SmartNews

The Trump administration’s refusal to follow a court order and make any efforts to return the Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador sent CNN legal analyst Elie Honig into a fiery rebuke of the MAGAfied government.

Honig, a former federal prosecutor, built the case Tuesday against the administration’s inaction in returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States during an appearance on CNN’s “NewsNight.”

Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative is eyeing having staffers assigned to work at all institutes and agencies that receive federal funding via congressional appropriations, according to a new report.

The revelation came to light Tuesday during a 20-minute phone call between DOGE representatives and leaders of the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, The Washington Post reported. DOGE representatives said they're mulling potentially attaching members to more organizations and institutes that receive government funding, according to the report.

The Republican Party under President Donald Trump has gone from a largely expansionist, neoconservative foreign policy to old-school isolationism, to the point that they repudiate their own party's previous military leadership, CNN data analyst Harry Enten told host Kate Bolduan with a degree of astonishment.

A key demonstration of this is Vice President JD Vance proclaiming it is not in anyone's interest "for Europe to be a permanent security vassal of the United States," as an argument against taking leadership in NATO affairs.

The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board went after President Donald Trump for what they framed as an unconstitutional attempt “to run Harvard” University after the Ivy League school rejected his demands for a MAGA-inspired policy overhaul.

Trump’s funding freeze of $2.2 billion in retaliation for the university’s snub drew the ire of the Journal’s board, which scorched the action in a Tuesday opinion piece that detailed the “good reasons to oppose this unprecedented attempt by government to micromanage a private university.”

Republicans in the White House, Senate, and House are discussing a possible new tax bracket that would raise taxes on very wealthy people — specifically those making $1 million or more per year.

But not everyone in the GOP is thrilled with the notion.

The Trump administration is now taking aim at New York Attorney General Letitia James over a criminal referral that accuses her of mortgage fraud, reported Fox News' Laura Ingraham on Tuesday evening.

The complaint, also reported in Newsweek, alleged that she improperly amended her records for a real estate transaction months before she filed a major civil fraud case against President Donald Trump.

The federal judge presiding over the effort to return wrongly-deported Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an infamous Salvadoran megaprison laid down the law for the Trump administration in a highly revealing way, former Pentagon special counsel and federal prosecutor Ryan Goodman explained to CNN's Kate Bolduan on Tuesday.

The judge, Paula Xinis, was thoroughly unsatisfied with Trump's boasts earlier this week in a White House meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele that he had no power to return Garcia, who has never been convicted of any crime, is married to a U.S. citizen, and had a special protective order that barred his deportation to El Salvador — all after the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the majority of Xinis' order.

A Democratic lawmaker found himself on the defense over his party’s failure to impose a full ban on members of Congress trading stock when they had a House majority – a point that wasn’t lost on CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Tapper on Tuesday repeatedly pressed Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) on why Democrats didn't see pass a congressional trading ban, which the lawmaker said is now gaining steam in the House, including with Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

Several protesters at Marjorie Taylor Greene's town hall were forcibly removed by law enforcement on Tuesday, including a man whom police zapped with a stun gun as the MAGA lawmaker scolded Democrats.

The first outburst happened just seconds after Greene took the stage, which prompted at least five police officers to surround and physically escort the man out of the large event center in Cobb County, Georgia.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, is out with a brief in President Donald Trump's lawsuit against Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer, urging the court to dismiss the case as an attack on constitutional rights.

FIRE has previously attacked this case as a strategic lawsuit against public participation, or SLAPP, arguing that it has zero merit and is meant to chill negative coverage of Trump in the press.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) clashed with voters back home in a town hall meeting Tuesday. Among the questions from constituents was what he's doing for the Maryland father who the U.S. government admits was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador.

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said she was shocked to see Grassley be attacked by "his own people."

President Donald Trump's Department of Health and Human Services slashed staffing at a key agency overseeing child care, sparking worries that an already strained system keeping American children safe could be further jeopardized, reported Semafor on Tuesday.

"The Administration of Children and Families — which funnels federal funds to state governments and community organizations for things like child care, early education, foster care, and child protection services — has lost an estimated 40 percent of its employees in the last four months, according to a tracker compiled by former staff and shared with Semafor," reported Eleanor Mueller. Specifically, the personnel at ACF "fell from about 2,400 in January to about 1,500 following this month’s latest most recent round of layoffs, per the informal tracker."

A judge ordered an "intense" two-week investigation into the Trump administration's refusal to try to return a Maryland father who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

The Justice Department clashed with U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis in a Tuesday hearing over what the U.S. government acknowledged was an accidental deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.