Trump administration ordered to restore websites of US health agencies taken down – live

Marc Fogel, an American teacher who was serving a 14 year prison sentence in Russia after getting caught with medically-prescribed marijuana “will be on American soil” by tonight, the Trump administration announced on Tuesday.

“Today, President Donald J. Trump and his Special Envoy Steve Witkoff are able to announce that Mr. Witkoff is leaving Russian airspace with Marc Fogel, an American who was detained by Russia,” National Security Advisor Mike Waltz said in a statement.

“President Trump, Steve Witkoff and the President’s advisors negotiated an exchange that serves as a show of good faith from the Russians and a sign we are moving in the right direction to end the brutal and terrible war in Ukraine. Since President Trump’s swearing-in, he has successfully secured the release of Americans detained around the world, and President Trump will continue until all Americans being held are returned to the United States.”

Federal judge John Bates on Tuesday ordered US health agencies to restore websites that were suddenly and unexpectedly taken offline after Trump signed an executive order to scrub websites of “gender ideology extremism.”

The legal saga began after medical advocacy group Doctors for America sued US health agencies for taking down their websites.

“Prior to the sudden, unannounced removal, these Defendants had maintained these or similar webpages and datasets on their websites for years,” the lawsuit says. “The removal of the webpages and datasets creates a dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, deprives physicians of resources that guide clinical practice, and takes away key resources for communicating and engaging with patients.”

Donald Trump hit out at federal judges who have frustrated his efforts to transform the government, calling them “highly political” and arguing he is merely fighting fraud and waste. The president received an assist from his ally, House speaker Mike Johnson, who said he had met with Elon Musk and was “excited” about his work in the “department of government efficiency”. But the American Bar Association warned that the administration was flying in the face of the constitution, and that it “cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore”, while a Democratic senator said that if the White House begins ignoring court orders it does not like, it would be “maybe the greatest challenge to democracy in our lifetimes.” Meanwhile, an appeals court granted prosecutors’ request to drop charges against two of Trump’s co-defendants in the classified documents case, marking the end of the aborted federal effort to convict the president prior to his re-election.

Here’s what else has been going on today:

• Steve Bannon pleaded guilty to a fraud charge connected to a fundraiser falsely billed as paying for a border wall, but will serve no jail time.

• Two senior officials at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau have resigned, after a top White House official who also played a major role in Project 2025 ordered the watchdog to stop work.

• Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, will go to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced Trump, who also predicted the war with Russia would end “soon”.

King Abdullah of Jordan has arrived at the White House to meet with Donald Trump, and the fate of the ceasefire in Gaza is expected to be high on their agenda.

The two leaders may also discuss Trump’s proposal for the United States to take over the territory and for its population to be displaced to countries neighboring Israel – such as Jordan.

We have a separate live blog covering the meeting, and you can follow it here:

Donald Trump announced he is dispatching Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to Ukraine to meet with Volodymyr Zelenskyy, while also predicting the war in the country would end “soon”.

The US president made the news on Truth Social:

I am sending Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent to Ukraine to meet President Zelensky. This War MUST and WILL END SOON — Too much Death and Destruction. The U.S. has spent BILLIONS of Dollars Globally, with little to show. WHEN AMERICA IS STRONG, THE WORLD IS AT PEACE.

Trump’s announcement came after Zelenskyy, in an exclusive interview with the Guardian, warned that he does not think Europe could replace the United States as the country’s top security partner. Here’s more:

Steve Bannon will serve no jail time after pleading guilty to a fraud charge connected to duping donors into thinking they were funding construction of a wall along the US-Mexico border, the Associated Press reports.

The plea deal resolves a long-running case against Bannon, a top ally of Donald Trump and an architect of his Maga political philosophy, which began at the federal level before being disrupted when Trump pardoned Bannon near the end of his first term, and was then taken up by prosecutors in New York. Here’s more on its resolution, from the AP:

Bannon, a longtime ally of President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty to one scheme to defraud count as part of a plea agreement that spares him from jail time in the “We Build the Wall” scheme. He received a three-year conditional discharge, which requires that he stay out of trouble to avoid additional punishment.

Asked how he was feeling as he left the courtroom, Bannon said, “Like a million bucks.”

Bannon spoke to reporters afterward and called on U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to begin an immediate criminal investigation into New York Attorney General Leticia James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Defense attorney Arthur Aidala called the case against Bannon flimsy, saying it was never about his client.

“Mr. Bannon deserves credit. He wants to fight. Everyone knows Steve Bannon, he always wants to put up a fight,” Aidala said.

The district attorney’s office said Bannon is barred from fundraising for or serving as “an officer, director, or in any other fiduciary position” for any charitable organization with assets in New York state, under the plea agreement. He’s also barred from using, selling or possessing any data gathered from donors to the border wall scheme.

“This resolution achieves our primary goal: to protect New York’s charities and New Yorkers’ charitable giving from fraud,” Bragg said in a statement.

“New York has an important interest in rooting out fraud in our markets, our corporations, and our charities, and we will continue to do just that,” he added.

A federal court has approved a request by prosecutors to drop charges against two co-defendants indicted alongside Donald Trump for allegedly hiding classified documents, marking the end of the unprecedented, and ultimately fruitless, effort to convict the president prior to his return to the White House.

