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Trump blames Fed board as he labels Powell a ‘numbskull’
Donald Trump on Friday blamed US Federal Reserve officials as he reiterated his criticisms of Fed chair Jerome Powell and again called for lower interest rates, Reuters reports.
Trump wrote on his social media platform:
And the Fed Board has done nothing to stop this ‘numbskull’ from hurting so many people. In many ways the Board is equally to blame!
Fed officials meet later this month.
Updated at 07.01 EDT
Trump gives New York attorney new title after judges reject his appointment
by Joseph Gedeon in Washington
Donald Trump has given a New York prosecutor a new job title to keep him in power after federal judges rejected his appointment.
John Sarcone III was supposed to be removed as interim US attorney for New York’s northern district after a judicial panel refused to make his appointment permanent. Instead, the justice department has made him “special attorney to the attorney general” with the same powers and no time limit.
The appointment represents Trump’s curious pattern of working around traditional oversight mechanisms. Unlike his first term, when all 85 US attorney nominees were confirmed by the Senate, his second administration has formally nominated only about a quarter of that number, relying instead on interim appointments that bypass Senate confirmation.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, trying to make sense of the appointment, said the justice department is using a federal law called 28 US Code Section 515 to justify the move, but he says that’s a stretch. That law allows for “special attorneys” to handle specific cases, but this sort of application may not be intended to let someone serve as both acting US attorney and first assistant at the same time.
John Sarcone III was supposed to be removed as interim US attorney for New York’s northern district. Photograph: Albany Times Union/Hearst Newspapers/Houston Chronicle/Getty Images
Read the full report here:
A federal judge on Friday could deal another blow to Donald Trump’s attempts to limit birthright citizenship, even though a US Supreme Court decision last month made it more difficult for lower courts to block White House directives, Reuters reports.
A group of Democratic attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia will urge US District Judge Leo Sorokin at a hearing in Boston at 10am ET Friday to maintain an injunction he imposed in February that blocked Trump’s executive order nationwide.
The order directs US agencies to refuse to recognise the citizenship of children born in the United States after February 19 if neither their mother nor father is a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.
Donald Trump’s plan to convert Alcatraz back into a maximum-security prison could cost roughly $2bn (£1.5bn), Axios reported on Friday, citing administration sources.
Alcatraz was closed as a maximum-security prison in 1963 after 29 years of operation, because it was too expensive to continue operating.
Trump previously said he would order the long-shuttered facility, now operated as a historical site in San Francisco Bay, to once again house violent criminals, reports Reuters.
Trump plans to reopen the prison on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPAShareOpening summary: Trump threatens to sue WSJ
Good morning and welcome to our live coverage of US politics where, after days of resistance and trying to play down the story, Donald Trump has directed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to seek the release of grand jury testimony related to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking case.
The president said on Truth Social he had authorised the justice department to seek the public release of the materials, citing “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein”.
It comes after the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump allegedly contributed a sketch of a naked woman to Epstein’s 50th birthday album.
Trump denied to the Journal that he was the author of the birthday message and, hours after the story was published, announced he intended to file a lawsuit in a post on Truth Social, decrying the reporting as fake and condemning it as what he called “the Epstein Hoax”.
In other developments:
The US’s Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed president Donald Trump’s $9bn funding cut to public media and foreign aid early on Friday, sending it to the White House to be signed into law. The chamber voted 216 to 213 in favour of the funding cut package.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been cancelled and will end in May 2026 after a 33-year run, the network CBS announced. The news comes days after Colbert criticised the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a lawsuit with Trump for $16m (£12m) over the US president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with the then presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Five migrants deported by the US to the small southern African country of Eswatini, under the Trump administration’s third-country programme, will be held in solitary confinement for an undetermined time, an Eswatini government spokesperson has said. The spokesperson said a UN agency will repatriate five men to their home countries, but the agency said on Thursday that it had not been contacted. The men, who the US says were convicted of serious crimes and were in the US illegally, are citizens of Vietnam, Jamaica, Cuba, Yemen and Laos.