Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, but we will be back on Friday. Here are the latest developments:
Zohran Mamdani, New York’s mayor, met again with Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss federal funding for a housing project, and persuaded the president to release a Columbia University student detained by ICE agents.
Hillary Clinton said that, after she repeatedly told House Republicans she did not know Jeffrey Epstein, their questions got “quite unusual, because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate, one of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet”.
The Federal Aviation Administration closed the airspace in an area around Fort Hancock, Texas after congressional Democrats said a military laser-based anti-drone system accidentally shot down a Customs and Border Protection drone.
Democratic leaders in the US Senate said they will also force a vote “in the coming days” on a war powers resolution to make sure any US participation in military action against Iran requires congressional authorization.
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.
Massie calls on justice department to explain why photo that appears to show Lutnick with Epstein disappeared
Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky, called on the justice department to explain why a photograph that appears to show Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, with Jeffrey Epstein, was removed from the public database of Epstein files.
“I’m sure there’s a good reason for this,” Massie, who co-wrote the law that requires the justice department to make public files from the federal investigations into Epstein wrote on social media. “DOJ needs to tell Congress who pulled this file down so we can ask them.”
The photograph, which could have been taken during Lutnick’s 2012 visit to Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean with his family, is no longer on the justice department’s website but it remains available on Jmail, a mirroring archive of the files assembled in the form of a Gmail account.
