White House doubles down on Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at FBI raid of election center – as it happened

The US military said it conducted a kinetic strike on a suspected drug vessel in the Eastern Pacific on Thursday, killing two people.

“Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the Eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations,” the US military said in a statement. No American military forces were harmed, according to the US Southern Command.

The latest strike comes nearly two weeks after the US killed two people in another strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific. Since September, the US military has conducted more than 30 strikes against boats that American officials allege were involved in drug smuggling, killing more than 100 people.

Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, said his office has been assured there will be no immigration enforcement operations at the Super Bowl.

Confusion and fear had been swirling around the issue in recent months, after the DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and her advisor Corey Lewandowski said last fall that agents would conduct operations during the game in Santa Clara, California. “We’ll be all over that place,” Noem said to a podcaster.

The news caused outrage, particularly among local officials who said it would bring chaos to the event. This week the NFL announced there were “no planned ICE enforcement activities” at the game, which Newsom echoed in a statement on Thursday.

“California is working with all stakeholders and public safety personnel to keep people safe — and ensure they feel safe — during the Super Bowl. We’ve been assured there will be no immigration enforcement tied to the game,” the governor said. “Our focus is protecting people, supporting workers and small businesses, and delivering on an event with real benefits for the region.”

Governor Tina Kotek and more than 30 Oregon mayors have demanded the Trump administration halt all federal immigration enforcement actions in the state.

On Thursday, Kotek and the mayors sent a letter to DHS secretary Kristi Noem and border czar Tom Homan urging the federal government suspend such operations in Oregon until recent “use-of-force” incidents are thoroughly investigated.

“The actions of your officers are not making our communities safer. Parents are afraid to take their children to school. Families are avoiding healthcare.” the letter states. “The actions of your officers, especially the use of lethal force, are damaging local economies and hurting the people we are responsible for protecting and serving.”

Over the weekend, federal agents used teargas on a crowd that included children during a protest outside a Portland ICE facility over the weekend. The demonstrators present “made no threat and posed no danger”, the city’s mayor said in recent days. The protest was part of a wave of demonstrations in the US in response to Trump’s immigration crackdown and the killings of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, by federal agents in Minneapolis.

“Things need to change,” Kotek said in a video announcing the letter. “The federal government needs to rebuild trust with Americans. What they’re doing is making all of us less safe.”

Donald Trump just introduced TrumpRX.gov, which the White House says aims to help Americans get discounted prescription drugs.

Under the new initiative, sixteen of the world’s largest drug manufacturers agreed to cut prices for Americans in exchange for exemptions from US tariffs as part of what the president describes as a “most-favored nation” deal. The companies will also reduce prices for Medicaid and to cash-paying consumers, Reuters reports.

“People are going to save a lot of money and be healthy,” the president said at a White House event.

The website won’t sell drugs directly, and instead will send patients to other sites to purchase medicines. The more than 40 available prescriptions include GLP-1-weight-loss drugs, as well as blood thinners, inhalers, cholesterol medication and diabetes medicine.

Patients in the US often pay nearly three times more for prescriptions than patients in other developed nations. It’s not yet clear how much consumers will save, and TrumpRX is primarily geared toward consumers buying drugs without insurance, according to Reuters.

“There is a real question about the value of this for people with insurance,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director for Medicare policy at health policy organization KFF, told the outlet. “In some cases, we could be looking at out-of-pocket costs that are still relatively unaffordable for a lot of people.”

Donald Trump reportedly wants to see New York’s Penn Station and Dulles airport in Washington renamed in his honor.

The president is said to have told Senator Chuck Schumer that he would release billions of dollars in federal funding set aside for a New York infrastructure project if the minority leader agreed to back the renaming, according to reports from Punchbowl and CNN.

Schumer reportedly rejected the offer, telling the president it was not within his power.

The president has sought to put his name on numerous government buildings and projects in his second term, including the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the US Institute of Peace and the newly launched website TrumpRX, which aims to help American buy prescriptions at lower prices.

Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan said she will not sit down for an interview with Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, and US attorney Jeanine Pirro regarding a video that she and other Democrats made urging troops to refuse illegal orders.

