Treasury Sec. Forgets Own Job in Rush to Dodge Democrat’s Questions

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent became so engrossed Wednesday in providing nonanswers about the president’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that he accidentally dodged a question about his own employment.

Bessent’s appearance before the Senate Finance Committee was nothing short of contentious. It was his first time speaking before the committee since Trump settled his fragile $10 billion lawsuit over the 2019–2020 leak of his tax returns with his own administration, and created an enormous DOJ-backed slush fund out of its ashes. Yet the secretary was not so keen to provide answers regarding the honeypot, or the myriad legal allowances—such as future audit immunity—that have been afforded to Trump as a result.

Instead, Bessent spent a significant chunk of his time before the committee skirting and dodging critical questions about the fund, claiming that he could not comment on any component of the proposal due to “ongoing litigation” while deferring questions to the Justice Department.

But in one particularly heated exchange with Texas Senator Ben Ray Luján, Bessent’s default answer became so routine that he failed to notice when he was asked a question about his own job that he very much could answer.

“Are you the secretary of Treasury?” asked Luján.

But Bessent was silent.

“Yes, is the answer,” Luján responded, incredulous.

“Mr. Secretary, Scott—are you the secretary of Treasury for the United States government?” asked Luján again.

“Yes,” Bessent said.

“Appreciate that. The Department of Justice represents the IRS and the Department of Treasury in this lawsuit. Correct?” continued Luján.

“Correct,” said Bessent.

“You’re telling me that the DOJ gave the president this—without you knowing about it?” Luján asked, raising a piece of paper that assumedly related to the Treasury’s joint agreement with the DOJ over the settled suit. “That’s not how the law works.”

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the committee’s ranking member, derided the DOJ agreement as “an abuse of the IRS that goes way beyond anything we’ve seen in the past.”

Whether or not the slush fund is still alive is currently in doubt. Bessent told the Senate Finance Committee earlier Wednesday that the federal financial department intended to comply with a DOJ directive to shutter the fund. The evening before, during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the fund was dead in the water and that his agency would not “ever” move forward with the payments.

But Trump has since defied both of them, standing by the far-right reparations effort while speaking with the New York Post Wednesday morning.

Ousted 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley disputed the words of CBS editor in chief Bari Weiss, claiming that what she told the network’s employees about his firing in an editorial call Wednesday was “not true.”

In a written statement first obtained by The New York Times’ Ben Mulllin, Pelley said, “In the meeting on Tuesday in which I was effectively fired, there was no effort of any kind to ‘find a way back,’” contrary to Weiss’s account.

“At no point did anyone in the Tuesday meeting suggest there could be steps taken by either side that would lead to a resolution,” Pelley wrote in his statement. “Weiss and [CBS News president] Tom Cibrowski were openly hostile from the start. ‘Firing’ was raised by Cibrowski in the first 15 seconds. No CBS executive, at any time, suggested ‘a way back.’ To say so now is disingenuous. And they know it.”

Weiss reportedly said, in the editorial meeting, “Despite our attempts to engage with Scott Pelley and to find a way back, unfortunately we weren’t able to do so, and so we had to part ways. We did not want that to happen, but that’s the path that he chose.”

Pelley was fired after he called out Weiss in an earlier staff meeting Monday that she didn’t attend. He criticized her changes to the network and her changes to CBS’s flagship news program, 60 Minutes, accusing her of “murdering” the program. The meeting was meant to introduce the new executive producer for the program, Nick Bilton, who was personally chosen by Weiss despite having no broadcast journalism experience.

Pelley was openly hostile to Bilton, and brought up the firing of several veteran 60 Minutes staffers, including correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, correspondent Cecilia Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.

“You come into our house and expect to be welcome?” Pelley asked Bilton while openly questioning his credentials. “Why was Tanya Simon fired? Why was Sharyn fired? Why was Cecilia fired? Why Draggan? Do you know the names of the people that were fired?”

Pelley was fired the next day, and then accused Weiss and CBS’s management of enforcing political bias. Weiss’s attempts to save face by saying Pelley rejected overtures to return don’t hold up next to the words of Pelley and the other veteran journalists she has forced out of CBS.

Senate Republicans decided not to allocate federal funds to Donald Trump’s ballroom project in the latest draft of their budget reconciliation bill on Wednesday, in a blow to the president’s architectural takeover of the nation’s capital.

Before the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” overshadowed it, Trump’s ballroom project was the clearest example of how his solipsism was hurting American taxpayers.

The White House said the ballroom was needed for security purposes, and initially claimed it would be funded with approximately $200 million from Trump and “other patriot donors.”

That number later doubled to $400 million, before ballooning to a $1 billion funding request for White House security—part of which would go toward the ballroom.

Despite badgering by Trump that the ballroom was especially needed after a gunman attempted to sprint through a security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents Association dinner at the Washington Hilton in April, using taxpayer money on a ballroom was deemed unnecessary by nonpartisan Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough in May.

