Summary
Here’s a wrap-up of the day’s key events:
On Saturday evening, emails were sent to federal employees including at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others with the subject line: “What did you do last week?,” Reuters reports. The email, seen by Reuters, asks employees to reply with five bullet points summarizing “what you accomplished at work last week” and to copy their managers.
Aquilino Gonell, a former US Capitol police sergeant who defended the Capitol on January 6, confirmed that he and his former colleagues, including the former Capitol police officer Michael Fanone, were confronted by Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, at the site of the Principles First summit in Washington DC. “You’re a traitor to this country,” Fanone told Tarrio during the exchange. “So are you,” Tarrio replied, adding: “You were a coward that day, you were a coward after.”
On Israel’s war on Gaza, Donald Trump claimed that Joe Biden got back “zero” hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. “Biden got none back, by the way, just so you understand, none, zero,” Trump claimed. In fact, 105 hostages were freed in the November 2023 ceasefire deal brokered by Biden’s administration.
JD Vance has taken an early lead in the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. Vance, 40, stormed to victory in the annual straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at National Harbor in Maryland on Saturday. In a survey of 1,022 attendees by pollster Jim McLaughlin, 61% said they would vote for Vance if the 2028 Republican primary election were held today, well clear of rightwing strategist and podcaster Steve Bannon at 12%.
Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the far-right Oath Keepers, who was convicted of seditious conspiracy but had his 18-year sentence commuted, denied that his group acted violently on behalf of Donald Trump on 6 January or at any other time. Sporting a Trump tattoo on his arm, Rhodes, 59, from Granbury, Texas, said he is “very happy” with Trump, adding: “I got no complaints. His cabinet is fantastic from what I’ve seen so far. I love Doge. Let the sunlight come in and show all the corruption.”
Kash Patel, the newly appointed FBI director, has told senior officials that he plans to relocate 1,000 employees from Washington to field offices across the US, the Associated Press reports, citing an individual familiar with the matter. According to the AP, Patel also said he plans to move an additional 500 employees to a bureau facility in Huntsville, Alabama.
Updated
Federal employees receive email demanding: 'What did you do last week?'
On Saturday evening, emails were sent emails to federal employees including at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others with the subject line: “What did you do last week?,” Reuters reports.
The email, seen by Reuters, asks employees to reply with five bullet points summarizing “what you accomplished at work last week” and to copy their managers.
The email gives employees until 11.59pm EST on Monday to respond, according to Reuters.
On Thursday, Musk hailed efforts by himself and Trump to cut the federal workforce by the hundreds of thousands. In a post today on X – which he owns – Musk, who leads the so-called “department of government efficiency”, said:
All federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick from the American Immigration Council wrote on Bluesky:
No one at DOGE is going to be personally reviewing 2 million emails about what people did each week. Everyone in the government already has a supervisor they report to. This is a transparent effort to manufacture reasons to fire people because their Fork offer got low results.
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