Closing summary
As another day of live coverage draws to a close, here are some of the day’s developments:
Lawmakers sent a bipartisan letter to the Pentagon’s inspector general asking for an investigation into the Signal group chat in which the defense secretary texted attack plans on a non-secure device.
Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.
Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.
Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, US secretary of state Marco Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using “illegal DEI policies” in admissions.
Trump signed an executive order directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.
A Russian scientist working at Harvard has been detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia, where she faces jail for protesting the war on Ukraine.
Russian scientist who protested Putin before moving to US detained by Ice and threatened with deportation back to Russia
A Russian scientist from Harvard Medical School has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to her friends and colleagues.
On Wednesday, Cora Anderson, who works with the Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova, shared the news of Petrova’s detention on Facebook, saying the Russian scientist arrived at Boston Logan international airport on 16 February from a trip to France when she was stopped by US authorities.
According to Anderson, authorities revoked Petrova’s visa and told her that she was to be deported to Russia. In response, Petrova said that she feared political persecution and was instead sent by authorities to a detention facility, Anderson said.
“We had no idea initially what had happened to her since she was unable to send any messages or make any calls upon detention. She was moved to a facility in Vermont at first and then Louisiana where she is now. Where she is now is a jail that has space rented by ICE and is kept in a room with over 80 other female detainees,” Anderson wrote in her Facebook post.
“Despite having lawyers and the fact she did not do anything illegal in the first place, she is still there, and we have no idea when she will be paroled (or released, however simply released is unlikely),” she added.
Petrova’s boss, Leon Peshkin, said in an interview on Thursday that the researcher had good reason to fear being returned to Russia, because she had publicly protested the Russian invasion of Ukraine in its first days, called for the impeachment of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, and was arrested. She managed to flee, first to the former Soviet republic of Georgia and then to the United States, to continue her research on genomes.
Peshkin said that Petrova was a highly skilled researcher, “she is spectacular, the best I’ve ever seen in 20 years at Harvard,” and had a visa that enabled her to work in the US and travel abroad freely. In February, however, when she was in Paris on vacation, her boss “made a huge mistake”. He asked her to pick up a box of frog embryo samples from colleagues in France and bring them back to the lab at Harvard.
The import of these samples, Peshkin said, was legal, but Petrova made some sort of paperwork mistake on the US customs declaration form and was stopped by customs officers on her return to Logan airport in Boston.
Although the legal penalty for improperly importing this non-toxic, non-hazardous frog material is simply a fine of up to $500, Peshkin said, immigration officers decided to deny Petrova re-entry to the US. When she informed the authorities of her very real fear of being jailed for protesting Putin’s war on Ukraine should she be returned to Russia, “she was transferred to Ice, into detention, to wait for an asylum hearing”, Peshkin said.
Petrova should be eligible for parole while she waits for that hearing, Peshkin said, “but paroles are now not happening”.
A GoFundMe page set up by Anderson for Petrova said that the researcher was hired to work for Harvard Medical School and had entered the US on a work visa. Anderson did not specify which work visa category Petrova was under. She said that Petrova is “supported in applying for a new visa” but added that it is a “multi-month process during which she will not be able to work thus not collect a paycheck”.
Reports of Petrova’s detention come just weeks after a French scientist was denied entry in the US this month after US immigration officers searched his phone and found messages critical of Donald Trump.
But Petrova’s boss told the Guardian that she does not seem to have had her visa revoked over any type of protest activity in the US. She never protested against Trump or in support of Palestinians under siege in Gaza, Peshkin said. But her Facebook messages denouncing Putin, and supporting the Russian anti-war activist Ilya Yashin, are still online.
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Susan Collins accuses Trump of illegally refusing to spend $2.9bn appropriated by Congress
On the same day that Elon Musk told Fox that “we try to keep Congress informed” on his team’s efforts to slash federal spending, Senators Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, and Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, sent a letter to the White House accusing the president of illegally refusing to spend $2.9bn already appropriated by Congress.
In the letter, Collins, chair of the Senate appropriations committee, and Murray, its senior Democrat, contested Trump’s authority to not spend billions of dollars in the emergency budget bill Congress approved last week to avert a government shutdown.
The letter, to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, is in response to a memo Trump issued to Congress at Vought’s urging in which he said that he did not concur with Congress’s emergency designations for 11 specific appropriations.
But the law, the senators write, gives “the President a binary choice: He must concur with all or none of Congress’s emergency designations. Just as the President does not have a line-item veto, he does not have the ability to pick and choose which emergency spending to designate.”
It is, the senators write, “incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written – not as we would like it to be”.
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The White House says that Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing his vice-president, JD Vance, to eliminate “improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology” from Smithsonian museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.
The order also directs the interior secretary to restore federal monuments and statues that have been removed or changed in the past five years “to perpetuate a false revision of history or improperly minimize or disparage certain historical figures or events”.
The title of the order, “President Donald J Trump Restores Truth and Sanity to American History”, oddly echoes the 2010 “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” hosted by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the National Mall in Washington.
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Fox interviews Musk on 'fake White House set' Trump aides mocked Biden for using
When Elon Musk sat down today, with a team of aides, for a friendly interview with Bret Baier of Fox, billed as an “unprecedented peek behind the curtain of Trump’s cost-cutting department”, there was something uncanny about the set, which was a sort of mock White House created on a soundstage.
.@elonmusk, @DOGE team offer unprecedented peek behind the curtain of Trump's cost-cutting department during exclusive @BretBaier interview🧵 pic.twitter.com/8or1yxZG8m
— Fox News (@FoxNews) March 28, 2025
The backdrop, with new wood panelling, purple lights strips and a bright White House seal, was probably familiar to Fox viewers because it was the “fake White House set” Donald Trump’s aides had spent years mocking Joe Biden for creating to host televised events. The set is in an auditorium of the Eisenhower executive office building, across from the White House, that presidents have used for years.
Biden is back at his fake White House set again pic.twitter.com/puYuiGfvib
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 9, 2024
Just two weeks ago, Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer and his new interim US attorney for the district of New Jersey, recorded a social media video to boast that she had discovered “Biden’s fake Oval Office”.
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An internal White House document obtained by the Washington Post indicates that the Trump administration plans sweeping job cuts across federal agencies between 8 and 50% of their employees in the first phase of its push to shrink the federal government.
“The details are compiled from plans that President Donald Trump ordered agencies to submit, according to two people familiar with the document”, the Post reports.
The document outlines layoffs of nearly half the 8,300-person staff of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, nearly one in four of the workers at the Interior Department and nearly one in three IRS workers, 8% of the workforce at the justice department 28% at the National Science Foundation, 30% at the commerce department and 43% at the Small Business Administration.
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Justice department civil rights division investigates Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA to root out 'DEI discrimination'
Attorney general Pamela Jo Bondi announced on Thursday that she has directed the justice department’s civil rights division to ensure that four California universities – Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA, and University of California, Irvine – are not using what she called “illegal DEI policies” to select students from diverse backgrounds.
“Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellow of Harvard Coll., 600 U.S. 181 (2023), colleges and universities are prohibited from using DEI discrimination in selecting students for admission, and the Department of Justice is demanding compliance” the attorney general’s office said in a statement.
“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” said Bondi.
As we reported last month, a group co-founded by a professor of law at UCLA to fight what he calls the covert use of affirmative action in admissions decisions by colleges in the University of California system filed a lawsuit, aiming for an injunction to prohibit any consideration of race in student admissions.
