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      Bernie Sanders: law firms that cut deals with Trump administration ‘sell out their soul’

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      Law firms that cut deals with Donald Trump’s administration after the president issued executive orders targeting attorneys who challenge his priorities are demonstrating “absolute cowardice”, the independent US senator Bernie Sanders has said.“They’re zillion-dollar law firms, and money, money, money” is all that motivates them, the popular Vermont lawmaker who caucuses with Democrats said in a feature interview on the latest CBS News Sunday Morning. “So they’re going to sell out their souls to be able to make money here in Washington.”Sanders’ remarks provided a notable condemnation of law firms who had represented political rivals of Trump then chose the path of least resistance after he aimed orders that threatened to cripple them. The orders sought to revoke security clearances, ban attorneys from accessing federal buildings, and – if they do business with the government – to force the targeted firm’s clients to disclose existing relationships with them.Some of the US’s most prominent legal practices subsequently capitulated. Willkie, Farr and Gallagher; Milbank LLP; and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom all reached deals with the White House meant to avoid Trump’s orders.In exchange, the firms would perform pro bono work for causes that are dear to them and Trump while also declining to engage in race-based hiring.Some firms, on the other hand, have sought to stand up to Trump. Perkins Coie got a court injunction blocking much of an executive order from Trump that targeted the firm. Hundreds of law firms and former judges have signed on to court briefs supporting Perkins Coie in its opposition to Trump.Meanwhile, after suing over Trump orders directed at them, Jenner & Block as well as WilmerHale were able to secure court mandates impeding most of his measures against them.Alums of the law firms which have yielded to Trump have voiced some of the strongest criticism for choosing that course of action.On Sunday, CBS asked Sanders what the cost was to the US when some of its most well-heeled institutions folded in that manner amid a standoff with Trump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It is indescribable,” Sanders said.Sanders on Sunday also contended that many of Trump’s maneuvers nearly three months into his second presidency had rendered the US into a “pseudo-democracy”. He singled out how Trump tasked Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, with slashing the size as well as funding of various federal government agencies and services.The multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X landed the role after spending more than $270m supporting Trump’s successful run for the White House in November.“Look, you get one vote, and Elon Musk can spend $270m to help elect Trump,” Sanders told CBS. “Does that sound like a democracy to you?” More

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      Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

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      For many librarians, the stakes of the job are high – they’re facing burnout, book bans, legislation pushed by rightwing groups, and providing essential resources in an effort to fill gaps in the US’s social safety net.Now, as Donald Trump’s administration rolls out their agenda, many librarians are describing his policies as “catastrophic” to accessing information and the libraries themselves – institutions considered fundamental to democracy.Rebecca Hass, the programming and outreach manager at the Anne Arundel county public library in Maryland, has seen the effects of Trump’s second term ripple in.“The impact [is] on many different community partners and customers that are represented in some of the executive orders,” said Hass. “We get everyone at the library. When people lose their jobs, they come to the library. When they’re not sure what’s going on, they come to the library.”Hass said the library received some pushback about LGBTQ+ programming, including protesters showing up to its trans Pride event. But the library is undeterred in efforts to meet community needs and supply resources, creating new resource pages on immigration and LGBTQ+ communities, and updating others. They have expanded partnerships, including with social workers in the library. Usage of the community pantry has increased.Much of this is work the library has always done, Hass said, adding: “But now it’s taken on urgency and additional responsibilities.”Emily Drabinski, an associate professor at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at the City University of New York, said that what is happening to librarians now mirrors what is happening to other workers.“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” she said.Some librarians described the impact of institutions capitulating to censorship on their work. A librarian in the deep south, who asked to remain anonymous in order to protect their safety, described tensions rising on their library board, and how the library is taking pre-emptive measures to make it challenging to find titles considered “controversial”.“I see all that being as a measure of: ‘If we fly under the radar, we’ll be safe,’” they said. “But it’s sad because who gets left behind – for staff members of color, [or] who are visibly queer, who are disabled, we don’t get to turn off that part of ourselves.”Meanwhile, Imani, an academic librarian in Texas who declined to give their full name for privacy concerns, is an active public library user, said “DEI removal” happened in her workplace in 2023. Now, they’re seeing increased scrutiny on how funds are spent, especially in regard to large databases.“It’s really important that people know that this isn’t new at all,” she said, adding that she knew a school librarian who retired several years ago due to fears of criminalization. “At this point, many librarians have done every single thing they can to save things.”Also, Imani noted, librarians are doing their work with “very little money, very little support [and] higher, higher demand”.Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” recently gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which the American Library Association noted greatly affects the important services they offer, including high-speed internet access, summer reading programs, veterans’ telehealth spaces and more, with the most intense losses in rural communities.While the majority of public library funding comes from city and county taxes, according to EveryLibrary, the IMLS provides grants that support these critical services in every state.Marisa Kabas, the independent journalist who writes the The Handbasket, obtained a copy of a letter sent by IMLS’s acting director, Keith Sonderling, announcing that state library grantee funding would be terminated immediately. (Sonderling previously declared his intention to “restore focus on patriotism” to the IMLS, which many groups noted as an attack on freedom of expression.)The IMLS submitted a budget request of $280m for 2025.“That’s nothing in terms of the federal budget, yet it’s going to affect every single library in the country,” said Jessamyn West, who works in a rural, public library in Vermont in addition to working with the Flickr Foundation. “It’s going to make them scramble, it’s going to make them worry, and it’s going to make them have to make really difficult choices for the services that they give to their patrons.”In many cases, the money is already spent because of contracts libraries had with governments, West added.“We’re all pretty furious,” West said.Librarians are speaking out about what communities could lose, including internet access and workforce development in Kentucky, the Talking Book and Braille Center in New Jersey, digital hotspots in North Carolina, and much more outlined in reporting from Book Riot. As librarians grappled with losses that would directly affect their work, the IMLS Instagram account issued posts appearing to mock grantees.“It’s catastrophic,” Drabinski said, adding that IMLS funds significant library infrastructure, including ebook platforms and interlibrary loan systems. “Without those funds, many of those systems will grind to a halt. All of our work is about to become harder at the same time that the need for our resources and services will explode.”Drabinski continued: “What we want is for people to be able to read, and for people to have enough. The problems that we face as American workers are similar to yours, and we share a fight.” More

