Fox News host urged Trump to seize Kharg Island ahead of US strikes – US politics live

This concludes our live coverage of US politics for the day, but for updates on the US war on Iran, please visit our Middle East crisis live blog. Here are the days developments:

• Donald Trump order the US military to bomb military targets on Kharg Island, a vital oil transit point for 90% of Iran’s oil exports, and threatned to attack oil infrastructure if Iran does not re-open the strait of Hormuz.

• Trump told the Guardian in a 1988 interview he was reminded of by Fox News on Friday that, should he ever become US president: “I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it.”

• Twice on Friday, vice-president JD Vance cited secrecy to dodge questions about claims by unnamed administration officials that he is “skeptical” about or even opposed to the war on Iran.

• Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, called on the justice department to drop what he called the “weak and frivolous” criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, after a federal judge blocked a justice department subpoena of Powell on Friday.

• In the midst of armed hostilities with Iran in a war he started, Trump found time on Friday to concern himself with what he apparently considers a pressing issue: who will run the Kennedy Center, the living memorial to John F Kennedy created by Congress that Trump added his name to, while it is closed for renovations.

Thirty six years before Donald Trump ordered military strikes on Iran’s vital oil hub, Kharg island, he told the Guardian that he would attack the island if he ever became president and Iran fired even one bullet at an American.

In a 1988 interview with the Guardian, which Trump was reminded of during a Fox News interview on Friday morning, Polly Toynbee, now a Guardian columnist, asked the businessman what his platform would be if he ever did run for president.

“Respect,” Trump replied.

“We’re a second rate economic power, a debtor nation. We’re getting kicked around,” he added.

When Toynbee asked him what he would do about Iran, Trump replied:

I’d be harsh on Iran. They’ve been beating us psychologically, making us look a bunch of fools. One bullet shot at one of our men or ships and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it. Iran can’t even beat Iraq, yet they push the United States around. It’d be good for the world to take them on.

Seven years before that interview, the New York Times and other outlets had reported that Pentagon invasion plans for Iran drawn up during the 1979 hostage crisis started with an attack on Kharg Island.

The White House released a list of family members and close aides traveling to Florida with Donald Trump on Air Force One this evening.

In addition to his wife, Melania Trump, the president is accompanied by his father-in-law, Viktor Knavs who is just two years older than his son-in-law.

Others on the flight include: the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, who tried and failed to conceal from the public that he once visited Trump’s former friend, Jeffrey Epstein, on the late child sex offender’s private island.

One of the aides on the flight is Walt Nauta, a former US Navy valet to Trump during his first term, who was indicted along with Trump by special counsel Jack Smith in 2023 for allegedly helping Trump retain and hide boxes of classified documents at his beach club, Mar-a-Lago, when he was not president.

The traveling party also includes Dan Scavino and Natalie Harp, the only two aides who are reported to have permission to post in Trump’s name on his Truth Social account.

Scavino, a deputy chief of staff, started as Trump’s golf caddy and is widely credited with orchestrating his social media presence.

Harp left her job as a host on the far-right One America News channel in 2022 to become what some colleagues called Trump’s “human printer”, because she carried around a portable printer to provide her boss with hard copies of social media posts, articles and conspiracy theories flattering him and demeaning his rivals.

In 2023, a half-dozen people around Trump told the New York Times that Harp had written a series of letters to Trump that unnerved people around him.

“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.

“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

Just 24 hours before Donald Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s Kharg island, a vital oil hub home to 10,000 people, one of the president’s favorite cable news pundits suggested that seizing the island could end the war and make it safe for shipping through the strait of Hormuz to resume.

Iran exports about 90% of its crude oil through facilities on the island, which is about 20 miles off the mainland in the Persian Gulf.

“We might not get what we got in Venezuela, but as long as Iran’s completely disarmed, and can’t threaten America and the strait with missiles, drone and nukes, the president will take the win,” Jesse Watters told his Fox News viewers Thursday night.

“We also have Kharg island, 15 miles off Iran’s coast, their main export terminal, essentially the country’s cash register,” Watters added. “Kharg’s Iran’s oil lifeline; if we seize it, it’s over. That option remains on the table.”

In 1980, nine months after 52 American were taken hostage at the US embassy in Tehran, the columnist Jack Anderson revealed that Kharg Island was the primary target of a US invasion plan presented to then president Jimmy Carter. “Kharg Island is the site of the oil terminal through which 90 percent of Iran’s crude is pumped into tankers for export,” Anderson wrote. “Not long after the U.S. hostages were seized in Iran, contingency plans were developed for an assault on Kharg Island.”

