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The Senate has begun voting on breaking a Democratic filibuster on the funding bill to avoid a government shutdown at midnight.
This vote needs 60 votes to advance.
President Donald Trump falsely claimed in his Friday remarks at the Department of Justice that former President Joe Biden was “essentially found guilty, but they said he was incompetent and therefore let’s not find him guilty, I guess.”
“Nobody knows what the ruling was,” he said, continuing, “I think I would have rather been found guilty than what they found with him. They said he didn’t know what the hell he was doing and therefore … let him go.”
Facts first: Biden was not found guilty, “essentially” or not, and there was no judicial “ruling” at all. Biden was not even charged with a crime. The special counsel who was appointed to look into Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, wrote in his public report that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” adding that “several defenses are likely to create reasonable doubt as to such charges.”
Trump appeared to be referring Friday to the fact that Hur wrote in the report, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
But Hur did not say he would have brought charges against Biden if not for this. Hur wrote at length about various facts of the case and possible Biden defenses that meant that he thought would make it too difficult for the government to win a unanimous guilty verdict.
President Donald Trump heaped praise on the federal judge in Florida who threw out his classified documents criminal case last summer, calling the jurist he appointed during his first term “amazing” and “brilliant.”
“We had an amazing judge in Florida, and her name is Aileen Cannon,” Trump said today during a wide-ranging campaign-style speech at the Justice Department. He went on to claim that he didn’t know her and never spoke to her. (Cannon has said the same.)
“I did appoint her,” Trump said, going on to criticize unnamed “public relations lawyers” who criticized Cannon’s handling of the historic case. “They were saying she was slow, she wasn’t smart, she was totally biased. ‘She loved Trump.’”
“Actually, she was brilliant, she moved quickly. She was the absolute model of what a judge should be,” the president said. “And she was strong and tough.”
Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the Southern District of Florida in 2020, threw out the classified documents case last July after concluding that the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith violated the Constitution. She did not rule on whether Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents was proper or not.
Smith’s appeal of Cannon’s ruling was pending when Trump was reelected, and the special counsel later moved to drop the appeal as it related to Trump after his November win.
Smith indicted Trump in 2023 for allegedly taking classified national defense documents from the White House after he left office and resisting the government’s attempts to retrieve the materials.
Cannon has previously defended her independence from Trump. “I have no control over what private citizens, members of the media, or public officials or candidates elect to say about me or my judicial rulings,” Cannon said in a ruling last year. “I have never spoken to or met former President Trump except in connection with his required presence at an official judicial proceeding, through counsel.”
President Donald Trump said in a Friday speech that he got “pretty good news” on a potential ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, without expanding on what it was, and that his administration had “very good calls” on Friday with both countries.
“Just before I came here I got some pretty good news,” Trump said while giving a speech at the Justice Department. “So, but we have to see what happens. It’s a long way to go,” the president said.
“I think we have it,” the president added before cautioning the conflict could lead to World War III.
“We’ve had some very good calls today with Russia and with Ukraine. They’ve agreed for a ceasefire, if we can get it with Russia,” the president said.
The president again appeared to blame the Ukrainians for the war when he said that you should not “pick on somebody that’s a lot larger than you.”
The president’s remarks come as he said said in an interview taped Thursday that his administration would know a “little bit more on Monday” about the US-proposed temporary ceasefire in the war.
President Donald Trump took to the podium at the Justice Department Friday afternoon and railed against Biden-era officials for acting, in his view, in a partisan and corrupt way.
While the president welcomed allies — including his former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, as well as Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley — his speech quickly turned to outrage over the failed investigations into him.
The president, standing in the Justice Department’s great hall next to 180 kilos of fake fentanyl sitting underneath a box that said in capital letters, “DEA evidence,” proclaimed that he was the “chief law enforcement officer in our country.”
“I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred,” he said. Those abuses, the president said, included how investigators “spied on my campaign, launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another.” Tump also claimed investigators “broke the law on a colossal scale.”
They “persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home, Mar-a-Lago, and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States,” Trump said.
“Unfortunately, in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations,” the president said. “They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”
President Donald Trump praised Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer for announcing he will vote for the House-passed GOP spending bill to avert the government shutdown.
During remarks today at the Justice Department, Trump said he has “great respect” for what Schumer did, adding that he “couldn’t believe what I heard. But you know I think he’s going to get some credit for it.”
