Trump Makes Stunning Confession About Russia’s Influence Over Him

President Donald Trump isn’t even denying that his administration has been influenced by Russia.

During a Cabinet meeting Monday, Trump was asked to respond to statements made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Time magazine, where he suggested that members of Trump’s White House had been influenced by Moscow.

Rather than outright deny it, Trump dodged the question.

“Well, probably they have been influenced to get this thing settled because Ukraine wants to see it settled, I think they have to have it settled, and Russia wants to see it settled. And I think if I weren’t president this would never happen,” Trump said.

In his interview with Time, Zelenskiy recounted how, in the midst of the U.S. withholding crucial military and intelligence aid from Kyiv earlier this month, Trump had repeated a story from Russian President Vladimir Putin claiming that Russian forces had surrounded thousands of Ukrainian troops in Kursk.

“That was a lie,” Zelenskiy said, but it was one that Trump had readily amplified.

Zelenskiy suggested that it was part of a pattern among U.S. officials to parrot Putin rather than trust their own intelligence. “I believe Russia has managed to influence some people on the White House team through information,” Zelenskiy told Time. “Their signal to the Americans was that the Ukrainians do not want to end the war, and something should be done to force them.”

Last week, after agreeing to a partial ceasefire with Russia, Zelenskiy shared several photographs of Russia’s continuing strikes on Ukraine. “Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, despite its propaganda statements, do not stop,” he wrote.

As Russian and U.S. officials sat down for a new round of negotiations for a partial ceasefire on Monday, Russia launched a series of strikes on the Ukrainian city of Sumy, injuring 74 people including 13 children.

One of the four directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, Palestinian Hamdan Ballal, was allegedly beaten by Israeli settlers, then removed from an ambulance he called by Israeli soldiers, his Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham posted on X Monday.

There’s no word on whether Ballal is receiving medical treatment for his head and stomach injuries, Abraham noted. Abraham also posted video footage of the Israeli settler mob that attacked Hamdan’s village, showing them attacking Jewish American activists by throwing stones and causing damage to their car.

According to activists from the Center for Jewish nonviolence, a group of 10 to 20 Israeli settlers attacked them and Hamdan in the Palestinian village of Susiya in the Masafer Yatta area south of Hebron.

“We don’t know where Hamdan is because he was taken away in a blindfold,” said Josh Kimelman, one of the activists, to the Associated Press.

No Other Land won the Academy Award for best documentary feature film earlier this month but has still struggled to find a distributor in the United States. The film, which chronicles the destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, was directed by four activists: Hamdan, Abraham, Palestinian Basel Arda, and Israeli Rachel Szor.

The documentary premiered on just one screen in the United States on February 2, grossing $26,000 before drawing $1.2 million in the following weeks, eventually expanding to 120 screens and drawing a backlash. Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner even tried to block the film from being shown in the Florida city by attempting to evict a theater hosting it from a city-owned building, only to relent after a public outcry.

Meanwhile, Israel’s ongoing military campaign in the West Bank has displaced 40,000 Palestinians, the largest number in more than 50 years, and has killed 55 Palestinians, including five children, according to the United Nations and Israeli military. In Gaza, Israel’s brutal war against the territory has resumed after a brief “ceasefire” ended last week, killing 634 people, including at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men since March 18, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Among those killed on Monday in Gaza include two journalists, Hossam Shabat of Al Jazeera and Mohammad Mansour of Palestine Today. Israel has faced criticism for targeting journalists in the past and has killed 170 journalists and media workers since its war on Gaza began in October 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Was the attack on Ballal, and his subsequent detention by the Israeli military, part of a campaign to silence Palestinian voices, journalists, and filmmakers alike?

The Trump administration is treating immigrants worse than prior presidents treated real Nazis, according to a federal judge.

The stunning observation by U.S. Circuit Judge for the D.C. appeals court Patricia Millett came during a hearing Monday over the White House’s spontaneous decision to deport more than 200 alleged members of a Venezuelan gang to El Salvador by invoking a Japanese internment-era wartime policy, the Alien Enemies Act.

Five of the men sued the Trump administration in response, attempting to prevent their “imminent removal.” But even after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the immigrants should remain in the U.S. as they await trial, Trump officials thwarted the law and sent them to Honduras. Donald Trump justified the infraction by claiming that immigration into the country constituted an “invasion,” and described the current era as a “time of war.”

But Judge Millett argued that such an act was wildly unprecedented—even during the wartime tribulations of World War II.

“There were planeloads of people. There were no procedures in place to notify people,” she said. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien [Enemies] Act than has happened here where the proclamation requires the promulgation of regulation.”

“They had hearing boards before people were removed, and yet here there’s nothing in there about hearing boards, no regulations, and nothing was adopted by the agency officials administrating this,” Millett continued.

