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FBI director Kash Patel fails to recognize name of Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof in Senate questioning – live
In a remarkable moment during his appearance before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, appeared not to recognize the name of the white supremacist murderer, Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black congregants at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.At the start of a series of questions on violent extremism coming from both sides of the partisan divide, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles, asked Patel to tell her if he disagreed with the characterization that several violent extremists were motivated by rightwing views.“So Dylann Roof, who followed white supremacist propaganda, murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015. Do you deny this?” Kamlager-Dove asked Patel.“I’m sorry, Dylan Ruth?” Patel asked, puzzled.“Roof,” Kamlager-Dove corrected him.“Roof. Can you give me some more information?” Patel asked.“You’re head of the FBI, you probably know this,” Kamlager-Dove said. “If you don’t know, that’s fine.”“If you can give me a reminder, I’ve got a lot in front of me,” Patel said.“It was national news,” Kamlager-Dove said. She then moved on to ask if Patel disagreed with the statement that “Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh in 2018–”“I do remember that,” Patel interjected.“And it was the deadliest antisemitic attack. So do you admit that that happened?” Kamlager-Dove asked.“I’m not saying the other thing didn’t happen, I’m just asking for a little information,” Patel replied.After the hearing, the congresswoman shared video of the exchange on social media with the comment: “The Director of the FBI doesn’t know who Dylann Roof is? It’s incredibly shameful and concerning that Kash Patel doesn’t know about one of the most heinous hate crimes against Black Americans in the last decade.”Outside DC, and on the campaign trail, Kyle Sweetser, who is running as a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Alabama, delivered a speech this week where he accused Donald Trump of “tearing” down the economy.Sweetser, who voted for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, noted that he once “believed” the president’s promises to “shake up Washington”.But now, the president’s widespread tariffs, Sweetser says, have pushed him across the aisle and into electoral politics.“His [Trump’s] favorite thing to do is raise OUR prices with HIS tariffs. Those tariffs have hurt businesses like mine and driven up prices on just about everything,” he said.Sweetser, who owns a construction company, spoke at last year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and has said the January 6 attack led him to become a “Republican voter against Trump.”At an event for rank-and-file Alabama Democrats in downtown Mobile, Sweetser said that instead of strengthening our economy, Trump has “made it harder for families and small businesses to get by.”“I’ve come to understand that Trump isn’t the answer – he never was. His policies are cruel, reckless, and defy logic,” he said. “ He sees himself above the law, and with the Republican Party groveling at his feet, bending over backwards to praise their so-called King, he can get away with anything – no matter the cost to the American people.”But Sweetser also called out a wing of the Democratic party rallying around progressive policies and candidates – like Zohran Mamdani, the NYC mayoral candidate surging ahead in the polls.“I’m a common sense, Southern Democrat – not a New York City socialist. I’m a hardworking American who owns more guns than shoes,” Sweetser said.Despite calling for Americans to treat the trans community with respect, Sweetser did note today that he doesn’t “think it’s fair for men to participate in women’s sports” and urged the party at large to “reevaluate” its “image and policies.”“We need to start talking about the most important issues. Not focusing on everyone’s pronouns,” he added.Sweetser is running to fill the Alabama Senate seat in 2026 — left open by Tommy Tuberville, the incumbent Republican running for governor. He faces a stiff challenge from the state’s attorney general and GOP front runner, Steve Marshall.In a remarkable moment during his appearance before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, appeared not to recognize the name of the white supremacist murderer, Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black congregants at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.At the start of a series of questions on violent extremism coming from both sides of the partisan divide, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles, asked Patel to tell her if he disagreed with the characterization that several violent extremists were motivated by rightwing views.“So Dylann Roof, who followed white supremacist propaganda, murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015. Do you deny this?” Kamlager-Dove asked Patel.“I’m sorry, Dylan Ruth?” Patel asked, puzzled.“Roof,” Kamlager-Dove corrected him.“Roof. Can you give me some more information?” Patel asked.“You’re head of the FBI, you probably know this,” Kamlager-Dove said. “If you don’t know, that’s fine.”“If you can give me a reminder, I’ve got a lot in front of me,” Patel said.“It was national news,” Kamlager-Dove said. She then moved on to ask if Patel disagreed with the statement that “Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh in 2018–”“I do remember that,” Patel interjected.“And it was the deadliest antisemitic attack. So do you admit that that happened?” Kamlager-Dove asked.“I’m not saying the other thing didn’t happen, I’m just asking for a little information,” Patel replied.After the hearing, the congresswoman shared video of the exchange on social media with the comment: “The Director of the FBI doesn’t know who Dylann Roof is? It’s incredibly shameful and concerning that Kash Patel doesn’t know about one of the most heinous hate crimes against Black Americans in the last decade.”As our colleague Lucy Campbell reports on the UK live blog, Donald Trump has just completed his toast to King Charles at the state banquet in the UK.Trump’s remarks were laced with a heavy dollop of praise for his own leadership.“We are, as a country, as you know, doing unbelievably well,” Trump said, reading from printed remarks. “We had a very sick country, one year ago, and today I believe we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. In fact, nobody’s even questioning it.”This is a slight departure for Trump from a claim that he has made dozens of times this year, in a variety of settings. More usually, Trump claims that, during the presidency of Joe Biden, the United States was “a dead country”. What prompted his revised diagnosis of the state of the US under Biden is unclear.Trump also did not, as he usually does, attribute the appraisal that the US is now “the hottest country” in the world to the king of Saudi Arabia, as he has done since visiting Riyadh in May. (Trump did not actually meet the Saudi king, who is elderly and in poor health, on that trip, but that has not stopped him from repeatedly claiming since then that it was the king who told him the US was “dead” a year ago, and is now “the hottest”.)Trump also overlooked centuries of imperialism and unprovoked military aggression of the part of the UK and the US to claim: “Together, we’ve done more good for humanity than any two countries in all of history.”Also today, FBI director Kash Patel appeared before the House judiciary committee today. He answered questions from lawmakers about the department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.In several exchanges Patel sparred with Democratic representatives. When congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland – who also serves as the committee’s ranking member – asked why Patel had not released the full tranche of Epstein records, the FBI director said he was hamstrung by recent court orders preventing him from doing so. “I’m not going to break the law to satisfy your curiosity,” Patel said.Raskin also played clips of Patel on a podcast where he urged the Biden administration to “put on your big boy pants” and release Epstein’s so called “client list”. Patel had previously claimed that the FBI was in possession of the list.More broadly, Raskin denigrated Patel’s management of