Russia Embarrasses Marco Rubio With Update on Prisoner Release

After American Marc Fogel was released Tuesday after more than three years in a Russian prison, Secretary of State Marco Rubio bragged that his freedom was “not in return for anything.”

“There wasn’t some deal here where we had to release, like, 10 spies. And I think it shows President Trump’s commitment to bringing home Americans,” Rubio told NewsNation Tuesday.

But Russia threw cold water on that assertion Wednesday, saying that Fogel’s release definitely was part of an exchange, with a Russian citizen being freed from a U.S. prison. Even Trump told reporters late Tuesday that Russia got “not much” in return for Fogel.

“We were treated very nicely by Russia,” Trump said. “Actually, I hope that’s the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war and millions of people can stop being killed.”

According to Trump, the deal with Russia was “very fair, very reasonable,” and that “somebody else is being released” Wednesday “that you will know of.”

Conservatives are keen to show a difference between how Biden and Trump negotiated for Americans to be released from overseas, with the right trashing American basketball player Brittney Griner’s release from Russia in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2022.

Trump continued to bash the Griner deal as recently as October on the campaign trail, and had an unhinged response to the release of four American citizens, including Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, from Russian captivity last year. It seems as though Trump wants his administration to reap praise for securing the release of Americans held captive overseas, while putting down Biden for the very same thing.

Employees at the Small Business Administration started getting fired before the ink on President Trump’s most recent executive order was dry.

On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order formally forcing federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency takeover of the federal government. Just hours later, a few hundred SBA employees received emails with formal termination notices. People involved with the SBA told Politico that employees had actually received similar notices on Friday, then were told the notices were a mistake on Monday, before being officially cut on Tuesday.

“They seemingly jerked people around like this for the sake of EO choreography,” a source familiar with the matter said.

Musk stood by the firings on Tuesday, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office while standing behind Trump like the slimy adviser to some medieval lord. “If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?” Musk said. “It does not match the will of the people, so it’s just something we’ve got to fix.”

But is firing hundreds of federal employees really the “will of the people?”

“Firing huge numbers of federal employees won’t decrease the need for government services,” American Federation of Government Employees president Everett Kelley said in a statement. “It will just make those services harder or impossible to access for everyday Americans, veterans, and seniors who depend on them.”

Donald Trump’s MAGA makeover of the federal government extended to judges on Tuesday, with the commander in chief telling a crowd of reporters in the Oval Office that the judiciary would be the next branch of government to receive a massive reimagining under his stewardship.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth, much more than that, in just a short period of time. We want to weed out the corruption. It seems hard to believe that a judge could say, ‘We don’t want you to do that,’ so, maybe we have to look at the judges,” Trump said. “I think it’s a very serious violation.”

Trump had called press into his office to observe the signing of a new executive order, which effectively greenlights Elon Musk’s work to cull large swaths of the federal workforce through DOGE. But the president’s comments were made in specific reference to attempts that his administration made on Friday to cut funding to biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. The slashed spending was intended to affect $4 billion in “indirect funding” for research, a category that encompasses administrative overhead, facilities, and operations.

Those efforts were waylaid by a federal judge Monday, who temporarily blocked the spending cuts. A coalition of attorneys general from 22 states across the nation sued to block Trump’s order, arguing that the initiative violated a 79-year-old law intended to dictate how agencies administer regulations.

“Without relief from N.I.H.’s action, these institutions’ cutting-edge work to cure and treat human disease will grind to a halt,” the lawsuit read.

The Association of American Medical Colleges impressed in a statement that losing the indirect funds would “mean less research.”

“Make no mistake,” the AAMC wrote. “Lights in labs nationwide will literally go out. Researchers and staff will lose their jobs.”

But Musk was, apparently, not aware of the impact his cuts would have, by the end of the weekend. In a concerning exchange with Vanity Fair’s Molly Jong-Fast, the world’s richest man appeared totally oblivious to the disastrous results of his recommended cuts.

Several of Trump’s other pet projects, including freezing all funding for government grants and loans and letting Musk root around in Treasury Department data, have also been blocked in the courts.

“If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their elected representatives, in the form of the Senate and the House, then we don’t live in a democracy. We live in a bureaucracy,” said Musk—who was not elected by anyone to systematically dismantle the federal government—following Trump’s remarks.

Democrats apparently aren’t going to use the upcoming spending fight to take a stand against Donald Trump’s attempts to dismantle the federal government. 

During a press conference Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked whether the Democrats intended to withhold their support from an upcoming government spending bill that would keep the government open past March 14.

“Look, here’s the bottom line: The Republicans are already shutting down good chunks of the government,” Schumer said. “Democrats don’t want to shut down, but it’s in Republicans hands, it’s up to them.”

Schumer seems to think that any way the cookie crumbles, Trump and the Republicans will chart their own course with government spending—a particularly disturbing attitude for the head of the opposition party.

This seems like a significant reversal from the Democrats. Just two weeks ago, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries promised that Democrats would fight Trump’s agenda in the legislature, in the courts, and even “in the streets.”

And he kept up that energy the following week, pledging that his party would use the upcoming spending fight to try and put a stop to Trump’s illegal funding freeze.

“I have made clear to House Republican leadership that any effort to steal taxpayer money from the American people, end Medicaid as we know it or defund programs important to everyday Americans, as contemplated by the illegal White House Office of Management and Budget order, must be choked off in the upcoming government funding bill, if not sooner,” Jeffries wrote Monday in a letter to his colleagues. 

Other Democrats appeared to get on board with this idea. “I never support a shutdown, but I can see where it could happen in this situation. It’s an extreme situation,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, according to The Hill.  

But by the end of the week, Jeffries appeared to have backed off his threat to play hardball with Republicans.*

“I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. What leverage do we have?” Jeffries said Friday. “They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It’s their government! What leverage do we have?”

“We are going to try to find bipartisan common ground on any issue. We will work with anyone in this town to get things done for the American people,” Jeffries continued. “We have repeatedly made that clear. But Republicans have decided to go it alone.”

Now, Schumer’s not even pledging that Democrats will oppose Republicans’ plans—rather they will be complicit, so as not to cause the shutdown they have long worked to avert, and consequently forfeiting their only shot at leverage over Trump.

* This story originally misstated the day Jeffries made his comments about leverage.

Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to strong-arm federal agencies into bowing down to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The executive order, first reported by Semafor and Reuters, has specific instructions for agency leaders to cooperate with DOGE’s culling of the federal workforce and limit future hiring. The order will allow agencies to only rehire one worker for every four people who leave the workforce. This is all a part of DOGE’s “workplace optimization initiative,” which is code for overhauling the bureaucratic apparatus in MAGA’s image.  

The order is a signal that Trump is backing all the anti-woke chaos that Musk and his DOGE minions have inflicted thus far. Musk even stood next to Trump as he signed the order in the Oval Office, saying that “it’s important that the public’s elected representatives decide what happens rather than a large unelected bureaucracy,” according to Reuters’s Nandita Bose. Musk is an unelected official. 

Federal agencies, their employees, and the courts have been fairly resistant to DOGE’s takeover up to this point, filing multiple lawsuits and refusing to take buyouts. But this executive order clearly shows that Trump does not respect the basic power of the judiciary and will do everything he can to carry out his agenda faster than a court can rule against it—including signing executive orders like this one.