Closing summary
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.
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Retsef Levi, mRNA vaccine critic appointed to vaccine advisory panel by Kennedy, is a management professor, not a scientist
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”.
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Elon Musk absent as Trump sits down to dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin
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.
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Trump plans to sign executive order restoring 'Department of War' name to Pentagon
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%?’”
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Three Trump cabinet members have mortgages identical to Fed governor he accuses of fraud – report
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.
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Trump asks supreme court to let him remove FTC Democrat reinstated by appeals court
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.
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Fired CDC director offers to repeat under oath claim that Kennedy called a lie
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.
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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.
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Justice department opens criminal mortgage fraud inquiry into Fed governor Lisa Cook – report
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.
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US to cut some security funds for countries bordering Russia – reports
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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New York attorney general asks court to reinstate Trump’s massive civil fraud penalty
New York’s attorney general moved today to have the state’s highest court reinstate Donald Trump’s staggering civil fraud penalty, appealing a lower court decision that slashed the potential half-billion dollar penalty to zero, the Associated Press reports.
Attorney general Letitia James’ office filed a notice of appeal with the state’s court of appeals, seeking to reverse the mid-level appellate division’s ruling last month that the penalty violated the US constitution’s ban on excessive fines. James had previously said she would appeal.
Trump declared “TOTAL VICTORY” after the appellate division wiped away his fine, but the five-judge panel left other punishments in place and narrowly endorsed a trial court’s finding that he committed fraud by padding his wealth on financial paperwork given to banks and insurers.
The president filed his own appeal last week, asking the court of appeals to throw out those other punishments, which include a multi-year ban on him and his two eldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr, from holding corporate leadership positions in New York.
Those measures have been on hold during the appellate process and the appellate division judges said Trump can seek a court order to extend the pause pending further appeals.
James’ appeal is the latest twist in a lawsuit she filed against Trump in 2022, which alleged that he inflated his net worth by billions of dollars on his financial statements and habitually misled banks and others about the value of prized assets, including golf courses, hotels, Trump Tower, and his Mar-a-Lago estate.
After a trial that saw a sometimes testy Trump take the witness stand, judge Arthur Engoron ruled last year that James had proven Trump engaged in a years long conspiracy with executives at his company to deceive banks and insurers about his wealth and assets.
Engoron ordered Trump to pay $355m – payback of what the judge deemed “ill-gotten gains” from his puffed-up financial statements. That amount soared to more than $515m, including interest, by the time the appellate division ruled.
The five-judge appellate division panel was sharply divided on many issues in Trump’s appeal, but a majority said the monetary penalty was “excessive”.
“While harm certainly occurred, it was not the cataclysmic harm that can justify a nearly half billion-dollar award,” two of the judges wrote.
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Tech leaders genuflected to Melania Trump and other White House officials after a midday conclave, thanking her for working to bring artificial intelligence to children nationwide. Executives joined the First Lady for the inaugural meeting of a government task force on AI education, part of Trump’s Presidential AI Challenge.
“It’s a real honor for me to be here,” said Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet. “You’re really inspiring young people to use technology in extraordinary ways.”
Pichai said Google is imagining a future where every student “can learn anything in the world.” He said the company was actively working to set up systems to make AI more accessible in schools around the country.
Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM, and Cameron Wilson, the president of Code.org, also addressed the First Lady, praising her leadership in bringing AI to children. Krishna said IBM was pledging to teach AI skills to two million workers in the US. Wilson said Code.org would “engage 25m learners” with artificial intelligence, saying it was the company’s goal to “transform our education system so students can thrive in AI”.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has scheduled a 3pm ET press conference in Tampa, Florida, to discuss recent justice department efforts to reduce human trafficking. She will update work done by Joint Task Force Alpha, which combats human smuggling and trafficking groups operating in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia and Panama.
The taskforce was created four years ago as a combined effort from the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies.