the FBI, including the firing of senior officials for, what they claim, are politically motivated reasons. “You share [J Edgar] Hoover’s dangerous obsession with blind loyalty over professionalism,” Raskin said. “For you, it’s blind loyalty to Donald Trump and keeping his secrets.”Later, California congressman Eric Swalwell, also a Democrat, went back and forth with Patel over whether he spoke to attorney general Pam Bondi about the president’s name appearing in the Epstein files. When Swalwell pushed Patel for answer, the FBI director snapped back with an unrelated diatribe: “Why don’t you try serving your constituency by focusing on reducing violent crime in this country, and the number of pedophiles that are illegally harbored in your sancturary cities in California.”After Swalwell attempted to discuss Patel’s history of listing several “political enemies” for investigation, the FBI director said: “I’m going to borrow your terminology and call bullshit on your entire career in Congress. It has been a disgrace to the American people.”A group of 95 members of Congress have written a letter to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, condemning the arrest of protected immigrants known as Dreamers and demanding to know how many have been detained and deported in recent months.In a letter shared with the Guardian and submitted to Noem on Wednesday morning, Democratic representatives denounced the recent rise in the wrongful detention and deportation of immigrants residing in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.The representatives’ letter is also addressed to Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the federal agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.In the letter, co-written by House members Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Sylvia Garcia of Texas and backed up by the dozens of other signatories, the representatives condemned the “blatant disregard” of the protections afforded to people under Daca.The members of Congress also included various examples of the detention and even deportation in the second Trump administration of Daca recipients, who are known as Dreamers after the Dream Act, legislation first introduced in 2001 to protect a large group of undocumented people who had been brought to the US as children.As Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK continues, guests are due to start arriving for the state banquet shortly, with the dinner expected about 3.30pm EST/8.30pm BST, to top off a day off pomp, pageantry and parades in Windsor.Prime minister Keir Starmer will want to make the most of the face time with Trump, with the aim of this unprecedented visit to keep relations sweet with the administration, as opposed to securing any immediate big-ticket deals or international agreements.Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is expected to meet the president for the first time. And a number of American business leaders, who accompanied Trump on Air Force One yesterday, will also attend the dinner, as the UK government tries to court investment and boost growth. Among those expected are Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Open AI’s Sam Altman.Both King Charles and Donald Trump are expected to deliver short speeches at today’s banquet.You can follow the latest developments at our dedicated live blog below:Per my last post, classes at Utah Valley University have resumed today – one week after Charlie Kirk’s murder on campus.Following the shooting on 10 September, the university closed and students and faculty were sent home. There will be a vigil on campus in Kirk’s honor, scheduled for Friday 19 September.Republican congressman James Comer, who also serves as chair of the House oversight committee, has called the CEOs of the leading online forum and messaging companies – Discord, Twitch, Steam and Reddit – to a hearing on 8 October.“The hearing will examine the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts,” Comer said. This comes after the news that Tyler Robinson, the man charged with killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk, used Discord to communicate that he had killed Kirk.Comer added that the leaders of these platforms must appear before lawmakers to explain “what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purpose”.At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, FBI director Kash Patel said that the department was investigating other members of the Discord group chat in which Robinson was providing updates.The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates by a quarter point – the first time in nearly a year. Rates now stand between 4% and 4.25%, the lowest since November 2022. Fed chair Jerome Powell is due to host a press conference at around 2:30pm ET where our business blog will be bringing you all the details:Barack Obama addressed the recent killing of Charlie Kirk and told a crowd in Pennsylvania on Tuesday the country was “at an inflection point”, but that political violence “is not new” and “has happened at certain periods” in US history.Obama added that despite history, political violence was “anathema to what it means to be a democratic country”.The former president made the remarks at the Jefferson Educational Society, a non-profit in Erie, Pennsylvania. He explicitly denounced political violence, addressing the fatal attacks this year of Kirk and the Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman. He called both incidents “a tragedy” and said that Donald Trump has further divided the country rather than work to bring people together.“There are no ifs, ands or buts about it, the central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resorting to violence,” he said.For the full story, click here:With the hearing of fired CDC director Susan Monarez and fomer public health official Debra Houry now over, here’s a look at today’s key developments so far – both on Capitol Hill and beyond:
Susan Monarez said that there had been “several explanations” about her removal from the top role at the CDC. “I had refused to commit to approving vaccine recommendations without evidence, fire career officials without cause or resign,” she said, adding: I told the secretary that if he believed he could not trust me, he could fire me … I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity.”
Asked by Senator Bernie Sanders why she refused to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations without seeing them or the evidence behind them, the former CDC director explained that it wasn’t negotiable. “I refused to do it because I have built a career on scientific integrity, and my worst fear was that I would then be in a position of approving something that would reduce access of life-saving vaccines to children and others who need them,” she said.
Both Monarez and Houry expressed their concerns about the decisions that the vaccine advisory committee meeting tomorrow will make. “I know that the medical community has raised concerns about whether or not, again, they have the commensurate backgrounds to be able to understand the data and the evidence and to evaluate it appropriately.” Meanwhile Houry said she had “significant concerns” as the public had not been able to weigh in.
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr did not express condolences for the police officer killed at the CDC shooting, Monarez said. David Rose was the police officer who was killed during the recent shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The perpetrator had blamed the Covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.
Houry also called for Kennedy’s resignation. Speaking at the hearing, she said: “After seeing his Senate finance testimony, and the number of misstatements, seeing what he has asked our scientists to do, and to compromise our integrity, and the children that have died under his watch, I think he should resign.”
The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers. The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2bn and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations.
The Trump administration has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking, a Guardian investigation has found. The sweeping retreat threatens to negate decades of progress in the drive to prevent sexual slavery, forced labor and child sexual exploitation, according to legal experts, former government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.
