RFK Jr. Says Every Person Who Lost Health Insurance Is Illegal

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a callous and wildly inaccurate response to a question about millions of Americans losing their health insurance at a congressional hearing Friday. 

The secretary of health and human services was testifying before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and was asked by Democratic Representative Greg Casar if he had “met with any of the 1.4 million people who have lost their health insurance just this last year from dropping off of Obamacare.” 

Kennedy was unmoved by the question. 

“They’re almost all illegal immigrants,” Kennedy responded. Casar pressed further, saying it sounded like Kennedy hadn’t met with anyone, referring to one person in his congressional district who lost insurance. Kennedy cut in.

“We found 1.5 million illegal immigrants illegally collecting Medicaid,” Kennedy said, before Casar interjected and noted that people in his district saw their monthly health insurance costs skyrocket by hundreds of dollars, including mothers and kids. He again asked Kennedy whether he had spoken to anyone who had lost their insurance, and Kennedy tried to claim that Affordable Care Act costs are lower for many Americans. Casar’s time for questioning then ran out.  

“Chairman, it sounds like he’s met with nobody and been able to explain to them why it’s okay that this policy kicks them off their healthcare,” Casar concluded, addressing committee chair Tim Wahlberg. 

Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act. In January, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which RFK Jr. oversees as health secretary, reported that 1.4 million fewer Americans had signed up for ACA plans because prices had gotten too high. That’s all thanks to Republicans and the Trump administration letting ACA subsidies expire. Kennedy doesn’t seem to care. 

A top Department of Justice official was removed Friday from an investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan after she reportedly expressed doubts about the probe.

Maria Medetis Long, chief of the national security section for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, notified attorneys working on the probe that she would no longer handle the case moving forward, people familiar with the matter told CNN.

Two sources told ABC News that Medetis Long had expressed doubts about the investigation. The prosecutors in the Southern District of Florida are looking into allegations that Brennan lied to Congress about his role in crafting an intelligence assessment about Russian efforts to interfere on behalf of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Some attorneys were surprised by the news, sources said, because there were additional interviews scheduled in the coming days as the department weighed whether to bring charges against Brennan.

The U.S. attorney’s office in southern Florida issued 30 subpoenas to individuals, including Brennan and other former intelligence officials, as part of a sprawling conspiracy investigation into Trump’s perceived political enemies. Those cases are set to land on the desk of the same judge who handed the president his get-out-of-jail-free card back in July 2024: Aileen Cannon.

Asked about the move, a Justice Department spokesperson said, “As a matter of routine practice, attorneys are moved around on cases so offices can most effectively allocate resources. It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.”

Caitlyn Jenner, perhaps the most prominent transgender Trump supporter around, made a public appeal to President Trump, begging him to reconsider his executive order requiring passports to only offer options for male and female—and match the gender the passport holder was assigned at birth.

Jenner lamented her status earlier this month on the Tomi Lahren is Fearless podcast.

“I love President Trump. And I think he signed this executive order.... I don’t know who underneath him was putting this thing together—that all federal documents, it has to be your biological sex at birth,” Jenner said, absolving the president. “Recently I had my passport, I had to get it renewed. I sent it back. [It] comes back, gender marker ‘M.’ Screws everything up.”

She went on to note that she tried multiple different avenues to remedy the situation, even sending in her female birth certificate, but to no avail.

“This is a safety factor, OK? I can’t travel internationally anymore.... I don’t blame President Trump, I love him. But for a lot of people this is a huge issue.... I don’t know what’s gonna happen because I don’t think this was really thought out, what this means—not just for the males-to-females.”

Jenner said she left a note for Trump with his Secret Service while visiting Mar-a-Lago two months ago, but still hasn’t heard back.

Trump signed the executive order in January 2025, and the Supreme Court upheld it in November, meaning many trans Americans are now dealing with the chaos.

Jenner is just the latest vocal Trump supporter to put her foot in her mouth. What exactly did she expect to happen when Trump made it clear more than a decade ago that the LGBTQ community would be a primary target? And how many trans rights organizations warned against the exact thing Jenner is now complaining about?

President Donald Trump claimed Friday that Iran had finally agreed to hand over its nuclear stockpile—but Tehran said otherwise.