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'We try to keep Congress informed', Musk tells Fox of cuts made by his team
In an interview with Fox, Elon Musk and members of his so-called “department of government efficiency” team defended their role in making sweeping cuts to spending by federal agencies that has been legally appropriated by Congress.
“But the process still involves Congress, right, at some level?” the Fox host Bret Baier asked.
“We try to keep Congress as informed as possible. But the law does say that money needs to be spent correctly; it should not be spent fraudulently or wastefully”, Musk said. “It’s not contrary to Congress to avoid waste and fraud, it is consistent with the law and consistent with Congress”.
Baier, a former golfing partner of Donald Trump, did not press Musk to explain why his team has repeatedly failed to uncover fraudulent spending, instead pointing again and again to spending that he and other Republicans disagree with, but was lawfully appropriated by Congress.
“Usually when they attack Doge, they never attack any of the specifics”, Musk then claimed, falsely. “We are like well, which line of the cost savings do you disagree with? And they can’t point to any”.
In fact, journalists have repeatedly discovered that specific items identified by Musk’s team as supposed waste or fraud, starting with the false claim that $50m was budgeted to send condoms to Gaza, were either mischaracterized, exaggerated or entirely invented.
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A man was scheduled to appear in court in Las Vegas today, charged in relation to acts of vandalism in which Tesla cars were set on fire with molotov cocktails.
Attacks on Teslas and Tesla dealerships have been reported in relation to Tesla owner Elon Musk’s work for Donald Trump, overseeing brutal cuts to federal government staffing and budgets carried out by the so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reported that “Paul Hyon Kim, 36, was booked into the Clark County Detention Center on Wednesday on a total of 15 counts, including suspicion of arson, destroying or injure real or personal property of another, value $5,000 or greater, possessing/disposing of a fire device, all felonies, and misdemeanor discharging a firearm into a vehicle”.
Kim is also facing “facing federal charges of unlawful possession of an unregistered firearm (destructive device) and arson, according to court records”, the paper said.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has promised harsh treatment for anyone found guilty of vandalizing Teslas and Tesla properties, calling such attacks “nothing short of domestic terrorism”.
Las Vegas law enforcement posited “very loose” ties between Kim and leftwing groups but said investigations continued.
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Two Democratic commissioners fired by Donald Trump from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit on Thursday to challenge their “indefensible” terminations.
Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, whose controversial firings were announced last week, are suing the Trump administration for “unlawfully” removing them from their positions.
“The President’s action is indefensible under governing law,” the complaint, obtained by the Guardian, states. The firings should be legally declared “unlawful and ineffective”, it argues, adding that the court should formally instruct the FTC’s leadership to allow Slaughter and Bedoya to serve out the remainder of their terms.
Under the FTC Act, a commissioner can only be removed by the president for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office. The act also says that no more than three of the FTC’s five commissioners can be of the same political party. After the terminations, the FTC currently holds a 3–0 Republican majority.
“The president’s attempt to terminate commissioners Bedoya and Slaughter is contrary to federal law and nearly a century of supreme court precedent,” said Amit Agarwal, special counsel for Protect Democracy, which is representing Slaughter and Bedoya in the lawsuit.
“This isn’t about Democrats versus Republicans or liberals versus conservatives – it’s about an economy governed by laws rather than political whims.”
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The US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth – a central figure in the “Signalgate” scandal – has a tattoo that appears to read “infidel” or “non-believer” in Arabic, according to photos on his social media account.
In photos posted on Tuesday on X, the former Fox News host had what appears to be a tattoo that says “kafir”, an Arabic term used within Islam to describe an unbeliever. Hegseth appears to have also had the tattoo in another Instagram photo posted in July 2024.
Some people on social media criticized Hegseth for getting a tattoo that could be considered offensive to Muslims, especially as the US military seeks to represent a diverse pool of faiths. It is estimated that upwards of 5,000 to 6,000 US military members practice Islam.
“This isn’t just a personal choice; it’s a clear symbol of Islamophobia from the man overseeing US wars,” posted Nerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist in New York.
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The “Signalgate” lawsuit heard by Judge James Boasberg in Washington DC this afternoon was filed by American Oversight, an independent advocacy group.
The group said its motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) sought to force the Trump administration “to immediately halt any further destruction of critically important federal records regarding the administration’s use of Signal to discuss military planning”, which key figures did in regard to airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, only for national security adviser Mike Waltz to add a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, to the high-level chat.
“The motion asks the court to order the defendants, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Secretary of State and acting Archivist Marco Rubio, to comply with their mandatory obligations under the Federal Records Act.”
Bizarre as it may sound, Rubio is indeed the acting national archivist – as well as secretary of state and head of USAid.
As reported by Politico, Judge Boasberg this afternoon granted the TRO, “order[ing] the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.
Chioma Chukwu, interim executive director of American Oversight, said: “Using disappearing messaging apps to plan highly sensitive military operations isn’t just a transparency problem – it’s a national security crisis and potentially criminal.
“These officials chose platforms specifically designed to leave no paper trail for decisions that could cost lives and impact global stability.”
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Deportations case judge assigned to Signal leak case orders all group messages must be preserved
James Boasberg, the judge Donald Trump says should be impeached over his handling of court proceedings regarding Trump’s hardline immigration policy, is currently conducting a hearing in a lawsuit filed over “Signalgate.”
Trump complained about Boasberg earlier today, posting a long rant in which he called Boasberg’s assignment “disgraceful” and implied it was rigged against him.
“Boasberg, who is the Chief Judge of the DC District Court, seems to be grabbing the ‘Trump Cases’ all to himself, even though it is not supposed to happen that way,” Trump wrote, adding: “The good news is that it probably doesn’t matter, because it is virtually impossible for me to get an Honest Ruling in D.C. Our Nation’s Courts are broken, with New York and D.C. being the most preeminent of all in their Corruption and Radicalism. There must be an immediate investigation of this Rigged System, before it is too late!”
Now, Kyle Cheney of Politico reports that Boasberg felt obliged to begin his Thursday hearing with “a detailed explanation of the random case assignment process, emphasizing that he did not ask for or somehow proactively get this case”.
Boasberg has also “ordered the agencies who participated in the Signalgate chat to preserve all Signal messages between 11-15 March and to provide an update to the court about efforts to do so”.
A reminder, if it could possibly be needed: “Signalgate” refers to a group chat about airstrikes in Yemen, between top national security advisers and containing national security information, to which national security adviser Mike Waltz apparently inadvertently added Jeffery Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
More, from Hugo Lowell:
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The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke for two whole minutes earlier, when he was asked about his decision to revoke a visa given to Rumeysa Ozturk, 30, a graduate student at Tufts University in Boston who co-wrote an op-ed critical of the school for not divesting from Israel.
Rubio’s remarks seem worth quoting at length – given his increasingly angry and harsh tone and given his involvement in other immigration enforcement actions such as the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate with a green card and an American wife who is nonetheless being held for deportation without being accused of committing a crime, under a law from 1952 – the heart of the Red Scare.
Rubio was once seen as the face of a new Republican party, potentially more friendly to immigrants.
In Guyana, he said:
We just send this message out: if you apply for a visa to enter the United States, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just that you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings and creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa if you lie to us, the United States, and with that visa, participate in that sort of activity, we’re going to take away your visa.
And once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legal in the United States. And we have a right, like every country in the world has a right, to remove you from our country. So it’s just that simple.
I think it’s crazy. I think it’s stupid for any country in the world to welcome people into their country, they’re going to go to your universities as visitors … and say, ‘I’m going to your universities to start a riot. I’m going to your universities to take over a library and harass people.’ I don’t care what movement you’re involved (in). Why would any country in the world allow people to come and disrupt?
