Intelligence officials testify at House as Atlantic releases text details

The United Auto Workers praised the 25% tariff Trump announced for automobile imports today, saying in a statement that it could lead to more blue-collar jobs, spur investment in domestic manufacturing and correct trade agreements it characterized as "allowing automakers to offshore U.S. jobs and drive a race to the bottom."

“We applaud the Trump administration for stepping up to end the free trade disaster that has devastated working class communities for decades. Ending the race to the bottom in the auto industry starts with fixing our broken trade deals, and the Trump administration has made history with today’s actions,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a statement also calling for stronger rights for all autoworkers.

“These tariffs are a major step in the right direction for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country, and it is now on the automakers, from the Big Three to Volkswagen and beyond, to bring back good union jobs to the U.S,” Fain added.

The praise for Trump marks a shift in tone for a union that emerged as one of his loudest critics last year, when it ultimately decided to endorse Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

A child slipped through fencing outside the White House on Wednesday and was intercepted by Secret Service officers.

Secret Service spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said the young trespasser squeezed through the fence on the North Lawn around 6:30 p.m., about an hour after President Donald Trump announced planned auto tariffs from the Oval Office.

“Officers quickly reunited the child with their parents without incident,” Guglielmi said in a social media post.

The judge presiding over a law firm's case challenging Trump's executive order punishing it for its work for Democrats denied the administration's bid to disqualify herself from the case, saying today that it was based on "speculation" and "innuendo."

"When the U.S. Department of Justice engages in this rhetorical strategy of ad hominem attack, the stakes become much larger than only the reputation of the targeted federal judge. This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented," U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said in a sharply worded ruling.

The Justice Department had asked Howell to recuse herself from the Perkins Coie case after she issued a temporary restraining order barring some of Trump's directives against the firm, saying she had "repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the President.” One of the previous cases the Justice Department pointed to involved comments she made when she formally dismissed charges against Jan. 6 defendants who'd been pardoned by Trump, arguing she had exhibited "hostility" toward Trump and "disdain for his supporters."

Howell wrote that the Jan. 6 defendants "were not identified, investigated, and prosecuted for their political beliefs or support for President Trump but because they engaged in offense conduct during the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that allegedly violated federal criminal laws."

The Associated Press is returning to a Washington courtroom Thursday to ask a judge to restore its full access to presidential events. That’s weeks after the White House retaliated against the news outlet last month for not following President Trump’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico.

In a previous hearing last month, U.S. District Court Judge Trevor N. McFadden refused the AP’s request for an injunction to stop the White House from barring reporters and photographers from events in the Oval Office and Air Force One. He urged the Trump administration to reconsider its ban before Thursday’s hearing. It hasn’t.

The AP has said it needs to take a stand against Trump’s team for punishing a news organization for using speech that it doesn’t like. The news outlet said it would still refer to the Gulf of Mexico in its style guidance to clients around the world, while also noting that Trump has renamed it the Gulf of America. The White House said it has the right to decide who gets to question the president.

“For anyone who thinks the Associated Press’s lawsuit against President Trump’s White House is about the name of a body of water, think bigger,” Julie Pace, the AP’s executive editor, wrote in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal. “It’s really about whether the government can control what you say.”

Canadian and European leaders are slamming Trump's announcement today of 25% tariffs on all automobiles made outside the United States.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said at a news conference that the move was a "direct attack" on Canadian workers. He said he is awaiting further details to assess the full impact the tariffs will have on the Canadian economy, but he called them "entirely unjustified."

"This will hurt us, but through this period, by being together, we will emerge stronger," Carney said, adding that he is considering additional retaliatory tariffs and that a conversation with Trump would be "appropriate."

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, said the tariffs will "do nothing more than increase costs for hard-working American families."

The Education Department says applications for income-driven repayment plans are available online again for student loan borrowers.

The applications were taken down in response to a February court ruling that blocked some Biden-era programs. The materials’ removal had complicated the renewal process for borrowers already enrolled in other repayment plans.

The department said Wednesday that revisions to the form were necessary to comply with the court ruling.

The American Federation of Teachers had filed a lawsuit seeking to force the department to accept and process applications for the repayment plans.

More Republican lawmakers are weighing in on the use of a Signal chat by several top Trump administration leaders to discuss imminent military plans, with some sharpening their critiques of the U.S. officials use of the platform.

