Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day. Here are the latest developments:
The FBI fired at least 10 people this week who worked on the special counsel’s investigation of Donald Trump for illegally taking classified documents after he lost the presidency and left office in 2021.
A federal judge in Boston ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s third-country removal policy, deporting immigrants to countries to which they have no ties, is unlawful.
Dr Jerome Adams, who served as the US surgeon general during Donald Trump’s first term, denounced the president’s nomination of Dr Casey Means, a wellness influencer without a medical license
Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, said to the Trump administration’s decision to withhold $259m in federal Medicaid funds from his state “has nothing to do with fraud”, but is instead about Trump “weaponizing the entirety of the federal government to punish blue states”.
FBI fires at least 10 people over special counsel investigation of classified documents taken by Trump in 2021
The FBI fired at least 10 people this week who worked on the special counsel’s investigation of Donald Trump for illegally taking classified documents after he lost the presidency and left office in 2021, multiple news outlets report.
The firings became public after the FBI director, Kash Patel, told Reuters that the bureau had subpoenaed his phone records and those of Susie Wiles, Trump’s 2024 campaign manager who is now the White House chief of staff, over their involvement in the classified documents case.
As the investigative reporter Carol Leonnig explained on MSNOW, Patel had claimed during the investigation into Trump’s illegal retention of classified documents that he had witnessed him declassify them at the end of his first term.
Federal prosecutors reportedly identified Wiles as the Trump campaign aide he showed a classified map to in August or September of 2021.
Patel’s claim that the documents were declassified by Trump before he took them at the end of his term in January 2021 was undermined by an audio recording of Trump telling a ghostwriter for his previous chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that he “could have declassified” a war plan he showed him while out of office, “but this is still a secret.”
The FBI Agents Association condemned the firings in a statement to the Associated Press as unlawful and endangering national security.
“These actions weaken the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce, undermining trust in leadership and jeopardizing the Bureau’s ability to meet its recruitment goals — ultimately putting the nation at greater risk,” the association said.
Patel was subpoenaed by federal prosecutors in 2022 to testify before a grand jury in Washington in the Mar-a-Lago investigation, and appeared after being given immunity. Wiles was reportedly interviewed by prosecutors multiple times.
“It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records - along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles - using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight,” Patel told Reuters.