We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses. And if we’ve given you a visa, and then you decide to do that, we’re going to take it away. I encourage every country to do that, by the way … So we’ll revoke your visa, and once your visa is revoked, you’re illegally in the country and you have to leave.
Every country in the world has a right to decide who comes in as a visitor and who doesn’t. If [I] … say, ‘I want to come to your house for dinner, and I go to your house and I start putting mud on your couch and spray painting your kitchen,’ I bet you you’re going to kick me out. But we’re going to do the same thing if you come into the United States as a visitor and create a ruckus for us. We don’t want it, we don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country, but you’re not going to do it in our country.”
Ozturk wrote an opinion column. Friends said she was not active in campus protests. Reyyan Bilge, a friend, posted on X: “Rumeysa has been my student, colleague, friend for over a decade. She does not carry a hateful bone in her body, let alone being antisemitic.”
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Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, broke off from campaigning on Thursday, ahead of a general election next month, to address what he called “Canada’s response to the latest developments in the trade crisis”.
“Yesterday, in the latest salvo in his trade war, President Trump again imposed unjustified tariffs on out nation, in violation of our existing trade agreements,” Carney told reporters, noting that Trump’s 25% tariffs on cars and car parts would impact more than “500,000 hardworking, dedicated Canadians”.
“With time it will become apparent that these actions will end up hurting American workers,” Carney said.
He announced that Canada will wait until next week, when the auto tariffs are set to take effect, to respond, but said nothing is off the table regarding possible countermeasures.
Carney said that he would speak to provincial premiers and business leaders on Friday to discuss a coordinated response.
“It doesn’t make sense when there’s a series of US initiatives that are going to come in relatively rapid succession, to respond to each of them. We’re going to know a lot more in a week, and we will respond then,” he said.
One option for Canada is to impose excise duties on exports of oil, potash and other commodities.
“Nothing is off the table to defend our workers and our country,” said Carney, who added that the old economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States was over.
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Rubio says he has already revoked hundreds of visas from student protesters
Speaking to reporters in Guyana on Thursday, US secretary of state Marco Rubio defended his decision to revoke the visa of a Turkish student at Tufts, who co-wrote an opinion article critical of the school for not divesting from Israel, and said that he has already revoked hundreds of visas from student protesters he characterized as “lunatics”.
Asked about reports that 300 student visas had been revoked, Rubio replied: “It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visa.”
Asked what specifically had triggered the detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts graduate student who was snatched off the street outside her home on Tuesday, Rubio pivoted to his general claim that any student who applied for a visa to study in the US would not have been allowed in to the country if they had said they wanted “to participate in movements that are involved in vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus”.
“I don’t care what movement you’re involved in”, Rubio added, “if we’ve given you a visa and you decided to do that, we’re going to take it away. I encourage every country to do that.
“If you come into the US as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,” Rubio added.
Ozturk is from Turkey, where protests have been banned after the leading opposition candidate to run for president was suddenly arrested. Turkey’s state-run news agency, Anadolu, noted in its report on her arrest that the doctoral student had co-authored an opinion article in which the authors called on the university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide”.
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Trump withdraws Elise Stefanik's nomination as UN ambassador
Donald Trump has withdrawn his nomination of his staunch supporter and New York representative Elise Stefanik as the US ambassador to the UN.
Citing the necessity to “maintain every Republican seat in Congress”, Trump took to Truth Social to explain his decision on Thursday, saying:
“As we advance our America First Agenda, it is essential that we maintain EVERY Republican Seat in Congress. We must be unified to accomplish our Mission, and Elise Stefanik has been a vital part of our efforts from the very beginning. I have asked Elise, as one of my biggest Allies, to remain in Congress… With a very tight Majority, I don’t want to take a chance on anyone else running for Elise’s seat. The people love Elise and, with her, we have nothing to worry about come Election Day.”
Trump went on to say that “there are others that can do a good job at the United Nations”.
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Ireland is bracing itself for targeted tarrifs in addition to those threatened against the European Union, after Donald Trump again singled out the US pharmaceutical sector in the country.
But business chiefs have warned that the uncertainty and Trump’s policy by press release and cycle of threat and cancellation of threat is going to see the US punished by investors and particularly bond holders.
“He is really putting the United States at risk primarily, and then by a knock on consequence the rest of the world,” said Danny McCoy, chief executive of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation.
He told RTE that while Trump may be trying to lure pharmaceutical giants back from Ireland and force the EU to buy more American cars through tariffs, the uncertainty was increasing the risk of investing in the US, something that would be translated into potential downgrading of its credit rating.
“The checks and balances that the United States have, even from their judiciary or from Congress just seem to be bypassed right now, and that’s not a good place for business … But I think [it is] outside, where he will get disciplined, in time, through the bond markets,” he said.
Trump claimed Ireland had stolen the US pharmaceutical sector when he met the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, earlier this month in the Oval Office. On Wednesday night, the US president returned to his threat to impose tariffs on medicines coming from Ireland.
“We’re going to be doing tariffs on pharma, in order to bring our pharma back, …. its in other countries, largely made in china, a lot of made it in Ireland. Ireland very smart, we love Ireland, but we’ll have that,” Trump said.
Ireland cannot retaliate but along with the EU it is hoping that in the weeks after his annoucenment and the introduction of counter tariffs in Europe a space will be created for negotiation.
Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Harris, said on Thursday the EU wanted to “sit down with the US and reach agreement on a trade relationship that works for everyone because trade is good for jobs, growth and all our economies”.
He will attend an emergency meeting of EU trade ministers on 7 April where tariffs will be central.
The Trump administration has terminated 69 international programs aimed at combating child labor, forced labor and human trafficking, potentially undermining decades of progress in protecting vulnerable workers globally.
The Washington Post obtained an email detailing how the US Department of Labor’s bureau of international labor affairs (ILAB) will immediately end grants totaling more than $500m that supported labor standard enforcement across 40 countries, including critical initiatives in Mexico, Central America, south-east Asia and Africa.
John Clark, a Trump-appointed official, in the email justified the cuts by citing a “lack of alignment with agency priorities and national interest”.
The department’s spokesperson, Courtney Parella, echoed this sentiment, telling the Post that the administration wants to prioritize “investments in the American workforce”.
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The Associated Press isn’t Donald Trump’s favorite news outlet, largely because it won’t play ball over his attempt to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Chances are his staff won’t be printing out and presenting its new story about an analysis of the likely effects of Trump’s tariffs policy on cities across America.
According to the AP, “The US cities most vulnerable to a trade war with Canada turn out to largely be in the states that helped return Donald Trump to the White House – a sign of the possible political risk he’s taking with his tariff plans.
A new analysis released Thursday by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce detailed the areas most dependent on exports to Canada, with San Antonio and Detroit topping the list of 41 US metro areas. The findings show that the United States’ 25% tariffs on Canada and Canada’s retaliations could inflict meaningful damage in key states for US politics.
“The analysis was conducted before the Republican president announced Wednesday that he was placing additional 25% tariffs on imported autos and parts starting on 3 April.
Candace Laing, president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, tells the AP: “The consequences of today’s escalation in this destructive tariff war will not be contained to Canada, as much as the US administration would like to pretend.
“Throwing away tens of thousands of jobs on both sides of the border will mean giving up North America’s auto leadership role, instead encouraging companies to build and hire anywhere else but here. This tax hike puts plants and workers at risk for generations, if not forever.”
