House Democrats file six articles of impeachment against defense secretary Pete Hegseth
Yassamin Ansari, a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, and colleagues including John Larson of Connecticut filed six articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth on Wednesday, accusing the defense secretary of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in relation to the attack on Iran without congressional authorization, deadly strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats, sharing classified information on Signal and other official acts.
The articles also include Hegesth’s “efforts to withhold material facts relating to civilian casualties and operational conduct in Iran and Venezuela”; his attempt to punish the senator Mark Kelly, a retired US navy captain, for reminding service members that they can refuse illegal orders; and forcing transgender service members from the military.
“Pete Hegseth did not follow his oath to the US constitution,” Ansari told the reporter Pablo Manríquez. “He committed a war crime in Iran with the attack on a school that killed over 160 children. So not only do we need to end this war, but we need to hold accountable and prosecute anyone in the US administration who may have committed war crimes.”
“Pete Hegseth has been committing crimes and violating his oath,” Ansari added. “So I have no doubt that if this absolute clown – this former Fox News, not even a real anchor – continues in his position, there will be more, and we will get more support and I urge my colleagues to join me. He is a national security risk to the United States.”
Key events
Summary
That’s all for live coverage today, thanks for following along. Here are some key links and developments from the day:
Sonia Sotomayor apologizes to Brett Kavanaugh for ‘hurtful’ comments
Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal US supreme court justice, has issued an unusual apology to Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative on the court, after she publicly criticized him at a recent event.
Speaking at the University of Kansas, Sotomayor referenced a consequential 6-3 decision last year in which the court said federal immigration agents could stop people in Los Angeles for simply appearing Latino or speaking Spanish, a ruling that advocates said “effectively legalized racial profiling”.
Kavanaugh faced widespread scrutiny at the time for his concurring opinion in the case, which said race can be a “relevant factor” alongside other “common sense” indicators, such as employment in agriculture, to justify questioning individuals about their immigration status. He also downplayed the impact on lawful residents wrongfully stopped by agents, saying those encounters were “typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free”. Some critics subsequently used the term “Kavanaugh stops” to refer to racially motivated arrests by agents.
In her recent remarks, Sotomayor said: “I had a colleague in that case who wrote, you know, these are only temporary stops. This is from a man whose parents were professionals. And probably doesn’t really know any person who works by the hour.”
Today, in a brief statement released by the court, Sotomayor apologized, though did not reference Kavanaugh by name, saying: “At a recent appearance at the University of Kansas School of Law, I referred to a disagreement with one of my colleagues in a prior case, but I made remarks that were inappropriate. I regret my hurtful comments. I have apologized to my colleague.”
A January 6 defendant who was pardoned by Donald Trump will plead guilty to charges in a separate case involving child sexual abuse allegations, NBC News reports.
In January 2025, David Daniel, a North Carolina man, pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement during the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. He was granted clemency when Trump returned to office and issued mass pardons.
Court documents posted by NBC News show that on Tuesday, Daniel’s lawyer indicated his client intended to enter a plea agreement in a case involving claims that he enticed a minor under age 12 to “engage in sexually explicit conduct” to produce a “visual depiction” of the conduct.
Last month, a Florida man who had been convicted of January 6 charges, was sentenced to life in prison in a separate child sexual abuse case. He was one of several January 6 defendants who were pardoned by Trump’s sweeping clemency order, then charged with new crimes.
Senate fails to block US weapons sales to Israel
An effort led by Bernie Sanders to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel has failed to pass, but the vote count suggested there was growing interest among Democrats to limit US weapons transfers to its longtime ally.
A total of 40 senators voted for the Sanders-backed resolution to prevent the sale of of $295m in bulldozers, and 36 members backed a second resolution to stop a $151.8m sale of 12,000 1,000lb bombs to Israel’s military. In July, 27 members had backed similar proposals, and last April, only 15 of the Democratic caucus’s 47 members supported related measures.
This was the fourth time Sanders has forced consideration of resolutions cutting off military aid for Israel in the Senate. The measures have been rejected by the chamber’s GOP majority. Sanders is an independent who caucuses with Democrats.
Sanders earlier cited a Pew Research Center survey finding that 80% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans have negative views of Israel, saying, “Let us be clear: given the horrific and illegal behavior of the Netanyahu government over the last three years, the American people have had enough. Support for Israel in this country has plummeted.”
More background here:
California disbars John Eastman, lawyer behind Trump’s fake electors scheme and birthright citizenship order
John Eastman, the Republican legal scholar who convinced Donald Trump that he could stay in office despite losing the 2020 election, by illegally offering alternate slates of electors to Congress, lost his license to practice law in the state of California on Wednesday, when the state’s supreme court refused to hear his appeal of his disbarment over his role in the scheme.
