US News

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called out former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark after Clark insisted that details surrounding a letter aimed at overturning the 2020 presidential election were legally privileged.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Whitehouse questioned Clark about the letter he had drafted while working for the Justice Department, which he suggested should be sent to Georgia, where President Donald Trump was seeking additional votes to reverse former President Joe Biden's victory.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth loosened the requirement for U.S. troops to receive an annual flu vaccine, and critics questioned his decision.

The Pentagon chief and former Fox News host announced Tuesday that the military would end its mandate requiring the vaccine, which called an "absurd, overreaching" order that serves only to "weaken our war-fighting capabilities."

A longtime employee who worked for a division of the conglomerate that owns the Reuters News Agency claims she was dismissed from her job for raising the alarm within the company that it was providing services to the Department of Homeland Security that were being used illegally.

According to NPR reporting, Billie Little, who worked in legal publishing for the company's Westlaw division, was fired shortly after she joined colleagues in flagging potential unlawful use of Thomson Reuters products by ICE.

Little became alarmed after witnessing ICE enforcement activities in Minneapolis. In late January, she followed news reports about U.S. citizens detained by ICE and heightened tensions in the Twin Cities area following shootings. She also heard disturbing accounts from colleagues working at the Thomson Reuters office in Eagan, Minnesota.

"People afraid to go to work, people afraid to take their kids to school, people being followed and all of that," Little recalled to NPR.

When a colleague posted on an internal employee chat claiming Thomson Reuters was a top corporate collaborator with ICE, Little said she felt "sick to my stomach."

Little joined a committee that sent a letter to company management in February demanding transparency. The group flagged that ICE could be using Thomson Reuters products unlawfully and requested greater oversight of the company's Department of Homeland Security contracts.

"Instead of addressing our concerns, our legitimate concerns — instead, they turn toward investigating me," Little told NPR. "And I was instrumental in leading the group. So I think that clearly they were trying to chill [the] activity of workers and that should scare every worker across the country."

Thomson Reuters' main surveillance tool is called CLEAR. According to NPR, the platform aggregates billions of data points on individuals from public and proprietary records, as well as social media. CLEAR also includes images from a network of license plate readers. ICE holds a nearly $5 million contract with Thomson Reuters beginning May 2025 for "license plate reader data to enhance investigations for potential arrest, seizure and forfeiture."

Little initially understood CLEAR was being used to target human traffickers and child exploitation cases — work she could support. But she grew concerned the tool was being deployed far more broadly by ICE "to identify immigrants and protesters without criminal histories."

An archived Thomson Reuters description stated explicitly that CLEAR is "not designed for use for mass illegal immigration inquiries or for deporting non-criminal undocumented persons and non-citizens." This raised question for Little about ICE's use of the platform and if it violates the company's own stated parameters.

President Donald Trump’s pick to succeed Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Kevin Warsh, repeatedly dodged questions Tuesday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, refusing to acknowledge the president’s election loss in 2020.

During the hearing, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), the top Democrat on the committee, cited remarks from Trump that she said raised concerns.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pressed President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the Federal Reserve on his financial holdings and ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Fed nominee Kevin Warsh faced questions Tuesday during his confirmation hearing about undisclosed holdings of two individual assets worth more than $50 million each, and his wife Jane Lauder, granddaughter of the cosmetics founder Estée Lauder, holds an estimated $1.9 billion fortune.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) was forced to explain what “sarcasm” was Tuesday following a barrage of attacks from right-wing figures over a remark he’d made about the U.S. naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

On Monday, multiple reports revealed that more than two dozen Iranian vessels bypassed the U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical shipping waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil trade flows. In response to the reports, Murphy published a single-word post on social media: “awesome.”

Appearing on MS NOW, Bloomberg reporter Jeff Mason lightly laughed when discussing a Monday interview with Donald Trump and admitted the president became abusive when cornered on his Iran difficulties.

During a segment on the on-again, off-again Iran war negotiations that has the president scrambling for good news, co-host Willie Geist pressed Mason for what is going on inside the White House.

Prominent conservative media figure Tucker Carlson issued a public apology Monday for having supported President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, telling his millions of followers that he was “sorry for misleading people.”

“I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people and it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say,” Carlson said during an episode of his podcast aired on Monday, The Hill reported Tuesday. “You don’t want to be a conspiracy nut, but like, clearly, there were signs of low character, we knew that, but there are tons of people of low character who, like, outperform their character.”

More U.S. troops could soon be suffering from influenza after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the flu vaccine was no longer mandatory for the armed forces.

"Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions," Hegseth said in a statement on Tuesday. "Even when those decisions posed no threat to our military readiness, you know what I'm talking about, what happened: COVID-19 and the vaccine. No more. That era of betrayal is over."

Donald Trump will be returning the White House Correspondents' Dinner, after years of boycotting the event and attacking journalists for their reporting on him.

According to reporting from Status's Oliver Darcy and analysis from The Atlantic's Paul Farhi, some of the president's most controversial appointees will also be there to cheer him on, courtesy of recently Trump-friendly Paramount and CBS.