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The Trump administration announced today that it will look to sell the Washington, DC, headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The move comes more than a month after the Trump administration said that it was considering selling off hundreds of “non-core” federal properties to ensure taxpayers “no longer pay for empty and underutilized federal office space.”
The building has been added to a list of federal buildings identified for “accelerated disposition,” in an effort “to engage the market and explore HUD’s relocation options,” the General Services Administration said in a news release. The Washington, DC, metropolitan area remains “a top priority,” the agency added.
“We’re committed to rightsizing government operations and ensuring our facilities support a culture of optimal performance and exceptional service as we collaborate with our partners at GSA to deliver results for the American people,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement.
HUD’s potential relocation also echoes promises President Donald Trump made during his 2024 campaign, where he vowed to move tens of thousands of federal jobs out of Washington, DC, and into “places filled with patriots who love America.”
A Justice Department attorney said today that Attorney General Pam Bondi could potentially take “criminal action” against states that count mail ballots that arrive at election offices after Election Day.
Michael Gates from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division said this in court while defending an executive order signed by President Donald Trump last month that attempts to unilaterally overhaul how elections are run, including with provisions targeting states with post-Election Day receipt deadlines for mail ballots.
One such provision is instructing the attorney general to “take all necessary action to enforce” an Election Day deadline for mail ballots. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly grilled Gates on how the attorney general might implement it.
Gates said Bondi could take any number of actions, including “criminal actions.” But, as Kollar-Kotelly pressed him for specifics, including the possibility Bondi would file lawsuits against states for their policies, the Justice Department lawyer suggested that the judge was asking him to look into a “crystal ball” by demanding that he predict what actions the attorney general might take.
Kollar-Kotelly did not issue a ruling from the bench today, but said she was hoping to issue her ruling by April 24 — a deadline requested by some of the challengers.
Some background: Roughly 20 states currently have laws for counting mail ballots received within a certain period after Election Day — and typically require a postmark or some other indication confirming the ballot was mailed by Election Day or earlier.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department did not respond to previous CNN inquiries about the instruction to the attorney general in question.
President Donald Trump has extended the federal hiring freeze through July 15, White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields wrote in a post on X.
The move is part of the president and Elon Musk’s aggressive efforts to cut spending within the federal government.
What the memo includes: The president signed the initial executive action implementing the hiring freeze on his first day in office. The original action dictated that no new federal civilian positions could be created and no vacant positions could be filled. It specifies that it does not prohibit hirings to “maintain essential services, and protect national security, homeland security, and public safety.”
Ukraine has signed a memorandum with the US as a step toward a proposed minerals deal between the two countries, according to Ukrainian Economy Minister Yulia Svyrydenko.
“We are happy to announce the signing, with our American partners, of a Memorandum of Intent, which paves the way for an Economic Partnership Agreement and the establishment of the Investment Fund for the Reconstruction of Ukraine,” Svyrydenko said in a post on X.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said earlier that a memorandum related to the deal could be signed remotely today.
“This document is the result of the professional work of the negotiating teams, which recently completed another round of technical discussions in Washington,” Svyrydenko said. “Ahead is the finalization of the text of the agreement and its signing — and then, ratification by parliaments.”
“There is a lot to do, but the current pace and significant progress give reason to expect that the document will be very beneficial for both countries,” Svyrydenko concluded.
An earlier iteration of the minerals deal went unsigned following a public argument between Zelensky and US President Donald Trump in February.
Details of the proposed deal have since been in flux, with Treasury officials meeting a Ukrainian delegation in Washington this week to hammer it out, sources told CNN.
CNN’s Elise Hammond contributed to this reporting.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Thursday that he wants to negotiate trade deals with every country, including China.
“We’re going to make a deal with everybody,” he said. “I would think over the next three or four weeks, I think maybe the whole thing could be concluded.”
Trump’s comments come a week after he enacted a 90-day pause on “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of nations, which now instead face a baseline 10% tariff. The big exception, however, is China, which faces a whopping 145% tariff. China’s responded with a 125% tariff on American goods, heightening tensions between the two largest economies in the world.
Trump compared the United States to “a big, beautiful department store before that business was destroyed by the internet.”
“Everybody wants a piece of that store,” Trump said, referring to other countries wanting to gain access to American markets to sell their products.
