Mitch McConnell statement suggests he considers Bill Pulte unfit for national intelligence director role – US politics live

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, before the CNN host Kaitlan Collins could even ask Donald Trump a question, he launched into a tirade against her, for not smiling in his presence, and went on to accuse her network of being responsible for the suicides of a number of his supporters who took part in the January 6 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

The rant began when the president was asked, by another reporter, to explain why he has apparently “decided to drop” the $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund his Department of Justice created to funnel taxpayer money to people indicted for committing crimes on his behalf.

Trump began by saying that he was strongly in favor of the fund, which he claimed he had no hand in creating, but it had been blocked by “a radical left judge”.

“I love it. I think it’s so important,” the president said. He then bemoaned what he said were the injustices committed against “great American people” who were prosecuted by the justice department during the Biden administration, without pointing out that many of his supporters who joined the January 6 riot either pleaded guilty to committing crimes or were convicted by juries of their peers.

As his monologue went on, Trump insisted that all of those indicted for the January 6 riot were innocent victims, himself included.

“These people, their lives have been destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many of them. And actually, I’m not just talking about a few people. Many of them”, the president said. “I’m one of them”, he added, calling the FBI raid on his beach club in Mar-a-Lago, where he illegally retained and tried to hide boxes of classified records, “fake and corrupt”.

It was then, entirely unprompted, that Trump turned his attention to attacking Collins who was standing in the room.

“CNN’s a very corrupt organization, with a corrupt reporter standing right there” the president said. Never smiles. She never- she’s a young, beautiful woman, never smiles. I never see a smile off her face [sic]. I see her standing with hatred in her eyes.”

Fifteen minutes later, when Collins finally got to ask Trump question, she brought the president back to the topic he was ranting about when he attacked her.

“Excuse me, Mr President, just to clarify: Is the $1.8bn DoJ fund dead or on hold?”

“I’d have to ask the lawyers”, Trump said before heading off on another tangent, in which he suggested that the people he held responsible for persecuting his supporters, and him, were not Biden administration prosecutors, but journalists like Collins who had reported on the crimes committed on January 6.

“The weaponization fund as far as I’m concerned was a beautiful thing” Trump said.

He then launched into a strident defense of the January 6 rioters who breached the Capitol and beat police officers, suggesting that they somehow deserved to be compensated with taxpayer finds for having been the victims of unflattering reporting.

“I thought that was the greatest thing because people like you have abused our people so badly”, Trump said to Collins. “The fake news, like CNN, like the New York Times, and like others have abused our people.”

As Collins tried to respond, Trump appeared to become even more irate that he was being questioned by a former reporter for the Daily Caller, a partisan conservative website.

“Wait a minute, be quiet”, the president said. “And you should be ashamed of yourself. You used to be a conservative. She was a conservative from Alabama, can you believe it?”

“But CNN, in particular, CNN does such false reporting. But now they have new ownership, so maybe it’ll straighten it out”, Trump continued, referring to the looming takeover of the network’s parent company by David Ellison, a Trump supporter who is currently overseeing the destruction of CBS News as a nonpartisan news organization.

“It’s hard to straighten garbage out. But CNN has abused, and others have abused so badly, people, these are people that are great people that were destroyed. Their families have been destroyed. Many suicides. They committed suicide. People that went there to with love. They went there with love”, Trump went on.

“You know, when I made that speech early in the day” Trump added, before a digression about the size of the crowd for his speech urging his supporters to go to the Capitol on January 6 2021. “There was so much love and and friendship. It was the most amazing thing. People were crying.”

When Collins again tried to interject, Trump refused to give way. “Wait a minute. Let me finish” he said. “Those people have been abused by you”.

“There’s something wrong with you” the president added after another long digression to attack his political rivals. “It’s a shame.”

He then called on a reporter from reliably pro-Trump correspondent, Iris Tao of the Epoch Times’s television channel, NTD, who praised the president’s “stirring words” in a Truth Social post attacking communism. The Epoch Times is owned by members of the dissident Chinese Falun Gong spiritual movement that the Chinese Communist Party has banned as a cult.