Leaving a Senate Intelligence Committee closed-door meeting this afternoon, Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., told reporters that there’s “no rationale” for a detailed conversation about military strikes to have taken place on a commercial messaging app.

“I can’t see any rationale for the kind of conversation that took place over Signal, for not taking place in a more secure manner than that. I think that’s hard to explain,” Moran said.

Asked if he thinks the information discussed was classified, Moran said, “Certainly the topic is of a nature in which you would not want our adversaries to know. You certainly wouldn’t want the details known, and this form of communication allowed that to happen.”

Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said today he expects a "hopefully quick" investigation into the Signal chat used by several administration officials to discuss imminent military plans.

Reed, alongside Senate Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., requested the inspector general for the Pentagon perform an expedited investigation into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of a Signal chat to discuss sensitive plans and determine whether any of the information shared should have been kept on more secure channels.

“An expedited one shouldn’t take that long really, because it’s a series of five or six chats and then some subsidiary material, hopefully quick,” Reed told NBC News, adding the bipartisan focus on the report by the committee's leadership "signals how important it is to the Senate to get this done."

Wicker said he will ask the administration for a classified briefing on the Signal chat for Armed Services Committee members. He said he'd request a "senior person" perform the briefing, which would take place in a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was imposing a 25% tariff on all autos coming into the U.S.

Trump said he expects auto firms to relocate to the U.S. and build new sites, or expand existing ones. He hit out at companies that have in recent decades opened facilities in Canada and Mexico at what he said were the expense of U.S. workers.

"If you build your car in the U.S., there's no tariff," Trump said.

Shares of the top U.S. automakers fell sharply in after-hours trading on the announcement. Ford Motor shares dropped 2%, General Motors tumbled 2.3% and Jeep owner Stellantis declined 3%.

Prime Minister Mark Carney said Trump’s trade war “is hurting American consumers and workers and it will hurt more.”

American consumer confidence is at a multiyear low and U.S.-Canadian kinship is under more strain than ever before, Carney said while campaigning in Windsor, Ontario ahead of Canada’s April 28 election.

Trump put 25% tariffs on Canada’s steel and aluminum and is threatening to impose sweeping tariffs on all Canadian products on April 2.

But America will never own Canada, Carney said: “It will never ever happen because we just don’t look out for ourselves we look out for each other.”

A federal appeals court has refused to lift an order barring the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under an 18th century wartime law.

Salvadoran Government via Getty Images

A split three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a March 15 order temporarily prohibiting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Invoking the law for the first time since World War II, the Trump administration deported hundreds of people under a presidential proclamation calling the Tren de Aragua gang an invading force.

The Justice Department appealed after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg blocked more deportations and ordered planeloads of Venezuelan immigrants to return to the U.S. That did not happen.

Senate Republicans are warming up to the idea of including a debt ceiling increase in their big party-line bill to advance President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has told Republican senators that he’s now open to raising the debt limit in a broader spending package, according to a source familiar with his conversations. That’s a shift for Thune in the direction of a budget blueprint adopted by House Republicans, which included a $4 trillion debt limit hike.

The Senate's separate budget plan, by contrast, avoided the issue, one of several major conflicts between the two measures to provide funding for Trump's policy priorities. But now, as the Trump administration pushes the chambers to resolve their differences, some Republican senators are changing their tune after initially preferring to address the debt limit question separately.

“I’m warming up to it, as well,” Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., told NBC News about a debt limit increase in the bill.

The Treasury Department is planning to furlough a “substantial” level of its workforce in conjunction with Elon Musk’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal government, according to a court document.

As part of a complaint in a related case, Trevor Norris, the department’s deputy assistant secretary in human resources, indicated that the layoffs will be coming as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s ongoing moves to cut the federal employee rolls.

In a sworn statement, Norris said the Treasury is wrapping up plans to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order backing DOGE’s activity. The Treasury currently has more than 100,000 employees.

“These plans will be tailored for each bureau, and in many cases will require separations of substantial numbers of employees through reductions in force (RIFs),” Norris said in an affidavit.

Senate Democrats said Frank Bisignano should withdraw his nomination to lead the Social Security Administration.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer compared appointing Bisignano to “hiring an arsonist to run the fire station.”

“And what is the intent? Kill Social Security — by strangling, by not letting it work, by making it so that it’s impossible for people to get their help and their benefits,” Schumer said.