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A rule proposed by the Biden administration that would have entitled airline passengers to automatic compensation for delayed flights has been scrapped by the Department of Transportation.
The Biden administration proposed the rule in December, asking for public comment on a plan to require airlines to pay $200 to $300 to passengers delayed by at least three hours on domestic flights and up to $775 for longer delays.
The rule would have brought the United States to parity with European rules requiring compensation. But domestic air carriers sharply criticized the proposal.
In June, the EU relaxed its own rules, increasing the amount of time aircraft passengers are delayed before they can qualify for compensation to four hours for short-haul flights and six hours for long-haul flights.
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RFK Jr's testimony: top takeaways
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s testimony before the senate finance committee displayed some cracks in the administration’s armor, as a few Republicans joined Democrats with pointed questions about his posture toward vaccines – particularly the COVID-19 vaccine – and the firing of former CDC director Susan Monarez.
Kennedy spread vaccine misinformation during his testimony. He argued in defense of a statement made by Dr. Retsef Levi, a new appointee to a key vaccine panel, that mRNA vaccines present a risk of “serious harm, including death, especially among young people.” The scientific consensus today is that mRNA vaccines – including the Covid vaccine - only rarely have side effects and are both effective and safe.
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) with a call to put Kennedy under oath, describing his testimony during his confirmation hearing as a lie.
Monarez told the Wall Street Journal that she was asked to pre-approve vaccine recommendations made by a panel now composed entirely of Kennedy allies, some of whom have openly argued against vaccination, after the secretary purged it of its previous expertise, and that her refusal led to her ouster. Kennedy repeatedly called that accusation a lie.
“I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said, ‘no’.”
Wyden and several other Democrats called on Kennedy to resign, and for President Donald Trump to fire him if he wouldn’t quit.
Highlights:
“These changes were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency with the central mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease.” The CDC “failed [its] responsibility miserably during Covid when its disastrous, nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools and caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science and heightened economic inequality,” Kennedy testified. The “unscientific interventions failed to do anything about the disease itself.”
“Kennedy: “We literally did worse than any country in the world,” in preventing COVID-19 deaths “and the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”
Kennedy: “It’s chronic disease that’s bankrupting us and destroying our national security.”
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Melania Trump welcomed tech leaders to the East Wing of the White House to inaugurate a taskforce on artificial intelligence and education as part of her Presidential AI Challenge. The event concerned how to integrate artificial intelligence into childhood education and devise ways for the government to work more with the private sector.
“It’s a beautiful event today,” Trump said as she kicked off the meeting. “We are living in a world of wonder.”
Trump spoke about how driverless cars now “steer themselves through cities” and drones have become an everyday part of warfare. She said AI is responsible for all of these new technologies. “The robots are here, our future is no longer science fiction.”
Joining the First Lady at the meeting table were Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, Cameron Wilson, the president of Code.org, and Arvind Krishna, the CEO of IBM. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, was also present in the gallery.
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Kennedy had not visited CDC before shooting at Atlanta headquarters last month
Warnock earlier pushed Kennedy on the reported motives of the gunman who attacked the CDC headquarters in Atlanta last month, highlighting that the shooter believed that the Covid vaccine had made him ill, and wanted to raise awareness of that issue.
Warnock confirmed that Kennedy had never been to the agency before the shooting, and had not been briefed by any of its scientists about vaccines.
The New York Times notes: “Kennedy did visit the premises after the shooting, but no employees were present. Many CDC employees hold Kennedy directly responsible for the misinformation that may have led to the shooting.”
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'You are a hazard to the health of the American people': Warnock calls on RFK Jr to resign
Democratic senator Raphael Warnock told Kennedy, “You are a hazard to the health of the American people” and called on him to step down.
“I think that you ought to resign, and if you don’t resign, the president of the United States, who put forward Operation Warp Speed, which worked, should fire you,” he said.