More on Trump’s tariffs:
In lighter news, heavily armed Secret Service agents yesterday apprehended an intruder on White House grounds: a young child.
According to Tyler Smith, a video journalist on the scene, the kid “squeezed through the fence on the north lawn” before being “retrieved” and “brought back to his parents”.
A kid squeezed through the fence on the north lawn of the White House. Secret Service has retrieved him and brought him back to his parents. pic.twitter.com/42jpG1tF5w
— Tyler Smith (@tyler5mith) March 26, 2025
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Though exactly how Jeffrey Goldberg ended up on a Signal group chat to discuss what were meant to be secret plans to bomb Yemen remains a mystery, posterity may render it one of recent US history’s most serendipitous chance encounters.
Had the fates been conspiring to add a journalist to the forum whose presence would inflict the maximum discomfort to Trump and his circle, they could hardly have chosen a more fitting candidate.
Goldberg, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, was already considered a bete noire by circles around Donald Trump even before Monday’s embarrassing revelation that he had been accidentally added to a chat that included the US defense secretary, the White House national security adviser and the heads of the country’s intelligence community.
At the same time Goldberg is also widely criticized by some on the left of US media and politics for his views on Israel, his past record serving in the Israeli military and his hawkish views on Iran and his support for the US invasion of Iraq.
However, since becoming the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief in 2016, he has built a track record of unearthing stories that have managed to specifically get under Trump’s skin with the type of journalism loathed by the president’s “Make America Great Again” (Maga) followers. That, coupled with seemingly acute embarrassment over the sensitivity of his disclosures, helps explain the animus displayed towards Goldberg by multiple administration officials and surrogates.
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The US Department of Justice has proposed merging the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the Washington Post reports.
The Post said it obtained a memo proposing the move and other reforms. Unnamed justice department officials were said to have “stressed” that the DEA-ATF merger, like other reforms, was not a done deal.
Other possible reforms, the Post said, included transferring an office that deals with international law enforcement to the US marshals service.
“The memo does not detail how the changes would be implemented and what, if any, functions of the affected offices would be eliminated,” the Post said, on a day when elsewhere in the federal government, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced 10,000 layoffs, an approach consistent with the Trump administration’s brutal slashing of federal departments, under the eye of Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge.
“Many of the proposals reflect the public priorities of the Trump administration,” the Post said about the justice department memo it obtained. “For example, the memo floats reducing the number of attorneys working on investigations and prosecutions related to the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
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As controversy over “Signalgate” continues through a fourth day, Hugo Lowell and Joseph Gedeon consider what this very Washington controversy really means …
The problem with the now infamous Signal chat read around the world is not just that sensitive military-operations details were broadcast, but that this reveals a pattern of what appears to be institutional dishonesty inside the Trump administration and the legal ramifications that presents.
While the national security sphere operating in secret is nothing new, the leak exposes a system of broken accountability, where high-ranking officials can spill military secrets with apparent near-total immunity. Despite potential violations of classification protocols, federal record-keeping laws and promises of operational security, the leaders look to face no meaningful legal consequences.
The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, and the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have doubled down on the administration’s position that none of the messages in the Signal chat were classified, claiming they amounted to a “team update” that did not name intelligence-collection sources or methods.
But Brian Finucane, a former state department attorney with extensive experience in counter-terrorism and military operations, including deliberating and advising on past US military strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, said the specificity of the information about the aircraft types suggests it was classified.
“If I had seen that sort of information beforehand, that was shared with the special operation, in my experience, it would have been classified,” Finucane said. “I can’t guarantee what the state of the information was that Hegseth shared, but in my experience, this kind of pre-operational detail would have been classified.”
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US attorney general unlikely to open criminal investigation of Signal leak – report
The New York Times reports on remarks by Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, who the paper said “signaled” that there will be no criminal investigation of “Signalgate” – the scandal over the sharing of sensitive information about airstrikes in Yemen on a group chat which contained a top Washington journalist.
“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released,” Bondi told reporters in Virginia “while praising the military operation that ensued”, the Times said.
“What we should be talking about is, it was a very successful mission.”
Bondi also said: “If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was in Hillary Clinton’s home. Talk about the classified documents in Joe Biden’s garage, that Hunter Biden had access to.”
People have indeed been talking about such episodes, particularly the saga over Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state between 2009 and 2013, which Republicans notably including Donald Trump used as a bludgeon against Clinton when she ran against Trump in the presidential election of 2016.
Observers have also noted Trump’s own problems regarding the handling of classified information after leaving the White House in 2021, which resulted in criminal charges only laid aside after he won the election last year.
Biden also faced scrutiny over his handling of classified information after leaving office, in his case as vice-president between 2009 and 2017. Unlike Trump, Biden was not charged though a scathing report did real political damage. The former president’s son, Hunter Biden, was found guilty on tax and guns charges before his father pardoned him on his way out of office.
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Summary of the day so far
As we’re halfway through the day in Washington and other places affected by what goes on in Washington, here’s a brief rundown of significant stories in US politics today:
“Signalgate”, the scandal over how a journalist was added to a group chat about US airstrikes in Yemen, drags on. Two senators have demanded a Pentagon investigation into the affair, while Guardian reporting from Hugo Lowell suggests Donald Trump does not plan to give his political opponents or the media a scalp, whether Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who set up the chat and added Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to it, or Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defense secretary who shared sensitive information.
In a related development, Waltz abruptly made his Venmo account private after Wired was first to report that it was public, showing contacts including White House officials and prominent journalists, and, experts said, exposing his account to malign actors.
Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, said he will cut around 10,000 jobs at his department, saying: “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”
Amid Trump’s blizzard of tariff announcements, newly released data shows airline travel between Canada and the US is “collapsing”, with flight bookings between the two countries down by over 70%.
Speaking of tariffs, here’s some further lunchtime reading:
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Away from “Signalgate”, in a hearing room on Capitol Hill, Paul Atkins, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), has been facing senators in a confirmation hearing.
In prepared remarks, the chief executive of Patomak Global Partners said: “The current regulatory environment for our financial system inhibits investment and too often punishes success. Unclear, overly politicized, complicated, and burdensome regulations are stifling capital formation, while American investors are flooded with disclosures that do the opposite of helping them understand the true risks of an investment. It is time to reset priorities and return common sense to the SEC.”
Atkins is yet another Trump nominee drawn from the world of the extremely rich. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that he had disclosed “personal assets held jointly with his wife valued at more than $328m”.
Reuters went on: “The SEC is set to hemorrhage workers under voluntary buyouts offered by the White House, which come as officials say the agency was already stretched thin. Atkins, who was an SEC commissioner from 2002 to 2008, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, a spokesperson for the Trump presidential transition said Atkins was in full compliance with ethics and disclosure requirements. If confirmed, Mr Atkins will consult with the SEC’s ethics officer and act in accordance with the governing regulations during his term at the SEC,” the spokesperson said.
Atkins’ disclosures revealed $6m in crypto-related assets – not something to please Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachussetts. In a letter to Atkins on Sunday, Warren posited “significant conflicts of interest” ahead, and said: “You … have served as an expert witness hired by Wall Street firms accused of engaging in Ponzi schemes and other misconduct that you would now be responsible for investigating as SEC chair. Furthermore, you have served as a Board Advisor to the Digital Chamber, a registered lobbying group for the crypto industry. In these roles, you and your firm were paid by the same companies that you would now be responsible for regulating.
“This will raise serious concerns about your impartiality and commitment to serving the public interest if you are confirmed to serve as the next SEC chair.”