“Those people on those planes on that Saturday had no opportunity to file habeas or any type of action to challenge” their deportation, she added.

Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign disputed the “Nazi analogy,” and instead compared Boasberg’s decision to block the deportation to a judge redirecting a carrier group from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf.

“Hang on. Hang on,” Millett rebuked. “Asserting a power to do that is not ordering ships to relocate in foreign waters, right? That is a straight up judicial process that’s allowed by the Supreme Court and Circuit precedent.”

Trump is claiming complete ignorance after his defense secretary accidentally leaked war plans to The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief after adding him to a Signal chat. In fact, he only has three words on the matter: “I don’t know.”

Jeffrey Goldberg reported that earlier this month, he received an offer to join a group chat on the encrypted messaging app from Trump national security adviser Michael Waltz. Goldberg accepted the invite, and saw multiple text exchanges between Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, among other Cabinet officials. Then, they discussed a planned attack on the Houthis in Yemen.

The president was asked about all this at a press conference in the White House’s Roosevelt Room on Monday.

“Your reaction to the story in The Atlantic that said some of your top Cabinet officials and aides had been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and included an Atlantic reporter for that,” a reporter asked Trump. “What is your response to that?”

“I don’t know anything about it. I’m not a big fan of The Atlantic, to me it’s a magazine that’s going out of business, I think it’s not much of a magazine. But I know nothing about it, you’re saying that they had what?”

“They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials,” the reporter responded.

“Having to do with what? … What were they talking about?”

“The Houthis.”

“The Houthis, you mean the attack on the Houthis?”

“Correct.”

“Well it couldn’t have been very effective, because the attack was very effective I can tell you that. I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time.”

It’s shocking—even from this administration—that Trump’s team allowed him to take the podium without at least briefing him on the slip up. The group chat had the potential to be a massive national security crisis and raises serious questions about the care and qualifications of Trump’s inner circle.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth probably regrets mistakenly sending the Trump administration’s classified plans to attack Yemen to Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg, not least because he’ll have to eat his own words.

In 2016, while working for Fox News, Hegseth repeatedly criticized then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for storing classified information on a private email server at her home. In one instance, Hegseth pointedly asked: “How damaging is it to your ability to recruit or build allies with others when they are worried that our leaders may be exposing them because of their gross negligence or their recklessness in handling information?”

In the same segment, Hegseth also remarked on the recklessness and danger of Clinton’s actions.

“The people we rely on to do dangerous and difficult things for us rely on one thing from us: That we will not reveal their identity, that we will not be reckless with the dangerous thing they are doing for us. That’s the national security implications of a private server that’s unsecured,” Hegseth said.

Later, in 2023, Hegseth spoke on Fox News about classified documents found at President Biden’s home (which Biden cooperated with investigators to return, unlike Trump).

“If at the very top, there’s no accountability … then two tiers of justice exist,” Hegseth said, comparing Biden to a Navy sailor who was jailed for photographing classified areas of a submarine.

All of this exposes Republican double standards when it comes to classified information. Hegseth’s 2016 attacks on Clinton’s server seem quaint compared to sharing military plans outside of government communications on a Signal chat with a journalist present, as Hegseth did.

Hegseth’s attacks on Biden’s lack of accountability for his handling of classified documents were hypocritical even without Monday’s revelations, as Trump faced no legal consequences for keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and refusing to return them. In keeping with Hegseth’s own statements, should he, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and everyone else in the Signal chat face accountability for discussing secret military plans outside of government servers and channels?

Everyone knows what it’s like to be unwillingly added to a group chat—but it’s not usually a threat to national security. 

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported Monday that earlier this month, he’d been dropped into a Signal group chat with several high-ranking members of Donald Trump’s administration, where they plotted a bombing campaign in Yemen. 

The 18 members of the group chat called “Houthi PC small group” appeared to include senior Trump officials and Cabinet members such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. 

Goldberg said that he had been inexplicably added to the group chat on March 11 by a user called Michael Waltz, whom Goldberg determined to be Trump’s national security adviser. 

There, in full view of the head of a publication Trump recently called a “Third Rate Magazine,” senior-most officials hatched what appears to be a moneymaking scheme to bomb a foreign country. The latest round of strikes last week killed more than 50 people so far, and injured 100 more, according to Al Jazeera.  

On March 13, Waltz wrote that he was creating a “principles group,” or principals committee of senior officials, to discuss national security plans. 

Waltz requested points of contact from the group’s many high-ranking members, and the names seemed to be reasonably real. For instance, Vance said his point of contact would be Andy Baker, his national security adviser, and Rubio said the State Department’s would be Mike Needham, Rubio’s counselor and chief of staff. 

The next day, a signal user identified as “JD Vance” aired his hesitations about moving forward with bombing Yemen. The alleged Vance claimed that it would be a “mistake” to defend trade in the Suez Canal because that would mostly benefit Europe, which sees 40 percent of its trade travel through that route. Meanwhile, the U.S. only ships 3 percent of trade through the Suez Canal. 