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Challenged on his comments blaming school shootings on antidepressants, Kennedy went on the attack again: “I never said that, you’re making stuff up … you’re being dishonest right now.”
Democratic senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, said they should be talking about mental health and access to guns.
Asked whether he was lying when he told the committee that he wasn’t anti-vaxx or if he was lying when he told Americans that there’s no safe and effective vaccine.
“Both things are true,” said Kennedy.
Republican senator Thom Tillis, who isn’t seeking re-election, also criticized Kennedy over Monarez’s firing, comparing his former praise for her with his recently sacking her.
Tillis said he believed that some of Kennedy’s statements contradicted what he said previously, and asked him for evidence that he has “empowered scientists to do their jobs”.
He added that Kennedy’s prior assertion that he would not impose his own beliefs seemed “contradictory to the firing of a CDC director, the canceling of mRNA research contracts, firing advisory board members, attempting to stall NIH funding”, among other actions.
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in Washington
Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, has condemned Republicans for defunding police even as Donald Trump claims to be cracking down on crime.
The president deployed national guard troops to the streets of Washington last month and is threatening similar measures in Chicago and other Democratic-led cities.
Asked if Washington now feels safer, Jeffries told reporters: “I haven’t seen a difference one way or the other but I spend a lot of time in and around the Capitol.”
Urging support for police departments and local law enforcement, he said: “What we should be doing is giving them the ability to do their jobs with the resources they need to continue to protect and serve.
“Republicans have actually cut funding for local law enforcement. What does that have to do with making communities safe?”
Trump’s hardline approach has set a political trap for Democrats to be seen as soft on crime. But Jeffries added: “We’re going to continue to make clear we’re focused on keeping communities safe all across America and, in my humble opinion, the best way to do that is to support local law enforcement, local police departments and local partnerships between the police and the community.”
Senator Bernie Sanders said he hoped to call Monarez to a hearing.
Kennedy repeats claim that former CDC director lied about being fired
Asked about his firing of Susan Monarez as CDC director, RFK Jr said: “I told her that she had to resign because I asked her, ‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ And she said, ‘no’.”
This seems to confound Warren, who points out that this is not the account that Monarez has given about her departure.
Kennedy adds that she was “lying” when she said he had fired her because she would not accede to his demands on vaccine policy.
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Yelling at Warren now, Kennedy asks: “You want me to indicate a product for which there is no clinical data?” (There is plenty of clinical data around the safety and effectiveness of Covid boosters).
He also falsely claims that “everybody can get access to [the vaccines]” before adding “it depends on the states”.
RFK Jr and senator Warren have tense exchange about Covid boosters
Asked by Elizabeth Warren if all adults and all children in America over the age of 6 months old can get the Covid booster shot at their local pharmacy, RFK Jr said: “Anybody can get the booster.”
Asked if that’s now the official rule of HHS, that anybody can get the shot at their local pharmacy, Kennedy replies (misleadingly): “It’s not recommended for healthy people.”
Challenged that he is effectively denying people vaccines, Warren says he should be honoring his promise he made when he was seeking confirmation for this role – that he wasn’t going to take vaccines away from anyone who wanted them.
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RFK Jr falsely claims no cuts to Medicaid under Trump
Kennedy also falsely claimed that “there are no cuts to Medicaid” taking place under the Trump administration.
Deep cuts to Medicaid, which provides healthcare to low-income and disabled Americans, have been one of most contentious aspects of Trump’s signature tax and spending megabill.
Under the legislation, 8.6 million Americans could lose their Medicaid coverage, according to a preliminary estimate from the Congressional Budget Office.
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There is now a short recess in the hearing, but earlier Kennedy claimed that the vaccine manufacturers couldn’t produce a study showing that the Covid vaccines were effective for healthy children.
Per the New York Times: “That is incorrect. The companies did indeed test the vaccine in children, although they did so after the shots had been shown to be safe and effective in adults. That is typical for all products given to children.”
in Washington
Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have faced growing criticism for refusing to endorse primary winner Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York.
