Letter to federal employees warns of ‘adverse consequences’ if they do not report disguised DEI efforts – as it happened | Trump administration

Key events

Closing summary

This is blog is closing now, thanks for joining us. We’ll be back tomorrow with more breaking news. In the meantime, here are today’s main developments:

Donald Trump has threatened Russia with taxes, tariffs and sanctions if a deal to end the war in Ukraine is not struck soon, as the new US president tries to increase pressure on Moscow to start negotiations with Kyiv. Writing in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump said Russia’s economy was failing and urged Vladimir Putin to “settle now and stop this ridiculous war”.

Trump suggested that states should take care of their own disasters, hinting at a reduced federal role, in his first interview since the inauguration. “FEMA is gonna be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems,” he told Sean Hannity on Fox.

House Republicans will continue investigating the January 6 insurrection, attempting to undermine the prior investigation that found Donald Trump responsible and rewrite the narrative about the deadly Capitol siege. House speaker Mike Johnson announced on Wednesday that a new select subcommittee will be formed to investigate “all events leading up to and after January 6”.

Three federal judges denounced Trump’s pardons of January 6 rioters in stark terms in court orders formally dismissing cases before them. The US district judge Tanya Chutkan wrote that “no pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021”.

The US House gave final approval to a bill requiring the detention of undocumented immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, sending the proposal to Donald Trump’s desk and giving the new president his first legislative victory as he presses his hardline immigration agenda on multiple fronts.

Trump signed an executive order effectively closing the US-Mexico border to migrants, including people seeking asylum, part of a flurry of actions targeting immigration. The Pentagon is also set to deploy up to 1,500 active-duty troops to the US-Mexico border, marking a significant militarisation of the southern border.

The US justice department is ordering federal prosecutors to target state and local officials who resist the administration’s planned mass deportation campaign. The acting deputy attorney general, Emil Bove, directed prosecutors nationwide, in a document obtained by the Washington Post and the Associated Press, to investigate and potentially bring criminal charges against officials in “sanctuary” jurisdictions for “harboring” undocumented immigrants or withholding immigration information from federal authorities.

Trump criticized the Right Rev Mariann Edgar Budde as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater” and said her tone as “nasty” after she implored him to “have mercy upon” immigrants and LGBTQ+ people”, at the National Cathedral prayer service for the inauguration.

The US Coast Guard (USCG) and the state of Florida have started referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America – a new label pushed by Donald Trump – despite the name of the body of water not yet being formally changed.

Refugees approved for resettlement to the United States have been stranded around the world after the new administration cancelled travel plans, with advocates warning it puts lives in danger and has left families devastated.

Democratic senators have called for the Senate to hold off on confirming Pete Hegseth as defense secretary, saying revelations about his behavior during his second marriage and excess drinking are cause for concern.

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Multiple agencies sent versions of an apparent form letter to federal employees on Wednesday warning of “adverse consequences” if they fail to report on disguised efforts to continue promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

“These programs divide Americans by race, waster taxpayer dollars and result in shameful discrimination” letters sent to staffers at Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security and the State Department all read, according to reporters who shared images of the letters.

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Asked by Hannity about his pardons for violent supporters who attacked police officers on January 6, Trump says Capitol rioters were simply protesting because “they knew the election was rigged”.

“They were treated like the worst criminals in history. Do you know what they were there for? They were protesting the vote”, Trump says. “They knew the election was rigged and they were protesting the vote. You should be allowed to protest the vote.”

When Hannity suggests that some of the rioters should not have been allowed “to invade the Capitol”, Trump downplays the extent of the violence and says that they had already served long enough in prison. “Some of those people with the police— true— but they were very minor incidents” Trump says.

The president then argues that his pardons were fine because he said, during the election campaign, that he would do it, and won.

Trump then boasts about the success of a recording of the Star-Spangled Banner, sung by a group of defendants jailed over their roles in the January 2021 insurrection, in which he provided a voice-over.

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Updated at 21.56 EST

Hannity is struggling mightily to keep Trump focused on the latest things that Fox viewers are outraged by, but the president cannot help himself and is using much of the interview to rehearse old grievances.

