FCC commissioner accuses CBS of ‘corporate capitulation’ in Colbert row
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with FCC commissioner Anna M Gomez criticizing CBS for what she called “corporate capitulation in the face of this administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech”.
Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC, was appointed by former president Joe Biden to the five-person board in 2023. Her comments follow talkshow host Stephen Colbert accusing the Trump administration and CBS of censorship after he said the network told him not to air a television interview with a Texas Democrat running for Senate.
Gomez said in a statement:
This is yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech.
The FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.
CBS is fully protected under the First Amendment to determine what interviews it airs, which makes its decision to yield to political pressure all the more disappointing.
On his show, Colbert told viewers of the Late Show that network lawyers told him he was also prohibited from talking about their refusal to air his interview with James Talarico, a Texas state representative seeking his party’s nomination to challenge the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, for a Senate seat in November.
“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said, stemming from a concern that it would trigger a legal requirement to provide equal access to Talarico’s campaign rivals.
In the end, the interview was instead broadcast on Colbert’s YouTube page, which is out of the remit of the Federal Communications Commission. CBS has disputed Colbert’s account, saying that the network only “provided legal guidance” that broadcasting the interview could violate the FCC directive.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
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Democrats mourned the passing of Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader whose 1988 campaign for the Democratic nomination to be president paved the way for Barack Obama.
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Donald Trump’s former receptionist, Chamberlain Harris, 26, will be sworn in on Thursday as the newest member of the US Commission of Fine Arts, just in time to review his ballroom plans.
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Police officers “surrounded and arrested a man who ran toward the U.S. Capitol with a loaded shotgun” on Tuesday, the United States Capitol Police said.
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A US immigration judge has ended the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student who helped lead protests at the school over the Israeli assault on Gaza
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After Republican congressman Randy Fine posted an Islamophobic comment to social media over the weekend, the backlash from Democrats has been swift.
Key events
Overisght committee to depose Victoria’s Secret CEO, amid renewed scrutiny over ties to Epstein
Today, congressional lawmakers on the House oversight committee continue their investigation into the handling of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes with a deposition of Les Wexner, the billionaire and former CEO of Victoria’s Secret.
Wexner is facing scrutiny for his association with Epstein – who served as his personal money manager from the mid-1980s until 2007, when Epstein was under investigation for sex crimes. He then stepped away from managing Wexner’s personal finances. The businessman, who also owned Bath & Body Works, later discovered that Epstein had been mismanaging funds, and severed ties with him.
While Wexner has vehemently denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, he is under renewed dissection after his name appeared in the latest tranche of documents released by the justice department, which showed a 2019 FBI document that listed Wexner as a co-conspirator of Epstein. The 88-year old has never been convicted of a crime, and maintains that he has cooperated with officials at each juncture of their investigations into Epstein, who died by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
Last week, congressman Ro Khanna, revealed that Wexner’s name was one of six high-profile men whose names were redacted in the latest document drop by the Department of Justice.
Wexner will testify for lawmakers in Albany, Ohio, and several Democratic members of the committee will hold a press conference after the deposition.
Conservative Georgia town pushes back against ICE detention center
On a recent morning Eric Taylor, city manager for a small Georgia town of about 5,000 residents called Social Circle, was contacted by a staffer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“They asked me to turn on the water,” he said of a 1m sq ft warehouse nearby that the federal government recently purchased for $128m, with plans to use it for locking up as many as 10,000 detainees as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan.
“I told them I’m not going to do it,” Taylor said. “Not until they come and talk to me.”
The local official, together with the town’s mayor and police chief, have all publicly opposed the Department of Homeland Security’s plans to open what could become one of the largest immigration detention centers in the US – in a rural town with 19th-century buildings downtown, and horse and cattle farms and hay for sale on the outskirts.
ICE’s warehouse purchase in Social Circle is one of several dozen across the US in recent weeks. In a handful of locations – such as Ashland, Virginia and Kansas City, Kansas – local opposition appears to have thwarted such plans.
