Trump threatens to seize Greenland as Panama rebuffs president-elect’s canal demands

Not a sentence anyone could have predicted writing or reading.

Nevertheless, here’s CNBC this morning:

A day after Donald Trump reiterated his threats to take back the Panama Canal, Panamanian President Jose Raul continued business as usual, meeting Venezuelan opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia at the presidential palace in Panama City.

Gonzalez Urrutia, who claims to have won Venezuela’s July election in a landslide, is on an international tour to ramp up pressure on his country’s President Nicolas Maduro to relinquish power.

Maduro is set to be sworn in for a third six-year term on January 10.

The Department of Justice is releasing Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference on Friday, as planned.

However, it is withholding the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case report for now. Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon halted its release in a decision earlier this week.

Smith’s office handed the report to Attorney General Merrick Garland last night.

After Judge Cannon’s decision on Tuesday, Garland will not make the second volume of the report on Trump’s classified documents case available to the public, while the cases against his co-defendants — Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira — remain open.

“But in light of congressional interest in the work” of the special counsel, a redacted version of Volume Two will be made available to the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate judiciary committees, according to federal prosecutors.

Volume One, relating Trump’s role in January 6, will be released publicly and made available to Congress.

Trump’s lawyers will likely contest the decision. They view Judge Cannon’s ruling as covering both volumes of the report.

Gustaf Kilander takes a look.

According to excerpts shared with CNN of the forthcoming book by Alex Isenstadt Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power, Donald Trump’s team was given questions in advance by someone at Fox News ahead of an Iowa town hall in January 2024.

That would constitute a serious breach of journalistic ethics. CNN, which exclusively received two excerpts of the book, reports that Fox plans to investigate.

Isenstadt, a national political reporter at Politico, reports that Trump’s attendance at the town hall of Iowa voters was discouraged by some of the now president-elect’s advisers. The event was moderated by Fox News anchors Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.

They “were still peeved at Fox, whose coverage they continued to find antagonistic, and did not want the former president to do the prime time event,” Isenstadt writes. “But Trump had a good relationship with Baier—they were golf buddies—and wanted to do a sit-down.”

Given that Baier and MacCallum were known for tougher questioning of the former president compared to some of their colleagues, Trump’s aides warned they would ask about disavowing political violence and if he planned political retribution.

Isenstadt reports that Trump wasn’t “taking prep for the telecast seriously. He’d basically be winging it.”

“About thirty minutes before the town hall was due to start, a senior aide started getting text messages from a person on the inside at Fox. Holy s–t, the team thought. They were images of all the questions Trump would be asked and the planned follow-ups, down to the exact wording. Jackpot. This was like a student getting a peek at the test before the exam started,” Isenstadt writes.

Sure enough, the questions covered whether he would divest from his businesses; if the GOP was taking a risk nominating him because of his indictments; as well as the topics of political violence and retribution.

“Trump was pissed,” Isenstadt writes, as he felt the questions were “like attacks designed to put him on the defensive.”

But “with the questions in hand” ahead of the telecast, the team “workshopped answers.”

Isenstadt told CNN the anecdote was based on “multiple people with direct knowledge” of the event and that he was fully confident in the reporting.

President-elect Donald Trump’s dark hints of military action in Greenland have already inspired an angry reaction from France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot regarding the sovereignty of the territory of Denmark, a member of the European Union.

He told French radio on Wednesday morning: “There is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are. We are a strong continent.”

By coincidence, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Paris for a meeting with Barrot today.

Here’s Sean O’Grady for Indy Premium with a look at why the Trumps have US expansion on their minds.

Here’s Morning Joe economic analyst and former Obama administration official with the data: