Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for Friday. Here are some of the day’s developments:
Local reporters were barred from attending vice-president JD Vance’s news conference in Los Angeles, during his four and a half hour trip to the city.
Vance mistakenly called Alex Padilla, California’s first Latino senator, “Jose Padilla”, using the name of an American citizen who was accused of planning to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in a major US city on behalf of al-Qaida.
Two hours after Donald Trump again said that his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was “wrong” to cast doubt on his claim that Iran could have a nuclear weapon within weeks she said that she agrees with the president.
A federal judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to keep Harvard University from admitting foreign students.
Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil was released from US immigration detention, where he had been held for more than three months over his activism against Israel’s war on Gaza.
Vance excluded local reporters from Los Angeles news conference during very brief visit
Local reporters were barred from attending vice-president JD Vance’s news conference in Los Angeles on Friday, according to Elex Michaelson, the host Fox LA’s local evening news report.
“It’s disappointing” Michaelson wrote on X, that the vice-president “did not allow local reporters inside his Los Angeles press event. At this inflection point in L.A. history, they only took questions from national reporters.”
When a press aide to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, asked Michaelson on the social network who the reporters allowed in were, since “the tone felt more like partisan influencer content than real journalism”, the anchor for the local Fox affiliate replied: “I wasn’t allowed inside so I don’t know who was there. I didn’t recognize those voices. Those were not questions that most of my colleagues would have asked.”
As we reported earlier, at least two of the partisan questions, inviting Vance to attack Democrats, were asked by Mary Margaret Olohan, a correspondent for the far-right Daily Wire, who was selected by the White House to be the official pool reporter traveling with Vance on Friday.
According to Olohan’s dispatches, Vance had very little time to evaluate the situation on the ground in the city. His flight from Washington on Air Force Two touched down at LAX at 1:35 pm local time. Vance’s motorcade arrived at the federal building in Westwood being guarded by active-duty marines at 2pm. He started the news conference at 3:11pm.
It is not clear exactly how much time Vance spent meeting marines, federal agents and officers from the Los Angeles Police Department and California highway patrol, but just after his fourteen minutes news conference ended, the Fox national correspondent Bill Melugin reported that he had managed to conduct an “exclusive” and “lengthy interview” with the vice-president during the 71 minutes Vance spent in the federal building before meeting the press he brought with him.
According to Olohan, a short time later, Vance departed the federal building for a Republican National Committee event. By 6:05pm, he was back on Air Force Two at LAX and ready for departure after just four and a half hours in the city.
Updated