After Trump won the November election, special counsel Jack Smith dropped charges against Trump over the documents, and in a separate case involving attempting to stop Joe Biden from entering the White House. However, Smith allowed the prosecutions of the co-defendants in the documents case, Carlos De Oliveira and Walt Nauta, to continue.

The 11th circuit court of appeals has now agreed to drop those charges. Here’s more, from Reuters:

The U.S. Court of the Appeals for the 11th Circuit approved dropping the case against Trump valet Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos De Oliveira, who were charged alongside Trump in a case accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home and social club. All three pleaded not guilty.

A lawyer for Nauta, Richard Klugh, said the decision “closes out a prosecution that was misguided and which should never have been filed.”

The charges were brought by former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who also accused Trump in a separate case of conspiring to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election.

Smith dropped both cases after Trump won the November election, citing a longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.

At the time, prosecutors said they would continue the case against Nauta and De Oliveira, who faced obstruction charges.

But after Trump took office, the acting U.S. attorney in south Florida, who had taken over the case from Smith, asked the appeals court to drop it.

Prosecutors asked the appeals court to intervene last year after U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump, dismissed the charges against Trump and his two co-defendants, ruling that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel.

The court had not weighed in on that issue at the time prosecutors asked to drop the case.

Republican speaker of the House Mike Johnson said he met with Elon Musk about what he called his “exciting” efforts to dramatically downsize the federal government.

“I met with Elon yesterday about this, to get an update, and it’s to me, it’s very exciting what they’re able to do, because what Elon and the Doge effort is doing right now is what Congress has been unable to do in recent years,” Johnson said, referring to the Musk-chaired “department of government efficiency” that has been behind the attempts to dramatically cut the federal workforce and disrupt agencies such as USAid and the Consumer Financial Bureau.

Johnson said previous attempts by his lawmakers to audit the federal government’s operations have been blocked by agencies’ unwillingness to share information, and added that judges should not stop Doge’s efforts.

“That’s why this is so exciting. They’re uncovering things that we have known intuitively have been there, but we couldn’t prove it,” Johnson said.

“I think the courts should take a step back and allow these processes to play out. What we’re doing is good and right for the American people, what Doge is doing is making sure that your taxpayer dollars, all of us, are spent in the way that they’re intended to be spent.”

Reacting to his administration’s setbacks in courts across the country, Donald Trump has defended his efforts to upend the federal government by closing down agencies and attempting to remove large numbers of federal workers.

In a post on Truth Social, he also took a swipe at “highly political judges” that he blames for blocking his efforts. Here’s what he said:

Billions of Dollars of FRAUD, WASTE, AND ABUSE, has already been found in the investigation of our incompetently run Government. Now certain activists and highly political judges want us to slow down, or stop. Losing this momentum will be very detrimental to finding the TRUTH, which is turning out to be a disaster for those involved in running our Government. Much left to find. No Excuses!!!

The American Bar Association has hit back at Donald Trump’s efforts to pause federal spending and dismantle agencies created by Congress, saying that the administration must adhere to the rule of law and respect court decisions.

In a statement, the bar association’s president William Bay singled out Trump’s attempt to freeze federal loans and grants that Congress had authorized, calling it “a violation of the rule of law [that] suggests that the executive branch can overrule the other two co-equal branches of government.”

“The money appropriated by Congress must be spent in accordance with what Congress has said. It cannot be changed or paused because a newly elected administration desires it. Our elected representatives know this. The lawyers of this country know this. It must stop,” Bay said.

He then called for elected officials and attorneys to work to ensure that the Trump administration respects the courts:

We call upon our elected representatives to stand with us and to insist upon adherence to the rule of law and the legal processes and procedures that ensure orderly change. The administration cannot choose which law it will follow or ignore. These are not partisan or political issues. These are rule of law and process issues. We cannot afford to remain silent. We must stand up for the values we hold dear.

Good morning, US politics blog readers. Donald Trump’s efforts to upend the federal government have been given a dim reception by judges nationwide, who in recent days handed down rulings blocking his attempt to curtail birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants, allow Elon Musk and his cohort access to the Treasury’s payment systems, coax government workers to resign en masse and freeze federal funding, among others. But as the decisions have come down talk among Trump administration officials of ignoring decisions they disagree with has increased. JD Vance was the most prominent of those who have floated these ideas, musing over the weekend that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Such statements have sparked worries among Democrats and legal scholars that the Trump administration will create a constitutional crisis by defying the courts. You can expect to hear plenty more about that today, as the president’s campaign, and the legal battle it has created, continues.

Here’s what else we are watching for:

• Trump will host King Abdullah II of Jordan at the White House beginning at 11.30am, then sign unspecified executive orders at 3pm. Yesterday’s orders included new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and regulations to hold off on enforcing an anti-bribery law.

• Today may be the day that House Republicans release details of their big bill that is expected to cut taxes and government spending and pay for Trump administration priorities such as mass deportations. Mike Johnson and his team have a press conference scheduled for 10am.

• Hamas said they are holding off on the release of future Israeli hostages over breaches of the ceasefire deal, prompting Trump to say “let hell break out” if more aren’t freed by Saturday. We have a separate live blog covering the crisis in the Middle East, and you can read it here.