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      Abigail Disney: ‘Every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath’

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      My conversation with Abigail Disney opens with the kind of bog-standard line that starts most chats. But because she is a left-leaning American, with a record of righteous criticism of the man now once again in charge of her country, I suspect it might invite a very long answer indeed.Still, out it comes: “How are you?”“It’s a good question,” she says, “because we’re all struggling with it.”A deep breath. “I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.“Trump is an inheritor,” Disney tells me. “He never acknowledges it, but he wouldn’t have been able to do any of the things he did without an inheritance. He absorbed the lessons of inheriting money almost unfiltered: ‘You have this money because you’re special.’ If you read about his childhood, it’s like the textbook worst way to raise a person – you know, he was violent, he was a bully and he was rewarded for that, even as a very small child. And the more money he had, the more he exhibited these bad qualities, and the more people told him he was wonderful.”I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.”She exhales. “That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it. They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”View image in fullscreenWhat makes Abigail Disney fascinating is that she is also an inheritor. To quote from a speech she recently made – at the Vatican, where she took part in an event focused on making wealthy people around the world pay more tax, and the idea that large concentrations of wealth now threaten democracies – she acknowledges that she is rich “only because of some quirks in the tax system, some good luck, and some very loving grandparents. But nothing else.”Now a 65-year-old mother of four, she is the granddaughter of Roy O Disney, who, with his brother Walt, founded the Walt Disney company in 1923. In her early 20s, she resolved to start giving away large chunks of her inheritance. By 2021, she had donated approximately $70m to causes centred on women living with HIV, women in prison and women affected by domestic violence. She has long been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires, an American organisation focused on changing the system so that people as rich as its members – and those who have even more money – pay more of their income in tax.“I am of the belief that every billionaire who can’t live on $999m is kind of a sociopath,” she says. “Like, why? You know, over a billion dollars makes money so fast that it’s almost impossible to get rid of. And so by just sitting on your hands, you become more of a billionaire until you’re a double billionaire. It’s a strange way to live when you have objectively more money than a person can spend.”She has also campaigned – successfully – to improve wages and conditions for workers in the theme parks that bear her family name (she still owns shares in Disney, though not, she says, enough to give her substantial clout). As an active Democrat, she was among the big political donors who, in the summer of 2024, said they would withhold money from the party until Joe Biden stepped down as its candidate in the presidential election.View image in fullscreenBut aside from all that work and her advocacy on wealth and tax, Disney is chiefly known as a film producer and director, some of whose work has presciently looked ahead to the polarised, angry country the US seems to have become.In 2015, for example, she made The Armor of Light, an acclaimed and very sobering documentary about Rob Schenck, an evangelical pastor based in Washington DC who was long associated with the American hard right, with views on abortion to match. The film portrays him trying to find the courage to speak out about the scourge of American gun violence and pull his followers out of their love affair with firearms; after it was released, he and Disney began to regularly make their case to gatherings of rightwing Christians.But as Trump began his march towards the White House, they started to get a sharp sense of what his politics were going to do to American society. “When I first started asking about Trump, the people we met were like, ‘Are you kidding? No way – he’s a joker, he’s nothing.’ And then, halfway through the summer of 2016, it was like the iron curtain came down, and we stopped getting invitations. And when Trump was elected, we never got another request to speak.”For Schenck, things were about to get very ugly indeed. Over decades, he had been involved in the campaign to nullify Roe v Wade, the US supreme court judgment that established women’s constitutional right to abortion – which, in 2022, was overturned. But three years before that watershed decision, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times announcing that he had changed his mind. At that point, Disney tells me, former allies who were now staunch Trump supporters turned on him.