Trump tells CNN that Cuba is ‘going to fall pretty soon’
Earlier, Donald Trump told CNN in a phone interview that Cuba is “going to fall pretty soon”.
This follows the president’s comment at the White House on Thursday, when he claimed that Cuba wants to “make a deal so badly”.
Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the US attacked Venezuela in January, and depleted the country’s petroleum shipments. Later that month, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling or supplying Cuba with oil. Now, half of the country is dealing with blackouts.
Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, Trump said that he would put secretary of state Marco Rubio in charge of the operation, whose parents fled Cuba for the US during the Batista regime. “We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready – after 50 years,” the president added.
Key events
Vinay Prasad, FDA’s vaccine chief, to step down, again
Dr Vinay Prasad, who leads the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccines and biologics unit, is leaving the Trump administration for a second time, a spokesperson for the agency told Reuters on Friday.
The FDA commissioner, Dr Marty Makary, confirmed the departure of Prasad, a vaccine critic, to the Wall Street Journal. “He’s really been successful and gotten a lot done in one year,” Makary said.
Prasad, an oncologist, took several controversial regulatory decisions as the head of the division responsible for approving vaccines and biotechnology products.
Last month, the FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts said would have a chilling effect on vaccine development.
Prasad was first appointed director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in May last year. He briefly stepped down in July, under apparent pressure from Laura Loomer, a far-right, racist podcaster with unusual influence over Donald Trump.
Trump welcomes Iran war supporter Condoleezza Rice to the White House
Donald Trump, who said in a 2016 Republican primary debate that George W Bush’s administration had “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 war he called “a big fat mistake”, just welcomed Condoleezza Rice, a prominent member of that administration, to the White House for a roundtable on college sports.
Trump singled out Rice during his introductory remarks at the start of an ongoing White House roundtable on “Saving College Sports”.
“We have some great people,” Trump said. “Condoleezza, thank you very much. I see you over there. Great to have you. Great to be with you.”
That warm welcome for Rice, who was Bush’s national security adviser, came 10 years after a February 2016 debate in which Trump had been asked about his comment in 2008 that it “would have been a wonderful thing”, for the Democrats to have impeached George W Bush because “he got us in to a war with lies”.
“Obviously it was a mistake,” Trump said then, as he stood next to his main rival at the time, Jeb Bush. “So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Rice was front and center in making the case for the US invasion of Iraq at the time, most notably when she told CNN that doubts about whether or not Saddam Hussein even had a nuclear weapons program (spoiler alert: he did not) did not undermine the case for war. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” Rice said. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
This week, however, as Trump launched his own regime change war on Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, Rice has been a forceful proponent of Trump’s war.
“To say that this regime was not a threat … it’s ahistorical,” Rice told Fox News on Wednesday, citing Iran’s nuclear program. “They have been a threat for a long time.”
Like Trump, Rice also claimed that Iran’s role in arming proxy militias in Iraq that attacked US troops there with roadside bombs, justified the current US-Israeli bombing campaign.
“Iran has been at war with us for at least 47 years,” Rice said. “If you ask people about Iraq, what was the source of many of our casualties in Iraq, you’ll get estimates as high as 75 or 80% of them were due to Iranian-made roadside bombs.”
In remarks on Thursday, Trump had claimed that Iran was responsible for “95%” of the casualties in Iraq during the US occupation he had denounced a decade ago.
In the closing days of his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Trump focused on the fact that Liz Cheney, the daughter of Bush’s vice-president, supported his rival Kamala Harris.
“Kamala’s campaigning with warmongers like Liz Cheney… whose father virtually destroyed the Middle East,” Trump told a rally crowd. “Every time I was with her in the White House,” he claimed, Cheney urged him to start wars. “‘We should attack this nation, that nation, nations that people never heard of,” Trump said. The clincher of his argument was his claim that Cheney had even said to him: ‘“We ought to to go attack Iran’”.
My colleague, Lucy Campbell, is covering the latest out of the Middle East, and she just noted that Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian has spoken on the phone with Russian president Vladimir Putin, according to Iran’s government news service.
This comes as reports allege that Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to strike US forces in the region. Earlier, asked whether Russia’s involvement in the Iran conflict affects efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, Karoline Leavitt said the White House still believes peace is “an achievable objective”, but declined to confirm whether Moscow has supplied information to Tehran.
Oversight Democrats say White House ‘cover-up is ongoing’ after justice department releases more files
Following the release of additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, including FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who made uncorroborated allegations against Epstein and Donald Trump, Democrats on the House oversight committee said that the “White House cover-up is ongoing”.
“Millions of pages still remain concealed from the public and our committee,” spokesperson Sara Guerrero said in a statement. “We will get answers when Pam Bondi appears before our committee under oath.”