As he brought the hearing with fired CDC director Susan Monarez, and former public health official Debra Houry to a close, Republican chair Bill Cassidy spoke about his years as a practising physician, specializing in liver issues.He noted that in Thursday’s vaccine advisory panel meeting, ending the recommendation for the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine is reportedly set for discussion.“Why should a child be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease when they’re at birth? The child passes through the birth canal and is exposed to the same secretions of one would otherwise, and that passage through the birth canal makes that child vulnerable to the virus being transmitted,” Cassidy said. “If that child is infected at birth, more than 90% of them develop chronic, lifelong infection.”Cassidy summarized the impact of the vaccine on infection rates in the decades following the approval of a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. “Now, fewer than 20 babies per year get hepatitis B from their mother,” he added. “That is an accomplishment to make America healthy again, and we should stand up and salute the people that made that decision, because there’s people who would otherwise be dead if those mothers were not given that option to have their child vaccinated.”Dr Debra Houry just said that Robert F Kennedy Jr should resign.
After seeing his Senate finance testimony, and the number of misstatements, seeing what he has asked our scientists to do, and to compromise our integrity, and the children that have died under his watch, I think he should resign.
And another update on that front. Senator Cassidy has just said that Senator Mullin told reporters that “he was mistaken” in saying that the meeting between secretary Kennedy and Dr Monarez on 25 August was recorded.“But in case he’s mistaken, that he was mistaken,” Cassidy said, invoking laughter from those in the hearing room. “If there is a recording, it should be released, and would beg the question of what other conversations were recorded.”Per my earlier post, where senator Mullin made claims that Monarez was lying about her meeting with Kennedy – where she told him that if he felt she was untrustworthy he could fire her.Republican senator Bill Cassidy – the committee chair – has called out Mullin’s “implication” that he has a recording of that meeting.“I will note that if materials have been provided to Senator Mullin, and invoked in official committee business, they’re committee records and all other senators on the committee have the right to see those records,” he said. “This is allegiance to President Trump’s values, and so I ask that that recording be released.”He added:
I’ll also note that we put in a request for any documents or communications that would bring transparency to the situation. We have not yet received those documents. If a recording does not exist, I asked Senator Mullin to retract his line of questions.
When asked by Democratic senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, whether Dr Monarez and Dr Houry feel that politics is driving the change to vaccine recommendations, including hepatitis B vaccines, instead of science in children’s health, both former officials agree.“I’m thankful to Senator Cassidy for really raising hepatitis B via social media,” Houry said of the series of posts by the Republican chair of the committee, which sought to debunk misinformation around testing and the vaccine. “I think there’s a lot of moms that don’t know they have hepatitis that can then transmit it to their baby, and even the mom is hepatitis B negative, we don’t know what the home situation is.”Republican senator Markywane Mullin, of Oklahoma, is saying that Monarez is “not being honest” about her recollection of the conversation with secretary Kennedy.“I tell my kids all the time, you know one thing I want from you. I can deal with any situation we walk into, as long as I know you’re being 100% honest with me,” he said.Mullin has provided no evidence about how why he feels she is not telling the truth.“Your personality and your answers aren’t correct,” Mullin said in an exchange with the fired CDC director. More - in US Politics
RFK Jr and red flags: key moments from ousted CDC director’s testimony
Two former Centers for Disease Control (CDC) leaders testified at a fiery congressional hearing on Wednesday – taking aim at Robert F Kennedy Jr’s sweeping changes to the agency and the country’s public health system.Susan Monarez, the CDC director who was fired after less than a month, and Debra Houry, the chief medical officer who resigned after a decade at the agency, faced lawmakers on the Senate health, education, labor and pensions (Help) committee.The hearing, chaired by Republican senator Bill Cassidy, saw senators from both sides of the aisle question the impact of RFK Jr’s dismantling of vaccine standards. Here are the main takeaways.1. Monarez said she was fired for not complying with RFK Jr’s vaccine agendaMonarez said Kennedy demanded “blanket approval” of “each and every one of the recommendations” in the upcoming vaccine advisory panel meeting. Monarez claimed Kennedy said if she could not do that she would need to resign.“I did not resign, and that is when he told me he had already spoken to the White House about having me removed,” Monarez said.When Bernie Sanders asked Monarez why she refused to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations without seeing them or the evidence behind them, she explained it was not negotiable.“I refused to do it because I have built a career on scientific integrity, and my worst fear was that I would then be in a position of approving something that would reduce access of life-saving vaccines to children and others who need them,” she said.2. Monarez and Houry raised flags about the impact of Kennedy’s vaccine agendaAn Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) meeting on Thursday loomed over the hearing. RFK Jr has replaced many members of the panel with other people who question the science of government recommended vaccines.“I know that the medical community has raised concerns about whether or not, again, they have the commensurate backgrounds to be able to understand the data and the evidence and to evaluate it appropriately,” Monarez said.Monarez also said there was a risk of vaccines being restricted without rigorous review. She continued: “The stakes are not theoretical. We already have seen the largest measles outbreak in more than 30 years, which claimed the lives of two children. If vaccine protections are weakened, preventable diseases will return.”Meanwhile Houry said she had “significant concerns” about the ACIP meeting as the public had not been able to weigh in.The pair said the prospect of future pandemics is what keeps them up at night. Answering a question by Democratic senator John Hickenlooper, Monarez and Houry expressed concern over how the US might respond to future pandemics.“I don’t believe that we’ll be prepared,” Monarez said. Houry echoed similar sentiments, saying: “I’m concerned about the future of [the] CDC and public health in our country.”3. Monarez said RFK Jr had expressed disdain for CDC employees“He called, in that context, [the] CDC the ‘most corrupt federal agency in the world’,” Monarez said. “He said that CDC employees were killing children and they don’t care. He said CDC employees were bought by the pharmaceutical industry. He said the CDC forced people to wear masks and social distance like a dictatorship.”Monarez said the health secretary did not express condolences for David Rose, the police officer who was killed during the recent shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. The perpetrator had blamed the Covid vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.4. Monarez and Houry said politics is driving changes to vaccine recommendationsWhen asked about the public implications of health decisions made by political staff, Monarez expressed concern. She added: “These are important and highly technical discussions that have life-saving implications.”Similarly, Houry accused Kennedy of “politicizing” the CDC, saying that the secretary “censored CDC science, politicized its processes and stripped leaders of independence”.In response to a question about career scientists who have been excluded from the director’s office, Houry said that nearly everyone who left is political.“A level down we do have center directors, although 80% are now acting because they’ve been fired, resigned or retired,” Houry said.5. Monarez said that Kennedy deemed her untrustworthy for expressing her concernsMonarez laid out a timeline of events that resulted in her firing.In a meeting with Kennedy, Monarez claimed he was “very concerned” that she had spoken to members of the Help committee about what was being asked of her, with regard to approving vaccine recommendations and firing career officials.“He told me I was never to do it again,” Monarez said.When Republican senator Ashley Moody questioned whether Monarez’s decision to contact the committee chair was calculated, Senator Cassidy pushed back.“It is entirely appropriate for someone with oversight concerns to contact my office, or me, or, frankly, any of us,” he said. “Upon receiving outreach from Dr Monarez, I contacted both the secretary and the White House to inquire what was happening and to express concerns about what was alleged.” More
