Trump officials sent war plans to a magazine editor

In his first public comments since The Atlantic story broke today, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came out swinging. But rather than addressing the alleged classified information shared on an unclassified app, Hegseth took aim at journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who wrote the story.

Asked how information about war plans were shared with a journalist and whether the information was classified, Hegseth went after Goldberg, calling him a "so-called journalist."

Asked why were military details were shared on Signal and how he found out there was a journalist on the chain, Hegseth said: “I’ve heard I was characterized. Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that.”

He then walked away from reporters.

Embassies in at least 17 countries have put up posts featuring images of administration figures, including Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, warning those seeking visas that engaging in behavior the government deems harmful could get them deported.

A post put up by the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia, reads: “When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest. Now, if you are in this country to promote Hamas, to promote terrorist organizations, to participate in vandalism, to participate in acts of rebellion and riots on campus, we never would have let you in if we had known that. You lied to us. You’re out.”

The Trump administration has been clamping down on visa holders who have participated in protests in support of Palestinians and against Israel’s military actions in the Gaza Strip.

Trump issued an executive order today that imposes a 25% tariff on imported goods from any country that directly or indirectly imports Venezuelan oil.

The tariff will be enacted starting April 2.

Trump previewed the order in a Truth Social post today that described Venezuela as “very hostile” to the United States.

Were it not for bad weather, Jhon Chacin would have been aboard a flight to his native Venezuela on March 13, having volunteered to go home after giving up on an asylum request that was initially denied. Instead, his brother said, Jhon was among the nearly 300 Venezuelan men sent by U.S. immigration officials to El Salvador's notorious megaprison.

Eudomar Chacin spoke to his brother the day after he was supposed to have returned to Venezuela; because of bad weather they couldn't board the flight, Jhon said. According to Eudomar, Jhon, 35, was crying and told him he was scared because he was seeing unusual movements by staff at the detention center in Texas where he was being held. Eudomar hasn't heard from him since.

“I just feel like crying all the time — he is a good, healthy kid, he didn’t have any vices, he is Christian, my family is all Christian," Eudomar, who's 56 and lives in Florida, told NBC News. "I want justice and freedom for my brother. And I want him to return to Venezuela.”

Like Eudomar, families of the men who were whisked away have been grappling with the horror of relatives suddenly going "missing" amid the politically charged U.S. government operation, as more relatives and attorneys push for answers and for their release.

Sen. Roger Wicker, the Mississippi Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters, “We’re very concerned about it and we’ll be looking into it on a bipartisan basis.”

Senate Democrats have been calling for an investigation into a report in The Atlantic that Trump’s top advisers texted plans for military strikes in Yemen to a group chat in the secure messaging app Signal that included the magazine’s editor-in-chief.

Some Republicans have been critical of the episode Monday, but had mostly stopped short of calling for an investigation or congressional hearings.

A surge of grant cancellations hit researchers focused on the health of gay, lesbian and transgender people last week, as the Trump administration continues to target what it describes as ideologically driven science.

Last week the U.S. government terminated at least 68 grants to 46 institutions totaling nearly $40 million when awarded, according to a government website. Some of the grant money has already been spent, but at least $1.36 million in future support was yanked as a result of the cuts, a significant undercount because estimates were available for less than a third of grants.

Most were in some way related to sexual minorities, including research focused on HIV prevention. Other canceled studies centered on cancer, youth suicide and bone health.

Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said the agency is “dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science." The grants were awarded by the National Institutes of Health, an agency under HHS.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said in a statement that he will retire today as the Postal Service's top official.

"After nearly five years as America’s 75th Postmaster General, and after informing the Governors in February of my intention to retire, I have today informed the Postal Service Board of Governors that today will be my last day in this role," DeJoy said.

DeJoy said that he has been working closely with his deputy, Douglas Tulino, in preparation for the transition, noting that Tulino will serve as interim postmaster general until the board of governors names a permanent successor.

"The Governors have hired a search firm in support of those efforts, which are well underway," DeJoy added.

Trump announced this afternoon that he is nominating Dr. Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to permanently lead the public health agency.

CDC

The announcement comes after the White House withdrew the nomination of former Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., shortly before his Senate confirmation hearing.

“Dr. Monarez brings decades of experience championing Innovation, Transparency, and strong Public Health Systems,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, adding that Monarez will “work closely” with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. if confirmed.

A White House official told NBC News that Trump pulled Weldon’s nomination after it became clear his past ties to anti-vaccine rhetoric would cost him too many votes to be confirmed.

Hakeem Jeffries said there should be a congressional investigation of top Trump administration officials texting war plans for military strikes in Yemen to a group chat that included a journalist.

