Harvard sues Trump administration as it fights back against threats to slash federal funding – live
First Republican lawmaker calls for Hegseth to go
Don Bacon, a Republican congressman from Nebraska who serves on the House armed services committee, has become the first sitting GOP lawmaker to suggest Donald Trump should fire his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth.
Bacon, a former air force general, told Politico:
I had concerns from the get-go because Pete Hegseth didn’t have a lot of experience. I like him on Fox. But does he have the experience to lead one of the largest organizations in the world? That’s a concern.
He said it was “totally unacceptable” that Hegseth reportedly shared sensitive information about military operations in Yemen in a private Signal chat that included his wife, his brother and personal lawyer. Bacon added:
I’m not in the White House, and I’m not going to tell the White House how to manage this … but I find it unacceptable, and I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was in charge.
Key events
Harvard is suing the Trump administration
In a new lawsuit, Harvard University alleged the Trump administration is trying to “gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard,” several news outlets are reporting.
The university is fighting back against the administration’s threat to review about $9 bn in federal funding after Harvard officials refused to comply with a list of demands that included appointing an outside overseer to ensure that the viewpoints being taught at the university were “diverse”.
In a letter announcing the university’s decision to reject Trump’s demands, Harvard president Alan Garber wrote that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
Government watchdog group American Oversight has asked a judge to order the Trump administration to keep records of its messages including those in the second Signal group chat Pete Hegseth shared Yemen attack details with.
American Oversight initially filed the lawsuit on 25 March, but amended the suit following revelations that Hegseth reportedly shared the details of an attack on Yemen’s Houthi group in a Signal chat that included his wife and brother.
The lawsuit asks the judge to declare that these Signal messages are “federal records subject to the Federal Records Act (FRA).”
“It is now evident the administration’s unlawful use of Signal to conduct — and delete — sensitive government business is a feature and not a bug,” said Chioma Chukwu, interim Executive Director of American Oversight. “We cannot stand idly by while senior government officials share imminent attack plans with their family and friends, putting our national security at risk and betraying the men and women in uniform whose very lives are endangered as a result.”
A judge has issued a temporary restraining order, blocking New York City mayor Eric Adams’s administration from allowing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) from operating from Rikers Island, according to Gothamist.
The temporary block was requested by the New York city council, which is suing the Adams administration over its attempt to broker a deal with Ice for the use of the Rikers Island.
In the ruling, Judge Mary V Rosado wrote: “City Hall and all other New York City government officials, officers, personnel and agencies are prohibited from taking any steps towards negotiating, signing or implementing any memoranda of understanding with the federal government regarding federal law enforcement presence on Department of Correction property.”
In the lawsuit, New York city council alleged Adams entered into a “corrupt bargain” with the Trump administration to get the mayor’s federal charges dropped.
Nadine Menendez, the wife of former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez, has been convicted of accepting bribes of gold bars, cash and a luxury car, according to the Associated Press. Prosecutors said she played centrally in a scheme in which Menendez accepted bribes from three New Jersey men looking for help with their business and legal troubles. The couple maintains their innocence.
The senator, who resigned from the Senate in August after his conviction, is expected to start an 11-year sentence in June. During an FBI raid of the duo’s home, officials found $150,000 worth of gold bars and $480,000 in cash stuffed in various belongings and a Mercedes-Benz that was also allegedly a bribe.
Summary of the day so far
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Donald Trump offered public support for defense secretary Pete Hegseth after it emerged that Hegseth had shared information about US strikes in Yemen last month in a second Signal group chat that included family, his personal lawyer and several top Pentagon aides.
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A former top Pentagon spokesperson, John Ullyot, slammed Hegseth and said it had been a “month of total chaos” in an opinion essay that said the defense secretary would be unlikely to remain in his role.
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Republican congressman Don Bacon suggested he would not keep Hegseth in place were he was the president. Bacon, who sits on the House armed services committee, did not explicitly call for Hegseth’s resignation but said he had “concerns from the get-go because Pete Hegseth didn’t have a lot of experience”.
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The White House denied an NPR report that it had begun the process of looking for a new secretary of defense. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the report was “total FAKE NEWS”.
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The Trump administration is planning to pull an additional $1bn of funding for Harvard University amid an escalating fight with the university, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
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Four House Democrats have travelled to El Salvador to call attention to the flight of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador. Congress members Maxwell Frost of Florida, Robert Garcia of California, Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Maxine Dexter of Oregon are in El Salvador to facilitate Garcia’s return to the United States.
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US stock markets started falling again on Monday morning as Donald Trump continued attacks against the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, who the president called “a major loser” for not lowering interest rates.
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The US supreme court is hearing arguments today in a case that could threaten Americans’ access to free preventive healthcare services under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
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Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s purse, containing her driver’s license, apartment keys, passport, DHS access badge, blank checks and about $3,000 in cash, was stolen while she was dining at a restaurant in Washington DC on Sunday night.