“At a certain point, if we don’t make a deal we’ll just set a limit, we’ll set a tariff … and we’ll say, ‘Come in and shop.’” If trading partners don’t like those tariffs, Trump said, they don’t have to “shop at the store of America.”
President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday that he was invited by King Charles to visit the United Kingdom in September.
“It’s an honor to be, you know, a friend of Charles. I have great respect for King Charles and the family, William. We have just, really, just a great respect for the family,” the president said. “And I think they’re setting a date for September.”
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer delivered a letter from King Charles to Trump in February during a trip to the White House, inviting the president for a second state visit. Trump accepted and said he’d plan the trip soon.
Starmer told Trump in the Oval Office that two state visits for one world leader has “never happened before.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday called a shooting at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, that left two dead and five injured “a shame,” but said he was unlikely to seek changes to the nation’s gun laws.
“Look, I’m a big advocate of the Second Amendment, that happened from the beginning. I protected it, and these things are terrible, but the gun doesn’t do the shooting, the people do,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office when signing unrelated executive orders.
“As far as legislation is concerned, this has been going on for a long time. I have an obligation to protect the Second Amendment, I ran on the Second Amendment, among many other things, and I will always protect the Second Amendment,” he said.
During his first term in office, Trump suggested he’d be open to expanding background checks for purchasing firearms but later seemed to walk back those comments after meeting with then-National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre at the White House.
In remarks from the campaign trail, Trump told supporters in October 2024 the Second Amendment “is under siege,” touting his endorsement from the NRA.
President Donald Trump singed two executive orders Thursday related to opening up protected areas for fishing in the Pacific Ocean.
Mongabay, a conservationist news website, has previously reported that Amata Radewagen, a US delegate who represents American Samoa, had asked the Trump administration to “reopen … an enormous marine protected area in the Central Pacific Ocean to industrial fishing.”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the move, which affects tuna fishing, “common sense.”
“We’re going to open all of these markets and we’re going to let our fishermen thrive and prosper. And we’re going to have lower cost fish, more of it, and the freshest fish in the world,” Lutnick said.
Peter Navarro, one of the president’s top advisers, told Trump during the signing that he would have a similar order related to Maine lobster on the president’s desk next week.
“It’s incredible,” Trump said. “Canada fishes there and we’re not allowed to … I did it last time and they undid it. That’s why we have to stay president for a long time.”
President Donald Trump on Thursday said his administration is speaking with Chinese officials in an effort to work on a trade deal.
This comes after he slapped a 145% tariff on China, prompting China to retaliate with a 125% tariff on American goods.
Trump declined to say if he’s spoken directly with Chinese President Xi Jinping but told reporters that government officials who report to Xi have reached out “a number of times.”
“I believe we’re going to have a deal with China,” Trump said after an executive order signing ceremony in the Oval Office.
President Donald Trump in the Oval Office said Thursday “Harvard is a disgrace” when asked why the Internal Revenue Service is making plans to rescind the tax-exempt status of the Ivy League university.
“Because I think Harvard’s a disgrace. I think what they did was a disgrace. They’re obviously antisemitic,” he said, citing former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s congressional testimony at a hearing focused on antisemitism on campus. “Tax-exempt status is a privilege, it’s really a privilege. And it’s been abused by a lot more than Harvard.”
While Trump said lawyers working on the matter haven’t made a final decision, he warned that schools must be careful.
President Donald Trump said he was “so happy” that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear oral arguments over his day-one request to enforce a plan to end birthright citizenship.
The high court will hear arguments in the case on May 15.
Some background: Past presidents and courts for more than a century have read the 14th Amendment to guarantee citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States,” but Trump campaigned on ending it, and he signed an executive order that would have barred the government from issuing or accepting documents recognizing citizenship for people born in the US to foreign parents. It was subsequently wracked with lawsuits and sweeping injunctions.
Asked today about the Supreme Court agreeing to hear arguments, Trump claimed that birthright citizenship “is about slavery,” appearing to tie the constitutional right to its Civil War-era context. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.
“If you look at it that way, the case is an easy case to win. And I hope the lawyers talk about birthright citizenship and slavery, because that’s what it was all about. And it was a very positive — it was meant to be positive, and they use it now instead, not for slavery. They use it for people that come into our country, and they walk in, and all of a sudden they become citizens,” he claimed.