In response to a question about Joe Biden’s pre-emptive pardons for figures like Dr. Anthony Fauci, for instance, Trump meanders into a diatribe about Senator Adam Schiff, who was also pardoned by Biden, and moves onto the subject of how unfair it was that he was impeached, thanks in part to Schiff’s investigative work, for the phone call in which he tried to extort Ukraine’s president. “It was a perfect phone call” Trump said, as he has many, many times before.

Trump then tells Hannity that he “heard” that Schiff, who said publicly that he did not want a pardon, secretly begged for one. Hannity, unsurprisingly, does not press Trump for any evidence to support his story.

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Trump dismissed the threat of TikTok spying on America’s youth, as Hannity suggested that it could be a way for the Chinese communist party to spy on Americans.

“Is it that important for China to be spying on young people, on young kids watching crazy videos?” Trump asked.

“ I don’t want China spying on anybody” Hannity replied.

“But they make your telephones and they make your computers, and they make a lot of other things. Isn’t that a bigger threat?” Trump asked.

During the same part of the interview, Trump asserts once again that he is fond of TikTok because he believes, wrongly, that he won the youth vote “by 36 points”, an entirely fictional victory he attributes to his support on the app. In fact, Trump narrowly lost voters 18-29 to Kamala Harris by about 5 percentage points, according to exit polling.

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Updated at 22.41 EST

Trump says FEMA is ‘getting in the way of everything’

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Wednesday, President Donald Trump suggested that states should take care of their own disasters, hinting at a reduced federal role.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Trump said, was a problem, “because all it does is complicate everything.”

“FEMA is gonna be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems” he added.

After boasting about how well he did in the last election in Oklahoma, Trump said that it would be better for even a state that supports him so broadly to simply take care of its own recovery efforts following natural disasters, with some funding from the federal government.

“The FEMA is getting in the way of everything” Trump said.

Trump’s remarks surprised some viewers, but making radical changes to the agency was mentioned in the Project 2025 agenda drawn up to guide Trump’s second term.

“The bloated DHS bureaucracy and budget, along with the wrong priorities, provide real opportunities for a conservative Administration to cut billions in spending and limit government’s role in Americans’ lives”, Ken Cuccinelli, who served as Trump’s acting director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in his first term, wrote in Project 2025.

“These opportunities include privatizing TSA screening and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Flood Insurance Program, reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government”, Cuccinelli added.

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Updated at 22.36 EST

Trump gives first presidential interview with Sean Hannity

Trump’s interview with conservative commentator Sean Hannity begins at the top of the hour. We will be watching and will bring you any significant developments here.

Given Hannity’s reputation as Trump’s “shadow chief of staff” during his first term, it is unlikely to be challenging to Trump in any way. Here is a preview clip released by Fox, in which Trump claims that there would have been no inflation in the United States, no invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin, no attack on Israel by Hamas on October 7, and no catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan had he been in office for the past four years.

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Updated at 22.48 EST

National Institutes of Health study sections, which review applications for fellowships and grants, were suddenly canceled on Wednesday, according to social media posts from participants and reporting from STAT.

A meeting of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, which advises the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services on vaccine policy, was also canceled.

“My NIH study section that was to meet tomorrow was one of those canceled”, Dr. Esther Choo, an emergency medicine doctor, wrote on Bluesky. “This represents many months of work by the applicants and by the NIH staff and reviewers. Devastating is the correct word.”

The moves have confused and unsettled scientists and the he $47.4 billion research agency, which has become a target for Trump’s political allies. “The impact of the collective executive orders and directives appears devastating,” one senior NIH employee told Science.

NIH also imposed an immediate ban of travel and a hiring freeze.

According to Nsikan Akpan, a health and science editor, the NIH grants placed on hold “fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions.”

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Days after freeing hundreds of supporters who attacked Capitol police officers, President Trump pardoned two DC police officers convicted of murder for killing an unarmed Black man in 2020.

Trump granted full and unconditional pardons to both Terence Sutton and Andrew Zabavsky, former officers of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, who were convicted of second-degree murder for killing Karon Hylton-Brown, a 20-year-old Black man, during an unauthorized police pursuit that ended in a crash on Oct. 23, 2020.

