Bipartisan letter to Pentagon inspector general implores investigation into Signal group chat leak – live

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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 Politicoreports 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:

As another day of live coverage draws to a close, here are some of the day’s developments:

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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.

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Fearing the loss of her seat in the House, Donald Trump withdrew the nomination of Representative Elise Stefanik as US Ambassador to the UN.

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Judge James Boasberg ordered all relevant government agencies to retain the Signal group chat messages tat are now the subject of litigation.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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A Russian scientist from Harvard Medical School has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to her friends and colleagues.

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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.

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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.

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“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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Petrova should be eligible for parole while she waits for that hearing, Peshkin said, “but paroles are now not happening”.

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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”.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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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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.

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.@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

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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.

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Biden is back at his fake White House set again pic.twitter.com/puYuiGfvib

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 9, 2024

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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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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.

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“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.

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“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” said Bondi.

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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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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.

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“But the process still involves Congress, right, at some level?” the Fox host Bret Baier asked.

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“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”.

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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.

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“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”.

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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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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.

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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”.

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More, from Hugo Lowell:

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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”.

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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.”

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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”.

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“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.

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“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.

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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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Donald Trump has withdrawn his nomination of his staunch supporter and New York representative Elise Stefanik as the US ambassador to the UN.

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Citing the necessity to “maintain every Republican seat in Congress”, Trump took to Truth Social to explain his decision on Thursday, saying:

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“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.”

n

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Trump went on to say that “there are others that can do a good job at the United Nations”.

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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.

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“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released,” Bondi told reporters in Virginia “while praising the military operation that ensued”, the Times said.

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“What we should be talking about is, it was a very successful mission.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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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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:

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“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.

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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.

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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.”

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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%.

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Speaking of tariffs, here’s some further lunchtime reading:

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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.

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Addressing Steven A Stebbins, Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Jack Reed of Rhode Islandwrite: “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.

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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.

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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”.

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The senators also say they will schedule a briefing from Stebbins.

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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.

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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.

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The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports that Trump is not minded to sack anyone over the scandal.

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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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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.

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Kennedy also plans to close some regional offices. The restructuring, along with previous voluntary departures, will result in a total downsizing to 62,000.

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“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.

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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.

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Musk and select agents of Doge are due to give an interview to Fox News tonight.

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The Wall Street Journal first reported Kennedy’s cuts announcement.

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More here:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The president also defended Hegseth’s involvement. “He had nothing to do with this. Hegseth? How do you bring Hegseth into this?”

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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.

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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.

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Full story:

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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.

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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.

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Wired has its report here. It begins:

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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.

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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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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.

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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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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.

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“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).

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“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.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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“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.

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“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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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On Wednesday evening, Trump backed Hegseth, saying “He had nothing to do with this” and calling the scandal a “witch-hunt”.

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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.

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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.

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It said the mobile number led to a WhatsApp account that Hegseth appeared to have only recently deleted.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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Democrats used an intelligence committee hearing on Wednesday to demand an explanation of how operational military plans are not classified information.

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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.

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More on that in a moment, but first, here are some other developments:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Trump administration has paused the processing of certain green card applications as the US government continues to implement a hardline immigration agenda.

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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.

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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.

Petrova should be eligible for parole while she waits for that hearing, Peshkin said, “but paroles are now not happening”.

Susan Collins accuses Trump of illegally refusing to spend $2.9bn appropriated by Congress

It is, the senators write, “incumbent on all of us to follow the law as written – not as we would like it to be”.

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.

Fox interviews Musk on ‘fake White House set’ Trump aides mocked Biden for using

.@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

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Biden is back at his fake White House set again pic.twitter.com/puYuiGfvib

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 9, 2024

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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.

Justice department civil rights division investigates Stanford, Berkeley and UCLA to root out ‘DEI discrimination’

“President Trump and I are dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country,” said Bondi.

‘We try to keep Congress informed’, Musk tells Fox of cuts made by his team

“But the process still involves Congress, right, at some level?” the Fox host Bret Baier asked.

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.

Marina Dunbar

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.”

Full story:

Marina Dunbar

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,” postedNerdeen Kiswani, a pro-Palestinian activist in New York.

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.”

Deportations case judge assigned to Signal leak case orders all group messages must be preserved

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 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”.

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