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.,” Vance wrote. 

A user called “Pete Hegseth” said that Vance should raise his concerns with the president. “I think messaging is going to be tough no matter what—nobody knows who the Houthis are—which is why we would need to stay focused on: 1) Biden failed & 2) Iran funded.” He pushed for them to proceed with the campaign in case Israel took action first or the plans leaked.

“This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered,” the user called Hegseth wrote. 

Waltz also pushed that they move forward with strikes, reminding members that the president had directed the Defense and State departments to “compile the costs associated and levy them on Europeans.” 

Later that day, the alleged Vance agreed with alleged Hegseth, writing, “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.” 

The possible DOD head replied, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

One user, called “S M,” who Goldberg believed could be Stephen Miller, said that the U.S. should seek remuneration for the strikes in Yemen from Europe and Egypt, and figure out a way to “enforce such a requirement.”

“If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” the user “S M”  wrote. 

Goldberg wrote that the next day, March 15, Hegseth sent lengthy messages that could not be repeated. “The information contained in them, if they had been read by an adversary of the United States, could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel, particularly in the broader Middle East, Central Command’s area of responsibility,” Goldberg said.

To confirm that the group chat was legitimate, Goldberg said he waited for the first round of detonations to hit Sanaa, and they did, exactly when the user identified as “Pete Hegseth” said they would. A round of congratulatory messages were sent in the chat. Goldberg, having concluded that the conversation was real, exited the group chat, and received no follow-up from Waltz. 

Goldberg’s surreal experience among the decision-makers of the Trump administration comes amid promises to crack down on leakers within the government. 

Just hours before the U.S. began strikes on Yemen, Gabbard warned that the Trump administration would be aggressively pursuing leakers from within the intelligence community. By including Goldberg in the conversation, Waltz has made himself the classic definition of a leaker. But it may be worse than that.

“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain [has] now committed a crime—even if accidentally. We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe,” wrote Delaware Senator Chris Coons in a post on X Monday. 

The Atlantic reported that several national security experts surmised that Waltz’s use of Signal had likely violated the Espionage Act, because he had discussed information related to national defense. Typically, discussing military activity requires officials to enter a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF, where cell phones are not allowed. “Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe,” Goldberg wrote. 

Signal is also not an approved venue for sensitive information, and because Waltz had set some of the messages to automatically disappear after a few weeks, it seems that the group chat likely violated federal rules about keeping records of official acts.

National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes confirmed Monday that the group chat was legitimate.

“At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain. The thread is a demonstration of the deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials. The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to our servicemembers or our national security,” he said. 

Elon Musk’s decision to take a chainsaw to the IRS is fast-tracking the agency for a steep decline in revenue.

Abrupt, DOGE-directed staff cuts at the agency have sparked fears that U.S. tax revenue could plummet by 10 percent, or $500 billion, this spring, reported The Washington Post.

Last year, the IRS collected $5.1 trillion, with $825 billion going to the Defense Department. Such a massive loss would hobble government services or increase the national deficit.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official, told the Post.

Some of DOGE’s loftiest goals for the tax collection agency include a mass layoff of some 20,000 agency employees, many of whom work directly in processing taxes and investigating tax fraud. But the Trump administration has been less than serious with regard to the impact of the cuts: In February, Donald Trump suggested that the tax specialists could find new work as armed border agents.

So far, DOGE has fired more than 11,000 IRS employees and lost two agency commissioners, both of whom stepped down since Trump was inaugurated. That’s forced the agency to quickly reimagine how it allocates its resources: In order to keep its core functions operating, the agency has dropped investigations into high-valued corporations and taxpayers, several IRS staffers involved in the matter told the Post.

That stands in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s agenda for the IRS, which aimed to beef up the agency with more than 80,000 new hires. That was under the helm of IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, who promised to make mincemeat out of the ultrawealthy and their tax cheats.

The transition hasn’t been too noticeable this tax season so far, Timur Taluy, CEO of tax-prep service FileYourTaxes.com, told the Post. So far, IRS data shows a roughly 8 percent drop in representative availability on the IRS helpline compared to last year—a small indicator of the forthcoming changes. But IRS specialists argue that more changes are on the way.

“We tried to make clear this is a logistics operation. There’s a science to it. If you put 30 people on the line, this is how much you can accomplish today. If you put 15 people on the line, you can accomplish half of that,” a source who was involved in warning the Trump transition team about the planned IRS changes told the Post. “You can change the productivity over time with a smaller input of personnel, but not this filing season. This is where we are today.”

Border czar Tom Homan gave up the game on Donald Trump’s revenge scheme to rob noncitizens of their legal rights under the Alien Enemies Act.

