Democrats have responded to the news earlier that the FBI has agreed to assist local law enforcement to track down Democratic lawmakers who left the state to break quorum in protest of the state’s GOP-drawn congressional map.
It comes after Republican Senator John Cornyn’s statement earlier, praising FBI director Kash Patel for his support.
Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the move in a post on X.
“The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” the House minority leader wrote. “We will not be intimidated.”
Meanwhile, Illinois governor JB Pritzker underscored on a podcast on Wednesday that Texas lawmakers hadn’t broken any laws. He also said that any arrests by FBI agents would be “unwelcome” in his state.
“They’re grandstanding, there’s literally no federal law applicable to this situation,” he added.
The US Air Force said it would deny all transgender service members who have served between 15 and 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits, the AP reports.
One Air Force sergeant said he was “betrayed and devastated” by the move.
The move means that transgender service members will now be faced with the choice of either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service.
An Air Force spokesperson told the AP that “although service members with 15 to 18 years of honorable service were permitted to apply for an exception to policy, none of the exceptions to policy were approved.”
About a dozen service members had been “prematurely notified” that they would be able to retire before that decision was reversed, according to the spokesperson who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Air Force policy.
A memo issued Monday announcing the new policy said that the choice to deny retirement benefits was made “after careful consideration of the individual applications.”
Earlier, we reported that two senior FBI officials involved in a number of FBI investigations related to the president were fired. Now, senior politics reporter Chris Stein brings us more details:
The Trump administration is forcing out a senior FBI official who resisted demands made earlier this year for the names of agents who investigated the January 6 insurrection, two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
Brian Driscoll briefly served as acting FBI director in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s new term, and his final day at the bureau is Friday, the people told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to discuss the move. Further ousters were possible.
The FBI declined to comment to the Guardian.
The New York Times further reported that the FBI was forcing out Walter Giardina, a special agent who worked on cases involving Trump as well as Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser to the president who was convicted of contempt of Congress.
The ousters were the latest under the FBI director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, who had repeatedly alleged that the bureau had become politicized under Joe Biden. Numerous senior officials, including top agents in charge of big-city field offices, have been pushed out of their jobs, and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst.
Here’s the full story:
Donald Trump’s administration turned to the US supreme court in an effort to defend its aggressive immigration raids after a federal judge in Los Angeles blocked agents from profiling individuals based on race or language in pursuit of deportation targets.
The justice department asked the supreme court in an emergency filing to lift the judge’s order temporarily barring agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally, by relying solely on their race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent.
The move comes after a federal judge last month ordered the Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in seven California counties, including Los Angeles.
Donald Trump said Thursday that he would meet with Vladimir Putin even if the Russian president won’t meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump, when asked by a reporter whether Putin would need to meet with the Ukrainian president to secure a meeting with the US, said: “No, he doesn’t. No.”
His comments followed Putin’s remarks earlier in the day that he hoped to meet with Trump next week, possibly in the United Arab Emirates. But the White House was still working through the details of any potential meetings, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Donald Trump announced he will nominate the Council of Economic Advisers chair Stephen Miran to serve as a Federal Reserve governor.
Miran would fill the position opened by Fed governor Adriana Kugler’s surprise resignation last week, as she returns to her tenured professorship at Georgetown University.
The term expires on 31 January 2026 and is subject to approval by the Senate.
Trump said the White House continues to search for someone to serve in the 14-year Fed Board seat that opens 1 February.
Miran has advocated for a far-reaching overhaul of Fed governance that would include shortening board member terms, putting them under the clear control of the president and ending the “revolving door” between the executive branch and the Fed.
Trump has unsuccessfully pushed the Fed to cut rates. Miran, if confirmed by the Senate, would have one of 12 votes on monetary policy at the Fed, which voted 9-2 last month to keep rates steady.
Donald Trump and Stephen Moore, a fellow at the rightwing thinktank the Heritage Foundation, held an event at the White House on Thursday to show reporters “new numbers” that allege the Bureau of Labor Statistics overstated job creation during the first two years of the Biden administration.
“I don’t think it’s an error,” Trump said during today’s event. “I think they did it purposely.”
Moore said the data comes from “unpublished Census Bureau data”, and will supposedly be released sometime in the next six months.
Moore is Trump’s former economic advisor and co-wrote the book Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy”, which praised the president’s economic plans. In 2019, Trump nominated Moore for a seat on the Federal Reserve board, but he withdrew amid scrutiny for his history of sexist comments and other scandals.
Colleges and universities will be forced to disclose more student admissions data to prove that they are not implementing affirmative action policies, according to a directive sent by the White House on Thursday.
The move comes as the Trump administration seeks to crack down on the use of race in the higher education application process. Ivy League universities, like Brown University, have reached settlements that require them to release information about applicants’ race.