CNN’s John Fritze contributed to this report.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni had a tightrope to walk at the White House today — and it looks like she succeeded.
Meeting President Donald Trump at a time when the relationship between Europe and the US is at one of its lowest points in decades, Meloni needed to play into her good relationship with Trump while also standing up for European interests.
Trump has previously criticized Europe for “screwing” the US by running a trade surplus. The threat of Trump’s so-called “reciprocal tariffs” coming into effect has already caused havoc to the European economy, forcing the European Central Bank to cut interest rates earlier today.
Meloni opened today’s meeting by making it clear that she was on the same wavelength as Trump. She proclaimed that her goal was “to make the West great again,” and said she was in on Trump’s “fight against ‘woke’ and DEI ideology that would like to erase our history.”
The meeting progressed in a relaxed atmosphere, with Trump repeatedly praising Meloni as a “great” leader and a “friend” who is doing “fantastic job.”
While this was Meloni’s first meeting with Trump at the White House, the two share a warm relationship. Trump hosted her at Mar-a-Lago after his reelection and she was the sole European leader invited to his inauguration.
In the Oval Office, Meloni capitalized on her relationship with Trump while lobbying for Europe. She said she was in Washington to “help make a deal,” while Trump responded by saying he believed there was a “100%” chance of an EU tariff deal.
A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration’s request that it halt the next steps Judge Paula Xinis is seeking to take in the case concerning a migrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, with a strident warning about the rule of law and the possibility the dispute presented an “incipient crisis.”
The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals said in its seven-page ruling Thursday that the Trump administration’s assertions in the case “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
The unanimous ruling was written by Judge Harvie Wilkinson, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan. In it, he was extremely critical of the administration’s effort to undo some of Xinis’ recent orders in the case, sounding alarm bells about how its maneuverings in the matter have resulted in the two branches “grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.”
“The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply,” Wilkinson wrote. “The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”
The appeals court used the order to weigh in on the broader atmosphere around President Trump’s conflict with the judiciary.
The Salvadoran government is “unfazed” by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s attempt to visit deported Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego García at the notorious CECOT prison, according to a high-level source close to the country’s president.
“Salvadoran officials are focused on formal diplomatic channels with US counterparts and not on public-facing pressure or unscheduled visits,” the source told CNN.
In a video released today, Van Hollen said he was blocked from entering the prison complex to visit Abrego García, one day after El Salvador’s vice president denied him access following an in-person meeting.
The Maryland senator told reporters in San Salvador that he was with the lawyer for his wife and mother, and their goal was “to check on the health and wellbeing of Kilmar,” said Van Hollen. Denying Abrego Garcia access to his lawyers “is a violation of international law,” he added, noting that Abrego Garcia’s wife and mother have also been unable to contact him in the prison.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele — who is out of the country — has no intention to return early or to meet with Van Hollen, the source said.
Nevertheless, the Salvadoran government is fully aware of the senator’s movements within the country, particularly when attempting to access highly sensitive or secure sites “as they would be with anyone approaching those locations,” the source said.
Salvadoran authorities have not formally charged Abrego Garcia, and are not bound by a strict timeline to do so, according to the source, under the country’s ongoing state of exception, which suspends certain constitutional rights.
More on the case: Abrego García’s family says that the Maryland man was never a gang member, and at least one US federal judge has expressed skepticism of the claim. The Supreme Court last week said President Donald Trump’s administration must “facilitate” the return of the Maryland man.
President Donald Trump responded to a report that he had waved Israel off of striking Iran’s nuclear facilities as the US continues nuclear talks with Iran.
“I wouldn’t say waved off,” he told reporters at the White House, but “I’m not in a rush to do it because I think that Iran has a chance to have a great country and to live happily without death.”
“I’d like to see that, that’s my first option. If there’s a second option, I think it would be very bad for Iran. And I think Iran is wanting to talk,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. “I hope they want to talk, it’s going to be very good for them if they do, and I’d like to see Iran thrive in the future, do fantastically well.”
The New York Times reported Wednesday that Trump urged Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear sites as soon as next month in order to let talks with Iran play out, which could impact planned engagements for Trump’s national security team in the coming days.