“The court orders that John Charles Eastman (Respondent), State Bar Number 193726, is disbarred from the practice of law in California and that Respondent’s name is stricken from the roll of attorneys,” the court said in a brief order posted online.
Eastman, a fellow at the far-right Claremont Institute who once served as a law clerk for US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas in the United States Supreme Court, was also behind Trump’s executive order seeking to deny birthright citizenship to the children of immigrants or visitors to the US.
Eastman is also a member of the bar in Washington DC, although his license to practice there was was suspended last year.
Before he clerked for Thomas, Eastman had clerked for Judge Michael Luttig, a conservative star who advised then vice-president Mike Pence that he had no authority to consider alternate slates of electors, as president of the Senate during the counting of electoral college votes, and rebuked his former aide’s theories on then-Twitter as “incorrect at every turn.”
Eastman has also argued for decades that the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, granting citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” should be read to exclude the children of people who are not US citizens when their child is born.
In 2020, Eastman claimed — in a discredited Newsweek op-ed that the publication sort of apologized for publishing — that California-born Kamala Harris had no claim to citizenship at birth, since her parents were still, at the time, subject not just to the jurisdiction of the United States but also to their native lands of India and Jamaica.
In 2019, Trump thanked Eastman and praised him as a “Brilliant Constitutional Lawyer” in two tweets urging his followers to watch a Fox News interview in which the Claremont scholar claimed that “the essential criteria for the appointment of” special counsel Robert Mueller to look into the Russian effort to help elect Trump in 2016 “did not exist.”
Dara Kerr
Sheldon Whitehouse, a democrat senator from Rhode Island, launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI on Wednesday. The senator sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin requesting that the agency look into the billionaire’s continued use of unpermitted methane gas turbines at his xAI data center in Southaven, Mississippi.
“Given the scale of emissions, the repeated use of unpermitted turbines, and the disproportionate effects on surrounding communities, EPA’s lack of enforcement is alarming,” wrote Whitehouse, who’s the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Musk has two massive data centers in the Memphis metropolitan area, one in the city’s industrial zone and the other just over the Tennessee border in Southaven. Both facilities have used unpermitted portable gas-burning generators, known to emit toxic pollutants including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde. The Memphis data center ultimately got a permit for 15 turbines.
Whitehouse’s investigation comes one day after the NAACP sued xAI over allegations of violating the Clean Air Act in Southaven. The civil rights group says xAI has been polluting areas with homes, schools and churches, including in historically Black communities, by operating more than two dozen methane gas generators without permits.
Whitehouse called xAI’s turbine array in Southaven a “de facto power plant” and said the EPA has the legal responsibility to carry out its enforcement obligations.
Republican senator compares Trump-driven investigation of Fed chair to ‘a Dave Chappelle skit’
In a statement that no doubt baffled many elderly, conservative Fox News viewers, Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, told the broadcaster on Wednesday that the Trump administration’s refusal to drop a criminal investigation into the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, “feels like it could be a Dave Chappelle skit, its so comedic”.
Tillis, who has said repeatedly that he won’t support any nomination to replace Powell as long as there is what appears to be a politically motivated investigation into him, was reacting to a Wall Street Journal report that prosecutors showed up unannounced on Tuesday at the construction site for the Fed’s renovations.
The exact reference was hard for even fans of the comedian to discern, but Tillis previously said in February that, if the investigation continued, “future hearings for the treasury secretary and other members will be a lot like that Chappelle skit, ‘I plead the fifth’”.
In an interview with NPR broadcast on Wednesday, Chappelle expressed some discomfort with how Republican politicians had used his jokes about transgender Americans for political gain.
Chapplle said he resents how “the Republican Party ran on transgender jokes. I felt like they were doing a weaponized version of what I was doing. That’s not what I was doing.”
“I was on Capitol Hill, and everybody ran up to take pictures with me from every congressional office. And I just take pictures with whoever asked,” he added. “At first, it was CBC people. Then here comes Lauren Boebert and she said, ‘Can I get a picture?’ And I had already taken 40 pictures. I didn’t want to say no in front of everybody, but I didn’t know the phrase ‘I respectfully decline.’ So I just took the picture. And then she posted the picture and says something to the effect of, ‘Just two people that know that it’s just two genders.’ Just instantly, like, weaponized or politicized. So I got to the arena, and I lit her ass up for doing that. And she should never do that to a person like me.”