Hugo Lowell
Donald Trump offered public support for defense secretary Pete Hegseth a day after it emerged that Hegseth had shared information about US strikes in Yemen last month in a second Signal group chat that included family, his personal lawyer and several top Pentagon aides.
The details that Hegseth sent in the Signal group chat were essentially the same information that he shared in a separate Signal group chat earlier this year that mistakenly included the editor of the Atlantic in addition to JD Vance and other top Trump officials, a person directly familiar with the messages said.
Trump called the defense secretary on Sunday after the story broke and aides concluded that it had been leaked to the news media by a former Hegseth aide who was in the group chat but abruptly fired last week.
Trump has resisted firing top officials in his second term, not wanting to be seen as caving to a media swarm even if he has been unhappy with the negative coverage. Trump also stuck by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, who had added the editor of the Atlantic to the first chat.
According to a person familiar with the call, Trump told Hegseth that he had his support and that disgruntled leakers were to blame for the story.
Trump also told his team to back Hegseth in public, and senior Trump aides repeated their defense line that none of the information shared in either of the group chats were classified, although the accusations have centered on why it was shared with Hegseth’s wife, for instance, since she is not a Pentagon official.
Edward Helmore
Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar’s comments on Sunday came hours after the supreme court released justice Samuel Alito’s dissenting opinion on the court’s decision to block the Trump administration from deporting more Venezuelans held in north Texas’s Bluebonnet detention center.
In his dissent, Alito criticized the decision of the seven-member majority, saying the court had acted “literally in the middle of the night” and without sufficient explanation. The “unprecedented” relief was “hastily and prematurely granted”, Alito added.
Alito, whose dissent was joined by his fellow conservative justice Clarence Thomas, said there was “dubious factual support” for granting the request in an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union to block deportations of accused gang members that the administration contends are legal under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
In his dissent, Alito said the applicants had not shown they were in “imminent danger of removal”. He wrote:
In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order.
“I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate,” Alito added.
Edward Helmore
Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, warned on Sunday that the US was “getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis”, but the courts, growing Republican disquiet at Trump administration policies, and public protest were holding it off.
Klobuchar told CNN’s State of the Union:
I believe as long as these courts hold, and the constituents hold, and the Congress starts standing up, our democracy will hold.
She added that Donald Trump is “trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis”.
Klobuchar said the supreme court should hold Trump administration officials in contempt if they continue to ignore a court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García from El Salvador, the Maryland resident the government admitted in court it had deported by mistake.
Lauren Aratani
US stock markets started falling again on Monday morning as Donald Trump continued attacks against the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, who the president called “a major loser” for not lowering interest rates.
Trump is pressuring the Fed to cut rates, probably to appease the stock market, which plummeted after he announced his newest slate of tariffs. But Wall Street isn’t taking the bait and appears to be reacting in opposition to Trump’s attacks against Powell.
On Monday morning the Dow was down 1,000 points, 2.8%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was over 3% down and the S&P 500 fell 2.9%.
Former tech stocks favorites Tesla and Nvidia were both down over 5% on Monday, while the value of the dollar fell to multiyear lows against most major currencies.
Joseph Gedeon
The supreme court is hearing arguments today in a case that could threaten Americans’ access to free preventive healthcare services under the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
At issue is the constitutionality of the US preventive services taskforce, which plays a critical role in determining which preventive services health insurers must cover without cost to patients.
The 16-member panel of medical experts, appointed by the health secretary without Senate confirmation, has designated dozens of life-saving screenings and treatments as essential preventive care.
If the justices uphold the lower court’s ruling, health associations said in a filing, life-saving tests and treatments that have been cost-free would become subject to co-pays and deductibles, deterring many Americans from obtaining them.
The case represents the latest in a long series of legal challenges to Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation to reach the nation’s highest court since its passage in 2010. A big critic of the program during his first term, Trump and his administration have now taken over the case after the Biden administration initially filed the appeal.
Republican congressman Don Bacon, in an interview with Politico, said defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to use a private device or Signal to communicate classified information was especially troubling. He said:
Russia and China put up thousands of people to monitor all these phone calls at the very top, and the No. 1 target besides the president … would be the secretary of defense.
Russia and China are all over his phone, and for him to be putting secret stuff on his phone is not right. He’s acting like he’s above the law – and that shows an amateur person.
Bacon’s comments come after an opinion essay also published in Politico by John Ullyot, a former top Pentagon spokesperson, who slammed Hegseth’s leadership of the Department of Defense.
“It looks like there’s a meltdown going on,” Bacon said.
There’s a lot – a lot – of smoke coming out of the Pentagon, and I got to believe there’s some fire there somewhere.
