The Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said a briefing from Trump administration officials about the US war with Iran “raised many more questions than it answered.”
“Look, a whole lot of questions were asked. I found their answers completely and totally insufficient,” Schumer told reporters as he exited the meeting. He departed without taking questions.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as CIA director John Ratcliffe are among those briefing Congress leaders in a classified facility in the Capitol. We expect other participants to come out and share their thoughts soon.
Melania Trump became the first spouse of a sitting world leader to preside over the UN security council today.
Speaking as the body held a meeting titled “Children, Technology and Education in Conflict”, Trump called on UN member states to protect children’s access to education. Over the weekend, Iranian state media reported that an airstrike killed at least 165 people at a girls’ school.
My colleague Joseph Gedeon reports:
Amir Saeid Iravani, Iran’s ambassador to the UN, had earlier called it “deeply shameful and hypocritical” for Washington to convene a meeting on protecting children in conflict while simultaneously launching airstrikes on Iranian cities.
The US holds the council’s rotating monthly presidency for March, and the White House explained the selection of Melania Trump by saying that child welfare is known to be her top issue. The session was the second in three days – on Saturday, an emergency meeting called in response to the outbreak of war grew contentious after Guterres condemned the US-Israeli strikes and Iran’s retaliatory attacks as violations of international law.
The US embassy in Riyadh has issued a security alert advising American citizens to “shelter in place immediately”.
The embassy’s post on X said:
The US Mission to Saudi Arabia has issued a shelter in place notification for Jeddah, Riyadh and Dhahran and are limiting non-essential travel to any military installations in the region – we recommend American citizens in the Kingdom to shelter in place immediately.
The US Mission to Saudi Arabia continues to monitor the regional situation.
The alert came as a Saudi defence ministry spokesperson was quoted as saying an attack by two drones on the US embassy in Riyadh had caused a fire.
Fox News is reporting that the embassy was empty at the time of the strike and there were no injuries.
A fire broke out at the US embassy in the Saudi capital of Riyadh after a blast, Reuters is reporting, citing two sources.
Loud explosions were heard and clouds of smoke seen in the city’s diplomatic quarter, home to foreign embassies in the capital and residences of foreign diplomats, four witnesses told Agence France-Presse early Tuesday morning.
“I heard two explosions followed by smoke rising over the quarter,” a resident said.
The blasts were heard as Iran pressed its campaign targeting Gulf states including Saudi Arabia with waves of missile and drone attacks in response to US and Israeli airstrikes.
In a memo to congressional Republicans, the White House aimed to clarify its intentions in striking Iran, repeating talking points that Marco Rubio shared with the Gang of Eight at a briefing earlier today, including that the US’s mission was to take out Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities and navy.
“We planned on this leaking to the press so they can recite our messaging for us!” White House communications director Steven Cheung said in a social media post linking to a Politico article about the memo.
The memo includes answers to a series of expected questions, including naming Article II of the Constitution as legal justification for the attack and emphasizing that “a long and drawn-out war is not the President’s intention”.
Eighteen American service members have been seriously wounded in the US-Israel war on Iran, a spokesperson for US Central Command (Centcom) has told the Associated Press.
Earlier today, Centcom said that six service members have been killed in action in the war thus far. The Associated Press reports that all six “were Army soldiers and part of the same logistics unit”, citing a US official who was not authorized to comment publicly.
Speaking on Sunday about the three deaths known then, Trump said: “Sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is likely to be more.”
Donald Trump will attend the White House Correspondents Dinner for the first time in either of his two terms in office.
Writing in a social media post, Trump said: “In honor of our Nation’s 250th Birthday, and the fact that these ‘Correspondents’ now admit that I am truly one of the Greatest Presidents in the History of our Country, the G.O.A.T., according to many, it will be my Honor to accept their invitation, and work to make it the GREATEST, HOTTEST, and MOST SPECTACULAR DINNER, OF ANY KIND, EVER!”
In 2017, Trump famously boycotted the dinner for the first time, and has not attended in any of the years since – notable because every president has attended the dinner at least once since the first one was held in 1921.
Since Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025, his allies have purchased major media companies, including Paramount, the owner of CBS News, and Warner Bros Discovery, which operates CNN.
Mark Warner, a member of the Gang of Eight and Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member, said Trump administration officials did not show that there was an imminent threat to the United States during a congressional briefing today on this weekend’s strikes on Iran.
“There was no imminent threat to the United States of America by the Iranians. There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel as an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory,” Warner said, after beginning his remarks by acknowledging the “six American soldiers who’ve been lost, and the expectation that more will be lost”.
Warner criticized the Trump administration for changing its rational for attacking Iran “four or five times,” noting “a week ago it was about the Iranian nuclear capacity, a few days later it was about taking out the ballistic missiles, it was then – in the president’s own words – about regime change” and “now we hear it’s about sinking the Iranian fleet”.
Warner also raised concerns about the United States’s obligations if Iranian citizens do go into the streets and face violence from IRCG forces, and said he would be voting in support of a war powers act.
“So far, our Congress has been basically – not basically, totally – irrelevant, because we have not used our power,” he said.
House speaker Mike Johnson echoed many of the points made by secretary of state Marco Rubio after attending a Gang of Eight briefing on the US-Israel strikes against Iran today.
Johnson said “this was a defensive measure” that the United States took after learning that “Israel was determined to act in their own defense”. Later, he said he believed the president had not violated his war powers because he acted defensively.