Trump had also congratulated Schumer in a Truth Social post earlier on Friday, saying the senator from New York was “doing the right thing — Took ‘guts’ and courage!”
On Capitol Hill: Republicans need eight Senate Democrats on board to clear a key procedural hurdle on the government funding bill. That vote is expected to happen this afternoon.
Senators completed two out of three votes in their afternoon vote series, but the third one — a highly anticipated procedural vote on the government spending bill — was pushed back.
According to two Republican senators, lawmakers are trying to lock down a time agreement that would help the Senate move swiftly to final passage of the government funding bill after the critical initial vote to break a Democratic filibuster on the measure.
They would need all 100 senators to agree to speed things up.
“There is continuing to be tremendous pressure on the Democrats who want to keep the government open to shut it down,” Republican Whip John Barrasso said. “This isn’t over until the 100 votes have been cast.”
President Donald Trump pledged to expel what he described as the “rogue actors and corrupt forces” from the government as he addressed the Department of Justice on Friday.
“We will expose, and very much expose, their egregious crimes and severe misconduct, of which was levels you’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said.
“It’s going to be legendary,” Trump added. “It’s going to also be legendary for the people that are able to seek it out and bring justice.”
The president bragged about revoking the security clearances of some of the former officials who investigated him — and about pardoning the rioters who were convicted for the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, calling them “political prisoners who had been grossly mistreated.”
“We removed the senior FBI officials who misdirected resources to send SWAT teams after grandmothers and J6 hostages,” he said.
The president also said it was a “great honor” to fire former FBI Director James Comey as he addressed the DOJ.
President Donald Trump is speaking at the Justice Department, the storied building from which the government pursued criminal investigations and prosecutions against him.
The White House said it will be a law-and-order speech.
“All I’m going to do is set out my vision. It’s going to be their vision, really, but it’s my ideas,” Trump said yesterday, when asked about his expected remarks.
“We want to have justice and we want to have safety in our cities as well as our communities,” he added, while noting that he will also cover immigration and border security in the speech.
More on the speech: Flanked by staunch allies he tapped to run the organizations he says attacked him relentlessly and unjustly, the event is a marked departure from how former presidents treated the department, taking pains to stay away from it and its law enforcement components so that its work would not appear political.
The speech is the first time that a president of the United States is delivering a political address inside the department since 2014 when Barack Obama unveiled new guidance for intelligence-gathering in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosure of US surveillance programs.
The Supreme Court signaled Friday that it’s in no hurry to resolve President Donald Trump’s emergency appeals on birthright citizenship.
The justices handling the three separate cases ordered the groups challenging Trump’s executive order to respond by April 4. That timeline is longer than usual and means the court will take weeks to resolve the cases.
Trump is asking the Supreme Court to curtail a series of lower court orders that are blocking him from enforcing his birthright citizenship policy. While the administration has repeatedly framed that request as “modest,” it would in practice allow the policy to move forward nationwide except for a handful of people involved in the lawsuits.
By comparison, in the recent emergency case involving nearly $2 billion in foreign aid, the court ordered a response two days after the Trump administration sent up its emergency appeal.
The briefing schedule was set by Chief Justice John Roberts, as well as Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who are assigned to handle cases rising from appeals courts based in Washington, DC, San Francisco and Boston.
FBI Director Kash Patel touted the actions of the FBI since he was sworn in as director during a speech at the Justice Department ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit Friday afternoon.
Patel said that in the past few weeks, the FBI has made hundreds of arrests against alleged gang members and seized kilos of drugs like fentanyl.
“That’s just what you can do when you put the great men and women of law enforcement in one room and get the hell out of their way,” he said.
Patel continued:
“I told you when I first got this job that we would crush violet crime, that we would take the fight to anyone who wishes to do harm to our way of life or to hurt our citizenry. That we would go to the ends of the very earth to bring them back to face American justice produced right here in this very hall in this very building.”
Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said in a statement she will vote to avert a government shutdown, saying it would be “devastating for the American people” and would give President Trump “free reign to cause more chaos than harm.”
The senator joins Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. John Fetterman as the third Democrat to say they will vote to avert shutdown.
Remember: Republicans need eight Senate Democrats on board to clear a key procedural hurdle on the government funding bill.