This comes after oversight lawmakers passed a motion to subpoena the attorney general to testify before the committee.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Donald Trump told CNN in a phone interview that Cuba is “going to fall pretty soon”. This follows the president’s comment at the White House on Thursday, when he claimed that Cuba wants to “make a deal so badly”. Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the US attacked Venezuela in January, and depleted the country’s petroleum shipments. Later that month, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling or supplying Cuba with oil. Now, half of the country is dealing with blackouts.
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Earlier, the president said there will be no deal with Iran “except unconditional surrender”. He noted that after that, and the selection of a new leader the US “will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt added that once Iran longer “poses a threat” to the US and “the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized”, then Iran will “essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender”.
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The US customs agency is readying a system within 45 days to process refunds on Donald Trump’s tariffs that were struck down as illegal and importers will not have to sue for them, a customs official said in a court filing today. The declaration by Brandon Lord, a top Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official, came as government lawyers were meeting with a federal trade judge to hammer out a process for returning $166bn in tariff payments to about 330,000 importers.
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The US lost 92,000 jobs in February, a major slackening in the labor market that came just before Donald Trump threw the global economy into upheaval with his conflict in Iran. Several Democratic lawmakers slammed the data as an example of Trump’s “failed economic agenda”, while White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that the report was “something of a surprise” but the economy remains “really strong”.
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The justice department released additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, including FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who made uncorroborated allegations against Epstein and Donald Trump. The documents were not included in the justice department’s earlier releases of Epstein-related records, which began in December. Justice department officials have said the files were initially withheld because they were mistakenly categorized as duplicates.
White House praises new pick for DHS secretary following Noem ouster
Karoline Leavitt praised senator Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Republican who Donald Trump tapped to takeover the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The press secretary called Mullin “a strong friend of the president” and a “a big supporter” of the administration’s immigration policies. “He’s exceptionally talented,” she said. “We look forward to his expeditious confirmation and I know the White House will be working with our counterparts in the Senate to make that happen as quickly as possible.”
Leavitt also told reporters today that she had no update on the investigation into a bombing of a girls’ school in Iran that killed 175 people. On Wednesday she noted that the Pentagon was investigating the strike.
Earlier, we reported the news that military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the attack, but have not yet reached a final conclusion, according to a report from Reuters.
White House says that administration is ‘well on our way’ to achieving Operation Epic Fury objectives
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she didn’t want to “get ahead of the president on any timelines”, but reiterated that the administration expects the military action to last “about four to six weeks” and “we are well on our way” to achieving Operation Epic Fury’s objectives.
On US forces taking control of the airspace in Iran, she added: “We are well on our way to doing so.”
Leavitt also elaborated on the president’s earlier post to Truth Social. “When he, as commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender,” she said.
The press secretary also noted that the president “wants to take an interest” in the choice of the country’s next leader. He has previously called the late supreme leader’s son an “unacceptable” option.
Today, Leavitt said that there are a “number of people” that US intelligence agencies and government officials are assessing, but declined to comment further.
‘The stakes could not be higher’: UN chief urges end to ‘all unlawful attacks in Middle East’
Lucy Campbell
The UN secretary-general has called on nations to “stop the fighting and get to serious diplomatic negotiations”. “The stakes could not be higher,” António Guterres wrote in a post on X.
All the unlawful attacks in the Middle East and beyond are causing tremendous suffering and harm to civilians throughout the region – and pose a grave a risk to the global economy, particularly to the most vulnerable people.
The situation could spiral beyond anyone’s control.
It is time to stop the fighting and get to serious diplomatic negotiations.
The stakes could not be higher.
Former Democratic presidents gather for Jesse Jackson’s funeral
Three former Democratic presidents will attend the public funeral service for the late civil rights leader, Jesse Jackson, in Chicago today.
Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are expected to deliver remarks at the memorial. Kamala Harris, the former vice-president, is also due to speak.
The service is being held at the House of Hope event center. Attendees include the California governor Gavin Newsom; the Illinois governor JB Pritzker, who is also expected to address mourners; and the Texas state representative James Talarico, who won the Democratic nomination for US Senate on Tuesday.
Trump tells CNN that Cuba is ‘going to fall pretty soon’
Earlier, Donald Trump told CNN in a phone interview that Cuba is “going to fall pretty soon”.
This follows the president’s comment at the White House on Thursday, when he claimed that Cuba wants to “make a deal so badly”.
Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the US attacked Venezuela in January, and depleted the country’s petroleum shipments. Later that month, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling or supplying Cuba with oil. Now, half of the country is dealing with blackouts.