The report comes just days before Trump’s foreign envoy Steve Witkoff is scheduled to meet Saturday in Rome with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.
Today, the president suggested his focus was on preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, telling reporters:
“Iran can’t have a nuclear weapon, it’s pretty simple.”
“We’re not looking to take their industry, we’re not looking to take their land, we’re not — all we’re saying is … you can’t have a nuclear weapon,” he added.
CNN’s Kylie Atwood contributed reporting to this post.
President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday that the United States will be “hearing” from Russia “this week” on the US proposal for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
“We’re going to be hearing from them this week, very shortly, actually, and we’ll see. But we want it to stop. We want the death and the killing to stop,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and envoy Steve Witkoff are meeting with Ukrainian officials in Paris at a summit Thursday aimed at bolstering Ukraine’s defenses against Russia’s ongoing attacks.
The president was asked Thursday about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and again claimed that the war between Russia and Ukraine would not have started if he had been president.
“I don’t hold Zelensky responsible, but I’m not exactly thrilled with the fact that that war started. That was a war that would have never started if I were president,” Trump told reporters, adding that he’s not a “big fan” of Zelensky.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said today that US President Donald Trump has accepted her invitation to come to Italy for an official visit, adding that he would have the opportunity to meet with other European leaders as well.
Speaking alongside Trump in the Oval Office, Meloni, who leads Italy’s right-wing Brothers of Italy party, tapped into her political similarities with Trump, and also touched on the war in Ukraine, an issue that has caused rifts between the US and Europe.
“The goal for me is to make the West great again and I think together we can do that,” she said, pointing to Trump. “We can,” Trump responded.
Meloni said she also believed that the US and Europe could work together on achieving “just and lasting” peace in Ukraine.
“We have been defending the freedom of Ukraine together,” Meloni said. The Italian Prime Minister has a staunch supporter of Ukraine and its leader Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Supreme Court deferred a request from President Donald Trump that would have allowed him to immediately enforce a plan to end birthright citizenship against all but a handful of individuals, but it agreed to hear arguments about his request to limit lower court judges from handing down sweeping injunctions.
The high court will hear arguments in the case on May 15.
President Donald Trump indicated that he believes he has the power to remove Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell from his position after slamming Powell in a post on social media earlier Thursday and saying his termination “cannot come fast enough.”
“Oh he’ll leave. If I ask him to, he’ll be out of there,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office during a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“I don’t think he’s doing the job. He’s too late, always too late. Little slow, and I’m not happy with him. I let him know it, and if I want him out, he’ll be out of there real fast,” Trump said, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has not shared that view, sat just feet away. Earlier this week, Bessent told Bloomberg in an interview that “monetary policy is a jewel box that’s got to be preserved.”
Trump ignored a follow-up question on whether he is trying to remove Powell.
Trump later chastised Powell for not bringing interest rates down and “playing politics.” “Interest rates should be down now,” he said, calling members of the Federal Reserve “not very smart people.”
Trump’s comments come after Powell on Wednesday said at an economic event in Chicago that the Trump administration has brought “very fundamental policy changes,” including sweeping tariffs that are “significantly larger than anticipated.” He said such changes are unlike anything seen in modern history, putting the Fed in uncharted waters and on a path to confront a challenge it hasn’t seen in decades.
Powell has pointedly noted that removing a Fed chair is “not permitted under the law,” and has said he intends to serve out the remainder of his term.
CNN Business’ Allison Morrow provides more context on Trump’s threats to oust Powell in the video below:
@cnnPresident Donald Trump said on his social media platform Truth Social that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” Powell, who is a lawyer, says that it is not legal for Trump to fire him without cause. CNN Business’ Allison Morrow breaks it down. #cnn #news #trump #powell #federalreserve
CNN’s Bryan Mena contributed reporting to this post.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said government officials from South Korea are traveling to Washington next week to firm up a trade deal.
Bessent, speaking alongside President Donald Trump and Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in the Oval Office on Thursday, did not specify who would be meeting with the administration.
The meeting comes after Trump and members of his administration have met with a string of foreign officials, including from the European Union and Japan, since the president’s 90-day pause on “reciprocal” tariffs took effect last week.
Bessent also said negotiations with India are advancing “very quickly.”