Some related reading:
Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser who is at the center of the storm over a group chat that leaked highly sensitive military plans to a journalist, left his Venmo account open to the public, according to a new report.
The oversight represents a further security breach, days after the news that Waltz added the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic to a Signal chat in which operational planning for a US attack on Houthis in Yemen was shared.
A Venmo account with the name “Michael Waltz”, which bore a picture of Waltz, was visible to the public until Wednesday afternoon, Wired reported. Waltz’s 328-person list of friends included accounts that appeared to belong to Walker Barrett, a National Security Council staffer, and Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff – whose account was also public.
Full story:
Leon Panetta, who served Democratic presidents as White House chief of staff, US defense secretary and CIA director, thinks someone should be fired over the “Signalgate” scandal:
“There’s no question that this is a serious breach of national security,” Panetta, 86, told CNN.
“For goodness sakes, this was an attack plan that carries, I think, the highest classification. It certainly did when I was secretary of defense, any kind of attack plan was top secret and had to be protected. And here it was not only put on a Signal commercial network, which is not cleared for confidential communications, but they also included a journalist in a list of very top national security officials who then was exposed to this kind of information.
“This is a serious breach. It needs to be investigated because it could have cost lives. It could have cost us a military mission, and it certainly costs us harm to our national security. It needs to be investigated, and the responsible individual who committed these offenses needs to be punished and fired.”
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, set up the Signal chat and invited the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, shared sensitive information. Donald Trump has backed both men. Both have denied wrongdoing and heaped abuse on Goldberg.
Panetta said he had “been around in Washington for a long time. The biggest problem in Washington, often times, is the truth, and when there are those that don’t want to acknowledge the truth, it will come back to undermine them in the future.
We have the truth here. We all know what happened here. There’s no mystery here. This is not rocket science. This was an attack plan that was leaked and could have potentially harmed our forces in the attack. There’s no question that this was an attack plan. There was talk of weapons, the talk of targets, timing, deployment. This is an attack plan, and it should not have been put on that kind of communication.
“Frankly, this is the kind of thing that ought to be handled in the National Security Council, a situation room, that’s where it should be handled. But it wasn’t. And now, I think what it does is it puts us in danger, because our enemies are going to be all over this. You know, they’ve seen us fail to protect our most sensitive information. They’re going to be all over the internet. They’re going to be all over Signal. They’re going to be trying to get the information that was available that put upon this mission, that that really does harm our national security. And it’s for that reason that, frankly, Republicans and Democrats ought to be concerned about making sure that this never happens again.”
Asked if he thought US allies would increasingly question whether to share information with the US, Panetta said: “One of the most important things when I was director of the CIA was our relationship with our allies and with those that we could share information with, because getting that kind of information helped us protect the country.
“I think, as a result of showing that we are careless in the way we’re handling highly classified information, that there are going to be a lot of countries that think twice about whether or not they’re going to share sensitive intelligence with the United States.
“That’s going to hurt us.”
Here’s a Guardian interview with Panetta from January with a headline that now seems somewhat optimistic:
A little more from Mike Rounds, the Republican senator from South Dakota who spoke to CNN about Signalgate and bipartisan congressional demands for investigations into how national security information came to be shared on a chat group containing a top journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic.
“We work together,” Rounds said, shortly after Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the chair of the Senate armed services committee, and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the ranking Democrat, demanded a Pentagon investigation.
“We recognize the seriousness of this indiscretion, and we’re going to get the inspector general’s report we’ve asked for … and that means the bottom line, we want as much information as we can get, and then we’ll do our own assessment.
“But right now, I think they screwed up. I think they know they screwed up. I think they also learned their lesson, and I think the president made it very clear to them that this is a lesson they don’t want to forget.”
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Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, is on the Senate armed services and intelligence committees. He just spoke to CNN about the “Signalgate” scandal about top national security officials’ sharing of sensitive information about air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Earlier this week, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, testified before the Senate intelligence committee. Both denied breaking the law or revealing classified information.
Asked if he thought Gabbard and Ratcliffe had told the truth under oath, Rounds did not give a resounding yes:
“I think they were doing their best to try to get past the committee hearing,” he said.
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser, set up the Signal chat and invited the Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg. Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, shared sensitive information. Donald Trump has backed both men. Both men have angrily denied wrongdoing and heaped abuse on Goldberg.
Rounds continued: “Look, these folks made a mistake, and they’re having a very difficult time trying to explain how they made the mistake. They made a mistake. I just hope they’ve learned their lesson. I think the president probably took a number of them to the woodshed.”
Rounds said Trump “made it clear in his statement that he was not happy with the way this thing turned out, in part because in the middle of a mission that was hugely successful … to have that overshadowed because they started talking way too early about what was going on in the Middle East and doing it on Signal where they really should not have done that.
“And so I think the president probably made it clear to a number of them that this is not going to happen again in front of the committee. I think a number of my colleagues, on a bipartisan basis, kind of sent the same message, and I know that we’re going to have an inspector general look at this thing and give us a classified annex report as well, but on a bipartisan basis, Republicans and Democrats, we will have another meeting on this, and we will discuss it with them.”
The request to the acting inspector general for an investigation was made by the armed services chair, Roger Wicker, and ranking Democrat, Jack Reed, on Thursday morning.
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Bipartisan letter to Pentagon inspector general implores investigation into Signal group chat leak
The Republican chair and ranking Democrat on the Senate armed services committee have written to the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense, to demand an investigation of “Signalgate”, the scandal over how a journalist was added to a group chat in which top national security officials shared details of airstrikes in Yemen.
Addressing Steven A Stebbins, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Jack Reed of Rhode Island write: “On 11 March 2025, Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, was reportedly included on a group chat on the commercially available communications application called Signal, which included members of the National Security Council.
This chat was alleged to have included classified information pertaining to sensitive military actions in Yemen. If true, this reporting raises questions as to the use of unclassified networks to discuss sensitive and classified information, as well as the sharing of such information with those who do not have proper clearance and need to know.
The senators go on to demand an assessment of facts and circumstances, and of “any remedial actions taken as a result”; a summary of Pentagon policies regarding such breaches of policies and processes; an assessment of whether other departments’ have different policies on the subject; an assessment of whether classified information was leaked through the Signal chat; and “any recommendations to address potential issues identified”.
The senators also say they will schedule a briefing from Stebbins.
Stebbins is in the Pentagon inspector general role in an acting capacity because Donald Trump fired his predecessor amid a round of such terminations in January – a highly controversial move given the notionally independent status of such officials.
Mike Waltz, the national security adviser who set up the Signal chat and added Goldberg, and Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary who shared sensitive material, have denied wrongdoing and attacked Goldberg and the Atlantic.
The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that Trump is not minded to sack anyone over the scandal.
Another Republican member of the Senate armed services committee, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, just spoke to CNN. More to come.
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As Hugo Lowell reports (see post here and full story here), Donald Trump is sticking by his men in the “Signalgate” scandal, reluctant to give the mainstream media or his political enemies the satisfaction of claiming a scalp.
Today, the president’s schedule shows an intelligence briefing at 11am, an executive order signing session at 2pm, a White House session with a group of podcasters, and at 8pm the White House Iftar dinner, an annual celebration of and for Muslim Americans which Joe Biden had to cancel last year, when US support for Israel’s war in Gaza prompted many guests to decline invitations.