The former CIA officer organized the video, which featured five other Democrats with military and intelligence backgrounds who said officers can resist unlawful commands. Donald Trump was outraged by the clip, and described it “seditious behavior by traitors” that was “punishable by death”. Slotkin announced last month that she was under federal investigation by the department of justice for her participation.

In a video published on Thursday, the senator said she sent a letter to Bondi and Pirro informing them she would not comply with their inquiries, and urged them to retain their records in the event she decides to sue. Slotkin also said that threats against her, her family and staff went “through the roof” following Trump’s statements.

“I’m not going to legitimize their actions,” Slotkin said. “Our constitution is crystal clear on the issue of freedom of speech – something worth fighting for. To be honest, many lawyers told me to just be quiet, keep my head down and hopefully this will all just go away.

“But that’s exactly what the Trump administration and Jeanine Pirro want. They are purposely using physical and legal intimidation to get me to shut up. But, more importantly, they’re using that intimidation to deter others from speaking out against their administration.”

New details are continuing to emerge in the case of Nancy Guthrie, the mother of anchor Savannah Guthrie. Officials confirmed on Thursday that the blood found at the 84-year-old’s home was hers.

My colleagues Marina Dunbar and Sara Braun report that law enforcement chiefs in Arizona on Thursday confirmed that they found blood belonging to Nancy Guthrie, the mother of the TV anchor Savannah Guthrie, on the 84-year-old’s porch after she was reported missing from home at the weekend.

The sheriff of Pima county, Chris Nanos, said during a press conference authorities do not yet have a suspect in the apparent kidnapping.

But they believe Nancy Guthrie is “still out there” and their protocol in such a situation is to assume she is alive until there is any information otherwise “and we’re going to continue thinking that way until we find her”, Nanos said.

You can read the full report here:

• Karoline Leavitt doubled down on Donald Trump’s earlier defense of Tulsi Gabbard’s role in an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia. Earlier today, Trump said that Gabbard – the director of national intelligence – went at the urging of attorney general Pam Bondi. At today’s White House briefing, Leavitt said that it is a part of Gabbard’s role “to make sure that American elections are free of foreign interference, and that American elections are safe and secure”.

• The White house also said today that the administration is willing to discuss “some” of the items on the list of demands by congressional Democrats as negotiations on a full year funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) continue. Leavitt said that some of the demands “don’t seem like they are grounded in any common sense, and they are non starters for this administration,” without elaborating on specifics.

• The Trump administration moved Thursday to issue a rule that would make it easier to fire tens of thousands of federal workers. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said it was reclassifying certain career civil service roles so agencies can “quickly remove employees from critical positions who engage in misconduct, perform poorly, or obstruct the democratic process by intentionally subverting Presidential directives”. The reclassification could also allow the administration to remove employees it views as disloyal.

• The Pima county sheriff said that local authorities believe Nancy Guthrie, the mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, is “still out there”. “We just want her home and find a way to get to the bottom of this,” sheriff Chris Nanos said, after the 84-year-old went missing almost five days ago.

• Treasury secretary Scott Bessent has said that further US sanctions against Russia depend on talks aimed at ending its nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine. Bessent, who participated in talks with Russian officials and Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner in Miami on 31 January, said he would consider sanctions against Russia’s shadow fleet.

• Meanwhile, Ukraine and Russia concluded a second day of US-led talks in Abu Dhabi on Thursday without a breakthrough towards ending Europe’s most deadly conflict since the second world war. The two sides agreed to a reciprocal exchange of 157 prisoners of war each, offering a rare concrete outcome from the discussions. But Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy involved in the talks, cautioned that “significant work remains” in the weeks ahead.

Brat summer faded long ago. But on Thursday, Kamala Harris relaunched her @KamalaHQ account on social media as “Headquarters”. She kept the green aesthetic that had saturated the strange, disorienting months after Harris stepped into the race to take on Donald Trump.

The rebranded “Headquarters” is a partnership between the former vice president and the liberal advocacy group, People for the American Way, that aims to be an organizing hub for Gen Z.

“Conservatives build permanent organizing infrastructure,” the press release states. “Progressives have historically built machines that dismantle after Election Day. Headquarters is the end of that cycle.”