House Democrats file six articles of impeachment against defense secretary Pete Hegseth
Yassamin Ansari, a Democratic congresswoman from Arizona, and colleagues including John Larson of Connecticut filed six articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth on Wednesday, accusing the defense secretary of “high crimes and misdemeanors” in relation to the attack on Iran without congressional authorization, deadly strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats, sharing classified information on Signal and other official acts.
The articles also include Hegesth’s “efforts to withhold material facts relating to civilian casualties and operational conduct in Iran and Venezuela”; his attempt to punish the senator Mark Kelly, a retired US navy captain, for reminding service members that they can refuse illegal orders; and forcing transgender service members from the military.
“Pete Hegseth did not follow his oath to the US constitution,” Ansari told the reporter Pablo Manríquez. “He committed a war crime in Iran with the attack on a school that killed over 160 children. So not only do we need to end this war, but we need to hold accountable and prosecute anyone in the US administration who may have committed war crimes.”
“Pete Hegseth has been committing crimes and violating his oath,” Ansari added. “So I have no doubt that if this absolute clown – this former Fox News, not even a real anchor – continues in his position, there will be more, and we will get more support and I urge my colleagues to join me. He is a national security risk to the United States.”
Adria R Walker
On Monday, Virginia’s governor, Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat and the state’s first female governor, signed into law a bill that eliminates tax exemptions for organizations connected to the Confederacy.
HB167, passed by Democrats in the Virginia house and senate, specifically removes the Virginia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Stonewall Jackson Memorial, the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the Confederate Memorial Literary Society, along with other groups, from the state’s list of organizations that are exempt from state property taxes.
Founded in 1894, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is a non-profit with chapters in states including California, Kentucky, South Carolina and others. The organization is largely responsible for the proliferation of Confederate statues and monuments across the country after the US civil war. According to tax filings published by ProPublica, the group raised more than $2.1m in revenue, had more than $1.1m in expenses and possessed $15.8m in assets in 2025.
Delegate Alex Askew, who sponsored versions of the bill for three consecutive years, celebrated the bill’s passage into law.
“Governor Spanberger’s signing of this bill is a proud moment and an important step forward for Virginia,” he said in a statement.
Richmond and Danville, both in Virginia, were capitals of the 11 treasonous, slaveholding states that seceded from the Union and attempted to form their own country built on enslavement. But in the last year, Virginia Democrats have worked to reshape the state’s reputation.
US Catholic bishops issue a ‘clarification on just war theory’ in response to JD Vance comments on Pope Leo
Bishop James Massa, the chair of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on doctrine, issued a formal response on Wednesday to JD Vance’s comment the night before that Pope Leo should “be careful when he talks about matters of theology” in relation to the US war on Iran.
“For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war,” Massa wrote. The bishop continued:
A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2308). That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’
“When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ. The consistent teaching of the Church is insistent that all people of good will must pray and work toward lasting peace while avoiding the evils and injustices that accompany all wars.
On Tuesday, at a sparsely attended Turning Point USA event in Georgia, the vice-president had suggested that the pope’s criticism of war, after the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran, was a matter of opinion.
Vance, a recent convert to Catholicism, seemed to suggest he understood the Catholic doctrine for determining whether a war is morally justifiable or not better than the pope.
“There are certainly things that the pope has said in the last few months that I disagree with,” Vance said at the University of Georgia event. “Let me just take one very concrete example related to this conflict in Iran. So the pope said something where he said, and I’m going to try to remember the exact quote, but he said that ‘God is never on the side of those who wield the sword’.”
“When the pope says that God is never on the side of people who wield the sword, there is more than a thousand-year tradition of just war theory,” the vice-president added. “We can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just.”
“How do you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword? Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis? Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated Holocaust camps and liberated those innocent people from those who had survived the Holocaust?” he continued.
“I think it’s very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology,” Vance said. “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”
Chris Stein
Congressional Democrats have introduced legislation to stop Donald Trump from collecting potentially billions of dollars from claims he brought against the US federal government.
The Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act was introduced in both the Senate and House of Representatives in response to a series of claims Trump has filed against agencies that he oversees. He is seeking $230m from claims filed under a 1946 federal law related to the search of his Mar-a-Lago property, and to the investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 election that brought him to power. Such claims are usually handled by career officials in the justice department, but Trump has stacked the department with bureaucrats believed to be loyal to him.
In another instance, he has sued the Internal Revenue Services after his tax returns were disclosed to news outlets, and is seeking $10b.
“It is such a blatant and obvious conflict for the president to be able to use the administration as his own personal ATM. We must immediately pass this legislation and close any loopholes that allow an executive to grift money from the American taxpayers,” said Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat who is backing the bill in that chamber.