“Shutting down the government gives President Trump and Elon Musk even more power to cherry-pick who is an essential employee, who they want to fire, and what agencies they want to shutter,” said the Nevada senator. “And a shutdown would force federal courts to slow work on lawsuits against this administration’s illegal actions. The last government shutdown cost the American economy $11 billion and thousands of hardworking Americans were harmed. I cannot vote for that.”
“This was not an easy decision,” she continues. “I’m outraged by the reckless actions of President Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans in control of Congress, so I refuse to hand them a shutdown where they would have free reign to cause more chaos and harm.”
Cortez Masto told reporters that she would not allow Trump to “to cherry pick agencies that he wants to fund. Cherry pick who gets paid, who gets fired, who gets their job back.”
And she said a shutdown would “cost the economy billions of dollars.”
President Donald Trump said in an interview taped on Thursday that his administration would know a “little bit more on Monday” about his efforts to secure a ceasefire in the Ukraine war, without providing more specifics or details.
“As you know, we have a ceasefire agreement with the Ukrainian group, and we are trying to get that with Russia too. And I think thus far it’s gone OK. We’ll know a little bit more on Monday, and that will be hopefully good,” the president told Sinclair’s Sharyl Attkisson in an interview that’s airing in full on Sunday.
CNN has reached out to the White House about Trump’s comment.
Trump also said he was being “a little bit sarcastic” about his repeated remarks that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours, before adding that he thinks he’ll be “successful” in getting it done.
CNN’s Alejandra Jaramillo contributed reporting to this post.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries would not answer when CNN asked him if he has lost confidence in Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, given the two Democratic leaders have different views on how to handle the GOP government spending bill.
“Next question,” Jeffries said during a news conference Friday.
It was Jeffries’ first public comments since Schumer came out in support of the bill to avert a shutdown at midnight and bucked the position of House Democrats.
In a moment that put the divide within the Democratic party on display, Jeffries repeatedly criticized the position of Senate Democrats but refused to call out Schumer directly, arguing the dispute is “not about one individual.”
When asked if Schumer has acquiesced to President Donald Trump, Jeffries said, “That’s a question that’s best addressed by the Senate.”
When pressed if it was time for new leadership in the Senate, Jeffries again said “next question.”
Jeffries said that his conversations with Schumer this week have been private and “will remain private.”
Despite his attempts to dodge answering questions about Schumer specifically, Jeffries went after Schumer’s logic for supporting the Republican government spending bill.
“It’s a false choice that Donald Trump, Elon Musk and House Republicans have been presenting, between their reckless and partisan spending bill and a government shutdown,” Jeffries said. “We do not support a bill that is designed to hurt the American people.”
Jeffries also implied that only House Democrats, who are pushing for a short-term government funding extension while appropriators hash out a deal, are on the right side: “We’ve made that decision as House Democrats and we’re going to stick by that decision because we believe we are on the side of the American people,” Jeffries said.
This post has been updated with more of Jeffries’ remarks.
A group of influential House Democrats, led by their caucus’ spending leader Rep. Rosa DeLauro, plan to urge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Friday to not “acquiesce to Republicans’ lawless destruction of our government.”
“We cannot acquiesce to Republicans’ lawless destruction of our government, and we cannot forfeit Congress’s Constitutional authority to dictate federal spending,” DeLauro and other House Democratic appropriators wrote Friday in a draft letter to Schumer obtained by CNN.
More context: The sharply worded missive from House Democrats calls on the Senate Democratic leader to abandon his plans to vote for the GOP funding bill. It is part of a last-ditch pressure campaign from the other side of the US Capitol, where House lawmakers are fuming at Schumer’s decision to back the President Donald Trump-endorsed bill to avert a shutdown at midnight.
“We urge all Senate Democrats to stand with House Democrats and with the American people,” the letter states.
More than 60 House Democrats wrote to Schumer in a separate letter Friday, urging the New York Democrat to oppose the stopgap measure. “The American people sent Democrats to Congress to fight against Republican dysfunction and chaos,” the group wrote.
CNN’s Annie Grayer contributed reporting to this post.
Newly sworn-in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney forcefully responded to a question about US President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to annex Canada as the 51st state, saying it will never happen.
“Personally, I’ve been clear … that we will never, ever, in any way, shape or form, be part of the United States,” Carney said on Friday.
He emphasized some differences between both countries. “America is not Canada. Look at the ceremony we just had,” Carney continued, referring to his swearing in, which was accompanied by remarks from two indigenous elders.
