What happened
President Donald Trump yesterday hosted the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace, announcing that nine countries had pledged nearly $7 billion to rebuild Gaza and five countries had agreed to contribute thousands of troops to an international stabilization force. Trump also said the U.S. would contribute $10 billion to his board, without disclosing how it would be used or whether Congress had agreed to fund the pledge. Some foreign leaders were among the representatives from the 27 countries that agreed to join the board, while another 21 countries and the European Union sent observers to the meeting.

Who said what
In a 47-minute speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Trump declared the Board of Peace the “most prestigious board ever put together” and said it would “strengthen up the United Nations” and also “almost be looking over the United Nations and making sure it runs properly.” Other speakers laid out some plans for rebuilding Gaza and implementing the teetering Trump-brokered peace plan.

The meeting “was like the United Nations General Assembly, if everything about the United Nations revolved around Donald Trump,” Shawn McCreesh said at The New York Times. Trump “cracked old jokes. Got people to pay money into something he’s named after himself. Hyped up his wife’s movie. Trashed his enemies. Aired familiar grievances. Congratulated himself.” It had “the trappings of another Trump vanity project,” Politico said, but the financial commitments “were concrete,” and despite the “skepticism from Democrats, Europeans, the United Nations and Palestinians,” the Board of Peace “won considerable momentum this week.”

What next?
Among the “major questions likely to test the effectiveness of the board in the months ahead” are how Hamas will disarm and whether Israel will withdraw its troops from the Palestinian enclave, Reuters said. 

What happened
Sexual assault allegations against Shawn DeRemer, the husband of Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, got him barred from the Labor Department’s headquarters and prompted a police investigation, The New York Times and other news organizations reported yesterday, citing a Jan. 24 police report and people familiar with the matter. At least two women on staff at the department reportedly accused DeRemer (pictured above, with his wife) of touching them inappropriately at the Labor Department’s Frances Perkins Building in Washington, D.C. 

Who said what
“If Mr. DeRemer attempts to enter, he is to be asked to leave,” security staff at the building were told in a late January notice warning, according to the Times and Politico. DeRemer, an anesthesiologist in Oregon, was also “disinvited” from the Jan. 29 D.C. premiere of “Melania,” said The Wall Street Journal. 

One of the alleged groping incidents, “during working hours on the morning of Dec. 18, was recorded on office security cameras,” the Times said. The D.C. Metropolitan Police Department’s investigation into that complaint of forced “sexual contact” is “active,” Politico said, and being carried out by the department’s sexual assault unit. “I categorically deny these things” and will “fight everything in this,” DeRemer told the Journal.

What next?
The allegations against DeRemer reportedly emerged during an investigation by the Labor Department’s inspector general into complaints that Chavez-DeRemer “was having an inappropriate sexual relationship” with a “member of her security detail” and “abusing her office by taking staff to strip clubs, drinking alcohol on the job and taking personal trips at taxpayer expense,” the Times said. She has denied the allegations, but her “chief of staff and deputy chief of staff have been placed on leave for weeks,” Politico said. The White House “has so far stuck by Chavez-DeRemer.”