During a hearing in the US Senate on Wednesday, Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, confirmed that he threatened to beat the pulp out of Bill Pulte, the federal housing official Donald Trump intends to make his director of national intelligence.

Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican who is retiring at the end of his term, began his questioning of Bessent by asking whether reports of the threat last year, from Politico and the New York Times, were accurate.

“Did you actually tell Pulte you were going to punch him in the face?” Tillis asked.

“No, sir,” Bessent replied. “I actually said I was going to kick his ass.”

“I share the emotion,” the senator replied.

The secretary went on to downplay the importance of the threat of physical violence. “As I’ve said, that was last summer, the summer of 25,” Bessent said. “And many teams have fights in the locker room and then go out and win for the team on the field.”

“I was just curious,” Tillis said, before adding that he had made it clear that he would not support Pulte assuming office as acting director of national intelligence after the departure of Tulsi Gabbard at the end of June.

In getting Bessent on the record, Tillis ensured that reports about Pulte assuming the job of intelligence director, without any prior experience, will note the treasury secretary’s distaste for him.

“He lost me when he went after Powell,” Tillis added, referring to Pulte’s role in agitating for the firing or criminal investigation of former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.

The three top Democrats in the US House on Wednesday called for the Senate’s Republican leadership to pass the war powers resolution adopted by the House, which directs the president “to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran”.

After the House voted 215 to 208 to approve the resolution, the Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, whip Katherine Clark and caucus chair Pete Aguilar said in a statement:

More than three months ago, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth plunged America into a reckless and costly war of choice in the Middle East without clear objectives, an exit strategy, public support or the authorization required by the United States Congress. Republicans have since spent billions in taxpayer dollars and carelessly put our brave men and women in uniform into harm’s way while causing gas prices at home to skyrocket out of control.

Following repeated attempts to get sycophants in the Republican-controlled House to join us, House Democrats successfully passed our War Powers Resolution today to stand up for the American people and hold Donald Trump accountable. It is now time for Senate Republicans to do the right thing.

Before signing an executive order related to customs in the Oval Office on Wednesday, Donald Trump took seven minutes to reassure an anxious public, beset by worries about a protracted war with Iran, surging gasoline prices and rising inflation, that progress has been made on at least one front: the resurfacing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is nearly complete.

The pool, he added, is extremely long.

“We’ll have it open before July 4th,” the president announced, after once again holding up a series of renderings of what he assured the nation would be a beautified “reflecting pond, or the reflecting pool, as some people call it.”

To date, the only person to call it “the reflecting pond” appears to be the current president.

“It’ll last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything,” Trump said, pointing to the “very strong, powerful substance” the company he gave a no-bid contract to used to temporarily seal its base.

During his seven-minute monologue on the renovation, the president again made the point he seems fixated on: that the 2,028ft-long reflecting pool is so long that even some of the tallest buildings on the world would be shorter, if, for some reason, they were laid on their side.

He then called on an aide to hand him a poster comparing the length of the pool to three American skyscrapers: Chicago’s Willis (Sears) Tower, New York’s Empire State Building and One World Trade Center.

“I just had this done,” the president told reporters as he held up the poster he apparently commissioned.

As he explained the quite self-evident poster to the assembled White House press corps, the president was apparently dissatisfied with one element: the poster includes an accurate measurement of the reflecting pool’s length, slightly rounded up to 2,030ft.

The pool, the president insisted without explanation, is “actually much more than 2,000, close to, including everything its about 2,500ft, in length, to the end”.

The president did not explain what the “everything” was that he was including to reach the higher figure.

The US House of Representatives delivered a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump over his war on Iran on Wednesday, as representatives backed a move to force him to seek approval from Congress or withdraw US forces.

The House voted 215 to 208 in favor of the war powers resolution, as four Republicans voted with Democrats.

Wednesday’s vote came nearly two weeks after House Republicans cancelled an earlier scheduled vote, on the grounds that they lacked the votes to defeat it.

The Senate voted last month to advance a resolution forcing Trump to seek congressional approval after four Republican senators rebelled and voted with the Democrats.

While bragging about how great his deal with Iran will be, once he manages to close it, Donald Trump just told reporters a blatant lie about the 2015 Iran nuclear deal he withdrew from in 2018.

His deal, Trump said, will be “the exact opposite of the Obama deal. The Obama deal was a disgrace, it gave them a nuclear weapon.”

In fact, the very first paragraph of the deal sealed in July 2015 said the exact opposite.

Here is the full text of the agreement’s first words, negotiated by the US, the EU and five other nations:

The E3/EU+3 (China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy) and the Islamic Republic of Iran welcome this historic Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which will ensure that Iran’s nuclear programme will be exclusively peaceful, and mark a fundamental shift in their approach to this issue. They anticipate that full implementation of this JCPOA will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security. Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, Donald Trump was just asked in the ceasefire with Iran is still on, given the deadly Iranian attack on Kuwait’s international airport, and US strikes on Iran.

The president played down the significance of the Iranianattack that killed at least one person and wounded 63 in the first deadly attack in the Gulf since a ceasefire came into effect on 8 April.

“You know, there’s a reason for everything, and we hit them pretty hard” Trump said, casting Iran’s strike as retaliation. “They did something, not a big deal,” he added. “Some people would say they were slightly provoked because we took a strong action… they were reciprocating.”

He went on to suggest that talks on a peace deal are continuing. “I hear the negotiation is going well, very well.”

“If it happens, might not happen, but it if happens it could happen over the weekend,” the president said, of a deal to end the fighting he has been promising is imminent for months now.

Asked how he defined ‘ceasefire’, the president joked: “I’d say, in that part of the world, ‘ceasefire’ is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”

As some of his aides laughed, Trump turned to them and praised his own quip about an exchange of fire in which at least one person died and dozens were wounded. “That’s not bad,” he said.

The supreme court’s decision allowing Alabama to use a redrawn congressional map that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts in this year’s midterm elections “cuts off most escape routes from Callais and sends a clear signal that plaintiffs should just lose all claims involving race and redistricting”, said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard who studies elections.

“The district court meticulously explained why it found discriminatory intent and why the revised Section 2 framework was still satisfied. The court reversed all that in a cursory paragraph, which faulted the district court for not applying a presumption of good faith even though it clearly did, and which gullibly accepted Alabama’s purported redistricting goals even though they were just post hoc concoctions,” Stephanopoulos said.

He added: “I think it’s now pretty obvious that, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, like legislators saying they’re drawing lines to harm minority voters, the supreme court will not tolerate any federal judicial regulation of race and redistricting.”

Travis Crum, an election law professor at Washington University in St Louis, said the court had now offered states “a blueprint for identifying certain priorities – incumbent protection or a particular partisan makeup of the congressional delegation – that make it virtually impossible for Section 2 plaintiffs” to win cases.

“There might still be Section 2 litigation at the local level – where many races are non-partisan – or in states that ban partisan gerrymandering. But statewide Section 2 claims are basically non-starters across the south after Callais,” he said.

Richard Hasen, an election law scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the decision “not only reinforces the virtually impossible standard plaintiffs must face now to bring a Section 2 claim, they’ve practically closed the door on constitutional vote dilution claims as well. The court did so by using a nearly irrebuttable presumption that states are acting in good faith, which a state can meet by coming up with only pretextual reasons for drawing the map as it did.”

If there was a glimmer of a possibility that the Voting Rights Act survived a body blow of a decision from the US supreme court in Louisiana v Callais in April, the court’s conservative justices extinguished it yesterday evening.

In an unsigned order issued on the court’s emergency “shadow docket”, the court’s six conservative justices allowed Alabama to use a congressional map that gets rid of one of the state’s two majority-Black congressional districts. That map the state will use is one that a three-judge panel ruled was drawn with an intent to discriminate against Black voters.