Carney emphasized that he respects Trump, pointing to their shared experience in the private sector and gently correcting a journalist who called the US president by his surname without his title.
“Just to be clear, we respect the United States. We respect President Trump,” Carney said.
“President Trump is has put some very important issues at the top of his agenda. We understand his agenda. We understand the importance of addressing the scourge of fentanyl, which is a challenge here in Canada as well as the United States,” he added.
Some Senate Democrats who are voting against the GOP government funding bill refused to criticize Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer for saying he will back the legislation, insisting that Democrats had been pigeon-holed into two bad options.
Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, when asked about Schumer’s leadership, told reporters, “I understand … these are tough, tough calls. We’re stuck with two bad choices presented by a unified Republican front.”
His fellow Virginian, Sen. Tim Kaine, added, “It’s a very, very difficult choice. There were no good options. I feel very strongly that my vote is the right vote, certainly the right vote for Virginians, it’s the right vote for veterans.”
It’s not that Democrats aren’t aware of the anger their base is feeling, they just largely stopped short of translating that into criticisms of their party’s Senate leader.
“I understand the anger” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal told CNN of Schumer. “But I am respectful of his position.”
New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Lujan told reporters that Republicans “came up with two horrible ideas, two horrible choices. That’s what we have before us,” and continued to push for a one month, stop-gap bill.
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock added, “It’s the American people who are in peril. They are imperiled by this CR (continuing resolution), and the leader is clear about that, that we were faced with two bad alternatives.”
However, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued that Democrats should not cave. “I believe Democrats should not go along with the Republican efforts to put a new budget in place that greases the skids for tax cuts for billionaires and takes it out of the hides of seniors, veterans and little kids,” she said.
Former House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi on Friday issued veiled criticism of Senate Democrats who are backing the GOP funding bill to avert a government shutdown, saying they have bought into the “false choice” that they either need to support the GOP spending bill or face a government shutdown “instead of fighting.”
“Donald Trump and Elon Musk have offered the Congress a false choice between a government shutdown or a blank check that makes a devastating assault on the well-being of working families across America,” the California congresswoman said in a statement on X.
“Let’s be clear: neither is a good option for the American people. But this false choice that some are buying instead of fighting is unacceptable,” she said without naming Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who announced yesterday that he will vote to keep the government open.
“Democratic senators should listen to the women. Appropriations leaders Rosa DeLauro and Patty Murray have eloquently presented the case that we must have a better choice: a four-week funding extension to keep government open and negotiate a bipartisan agreement,” she argued.
In a speech Thursday announcing his decision, Schumer said, “Democrats are being faced with the choice of accepting a package they despise or allowing a shutdown” and argued that a shutdown is a “far worse option.”
Congress is facing a midnight deadline to fund the government or risk a partial shutdown.
A federal lawsuit filed Friday morning alleges the Department of Education is attempting to “sabotage” the civil rights functions of the agency — leaving students unprotected from discrimination by “decimating” the staff at the Office of Civil Rights.
The reductions are part of the massive cuts affecting nearly 50 percent of federal employees at the agency.
“The gutting of OCR’s staff means that no complainant has a fair shot at accessing an OCR investigation. Anyone who files any claim is unlikely to secure relief from OCR,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia was brought by two parents and a disability rights group, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates.
More about the Office of Civil Rights: OCR aims to protect students by holding schools and colleges that receive federal funds accountable for combating discrimination, including antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and against students with disabilities.
The Education Department’s civil rights office has been among the hardest hit by layoffs at the agency this week, with the Trump administration shuttering seven of its 12 regional offices. The program also lost the largest proportion of employees of all the programs affected — losing 243 of 557 workers, according to an analysis by the non-partisan Ed Reform Now.
CNN reached out to the Department of Education but did not get an immediate response.
The Senate is expected to hold a vote this afternoon to break a Democratic filibuster on the House-passed spending bill — a critical initial step on the measure as Congress stares down a midnight government funding deadline.
About the timing: It’ll be part of the Senate’s afternoon vote series that is expected to begin at 1:15 p.m. ET, and senators are expected to vote on a few other measures.
Democratic votes will be needed to break the filibuster, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Thursday night that he would vote for the GOP stopgap funding bill.
While a key first step, the Senate will have to take a second vote to give final approval to the funding bill. Senate leadership does not yet have a timing agreement on when that final vote would occur.