In the case of Social Circle, officials and residents alike only learned of the Trump administration’s plans to buy the empty warehouse from a 24 December Washington Post report – and since then have been clamoring for the federal government’s attention, to no avail. Taylor contacted Jon Ossoff, a Democratic senator who has also opposed ICE’s plans for the town, and Mike Collins, a Republican congressman who has told Taylor that the federal government will be in touch.
Read Timothy’s full dispatch from Social Circle, Georgia:
A reminder that my colleagues are covering the latest out of Europe, including the news that Volodymyr Zelenskyy said no agreement has been reached in the US-brokered meetings between Ukraine and Russia, in an attempt to end the four-year conflict in the region.
“We can see that some groundwork has been done, but for now the positions differ, because the negotiations were not easy,”the Zelenskyy told reporters after the talks had finished
A reminder that Donald Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, and then president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, are representing the US at the talks in Geneva.
Donald Trump is in Washington today. We’ll hear from the president at 3pm ET, when he hosts a Black History Month reception in the East Room of the White House. This comes just weeks after Trump posted and deleted a racist video to social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama at apes. The White House ultimately blamed a staffer for the move, and distanced the president from the backlash.
Also today, we’ll hear from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who hold a briefing for reporters at 1pm ET.
Dharna Noor
More than a dozen health and environmental justice non-profits have sued the Environmental Protection Agency over its revocation of the legal determination that underpins US federal climate regulations.
Filed in Washington DC circuit court, the lawsuit challenges the EPA’s rollback of the “endangerment finding”, which states that the buildup of heat-trapping pollution in the atmosphere endangers public health and welfare and has allowed the EPA to limit those emissions from vehicles, power plants and other industrial sources since 2009. The rollback was widely seen as a major setback to US efforts to combat the climate crisis.
The suit was brought by the American Public Health Association, American Lung Association, the Center for Biological Diversity, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 11 other public health and environmental organizations. The lawsuit was filed by green legal organizations Clean Air Task Force and Earthjustice and it names the EPA and the agency’s administrator, Lee Zeldin, as defendants.
“EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding and safeguards to limit vehicle emissions marks a complete dereliction of the agency’s mission to protect people’s health and its legal obligation under the Clean Air Act,” said Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO at the Union of Concerned Scientists, another one of the groups behind the lawsuit. “This shameful and dangerous action by the Trump administration and EPA Administrator Zeldin is rooted in falsehoods not facts and is at complete odds with the public interest and the best available science.”
Joseph Gedeon
Fifteen members of Congress have written to Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, demanding to know what steps the United States has taken in response to the mistreatment of a Palestinian-American teenager who spent nine months in Israeli detention.
The letter, led by Senator Peter Welch and first seen by the Guardian, is centered around the case of Mohammed Ibrahim, a Florida resident who was 15 when Israeli soldiers arrested him during a raid on his family’s West Bank home in February 2025. He was charged with throwing objects at moving vehicles before being released on 27 November following a guilty plea and suspended sentence, and was taken directly to hospital upon his return.
The then 16-year-old was severely underweight, having lost roughly a third of his body weight, and had suffered a scabies skin infection a few months into his detention, the state department told his family at the time, according to correspondences seen by the Guardian.
Mohammed told family members and US consular officers that he and other Palestinian minors held in the same cell were beaten, threatened, pepper-sprayed and denied adequate food and medical care over the course of his detention.
In an interview with the advocacy group Defense for Children International – Palestine while still detained, Mohammed described receiving three small pieces of bread and a spoonful of yogurt for breakfast, with no dinner provided.
“There has been case after case of Palestinians, including hundreds of children, swept up in the Israeli military justice system, where they are not only denied basic rights of due process but subjected to systematic physical and psychological abuse,” the lawmakers wrote in the 16 February letter. “While such abuses are never permissible, we are especially concerned that cases involving abuse of US citizens in the West Bank be thoroughly investigated and that those responsible are brought to justice.”
A judge in Florida has set a trial date in US president Donald Trump’s $10bn defamation lawsuit against the BBC over a Panorama programme.
Court documents from the US District Court Southern District of Florida show judge Roy K Altman set a trial date of 15 February next year.
The order, made on 11 February, said:
This matter is set for trial during the Court’s two-week trial calendar beginning February 15, 2027. Counsel for all parties shall also appear at a calendar call at 1:45 p.m. on February 9, 2027.
