US justice department watchdog to review release of Jeffrey Epstein files – live

Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, has released the text for an extension of section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).

The language includes a three-year extension of the provision and some amendments. These include a monthly FBI review of any US citizens included in collected communication by intelligence agencies, and an investigation by the department’s inspector general for a review of any civil liberties that may have been compromised.

A reminder that section 702, which is now set to expire on 30 April, allows national security agents to collect and review texts and emails sent to and from foreigners living outside the US without a warrant. If Americans are talking to a non-US target living abroad, there is potential for them to get swept up in the investigation.

Notably, the new text released by Republicans does not include the need for a warrant to obtain communications, which had been a demand from several conservative hardliners and Democrats alike.

The legislation will now head to the House rules committee, where it may face further right-wing opposition, before it can end up on the floor for a vote.

Donald Trump, for his part, has pushed GOP lawmakers to “UNIFY” and pass a “clean” Fisa extension, while baselessly claiming he’s been a victim of section 702’s privacy vulnerabilities.

During a House appropriations committee hearing as part of Donald Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year, Howard Lutnick was grilled about his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Represenative Madeleine Dean, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, asked whether the president expressed “concerns” about the commerce secretary’s relationship with Epstein. Lutnick refused to comment.

A reminder, the commerce secretary was a longtime next-door neighbor of Epstein in New York. He has previously claimed that he distanced himself from Epstein in 2005.

However, the justice department’s release of case files showed that Lutnick had two engagements with Epstein years past that. He attended a 2011 event at Epstein’s home. And Lutnick’s family had lunch with Epstein on his private island in 2012 – four years after Epstein was sentenced to 13 months in jail for procuring a minor for prostitution.

Lutnick admitted to the 2012 lunch during his 10 February testimony before the Senate appropriations committee. “I did have lunch with him, as I was on a boat going across on a family vacation,” Lutnick said. In that testimony, Lutnick also insisted that he “barely had anything to do” with Epstein. CBS also reported that Lutnick and Epstein both appeared to have stakes in a now-shuttered advertising company, Adfin, as recently as 2014. Inclu­sion in the files does not imply wrong­do­ing.

However, during today’s hearing, the commerce secretary refused to answer Dean’s questions about whether he had any further business ties with Epstein beyond Adfin.

Dean noted that three female cabinet secretaries have been ousted from Trump’s White House: Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem and Lori Chavez-DeRemer. “If President Trump has even a shred of concern about accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s enablers,” Dean said to Lutnick, “he would fire you too”.

As my colleague, Chris Stein, notes, Republican speaker Mike Johnson has said that if progress is made on the reconciliation bill, he will hold a vote on a separate measure, which the Senate approved last month with bipartisan support, to allocate funding for the rest of Department of Homeland Security’s operations exclusive of Immigration and Customs Enforcment (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). A reminder that these subagenices, including the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Coast Guard, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), have gone without federal funding for 10 weeks, as the record-breaking partial government shutdown continues.

“Sequencing is important. We have to make sure we don’t isolate and make an orphan out of key agencies of the department,” Johnson told reporters this week.

The New York Times is reporting that the justice department has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it wants to revoke as part of its efforts to speed up denaturalizations by assigning the cases to prosecutors in multiple US attorney’s offices across the country.

Civil litigators in 39 regional offices would soon be assigned to file denaturalization cases against the individuals, according to an official who spoke with The Times.

Matthew Tragesser, a DOJ spokesman, told the news outlet that officials were “pursuing the highest volume of denaturalization referrals in history” from the department of homeland security. “The Department of Justice is laser focused on rooting out criminal aliens defrauding the naturalization process,” he added.

“Citizenship fraud is a serious crime; anyone who has broken the law and obtained citizenship through fraud and deceit will be held accountable,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, told The Times.

The justice department’s internal watchdog announced an investigation today into the DOJ’s compliance with a law mandating the release of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s investigative files.

The DOJ’s office of inspector general, which operates independently of the department, said it would “evaluate the DOJ’s processes for identifying, redacting, and releasing records in its possession as required by the act.”

That legislation, passed in November, forces the department to open its files on the sex trafficking investigations into Epstein and his former associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.

House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters today that there is “zero reason for us to trust Kash Patel.”

“Why is he still around as the FBI director? He is clearly and deeply flawed and unqualified, and many Republicans know it,” Jeffries said.

“As long as he’s still around as the FBI director, particularly with the most recent disclosures that he’s weaponizing the Bureau of the FBI not to keep the American people safe, not to protect us from terrorism, not to go after narco traffickers, but to go after perceived political adversaries, we’re going to continue to make clear that Kash Patel’s continued presence as the FBI director is going to make bipartisan common ground on the FISA 702 question extremely difficult,” he said.

Asked to respond to the substance of Donald Trump’s foreign policy and his personal attacks, Jeffries replied that he would debate him “anytime, anyplace.”

“If Donald Trump wants to debate me anytime, anyplace in the Oval Office, publicly, on camera, I’d be happy to do it, and we’ll see who’s intellectually superior in that type of contest,” he said. “I’ve got no doubts as to what the outcome would be, and it’s extraordinary to me that Donald Trump keeps recycling this low IQ insult, this from the dumbest President ever to sit at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”

Donald Trump told the BBC that next week’s state visit from King Charles and Queen Camilla could “absolutely” repair US relations with the UK.