After Carter was defeated the New York Times reported in a 1981 account of the hostage crisis that the Pentagon plans for military action against Iran, included a naval blockade, mining its harbors, and seizing of the huge oil depot on Kharg Island. “The closest Mr. Carter came to ordering such action,” he told the Times, “was on Nov. 20, 1979, 14 days after the seizure, when the Ayatollah was publicly threatening to put the hostages on trial for espionage.”

Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, whose campaign was believed by some Carter aides to have cut a secret deal with Iran’s leaders to prolong the hostage crisis and prevent their releaser in a pre-election “October surprise” that could have swayed the 1980 election, also left Kharg untouched during the 1908s Iran-Iraq war.

“Although Iraqi forces struck some ‌terminals ⁠and tankers during the eight-year war, Kharg remained largely operational and damage was typically repaired quickly, demonstrating that disabling it would require sustained, large-scale attacks,” JP Morgan said in a note reported by Reuters on Monday.

From his seat on Air Force One, which is ferrying him to his Florida beach club, Donald Trump just announced on social media that the US military has “executed one of the most powerful bombing raids in the History of the Middle East, and totally obliterated every MILITARY target in Iran’s crown jewel, Kharg Island.”

The five-mile-long coral island, located about 15 miles off the coast of mainland Iran in the northern Persian Gulf, had been previously untouched in US bombing, given its importance to Iran’s oil exports, 90% of which originate there.

Trump claimed that only military targets were struck, since, “for reasons of decency, I have chosen NOT to wipe out the Oil Infrastructure on the Island.”

“However, should Iran, or anyone else, do anything to interfere with the Free and Safe Passage of Ships through the Strait of Hormuz, I will immediately reconsider this decision,” he added.

Iran has effectively closed the strait, a vital channel out of the Persian Gulf for up to 20% of the world’s oil supply, by attacking commercial ships and laying mines.

Twice on Friday, vice-president JD Vance cited secrecy to dodge questions about claims by unnamed administration officials that he is “skeptical” about or even opposed to the war on Iran Donald Trump launched two weeks ago from an improvised situation room at his Florida beach club.

Trump himself told reporters on Monday at his Florida golf club that Vance “was, I’d say, philosophically a little different from me. I think he was maybe less enthusiastic about going, but he was still quite enthusiastic.”

After Politico reported early Friday that one official texted a reporter that Vance is “skeptical”, “worried about success” and “just opposes” the war on Iran, the vice-president was asked at an event in North Carolina about what he advised the president to do before the attack on Iran, and whether he still has the concerns he has expressed in the past about extended wars.

Vance laughed at the question and then told the reporter who asked: “Imagine the situation: we’re in the Situation Room, where you can’t even take your ipod in there, or your airpods I guess what they’re called, you can’t take your iphone in there, you can’t take anything in there, because it is the most classified space anywhere in the world. And I sit there with Pete Hegseth and General Caine and Marco Rubio and the entire White House team, and the president and I, and the entire senior team, are talking about the options”.

“I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not gonna show up here and in front of God and everybody else tell you exactly what I said in that classified room,” the vice-president said, to laughter from the audience.

“Partially because I don’t wanna go to prison,” he continued, “and partially because I think it’s important for the president of the United States to be able to talk to his advisors without those advisors running their mouth to the American media.”

Speaking to reporters after the event, the vice-president was pressed to explain Trump’s remarks. “The president said earlier this week that you had a philosophical difference, than him, that you were less enthusiastic on the onset of this war. Is that true? And what is your opinion of how it’s going?” a reporter asked.

“When you’re thinking about a major decision like this, the way the president makes these decisions is he talks to a lot of people,” Vance replied.

“Obviously we’re thinking about various ins and outs, various options, what this looks like, how to accomplish our goals, what our goals should be, and I think it’s important for the president of the United States to be able to have that conversation with his team, without his team then running their mouth to the American media,” the cive-resident continued. “So part of what makes our national security team so cohesive is that we all trust each other, and we all have a very free exchange of ideas. I’d like to keep that going.”

Vance then ended the exchange and walked away.

The vice-president’s assertion that the decision to start a war with Iran was made in “the most classified space anywhere in the world”, the White House Situation Room, was undercut somewhat by photographs from the first day of the war, which showed Vance in the Situation Room, while Trump conferred with Rubio, Caine, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and Dan Scavino, Trump’s former caddie turned social media guru, in a makeshift situation room at his Mar-a-Lago beach club, secured mainly by black drapes.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, called on the justice department to drop what he called the “weak and frivolous” criminal investigation of the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, after a federal judge blocked a justice department subpoena of Powell on Friday.

