March 25, 2025: Donald Trump presidency news | CNN Politics (2025)

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Ottawa, Canada, on Sunday.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said Canada must “look out for (itself)” after The Atlantic reported that top US officials sent detailed operational plans and other possibly classified information about US military strikes on Yemen on a group chat that mistakenly included a journalist.

“It’s a serious, serious issue and all lessons must be taken from any of those, including in this circumstance,” Carney told reporters.

Canada has long been one of the US’s closest allies, though the relationship has deteriorated in recent months since President Donald Trump threatened to enact sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods and annex the country as the “51st state.”

“We have a very strong intelligence partnership with the Americans through Five Eyes,” Carney said, referring to the intelligence-sharing alliance between Canada, the US, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.

Carney said the reported leak of sensitive military plans by senior US officials means Canadians must “look out for ourselves.”

Here’s how other US allies are responding to the fallout.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth speaks to reporters in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Tuesday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has again denied “texting war plans” as he and other top officials come under intense scrutiny for a group chat with potentially classified information sensitive US military strikes in Yemen that inadvertently included a journalist.

Hegseth was asked by reporters on Tuesday whether he had declassified the information before putting it in the group chat, or whether the messages may have endangered servicemembers. He did not answer the questions.

Hegseth’s texts in the Signal group chat, which The Atlantic has reported included “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen, including information about targets, weapons the U.S. would be deploying, and attack sequencing,” have drawn the most attention.

The spotlight is also on Hegseth after top intelligence officials shifted responsibility onto him earlier Tuesday.

Under sharp questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly denied that the chat contained classified information – but both deferred to Hegseth when pressed on whether the details shared about the Yemen strikes were classified.

National security adviser Mike Waltz said he had spoken to Elon Musk about the Signal leak, as he promised that the “best technical minds” would be investigating it.

Remember: Top Trump Cabinet members discussed military strike plans in a group chat that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg.

President Donald Trump said he asked Waltz to “study” the security of the encrypted messaging app, Signal, but that he doesn’t believe an FBI investigation is warranted to look into sensitive national security information on the app.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer leaves the Senate Chambers to speak to reporters on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump said he wrote Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer a letter after he decided to support the Republican spending bill to avert a government shutdown earlier this month.

“I wrote him a letter when he said we shouldn’t go out, and he was right about that,” Trump said in an interview that aired on Newsmax on Tuesday.

Schumer’s decision to ultimately vote to advance the bill angered some Democrats who wanted leadership to put up more of a fight against Trump’s agenda.

“I don’t know if he makes it or he doesn’t make it,” Trump said. “I really don’t know.”

Trump also said that Democrats have to adopt better policy viewpoints, expressing doubt that their party would win another election.

President Donald Trump said it was his understanding that a lower-level staffer for national security adviser Mike Waltz had The Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg’s phone number, which was mistakenly added to a Signal chat with top Trump officials about US military strikes in Yemen, although the president did not seem to fully understand how the secure messaging app works.

Goldberg reported that he was added to the chat by Waltz. Earlier on Fox News, Waltz said that a staffer of his was neither responsible for the error nor did a staffer enter Goldberg’s contact information into his phone.

“A staffer wasn’t responsible. And look, I take full responsibility. I built the — I built the group. My job is to make sure everything’s coordinated,” Waltz said.

“I can only go by what I’ve been told. I wasn’t involved in it,” Trump said in the interview.

Signal is an encrypted messaging app, and the group was messaging in a text thread, rather than a call, as Trump described it.

Trump said he likes “hard lines,” but the best place for complete security is the Situation Room.

“There’s always a risk that people are listening,” he said.

Sen. Angus King appears on CNN on Tuesday.

Sen. Angus King of Maine said that he hopes GOP Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton will “follow up” and investigate a report that Trump administration officials sent Yemen strike plans in a Signal group chat that the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief had been mistakenly added to.

“This wasn’t just a casual mistake. This wasn’t a bunch of teenagers deciding what they were going to do on the weekend.”

King, an Independent, joined Democratic members of the committee in pressing top intelligence officials about whether the operational details shared in the chat were classified at a hearing earlier today. CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly denied that the chat contained classified information.

Some Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Sen. John Cornyn Texas, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have voiced support for some type of probe.

National security adviser Mike Waltz takes part in an inteview with Fox News on Tuesday.

National security adviser Mike Waltz said he accepts “full responsibility” for creating a Signal group chat to discuss US military strikes in Yemen that inadvertently included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, while raising suspicions on how the journalist came to be added to the conversation.

While continuing to disparage Goldberg’s journalistic integrity, Waltz struggled to provide a clear answer for why the contact information of a reporter who is loathed by President Donald Trump was on his phone in the first place.