At a press conference today, a reporter noted that Jeffries had met Mamdani and asked why it is taking so long to support him.
“Stay tuned,” Jeffries said tersely. When the reporter tried to follow up, Jeffries repeated: “Stay tuned.”
Later another journalist had a go at the same subject, asking Jeffries, who represents a New York district, if he is out of step with his party.
The leader replied:
I don’t know. I guess people are going to have to figure that out. If that’s that question you think that my constituents are asking me, because they’re not.
This week the journalist Mehdi Hasan published a column in the Guardian accusing Jeffries of “brazen hypocrisy” over his failure to endorse Mamdani and arguing he Schumer should step down.
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The attorneys general of Rhode Island and Connecticut will sue the Trump administration over its decision to halt the Revolution Wind project, the two announced this morning.
“This kind of erratic and reckless governing is blatantly illegal, and we’re suing to stop it,” said Connecticut attorney general William Tong in a statement.
Located about 15 miles south of the Rhode Island coast and 32 miles south-east of the Connecticut coast, Revolution Wind is a joint venture between Danish energy company Ørsted and German wind developer Skyborn Renewables. The project has obtained all necessary federal and state permits, and construction is 80% complete.
Earlier this morning, the companies filed a separate lawsuit in the US district court for the District of Columbia, challenging the stop-work order, saying it was “unlawful” and “issued in bad faith”, and saying it will request a preliminary injunction.
If it comes online, the wind project is expected to deliver enough electricity to the New England grid to power 350,000 homes, supplying 2.5% of the region’s electricity supply beginning in 2026.
The project is also expected to slash Rhode Island’s planet-warming pollution by 11m metric tons, helping the state achieve its stated goal of zeroing out emissions by 2050.
“With Revolution Wind, we have an opportunity to create good-paying jobs for Rhode Islanders, enhance energy reliability, and ensure energy cost savings while protecting our environment,” Rhode Island attorney general Peter F Neronha said in a statement.
Trump’s Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management issued the stop-work order for the project on 22 August. They did not identify any legal violations in doing so, the attorney generals said. violation of law or imminent threat to safety. Rather, they said, the order “abstractly” cites unspecified “concerns”.
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Analysis: RFK Jr responding to sharp questions with full attack
There’s a pattern to contentious congressional hearings, in which senators or congresspeople hurl difficult questions from hostile lawmakers that require specific information from a witness, looking for a soundbite that can be used in political advertising later. The witness usually recognizes that and generally deflects these questions with vague, indistinct answers that can be more easily massaged later, giving no answer that can be weaponized.
Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has instead chosen to respond to accusations with a full attack.
His testimony has largely been an assault on the effectiveness on the American health care system that demands a gutting.
“I want to fix the system, and that’s what we’re doing,” Kennedy said. He accused the CDC of having poor data on the effectiveness of the Covid-19 vaccine. He said Senator Maggie Hassan was “making things up to scare people, and it’s a lie” as she asked him about how his policies would reduce the availability of the Covid-19 vaccine.
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Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, has begun a press conference on Capitol Hill by highlighting America’s affordability crisis.
“House Republicans are in complete disarray because they have no track record of accomplishment with respect to making life better for the American people,” he told reporters, flanked by signs that warned of a Republican healthcare tax hike.
“Costs are going up. Healthcare premiums are about to skyrocket.” They would cost Americans thousands of dollars more a year, “a crippling increase”.
Jeffries went on: “Electricity bills are skyrocketing through the roof, in part because of the damage that Republicans have done to the ability for America to generate the power that it needs.”
The leader added: “Donald Trump remains deeply unpopular. Democrats continue to win special elections all across the country. Their [Republicans’] efforts to gerrymander the midterm elections by rigging those congressional maps are going to backfire. And Republicans know that their One Big Ugly Bill is deeply unpopular.”