“Death threats and all kinds of things came in,” she says. “He was told he was going to hell by people he had been friends with for 40 years. It’s horrible what he’s been through.”That kind of belligerent nastiness is arguably the defining feature of the mindset of the president and his followers, but Disney is adamant that the roots of his politics lie in wealth and privilege, and how Americans view those things. As she sees it, Trump and Trumpism are not some sudden bolt from the blue: his rise to power, she says, highlights a cultural shift that began in the 1980s, when the US really started to venerate the wealthy.“Our magazine covers did not used to be littered with CEOs,” she says. “They used to have pictures of Martin Luther King on them, or a war hero, or the woman who founded the Girl Scouts. Just look at the magazine covers and you’ll see the way this country has lost its way.”Soon enough, along came reality TV, the frenzied worship of a new kind of celebrity, and social media. Trump, clearly, has skilfully used them all. “We all laughed and said he was stupid, but obviously he’s not,” she says. “In the 19th century he would have sold a lot of snake oil. He came along right at the correct moment. And he played his role brilliantly. You’ve got to give it to him.”View image in fullscreenOne question hangs over the whole of our conversation: what is to be done?For now, Disney tells me, pursuing political activism via film-making probably isn’t an option. She is understandably worried about what Trump and Musk might have planned for such outlets as the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which might once have played a key role in holding them to account. The fact that the TV and movie industries are in crisis – thanks to recent writers’ strikes, and the impossible economics of streaming – makes things even more difficult. “I’m thinking of maybe pivoting to short videos – just talking at the camera, and doing that low-maintenance kind of thing,” she says. “I feel like I’m missing an opportunity if I don’t go on social media and try to be present as a public voice.”As the Trump revolution gathers pace, I tell her, I often wonder when massed opposition will materialise. Put another way, why aren’t millions of people already in the streets?She sighs. “We could all show up on the streets. But what would be the uniting message? The chaos is deliberate: it’s meant to give us too much to handle. Do we go out there about the environment? Do we go out there about DEI [diversity, equality and inclusion policies]? Do we go out there about gay rights, about women’s rights?“You know, the difficulty of being progressive is that it’s difficult to unite everybody around a single issue. So most of the progressives I know are trying to figure that out. And even if we did go out [on the streets], what is our leverage? We have none.”What does she mean by leverage?“Well, we [Democrats] have a minority in the House and the Senate. We have a cabinet that is so radical, and they are lining the government with people who are beyond radical and there is no place where we can exercise visible dissent … We’re being shut out. And the way of communicating has completely changed. An op-ed in the New York Times isn’t going to change things.”View image in fullscreenDisney is at pains to talk about the necessity of slow and arduous work: building opposition from the grassroots up – which will be helped, she says, by the fact that Trump and his cronies will sooner or later hit no end of problems.“I really don’t think it will take very much time for a lot of the people who voted for him to regret it, especially on the economy,” she says. “We’re going to have so much inflation: the tariffs are terrible. I think that there’s going to be some turning, and in the meantime we have to really work on building institutions. Black associations, neighbourhood associations, PTAs – we need to do the work of rebuilding those spaces. We need the basis of a really vibrant progressive society. We let it die.”When I mention the progressive flag-bearers Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who have recently been organising Fight Oligarchy events across the US, Disney speaks with an urgency that sounds almost optimistic.“We need Bernie barnstorming,” she says. “We need AOC barnstorming. We need, you know, the people we have that are greeted as authentic in the real world, not focus groups, to go out and be authentic with their passion and their smarts about where to go from here.”She mentions a handful of impressive young Democratic politicians such as Maxwell Frost, the 28-year-old congressman from Florida who had a key role in the pro-gun-control movement March for Our Lives. “There’s a bunch of people,” she says. “And what we need to do is put together a coordinated campaign. But you’ve got to build the infrastructure to do it.”We end as we began, with Donald Trump, and how awful he has made so many Americans feel. “He has a critical mass of 35% to 40% of the American public – which is far too many people – who are completely on board with the cruelty and the derision and the trolling,” Disney says. “But that leaves everybody who’s either too tired, or too alienated or estranged from the process.”She suddenly brightens. “They’re ours,” she says. “But we have to do the work.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: president shrugs off tariff turmoil as ‘medicine’