“It’s embarrassing, yes,” he said. “We’re going to get to the bottom of it.”

Pressed on how he had Goldberg’s phone number, Waltz suggested that the reporter’s number was inadvertently listed under someone else’s name – the person he intended to have in the Signal group.

“Have you ever had somebody’s contact that shows their name, and then you have – and then you have somebody else’s number there? Right? You’ve got somebody else’s number on someone else’s contact. So, of course, I didn’t see this loser in the group. It looked like someone else,” Waltz said.

“Now, whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean is something we’re trying to figure out,” he continued, while maintaining during the interview that he had never met Goldberg.

Waltz would not identify the person who he intended to include on the chat, but said, “the person who I thought was on there was never on there.” He also voiced support for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

While Waltz maintains that the information shared in the Signal chat was not classified, he said he would prefer if Goldberg did not release the full messages.

The Senate today confirmed Dr. Marty Makary as commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration with a 56-44 vote.

Makary, a surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins University, has long called for “a change in culture” at the FDA. He wants to look at the ingredients in school lunches, as well as the use of seed oils and dyes in food, he said at his confirmation hearing this month.

He said he plans to build an “expert coalition” to review data on the abortion pill mifepristone, which was approved by the FDA decades ago. It has been shown to be safe and effective, but it has been the focus of abortion restrictions in some states since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Makary also said at his hearing that the FDA should review members of its advisory committees to determine whether they have conflicts of interest.

President Donald Trump said today that there “was no classified information, as I understand it” shared on the Signal chain about Yemen strike plans that included a reporter with The Atlantic, but declined to say who told him the information was not classified.

On Capitol Hill, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard repeatedly denied that the chat contained classified information as they faced sharp questioning from outraged Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Here’s the latest from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the White House.

Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said his country needs “clear guarantees” for the Black Sea agreement the White House says was agreed to in Riyadh.

The agreement stipulates that neither Russia nor Ukraine would use force in the Black Sea, but the Kremlin has said it needs certain sanctions on agricultural export capabilities to be lifted.

The Riyadh agreements also involved a moratorium on attacks on Russian and Ukrainian energy sites. Lavrov said Russia was in favor of a truce but with “nuances.”

“We are also in favor of considering ways to avoid causing any damage to the energy infrastructure. This is not in our interests,” he said.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson departs following a news conference following a meeting of the House Republican Conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, in Washington, DC.

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he left a meeting today with Senate GOP Leader John Thune on budget reconciliation “very encouraged” and “very optimistic,” as congressional Republicans look to advance President Donald Trump’s legislative agenda, though he acknowledged that they still need “more details to be ironed out.”

“It sounds like it’s moving a lot quicker now than it has been. So I’m pleased with that,” Johnson told reporters following the meeting.

Asked about the difference between the House and Senate over spending cuts, Johnson said that they need “more details to be ironed out,” but that the vision “is becoming more and more aligned.” “I think the two chambers are getting very close,” he said.

He also claimed that there’s “close alignment” between the two chambers on Trump’s requested tax cuts and said it sounds as though Senate Republicans are “coming around” on including the debt limit increase as part of the reconciliation package.

Johnson and Thune met with relevant committee chairs and administration officials this afternoon at the Treasury Department about the budget resolutions and reconciliation process.

Separately, Thune said that “everybody’s preferred outcome” would be to include the debt limit in Republicans’ budget resolution after the meeting.

Jayanta Bhattacharya speaks at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions on Capitol Hill on March 5, in Washington, DC.

The US Senate voted today in favor of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s nomination to lead the National Institutes of Health. The vote was 53-46, with one abstention.

Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor at Stanford University who’s well-known for his criticism of Covid-19 lockdowns and mitigation policies, repeatedly told senators at his confirmation hearing this month that he is committed to following the law and ensuring that NIH scientists have the resources they need to do their work.

He also said that, even though extensive research has shown there is no link between vaccines and autism, and he doesn’t “generally believe that there is a link,” he is open to supporting more studies on the topic. Bhattacharya will report to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, who has previously promoted false claims about vaccines.

President Donald Trump responds to a question from the news media during a meeting with Ambassador nominees in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on Tuesday.

President Donald Trump defended his national security adviser, a day after it was revealed in an Atlantic report that some of his top Cabinet officials were talking about plans for strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen on an unsecured platform.

He claimed US national security “is stronger than it’s ever been.”

Two key officials – Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe – testified in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee. They shifted blame and denied that there was any classified material in the chat.

Here’s the latest from the fallout of the report:

Flag posts set in front of the United Nations Headquarters, in New York, on August 2, 2021. (

United Nations staff members in New York have been told to carry their passports and UN credentials with them due to heightened fears of possible run-ins as the US cracks down on immigration.

Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General, confirmed the measure yesterday, telling reporters that he couldn’t remember it ever happening before.

The advisory was intended to “reassure,” he said. “It’s a good reminder for staff members to carry identification with them, including photos of their visas.”

UN staffers received an email on Friday, seen by CNN, which advises that they and their families carry “a form of identification at all times” including their “United Nations identification card” or “a copy of your national passport with G-4 visa.”

“While the likelihood of a situation requiring you to produce such documents to confirm your identity/employment remains low, we want to ensure that everyone is prepared,” the email also says, including instructions on what to do if detained.

In the regular briefing today, Dujarric further emphasized that “there is no indication that there is a targeting of UN staff or diplomatic staff.”

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed executive order aimed at revamping the way US elections are run instructs the Department of Homeland Security to work with the Department of Government Efficiency to review state voter rolls in an effort to identify foreign nationals, and to turn over that list to the state and local officials tasked with managing elections.

The directive is likely to raise alarm bells among voting rights advocates who have argued that DHS immigration databases are not equipped for vetting voter rolls without proper guardrails, as they pose a risk of identifying naturalized citizens for purges.

It is one aspect of the new order that facilitates potentially sweeping changes to election practices long sought by conservatives while capitalizing on Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

The impact of the order won’t be fully clear until it is implemented, and parts of it could be challenged in court. Elections are run by state and local officials, with the federal government playing only a limited role.

But Trump’s order uses a number of tools, including the threat of withholding federal funding, to push changes to election policies that Republicans say will make elections more secure. Their opponents counter such changes create needless hurdles for legitimate voters.

In his strongest remarks to date on the Trump administration’s Signal group chat, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries penned a letter to President Donald Trump today saying that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “should be fired immediately.”

Reed Rubinstein, nominee to be legal adviser at the State Department, testifies during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing on Tuesday, in Washington, DC.

The Trump administration’s nominee to be the State Department’s top lawyer would not give a yes or no answer today as to whether he’d follow the law at his nomination hearing.

In a heated exchange with Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Reed Rubinstein was asked multiple times to answer, “yes or no” that he would “commit to following the law and to advising against policies or actions that would violate current federal law.”

Rubinstein said he didn’t think it was necessarily a “yes or no answer,” claiming that “the law is a conversation.”

Vice President JD Vance announced today that he is joining second lady Usha Vance on her upcoming trip to Greenland.

The pair will visit Pituffik Space Base and receive a briefing on Arctic security measures, as well as meet with US servicemembers, according to a statement from the vice president’s office. The stop “will take place in lieu of the Second Lady’s previously announced visit to the Avannaata Qimussersu dogsled race in Sisimiut,” according to the statement.

In a video on X, the vice president said, “There was so much excitement around Usha’s visit to Greenland this Friday that I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself, and so I’m going to join her. I’m going to visit some of our Guardians in the Space Force on the Northwest coast of Greenland and also just check out what’s going on with the security there.”

“A lot of other countries have threatened Greenland, have threatened to use its territories and its waterways to threaten the United States, to threaten Canada and of course to threaten the people of Greenland,” Vance continued, saying it is the goal of the Trump administration to “reinvigorate” Greenland’s security.

The announcement of the second lady’s visit along with a US delegation including national security adviser Mike Waltz was characterized as “highly aggressive” by Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte B. Egede, plunging relations to a new low after President Donald Trump vowed to annex the autonomous Danish territory.

CNN’s Lex Harvey and Alejandra Jaramillo contributed reporting.

One of the international broadcasters targeted for termination by President Donald Trump has been granted a reprieve by a federal judge.

US District Judge Royce C. Lamberth granted Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s request for a temporary restraining order that will help the broadcaster stay on the air and online for the time being. The broadcasters filed suit last week to contest Trump’s shutdown order, claiming it “would violate the Constitution and federal laws.”

Lamberth heard arguments in the case today. Just before the hearing, the Trump administration agreed to pay what it owes Radio Free Europe for the first half of March. But it continued to defend the termination order that took effect March 15.

Lamberth signaled agreement in his restraining order against the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM for short).

“RFE/RL has, for decades, operated as one of the organizations that Congress has statutorily designated to carry out this policy. The leadership of USAGM cannot, with one sentence of reasoning offering virtually no explanation, force RFE/RL to shut down — even if the President has told them to do so,” Lamberth wrote.

The order means that the broadcaster is likely to succeed on the merits of the broader case. Lamberth said he intends to rule “expeditiously” and told the parties to file briefings before the court later this week. Multiple other lawsuits over Trump’s action to dismantle the US Agency for Global Media are also pending.