Unless instructed otherwise by subsequent order, the trial and all other proceedings in this case shall be conducted in Courtroom 12-4 at the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse, 400 N. Miami Avenue, Miami, Florida 33128.
US judge blocks deportation of Columbia University Palestinian activist
A US immigration judge has blocked the deportation of a Palestinian graduate student who helped organize protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza, according to US media reports.
Mohsen Mahdawi was arrested by immigration agents last year as he was attending an interview to become a US citizen, AFP reported.
Mahdawi had been involved in a wave of demonstrations that gripped several major US university campuses since Israel began a massive military campaign in the Gaza Strip, triggered by Hamas militants’ deadly 7 October, 2023 attack.
A Palestinian born in the occupied West Bank, Mahdawi has been a legal US permanent resident since 2015 and graduated from the prestigious New York university in May. He has been free from federal custody since April.
In an order made public on Tuesday, Judge Nina Froes said that President Donald Trump’s administration did not provide sufficient evidence that Mahdawi could be legally removed from the United States, multiple media outlets reported.
Americans believe that wealthy and powerful people are rarely held accountable, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll found after the release of millions of records on the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections in elite US business and political circles.
Some 69% of respondents in the four-day poll, which concluded on Monday, said their views were captured “very well” or “extremely well” by a statement that the Epstein files “show that powerful people in the US are rarely held accountable for their actions.“
Another 17% said the statement described their views “somewhat well,” while 11% said it didn’t reflect their thinking. Among both Republicans and Democrats, more than 80% said the statement described their thinking at least somewhat well.
CBS earlier this week attempted to address Stepen Colbert’s allegations about a corporate mandate not to broadcast the James Talarico interview.
“The Late Show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Rep. James Talarico,” the network said in a statement.
“The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates, including Rep. Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.
“The Late Show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal-time options.”
Colbert has accused the Trump administration of censoring critics and has been particularly critical of FCC chairman Brendan Carr.
“Let’s just call this what it is,” he said on Monday. “Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV.”
FCC commissioner accuses CBS of ‘corporate capitulation’ in Colbert row
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with FCC commissioner Anna M Gomez criticizing CBS for what she called “corporate capitulation in the face of this administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech”.
Gomez, the only Democrat on the FCC, was appointed by former president Joe Biden to the five-person board in 2023. Her comments follow talkshow host Stephen Colbert accusing the Trump administration and CBS of censorship after he said the network told him not to air a television interview with a Texas Democrat running for Senate.
Gomez said in a statement:
This is yet another troubling example of corporate capitulation in the face of this administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech.
The FCC has no lawful authority to pressure broadcasters for political purposes or to create a climate that chills free expression.
CBS is fully protected under the First Amendment to determine what interviews it airs, which makes its decision to yield to political pressure all the more disappointing.
On his show, Colbert told viewers of the Late Show that network lawyers told him he was also prohibited from talking about their refusal to air his interview with James Talarico, a Texas state representative seeking his party’s nomination to challenge the Republican incumbent, John Cornyn, for a Senate seat in November.
“He was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said, stemming from a concern that it would trigger a legal requirement to provide equal access to Talarico’s campaign rivals.
In the end, the interview was instead broadcast on Colbert’s YouTube page, which is out of the remit of the Federal Communications Commission. CBS has disputed Colbert’s account, saying that the network only “provided legal guidance” that broadcasting the interview could violate the FCC directive.
Read our full story here:
In other developments:
-
Democrats mourned the passing of Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader whose 1988 campaign for the Democratic nomination to be president paved the way for Barack Obama.
-
Donald Trump’s former receptionist, Chamberlain Harris, 26, will be sworn in on Thursday as the newest member of the US Commission of Fine Arts, just in time to review his ballroom plans.
-
Police officers “surrounded and arrested a man who ran toward the U.S. Capitol with a loaded shotgun” on Tuesday, the United States Capitol Police said.
-
A US immigration judge has ended the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and Columbia University student who helped lead protests at the school over the Israeli assault on Gaza
-
After Republican congressman Randy Fine posted an Islamophobic comment to social media over the weekend, the backlash from Democrats has been swift.