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      Asia’s key indexes tumbled in early trading on Monday as fears of a tariff-induced global recession continued to rip through markets. Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 index plunged nearly 9% in early trading on Monday, while South Korea’s Kospi index was halted for five minutes as stocks plummeted.Despite his tariffs wiping $6tn off US stocks, Trump appeared nonchalant late Sunday, saying, “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”Separately, Hugo Lowell exclusively reveals how Trump’s national security adviser Mike Waltz came to include the Atlantic’s chief editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the infamous Signal group chat about plans for US strikes in Yemen. An internal investigation showed a series of missteps that started during the 2024 campaign and went unnoticed until Waltz created the group chat last month.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump says countries must ‘pay us a lot of money’ to escape tariffsTrump said he had spoken to leaders from Europe and Asia over the weekend, who hope to convince him to lower tariffs that are as high as 50% and due to take effect this week. “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis,” Trump said, speaking to reporters on Air Force One late Sunday.Read the full storySenior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoilSenior Trump administration officials gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs, which have provoked rare expressions of dissent from within the Republican party.Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talkshows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariffs on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. One official took an aggressive stance on the tariffs, while two others suggested they were negotiable.Read the full storyExclusive: how the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg got added to the White House Signal group chatThree people briefed on the White House investigation said Waltz inadvertently saved the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s number in his iPhone under the contact card for Brian Hughes, now the spokesperson for the national security council. According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.Read the full storyUS attorney general says Trump likely ‘going to be finished’ after second termPam Bondi, the US attorney general, has expressed skepticism about the idea of Trump serving a third term in the White House, saying that when her boss’s current presidency ends on 20 January 2029, he is probably “going to be finished”.Bondi’s comments come just a week after Trump gave his most blunt indication yet that he was seriously considering trying for a third term to follow up ones that began in 2017 and this past January – despite the clear prohibition against doing so enshrined in the US constitution.Read the full storyA Nicaraguan asylum seeker checked in with Ice every week. He was arrested anywayAlberto Lovo Rojas, an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, had been worried for weeks that immigration officials would arrest him. But he had pushed the worry aside as irrational – he had a permit to legally work in the US, and he had been using an app to check in monthly with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Still, something felt off. The Trump administration had promised mass deportations, and in the weeks since Trump’s inauguration, Ice had asked him to do extra check-ins each weekend. His last check-in with Ice was on 5 February – all normal. On 8 February, they came for him.Read the full storyDoJ lawyer put on leave after not backing erroneous deportation of Maryland manA federal justice department attorney, Erez Reuveni, has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it erroneously deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.Read the full story.Second child dies of measles in Texas amid growing outbreakA second child with measles has died in Texas amid a steadily growing outbreak that has infected nearly 500 people in that state alone. The US health and human services department confirmed the death to NBC late Saturday, though the agency insisted exactly why the child died remained under investigation.On Sunday, a spokesperson for the UMC Health System in Lubbock, Texas, said the child had been hospitalized before dying and was “receiving treatment for complications of measles” – which is easily preventable through vaccination.Read the full storyIn depth: Trump’s third term trial balloon: how extremist ideas become mainstreamFor longtime Trump watchers, the president’s suggestion that there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution to potentially serve a third term, it smacked of a familiar playbook of the American right and the Maga movement: float a trial balloon, no matter how wacky or extreme. Let far-right media figures such as Steve Bannon make the case that it’s not so outlandish because, after all, Democrats are worse. Stand by as Republicans in Congress avoid then equivocate then actively endorse. Watch a fringe idea slowly but surely become normalised.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Office closures, staffing and service cuts, and policy changes at the Social Security Administration have caused “complete, utter chaos” and are threatening to send the agency into a “death spiral”, according to workers at the agency.

