Trump officials to give first classified briefing to Congress on Iran strikes
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines.
Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.
The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again, AP reported.
Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.
“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was “outrageous” that the Senate and House briefings were postponed. A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.
CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.
In other news:
-
Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.
-
Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.
-
Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.
-
Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.
-
Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.
-
The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.
-
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time.
Key events
Erdogan says Trump would join Ukraine peace talks in Turkey if Putin attends
Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan said his US counterpart Donald Trump told him he would attend potential peace talks between the leaders of Ukraine and Russia in Turkey, if Russian president Vladimir Putin also agreed to take part.
On his return flight from the Nato summit, where he met Trump for the first time since he returned to office, Erdogan said he told the US president Ankara aims to bring the Russian and Ukrainian leaders together in Turkey for peace talks.
“He (Trump) said, ‘if Russian president Vladimir Putin comes to Istanbul or Ankara for a solution, then I will also come,” Erdogan’s office on Thursday quoted him as telling reporters.
“We will hold the necessary contacts and God willing realise this meeting as soon as possible.”
The White House embraced the moniker of “daddy” for Donald Trump in a video that it released after Nato chief Mark Rutte used the term in a conversation with the US president.
“Daddy’s home,” the White House posted on X, along with the video featuring the song “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home)“ by Usher and images of Trump at the Nato summit in The Hague.
Rutte, the Dutch secretary general of the military alliance, used the word “daddy” in an appearance with Trump at Wednesday’s summit after the U.S. president berated Israel and Iran over violations of a ceasefire, which later appeared to be holding.
In response, Rutte laughed and said: “And then daddy has to sometimes use strong language to get (them to) stop.”
Robert Tait
The attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during roundups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.
Challenged at a Wednesday Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing by Gary Peters, a Democratic senator for Michigan, Bondi, who as the country’s top law officer has a prominent role in the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policy, implied she was unaware of plain-clothed agents concealing their faces while carrying out arrests but suggested it was for self-protection.
“I do know they are being doxxed … they’re being threatened,” she told Peters. “Their families are being threatened.”
Bondi’s protestations appeared to strain credibility given the attention the masked raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents have attracted on social media and elsewhere.
Civil rights campaigners and democracy experts have criticised the raids as evocative of entrenched dictatorships and police states, and say it is a warning sign that the US is descending into authoritarianism.
Trump officials to give first classified briefing to Congress on Iran strikes
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines.
Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.
The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again, AP reported.
Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.
“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was “outrageous” that the Senate and House briefings were postponed. A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.
CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.
In other news:
-
Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.
-
Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.
-
Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.
-
Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.
-
Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.
-
The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.
-
Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time.