Jeffries said it was important to understand what happened and to prevent “this type of national security breach from ever happening again.”

“This is reckless, irresponsible and dangerous,” Jeffries said.

He said Americans were promised that Trump would hire only the very best, but “this whole Trump administration is filled with lackeys and incompetent cronies.”

As congressional lawmakers scramble to respond to President Donald Trump's slashing of the federal government, one group is already taking a front and center role: military veterans.

From layoffs at the Department of Veterans Affairs to a Pentagon purge of archives that documented diversity in the military, veterans have been acutely affected by Trump's actions. And with the Republican president determined to continue slashing the federal government, the burden will only grow on veterans, who make up roughly 30% of the over 2 million civilians who work for the federal government and often tap government benefits they earned with their military service.

“At a moment of crisis for all of our veterans, the VA's system of health care and benefits has been disastrously and disgracefully put on the chopping block by the Trump administration,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the top Democrat on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, at a news conference last week.

Blumenthal on Monday announced a series of so-called shadow hearings by Senate Democrats to spotlight how veterans are being impacted. Blumenthal invited VA Secretary Doug Collins to the first meeting next week, though the Cabinet secretary is under no compulsion to attend and is unlikely to appear at an unofficial proceeding.

Trump said in remarks from the White House Roosevelt Room this afternoon that the South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai is opening a steel plant in Louisiana.

Trump said that Hyundai is announcing a $5.8 billion investment in American manufacturing by building a new steel plant in the state, which he said would produce more than 1,400 jobs.

"This will be Hyundai's first-ever steel mill in the United States, one of the largest companies in the world, by the way, supplying steel for its auto parts and auto plants in Alabama and Georgia, which will soon produce more than 1 million American made cars every single year," he said. "The cars are coming into this country at levels never seen before."

The automaker's factory was part of a broader investment in the U.S. Trump claimed that the announcement is a "clear demonstration that tariffs very strongly work." South Korea had requested an exemption from the tariffs the administration has imposed on other major trading partners.

The FBI said Monday it has launched a task force with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to investigate attacks targeting Tesla, the electric vehicle company headed by Trump administration DOGE chief Elon Musk.

The announcement came hours after a bomb squad found multiple incendiary devices at a Tesla showroom in Austin, Texas, the same city where the company has its headquarters.

That incident is the latest in a series of attacks and vandalism on Tesla properties related to CEO Musk’s DOGE team. DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, is engaged in a wide-ranging effort to sharply cut federal government spending and staffing.

“The FBI has been investigating the increase in violent activity toward Tesla, and over the last few days, we have taken additional steps to crack down and coordinate our response,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a post on X, the social media site owned by Musk.

The judge presiding over the Alien Enemies Act case on Monday denied the government's request to lift his hold on deportations under the rarely used wartime law despite President Donald Trump's repeated attacks on him and his order.

Denying the government's order to vacate his rulings, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found that the Venezuelan nationals the administration wants to deport under the law should most likely be given the opportunity to challenge allegations that they're members of the Tren de Aragua gang first.

The decision came just hours before a federal appeals court was set to hear arguments that the deportations should be allowed to continue while it considers the government's appeal of Boasberg's ruling.

Read the full story here on NBCNews.com.

Trump announced to Truth Social that Alina Habba, who is serving as counselor to the president, will be the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey.

"Alina will lead with the same diligence and conviction that has defined her career, and she will fight tirelessly to secure a Legal System that is both 'Fair and Just' for the wonderful people of New Jersey," he said in the post.

The move is "effective immediately," Trump said. He said John Giordano, the current interim U.S. attorney in New Jersey, is being nominated as the ambassador to Namibia.

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing people’s private data at the Education Department, the Treasury Department and the Office of Personnel Management.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman issued the preliminary injunction Monday.

She had previously issued a temporary restraining order but the preliminary injunction offers longer-term relief as the case plays out. Boardman found the Trump administration has likely violated federal privacy laws and has failed to adequately explain why DOGE needed access to “millions of records.”

The injunction could be challenged on appeal.

Seth Harrison / USA Today Network file

The Trump administration filed new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student detained due to his pro-Palestinian activism on campus, while trying to dismiss his First Amendment violation claims as a "red herring."

In a filing Sunday, the Justice Department said Khalil, who is a green card holder, withheld membership in certain organizations and failed to disclose his employment at the Syria Office in the British Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, in his permanent residency application. 

Khalil, a native of Syria and citizen of Algeria, entered the U.S. on a student visa in December 2022 and was adjusted to lawful permanent resident status in November 2024.