Colleges have been barred from considering race in admissions since 2023, when the supreme court overturned decades of precedent that allowed limited use of race as a factor. Trump’s directive would increase oversight of schools’ admissions processes.
“Although the Supreme Court of the United States has definitively held that consideration of race in higher education admissions violates students’ civil rights,” the directive reads, “the persistent lack of available data – paired with the rampant use of ‘diversity statements’ and other overt and hidden racial proxies – continues to raise concerns about whether race is actually used in practice.”
The directive was confirmed earlier today by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
The president’s higher tariffs hit major US trading partners today. Trump and members of his cabinet declared it an economic victory, with commerce secretary Howard Lutnick estimating that the tariffs will lead to “$50bn a month” in revenue for the USand treasury secretary Scott Bessent saying a “manufacturing renaissance” was on the horizon in an interview with MSNBC. Countries feeling the hit, however, are now scrambling to respond.
Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas said today that the FBI had approved his request for the agency to help locate and arrest Democratic state lawmakers, who left the state last week to break quorum in protest over a GOP-drawn congressional map. “We cannot allow these rogue legislators to avoid their constitutional responsibilities,” Cornyn said in a statement.
In response, undeterred Democrats have fired back. “The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on X. “We will not be intimidated.”
Meanwhile, on Truth Social, Donald Trump announced today that he’s ordered the commerce department to conduct a new census that would exclude undocumented immigrants from the official count. “People who are in our country illegally will not be counted,” the president said. It’s important to note that the US census has historically counted all residents regardless of citizenship or immigration status, as required by the 14th amendment’s “whole number of persons” provision.
And in Florida, the administration’s immigration agenda hit a snag as a federal judge in Miami ordered a temporary halt to the construction of the detention centre being built in the Everglades, known as “Alligator Alcatraz”. While the injunction says the facility can continue to operate and hold detainees, any further construction must stop while environmental threats to the wetlands are assessed.
More than 60 countries around the world are scrambling to respond to the latest wave of US tariffs announced by Donald Trump, which came into force on Thursday.
The Brazilian government said it was planning a state aid plan for companies affected. The president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said the duties were “unacceptable blackmail”.
Switzerland said it was seeking new talks with the US after a last-gasp mission to Washington by its president, Karin Keller-Sutter, failed to stop a 39% tariff blow that industry group Swissmem described as a “horror scenario”.
In a statement after an emergency meeting with Keller-Sutter, the Swiss cabinet said the tariffs would “place a substantial strain on Switzerland’s export-oriented economy”.
“For the affected sectors, companies and their employees, this is an extraordinarily difficult situation,” Keller-Sutter told reporters.
Despite a last-minute reprieve from Trump for Lesotho with tariffs dropping from 50% to 15%, the impoverished African nation said it was already hurting.
Textile industry players in the country – which produces jeans and other garments for US companies including Levi and Walmart – said the uncertainty around tariffs over the past few months had already devastated the sector, with orders cancelled and jobs cut.
Read more here:
A federal judge in Miami has ordered a temporary halt to the construction of the detention centre being built in the Florida everglades known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz’.
The temporary injunction, which lasts for 14 days, states that the facility can continue to operate and hold detainees, but any further construction must stop while any environmental threats to the wetlands are assessed.
The plaintiffs – which comprise environmental groups and Florida’s Miccosukee Tribe – argue that the detention center’s construction ultimately violates the National Environmental Policy Act.
The federal judiciary said on Thursday that it would be taking “additional steps” to strengthen protections for sensitive case documents after “recent escalated cyber-attacks” on its case management system.
Politico first reported the news of a hack that hit the federal courts’ filing system.
“Enhancing the security of its systems is a top priority for the Judiciary,” the Federal Courts system wrote in a statement. They didn’t offer any immediate information about who was behind the cyber-attacks.
My colleagues are reporting on the latest developments following Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks that he intends to take military control of all of Gaza, before eventually handing it over to Arab forces that will govern it properly.
The Israeli prime minister’s statement comes after special envoy Steve Witkoff visited the region last week to assess the ongoing humanitarian crisis, increase the flow of US aid to Gaza.
You can follow along here:
Democrats have responded to the news earlier that the FBI has agreed to assist local law enforcement to track down Democratic lawmakers who left the state to break quorum in protest of the state’s GOP-drawn congressional map.
It comes after Republican Senator John Cornyn’s statement earlier, praising FBI director Kash Patel for his support.
Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the move in a post on X.
“The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” the House minority leader wrote. “We will not be intimidated.”
Meanwhile, Illinois governor JB Pritzker underscored on a podcast on Wednesday that Texas lawmakers hadn’t broken any laws. He also said that any arrests by FBI agents would be “unwelcome” in his state.
“They’re grandstanding, there’s literally no federal law applicable to this situation,” he added.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