Speaking with CBS News, Trump claimed that Iran had “agreed to everything,” including working with the U.S. to remove the roughly 2,000 kilograms of enriched uranium that remains buried in underground facilities.

“Our people, together with the Iranians, are going to work together to go get it. And then we’ll take it to the United States,” Trump said. He clarified that by “our people,” he did not mean U.S. troops.

Trump claimed that the U.S. and Iran would continue to meet over the weekend to iron out the details, and that the U.S. military blockade on Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz would continue “until we get it done.”

But sources in Tehran have denied Trump’s claim that any progress has been made. “Contrary to Trump’s claim, no form of nuclear material transfer has been negotiated,” a source close to Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf wrote on X. Another Iranian source called Trump’s claim “another lie.”

Trump’s seemingly unsubstantiated claim came shortly after Axios reported that the U.S. was considering releasing $20 billion in frozen Iranian assets in exchange for the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium—which Trump furiously denied earlier Friday. The two countries were reportedly discussing a three-page plan, and could send negotiators to Pakistan this weekend to try and finalize it. The talks would concern what specifically will happen to the uranium, and how many Iranian assets will be unfrozen.

Donald Trump is in “discussions” to settle a $10 billion lawsuit with the Internal Revenue Service over the release of his tax returns.

The president’s lawyers asked a judge Friday to extend key deadlines on the multibillion lawsuit against his presidential administration, but hidden within the pages of the legal filing was a profound detail: that the president has been in talks with his own government staffers to “avoid protracted litigation.”

“Good cause exists to grant an extension in this matter while the Parties engage in discussions designed to resolve this matter and to avoid protracted litigation,” Trump’s lawyers argued. “This limited pause will neither prejudice the Parties nor delay ultimate resolution. Rather, the extension will promote judicial economy and allow the Parties to explore avenues that could narrow or resolve the issues efficiently.”

Any payment from Trump’s lawsuit against the government would be doled out to him via taxpayer funds.

The suit alleges that the IRS and Treasury Department during Trump’s first term did not do enough to thwart Charles Littlejohn, a former contractor for the IRS, from leaking the tax returns to the press. Littlejohn leaked 15 years of Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. The documents were published by the paper of record the following year, in September 2020, two months before the presidential election.

Trump’s attorneys have argued that, despite the fact that Littlejohn was classed as a contractor, he acted as a “joint employee” of the two agencies. They further asserted that the government was liable for Littlejohn’s actions due to the IRS’s “extensive, detailed, day-to-day supervision” of his behavior.

The legal challenge has raised numerous ethical quandaries, chief among them the apparent conflict of interest in the case. Legal experts have questioned whether a president can sue his own administration to pocket taxpayer money, and have expressed doubts about whether Trump’s Justice Department can appropriately defend the financial institutions.

A group of former government officials filed an amicus brief in February that challenged the suit’s core claims. Those officials included former IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and former National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson. Together, the cohort argued that Trump’s lawsuit contains “significant legal flaws” and risks becoming “collusive litigation.”

This story has been updated.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to claim Friday that vaping is healthier than smoking.

Speaking before the House Education and Workforce Committee, Kennedy tried to peddle some of his classic pseudoscience.

“There’s an argument for vapes,” Kennedy said. “Vapes reduce cigarette tobacco smoking—”

“No sir. That was an argument Juul made, and I’d be happy to have a further conversation,” California Representative Mark DeSaulnier interrupted.

“I’d love to have that conversation,” Kennedy said.

The Centers for Disease Control’s own website states: “E-cigarette aerosol generally contains fewer harmful chemicals than the deadly mix of 7,000 chemicals in smoke from cigarettes. However, this does not make e-cigarettes safe.”

The vape company Juul illegally tried to market its electronic cigarettes as a safer alternative to smoking cigarettes, earning it a strong admonishment from the Food and Drug Administration in 2019—another of the many health agencies which Kennedy now oversees.

No federally reviewed vaping product has been found to be less harmful than cigarettes. Studies have shown that vapes and e-cigarettes are just as dangerous—if not more so—than traditional cigarettes, because they can increase the risk of heart disease and limit blood flow to the heart. They also still contain nicotine, which is highly addictive.