In a video launched on the account, Harris describes Headquarters as a place “where you can go online to get the latest of what’s going on, and also to meet and revisit with some of our great and courageous leaders – be they elected leaders, community leaders, civic leaders, faith leaders, young leaders”.

Taking on her first official role since leaving the White House last year, Harris will serve as the chair emerita of Headquarters, and will be joined by many of her former campaign staff.

Encouraging young people to stay engaged in politics despite their disillusionment with the state of the world and the status quo has been a major focus of Harri’s post-vice presidency. In her public remarks, she has encouraged young people to “stay in the fight”.

Last summer, Harris declined to run for governor, but has left the door open to another presidential run.

Leavitt brushed off a question in the briefing room today about Steve Bannon’s comments that federal immigration agents will be present at election sites in the upcoming midterms. “You’re damn right we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” Bannon said on his War Room show on Tuesday.

In response, the White House press secretary said that she “can’t guarantee that an ICE agent won’t be around a polling location in November”.

“I mean, that’s frankly a very silly hypothetical question,” she added. “What I can tell you is I haven’t heard the president discuss any formal plans to put ICE outside of polling locations. It’s a disingenuous question.”

In today’s briefing, Leavitt said that the “softer touch” that Donald Trump referred to in his interview with NBC News on Thursday was increased cooperation between local and federal law enforcement.

“If the states in the local governments just turn over their illegal aliens to ICE at jails, as they should be doing, it requires one agent to deport that one illegal alien, who can then go on their way to their home country in a peaceful manner,” Leavitt said. “The escalation that we’ve seen take place in Minnesota is a direct result of the refusal of state and local officials to cooperate with the federal government and with ICE.”

However, as we have reported, there is no federal law that requires county jails to coordinate with federal law enforcement. Some sheriffs throughout the state have signed agreements to work with ICE, but many limit working with federal immigration enforcement as it can undermine trust between local officials and immigrant communities.

What’s more, jails are unable, under state law, from holding someone past their scheduled release date – a request known as an “ICE detainer”. Prisons, operated by the Minnesota Department of Corrections, already facilitate transfers of those convicted of felonies to federal custody.

Karoline Leavitt doubled down on Trump’s earlier defense of Tulsi Gabbard’s role in an FBI raid of an election center in Georgia. Earlier today, Trump said that Gabbard – the director of national intelligence – went at the urging of attorney general Pam Bondi.

At today’s briefing, Leavitt said that it is a part of Gabbard’s role “to make sure that American elections are free of foreign interference, and that American elections are safe and secure”.

As the Guardian reported, Trump’s remarks earlier marked a departure from remarks in an interview with NBC News on Wednesday. “I don’t know,” Trump said when asked why Gabbard was present. The Guardian has also reported that Gabbard is conducting her own review of the 2020 election through her office with Trump’s approval – working separately from the justice department investigation – and that she was sent to observe the raid as part of that effort.

Leavitt did not clarify whether the president directed Gabbard to go to Fulton County for the seizure of almost 700 boxes of 2020 election documentation.

“It’s the media who has said that there’s Russian interference in American elections. You guys have been saying that for many saying that for many, many years,” the press secretary said. “I don’t understand why anyone in this room, considering you’re all American citizens I believe, and like to vote in our nation’s elections, should have any problem with that whatsoever.”

When asked about Donald Trump’s comments in an NBC News about the federal government’s role in elections.

“What the president is suggesting, and I just spoke to him about this, is that Republicans and Democrats in Congress should pass the SAVE America act,” Leavitt said of the legislation that requires prospective voters to provide proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport, when registering to vote.

Leavitt said today that the administration is willing to discuss “some” of the items on the list of demands sent by the Senate’s top Democrat Chuck Schumer and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Others don’t seem like they are grounded in any common sense, and they are non starters for this administration,” Leavitt said.

She didn’t elaborate on which aspects are off the table, but many Republican remembers of Congress have said that some of the key demands from Democrats, like asking federal immigration agents to not wear masks and the need for judicial warrants to conduct raids, are untenable.

Of note, Leavitt says that the president will announce the unveiling of TrumpRx at 7pm ET on Thursday. This will be a new website that helps Americans buy prescription drugs directly from manufacturers.