Trump then tried to get MacDonough fired, while his administration submitted court documents claiming the ballroom was somehow “under budget.”

Four Republican senators—Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina—publicly voiced opposition to public money going to the vanity project in May. A larger group inside the GOP was privately against the ballroom, according to five anonymous insiders who spoke with Politico. And most GOP senators were likely worried Democrats would put them on the record about whether they supported public funds going to the ballroom during the filibuster process.

Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” has also recently been discarded after he faced public pressure and legal challenges to it.

The Senate began voting to begin discussing the reconciliation bill Wednesday at 2:15 p.m. Eastern Time. The bill’s primary impact would be to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of Trump’s second term.

Marco Rubio just refused to provide a clear answer regarding the administration’s plans for Cuba.

The state secretary appeared before Congress Wednesday for the second day in a row as part of the executive branch’s efforts to defend its $2.2 trillion budget request for 2027. But Rubio’s seemingly endless talking points abruptly ended when he was asked a yes or no question by Representative Jonathan Jackson about whether the White House will invade Cuba.

“In closing, I’d like to ask you, will you invade Cuba?” asked Jackson.

“Well, I have one second to answer. What do I do?” mused Rubio.

“Will you invade Cuba?” pressed Jackson.

“That’s not the only thing you said,” Rubio said, before committee Chairman Brian Mast took the reins of the exchange.

Rubio never provided a deeper explanation on the president’s aims for Cuba, but attacking America’s Communist Caribbean neighbor is apparently not off the table.

Donald Trump told reporters at the White House in March—while Cuba was struggling with an unprecedented economic crisis made worse by America’s Venezuelan oil blockade—that he expected to have the “honor” of “taking Cuba in some form.”

“I do believe I’ll be … having the honor ​of taking Cuba. That’s a big honor. Taking Cuba in some form,” Trump said at the time. “I ​mean, whether I free it, take it. Think I can do anything I want with it. You want to know the truth.”

Months later, in May, White House officials told Politico that what had originated as mild musings had since morphed into a genuine interest inside the Oval Office.

“The mood has definitely changed,” the person familiar with the White House’s discussions said. “The initial idea on Cuba was that the leadership was weak and that the combination of stepped-up sanctions enforcement, really an oil blockade, and clear U.S. military wins in Venezuela and Iran would scare the Cubans into making a deal. Now Iran has gone sideways, and the Cubans are proving much tougher than originally thought. So now military action is on the table in a way that it wasn’t before.”

The conversations took place around the same time that the Justice Department indicted Cuba’s former President Raúl Castro, sparking concerns that the Trump administration would extract and abduct him as it did former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent repeatedly refused to acknowledge Donald Trump’s blatantly corrupt stock trading under fierce questioning by Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday.

During a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Warren hammered Bessent for pushing to end congressional stock trading, while Trump made more than 3,400 stock trades worth more than a quarter of a billion dollars in the first three months of 2026 alone.

“So, Secretary Bessent, you and I agree that it is a conflict of interest for members of Congress to trade stocks. Do you also agree that it’s a conflict of interest for President Trump to trade stocks?” Warren asked.

“President Trump is not sitting in the Oval Office engaging in high frequency trading strategy, clearly he had an outside manager who was doing that,” Bessent said. “I think it’s incumbent upon both houses of Congress to get their house in order before you move to the administrative branch—”

“You’re a Wall Street guy, so you know better,” Warren said. “The investments that President Trump has made are not blind.”

The Massachusetts Democrat explained that Trump had signed a 113-page document listing all of his individual stock trades, while simultaneously making policy decisions that affected those stocks. “So you’re going to sit here with a straight face and say it’s not a conflict of interest for the president of the United States to do that?” she asked.

“I am going to say this body needs to get its house in order first, I would encourage you to do that—” Bessent said.

“I don’t trade in individual stocks. I don’t own any individual stocks,” Warren said. “My house is in order, thank you Mr. Secretary.”

Warren questioned Bessent about Trump’s purchase of between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock one week before his administration moved to loosen export restrictions, allowing the sale of Nvidia chips to China and causing the stock price to soar. The senator asked whether the SEC should knock on Trump’s door to investigate this trade, but Bessent continued with his obstinate denials.

“Please lead by example,” Bessent said.

“I would like to see the president of the United States lead by example,” Warren said.

Warren also asked about Trump’s purchase of tens of thousands of dollars of stock in the Bank of New York (BNY) and its partner Robinhood. Shortly after his purchase, the Treasury Department announced that the Trump accounts would be managed through, you guessed it, BNY and its partner Robinhood.

“If these stock purchases that Trump made were made using inside information, would that be illegal?” Warren asked. Clearly, the answer would be yes, but Bessent played dumb.

“Again, I’m not a lawyer,” Bessent said.

“Would it be worth investigating?” Warren asked.

“Why don’t we investigate many people on this committee?” Bessent said smiling.

The secretary has good reason to avoid condemning Trump’s blatant corruption—he appears to be instrumental in pulling it off.