Trump hasn’t been particularly busy on social media – at least not since the small hours of the morning, when posts included a rant about James Boasberg, the federal judge Trump wants impeached, over rulings concerning the invocation of the Aliens and Enemies Act of 1798, in relation to deportations of alleged (but not proven) undocumented criminals.
Boasberg has been assigned to a lawsuit concerning the Signal leak. Trump wrote, in part: “How disgraceful is it that ‘Judge’ James Boasberg has just been given a fourth ‘Trump Case,’ something which is, statistically, IMPOSSIBLE. There is no way for a Republican, especially a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, to win before him. He is Highly Conflicted, not only in his hatred of me — Massive Trump Derangement Syndrome! — but also, because of disqualifying family conflicts.”
Trump, the likely direct author of the post, given its length, timing and extensive use of capitals, continued without identifying the alleged “family conflicts” he claimed. (Rightwing media has more.)
Trump also complained about NPR and PBS, which he wants Republicans in Congress to defund, and the European Union and Canada, targets of his newly announced automotive industry tariffs.
This morning, Trump heralded the arrest of “a major leader of MS-13”, a criminal gang with roots in El Salvador. Then he returned to attacking Judge Boasberg … and Politico and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
Later, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, spoke to reporters about the MS-13 arrest, which she said involved a “top” leader of the gang in the US, “right here in Virginia, living half an hour outside of Washington, DC”. No name was given – court documents should show that later.
El Salvador has been the destination for US deportation flights at issue in Trump’s clash with Judge Boasberg. Here’s a heartbreaking report from the Dallas Morning News, about a deportee who insists on his innocence and his family’s grief.
RFK Jr to slash at least 10,000 health department jobs
The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has announced plans to slash the department he leads by around 10,000 jobs out of an 82,000-strong full-time workforce.
Kennedy also plans to close some regional offices. The restructuring, along with previous voluntary departures, will result in a total downsizing to 62,000.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said.
The announcement is the latest in a string of aggressive cuts to federal departments, both staffing and budgets, by the Trump administration, largely under the auspices of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and his so-called department of government efficiency, or Doge.
Musk and select agents of Doge are due to give an interview to Fox News tonight.
The Wall Street Journal first reported Kennedy’s cuts announcement.
More here:
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Trump unlikely to fire Mike Waltz and others involved in Signal scandal, sources say
Donald Trump is unlikely to fire Mike Waltz, or anyone else involved in the now-infamous sharing of military plans in a group chat, to avoid even a tacit admission of fault, according to two administration officials close to the president.
Trump repeated his public support for Waltz at the Oval Office on Wednesday, saying his national security adviser had taken responsibility for creating the group chat and for unintentionally adding the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg.
The officials said Trump rarely if ever admits mistakes, and has reportedly enjoyed the ferocious response of Waltz and other White House officials, including the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to critical reporting of the leak.
The president also defended Hegseth’s involvement. “He had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this?”
Hegseth sent the messages that sparked the classification concerns. The contradiction appears to underscore Trump’s personal determination to not hand the Atlantic a victory, a person familiar with the matter said, and indicates he will continue to characterize the leak of attack plans as minor and immaterial.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration’s attempts to defend the leak of sensitive military plans on grounds that they were not classified became harder to reconcile on Wednesday, after the Atlantic published the full text chain showing the level of detail of the attack plans.
Full story:
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Reporting Mike Waltz’s apparent carelessness with his Venmo contacts, which remained public until Wednesday, Wired refers to previous such stories including one last year concerning JD Vance, now Donald Trump’s vice-president.
The site also quotes expert opinion on the risks involved with leaving such information public.
The first thing you think of is the counterintelligence issue, right? And the security vulnerabilities. It kind of boggles the mind, in a way,” says Michael Ard, a former intelligence analyst who now runs the masters program in intelligence analysis at Johns Hopkins. “It would be really easy for somebody to spoof a contact, and that is something the security industry has already been issuing notices on.”
Wired goes on to point out that in February, the American Prospect identified a public Venmo account in the name of Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned US defense secretary who shared classified information in the Signal chat about Yemen.
The Hegseth account “revealed a similarly elite network” to that on Waltz’s account, Wired said, “including names matching executives at defense firms like Palantir and Anduril as well as lobbyists and President George W Bush-era officials”.
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Mike Waltz’s contacts list on Venmo, the online payments platform, was public until Wednesday when reporters from more than one outlet asked the national security adviser about it. The list disappeared and the White House declined to comment.
Waltz was already under pressure, over his role in the “Signalgate” scandal, in which a journalist was added to a group chat about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen, a platform on which sensitive national security information was shared.
Wired said its reporting about Waltz’s Venmo account “suggests that the Signal group chat was not an isolated mistake, but part of a broader pattern of what national security experts describe as reckless behavior by some of the most powerful people in the US government”.
According to Wired, Waltz had 328 Venmo friends, among them White House officials including Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, former colleagues of Waltz in the US House, and journalists including prominent Fox News hosts Bret Baier and Brian Kilmeade, and Kristen Holmes and Brianna Keilar of CNN.
Notably, the list also included Ivan Raiklin, a far-right figure who anointed himself Trump’s “secretary of retribution” and created a “target list” including prominent figures.
Wired also noted that Waltz was not the only Trump White House figure to have left their Venmo friends list public – Wiles did too.
A Venmo spokesperson said: “We take our customers’ privacy seriously, which is why we … make it incredibly simple for customers to make these private if they choose to do so.”
Wired and the Atlantic – which broke Signalgate as its editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was the journalist added to the chat – are not alone in reporting apparent online security weaknesses among Trump’s top team:
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Mike Waltz faces new scrutiny over public Venmo account
Mike Waltz is under pressure for his role in the Signalgate scandal, after he included a leading national security journalist on a group chat concerning air strikes in Yemen.
But Donald Trump’s national security adviser may have another growing problem, over news that he left his list of Venmo contacts public – at least until reporters noticed and asked him about it yesterday.
Wired has its report here. It begins:
Analysis shows that the account revealed the names of hundreds of Waltz’s personal and professional associates, including journalists, military officers, lobbyists, and others – information a foreign intelligence service or other actors could exploit for any number of ends, experts say.
Among the accounts linked to ‘Michael Waltz’ are ones that appear to belong to Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Walker Barrett, a staffer on the United States National Security Council. Both were fellow participants in a now-infamous Signal group chat called ‘Houthi PC small group.’
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Next, Pete Hegseth. He came to the Pentagon, remember, from Fox News. But reporting from the same outlet won’t make comfortable reading for him this morning.
Yesterday evening, Jennifer Griffin, Fox News’s chief national security correspondent, made the point that though Mike Waltz set up the Signal chat and invited a top journalist into it, Hegseth was the official who disclosed the most sensitive information – broadcasting it to a group of entirely hackable phones.
Here’s Griffin, on X, dissecting Hegseth’s angry, semantics-based contention that the Atlantic’s description of “attack plans” shows the chat to which it gained access was not so sensitive as one concerning “war plans”:
“I surveyed a range of current and former US defense officials who agreed ‘war plans’ is not the right term but what was shared may have been FAR MORE sensitive given the operational details and time stamps ahead of the operation, which could have placed US military pilots in harm’s way.
What Hegseth shared two hours ahead of the strikes were time sensitive ‘attack orders’ or ‘operational plans’ with actual timing of the strikes and mention of F18s, MQ9 Reapers and Tomahawks. This information is typically sent through classified channels to the commanders in the field as ‘secret, no forn’ message. In other words the information is ‘classified’ and should not be shared through insecure channels.