Changing the name of the bill will not help, he said, arguing that Republicans “stole food from the mouths of hungry children” to fund tax breaks for the wealthy.
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The Republican senator Bill Cassidy, a physician, pressed Robert F Kennedy Jr about whether Donald Trump in 2020 deserved a Nobel prize for spearheading Operation Warp Speed, which quickly developed the Covid-19 vaccine that Kennedy has been attacking.
The health secretary agreed that Trump deserved the award.
“The reason that Operation Warp Speed was genius is it’s something nobody had ever done. I don’t think any president but President Trump could do it,” Kennedy said. “It got the vaccine to market that was perfectly matched to the virus at that time when it was badly needed, because there was low natural immunity, and there were people getting very badly injured by Covid.”
Kennedy then touted the value of “therapeutics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin” in Coid-19 treatment. Ivermectin has been found ineffective as a human therapy for Covid.
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Robert F Kennedy Jr noted the gap in longevity between European countries in the United States. “We spend two to three times what European countries spend on healthcare,” he said, while having worse outcomes.
The US health secretary said these outcomes justify firing healthcare leaders. “It’s chronic disease that’s bankrupting us and destroying our national security,” he said.
Senator Michael Bennet asked if parents should be prepared for more measles and mumps cases, when a vaccine panel changes the recommendations for vaccinations. The Colorado Democrat said he expected no changes to the MMR vaccine, which is currently free.
“This is not a podcast,” Bennet said. “This is the American people’s health on the line.”
Kennedy shot back, asking if the senator was aware that one vaccine was associated with an increase in myocarditis. The two began shouting over one another about who was asking – or evading – questions.
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In a contentious round of questioning from Senator Ron Wyden, Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr described the American Academy of Pediatrics’ criticism of changes to a vaccine approval board as “gravely conflicted”.
“Their biggest contributors are the four largest vaccine makers,” Kennedy said. “They run a journal, Pediatrics, which they make a lot of money on, that is completely dependent on pharmaceutical companies. So, I don’t think I wouldn’t put a big stake in what they say that benefits pharmaceutical interests.”
Wyden shot back. “They’re all wrong, too?”
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Senator Ron Wyden questioned Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr about the truth of the claim in the Wall Street Journal by Susan Monarez that she was ordered to pre-approve the recommendations of a vaccine advisory panel that has now been replaced with people who have publicly expressed opposition to vaccine use.
“I never had a private meeting with her,” Kennedy said. Kennedy then called her a liar.
“We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at the CDC,” Kennedy said in testimony before the Senate finance committee.
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Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr testified that changes in leadership at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “were absolutely necessary adjustments to restore the agency to its role as the world’s gold standard public health agency in the central mission of protecting Americans from infectious disease.”
“CDC failed that responsibility miserably during Covid when its disastrous, nonsensical policies destroyed small businesses, violated civil liberties, closed our schools and caused generational damage in doing so, masked infants with no science and heightened economic inequality,” Kennedy testified. The “unscientific interventions failed to do anything about the disease itself.”
Kennedy noted accurately that America is home to 4.2% of the world’s population and had 20% of its Covid deaths, without reference to rampant misinformation leading to public resistance to vaccine use that was not present elsewhere. “We literally did worse than any country in the world, and the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”
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RFK Jr's opening remarks interrupted by protester
Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr opened his testimony this morning with an appreciation for Officer David Rose, who was killed while fending off a gunman at the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) last month.
A protester interrupted his initial comments, shouting from the seats “You’re killing millions of people!” before being dragged out of the committee room.
Kennedy began with a recitation of the activities of the health and human services department, including a reduction in animal testing, research on child mutilation, nutrition education in medical schools and the East Palestine chemical spills.
“We are now on track to approve more drugs this year than at any time in history.”
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Democratic senator opens hearing by calling RFK Jr's tenure a 'disaster'
Senator Ron Wyden said the US is in a “healthcare calamity” after CDC employees were fired or resigned because they wouldn’t go along with Robert F Kennedy Jr’s anti-vaccine views. The Democrat called Kennedy’s tenure a “disaster”.