Hylton-Brown was riding a motorbike without a helmet as Sutton pursued him in an unmarked car, federal prosecutors said. Eventually, Sutton followed Hylton-Brown down an alley at what prosecutors called unreasonable speed causing Hylton-Brown to be hit by a car.

After the collision, prosecutors said, Sutton and Zabavsky conspired to cover up what happened.

Sutton was the first DC police officer to be convicted of murder for actions on duty. Zabavsky, a police lieutenant, was sentenced last year for conspiring to cover up the deadly chase.

Trump had hinted at the pardons a day earlier, when he told reporters who pressed him on his pardons for rioters who had attacked police officers on Jan. 6 that he was “a friend of the police” and was about two free two DC officers. But Trump seemed confused about the details of the case, saying, incorrectly, that the officers “were arrested, put in jail for five years, because they went after an illegal”. Hylton-Brown was a native-born American citizen, a lawyer representing the mother of his child in civil litigation related to his death told the Washington Post.

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Hylton-Brown’s mother, Karen Hylton, told News4 Washington that she was stunned by news of pardons. She repeatedly said, “There is no way. This can’t be happening.”

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Federal judge says Trump pardons for January 6 rioters ‘cannot whitewash’ the reality

Three federal judges denounced Donald Trump’s pardons of January 6 rioters in stark terms in court orders formally dismissing cases before them.

The US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who was set to preside over Trump’s own criminal prosecution for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election until the supreme court stepped in, wrote that “no pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021”. Trump’s action, forcing her to dismiss the case against John Banuelos, who was charged with firing a pistol into the air during the riot, Chutkan added, “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake … And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.

“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor,” she added. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”

Similarly, the US district judge Beryl Howell scoffed at Trump’s claim, in the pardon language, that his action “ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation”.

In an order dismissing the case against two January 6 defendants who pleaded guilty to felonies, Howell wrote: “No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity”.

The US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly agreed that Trump’s action could never change the reality of the crimes. “What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.”

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Updated at 20.00 EST

Here’s more from the news conference with Capitol police officers reacting to Donald Trump’s pardons of January 6 rioters.

Harry Dunn, a former officer, explained that another former officer, Sgt Aquilino Gonell, wanted to be present but was unable to do so. “He’s struggling, like a lot of us are,” Dunn said.

Representative Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat, read a statement from Gonell, who stressed that Trump pardoned rioters who attacked the police that day even though “many of the officers who guarded his inauguration were violently assaulted by the people he pardoned later that day”.

Dunn also said that he was most outraged by the submission of Republican members of Congress he had helped protect that day, and who say privately that they disagree with the pardons. “That’s not good enough,” Dunn said. “His enablers in Congress didn’t say anything when Donald Trump told you exactly what he was going to do,” he added.

But Dunn finished with a defiant statement that he would refuse to be silent as Trump tries to rewrite the history of January 6. “The winner writes history; he didn’t win. I’m not going away,” he said.

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Updated at 18.41 EST

January 6 police officers hit back at Trump’s pardons for rioters

Daniel Hodges, a serving Capitol police officer, and Harry Dunn, a former officer, who both defended the Capitol against the pro-Trump mob on January 6, just reacted to Donald Trump’s pardons for the rioters at an emotional news conference with Democratic lawmakers.

Dunn, who said that it was difficult to speak about the pardons, given the violence he experienced that day, said that Trump made it clear four years ago, and during his campaign for the presidency last year, that he “was proud of the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan 6”. Even still, Dunn noted, many of the Capitol police officers “that Donald Trump sent a mob to attack are the same people who made sure he was safe on Monday”.

Hodges, who was one of the officers who spent the previous several days protecting the Capitol for the inauguration of Trump, said that he had done so even though, “everything he is everything he stands for is anathema to me, but he is the president.” He seemed stunned when he noted that one of the first things Trump did after the inauguration at the Capitol was to pardon everyone “who tried to stop the transfer of power” in that same building four years earlier.