Read the rest of this story on NBCNews.com.

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to halt a ruling ordering the rehiring of thousands of federal workers let go in mass firings aimed at dramatically downsizing the federal government.

The emergency appeal argues that the judge can't force the executive branch to rehire some 16,000 probationary employees.

It also calls on the conservative-majority court to rein in the growing number of federal judges who have slowed President Donald Trump's sweeping agenda, at least for now, by finding that his administration hasn't followed federal law.

The order came from U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco, who found the firings didn’t follow federal law and required immediate offers of reinstatement be sent.

A voter in Milford, New Hampshire, missed out on approving the town’s $19 million operating budget, electing a cemetery trustee and buying a new dump truck. In Durham, an 18-year-old high school student did not get a say in who should serve on the school board or whether $125,000 should go toward replacing artificial turf on athletic fields.

Neither was able to participate in recent town elections in New Hampshire thanks to a new state law requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote. Their experiences, recounted by town clerks, could prove instructive for the rest of the country as the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act advances in Congress and more than a dozen states consider similar legislation.

“Everything that conservatives tried to downplay, New Hampshire told us exactly what would happen on a national scale under the SAVE Act,” said Greta Bedekovics, a former policy adviser for Senate Democrats who is now with the Center for American Progress.

Read the full story at NBCBoston.com.

Matt Sullivan / Getty Images file

The Supreme Court on Monday hears an unusual case in which civil rights groups are in a tentative alliance with Republican officials in defending a Louisiana congressional map that includes two majority Black districts for the first time in decades.

The justices took up an appeal brought by the state over its efforts to draw a map while being sued from the left and right about whether it appropriately considered race in doing so.

The case has a complicated history, resulting from an original map drawn by the Legislature after the 2020 census that included just one Black majority district out of the state's six districts. About a third of the state's population is Black.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com

A new memo from President Donald Trump that authorized the attorney general and the homeland security secretary to sanction law firms that file lawsuits they deem “frivolous" is a major escalation of his intensifying assault on law firms, legal experts and former Justice Department officials told NBC News.

The presidential memorandum, “Preventing Abuses of the Legal System and the Federal Court,” also ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to recommend revoking attorneys’ security clearances or terminating law firms' federal contracts if she deems their lawsuits against the administration "unreasonable" or "vexatious."

The memo, which was issued Saturday, follows executive orders against three firms: Covington & Burling, which provided pro bono legal services to former special counsel Jack Smith, who secured an indictment against Trump; Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and worked with an opposition research firm that compiled a discredited dossier against Trump; and Paul Weiss, where a former firm partner, Mark Pomerantz, tried to build a criminal case against Trump while he was working at the Manhattan district attorney’s office several years ago.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com.

The Trump administration and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Wednesday that Ukraine has agreed to move forward with a partial ceasefire with Russia, which President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had discussed a day earlier.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz said that after Trump spoke to Zelenskyy by phone Wednesday morning, the two leaders agreed "on a partial ceasefire against energy," according to a joint statement released by the White House.

Zelenskyy wrote in a lengthy post on X, "One of the first steps toward fully ending the war could be ending strikes on energy and other civilian infrastructure. I supported this step, and Ukraine confirmed that we are ready to implement it."

Rubio and Waltz's statement, however, did not mention that the ceasefire would apply to civilian infrastructure as Zelenskyy suggested, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to answer questions at an afternoon White House news briefing asking for clarification about the discrepancy in details.

Read the full article here.

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said he expected “some real progress” at the talks in Saudi Arabia, “particularly as it affects a Black Sea ceasefire on ships between both countries, and from that you’ll naturally gravitate into a full-on shooting ceasefire.”

Asked about concerns that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be looking beyond Ukraine and could press further into Europe, even if Russia is awarded territory within Ukraine now, Witkoff said he has been asked his opinion on what Putin’s motives are on a large scale.

“I simply have said that I just don’t see that he wants to take all of Europe. This is a much different situation than it was in World War II. In World War II there was no NATO. You have countries that are armed there. I take him at his word in this sense. And I think the Europeans are beginning to come to that belief, too. But it sort of doesn’t matter. That’s an academic issue. … The agenda is stop the killing, stop the carnage, let’s end this thing.”

Asked whether he was convinced that Putin wanted peace, Witkoff said: “I feel that he wants peace.”

The Ukrainian delegation is expected to meet with U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia a day ahead of the indirect talks, Ukraine's President Voldoymyr Zelenskyy said.

Ukraine is planning to send technical teams to discuss the details of the partial ceasefire.