Bisignano, a Wall Street veteran and self described “DOGE person,” faced tough questions at his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

The NAACP warned against the sweeping executive order Trump signed yesterday that aims to overhaul U.S. election administration and implement requirements controversial among voting rights groups, including requiring voters to provide documented proof of their U.S. citizenship before voting in federal elections.

“Trump’s so-called executive order is blatantly unconstitutional and designed to disenfranchise millions of lawful, eligible voters. In America, Presidents do not control elections,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “Trump is clearly pushing the boundaries of executive power, and seeing how much he can get away with. It’s time for the public and all elected officials to speak up as loudly as they can before our country is stolen from its people. If we hand the president control over how elections are run in America, we no longer live in a democracy.”

The order, called Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, moves key election administration decisions typically left to the states under control of the Executive Branch. It threatens to withhold federal funding, which states rely on to safely and securely administer elections, from states who do not comply with the order’s provisions. 

Trump’s order explicitly targets mail-in voting, which the president has baselessly claimed to be rife with fraud, despite encouraging his own voter base to vote absentee throughout the 2024 campaign cycle after realizing its popularity among registered Republicans. 

In an extended back-and-forth about the military plans group chat, Karoline Leavitt directed reporters to comments by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserting that the contents were not classified — even as messages seemingly shared by Hegseth detailed the timing of an attack against the Houthis, and some of the weapons used, shortly before it occurred.

“It’s not just me saying that,” Leavitt said. “It’s the secretary of defense himself who is saying this as well. And he put out a very strong statement earlier today listing all of the things that were not included in that message that he sent to the group. And again, this message, there was no classified information transmitted. There were no more plans discussed.”

Pressed by a reporter on why the strike launch times wouldn't be classified, Leavitt said, "I would defer to you to the secretary of defense’s statement he put out this morning. There were various reasons he listed, things that were not included in that messaging thread that were not classified."

"Going back to the American public: Do you trust the secretary of defense ... or do you trust Jeffrey Goldberg?" she added.

Witkoff denied having a personal device with him during his trip to Russia, saying in a post to X that he had only a government issued secure phone during his travels and suggested that was why he did not comment in the group chat for a period of time.

Witkoff's post was responding to an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, which referenced press reports about Witkoff "receiving these messages on the commercial app while in Moscow."

He did not confirm in the post whether he had been using Signal on a government device or personal device. But when recounting why he was silent for portions of the group chat discussion, Witkoff said it was "because I had no access to my personal devices until I returned from my trip."

Witkoff's tweet comes after Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., sent a letter to Gabbard and Witkoff requesting information about their use of Signal on personal devices by March 31.

Trump will announce tariffs on the auto industry today at 4 p.m. ET, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.

Leavitt said during today's press conference that Trump would hold a press conference in the Oval Office to make the announcement.

The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has adjourned the public portion of its annual hearing on worldwide threats.

The committee will now move into a closed session where top U.S. intelligence officials will continue their testimony.

The questioning of John Ratcliffe descended into yelling as a California Democrat asked the CIA director whether Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was drinking when he used the Signal app to text his plans for attacking Houthis in Yemen.

“I think that’s an offensive line of questioning,” Ratcliffe told Rep. Jimmy Gomez. “The answer is no.”

Ratcliffe and Gomez then began shouting over each other as Gomez tried to follow up.

“We want to know if his performance is compromised,” Gomez said.

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified Wednesday that intelligence and senior U.S. officials at the Departments of Energy, Commerce and Treasury are investigating attempts by foreign adversaries to target and encroach the American southeast.

The Atlantic released details this morning of the top Trump officials' chat that revealed military strike plans to the magazine's editor-in-chief.

The release of the messages in the chat follows repeated denials from the Trump administration that war plans were discussed on the chat or that the information was classified.

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg had previously declined to release parts of the conversation, saying that if the messages were read by an adversary, the information "could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel."

The messages released today showed that a text from U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about imminent military strikes were highly detailed. In them, Hegseth laid out the exact timing of the pending military strikes in Yemen.

Lawmakers will have another chance to question Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe today about leaked military plans, this time at a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

The hearing comes one day after the officials — both reportedly members of the Signal group chat reported by The Atlantic — faced pointed questions from Democrats over the group chat's contents and security.

The hearing has an open session beginning at 10 a.m. ET and a closed-door session for lawmakers at 2 p.m.

Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, R-Ark., has not yet weighed in publicly on The Atlantic's reporting. The top Democrat on the committee, Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, said he was "horrified" by the report.

"These individuals know the calamitous risks of transmitting classified information across unclassified systems, and they also know that if a lower ranking official under their command did what is described here, they would likely lose their clearance and be subject to criminal investigation," Himes said. "The American people deserve answers, and I plan to get some on Wednesday at the Intelligence Committee’s Worldwide Threats hearing."

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and top Democrats on national security-related committees sent a letter to Trump expressing their "extreme alarm about the astonishingly poor judgment shown by your Cabinet and national security advisors" following a report in The Atlantic about leaked military plans for strikes in Yemen.

"You have long advocated for accountability and transparency in the government, particularly as it relates to the handling of classified information, national security, and the safety of American servicemembers," the senators said. "As such, it is imperative that you address this breach with the seriousness and diligence that it demands."

The senators said that they "expect" that Attorney General Pam Bondi conduct an investigation "of the conduct of the government officials involved in improperly sharing or discussing such information."

The group also sent nearly a dozen questions to the president, asking for details about the devices used by the officials in the group chat, a transcript of the group chat, and whether Signal is used by other officials to discuss sensitive information that is "subject to statutory recordkeeping requirements."

The latest attempt by conservatives to undermine the federal bureaucracy reaches the Supreme Court on Wednesday as the justices consider whether the Federal Communications Commission unlawfully wields power via a program that subsidizes telecommunications services in underserved regions.

The court has a 6-3 conservative majority that has, in a series of recent decisions, undercut the authority of government agencies and advanced a deregulatory agenda largely favored by business interests and Republicans.

The case concerns whether Congress in a 1996 law exceeded its authority in setting up the Universal Service Fund, which requires telecommunications services to submit payments to subsidize “universal service” in low-income and rural areas.

The fees, which are passed on to customers, raise billions of dollars a year that are spent on providing phone and internet services, including for schools, libraries and hospitals.

Read the full NBC News story here.

Finalizing applications filed by certain immigrants to become legal permanent residents is being put on hold to comply with an executive order President Donald Trump signed in January.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the part of the Department of Homeland Security that handles citizenship, legal status and other immigration benefits, has suspended processing some applications for so-called green cards to do more vetting of the applicants, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.

Trump's executive order, signed Jan. 20, titled "Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Safety Threats," called for agencies to "vet and screen to the maximum degree possible all aliens who intend to be admitted, enter, or are already inside the United States, particularly those aliens coming from regions or nations with identified security risks."

CBS News reported Tuesday that USCIS has directed its staff to conduct the additional vetting of refugees or people who were granted asylum and have applied for legal permanent residency, or green cards.

Read the full story here.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday will visit the high-security El Salvador prison where Venezuelans who the Trump administration alleges are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang have been held since their removal from the U.S.

Noem's trip to the prison — where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside — comes as the Trump administration seeks to show it is deporting people it describes as the “worst of the worst.”

Since taking office, Noem has often been front and center in efforts to highlight the immigration crackdown. She took part in immigration enforcement operations, rode horses with Border Patrol agents and was the face of a television campaign warning people in the country illegally to self-deport.

Read the full story here.

National security adviser Mike Waltz said during tonight's Fox News interview that he does not support releasing a chain of messages on military planning that inadvertently included The Atlantic's top editor.

"I certainly want our deliberations to stay confidential," Waltz told host Laura Ingraham. "Of course, I don't want it all out there, because these were conversations back and forth that you should be able to have confidentially."

The comments were made in response to a question about whether — if the contents of the texts were not classified as Trump and his allies have claimed — Waltz would object to the public release of the messages.

Goldberg wrote in his article yesterday that plans in the group text “included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,” but that he had not included those details due to national security concerns.

National security adviser Mike Waltz said during a Fox News interview tonight that he takes "full responsibility" for organizing a text group on the messaging app Signal that accidentally leaked plans for U.S. airstrikes on Houthi militants in Yemen to an editor from The Atlantic.

"I take full responsibility. I built the — I built the group," Waltz told host Laura Ingraham in his first public comments since the story broke yesterday. "My job is to make sure everything's coordinated."

The comment came in response to a question about whether a staffer was responsible for adding The Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the group.

Waltz also suggested, without evidence, that Goldberg might have "deliberately" appeared in the group, which included top administration officials.