      A woman being detained in Arizona by US border patrol for overstaying her visa died by suicide, according to Pramila Jayapal, who said “initial reports” suggested border patrol agents failed to perform required welfare checks prior to the woman’s death.

      A wildlife crossing in Los Angelesthat cuts across a major freeway will connect two parts of the Santa Monica mountains for animals and is starting to take shape.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 5 April 2025. More

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      US attorney general says Trump likely ‘going to be finished’ after second term

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      Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has expressed skepticism about the idea of Donald Trump serving a third term in the White House, saying that when her boss’s current presidency ends on 20 January 2029, he is probably “going to be finished”.Bondi’s comments come just a week after Trump gave his most blunt indication yet that he was seriously considering trying for a third term to follow up ones that began in 2017 and this past January – despite the clear prohibition against doing so enshrined in the US constitution.In an interview broadcast on 30 March, the US president told NBC News that “I’m not joking” about the idea of a third term, adding: “I like working.” Asked how he could get around what appears to be a watertight two-term cap for any individual president, he said: “There are methods which you could do it.”Bondi’s take on the controversy carries weight because she is the top law enforcement official in the US and also a Trump loyalist whose devotion to the president is unquestioned. She told Fox News Sunday that in her opinion the president was a “very smart man, and we, I wish we could have him for 20 years as our president”.She then added: “But I think he’s going to be finished, probably, after this term. We’d have to look at the constitution, and it would be a heavy lift.”The two-term limit was set into stone in 1951 with the ratification by the states of the 22nd amendment. It says that “no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice”.The restriction was introduced in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented record of serving three full presidential terms during the second world war. He won a fourth term but died in 1945 just one year into it.Bondi’s comment that it would be a “heavy lift” for Trump to overcome the two-term rule was a reference to what it would take to change the US constitution and revoke the 22nd amendment. Any reform to the text of the constitution requires a two-thirds vote from both chambers of Congress, combined with ratification by three-quarters of the 50 states.In today’s highly polarized political world, such a scenario is beyond imagination.Constitutional change aside, Trump’s cryptic remarks about other “methods” have prompted speculation about his intentions. One tactic that has attracted some attention would be for the vice-president, JD Vance, to run as Republican presidential candidate in 2028, with Trump as his running mate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen, the theory goes, should the Vance-Trump ticket win the presidential election, Vance could step down on day one of the new term and Trump would then automatically become president for the third time.The strategy has an appealing simplicity. There is a major snag, however.The 12th amendment, which lays out procedures for electing both the president and vice-president, states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States”. The clear implication is that Trump, debarred from running for a third term as president, would equally be debarred from running for vice-president – rendering the ruse null and void. More

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      DoJ lawyer put on leave after not backing erroneous deportation of Maryland man

