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?