While vapes may be considered preferable to cigarettes for adult smokers, that’s not who uses them: Children are, on average, nine times more likely to vape than adults, according to the World Health Organization.

Amongst the upper echelons of the MAGA movement, Donald Trump’s word is God’s.

Paula White-Cain, a Pentecostal televangelist who has offered Trump spiritual guidance since 2002 and was appointed to run the new White House Faith Office last year, once said that “saying no to Trump would be saying no to God.”

Earlier this month, White-Cain compared Trump to Jesus at the White House’s Easter lunch, likening Trump’s various political scandals to Christ’s crucifixion.

“It almost cost you your life,” she said, feet away from Trump. “You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us. But it didn’t end there for him, and it didn’t end there for you.”

White-Cain’s sycophantic public commentary offers a brief glimpse into the rhetoric circulating around the president, and could possibly explain why Trump felt it appropriate to circulate an AI-generated picture of himself as the messiah earlier this week.

That act earned Trump nationwide backlash, driving a wedge between himself and many of his loyal supporters, who overwhelmingly condemned the blasphemous depiction. (The image features Trump dressed in white and red robes, encircled in light, holding light, and sharing it with the fallen.)

Several self-identified Trump voters interviewed by MS Now said that they were “disgusted” by and “ashamed” of the image, and further implied that they regretted voting for the self-identified Christian. (Reminder: while Trump has claimed the Bible is his “favorite book,” he couldn’t name a single passage from the text when prompted to do so in a 2019 interview.)

“Trump knows what he is doing. He knows what he posted,” former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on X Thursday after prominent evangelist Franklin Graham came to the president’s defense. “He knows how to manipulate his followers. And he’s not sorry, he never apologized. Instead he lied, and said he was a doctor, which is also absurd.”

A Franciscan friar that spoke with CBS News earlier this week said that “no one” should try to “put themselves in the person of Christ.”

“I think that’s a little bit of a problem,” he said.

White-Cain’s remarks could also explain the president’s attitude as he escalates a seemingly pointless feud with Pope Leo XIV, who apparently upset the administration by advocating for peace, not war.

As Trump’s base begins to turn on him, questions have arisen about Trump’s other political miracles. Several MAGA voters have recently begun to reexamine the 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in apparent suspicion that the ordeal was staged.

As Donald Trump’s MAGA base sours on him, some of them now think the 2024 assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania, was staged.

Wired reports that this conspiracy theory started to take hold after Joe Kent, who resigned from the Trump administration over the Iran war, went on conservative pundit Tucker Carlson’s show and asserted without evidence that investigations into the shooting were halted before they were finished.

“If you don’t want to address that question, then you just go silent and say you can’t ask that question,” Kent, formerly the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said. “Which then creates people who come out of nowhere and they start drawing their own conclusions.”

Kent noted that this would fuel conspiracy theories, and ever since his interview, that is exactly what seems to be happening within MAGA. Trisha Hope, who served as a delegate from Texas during the 2024 Republican National Convention, posted on X last week that “if you cannot look at this story, and use critical thinking skills and have at least some questions, you are the problem and we need you to snap out of it.” 

“Since the attempt on his life, Trump has show [sic] no interest in investigating what really happened. He never mentions it, it’s as if it never happened, except when he tells us, he took a bullet for us,” Hope said in a long post.

Comedian Tim Dillon, who interviewed JD Vance on his podcast during Trump’s presidential campaign, said last week that he thinks “maybe it was staged,” adding that Trump should now say publicly that “some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”

Candace Owens, a far-right conspiracy theorist who has abandoned Trump, claimed on her podcast last week that Miriam Adelson, an Israeli-American billionaire and Republican donor, was actually behind the assassination attempt because Trump hadn’t followed through on a promise to allow Israel to annex the occupied West Bank.  

Ali Alexander, who helped pushed the “Stop the Steal” campaign around the conspiracy that Trump had the 2020 election stolen from him, wrote on Telegram Tuesday that the attempt on Trump’s life could mean he is in the Antichrist, echoing a different right-wing conspiracy theory pushed by Tucker Carlson and others.   

“To be clear: if Donald Trump didn’t receive a miracle, then it was deception or a dark sign,” Alexander wrote. “There is biblical prophecy in Revelation 13:3 apparently about the Antichrist being struck on the head.”