“‘Attack orders’ or ‘attack sequence’ puts the joint force directly and immediately at risk, according to former senior defense official #1.
It allows the enemy to move the target and increase lethal actions against US forces.
“This kind of real time operational information is more sensitive than “war plans”, which makes this lapse more egregious, according to two former senior US defense officials.
This information was clearly classified,” according to former senior defense official #1.
“The Defense Secretary can retroactively declassify information after the fact, but the fact that this was shared in real time before the strike took place makes it unlikely to have been declassified when it was being shared and seen by the journalist for the Atlantic who was inadvertently included in the Signal chat.
“According to a second former senior US defense official, when Hegseth says he didn’t release ‘war plans’ that is pure semantics. These were ‘attack plans’. ‘If you are revealing who is going to be attacked (Houthis – the name of the text chain), it still gives the enemy warning. When you release the time of the attack – all of that is always ‘classified’.’”
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In Washington, it’s day four of what the media is duly, inevitably, calling Signalgate: the scandal over the addition of a leading national security journalist to a chat between top national security figures about air strikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen.
Politico, meanwhile, has some much more interesting things to say about the continued job prospects of two men at the heart of the scandal: Mike Waltz, Donald Trump’s national security adviser who added Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic to his Signal chat, and Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host turned defense secretary who shared war plans on the chat and like Waltz has responded to reporters with bluster, denial and virulent abuse of Goldberg.
Waltz first.
Dasha Burns, White House bureau chief for Politico, reports: “Waltz’s relationship with top White House staff was fraying before this. And between the substance of the story and his handling of the fallout, the walls are closing in.
One person close to White House tells me: ‘He has no credibility because he continues to lie. Everyone is united against him. When you’re becoming a liability or a distraction for the president, it’s time to resign.’
As Politico says … “Oof.”
Burns, however, also reports that “although Waltz has been on thin ice for a while, Signalgate may actually save him – for now – because ‘they don’t want to give Goldberg a scalp.’ So it’s possible Waltz survives or that it requires a little distance from this relentless news cycle before the proverbial guillotine comes down.”
Here’s more on the scandal – and a rather, let’s say timely development, given other Trump administration priorities:
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Donald Trump announced a 25% tariff on all car imports, sending shares in carmakers around the world sharply lower.
Trump said in the Oval Office that the tariffs “start off with a 2.5% base, which is what we’re at, and go to 25%”.
The new levies on cars and light trucks will take effect on 3 April, a day after Trump plans to announce reciprocal tariffs aimed at the countries responsible for the bulk of the US trade deficit.
Shares in US carmakers fell in after-hours trading after Trump’s announcement, with General Motors down by 6.2% and Ford 4.7% lower.
Cars are the UK’s biggest goods export to the US, with £6.4bn in sales in 2023, led by manufacturers such as Aston Martin, Jaguar and Land Rover.
Aston Martin was the top faller on the FTSE 100 index in London on Thursday morning, with the shares falling 6% to hit a record low of 67p. The FTSE 100 fell more than 50 points.
A cutting-edge technology expected to foster new medical breakthroughs in treatments for cancers and infectious disease is being treated “like a four-letter word” inside the Trump administration, causing panic among scientists who fear Trump-appointed health officials, driven by misinformation and conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 vaccine, will cut critical research in the field.
Scientists and public health experts interviewed by the Guardian are sounding the alarm over a recent move by the National Institutes of Health to collect information about funding for research into mRNA technology.
Some fear it is the first step in a move to cut or defund grants that involve the technology, which was an essential component in the rapid creation of vaccines against Covid-19, a major accomplishment of the first Trump term in fighting the pandemic.
Messenger RNA technology, which in the case of Covid-19 teaches the body to fight infection by introducing immune cells to the coronavirus’s characteristic spike proteins, is being tested for use against diseases ranging from bird flu and dengue, to pancreatic cancer and melanoma.
While the NIH has not formally stated that it is cutting mRNA vaccine and therapy research, scientists who were interviewed by the Guardian said they have been told informally that the NIH is performing key word searches on grants that mention mRNA vaccine-related technology and related phrases.
“Colleagues have also been advised not to apply for mRNA vaccine grants. This is all through the grapevine. There has not been an official statement about it,” said one New York-based scientist.
The NIH confirmed in a statement to the Guardian that it made a “data call” to learn more information about the funding of mRNA vaccine grants.
The Gavi vaccine alliance’s chief said on Thursday that any cut in US funding risks causing more than a million deaths, after a report that Washington is to back out.
“A cut in Gavi’s funding from the US would have a disastrous impact on global health security, potentially resulting in over a million deaths from preventable diseases and endangering lives everywhere from dangerous disease outbreaks,” the international vaccine organisation’s chief executive Sania Nishtar told Agence France-Presse (AFP) by email.
Top aides to Joe Biden “aggressively” warned Democratic donors last summer that if the then president was forced out of the 2024 election over concerns about his age and fitness, the party would inevitably make the “mistake” of running the vice-president, Kamala Harris, against Donald Trump, a new book says.
“One donor on the receiving end of an electronic message summed up the sentiments of Biden’s top aides: ‘They were aggressively saying that we would wind up with the vice-president and that would be a mistake.’”
Biden was forced out and Harris did become the nominee. Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ account of the campaign that followed, will be published next week – as Trump’s second term enters its third tempestuous month. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Published extracts from the book have described controversial episodes from Harris’s short campaign and conclusive defeat, including her inability to land an interview with the influential podcaster Joe Rogan, in contrast to Trump, and her frustration with close control maintained by former aides to Biden.
Long an issue for Democrats, the question of Biden’s age and fitness came to a head on 27 June, when the president performed disastrously onstage with Trump in Atlanta. Parnes and Allen provide detailed and dramatic insights into the crisis.
Amid calls for Biden to withdraw, the authors write, aides to Biden “frantically push[ed] back in phone calls and in text messages, accusing donors of promoting their own agendas at the expense of Biden, the party, and the country”
Trump threatens higher tariffs on EU and Canada if they work together 'to do economic harm' to US
President Donald Trump has said that if the EU works with Canada “to do economic harm to the USA”, then “large scale tariffs, far larger than currently planned” will be placed on them both.
Writing on the Truth Social network on Thursday, Trump said the threatened higher tariffs would be placed in order “to protect the best friend that each of those two countries has ever had”.
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French president Emmanuel Macron spoke with US president Donald Trump before a meeting of 30 countries with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the French presidency said on Thursday.
Macron and the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, are hosting the meeting to discuss strengthening military support to Ukraine and what future role Ukraine’s allies could have to guarantee security if there were a peace deal with Russia.
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, Johnson, a former constitutional attorney, raised the prospect of congressional intervention in the court system.
“We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said.
While Johnson later clarified that his remarks were meant to illustrate Congress’s broad constitutional powers rather than a direct threat, it traces the mounting pressure from Trump’s allies to challenge judicial independence.
Republican lawmakers have grown more visibly frustrated with federal judges blocking Trump administration actions, particularly regarding immigration policies.
One particular point of their ire is US district judge James Boasberg, who recently issued a nationwide injunction preventing the deportation of Venezuelan immigrants. Trump has since called to impeach Boasberg over his decision, and several House Republicans have taken up the call to introduce articles of impeachment against him and other judges who have issued similar nationwide injunctions.
Article III of the US constitution gives Congress the power to establish lower federal courts, and there’s historical precedent: Congress has eliminated courts before, such as the commerce court in 1913. And the House judiciary chair, Jim Jordan, has suggested that some legislative moves are being explored that could home in on potential funding restrictions.
