates.
Massie, who is facing a primary opponent endorsed by Trump, said the president is “still with the Epstein class. This is the Epstein administration and they’re attacking me for trying to get these files released.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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- Mace slams DOJ over letter about completing Epstein files release: ‘They’re missing names’
- Rubio says ‘no reason’ to doubt Navalny was killed by dart frog poison
- FBI links glove found near Nancy Guthrie’s home to suspect on video
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