Jamie Raskin, the Democratic ranking member on the House judiciary committee, said: “Trump’s systematic exploitation of executive branch power to loot billions of dollars from American taxpayers is the ongoing scandal of this ruthlessly corrupt Administration. The ‘Ban Presidential Plunder of Taxpayer Funds Act’ will prevent the president from pursuing the emerging MAGA grift of suing the government as a ‘plaintiff’ on bogus grounds and then settling the suit as ‘defendant’ for big bucks.”
The bill would stop presidents and vice-presidents as well as their family and trusts from collecting damages from the government, curb their ability to file administrative claims and impose new guardrails on lawsuits they bring against the government.
Its prospects in the Republican-controlled Congress are unclear.
The supreme court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has delivered a sustained attack on her conservative colleagues’ use of emergency orders to benefit the Trump administration, calling the orders “scratch-paper musings” that can “seem oblivious and thus ring hollow”.
Jackson, the court’s newest justice, delivered a lengthy assessment of roughly two dozen court orders issued last year that allowed Donald Trump to put in place controversial policies on immigration, steep federal funding cuts and other topics, after lower courts found they were probably illegal.
While designed to be short-term, those orders have largely allowed the US president to move ahead, for now, with key parts of his sweeping conservative agenda.
Jackson spoke for nearly an hour on Monday at Yale Law School, which posted a video of the event on Wednesday.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Scott Bessent said that he was “confident” that Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warsh, would survive his confirmation hearing next week. The treasury secretary’s comments come after Trump told Fox Business that he would fire Jerome Powell at the end of the month if the Senate was unable to confirm Warsh to lead the central bank.
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However, John Thune, the Senate’s top Republican, urged the justice department to “wrap up” its ongoing investigation into Powell. The probe threatens to stall Warsh’s confirmation. Outgoing Republican senator Thom Tillis, a deciding vote, has said repeatedly that he won’t support any nomination as long as there is an investigation into Powell.
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In a vote of 47-52, Senate Democrats failed to pass a war powers resolution to curb the Trump administration’s military campaign in Iran. This is the upper chamber’s fourth failed attempt, but its first since Congress returned from its most recent recess and the ongoing two-week ceasefire with Iran began. At an earlier press conference, Democrats vowed to force a war powers resolution vote every week until it advances.
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Also on Capitol Hill, Thune is preparing to bring a “narrow” budget bill, to fund federal immigration enforcement until the end of Trump’s term, to the Senate floor. However, he’s set to face pushback from GOP lawmakers in both chambers, who argue that they should use a reconciliation bill, which only requires a simple majority to advance, to include more priorities before the midterm elections. Meanwhile, the House postponed a vote to extend a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa), amid pushback from several Republicans who are clamoring for greater reforms.
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The House voted to hold a vote on a bill that would extend temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants living in the US until April 2029. Six lower-chamber Republicans joined all Democrats to advance the bill via a discharge petition. This is the maneuver that forces a vote if there are more than 218 signatories. There will now be a full vote on the bill itself on Thursday.
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On Truth Social, the president leaned into controversy and shared another altered image. However, this time it depicts Jesus Christ embracing the president. “The Radical Left Lunatics might not like this, but I think it is quite nice!!!” Trump wrote. This comes as the administration’s standoff with Pope Leo XIV continues. In Georgia on Tuesday, vice-president JD Vance urged the pontiff to be “be careful” when talking about matters of theology.
Thune calls for justice department to ‘wrap up’ probe into Fed chair Powell
John Thune, the Senate majority leader, called on the Department of Justice to “wrap up” its investigation into the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.
“I think it’s in everybody’s best interest to wrap up the investigation. I’ve said that before, it would be better if it winds down,” he told reporters on Capitol Hill today.
As I reported earlier, the inquiry into the head of the central bank threatens to stall the confirmation of Donald Trump’s pick to replace Powell, Kevin Warsh.
Outgoing Republican senator Thom Tillis, who will be a crucial vote during Warsh’s confirmation hearing next week, has said repeatedly that he won’t support any nomination as long as there is an investigation into Powell.
The investigation appears to be ongoing. Prosecutors showed up unannounced on Tuesday at the construction site for the Fed’s renovations, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing an unnamed source and a letter.
Meanwhile, Trump went on a lengthy tangent during a Fox interview about the Fed’s renovations, alleging without evidence that it “is probably corrupt, but what it really is is incompetence”, and seemed unfazed by the possibility that Tillis could block Warsh’s nomination.