Tillis, who promised in January to block the confirmation of any nominee for the Federal Reserve board, including Donald Trump’s pick to replace Powell at the end of his term this year, unless the Powell investigation was dropped, reiterated that threat

The ruling, Tillis wrote in a statement, confirms that the investigation of Powell, who has refused to lower interest rates as Trump demands, “is nothing more than a failed attack on Fed independence.”

“We all know how this is going to end and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office should save itself further embarrassment and move on,” Tillis added. “Appealing the ruling will only delay the confirmation of Kevin Warsh as the next Fed Chair.”

Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host appointed US attorney for Washington DC by Trump, heatedly dismissed Tillis’s plea, in a news conference in which she said the decision by “an activist judge” would be appealed, and scolded journalists for asking her why grand juries are refusing to charge people her office seeks to prosecute for what appear to be partisan, political reasons.

Asked directly about Tillis’s threat to block Trump’s nominees, Pirro said: “honestly, I don’t know and I don’t care. You know why? I am in a legal lane. All of the rest is white noise. I don’t care what they say.”

Pressed as to whether she could assure the senator that the investigation would be dropped, Pirro shot back: “Did you hear what I just said? I just said that this decision will be appealed.”

Moments later, as Pirro insisted that she did not even know who Trump’s pick to lead the Fed after Powell was, she was forced to silence an incoming call on her phone.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the senior Democrat on the banking committee, also said that the Senate should not confirm any new nominees to the Federal Reserve unless and until politically motivated criminal investigations into both the central bank’s chair, Powell, and a board member, Lisa Cook, end.

In a social media post, Warren said that the ruling by federal district court judge James Boasberg, blocking a justice department subpoena of Powell, just confirmed “what we all already know: the Trump Administration’s weaponization of DOJ against Jerome Powell amounts to nothing more than a witch hunt.”

“The Senate should not move forward with any Fed nomination until the probes against Powell and Lisa Cook are dropped,” Warren said.

A group of protesters in Texas was found guilty of providing support for terrorism and other charges on Friday in a closely watched case in which prosecutors alleged anti-ICE activists were actually part of an antifa cell.

The case was seen as a major test of the first amendment and whether the government could use a broad anti-terrorism statute to prosecute leftwing protesters. It marked the first time the government alleged individuals were part of an antifa terrorist cell in a criminal prosecution.

Nine defendants – Benjamin Song, Zachary Evetts, Autumn Hill, Meagan Morris, Maricela Rueda, Savanna Batten, Ines Soto, Elizabeth Soto and Daniel Sanchez-Estrada – were all tried together in the case. They faced a mix of charges of providing material support to terrorists, rioting, attempted murder, as well as firearms and explosive charges.

Sanchez-Estrada was the only defendant not at the protest, and was only charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, after prosecutors say he moved leftwing zines following the arrest of his wife, Maricela Rueda, on the Fourth of July. Song also escaped after the incident and there was an 11-day manhunt for him. Several other people were charged with assisting Song during that period.

The nine defendants were convicted on all of the charges they faced, with limited exceptions. Of the five charged with attempted murder, Evetts, Hill, Morris and Rueda were acquitted on three counts of attempted murder and firearms charges. Song was acquitted on two charges of attempted murder and convicted on one. He was also convicted of the firearms charges.

In the midst of armed hostilities with Iran in a war he started, Donald Trump found time on Friday to concern himself with what he apparently considers a pressing issue: who will run the Kennedy Center, the living memorial to John F Kennedy created by Congress that Trump added his name to, while it is closed for renovations.

Trump announced on social media that he has replaced Ric Grenell, the belligerent Republican activist currently running the arts center, with Matt Floca, the operations vice president, who was photographed in December personally overseeing the addition of Trump’s name to the center’s facade by the independent journalist Chris Geidner.

Earlier in the day, as US forces remain engaged in combat with Iran, Trump shared renderings for the renovation of what he called the “new, highly improved, TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER!”

Grenell, long known for his hyper-aggressive confrontations with journalists and political rivals on Twitter and then X, served as US ambassador to Germany and then acting director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term. He was appointed despite no prior arts experience.

A source “familiar with the White House view” told CNN that Trump blames Grenell for doing a bad job of managing the publicity for the Kennedy Center during his tenure. The president apparently blames Grenell for a host of artists cancelling appearances after Trump had himself appointed chairman of the center’s board, and then had his name added to the exterior wall of the center, despite lacking congressional approval for changing the name of the memorial to his assassinated predecessor.