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‘Americans should be alarmed’: Experts say loss of expertise at CDC will harm US health
After high-profile departures and sweeping layoffs, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) faces an unprecedented loss of expertise and a simultaneous erosion of trust as top health leaders undermine vaccines and other vital health tools.“Americans should be alarmed,” said Nirav Shah, former principal deputy director at CDC and now a visiting professor at Colby College. “All of these moves leave us less safe, and it comes at a time of rising public health threats.”Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the second Trump administration, vowed to strip the CDC of its ability to issue guidance on vaccines and to end required testing for new pathogens.The changes to US health will be felt for decades, and the cutbacks and changes will erode the public’s already wavering trust in health officials, experts say.“Losing top, experienced experts managing crucial units in the CDC is going to put all of us at risk,” said Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Hastings College of Law.The departure of four senior officials – Debra Houry, Demetre Daskalakis, Daniel Jernigan and Jennifer Layden – dealt “a big blow to our nation’s health preparedness”, Shah said.They joined thousands of health agency employees who have been laid off or resigned, with entire departments gutted, since Donald Trump was re-elected.“Next time there’s a problem, we will not have qualified leadership for our response,” Reiss said.The loss of “experienced, world-class” experts at the CDC is “directly related to the failed leadership of extremists” in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.The losses may continue under budget cuts, with proposed reductions of $5bn – a 42% decrease from 2024.Two of the recently ousted officials will testify before Congress on Wednesday. Susan Monarez, the most recent CDC director, who was fired after 28 days, criticized the administration’s “reckless” approach to science, including a request to “rubber-stamp” recommendations from the CDC’s independent advisers.The advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) plans to meet on Thursday and Friday. Advisers have indicated the committee will re-examine recommendations on routine childhood vaccinations such as those against hepatitis B and HPV (human papillomavirus).The Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy released on Tuesday “reaffirms that Kennedy is gunning for childhood vaccines”, Reiss said.Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, said: “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: the CDC has been broken for a long time. Restoring it as the world’s most trusted guardian of public health will take sustained reform and more personnel changes.”When asked about Kennedy’s stance on childhood vaccines, Hilliard said that HHS is “reaffirming the importance of the doctor-patient relationship so people can make informed decisions about their health”, emphasizing the roles of “clear, honest information and personal choice”.Kennedy has also limited access to the Covid vaccines, restricting them only to people “at higher risk”, while also saying “anyone can get the booster”.“Kennedy’s claim that anyone can get them is deeply insincere,” Reiss said. He already removed, for example, the recommendation for pregnant people, making it harder for them to access the vaccine.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“While it’s legal to give vaccines off-label, not all doctors and pharmacists will, and depending what ACIP does, not all insurers will cover them”, including Medicaid, which is bound by ACIP recommendations, she said.Kennedy has repeatedly undermined the CDC and vaccines, calling the agency a “cesspool of corruption” and the Covid vaccine, for instance, the “deadliest vaccine ever made”. During the worst measles outbreak in decades, Kennedy framed vaccination as a personal choice. He has also cut millions of dollars for research on mRNA vaccines.Earlier this month, Trump defended the Covid and polio vaccines. But the president has given Kennedy sweeping control over the nation’s health and nutrition agenda.“In an era of rising threats to public health – whether it’s measles, whether it’s an Ebola outbreak, or whether it’s the continuing concern and threat from H5 [bird flu] – none of these things makes America healthy again,” Shah said.The acting director of the CDC, Jim O’Neill, has a background in biotechnology investing but he does not appear to have training in medicine or public health.“Based on what I understand, he does not have the requisite background to even be serving as acting director,” said Shah, who was acting director of the CDC while the Trump administration entered office.“Americans need to ask themselves: ‘Are we safe right now?’” Shah said. “‘Is there somebody who knows at the higher levels what should be done in the face of an emerging Ebola outbreak? Are they doing it? How do we know that?’”The news that top experts at the CDC haven’t briefed Kennedy is “alarming”, Shah said. ”If America’s top generals were planning a war and sketching out battlefield plans but had not talked to any of their lieutenants and colonels in the field, we would say that’s not leadership.”So far, many Americans have not yet felt the shock waves of Kennedy’s changes to public health, Shah said.For most people, “you don’t actually see the consequences of it until there’s an emergency”, Shah said. “And it’s way too late at that point.” More
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RFK Jr does not just reject vaccines. He rejects science and must step down | Bernie Sanders
Since taking office, Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the health and human services department (HHS), has undermined vaccines at every turn. He has dismissed the entire Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory panel, narrowed access to life-saving Covid-19 vaccines, filled scientific advisory boards with conspiracy theorists and fired the newly appointed CDC director for refusing to rubber-stamp his actions.But his rejection of vaccines is only part of the problem. Secretary Kennedy is unfit to be our nation’s leading public health official because he rejects the fundamental principles of modern science.For generations, doctors have agreed that germs – like bacteria or viruses – cause infectious diseases.In the 1850s, John Snow, known as the father of epidemiology, traced a cholera outbreak in London to water contaminated with human waste – not the “bad air”, or so-called miasma, that many at that time believed to be the cause.In the 1880s, Louis Pasteur, the French chemist, in a controlled experiment, injected one group of sheep with an anthrax vaccine while another group went without it. Then he injected all of the sheep with anthrax bacteria. The vaccinated sheep survived, the unvaccinated did not.The germ theory led to a revolution in public health and medicine which, over the years, has saved tens of millions of lives.Just a few examples.At a time when many women were dying during childbirth