Johnson also repeated Rubio’s claim that the mission’s “objective was not regime change” but “to take out those short range missiles” and “eliminate their naval capabilities”. Although he added, “Iran was a great threat to everybody in the region and everybody in the world, because it was an evil regime,” and called Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death “a great development for freedom-loving people around the world”.
The Senate’s Democratic minority leader Chuck Schumer said a briefing from Trump administration officials about the US war with Iran “raised many more questions than it answered.”
“Look, a whole lot of questions were asked. I found their answers completely and totally insufficient,” Schumer told reporters as he exited the meeting. He departed without taking questions.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio as well as CIA director John Ratcliffe are among those briefing Congress leaders in a classified facility in the Capitol. We expect other participants to come out and share their thoughts soon.
In a social media post today, Donald Trump said “Iran would have had a Nuclear Weapon three years ago” if he didn’t “terminate Obama’s horrendous Iran Nuclear Deal”.
Ex-president Barack Obama negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran, which was implemented in 2016. Before leaving office, the Obama White House issued a statement, which did not mention Trump by name, but read: “The United States must remember that this agreement was the result of years of work,” and “represents an agreement between the world’s major powers – not simply the United States and Iran.”
As my colleague Martin Pengelly reported in 2017:
Trump has not been as outright hawkish on the deal as other leading Republicans, saying he could seek to renegotiate it instead of tearing it up entirely. Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the Republican chair of the Senate foreign relations committee who Trump considered for secretary of state, said this month the deal would have to be strictly enforced, not scrapped.
Nonetheless, figures including Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu have expressed hope that Trump will abandon the deal, an eventuality a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said would be a “disastrous”.
The US state department is urging Americans to “depart now” from more than a dozen Middle Eastern countries, following the US-Israel strikes on Iran.
In a post on social media, the assistant secretary for Consular Affairs advised Americans to leave Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen “due to serious safety risks”.
Hundreds of thousands of travelers are currently stranded in the Gulf states, as the airspace over some of the world’s busiest airports, such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, closed over the weekend.
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren has questioned the Trump administration’s justification to try to remove several student activists who were living and studying in the US on valid visas and green cards.
In a letter written to secretary of state Marco Rubio, and first provided to the Guardian, Warren notes that these students – Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, Badar Khan Suri and Yunseo Chung – appear to have been targeted for their political views, “potentially violating their first amendment rights … despite the fact that none of these students were accused of a crime at the time or have been to date.”
All of these students became flashpoints of the administration’s crackdown on protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
Warren said that “recently unsealed court documents” also show that the state department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assessed the students’ speech, written materials, and participation in protests around the war in Gaza, and that Rubio “personally approved their arrest and the revocation of their visas in the United States”.
Signed by Warren, and fourteen other Democratic members of Congress – including senators Chris Van Hollen, Ed Markey and Jeff Merkley and representatives Ayanna Pressley, Greg Casar, Rashida Tlaib and Summer Lee – the lawmakers write they there are “particularly concerned” about the use of Section 237 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to justify the removal of several student activists from the US. This is a rare provision that allows deportation if a person’s presence has “serious adverse foreign policy consequences”. The letter notes that this authority had almost never been used in this way before.
The lawmakers also write that Rubio justified the removals of these students by citing a national foreign policy objective of “combatting antisemitism”, while on social media labeling some of the students as supporting terrorists.
They also note internal assessments from the state department which found no evidence to support the administration’s claims “for deportation based on support to a foreign terrorist organization” for any of the five students.
For example, the letter notes a department memo which found that federal immigration enforcement did not provide any evidence showing that Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University who authored an op-ed in her student newspaper that resulted in her being detained in a Louisiana detention center for six weeks, engaged in “any antisemitic activity or made any public statements indicating support for a terrorist organization or antisemitism generally”.
The letter concludes with a list of formal questions for Rubio to answer by 16 March 2026. These include a historical record of how often these specific deportation powers have been used by a secretary of state since 1990; a request for the number of deportation determinations for individuals whose presence in the country “compromises a compelling United States foreign policy interest”; and documentation of any policy changes made under Section 237 since January 2025.
“In attempting to deport these five students, a court ruled that you took actions ‘to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble’ of students and academics across the country,” Warren wrote. “This abuse of your authority risks normalizing a future where Secretaries of State may summarily revoke visas based on speech, depriving individuals of their rights and whittling down the guarantees of the First Amendment.”
California governor Gavin Newsom denounced Donald Trump for spending “more time talking about his ballroom” than the US servicemembers who died in this weekend’s attack on Iran, while speaking at an event today.
Newsom also said “energy prices are up across the globe” and called the war “unfunded” as Trump’s administration is “cutting food stamps” and other social supports amid an “affordability” crisis.
The US embassy in Amman, Jordan was temporarily evacuated on Monday due to a threat, it said in a statement. The embassy did not elaborate on the nature of the threat.
In a security alert posted on X, embassy staff wrote:
Out of an abundance of caution, all personnel at the U.S. Embassy have temporarily departed the Embassy compound due to a threat.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are set this afternoon to brief leaders of Congress as well as the chairs of several committees about the US war with Iran.
As he headed into the behind-closed-doors meeting in the Capitol, Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer made a brief comment to reporters: “This is Trump’s war. This is a war of choice. He has no strategy, he has no end game.”
He declined to take questions.
Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson entered the meeting shortly after him.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