Even after the supreme court made it nearly impossible to bring Voting Rights Act claims in Callais, there seemed a slim chance that it would uphold Alabama’s map. In Alabama, a lower court had found that the map was drawn with an intent to discriminate, something that wasn’t an issue in the Louisiana case.

But in its Tuesday order, the supreme court said that didn’t matter.

“Under Callais, the District Court was required to deny relief unless the plaintiffs’ alternative map performed ‘just as well’ with respect to all of the State’s constitutionally permissible districting criteria,” the court’s majority wrote. “Yet, the District Court found a violation even though the plaintiffs’ alternative map would not perform just as well as to the State’s constitutionally permissible criteria of keeping together the Gulf Coast community of interest and avoiding the pairing of incumbents.”

Donald Trump has also said in a post on Truth Social that he will travel to a G7 leaders’ summit in France later this month.

The president said in the post he would travel after the UFC fight at the White House on 14 June.

• The US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, refused to say whether Donald Trump, his family and his businesses would still get immunity from IRS audits after the administration yesterday abandoned plans for a $1.8bn fund that would have benefited the president’s allies. Bessent declined to answer when pressed repeatedly by lawmakers, citing the unresolved legal dispute, after the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, indicated yesterday that the provision remained unchanged.

• The Republican senator Mitch McConnell put out a scathing statement suggesting that Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, is not qualified to serve in the role. “Anyone performing this role of such immense public trust must have the extensive national security experience required by statute, and no nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote,” McConnell said. More on Pulte’s appointment here.

• The US secretary of state, Mario Rubio, told the House foreign affairs committee that Trump will be attending the Nato meeting of heads of state in Turkey next month. “I think the next meeting of Nato and Turkey in July is probably the most important meeting in Nato’s history, because there are some things here that need to be cleared up and fixed,” Rubio said.

• Rubio also admitted that the Trump administration “understood the risk factors” when it launched war on Iran, including that Tehran would retaliate against US allies in the region and close the strait of Hormuz, driving up costs globally. “Everyone knew what Iran would do in response … but they can’t have a nuclear weapon,” the secretary of state said.

• Donald Trump confirmed Axios’s report that he shouted and cursed at the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over Israel’s threats to resume airstrikes on Beirut’s southern suburbs earlier this week. “I was a little bit perturbed at his constantly fighting with Lebanon, you know, at some point I said, ‘Bibi, we gotta stop this, we gotta stop it,’” he told the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast.

• Trump also told the podcast that the vice-president, JD Vance, and the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, running together in 2028 would be “unbeatable”. “I would think that JD and Marco as a team would be very hard to beat,” Trump said. He has continued to fuel the succession talk even as both Vance and Rubio downplay their 2028 ambitions.

• Trump threatened tariffs of between 10% and 12.5% on 60 trading partners including the UK, the EU and Australia over alleged forced labour failures, in the latest attempt to revive his signature trade policy. The US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, said: “The failure of our most important trading partners to address the importation of goods made with forced labor is unacceptable. This creates a dynamic where American workers are forced to compete globally on an unlevel playing field. We will no longer tolerate this disparity.” Here’s our story.

• And finally, Senate Republicans officially dropped language providing up to $1bn for security upgrades to Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom from the updated text for their immigration enforcement bill released today. They unveiled the revised bill shortly before the first procedural vote on a motion to proceed with the measure.

Donald Trump is planning to attend game 3 of the Knicks-Spurs series, the first NBA finals game in New York in 27 years, on 8 June at Madison Square Garden, sources have told the New York Post, with the caveat that “there’s always the chance plans change”.

MSG performed security walk-throughs in preparation for the president’s potential visit, according to the Post’s sources.

The Republican senator Mitch McConnell put out a scathing statement today suggesting that Donald Trump’s pick for acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, is not qualified to serve in the role.