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      A federal justice department attorney has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it says it erroneously deported a Maryland man to El Salvador, which a US judge called a “wholly lawless” detention.The action against justice department lawyer Erez Reuveni came after US district judge Paula Xinis had ordered that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who lived in the US legally with a work permit, be returned to Maryland despite the Trump administration’s position that it cannot return him from a sovereign nation.The administration has appealed the case, and a ruling is expected as soon as Sunday night ahead of an 11.59pm Monday deadline for his return, which was set by the judge.Donald Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, went on Fox News Sunday and announced there that Reuveni was no longer actively working on the Abrego Garcia case or in the justice department in general.At a court hearing on Friday, Reuveni struggled to answer questions from the judge about the circumstances of Abrego Garcia’s deportation.Reuveni said he had raised questions with US officials about why the federal government could not bring back Abrego Garcia but had received no “satisfactory” answer. He acknowledged what he called an “absence of evidence” justifying Abrego Garcia’s detention and deportation.Of Reuveni, Bondi told Fox News Sunday: “It’s a pending matter right now. He was put on administrative leave by [deputy US attorney general] Todd Blanche on Saturday.“You have to vigorously argue on behalf of your client.”Reuveni’s supervisor, August Flentje, was also placed on leave, ABC News reported.The justice department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.Reuveni and Flentje, who according to his LinkedIn page is the deputy director of the justice department’s office of immigration litigation, civil division, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump’s administration asserted in previous court filings that it had erroneously deported Abrego Garcia to his home country despite a previous court order prohibiting his removal.The White House and administration officials have accused Abrego Garcia of being a criminal gang member, but there are no pending charges. His lawyers have denied the allegation.Xinis, in a written order on Sunday explaining her Friday ruling, said “there were no legal grounds for his arrest, detention or removal” or evidence that Abrego Garcia was wanted for crimes in El Salvador.“Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless,” she wrote in the filing.Abrego Garcia had complied fully with all directives from immigration officials, including annual check-ins, and had never been charged with or convicted of any crime, the judge wrote.Abrego Garcia was stopped and detained by immigration agents on 12 March and questioned about his alleged affiliation with the MS-13 gang, which he has denied.Abrego Garcia has been detained in El Salvador’s terror confinement center, colloquially known as Cecot, which the judge called “one of the most dangerous prisons in the western hemisphere”.The Trump administration has faced criticism in the US courts and elsewhere of its stepped-up enforcement against immigration rights. A judge in Washington DC is separately weighing whether the Trump administration violated a court order not to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members amid ongoing legal proceedings.Some of those deported have active asylum cases, and civil rights groups have argued the administration has failed to provide due process under the law.Bondi on Sunday vowed to continue the administration’s deportations, maintaining: “The best thing to do is to get these people out of our country.” More

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      Senior Trump officials give conflicting lines on tariffs after markets turmoil

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      Senior officials within Donald Trump’s administration gave conflicting messages on Sunday about the US president’s global tariffs that have caused a meltdown in stock markets, prompted warnings of a world recession and provoked rare expressions of dissent from within his Republican party.Cabinet members fanned out across Sunday’s political talk shows armed with talking points on Trump’s 10% across-the-board tariff on almost all US imports, with higher rates targeted at about 60 countries. If the intention was to calm nerves with a clear statement of intent, then it backfired as top officials gave starkly contrasting signals.Howard Lutnick, the billionaire commerce secretary, struck an aggressive note on CBS News’s Face the Nation in which he portrayed the tariffs as here to stay. Asked whether there was a chance that tariffs would be postponed to allow countries to negotiate a deal with Washington, he replied: “There is no postponing – they are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks, that is sort of obvious.”Lutnick added that Trump intended to “reset global trade”.