Wyden called for Kennedy to quit or be fired, noting that Kennedy testified earlier that he would do nothing to make it harder for Americans to get vaccines. “That was a lie,” Wyden said, asking for Kennedy to be formally sworn in before testifying.
The chairman refused.
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Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr will begin testifying before congress momentarily. Healthcare workers, particularly those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are looking for signs that lawmakers are prepared to address how the firing of CDC chief Susan Monarez and the subsequent resignation of four CDC directors has thrown the agency into turmoil.
Dr Debra Houry, who resigned as a CDC director last week, wants to see three questions answered: will America be healthier? Will America be prepared for the next pandemic or major health threat? And is this the gold standard of science and transparency, or are those just slogans?
The hearing is ostensibly about healthcare budgeting as Congress faces a 30 September deadline to avert a government shutdown.
“Secretary Kennedy has placed addressing the underlying causes of chronic diseases at the forefront of this Administration’s health care agenda,” said Senator Mike Crapo, the Republican chairman of the Senate finance committee. “I look forward to learning more about the Department of Health and Human Services’ Make America Healthy Again actions to date and plans moving forward.”
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RFK Jr to testify at Senate hearing on chaos at federal health agencies
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr will appear before a congressional committee on Thursday, where he’s expected to face questions about turmoil at federal health agencies.
The US Senate finance committee has called Kennedy to a hearing about his plans to “Make America Healthy Again”.
But the health secretary is expected to face questions about layoffs and planned budget cuts that detractors say are wrecking the nation’s ability to prevent disease.
Kennedy recently fired Susan Monarez, a longtime government scientist he installed as the CDC director for less than a month and has sought to reshape the nation’s vaccine policies to match his long-standing suspicions about the safety and effectiveness of long-established shots.
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Donald Trump suggested yesterday that New Orleans could be his next target for deploying the national guard, potentially expanding the number of cities around the nation where he may send federal law enforcement.
Trump says the escalation is necessary because New Orleans has a “crime problem” but city leaders point out that crime rates have dropped considerably this year.
Republican governor Jeff Landry said on social media that Louisiana would take Trump’s assistance “from New Orleans to Shreveport!” but leaders of the Democratic-controlled city were less supportive.
“Marching troops into New Orleans is an unnecessary show of force in effort to create a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist,” said city council president JP Morrell.
Trump has already said he plans to send the national guard into Chicago and Baltimore following his deploying troops and federal agents to patrol the streets of Washington, DC, last month.
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A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that president Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the prestigious Ivy League school.
The decision by US district judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House’s multi-front conflict with the nation’s oldest and richest university, Reuters reported.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school became a central focus of the administration’s broad campaign to leverage federal funding to force change at US universities, which Trump says are gripped by antisemitic and “radical left” ideologies.
The administration cancelled hundreds of grants awarded to Harvard researchers on the grounds the school failed to do enough to address harassment of Jewish students on its campus.
Harvard sued, arguing the Trump administration was retaliating against it in violation of its free-speech rights after it refused to meet officials’ demands that it overhaul its governance, hiring and academic programs to align with their ideological agenda.
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The US president, Donald Trump, has said he was not considering pulling US troops out of Poland and pledged to stand with Warsaw “all the way” during a meeting with the country’s conservative nationalist president, Karol Nawrocki, at the White House.
Backed by the populist rightwing opposition Law and Justice party, which ruled Poland between 2015 and 2023, Karol Nawrocki unexpectedly won Poland’s presidential election after running a campaign under a Trumpesque slogan of “Poland first, Poles first”.
The historian turned politician had met the US president before the election, securing his highly prized endorsement and presenting himself as someone who could safeguard Poland’s interests with the conservative US administration.
