Trump blames ‘employee’ for Signalgate and ‘billionaires on left’ for Tesla assaults in Newsmax interview: Live

“I would caution my colleagues on the other side of the aisle to refrain from making fun of the ‘Gulf of America’ because next up, you know it may end up being the ‘District of America’ that we’re working on,” the MAGA representative told lawmakers during a Water, Fisheries and Wildlife Subcommittee hearing Tuesday in response to jibes from opposition members about the renaming.

“So just, you know, keep the jokes at bay, and maybe we’ll just stick with the Gulf of America for now.”

Madeline Sherratt reports.

During his Newsmax interview last night, the president pledged to take a “look into” whether the U.S. government should reach a settlement with the family of Ashli Babbit and also into the continued employment of the U.S. Capitol Police officer who shot her dead on January 6 2021.

Trump has repeatedly praised his supporters who attempted to overturn his 2020 election loss, including Babbitt.

The 35-year-old U.S. Air Force veteran, who sported a Trump flag as a cape, was fatally shot while climbing through a broken door barricaded by officers as they attempted to evacuate dozens of members of Congress.

Last January, Babbitt’s family filed a $30 million wrongful death suit against the government.

James Liddell has more.

Very hard to degree with Democrat Eric Swalwell’s observation here on the Defense Secretary’s reassurances yesterday:

Here’s John Bowden’s analysis on what could happen next if this one refuses to blow over.

Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, demanded the resignations of senior Trump administration officials yesterday during an extremely timely and heated gathering of the panel.

Vice Chair Warner grilled Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday and slammed National Security Adviser Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after they failed to conduct “security hygiene 101” in their Signal chat, failing to notice that The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg had been included in the text chain.

“Putting aside for a moment that classified information should never be discussed over an unclassified system, it’s also just mind boggling to me that all these senior folks were on this line and nobody bothered to even check,” Warner said.

“Security hygiene 101 – who are all the names? Who are they?”

During the hearing, Warner posted on X that “incompetence is not an option” and said that both Hegseth and Waltz should step down.

Alex Woodward reports.

The administration’s response to this week’s security scandal has so far been to dig in and hope it can convince Americans to dismiss the unprecedented lapse as media-driven partisan squabbling, even as Democrats are calling for resignations.

Andrew Feinberg and Eric Garcia have this on the mood in Washington right now.

Members of the leaky Signal group reportedly partied with the president at a $1-million-a-seat “candlelight fundraising dinner” at Mar-a-Lago hours after the successful bombing raid on the Houthis took place on March 15.

Some 53 people, including children, were killed in the attacks on Yemen.

According to Wired, the dinner included guests who had been on the chat earlier before the bombings, including National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Others apparently in attendance were Trump’s Middle East and Ukraine negotiator Steve Witkoff, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Elon Musk and his four-year-old son.

Mike Bedigan has more.

The vice president has said he will join his wife Usha on her trip to Greenland this week, suggesting in an online video that global security is at stake.

Vance will join the delegation in visiting the U.S. Space Base at Pituffik in the north of the Arctic territory, as Trump continues to put pressure on Denmark about acquiring it for the United States..

“We’re going to check out how things are going there,” Vance said in a video posted to social media.

“A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada, and of course, to threaten the people of Greenland. So we are going to check out how things are going there.

“Unfortunately, leaders in both America and in Denmark, I think, ignored Greenland for far too long.”

Here’s more.

The president signed yet another order on Tuesday, this one requiring the public to prove they are U.S. citizens before they are allowed to vote and attempting to prevent states from counting mail-in ballots received after Election Day.

The sweeping order also seeks to take federal funding away from states that do not comply.

Trump has long questioned the U.S. electoral system and continues to falsely claim that his 2020 loss to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread fraud.

The president and his Republican allies also have made baseless claims about widespread voting by non-citizens, which is illegal and, in fact, rarely occurs.

Last year, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a bill that would ban non-citizens from registering to vote in federal elections, a practice that is already illegal. It did not pass the Senate, which was then controlled by Democrats.

The White House’s order seeks to achieve similar goals. Voting rights groups argued that it, like the aforementioned Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act that did not become law, would disenfranchise voters, particularly people of color, who do not have access to passports or other required identification.

“We’ve got to straighten out our elections,” Trump said as he signed the order at the White House.

“This country is so sick because of the elections, the fake elections and the bad elections, we’re going to straighten that out one way or the other.”

The order, like so many of his others, is likely to draw legal challenges.

In an interview of his own with Laura Ingraham on Fox News, the under-fire Waltz said he was solely to blame for the Signalgate debacle, struggling to explain how Jeffrey Goldberg was added to the top secret chat if, as the security official claimed, he had never spoken to him and did not have his number.

Even the ever-obliging Ingraham appeared to be having trouble making sense of Waltz’s excuses.

Here’s more from Josh Marcus.

Also in last night’s interview with Greg Kelly on the conservative cable news channel, the president agreed that George Soros and his ilk were “probably involved” in the spate of arson attacks on Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships in recent weeks, without offering any evidence for the claim whatsoever.

Mike Bedigan has more on this one too.