In a phone interview, Trump also called King Charles a “fantastic man”.

“I know him well, I’ve known him for years,” the president added. “He’s a brave man, and he’s a great man. They would absolutely be a positive.”

This comes after a once cordial relationship with UK prime minister Keir Starmer has turned icy – following the latter’s unwillingness to support the US-Israel war in Iran. Publicly, Trump has said that Starmer is “no Winston Churchill” and been vocal about his disappointment with the UK’s attitude to the conflict.

The president told the BBC that his relationship with Starmer would only “recover” if the prime minister changed course on immigration.

Trump and first lady Melania Trump will host King Charles and Queen Camilla at the White House on Monday 27 April, and the King will then address Congress on Tuesday 28 April before continuing his tour in Virginia and New York. This will be the first state visit of a British monarch since 2007 when King Charles’s mother, Queen Elizabeth II travelled to the US.

As I noted earlier, the budget plan passed by the Senate in the early hours of Thursday morning will now have to get approval from lawmakers in the House.

But Republican speaker Mike Johnson is facing pushback from members of his conference who want the bill to be broader, and not just focused on spending for federal immigration enforcement.

He’ll now have to get Republican representatives in line in order to pass the blueprint in its current form. In order to assure members that there will be an opportunity to tackle more GOP policy priorities, Johnson has told reporters that leadership will get a third reconciliation package together this year.

Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House oversight committee, slammed recent comments by the panel’s Republican chair James Comer that members are “split” on whether to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell, the accomplice of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“[Maxwell] is a sexual abuser who facilitated the rape of women and children. This is a shameful way to treat survivors. Oversight Democrats are united in opposing any pardon,” Garcia wrote on social media.

This comes after Comer told Politico that while the committee is divided over whether to grant clemency to Maxwell, he “thinks it looks bad”.

“Honestly, other than Epstein, the worst person in this whole investigation is Maxwell,” the Kentucky Republican told the outlet.

The Trump administration has moved to reclassify marijuana, more than four months after Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to move it from schedule I to schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act.

The schedule I classification meant marijuana was alongside heroin, LSD, MDMA and synthetic opioids, whereas a schedule III classification put it in the same category as ketamine, anabolic steroids and testosterone.

Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, signed the order on Thursday and said in a post on X that the Department of Justice was “delivering on President Trump’s promise to improve American healthcare”.

“These actions will enable more targeted, rigorous research into marijuana’s safety and efficacy, expanding patients’ access to treatments and empowering doctors to make better-informed healthcare decisions,” Blanche’s post read.

The move comes mere days after Trump signed an executive order to speed a review of psychedelic drugs, including ibogaine, found in the root bark of a west African shrub, which also sits in the top category of illegal drugs with a high propensity for abuse. The order could pave the way for restrictions to ease and increase research on the psychedelic compound drugs for medical purposes.

Donald Trump is slated to star at a cryptocurrency bash on 25 April at his Mar-a-Lago club for scores of purchasers of his crypto memecoin $Trump that has enriched him while in office.

The move is fueling renewed criticism from top Democrats and ethics watchdogs that he is using the presidency for financial gains in a break with ethical norms.

The Trump-linked Fight Fight Fight LLC has hyped the event as “THE MOST EXCLUSIVE CRYPTO & BUSINESS CONFERENCE IN THE WORLD”. It’s promising a luncheon with Trump as its keynote speaker, according to the memecoin’s official website and its social media account.

To boost sales of $Trump, Fight Fight Fight LLC announced last month that the 25 April event is only open to the top 297 coin purchasers, and that the top 29 investors will be invited to a special reception with Trump.

However, the gala is scheduled for the same day as the White House Correspondents Dinner, which the president plans to attend, and could hamper his appearance in Florida.

Memecoins are highly volatile crypto tokens whose value is not tied to a real-world asset, rather to something that has gone viral on social media. Trump launched his memecoin just days before his 2025 inauguration.

Besides Trump, the upcoming bash is slated to feature talks by several crypto entrepreneurs, and draw Trump friends like Mike Tyson, the ex-boxer. The gala is strongly reminiscent of a dinner that Trump hosted at his Virginia golf club last May for 220 purchasers of $Trump. That dinner, which brought in $148m, drew stinging rebukes from many Democrats and watchdog groups who called it a “pay to play” ploy and a conflict of interest for the US president to host a gala not for campaign donations but for his personal financial benefit.

Also on Truth Social, the president reiterated his claims that US forces are in control of the critical waterway, while repeating claims that the Iranian regime is deeply fractured.

“Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is! They just don’t know!” Trump wrote. “The infighting is between the ‘Hardliners,’ who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the ‘Moderates,’ who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY! We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz.”

A reminder that the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, has not been seen or heard from since he took over last month. However, a statement reportedly from the new supreme leader was read out on state TV in March.

Donald Trump said he has ordered the US Navy “to shoot and kill any boat” that is laying mines in the strait of Hormuz.

On Truth Social, he also said that US minesweepers were working “at a tripled up level” to clear any mines from the waters.