“The president has made it crystal, crystal clear,” he said.However, two other cabinet members gave the opposite take, suggesting that negotiations with individual countries were very much on the cards. Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, told Meet the Press on NBC News that Trump had “created maximum leverage for himself, and more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, stopping currency manipulation”.The agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins, echoed Bessent by flagging up possible talks. “We’ve got 50 countries that are burning the phone lines into the White House,” she told CNN’s State of the Union.The scale of Trump’s tariffs have sent shockwaves around the world, catching US investors as well as top Republican politicians by surprise. In just two days last week, more than $6tn was wiped off Wall Street’s market value.Trump told US consumers in a post on his Truth Social network to “hang tough, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic”. Yet as he spent the weekend golfing at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, his unprecedented tax increase goaded senior Republicans to speak out, in a vanishingly rare display of criticism of their leader.Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, denounced the tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax hike in US history”. Thom Tillis, the Republican senator from North Carolina, said: “Anyone who says there may be a little bit of pain before we get things right needs to talk to farmers who are one crop away from bankruptcy.”Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, warned of a “bloodbath” for Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections should the tariffs force the US into recession.Democrats are detecting opportunity in such unusual challenges to Trump from within his own party. Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator from California, floated on Meet the Press what sounded like a draft campaign strategy for the midterms.“If we head into a recession, it will be the Trump recession,” he said. Of Trump, Schiff also said: “He’s wrecking our economy.”Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota who ran as the Democrats’ vice-presidential candidate in last November’s defeat to Trump, called the tariffs “really, really terrifying” on State of the Union. He warned that if you punish dependable trading partners like Mexico and Canada, “they don’t come back overnight.”As the tariffs kick in, analysts are increasingly pointing to the chances of a recession, which is normally assessed as being two consecutive quarters of falling GDP. The head of economic research at JP Morgan, Bruce Kasman, has raised the probability of global recession to 60%, a figure that he included in a memo titled There Will Be Blood.Larry Summers, the US treasury secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, called the tariffs the “biggest self-inflicted wound we’ve put on our economy in history”. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, he gave his own estimate of the total loss to US consumers at $30tn – equivalent to doubling petrol prices at the pump.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump’s cabinet members attempted to use rhetorical devices as a way of assuaging rattled investors and consumers. Rollins said the markets weren’t crashing – they were “adjusting”.Asked what he would say to Americans close to retirement who had just watched their lifetime savings drop significantly in recent days, Bessent called that a “false narrative”.“Americans who want to retire right now, they don’t look at the day-to-day fluctuations of what’s happening,” Bessent said.Bessent’s answer was coloured, perhaps, by his own net worth, which has been put at more than $521m.There were moments of the surreal in the exchanges between Trump’s top officials and the political show hosts. Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper why 10% tariffs had been placed on Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which are populated by penguins near Antarctica but no humans, Rollins said: “I mean, come on, whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic – the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.”Tapper then pushed back on the agriculture secretary’s justification for the 20% “reciprocal” tariffs that have been imposed on EU goods sold to the US. Rollins said that Honduras bought more pork from the US than the entire European Union.Tapper pointed out that the EU had tight restrictions on hormone use in livestock production. The EU banned use of synthetic hormones in 1981, and blocked imports of animals that had been treated in that way.Rollins then accused the EU of using “fake science” to prohibit US products. “That’s just absolute bull,” she said. “We produce the safest, the most secure, the best food in the world.” More