at hospitals, Dr Ignaz Semmelweis found that handwashing by doctors saved lives.Joseph Lister showed that sterilizing medical equipment before surgery prevented needless deaths.Florence Nightingale, considered the mother of modern nursing, substantially improved hygiene at hospitals and made healthcare much safer for patients.Pasteur made the food we eat and the milk we drink safer through a process of heating called pasteurization.And these are just a few examples.Yet, incredibly, in the year 2025, we now have a secretary of HHS who has cast doubt and aspersions on the very concept of the germ theory – the very foundation of modern medicine for over a century.In his book The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy absurdly claims that the central tenet behind the germ theory “is simply untrue”. Vaccines are not, Kennedy falsely asserts, responsible for the massive decline in deaths from infectious diseases. Instead, Kennedy falsely proclaims that “science actually gives the honor of having vanquished disease mortalities to sanitation and nutrition”.Yes. No one disputes that proper sanitation, a nutritious diet and exercise can lead to healthier lives. But no credible scientist or doctor believes that alone makes a person immune from polio, measles, mumps, Covid, HIV/Aids and other infectious diseases. Otherwise healthy people can become sick, hospitalized or even die from these and other terrible diseases.Sadly, Kennedy’s dangerous rejection of well-established science is behind his wild conspiracy theories and misinformation campaigns.It’s what led to Kennedy’s false assertion that “there is no vaccine that is safe and effective” despite peer-reviewed scientific studies finding that vaccines have saved more than 150 million lives and reduced infant deaths by 40% in the past 50 years.It’s behind Kennedy’s bogus claim that the polio vaccine “killed many, many, many, many, many more people than polio ever did”, even though the scientific data has shown that the polio vaccine has saved 1.5 million lives and prevented about 20 million people from becoming paralyzed since 1988.It undergirds his history of promoting the ridiculous idea that HIV does not cause Aids, despite rigorous studies finding the exact opposite. This type of outrageous HIV/Aids denialism is widely believed to have caused the deaths of at least 330,000 people in South Africa who did not receive the life-saving medicine they needed.It’s what led him to say that the Covid vaccine was the “deadliest vaccine ever made”, that vaccines cause autism, and that the hepatitis B vaccine doesn’t work and should only be used for “prostitutes” and “promiscuous gay men” – lies that have been thoroughly debunked by scientific data and the medical community.Frighteningly, it’s what caused Kennedy to say: “I see somebody on a hiking trail carrying a little baby and I say to him, ‘Better not get him vaccinated.’ And he heard that from me. If he hears it from 10 other people, maybe he won’t do it.”As a private citizen, Kennedy is entitled to his views, no matter how misguided they may be.If Kennedy would like to swim in water contaminated by raw sewage and fecal matter, as he has done recently in Washington DC’s Rock Creek Park, he is free to do that.But as our nation’s top health official, Secretary Kennedy’s rejection of science and the actions he has taken as a result of his bizarre ideology is endangering the lives of millions of children in the United States and throughout the world.Today, Kennedy is making it harder for people to get vaccines. Tomorrow, what will it be? Will he tell doctors they don’t need to wash their hands before surgery? Will he tell hospitals that they don’t need to sterilize their scalpels and other medical equipment?The American people need a secretary of HHS who will listen to scientists and doctors, and not conspiracy theorists.We need a secretary of HHS who will listen to medical experts who may disagree with him, not fire them summarily.Bottom line: we need an HHS secretary who will not engage in a war on science and the truth itself.Secretary Kennedy must step down.
Bernie Sanders is a US senator, and ranking member of the health, education, labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More
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Trump’s former surgeon general urges president to fire RFK Jr
The surgeon general from the first Trump administration on Saturday said that the US president should “absolutely” fire health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr over his “dangerous” policies on vaccines and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).Jerome Adams, who has become a pointed critic of the public health decisions being swiftly rolled out in the second Trump administration, made his most fierce attack yet on what has been unfolding.“He’s putting us at risk,” Adams said of RFK Jr, adding that Kennedy is “endangering America at large” with moves to limit access to vaccines, such as shots to protect against the deadly Covid-19 virus.In an interview with CNN on Saturday morning, anchor Victor Blackwell asked Adams, who served as Donald Trump’s surgeon general from 2017 to 2021, including through the height of the coronavirus pandemic, whether Kennedy should resign.“Well, he’s not going to resign,” Adams said.Asked whether, therefore, Trump should fire his health secretary, Adams said: “I absolutely believe that he should, for the sake of the nation.”Kennedy was praised by the president after a stormy committee hearing in the US Senate on Thursday where Democrats called for his resignation or firing and accused him of ignorance and “reckless disregard for science and the truth”.Although more muted, a select few Republicans were critical, including Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who had been a crucial vote to confirm Kennedy to his post, who said the secretary was “effectively denying people the vaccine” with his policy positions. Kennedy snapped back: “You’re wrong.”Adams said he was “flabbergasted” by new restrictions from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last month on who is eligible to receive the latest version of the Covid-19 vaccination and hoped that Trump “will begin to see the danger … to America” of Kennedy’s leanings and will not be “in thrall” of his health secretary.On Friday, Adams was a co-author of a bipartisan opinion piece published in USA Today from three former surgeons general that said that Kennedy’s actions to shake up the CDC were actions that “jeopardize not only the institution’s integrity but also the health and well-being of millions of Americans”.The other authors were Jocelyn Elders, surgeon general in Democrat Bill Clinton’s administration, and Richard Carmona, surgeon general under Republican George W Bush’s presidency.The CDC erupted in chaos in late August when the Trump administration fired the center’s director Susan Monarez, who had been in the post for mere weeks, in an apparent divide over vaccine policy – although she is refusing to leave. Several senior CDC leaders quit in protest at Kennedy’s move to oust her. This followed his June firing of all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP) and his replacing them with some who publicly hold anti-vaccine views.The three former surgeons general wrote that they were “gravely concerned” for the CDC as a “cornerstone of public health in America and across the world” that had saved countless lives through its science-driven approach, earning public trust.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The recent turbulence at the CDC threatens to undermine this legacy, and we feel this is not just a bureaucratic or political issue. It’s truly a matter of life and death,” the article said.Adams said in the CNN interview that organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Medical Association have lost trust in the CDC under Kennedy’s leadership.He warned that Kennedy could effectively destroy the CDC and was “putting lives at risk by doing so”.Adams at times clashed with Trump when he was his surgeon general, including over policies over public masking during the pandemic.On Saturday, he warned that Kennedy’s policies threatened public health in general but that Covid vaccine restrictions were “specifically endangering Black, Hispanic and Native American communities, who experienced death rates during the pandemic that were twice as high as white Americans”.The day after the Senate hearing, former Massachusetts Democratic representative Joe Kennedy III, RFK Jr’s nephew, posted a statement on X calling the health secretary “a threat to the health and wellbeing of every American” and urging him to resign.Echoing that call to resign was one of the secretary’s siblings, Kerry Kennedy, who also posted on X and decried what she called “the decimation of critical institutions, like the [National Institutes of Health] and the CDC”. More
