The Department of Justice on Wednesday asked a federal court to withdraw its case against a Virginia man that top officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed was a senior “terrorist” within the ranks of the Salvadoran gang MS-13, less than two weeks after the man’s arrest.

Josh Marcus explains what’s going on.

Olivia Troye, former White House Homeland Security and Counter Terrorism Adviser in the first Trump administration, has spoken out after Donald Trump ordered his Justice Department to investigate to of his political enemies.

Troye wrote on X: “This is incredibly disturbing. I warned Trump would do this & that he would falsely try & claim ‘treason.’ He's issuing Executive Orders targeting Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor—two Republican officials who served in his first admin. Ordering the DOJ to investigate them—for what? For telling the truth? This isn’t justice. It’s retribution. This is authoritarianism plain & simple.”

A Delaware judge ruled Wednesday that the conservative news outlet Newsmax Media defamed Dominion Voting Systems through its false reporting, which accused the voting machine company of rigging the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Dominion is seeking $1.6 billion in damages to be determined by a Delaware jury in a trial scheduled to begin on April 28 in Wilmington, said Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis.

The Denver-based company sued Newsmax in 2021 for airing false claims that Dominion machines had stolen the election from President Donald Trump, who was defeated by President Joe Biden.

Read on...

Talking about the possibility of market manipulation or insider trading off the back of Donald Trump’s tariffs reversal today, Senator Bernie Sanders said: “Would I be surprised if there are were people who, hours before, knew exactly what Trump was going to do in rescinding his tariff proposals, understanding that the stock market would soar and you make huge amounts of money… No, I would not.”

Senator Bernie Sanders is currently on CNN, appearing in a town hall opposite host Anderson Cooper. Naturally, the first question was about tariffs.

The independent senator from Vermont cut Cooper off and talked to the audience about how living paycheck to paycheck was shortening the lives of working-class Americans.

Getting back to tariffs, Sanders — who has voted against free trade agreements during his career — said that tariffs used selectively are a good idea if they protect American jobs.

However, he added: “But to arbitrarily, out of nowhere, come up with a tariff that they can't even justify or explain to virtually every country on Earth is absolutely counterproductive.”

John Bowden and Andrew Feinberg report from Washington, D.C.

The president’s decision followed several days of sharp losses on the stock market. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that his reversal was a result of what White House officials have claimed are dozens of foreign nations reaching out with the intention of re-negotiating trade policy with the United States, rather than implementing tariffs of their own.

He said on Wednesday afternoon that his decision was made in response to days of market panic and rippling effects across various economic sectors, which Trump and other White House officials spend days unsuccessfully trying to quell.

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U.S. Space Command has finalized its options for a missile defense system, as directed by President Donald Trump.

It submitted recommendations for Trump’s “Golden Dome” system to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for his review and approval.

This futuristic system was requested by the president during his first week in office, and if successful, it would represent the first instance of the U.S. placing weapons in space intended to destroy ground-based missiles within seconds of launch.

Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said at a conference this week in Colorado that the system is necessary “to deter a space conflict and to be successful if we end up in such a fight.”

Officials did not provide details on what the options for the system entail.

There is considerable skepticism about the feasibility of such a system.

Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney has slammed President Donald Trump for his “special mix of incompetence and evil,” referencing his actions today.

Reposting a video clip on X in which the president is seen directing his Justice Department to pursue his political enemy Chris Krebs, Cheney wrote: “In a special mix of incompetence and evil, Trump has combined his disastrous implementation of 1930s tariff policies with Stalinesque targeting of political adversaries. The 2020 election wasn’t stolen and speaking the truth is only a crime in countries ruled by tyrants.”

Krebs, the first Trump administration’s administration's most senior cybersecurity official responsible for securing the 2020 election, is being targeted by the president for declaring that claims of digital electoral fraud back then were either “unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent” while dismissing the wilder claims as “nonsense” and a “hoax.”

The Supreme Court on Wednesday allowed President Donald Trump to temporarily remove Democratic members from two federal labor boards, suspending two judicial orders that had protected them from dismissal.

Chief Justice John Roberts, representing the court, halted the orders from two Washington-based federal judges that prevented Trump's dismissal of Cathy Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox from the National Labor Relations Board before their terms expired.

The court's action, known as an administrative stay, provides the nine justices with extra time to evaluate the Trump administration's formal request to suspend the judges' orders while the litigation over the firings proceeds.

Roberts told lawyers for Harris and Wilcox to file a response to the government's request by April 15.

On Wednesday, Justice Department lawyers stated in a Supreme Court filing that the lower court rulings had created an “untenable” situation.

“The president should not be forced to delegate his executive power to agency heads who are demonstrably at odds with the administration's policy objectives for a single day — much less for the months that it would likely take for the courts to resolve this litigation,” they wrote.

U.S. District Judges Rudolph Contreras and Beryl Howell upheld federal laws that protect officials in these roles from being dismissed without cause, rejecting Trump's argument that the measures enacted by Congress infringe upon the authority granted to the president by the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Monday declined to pause the rulings by the judges while the cases proceed after an earlier ruling by that court had permitted the removals.

Trump's decision to remove Harris and Wilcox was part of his extensive restructuring and downsizing of the U.S. government, which included firing thousands of workers, dismantling federal agencies, appointing loyalists to key positions, and purging career officials.

With reporting from Reuters