The US supreme court upheld on Wednesday a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.
The justices, in a 7-2 ruling authored by conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, overturned a lower court’s decision that the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its authority in issuing the 2022 rule targeting parts and kits for ghost guns.
Conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Gorsuch was joined in the majority by conservative justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh as well as the court’s three liberal members.
Ghost gun products are typically bought online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.
Plaintiffs including parts manufacturers, various gun owners and two gun rights groups – the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation – sued to block the ATF rule in federal court in Texas.
The regulation required manufacturers of firearms kits and parts, such as partly complete frames or receivers, to mark their products with serial numbers, obtain licenses and conduct background checks on purchasers, as already required for other commercially made firearms.
The rule clarified that these kits and components are covered by the definition of “firearm” under a 1968 federal law called the Gun Control Act and that commercial manufacturers of such kits must become licensed.
UK will not 'escalate' trade wars after Trump car tariff, says finance minister
The UK does not want to escalate trade wars, finance minister Rachel Reeves said on Thursday after US president Donald Trump announced import tariffs on cars and auto parts. The response came with London locked in talks with Washington over potentially securing a post-Brexit trade deal.
“We’re not at the moment in a position where we want to do anything to escalate these trade wars,” Reeves told Sky News, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We are looking to secure a better trading relationship with the United States,” she told the broadcaster, adding that the Labour government was “in extensive talks” with the Trump administration over securing a trade deal.
Trump on Wednesday announced steep tariffs on the auto sector, provoking threats of retaliation from trading partners ahead of further promised trade levies next week.
“What we’re going to be doing is a 25% tariff on all cars that are not made in the United States,” Trump said, as he signed the order in the Oval Office. The duties take effect at 12.01 am (04.01 GMT) on 3 April and impact foreign-made cars and light trucks. Key automobile parts will also be hit within the month.
The UK trade body for the auto sector urged the US and the UK to strike a deal that avoids Trump’s “disappointing” tariffs on foreign-made cars, reports AFP.
“The industry urges both sides to come together immediately and strike a deal that works for all,” Mike Hawes, chief executive at the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, said in a statement late Wednesday.
“The UK and US auto industries have a longstanding and productive relationship, with US consumers enjoying vehicles built in Britain by some iconic brands, while thousands of UK motorists buy cars made in America,” Hawes noted.
He said that “rather than imposing additional tariffs, we should explore ways in which opportunities for both British and American manufacturers can be created as part of a mutually beneficial relationship, benefiting consumers and creating jobs and growth across the Atlantic.”
Speaking at the end of January, Hawes said the Us was “an important market” for UK-produced luxury brands such as Bentley and Rolls-Royce, adding that this allowed for “a greater opportunity to absorb” tariffs.
President Donald Trump’s plan to impose a 25% tariff on imported cars and light trucks starting next week is “very bad news” and the only solution for now is for the European Union to raise its own tariffs, French finance minister Eric Lombard said on Thursday.
Lombard, who was speaking on France Inter radio, said he hoped be able to discuss soon with his US counterparts in view of lowering those tariffs, adding a trade war would lead “to nothing”, reports Reuters.
Trump, who sees tariffs as a tool to raise revenue to offset his promised tax cuts and to revive a long-declining US industrial base, said collections would begin on 3 April.
Private data of Trump officials in Signal scandal accessible online: report
The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Wednesday, adding to the fallout from the officials’ use of a Signal group chat to plan airstrikes on Yemen.
Mobile phone numbers, email addresses and in some cases passwords used by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard can be found via commercial data-search services and hacked data dumped online, it reported. It is not clear in all cases how recent the details are.
The Trump administration has been facing calls for the resignation of senior officials amid bipartisan criticism after Monday’s embarrassing revelations. The chat group, which included vice-president JD Vance, Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to carry out strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen via the Signal app, potentially threatening the safety of US servicemen and women taking part in the operation.
On Wednesday evening, Trump backed Hegseth, saying “He had nothing to do with this” and calling the scandal a “witch-hunt”.
The phone numbers and email addresses – mostly current – were in some cases used for Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, cloud-storage service Dropbox, and apps that track a user’s location.
Der Spiegel reported it was “particularly easy” to discover Hegseth’s mobile number and email address, using a commercial provider of contact information. It found that the email address, and in some cases even the password associated with it, could be found in more than 20 data leaks. It reported that it was possible to verify that the email address was used just a few days ago.
It said the mobile number led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth appeared to have only recently deleted.
In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators are calling for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.
“This is what happens when you don’t really have your act together,” the Alaska Republican senator Lisa Murkowski told the Hill.
The Trump administration has been facing criticism from Democrats – and now Republicans – after Monday’s embarrassing revelation that a team of senior national security officials accidentally added a journalist to a private group chat on Signal, an encrypted messaging app. The group, which included JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and others, discussed sensitive plans to engage in military strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.
On Wednesday, morning the Atlantic posted another tranche of messages that contained details of the attack on Yemen, including descriptions of targets, launch times and even the details of weather during the assault.
Senior national security officials testified before the Senate intelligence committee on Tuesday, where the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, and CIA director, John Ratcliffe, were grilled by lawmakers over the scandal. The national security officials said “no classified material” had been shared in the chat. Republicans are now calling for investigations, as well.
According to reporting from the Hill, top Republican senators are calling for various committees to investigate the leak, including the Senate armed services committee and the Senate intelligence committee. The Mississippi senator Roger Wicker, who chairs the armed services committee, told the Hill he would be asking the defense department’s inspector general to investigate the scandal.
Republican senators call for investigation of Signal scandal as messages released
Messages, released on Wednesday, from the Signal group chat discussing an attack on Yemen revealed details of US bombings, drone launches and other information about the assault, including descriptions of weather conditions and specific weapons.
“There is a clear public interest in disclosing the sort of information that Trump advisers included in nonsecure communications channels, especially because senior administration figures are attempting to downplay the significance of the messages that were shared,” the Atlantic wrote.
It reproduced numerous messages from the text chat between the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth – who said on Tuesday that “nobody was texting war plans” – and top intelligence officials.
US intelligence chiefs on Wednesday denied breaking the law or revealing classified information in a group chat where they discussed details of airstrikes on Yemen in the presence of a journalist, despite allegations from Democrats that the leak was reckless and possibly illegal.
Democrats used an intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday to demand an explanation of how operational military plans are not classified information.
In rare signs of unrest, top Republican senators called for an investigation into the Signal leak scandal and demanding answers from the Trump administration, as they raise concerns it will become a “significant political problem” if not addressed properly.
More on that in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:
The private data of top security advisers to US President Donald Trump can be accessed online, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported, adding to the fallout from the Signal group chat scandal.
Trump announced plans to impose sweeping 25% tariffs on cars from overseas on Wednesday, days before the president is expected to announce wide-ranging levies on other goods from around the world. Canadian prime minister Mark Carney called the move a “direct attack” on Canadian workers.
The US supreme court upheld a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.
The heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a heated congressional subcommittee hearing, helmed by conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene, amid a renewed Republican effort to defund US public media.
Republican House speaker Mike Johnson suggested potentially defunding, restructuring or eliminating US federal courts as a means of pushing back against judicial decisions that have challenged Donald Trump’s policies.
The Trump administration has paused the processing of certain green card applications as the US government continues to implement a hardline immigration agenda.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student in Boston detained on Tuesday by federal immigration agents in response to her pro-Palestinian activism, was on Wednesday evening being detained at the South Louisiana Ice processing center, according to the government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainee locator page.