Hodges added that while Trump “is going to leverage the power he has in terrible ways” the public still has the power to apply pressure to Republicans in Congress. “Those in Congress who enable him, still answer to you”, Hodges said.

“The people who attacked us on Jan 6 are free now,” Hodges said. “They can try it again.”

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Updated at 22.09 EST

Republicans to set up new January 6 investigation, Mike Johnson says

Mike Johnson, the House speaker, announced on Wednesday that he is setting up a new select subcommittee “to continue House Republicans’ investigation into all events leading up to and after January 6”.

The new panel, Johnson said on social media, will be dedicated to “exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated Jan 6 Select Committee”, that investigated the Capitol riot and issued its final report in 2022.

Johnson said the new panel to investigate the previous panel, and search for evidence that the Capitol riot was, as Trump supporters have suggested, somehow orchestrated by federal agents, would be chaired by Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia.

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Updated at 17.47 EST

California attorney general Rob Bonta said Donald Trump “cannot bully” the state into carrying out the president’s mass deportation agenda.

He was responding to a new DoJ memo that directs federal prosecutors to investigate any state or local officials who stand in the way of beefed-up enforcement of immigration laws under the Trump administration.

“This is a scare tactic, plain and simple. The President is attempting to intimidate and bully state and local law enforcement into carrying out his mass deportation agenda for him,” Bonta said, adding that his office was reviewing the memo and was “prepared to take legal action if the Trump Administration’s vague threats turn to illegal action”.

California law limits how state and local law enforcement can assist federal immigration authorities. The state has the largest population of undocumented people in the country. Bonta said Trump already tried – and failed – to undermine the state law during his first term when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that it “did not conflict with federal law or violate the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution”.

Bonta continued: “California law is clear – SB 54 prohibits state and local law enforcement from using taxpayer funds to enforce federal immigration law, subject to several narrow exceptions. SB 54 does not prevent state and local law enforcement from investigating and prosecuting crimes. Nor does it prevent federal agencies from conducting immigration enforcement themselves; what it says is that they cannot make us do their jobs for them.”

Trump and his team have also suggested using the threat of withholding federal disaster assistance as a way to force the state to cooperate.

The American Civil Liberties Union also announced that it is joining the legal effort to derail Trump’s deportation plans. “We’re suing to stop the Trump administration’s attempt to massively expand fast-tracked deportations without due process,” the ACLU declared in a Bluesky post. “This policy was illegal when Trump enacted it in his first term and it’s illegal now.”

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Laken Riley Act passes Congress, awaits Trump’s signature

The House has passed a bill to require the detainment of unauthorized migrants accused of theft and violent crimes. It marks the first legislation that President Donald Trump can sign as Congress, with some bipartisan support, swiftly moved in line with his plans to crackdown on illegal immigration. The Laken Riley Act is named after a Georgia nursing student who was murdered last year by a Venezuelan man. Its passage shows just how sharply the political debate over immigration has shifted to the right following Trump’s election victory.

Representative Tom Emmer, the House Republican whip, posted the final vote on X, showing that it passed with 263 votes in favor to 156 against, with 14 members not voting.

In an impassioned floor speech against the bill before it passed, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez argued that the law would be a financial windfall for private prison companies, by mandating detention for minor offenses. “I want folks at home to look, look at what members of Congress are invested in private prisons companies, who receive this kind of money, and look at the votes on this bill. It is atrocious that people are lining their pockets with private prison profits in the name of a horrific tragedy and the victim of a crime. It is shameful.”

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Updated at 17.28 EST

Trump draws attention to the fact that former president Joe Biden did not pardon himself.

“This guy went around giving everybody pardons,” Trump told the conservative commentator Sean Hannity in a preview clip from the Oval Office interview that will be broadcast later today. “You know, the funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon. And if you look at it, it all had to do with him.”

Trump is, of course, correct that the former president pardoned a slew of officials and six members of his own family, but not himself. But the fact that he brought Biden’s legal exposure up, unprompted, will raise eyebrows. Trump’s comment could be simply an observation, but could also be taken as a signal to his supporters in government that a criminal investigation of the former president is not out of the question.

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