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RFK Jr’s anti-science agenda will be catastrophic for the United States | Moustafa Bayoumi
Things seem to be going well at the CDC, the federal agency charged with protecting US public health. By “well” I mean terrible, thanks to the leadership of the health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr. Not only is the agency in complete disarray under his leadership, but the secretary’s fringe agenda is now also putting the lives of everyone in the country at risk.Let me recount a few of Kennedy’s stellar accomplishments. He is, after all, a man labeled “a crown jewel of this administration” by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. In June, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the CDC’s advisory committee on immunization practices (ACIP), a panel that has long developed scientifically based recommendations on the use of vaccines. Kennedy dropped them like a hot beaker and replaced them with new members, several of whom share his anti-vaccine views and half-baked skepticism of the most common mRNA Covid-19 vaccines.Covid is still with us, unfortunately, and the vaccines are helping us survive a dangerous reality. In fact, 14,660 people have died of Covid as an underlying or contributing cause so far this year alone. Yet, at his Senate hearing on Thursday, Kennedy was asked by Senator Jeff Merkley if he accepted the statistic that a million Americans had died of Covid since the outbreak began. “I don’t know how many died,” Kennedy responded. Meanwhile, the CDC’s own website, an agency he’s responsible for, tabulates the number of deaths as 1,234,371. At the same hearing, Kennedy also said he agreed with the statement made by one of his appointees to ACIP that “mRNA vaccines cause serious harm, including death, especially among young people”. Never mind that numerous studies have repeatedly shown the vaccines to be safe and effective.That’s not all. Getting that Covid booster shot will probably become significantly harder in the future. In late August, the Food and Drug Administration, also overseen by Kennedy, approved some updated Covid vaccines, but at the same time severely restricted who would be authorized to receive boosters. Last year, anyone over the age of six months was eligible. But this year, you must be over 65 years of age or have an underlying health condition that increases the risk of severe Covid-19 infection.We should have seen something like this coming. In May, Kennedy took the unprecedented unilateral move to remove Covid-19 booster shots from its recommended immunization schedule for pregnant women and healthy children. “Our healthcare system is now solidly anti-children and anti-science,” Fatima Khan, co-founder of the Protect Their Future group, which advocates for vaccine access for children, told CNN.Booster shots will still be available, Kennedy says. But what he’s not saying is that they will probably be a lot harder to find and afford. Private insurance companies generally base their decisions on covering the costs of vaccines by following government recommendations, and many states limit which vaccines pharmacists can administer based on those same recommendations. (California, Oregon and Washington recently announced an alliance to safeguard vaccine access.)The long and the short of it is that Kennedy is behind “a deliberate effort to weaken America’s public-health system and vaccine protections”. This is what Susan Monarez wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Monarez served as the director of the CDC for a whole 29 days before she was ousted from her position. (Jim O’Neil, Monarez’s replacement, is unsurprisingly a Trump loyalist with no medical or scientific background.) The ACIP is scheduled to meet later this month, and will discuss among other topics the Covid-19 vaccines. Monarez wrote that in August she was told to “preapprove the recommendations” to be made by ACIP. She refused. In another statement made through her lawyers, she said she would not “rubberstamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts”.Kennedy, of course, has done all those things. He fired 2,400 workers (about 18% of the CDC workforce), later rehiring about 700 people. He has “severely weakened programs designed to protect Americans from cancer, heart attacks, strokes, lead poisoning, injury, violence and more”, according to nine previous directors of the CDC who sounded the alarm about Kennedy’s leadership in the New York Times. He downplayed the use of highly effective vaccines during the largest single measles epidemic in 25 years in this country while cheering on the use of home remedies such as cod liver oil or vitamins.It’s all so ideological and irresponsible, leading predictably to horrible consequences. There have been three confirmed deaths from the measles outbreak, but they are not the only victims. Our collective trust in the government is perhaps the main casualty. After Monarez was fired, four senior officials of the CDC resigned in protest at the politicization of the agency. More than 1,000 past and present workers of the Department of Health and Human Services signed a letter demanding his resignation and stating that “Secretary Kennedy’s actions are compromising the health of this nation”. We’re now living through a battle between sane scientists and zealous anti-vaxxers, and nobody knows who will win.What do anti-vaxxers and the rightwing get out of such politicization of public health? They live in the same country as the rest of us, after all. Do they feel somehow healthier knowing that Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s surgeon general, aims to end childhood vaccination against preventable diseases such as measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis? I certainly don’t. Routine childhood vaccinations prevented about 508m cases of illness in the US between 1994 and 2023. And he’s getting rid of them? Madness.Ladapo claims that “what you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God”. OK. Fine. But none of us lives entirely alone, and your health affects my health, and vice versa. Living together means taking care of ourselves but also each other for our individual and collective wellbeing. It’s not rocket science. But it must be based on science.The right wing sees it otherwise. To them, the government response to Covid in particular and public health in general is leading us straight to “a regime of suppression, censorship, and coercion reminiscent of the power systems and governance that were previously condemned”. The result? “Human rights and individual freedom, as under previous fascist regimes, will lose,” according to David Bell of the Brownstone Institute, a thinktank established to oppose Covid-19 restrictions.But this seems a lot more like projection than any semblance to reality. Recent scholarship tends to point in the opposite direction, showing how social instability from the world’s last major pandemic before Covid, the 1918 global influenza pandemic, helped pave the way for the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and the Fascist party in Italy. One study found that “Mussolini’s newspaper tended to blame ‘others’ for the pandemic … and portrayed themselves as the voice of the common people against an out-of-touch ‘elite.’” Sounds familiar.Kennedy’s anti-science anti-vax agenda could have catastrophic health outcomes across the nation, helping fuel the rise of an even more extreme rightwing politics in the future. Could that result be what this government is even counting on? The idea sounds too far-fetched to be true, but I would also like to be alive when I’m proven wrong.
Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More
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Trump plans to sign executive order to rename Pentagon to ‘Department of War’ – as it happened
Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”This brings our live coverage of the second Trump administration to a close for the day, but we will return on Friday. Among the day’s developments:
The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, fended off calls for his resignation and spread vaccine misinformation during a contentious Senate hearing.
Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, rejected Kennedy’s claim that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies, and offered to repeat her claim under oath.
Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US Department of Defense to refer to itself as the “department of war”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.
Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.
As Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated as her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.
The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan.
New York’s attorney general moved to have the state’s highest court reinstate Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero.
As we reported earlier, during a contentious Senate hearing on Thursday, the health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, was asked twice whether he agreed with Retsef Levi, an MIT professor the secretary appointed to the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), who has said that mRNA Covid vaccines “cause serious harm including death, especially among young people”.Kennedy said that he did agree with that statement, which Levi made in a video he posted on his X account in 2023, and has pinned at the top to this day.“I am filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time all Covid mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video, “because of the mounting and indisputable evidence that they cause unprecedented level[s] of harm, including the death of young people and children.”Levi, who is Israeli, cited what he called evidence for this conclusion based on his reading of statistics from Israel’s EMS during its vaccination program in 2021. But he offered no scientific or medical evidence to support his claim, which is a fringe view not shared by the overwhelming majority or vaccine experts and medical doctors.It is worth stressing that both of the senators who asked Kennedy about that expert’s claim – Michael Bennet, a Democratic senator, and Thom Tillis, a Republican senator – referred to the new vaccine advisory board member as “Dr Levi”. That might have led some viewers to assume that Levi is a medical doctor, but he is not. He is a professor at MIT’s school of management, with a doctorate in operations research and no expertise in the science of infectious diseases or vaccines.It is unclear how Levi’s background qualifies him for a position on a vaccine panel responsible for making vaccine recommendations and whose members are supposed to be “medical and public health experts”.Donald Trump hosted an array of tech industry leaders for dinner in the White House state dinning room on Thursday night, including Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin, but his former first buddy, Elon Musk, was a notable absence.The event, which was to have been held on the newly paved-over Rose Garden, until a forecast of thunderstorms forced the event indoors, began with televised words of praise for the president from several of the assembled tech leaders, and a brief series of questions from reporters.On his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, Musk responded to a question about why he was not at the White House by writing: “I was invited, but unfortunately could not attend. A representative of mine will be there.”Musk did not say who his representative was, but one of the guests was Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut who had been Musk’s pick to lead Nasa, until his nomination was withdrawn as Musk’s relations with Trump frayed.Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order on Friday authorizing the US department of defense to refer to itself as to the “Department of War”, two people familiar with the matter told the Guardian on Thursday.The move, to use a name Trump called “much more appropriate” in remarks last week, would restore a name used until 1947, when Congress merged the previously independent war department and navy department with the air force into a single organization, known as the National Military Establishment. In 1949, Congress changed the name of the National Military Establishment to the Department of Defense, and made the army, navy and air force secretaries subordinate to a single, cabinet-level secretary of defense.A draft White House fact sheet on Trump’s rebranding initiative implicitly acknowledges that only Congress can formally change the department’s name, saying that the order would authorize the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to propose legislation that would make the change permanent. In the meantime, the order instructs Hegseth and the department to start using “Department of War” as a secondary title in official correspondence, public communications and executive branch documents. The order also authorizes Hegseth to refer to himself as the “secretary of war”.When Trump was asked by a reporter last week how he plans to rename the department, since that would require an act of Congress, Trump said: “We’re just going to do it. I’m sure Congress will go along, if we need that, I don’t think we even need that.”“It just to me, seems like a just a much more appropriate,” he added. “The other is, ‘defense’ is too defensive. And we want to be defensive, but we want to be offensive, too if we have to be. So, it just sounded to me better.”Trump’s embrace of the old name, which seems to put to rest longstanding claims that he was ever the “antiwar candidate” for the presidency, comes days after he ordered the military to carry out the extrajudicial killing of 11 suspected drug smugglers.During his 2015 campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump himself rejected the perception that he was anti-war by proclaiming that he was, in fact, “much more militaristic” than even George W Bush.Four years earlier, when he was flirting with a run for the presidency against Barack Obama, Trump had demanded US military intervention in Libya.“I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump told viewers of his YouTube video blog on 28 February 2011, two weeks before the Obama administration got US security council authorization “to protect civilians” in Libya. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: it’s a carnage.”Five months later, after the US-led air campaign had forced Gaddafi from power in Libya – and Trump had decided not to challenge Obama for the presidency – the star of The Apprentice posted another YouTube clip, complaining that the administration should have waited longer to aid the Libyan rebels, to force them to agree to surrender half of the country’s oil reserves.“What we should’ve done is we should’ve asked the rebels when they came to us – and they came to us, they were being routed by Qaddafi, they were being decimated – we should’ve said, ‘We’ll help you, but we want 50% of your oil,’” Trump had said. “They would’ve said, ‘How about 75%?’”As Donald Trump accuses Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook of criminal mortgage fraud, for allegedly obtaining more than one mortgage on a home designated her primary residence, at least three members of his cabinet have multiple primary-residence mortgages, ProPublica reports.Trump’s transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, his labor secretary, Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, Lee Zeldin, all have primary-residence mortgages on at least two properties, according to financial disclosure forms, real estate records and publicly available mortgage data provided by Hunterbrook Media to ProPublica.Real estate experts told the non-profit investigative outlet that claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time is often legal and rarely prosecuted.But Trump has called for the prosecution of Cook, the Biden-nominated central banker, for allegedly having multiple primary-residence mortgages, and leveled the same charge against Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who led his first impeachment, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general who brought a successful civil fraud case against Trump.Two days after an appeals court reinstated a Democratic member of Federal Trade Commission, ruling that her attempted firing by Donald Trump was unlikely to survive her legal challenge, the justice department asked the supreme court to let Trump remove her again as the legal battle continues.The commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter, posted an image of herself back at work on Thursday, with the caption: “Back at my desk, back online, and have already moved to reinstitute the Click to Cancel Rule. Hope a majority of the Commission will join me – all Americans deserve to be protected from abusive subscription traps.”The FTC’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required businesses to make it easy for consumers to cancel unwanted subscriptions and memberships, was adopted in October after the agency received more than 16,000 comments from consumers enraged about having to jump through hoops to cancel their enrollments.Implementation of the rule was delayed by the FTC in May, two months after Trump removed Slaughter and another Democratic commissioner.A federal appeals court vacated the rule on procedural grounds in July, just days before it was set to go into effect. Seven Democratic senators wrote to the new FTC chair that month, urging him to have the commission fix the procedural flaws identified by the court and reissue the rule.Susan Monarez, the ousted CDC director, just rejected Robert F Kennedy Jr’s claim, during a contentious senate hearing on Thursday, that she had lied about having been pressured to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations from a panel of his anti-vaccine allies.In an account of her firing published on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, Monarez wrote that, at a meeting with Kennedy on 25 August:
I was told to preapprove the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel newly filled with people who have publicly expressed antivaccine rhetoric. That panel’s next meeting is scheduled for Sept. 18-19. It is imperative that the panel’s recommendations aren’t rubber-stamped but instead are rigorously and scientifically reviewed before being accepted or rejected.