Grenell was rumored to have been in contention to be Trump’s second-term secretary of state, after he brokered a limited economic agreement between Serbia and Kosovo in 2020 that the president falsely portrayed as ending the war between the two former Yugoslav regions which concluded decades earlier.

As the independent journalist Jacqueline Sweet reported a week after the 2024 election, Grenell deleted more than 6,371 of his old posts on Twitter, now X, including tweets as far back as 2012 when he joined Mitt Romney campaign as foreign policy spokesman, before being ousted after just weeks when his abrasive posts came to light.

• A federal judge in Washington DC blocked two justice department subpoenas to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – including one seeking testimony from chair Jerome Powell – over his remarks to Congress on the central bank’s renovation project. In a 27-page ruling issued on Friday, chief judge James Boasberg said “a mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning.”

• Speaking to Fox News, Donald Trump again tried to limit concerns around the economy in the wake of the war on Iran, particularly the increasing price of fuel. “This will bounce right back when it’s over, and I don’t think it’s going to be long when it’s over,” he said. When asked when that might be, Trump said it would be up to him: “When I feel it in my bones.”

• The armed suspect who crashed into a large Michigan synagogue had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, an unnamed official told the Associated Press on Friday. Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized US citizen born in Lebanon, was killed by security after ramming into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township outside Detroit on Thursday.

• During his Pentagon press conference on Friday, Pete Hegseth downplayed disruption to the strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed off. “We have been dealing with it, and don’t need to worry about it,” the defense secretary said without offering much detail.

• Employees at the Transport Security Administration (Tsa) are set to miss their first full paychecks on Friday, as the partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) nears a month. This week, the Senate failed again to pass a funding bill to reopen the department, as Democratic lawmakers demand stronger guardrails on federal immigration enforcement.

A federal judge in Washington DC blocked two justice department subpoenas to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors – including one seeking testimony from chair Jerome Powell – over his remarks to Congress on the central bank’s renovation project.

Powell is a frequent target of Donald Trump.

The president frequently disparages the outgoing Fed chair – calling on him to cut interest rates, and regularly referring to him as Jerome “too late” Powell.

In a 27-page ruling issued on Friday, chief judge James Boasberg said “a mountain of evidence suggests that the Government served these subpoenas on the Board to pressure its Chair into voting for lower interest rates or resigning.”

He added that “on the other side of the scale, the Government has produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime”. Boasberg ultimately found that the subpoenas were issued “for an improper purpose” and the court “will quash them”.

A reminder that Powell’s term leading the Federal Reserve expires in May. The president nominated former Fed governor Kevin Warsh to lead the central bank. However, Trump has been met resistance from lawmakers, including Republican Thom Tillis. The North Carolina senator is a crucial vote on the Senate banking committee, and refused to confirm Warsh until the probe into Powell was dropped.

“This ruling confirms just how weak and frivolous the criminal investigation of Chairman Powell is and it is nothing more than a failed attack on Fed independence,” Tillis said on Friday. “We all know how this is going to end and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office should save itself further embarrassment and move on.”

During his phone interview with Fox News today, the president also said that he believes Russia might be helping Iran “a little bit”.

I think he might be helping him a little bit, yeah, I guess. And he probably thinks we’re helping Ukraine, right? Yeah, we’re helping [Ukraine] also. And so, [Putin] says that, and China would say the same thing. You know, it’s like, hey, they do it and we do it. In all fairness, they do it and we do it.

This comes after Trump also relaxed certain sanctions on Russia, amid the whipsawing price of oil in the wake of the conlict with Iran.

Speaking to Fox News, the president again tried to limit concerns around the economy in the wake of the war on Iran, particularly the increasing price of fuel. “This will bounce right back when it’s over, and I don’t think it’s going to be long when it’s over,” he said.

When asked when that might be, Trump said it would be up to him: “When I feel it in my bones.”

During an interview with Fox News earlier today, Donald Trump said he did believe Iran’s new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei is alive. “I think he’s damaged, but I think he’s probably alive in some form,” the president told Brian Kilmeade in a phone interview.

At a Pentagon press conference on Friday, Pete Hegseth said he believed Khamenei to be “likely disfigured”.

Trump also said that if needed, US forces will escort ships through the strait of Hormuz, after the Iranian regime severely disrupted passage through the crucial waterway. “We would do it if we needed to,” the president said today. “But, you know, hopefully things are going to go very well.”

The Pentagon is moving additional marines and warships to the Middle East, three unnamed officials tell the Wall Street Journal.

