Politics

By Jeremy Herb, Annie Grayer, Jennifer Hansler, Sean Lyngaas, Gabe Cohen, CNN (CNN) — President Donald Trump began his second term with a promise to cut “billions and billions of dollars” in government spending, empowering Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate programs and fire workers it deemed wasteful. One year later, cuts to

By Haley Britzky, CNN (CNN) — The seventh US service member killed in the conflict with Iran — a 26-year-old from Kentucky — was brought home Monday evening in a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Sgt. Benjamin Pennington, from Glendale, Kentucky, died Sunday after sustaining injuries the week prior in an

By Sydney Kashiwagi, CNN (CNN) — Alexander Butterfield, a former top aide to President Richard Nixon whose disclosure of a secret taping system in the White House dramatically shaped the Watergate scandal, ultimately leading to Nixon’s resignation, has died. He was 99. His wife, Kim, along with John Dean, who served as White House counsel

By Jennifer Hansler, CNN (CNN) — The Trump administration on Monday designated Afghanistan as a state sponsor of wrongful detention – a move meant to deter the Taliban from abducting Americans. It is the second country to be designated as such, and the announcement comes on Hostage and Wrongful Detainee Day. The administration designated Iran

By John Fritze, CNN (CNN) — Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday said the Supreme Court’s handling of emergency cases has created a “warped” process that effectively signaled the outcome of high-profile controversies prematurely, describing that as an “unfortunate” departure from how the justices handled short-fuse appeals just a few decades ago. “This uptick in

By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Haley Britzky, Avery Schmitz, CNN (CNN) — Recovering Iran’s remaining highly enriched uranium stockpile believed to be sitting in a storage facility deep underground, an objective the Trump administration has been discussing, would require a significant number of US ground troops beyond a small special operations footprint, seven current and

By Adam Cancryn, CNN (CNN) — The Trump administration has started to panic about the spiking price of oil. While senior Trump aides had anticipated some brief surge in oil prices in the first days of the war with Iran, the size and sustainability of the market reaction caught them off guard, people familiar with

By Aileen Graef, Alison Main, CNN (CNN) — Rep. Kevin Kiley has announced he is leaving the Republican Party effective immediately, making him the only independent member of the US House of Representatives. The move comes as the California lawmaker is facing a tough bid for reelection in the wake of redistricting in the state

By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN (CNN) — The Arizona state Senate complied with a federal subpoena about its review of the 2020 presidential election in the Phoenix area, according to the Senate president. That review of the election confirmed Joe Biden’s win in the state. “Late last week I received and complied with a federal grand

By Sarah Ferris, CNN (CNN) — As Speaker Mike Johnson and his team have navigated the House’s slimmest margin since before World War II, they’ve seen it all. Once, Republicans were headed for a second, embarrassing failed attempt to impeach then-President Joe Biden’s Homeland Security chief because of internal disputes — unless they could round

By Piper Hudspeth Blackburn, Isabelle D’Antonio, CNN (CNN) — A US soldier died after sustaining injuries during an attack last week in Saudi Arabia, the military said, bringing the number of American troops killed in the Iran war to seven. The military on Monday identified the service member as Army Sgt. Benjamin N. Pennington, 26,

By Adam Cancryn, CNN (CNN) — When President Donald Trump first raised the prospect of war with Iran, some of the most serious reservations came from his second in command. A former Marine who rose to political prominence as a critic of foreign wars, Vice President JD Vance counseled against the perils of launching another

By Jeremy Herb, Tierney Sneed, Kristen Holmes, Sean Lyngaas, Zachary Cohen, CNN (CNN) — Kurt Olsen became a key player in some of President Donald Trump’s most far-fetched 2020 election reversal schemes because he believed “that something was not right” in how he saw election officials handle the presidential count in Fulton County, Georgia, and

By Haley Britzky, CNN (CNN) — The families of the six US Army Reserve soldiers who were killed this week in Kuwait watched as their loved ones were brought home during a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware on Saturday. President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance

By Kevin Liptak, Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Kylie Atwood, CNN (CNN) — Inside the Oval Office this week, after a crowd of jostling reporters departed into the Rose Garden, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz tried to get an answer from President Donald Trump: how, exactly, did he envision the war with Iran ending? Despite some pressing