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      Under Trump and Musk, billionaires wield unprecedented influence over US national security

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      Just days before Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, launched its New Glenn rocket, named for John Glenn, the Mercury astronaut who was the first American to orbit the Earth. Around 2am on 16 January, the 30-story rocket powered by seven engines blasted off into the Florida night from Cape Canaveral’s historic launch complex 36, which first served as a Nasa launch site in 1962.The flight’s end was marred by a failure to bring the booster rocket back for further use, but the successful launch and orbit still marked a watershed moment for Blue Origin in its bid to compete with SpaceX, the company owned by Elon Musk, for dominance over American spy satellite operations. During the Trump administration, it is likely that both companies will play significant roles in placing spy satellites into Earth orbit, which could mean that the United States intelligence community will be beholden to both Bezos and Musk to handle the single most complex and expensive endeavor in modern espionage.In fact, Musk and Bezos are in a position during the Trump administration to personally exert significant influence over the direction of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the rest of the US national security apparatus. The two pro-Trump billionaires have already been awarded massive contracts with the US intelligence community, including some that predate Trump’s first term in office.The emergence of Musk, Bezos and a handful of other pro-Trump billionaires as key players in US intelligence marks a radical change in US spy operations, which have traditionally been controlled by career government officials working closely with a few longstanding defense and intelligence contractors, giant corporations such as Lockheed Martin, RTX and Northrop Grumman that are adept at lobbying both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But with Musk, Bezos and other pro-Trump Silicon Valley figures gaining an edge through their personal ties to Trump, civil servants in the intelligence community may be reluctant to deny them ever-larger contracts, especially since Trump has already fired several inspectors general who investigated Musk’s businesses in other areas of the government.Anticipating big rewards, Musk is reportedly joining forces with other pro-Trump billionaires to try to carve up the defense and intelligence business. SpaceX is working with Palantir, a hi-tech data analytics intelligence contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel, one of the most prominent rightwing figures in Silicon Valley; Anduril, a new defense contractor founded by 32-year-old pro-Trump tech bro Palmer Luckey; and several other Silicon Valley firms to form a consortium geared towards loosening the grip of the defense industry’s traditional players.Tech leaders eager to get into intelligence contracting have long complained that the business has become so consolidated around a few big players that it is nearly impossible for outsiders to compete, leading to a lack of innovation. “Consolidation bred conformity,” argued Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, in a widely read public memo, The Defense Reformation.Swapping one oligarchy for anotherIt is hard to separate Silicon Valley’s calls for breaking up the oligarchy now controlling the defense and intelligence business from the eagerness of pro-Trump tech bros to grab as much power and cash as possible while creating a new oligarchy of their own.“The idea of overturning the contracting process did intrigue me, but now, under Trump, I think it is just about greed,” observed Greg Treverton, a former director of the National Intelligence Council, the intelligence community’s top analytical arm. “Now, with Trump, it is mostly about money and connections.”In the eyes of their critics, tech entrepreneurs offer a simplistic, black-and-white picture of the defense and intelligence business in which Silicon Valley conveniently has all the answers.“Beware the instant expert,” said Peter Singer, a defense analyst at the New America Foundation. “It’s like they are saying ‘I watched a YouTube video and now I know everything.’ They have this narrative that only Silicon Valley can drive innovation.”Elon Musk, satellite spymasterAs he eagerly slashes and burns through the ranks of federal employees with his Doge apparatus, Musk has emerged as the most powerful and polarizing figure in the Trump administration. But what is less well known is that Musk has also gained an influential role in the US intelligence community despite never having served inside the spy world.Musk’s SpaceX has already become one of the main rocket contractors launching American spy satellites and is seeking to overcome the edge held by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the traditional giant in the niche. In addition, Starlink, Musk’s commercial satellite communication network, is playing a critical role in US foreign policy, providing internet service in remote regions of the world including in Ukraine, where it operates a communications network for the Ukrainian army. Starlink’s role in the Ukraine war has placed Musk squarely in the middle of the dispute between Trump and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Meanwhile, questions about whether Musk is assuming a dual role as both a player in Trump’s national security policymaking and a major contractor grew after he received a private briefing at the Pentagon on 21 March and visited the CIA headquarters 10 days later.SpaceX has a head start over Blue Origin in the spy satellite business, and Musk has a big lead over Bezos in Trump world. But Blue Origin and Bezos are working hard to catch up in both.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBezos seeks to add to classified cloud contractDuring his first term, Trump repeatedly attacked Bezos over negative stories that were published in the Washington Post, which Bezos owns, and as revenge threatened Amazon’s business dealings with the US Postal Service. Since the 2024 election, though, Bezos has turned himself into a Trump booster, lavishing praise and large donations on the president while also working to transform the Washington Post’s opinion page, which he says should focus on “personal liberties and free markets”.Bezos’s move into an alliance with Trump has put him in a position to expand his reach into the spy satellite business while also protecting the large stake he already holds in other aspects of intelligence. The billionaire, the second-richest person in the world after Musk, has been involved in the spy world for more than a decade through Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing subsidiary of Amazon, which Bezos founded and where he remains executive chair. Amazon Web Services has managed the CIA’s classified cloud since it won a $600m contract with the spy agency in 2013, and dramatically expanded its intelligence role when it was awarded a $10bn contract to manage the NSA’s classified cloud in 2022 through a program code-named “Wild and Stormy”.Palmer Luckey and Silicon Valley’s clique of young defense contractorsPlenty of other Silicon Valley billionaires are also seeking to crowd into Washington alongside Musk and Bezos. Palantir’s Thiel is a mentor of the vice-president, JD Vance, and his firm has a longstanding relationship with the intelligence community that is likely to expand under Trump. The CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel, was one of the early backers of Palantir after its 2003 founding, and the company has had a major role in the development of data integration and data analytics systems for the intelligence community. Palantir is now seeking a broader role in developing AI for both the Pentagon and the intelligence community.Luckey, who made his name as a virtual reality entrepreneur by founding Oculus, has become a prominent new face at the intersection of Trump world and national security. Luckey’s Anduril now has a contract with the US army to develop battlefield virtual reality headsets, which would allow data to be sent directly to soldiers while also allowing them to control unmanned drones and other weapons. In addition, Anduril won a $642m contract with the Marine Corps to develop countermeasures against small drones in March. Luckey first supported Trump in 2016, when that was an unpopular position in Silicon Valley, but now that Trump is back, he has said that he’s on an “I told you so tour”, trumpeting his America-first political views.Luckey said in a recent interview: “I don’t think the United States needs to be the world police. It needs to be the world’s gun store.”Google once committed to not building artificial intelligence for weapons or surveillance in a watershed moment of divorcing tech from the defense and intelligence industry. Earlier this year, though, the company scrapped that pledge. The campaign by the tech bros to win bigger roles for themselves in defense and intelligence represents a return to Silicon Valley’s roots. Hi-tech originally grew in northern California because of its early connections to the military and defense industrial base in the region, observed Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian at the University of Washington.“Silicon Valley has always been in the business of war,” O’Mara said. More