During a Sunday interview on ABC News’s This Week with Jonathan Karl, a sedated-sounding Homan struggled to answer questions about the rushed deportations of more than 100 alleged members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the Trump administration has declared an invading force.

Karl asked how authorities had been able to determine whether the individuals were in the gang; Homan readily admitted that many of the deportees did not have any criminal record.

“A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, just like a lot of terrorists in this world, they’re not in any terrorist databases, right?” he said.

Homan said that authorities had relied on social media, surveillance, sworn statements from gang members, and wire taps to determine supposed gang affiliation.

Karl explained that lawyers for several of the deportees claimed that authorities had wrongly labeled their clients as gang members.

“Do they get a chance to prove that before you take them out of the country and put them into a notorious prison in a country that they’re not even from? I mean, do they have any due process at all?” he asked Homan.

“Due process? What was Laken Riley’s due process? Where were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of TdA, where was their due process?” Homan said.

“Well the people who did that should be prosecuted—” Karl continued, but Homan cut him off.

The border czar insisted that due process could be suspended because “every Ven-ze-ulan” on the flight was determined to be a member of the gang, and therefore a terrorist.

Shortly after the AEA was invoked last week, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary injunction on deportations under the wartime law after lawyers from the ACLU challenged the designation of five individuals under the act. Still, the Trump administration proceeded with the swift removal of more than 100 Venezuelan nationals, launching a series of hearings last week reviewing the use of the law to suspend due process.

While the Trump administration has since said it would comply with court orders, the president and other members of his administration have begun relentlessly attacking Boasberg, claiming that he was a “lunatic” who was biased against Trump.

On This Week, Homan was asked to explain his own wild attack on the judiciary, when he said, “I don’t care what judges think.”

“I don’t care what that judge thinks as far as this case,” Homan explained Sunday. “We’re going to continue to arrest public safety threats and national security threats. We’re going to continue to deport them from the United States.”

On Monday, Boasberg ruled that the ACLU was “likely to succeed” in arguing that individuals the government had claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang were “entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether the Act applies to them at all,” denying the government’s request to lift his restraining order on AEA deportations.

Despite Homan’s admission that the deportees lacked actual criminal records, Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely claimed Sunday that the Trump administration was within its rights because the deportees had committed “the most violent crimes that you can imagine.”

Donald Trump is appointing his personal lawyer Alina Habba as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The president announced the move in a Truth Social post Monday morning, saying that Habba “will lead with the same diligence and conviction that has defined her career.”

The move will put Habba in charge of all federal cases in New Jersey on what is supposed to be a temporary basis, bypassing Senate confirmation. The state is the home of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, and is also the jurisdiction for the government’s case against pro-Palestine activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, whom Trump is trying to deport after rescinding his green card.

Habba has a reputation as one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, backing him up when he spreads conspiracy theories and, during his hush-money trial last year, offering defenses for his unusual behavior, from falling asleep in court to his penchant for holding press clippings of himself.

More recently, earlier this month Habba responded to the Trump administration’s firing of thousands of military veterans by saying that “perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.” Her seemingly unconditional support for the president also extends into her legal acumen, which is highly flawed at best.

Throughout Trump’s New York hush-money trial, Habba misspoke in court, hurting Trump’s case and even seeming to misunderstand the term “due process.” While representing the president in a defamation lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll, Habba’s opening statement seemed to immediately undermine Trump’s case, and during the case, she was reprimanded by the judge on multiple occasions.

Making Habba the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey seems like a recipe for disaster, considering she is supposed to uphold and enforce the law in accordance with the Constitution. But Trump’s decision to appoint Habba is almost certainly by design: He wants a loyalist to push prosecutions that he wants, regardless of legal justifications, and protect his interests in the state.

Education Department staffers warn that Trump’s mass firings will do irreparable harm to the student loan system. At least 300 people were fired last week from Federal Student Aid, the office within the department that manages student loans. 

This was shortly followed by President Trump’s Thursday executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely. 

“They got rid of all of the quality checkers. It’s only a matter of time [before] they cause the whole system to fail,” a high ranking department staffer told The Guardian anonymously. “If this was a bank, and they fired all the quality assurance team, their regulator would have shut them down.… It’s the opposite of safety.”

These anonymous workers believe the purge will create opportunities for fraud and abuse and  lead to more bureaucratic issues, like long wait times for loan service providers. “As an organization, we were already doing a lot more work than our staffing provides. We would need 10 times more people for a bank of our size,” the senior staffer said.

“What Linda McMahon has done is given 5,000 institutions the green light to cause massive amounts of taxpayer fraud and abuse of federal financial aid dollars financed by taxpayers without any check and balances in place,” one fired employee said. “The gatekeepers are gone.”

This is a massive blow to an already hobbled system. Many of those fired were working full time to make sure that American citizens could pay for college without drowning in millions of dollars in debt.