During their meeting in the Oval Office, Trump praised the Polish president for winning in a “pretty tough, pretty nasty race”, saying: “I don’t endorse too many people, but I endorsed him, and I was very proud of that, the job he’s done.”
Responding to a question from a Polish reporter, Trump declared he was not considering pulling US troops from Poland, despite growing concerns in the region about rumoured changes to the US force posture in Europe.
Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, said Joseph Ladapo, the state’s surgeon general, on Wednesday in a speech during which he likened vaccine mandates to “slavery”.
Ladapo, hand-picked for the role by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, is a longtime skeptic of the benefit of vaccines, and has previously been accused of peddling “scientific nonsense” by public health advocates.
In his announcement at a press conference in Tampa hosted by DeSantis, Ladapo said every state vaccine requirement would be repealed, and that he expected the move would receive the blessing “of God”.
“Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery,” said Ladapo, who altered data in a 2022 study about Covid vaccines in an attempt to exaggerate the risk to young men who received one.
“People have a right to make their own decisions. Who am I, as a government or anyone else, to tell you what you should put in your body? Our body is a gift from God. What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God.”
Ladapo condemned lockdowns and vaccination requirements during the coronavirus pandemic as a time “when crazy things did happen”, and said that growing skepticism of vaccines were “reflections of God’s light against the darkness of tyranny and oppression”.
A court ruling that blocked Donald Trump from invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans he alleged were part of a criminal gang has been hailed as “a victory for the rule of law”.
In a 2-1 decision on Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the fifth US circuit court of appeals issued a preliminary injunction that prevents the Trump administration using the 1798 law to justify rapid deportations.
Circuit judge Leslie Southwick, writing for the majority, rejected the administration’s assertion that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had engaged in a “predatory incursion” on US soil.
The Alien Enemies Act gives the government expansive powers to detain and deport citizens of hostile foreign nations, but only in times of war or during an “invasion or predatory incursion”.
Democrats welcomed the ruling by the fifth circuit, the first federal appeals court to rule directly on a 14 March presidential proclamation invoking the act.
Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, told the Guardian in a statement: “This president has repeatedly attempted to use wartime authorities like the Alien Enemies Act to threaten our fundamental constitutional rights.”
Several survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse signaled their support on Wednesday for a bipartisan resolution to release all the files related to the convicted sex offender, who died in a Manhattan prison in 2019.
Speaking outside the US Capitol, Anouska De Georgiou, a survivor of both Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, said that while “every day of this journey toward healing has come at a profound cost to my mental health”, she had chosen to be there because this legislation “really matters”.
The only motive to oppose the bill would be to “conceal wrongdoing”, she added, but also issued a plea to Donald Trump to use his power and influence to help release the full tranche of records on Epstein.
The section of the Capitol grounds, known as the House Triangle, was packed with reporters and demonstrators. Signs accusing the US president of “protecting pedophiles” were raised alongside placards demanding the administration “release the files”, and messages of support for survivors, reading “we believe you”. Many of those at the news conference told personal stories of how they were abused and trafficked. Annie Farmer, now 46, said she was only 16 when she was flown to New Mexico to spend a weekend with Epstein and Maxwell.
“For so many years, it felt like Epstein’s criminal behavior was an open secret,” Farmer said. “Not only did many others participate in the abuse, it is clear that many were aware of his interest in girls and very young women and chose to look the other way because it benefited them to do so.”
At the same press conference, the bill’s co-author, Republican representative Thomas Massie said that he is close to reaching the 218 signatures needed to bypass US House leadership and bring his bipartisan legislation, calling for the release of the Epstein files, to a floor vote.
“Hopefully they can find their spines,” the Kentucky lawmaker said of the Republican holdouts. “I’m calling on my colleagues to be one of the next two who sponsors this discharge petition.”
Trump to host tech CEOs for first event in newly renovated Rose Garden
President Donald Trump on Thursday will host more than two dozen technology and business leaders for a dinner in the newly renovated White House Rose Garden, according to a White House official.