“Very few Senate-confirmable positions come with statutory eligibility requirements,” McConnell said. “There are good reasons why the director of national intelligence is one of them.”

Though he did not name Pulte in his statement, McConnell made clear that he would not vote for him to serve as DNI in a permanent capacity.

“Anyone performing this role of such immense public trust must have the extensive national security experience required by statute, and no nominee who falls short of this requirement will earn my vote,” he said.

McConnell was the only Republican to join with Democrats to vote against the confirmation of former DNI Tulsi Gabbard to the role, citing her “alarming lapses of judgment”.

“When a nominee’s record proves them unworthy of the highest public trust, and when their command of relevant policy falls short of the requirements of their office, the Senate should withhold its consent,” he said at the time.

Senate Republicans have officially dropped language providing up to $1bn for security upgrades to Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom from the updated text for their immigration enforcement bill released today.

GOP senators had already decided before the Memorial Day recess that they would not pass the $70bn legislation to restore funding to ICE and border patrol ahead of the 1 June deadline set by the US president amid concerns about the $1bn proposal for security measures and controversial plans to create a $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund (though the administration abandoned the latter yesterday).

Some Republican senators were concerned about the optics of funding the ballroom with taxpayer dollars amid a cost-of-living crisis in the lead-up to November’s midterm elections.

Republicans unveiled the revised bill shortly before the first procedural vote on a motion to proceed with the measure at about 2.30pm ET.

At his Senate finance committee hearing earlier today, the US treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, dodged a slew of questions about Donald Trump’s contentious $1.8bn “anti-weaponization” fund – which is as of yesterday dead in the water – and repeatedly deferred to the justice department on the president’s IRS settlement.

“I’m unable to comment because of litigation,” he told the Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse. “Treasury is represented by the Department of Justice in all matters. They act as our attorneys, so I would suggest that you direct your questions to acting attorney general [Todd] Blanche.”

Bessent declined to comment on whether the provision that provides Trump and his family with immunity from IRS audits is still in place. Blanche said yesterday that it was.

The Democratic senator Catherine Cortez also pressed Bessent on whether other taxpayers whose returns were leaked alongside Trump’s would receive “the same immunity as President Trump and his family received”, but Bessent deflected once again.

“Treasury does not give any of that,” Bessent said. “We are represented by the justice department.”

Pressed again, he said only: “We will follow the instructions and the settlement.”

Mario Rubio, the US secretary of state, told the House foreign affairs committee today that Donald Trump will be attending the Nato meeting of heads of state in Turkey next month.

“The president himself will be attending,” Rubio said.

Trump has long criticized Nato but has escalated his rhetoric over the war in Iran. In April, he called the 77-year-old alliance a “paper tiger” and suggesting the US may consider leaving after Nato member countries ignored his call for military assistance to help reopen the strait of Hormuz.

“I think the next meeting of Nato and Turkey in July is probably the most important meeting in Nato’s history, because there are some things here that need to be cleared up and fixed,” Rubio said on Wednesday.

For anyone who needs a reminder on section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – due to expire next week – here’s an explainer:

Donald Trump’s appointment of a close political ally with no intelligence experience to lead the nation’s spy agencies has thrown last-ditch efforts to renew a critical surveillance program into doubt.

Bill Pulte, currently head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), major Republican donor and heir to a home construction fortune, was tapped by Trump to serve as acting director of national intelligence days after Tulsi Gabbard departed the role.

Senior Democrats immediately said the move could doom a fragile bipartisan agreement to renew section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is due to expire next week.

Section 702 permits US intelligence agencies to collect communications of foreign targets operating outside the country without a warrant. Congress is working toward a deadline of 12 June.

More here:

Jacobs then asked Rubio who won the 2020 presidential election.

Rubio declined to answer, insisting that he was “not here to answer” questions about that because “this is a foreign affairs committee”.

“I don’t answer the question because as secretary of state, I do not participate in domestic political issues,” he said.

Jacobs replied that the question wasn’t about a political issue but about democracy.