Speaking to CNN’s Dana Bash, Trump said that he would put secretary of state Marco Rubio in charge of the operation, whose parents fled Cuba for the US during the Batista regime. “We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready – after 50 years,” the president added.
US senator seeks perjury investigation into Kristi Noem over DHS spending
Joseph Gedeon
Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal said he would open a perjury investigation into the ousted homeland security secretary Kristi Noem after alleging she lied to Congress about the hidden influence her senior adviser Corey Lewandowski had over the agency’s contracts.
Blumenthal, the ranking member on the Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations, said today that he would push the panel to look into whether Noem committed perjury at a hearing this week, when she flatly denied Lewandowski had played any role in approving Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending. Blumenthal said Democrats had evidence to prove otherwise.
Her firing doesn’t absolve her or relieve her of potential liability for perjury. We are going to pursue an investigation of the evidence that she lied, because it relates to corruption in the administration.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Blumenthal had pressed Noem on whether Lewandowski, a longtime Trump ally serving as her senior adviser, was involved in approving contracts. She described him as a “special government employee” working for the White House, so when Blumenthal characterized that as a contracting role, she said simply: “No.”
The following day, Blumenthal sent her a letter arguing that DHS records told a different story: that Lewandowski had personally signed off on contracts and that staff in the department treated his signature as a green light for spending. “There are criminal penalties for knowingly and willfully making materially false statements or representations to Congress,” he wrote.
More on this story here:
CBP says tariff refund system will be ready in 45 days
The US customs agency is readying a system within 45 days to process refunds on Donald Trump’s tariffs that were struck down as illegal and importers will not have to sue for them, a customs official said in a court filing today.
The declaration by Brandon Lord, a top Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official, came as government lawyers were meeting with a federal trade judge to hammer out a process for returning $166bn in tariff payments to about 330,000 importers.
Trump’s global tariffs under a 1977 law designed to address national emergencies were struck down as unconstitutional by the supreme court last month. But the court did not say how the collected tariffs should be refunded, worrying small importers that the process would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming.
“This new process will require minimal submission from importers,” Reuters reports that Lord said in his declaration, which was filed with the US Court of International Trade just as government lawyers began meeting with Judge Richard Eaton.
Lord said the customs agency anticipated the refund process would require importers to file a declaration with the CBP’s computer system known as ACE detailing tariff payments, and the system and CBP would then validate those and process refunds with interest.
Each importer would receive a single payment from the treasury department, regardless of how many separate entries of goods the importer had made.
Lord didn’t estimate how long it would take to process the refunds, but said CBP would not be able to comply with Eaton’s order from Wednesday. Eaton contemplated a system in which refunds would be automatically returned to importers through the existing system without documentation or input from the importer.
“Its existing administrative procedures and technology are not well-suited to a task of this scale and will require manual work that will prevent personnel from fully carrying out the agency’s trade enforcement mission,” Lord said in explaining why the agency couldn’t use its existing system.
He said more than 330,000 importers had paid an estimated $166bn in tariffs on more than 53m shipments. Eaton’s order would have required the agency to manually review paperwork on every shipment, a process Lord said would require more than 4m hours of labor.
Ramon Antonio Vargas
Lindsey Halligan, a former interim US attorney who was appointed by Donald Trump and led failed prosecutions against two of his political opponents, is facing an ethics investigation by the bar association in her home state of Florida.
News of the investigation against Halligan – who temporarily served as the top federal prosecutor in the eastern district of Virginia – was contained in a February letter from the Florida bar to the Campaign for Accountability executive director, Michelle Kuppersmith.
Kuppersmith’s non-profit watchdog organization had previously complained to the Florida bar that Halligan breached ethical rules in the course of her work for the Trump administration. After sending follow-up correspondence about the complaint, Kuppersmith received a letter from Florida bar counsel Carlos A Leon, which read in part: “We already have an investigation pending.”
A message left for an email address listed for Halligan offering the opportunity to comment on Leon’s letter, seen by the Guardian, was not immediately returned. Halligan could be stripped of her license to practice law in Florida if the state’s bar association determines she acted improperly.
Primarily known as an insurance litigator and a personal lawyer to Trump, Halligan had no prosecutorial experience when she was sworn in as the eastern district of Virginia’s US attorney in September. Trump by then had forced Halligan’s predecessor out after declining to institute criminal charges against the New York attorney general, Letitia James, and former FBI director James Comey.
Though Halligan subsequently oversaw indictments against both James and Comey, the cases were roundly criticized as politically and unduly vindictive, and federal judge Cameron McGowan Currie dismissed both prosecutions in November.
Currie ruled that Halligan’s appointment had been unlawful – and therefore she lacked the legal authority to indict James and Comey. The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, announced that Halligan had left her position in January.