When Kennedy was confronted with that accusation by Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, at the Senate hearing, he denied that he gave Monarez that order.“No, I did not say that to her, Kennedy said. “And I never had a private meeting with her”, he added. “So there are witnesses to every meeting that we had, and all of those witnesses will say I never said that.”Kennedy was not asked if anyone else at the meeting did issue such an order to Monarez, which would be consistent with her account.Instead, Wyden asked Kennedy if Monarez was “lying today to the Wall Street Journal and the American people”.“Yes sir”, Kennedy replied.In a statement responding to Kennedy’s testimony, Monarez’s lawyers, Mark Zaid and Abbe Lowell, wrote: “Secretary Kennedy’s claims are false, and at times, patently ridiculous. Dr. Monarez stands by what she wrote in her op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, would repeat it all under oath and continues to support the vision she outlined at her confirmation hearing that science will control her decisions.”Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have already called for Monarez to be called to testify before the senate, which would be under oath.Hawaii announced today that it would join a new public health alliance formed by a trio of west coast states in response to the turmoil at the CDC.On Wednesday, the California governor Gavin Newsom announced that his state had partnered with Washington and Oregon to form the West Coast Health Alliance, which they said would provide residents with science-based immunization guidance as the nation’s top public health agency – and a slew of red states – roll back long-standing recommendations medical experts and researchers have credited with limiting the spread of infectious diseases.“By joining the West Coast Health Alliance, we’re giving Hawaii’s people the same consistent, evidence-based guidance they can trust to keep their families and neighbors safe,”Josh Green, theDemocratic governor of Hawaii, said in a statement.Green, an emergency room physician, said a science-driven approach was “critical as we all go forward into an era with severe threats from infectious diseases”.The Democratic governors of California, Oregon and Washington unveiled the new alliance on the same day that Florida’s Republican surgeon general said the state would end all vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.The justice department has launched a criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook and issued grand jury subpoenas out of both Georgia and Michigan, according to documents seen by Reuters and a source familiar with the matter.The investigation, which followed a criminal referral from Federal Housing Finance Agency director Bill Pulte, is being conducted by Ed Martin, who was tapped by attorney general Pam Bondi as a special assistant US attorney to assist with mortgage fraud investigations involving public officials, along with the US attorneys’ offices in the northern district of Georgia and the eastern district of Michigan, according to the person, who spoke anonymously since the matter is not public.Pulte, who was appointed by Trump, has accused Cook of committing fraud by listing more than one property as a primary residence when she applied for mortgages, potentially to secure lower interest rates. Cook owns properties in Michigan, Georgia and Massachusetts.Trump terminated Cook over Pulte’s allegations, prompting her to file a lawsuit challenging his effort to oust her. Cook’s lawyer, prominent Washington attorney Abbe Lowell, said the DoJ was scrambling to invent new justifications for Trump’s overreach in firing the Fed governor.“He wants cover, and they are providing it. The questions over how Governor Cook described her properties from time to time, which we have started to address in the pending case and will continue to do so, are not fraud, but it takes nothing for this DOJ to undertake a new politicized investigation, and they appear to have just done it again,” Lowell said.The case, which will likely end up before the supreme court, has ramifications for the Fed’s ability to set interest rate policy without regard to politicians’ wishes, widely seen as critical to any central bank’s ability to keep inflation under control.Trump has demanded that the US central bank cut rates immediately and aggressively, berating Fed chair Jerome Powell for his stewardship of monetary policy. The central bank is expected to deliver a rate cut at its 16-17 September meeting.In one of her recent legal filings challenging Trump’s actions, Cook said she listed mortgages on three properties on forms submitted to the White House and Senate in the vetting process for her appointment to the Fed in 2022. Any inconsistencies were known when she was confirmed and cannot give Trump grounds to fire her now.Cook is the third public official to be targeted in a criminal investigation over mortgage fraud allegations. Martin, who also presides over the “Weaponization Working Group” and serves as pardon attorney, is also pursuing criminal investigations into Democratic senator Adam Schiff as well as New York attorney general Letitia James.There are also grand juries convened in those two cases, which started prior to Martin’s new appointment as a special assistant US attorney, according to the source and documents seen by Reuters.The United States will phase out some security assistance for European countries near the border with Russia, two sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.The plan comes in the broader context of Donald Trump’s so-called “America First” foreign policy, in which his administration has slashed foreign aid and is pushing European countries to cover more of the cost of their own security.The move, first reported by the Financial Times (paywall), comes as Russia’s war with Ukraine has heightened concerns in Europe about regional instability and the possibility of further aggression from Moscow. Key recipients of the funding include Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.Congress has approved funding for the assistance plan, which comes under the Department of Defense, but only through the end of September 2026. Trump’s administration has not asked that the program be extended, according to the FT report and confirmed to Reuters by one of its sources.Asked for comment, a White House official referred to an order Trump signed shortly after beginning his second term in January.“On day one of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order to reevaluate and realign United States foreign aid,” the official said.“This action has been coordinated with European countries in line with the executive order and the president’s longstanding emphasis on ensuring Europe takes more responsibility for its own defense,” the official said.Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the top Democrat on the Senate foreign relations committee, called the decision misguided.“It makes no sense at all to undercut our allies’ defense readiness at the same time that we’re asking them to step up their own capabilities, and it puts American troops at risk when we slash the training of the allied soldiers they would fight alongside,” she said in a statement. 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