Cracks are beginning to show in Trump’s support base following his decision to break a major campaign promise and start a war with Iran, attack the Catholic Church, and imply that he’s Jesus Christ. All of this could be the beginning of the end of his political career and control of the Republican Party. 

A Trump-appointed federal judge handed down another loss to the Justice Department on Friday, striking down the department’s demand for personal voter information in Rhode Island. 

U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy said the DOJ lacked the authority “to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here.”

“In its September 8, 2025, letter to Secretary Amore (the ‘Demand Letter’), DOJ stated that the purpose of its demand for an unredacted copy of Rhode Island’s statewide voter registration list was ‘to ascertain Rhode Island’s compliance with the list maintenance requirements of the [National Voter Registration Act] and the [Help America Vote Act],’” McElroy wrote in her dismissal of the DOJ lawsuit. “The Demand Letter did not identify any facts suggesting that Rhode Island has not complied with the NVRA and HAVA, and it did not otherwise expressly identify any factual basis for DOJ’s demand.”

The DOJ initially filed the lawsuit as part of its effort to continue Trump’s immigration crackdown and weaponize voter registration information in deep-blue states. But now Rhode Island has become the fifth state—along with California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Orgeon—to reject Trump’s meddling. 

“Neither the NVRA nor HAVA authorize DOJ to conduct the kind of fishing expedition it seeks here,” McElroy concluded. “As such, for the foregoing reasons, the Court DENIES the United States’ Motion to Compel Production and GRANTS Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss.”  

That leaves Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon with zero wins and five losses on her voting records lawsuits, with 25 states still waiting on decisions. 

Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz on Friday, marking the end of a multi-week trade embargo that massively exacerbated oil and gas costs around the globe.

Donald Trump, however, was not happy.

The president went on a social media bender as the news came in, complaining that he had not received enough credit for his handling of the war (that he started) while optimistically suggesting that the war was already over, despite lacking a concrete peace deal.

“The Failing New York Times, FAKE NEWS CNN, and others, just don’t know what to do,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They are desperately looking for a reason to criticize President Donald J. Trump on the Iran situation, but just can’t find it. Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT, and start to gain back their credibility???”

In a series of posts, Trump incorrectly referred to the vital waterway as the “STRAIT OF IRAN,” and declared that the U.S. blockade on the strait would “REMAIN IN FULL FORCE AND EFFECT AS IT PERTAINS TO IRAN, ONLY, UNTIL SUCH TIME AS OUR TRANSACTION WITH IRAN IS 100% COMPLETE.”

“Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again,” Trump declared in a separate post. “It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!”

Trump thanked Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar for their involvement in the peace negotiations, and stated that while any potential peace deal will not pertain to Lebanon, he would eventually “MAKE LEBANON GREAT AGAIN.” At the same time, the president slammed America’s NATO allies, claiming in a separate post that the coalition had called to offer help in the region in the wake of the strait’s reopening.

“I TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL. They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!” Trump said.

Earlier this week, France and the U.K. agreed to cohost a summit with more than 40 nations to “restore freedom of navigation” along the waterway. Its results, however, were dependent on a peace deal, according to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

The war in Iran has thrust the entire world into an energy crisis, spiking oil and gas prices, stalling movement, and tanking economies. At the time of publication, Brent crude—a global oil benchmark—had dropped to around $89 per barrel. Last month, the cost reached a high of $108 per barrel—a dramatic increase from before the war started in late February, when Brent crude cost around $65 a barrel.

It is not clear exactly what the war in Iran has accomplished. Together, the U.S. and Israel have killed thousands of Iranian civilians and obliterated Iranian civilian infrastructure. Meanwhile, 13 U.S. soldiers have died. The war also spiked the cost of living for people around the world, agitated international relations—particularly between the U.S. and longtime allies in the Western hemisphere—cost American taxpayers over $50 billion, and sparked a political rejection of MAGA ideology across the U.S.

Trump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to erase Iran’s nuclear capabilities—but his administration’s battle assessments have stood in contrast to other attacks they boasted about as recently as last year.

Prior to the war—which never obtained congressional approval—Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22, 2025. At the time, the Trump administration claimed that the one-off air raid had set Iran’s program back by “years.”