Here’s the full report:
White House economic advisor says economy remains ‘strong’ despite weak jobs data
Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said that the “economy is really strong”, despite the latest data showing that the US economy cut 92,000 jobs in January.
In an interview with CNBC, Hassett said that while February’s jobs report is “something of a surprise”, he noted that “productivity is about the highest we’ve ever seen”.
He also predicted that the development of AI will ultimately drive economic growth, and add more employment opportunities. “Things move, people readjust what they’re doing, and it takes just a little bit of time,” Hassett said. “There will be so much activity that everybody’s going to be able to find a job that wants one.”
Anna Betts
The US justice department released additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, including FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who made uncorroborated allegations against Epstein and Donald Trump.
The documents were not included in the justice department’s earlier releases of Epstein-related records, which began in December. Justice department officials have said the files were initially withheld because they were mistakenly categorized as duplicates.
Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein or any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity.
The materials released on Thursday, which the Guardian obtained and reported on last week, describe a series of FBI interviews conducted in 2019 with a woman who alleged that she had been sexually assaulted by Epstein, and by Trump, in the 1980s, when she was a minor. The woman had contacted the FBI shortly after Epstein’s 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.
Her allegations have not been verified, and the FBI never brought charges related to her claims. The Guardian reported last week that some of her statements appear to contradict what is known about Epstein’s life in the early 1980s.
In a statement to the Guardian, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the woman’s allegations “completely baseless” and said that they are “backed by zero credible evidence”.
“The total baselessness of these accusations is also supported by the obvious fact that Joe Biden’s department of justice knew about them for four years and did nothing with them – because they knew President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong” Leavitt said. “As we have said countless times, President Trump has been totally exonerated by the release of the Epstein Files.”
In January, the justice department said that “some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election”.
Democratic lawmakers slam latest jobs report as example of Trump’s ‘failed economic agenda’
Several Democratic lawmakers have expressed concern over the latest jobs report, which showed that the US economy shed more than 90,000 jobs in February.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, said the latest figures show that the economy was “already weak” before Donald Trump launched initial strikes against Iran on 28 February.
“Now we’ve seen job losses in two of the last three months and economy teetering on the edge of a recession. Tariffs are increasing costs, gas prices are spiking, and jobs are evaporating,” Schumer said in a statement.
As my colleague Michael Sainato reported earlier, January’s jobs report included revisions that brought down the total number of jobs added to the economy in 2025 to 181,000 jobs – the weakest year of job growth since Covid and a substantial decrease from the 2m jobs added to the US economy in 2024.
Elizabeth Warren, the ranking member on the Senate banking committee, called the latest data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) an example of how Donald Trump’s “failed economic agenda is tanking the job market and making life more expensive for American families”. She also noted that since the president returned to the White House, the economy has lost nearly 100,000 manufacturing jobs.
According to an analysis by economic experts of today’s BLS report, almost every major industry group cut jobs in February.
The House’s top Democrat, Hakeem Jeffries was explicit in his reaction to the latest job numbers. “We need regime change in November,” the New York congressman said. “Gas prices are up. ICE is out of control. And Republicans have started another costly war in the Middle East.”
Eric Berger
Government officials across the US have taken new security measures because of fears that Iran, or its supporters, may launch attacks on targets in America to retaliate for the US and Israel’s bombing of the country.
Federal and local public officials have announced that they have taken steps such as increasing law enforcement patrols to prevent any attack, which could come directly from the Iranian regime or a lone actor, security experts said.
“If there were ever a time when Iran would want to put into place all the different capabilities it’s built up over these years as off-the-shelf operational planning … now would be it,” said Matthew Levitt, director of the counter-terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
After the US attacked Iran on 28 February, Kash Patel, the FBI director, posted on X that he had instructed “counterterrorism and intelligence teams to be on high alert and mobilize all assisting security assets needed”.
Donald Trump, asked about the possibility of Iran attacking the US mainland, said this week: “I guess … We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Kristi Noem, who was fired on Thursday but retains the role until the end of March, also posted that she was in “direct coordination with our federal intelligence and law enforcement partners as we continue to closely monitor and thwart any potential threats to the homeland”.
Leaders of major American cities including Los Angeles, Miami and New York have announced increased patrols around sensitive locations such as places of worship, cultural centers and schools.
The president posted to Truth Social again to insist that the state department is moving “thousands of people” out of various countries in the Middle East.
“It is being done quietly, but seamlessly,” he said, while praising his secretary of state, Marco Rubio.
This comes as the Trump administration faces pushback on how quickly and effectively it has evacuated US citizens from the region. On Thursday, a state department spokesperson said that 20,000 American citizens have returned to the US since 28 February.