As the Iranian regime continues to disrupt the flow of oil and cargo ships through the strait of Hormuz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth has approved a request from US Central Command (Centcom) to send a unit “typically consisting of several warships and 5,000 Marines and sailors” to the region, according the officials cited.

According to the Journal, the Japan-based USS Tripoli and its attached Marines are now headed for the Middle East. Marines are already in the Middle East supporting the Iran operation, the officials said.

The extra force comes as the Trump administration routinely claims that the US military has significantly degraded Iranian capabilities to the point of victory. Earlier this week, the Donald Trump boasted “we won”, while on stage at an event in northern Kentucky. On Friday. The president also told Fox News earlier today thathe US plans on hitting Iran “very hard” over the next week.

At a Pentagon press conference today, Hegseth was bellicose. “[Iran’s] production lines, their military plants, their defence innovation centres; defeated. Iran’s leadership is in no better shape,” he told reporters. “Desperate and hiding, they’ve gone underground, cowering – that’s what rats do.”

Only 77 ships have so far crossed the strait of Hormuz in March as the Mideast war disrupts one of the world’s most vital shipping routes, a maritime data firm reported on Friday.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence said most of these vessels belonged to the so-called ‘shadow fleet’ – ships used to skirt Western sanctions and regulations, typically linked to Russia and Iran.

They are often ageing ships in poor condition, without proper insurance and with opaque ownership.

The 77 transits recorded so far this month compare with 1,229 passages between 1 and 11 March last year, according to Lloyd’s List Intelligence.

Reporting from Portland, Oregon

US immigration agents in Oregon used a custom-made app to identify neighborhoods and people to target, and had daily arrest quotas they sought to meet during operations, courtroom testimony has revealed.

Details about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers’ surveillance tools and arrest goals in the state have come to light in a federal lawsuit that compelled officers to answer questions under oath, offering a rare window into opaque, internal strategies that are generally kept secret and have been driving mass detentions and chaotic raids.

The class-action suit, filed by Innovation Law Lab, an immigrants’ rights non-profit, challenged ICE’s practice of detaining people without warrants or probable cause. Advocates said the tactic resulted in widespread racial profiling and unconstitutional arrests, and a federal judge sided with the plaintiffs, issuing a ruling broadly halting warrantless arrests in Oregon.

Testimony in a December hearing in the case provided a remarkable acknowledgment by an ICE officer of how daily target arrest numbers played out at the local level, and appeared to contradict the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials’ repeated claims that officers didn’t have quotas. Trump adviser Stephen Miller has publicly said the administration’s target was 3,000 daily arrests. The hearing also appeared to be the first time that ICE disclosed in court its use of an app called Elite for operations.

In the hearing, an ICE agent identified as JB testified that his team was given a verbal order to target eight arrests a day.

JB’s team was made up of nine to 12 officers and was tied to the DHS’s so-called “Operation Black Rose”, which launched in Portland last fall and yielded more than 1,200 arrests through mid-December, according to DHS. The target of eight daily arrests a team suggested a potential quota of about 50 daily arrests across Oregon, Innovation Law Lab estimated.

Read the full report:

The armed suspect who crashed into a large Michigan synagogue had lost four family members in an Israeli airstrike in his native Lebanon last week, an unnamed official told the Associated Press on Friday.

Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, 41, a naturalized US citizen born in Lebanon, was killed by security after ramming into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township outside Detroit on Thursday. There were no casualties or injuries to the synagogue’s staff, teachers and 140 children at the early childhood center on site.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which is leading the investigation, described the attack as an act of violence targeting the Jewish community.

Ghazali came to the US in 2011 on a family-related visa as the spouse of a US citizen and was granted US citizenship in 2016, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

A local official in Mashgharah, in central Lebanon, told the Associated Press on Friday that Ghazali’s two brothers and a niece and nephew were killed at their home in the 5 March airstrike just after sunset as they were having their fast-breaking meal during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

At a press conference on Froday, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer said she would not comment on whether she believed the attack was in response to the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran, that has also resulted in mass casualties and displacement in Lebanon as Israel attempts to strikes Hezbollah targets.

“Putting my theories into the press is not going to help an investigation, so I’m going to refrain from that,” Whitmer told reporters.

The governor did call the Thursday attack antisemitic. “It was hate, plain and simple,” she added. “We must lower the rhetoric in the state and in this country, especially at this moment where we’ve seen such a rise in antisemitism and more attacks on the Jewish community. We must keep each other close. This community is on the edge.”