The guests include Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the official said.
The gathering highlights Trump’s complicated but evolving relationship with Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry, Reuters reported.
Once a source of frequent clashes over issues such as content moderation and antitrust scrutiny, the tech sector has recalibrated since Trump’s 2024 election victory.
Executives have sought closer ties with the Republican administration, aligning corporate policies with the White House’s push to roll back diversity and equity initiatives while courting Trump’s favor on artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
“The president looks forward to welcoming top business, political and tech leaders for this dinner and the many dinners to come on the new, beautiful Rose Garden patio,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle said.
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The Trump administration purposefully chose a notorious Louisiana prison to hold immigration detainees as a way to encourage people in the US illegally to self-deport, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday.
A complex inside the Louisiana state penitentiary, an immense rural prison better known as Angola, will be used to detain those whom Noem described as the “worst of the worst” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. Noem was speaking to reporters as she stood on the grounds of the facility near a new sign reading, “Louisiana Lockup.”
“This facility will hold the most dangerous of criminals,” Noem said, adding it had “absolutely” been chosen for its reputation.
Officials said 51 detainees were already being housed at Angola. But Louisiana governor Jeff Landry said he expects the building to be filled to capacity, expecting over 400 people to come in ensuing months, as president Donald Trump continues his large-scale attempt to remove millions of people suspected of entering the country illegally.
The dirt road to the new Ice facility meanders past lofty oak trees, green fields and other buildings – including a white church and a structure with a sign that says, “Angola Shake Down Team”.
The facility is surrounded by a fence with five rows of stacked barbed wire. Overlooking the outdoor area is a tower, where a guard paced back and forth.
At the prison entrance a sign reads: “You are entering the land of new beginnings.”
Trump asks US supreme court to overturn trade tariffs ruling
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that Donald Trump has asked the US supreme court to overturn a lower court decision that most of his sweeping trade tariffs were illegal.
The US president filed a petition late on Wednesday to ask for a review of last week’s federal appeals court ruling in Washington DC, which centred on his “liberation day” border taxes introduced on 2 April, which imposed levies of between 10% and 50% on most US imports, sending shock waves through global trade and markets.
The court found in a 7-4 ruling last Friday that Trump had overstepped his presidential powers when he invoked a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies to justify his “reciprocal” tariffs.
The decision was the biggest blow yet to Trump’s tariff policies, but the levies were left in place until 14 October – giving the administration time to ask the supreme court to review the decision.
Trump has now appealed and the supreme court is expected to review the case, although the justices must still agree to do so. The administration asked for that decision to be made by 10 September.
The appeal calls for an accelerated schedule with arguments being heard by 10 November, according to filings seen by Bloomberg. Justices could then rule by the end of the year.
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
Children in Florida will no longer be required to receive vaccines against preventable diseases including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis.
The governors of California, Oregon and Washington announced on Wednesday the creation of a West Coast Health Alliance aimed at safeguarding access to vaccines.
A letter published on Wednesday from more than 1,000 past and present workers of the Department of Health and Human Services department (HHS) has demanded the resignation of Robert F Kennedy Jr.
Donald Trump on Thursday will host more than two dozen technology and business leaders for a dinner, according to a White House official. The guests include Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft founder Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Several survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse signaled their support on Wednesday for a bipartisan resolution to release all the files related to the convicted sex offender.
A so-called “missing minute” of CCTV footage, a key ingredient of conspiracy theories surrounding Epstein’s death in prison has been found, contradicting the assertion of Pam Bondi, the attorney general, that it was recorded over.
A federal judge on Wednesday ruled Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully terminated about $2.2bn in grants awarded to Harvard University and can no longer cut off research funding to the Ivy League school.
Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana, said he backed the president’s threat to send federal troops to his state.
Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, warned that the US military would continue to target vessels belonging to alleged Venezuelan drug cartels.
