Kari Lake Forced to Backtrack on Trump Order to Avoid Legal Fight

Kari Lake, the failed Arizona politician and current special adviser to the president at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, has withdrawn the termination of a federal grant to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, one of the agency’s media properties, to end a legal fight. 

Lake gave notice in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday that the grant termination was being withdrawn, and also sent a letter to RFE/RL’s president, Stephen Capus, notifying the organization that the grant agreement was restored. But the letter added a caveat: The grant was restored “without prejudice,” meaning that Lake and the Trump administration can still terminate the grants at a later date if they so choose.

Lake officially serves as a special adviser to the president in charge of the agency while she awaits Senate confirmation to take over as director of Voice of America, also part of the USAGM.  Earlier this month, President Trump signed an executive order gutting USAGM, resulting in all VOA employees being fired and other outlets, such as RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, operating with minimal resources while they challenged the order in court. 

Now it seems that at least RFE/RL has some temporary relief to be able to serve its mission of reporting in 27 languages to 23 countries around the world, many of which don’t have a functioning free press. But the USAGM’s other media outlets aren’t so fortunate, and for now are still at the mercy of a Trump appointee known for peddling election lies and even lying about the agency she’s now trying to run.

It’s a good thing that the second lady’s trip to Greenland was canceled, because apparently nobody wanted her there.

U.S. representatives were reportedly seen knocking door-to-door in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to ascertain just how Vance’s visit to the Nordic island would be received. The answer? Not well.

“The Americans’ charm offensive mission has failed,” reported TV 2 correspondent Jesper Steinmetz, adding that locals have completely cold-shouldered the Vance family’s prospective visit.

American representatives were seen walking around the city, canvassing residents to see if people would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife.

“They’ve gotten no, no, no, no, no, every single time,” Steinmetz said.

Usha Vance was reportedly scheduled to attend a dogsled race in the foreign country, sharing in a video statement on Instagram that she was “reading all about it with my children” and was looking “forward to meeting” the island’s residents.

“I’m also coming to celebrate the long history of mutual respect and cooperation between our nations and to express hope that our relationship will only grow stronger in the coming years,” the second lady said. “See you soon!”

The Vance family’s travel plans to Greenland were, however, dropped. Instead, they will visit a U.S. space base on the island’s northwest coast later this week.

“This is categorically false,” a senior White House official told The New Republic, though they did not specify what part of the report they objected to. “The Second Lady is proud to visit the Pituffik Space Base with her husband to learn more about arctic security and the great work of the Space Base.”

Greenland’s government said in a statement posted on Facebook Monday that it had “not extended any invitations for any visits, neither private nor official.”

The self-governing Danish territory has not taken kindly to what its officials have described as Donald Trump’s repeated “aggression” against Greenland’s sovereignty. Over the last several months, the U.S. president has made odd jokes and eyebrow-raising militaristic threats about buying and annexing Greenland and shipped his son and MAGA allies to the island for a slapdash photo op with the island’s homeless.

Republicans at home have also incensed the other side of the long-standing international relationship. Last month, Georgia Representative Buddy Carter pitched that Greenland should be renamed “Red, White, and Blueland” while handing Trump free license to pursue Greenland under the belief that the territory is suddenly a national security priority.

A late January poll by pollster Verian found that 85 percent of Greenland’s residents do not want to become part of the United States. Just 6 percent were in favor of the switch, while 8 percent were undecided, according to The Guardian.

This story has been updated.

If Mike Waltz knows anything about national security, he sure isn’t acting like it.

As it turns out, adding a journalist to a Signal channel in which top Trump administration officials discussed imminent airstrikes in Yemen isn’t the only security breach that’s occurred under Donald Trump’s national security adviser.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel reported Wednesday that several senior administration officials had their personal data—including account passwords, cell phone numbers, and email addresses—listed online.

Some of the compromised Cabinet members include Waltz, as well as National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The foreign publication was able to track down their information via commercial search engines as well as databases composed of hacked customer data.

“Most of these numbers and email addresses are apparently still in use,” reported Der Spiegel.

Through those details, reporters were further able to uncover Dropbox accounts and personal profiles on running apps that track users’ health data. Reporters were also able to locate WhatsApp and, ultimately, Signal accounts for some members of the administration.

“Hostile intelligence services could use this publicly available data to hack the communications of those affected by installing spyware on their devices,” the weekly news journal reported. “It is thus conceivable that foreign agents were privy to the Signal chat group in which Gabbard, Waltz, and Hegseth discussed a military strike.”

Former intelligence officials are warning that America’s adversaries “undoubtedly” already have the chat records. That’s thanks to the Trump administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who was physically in Russia when he was added to the chat on the retail app. In an interview with MeidasTouch Tuesday, former national security adviser Susan Rice said that Witkoff’s use of Signal while in Russia would have basically hand-delivered news of the attack to the Kremlin hours before it took place.

“Russians have whatever Witkoff was doing or saying on his personal cell phone,” Rice told the network.

But Witkoff wasn’t the only group chat member traveling abroad at the time. During a House Intelligence Committee hearing Wednesday, Gabbard admitted that she had been in the Indo-Pacific at the time that the strike was being coordinated over Signal, though despite her sudden recollection, she could not remember which country specifically she had been in before Yemen was hit.

She was reportedly in transit from Thailand to India on March 15, the day of the strike. Days later, Gabbard delivered a keynote address at the Raisina Dialogue, according to a readout from her office.

Republicans have been caught in yet another lie about the war plans group chat.

After The Atlantic reported Monday that members of Trump’s Cabinet discussed U.S. military plans in a Signal chat that accidentally included The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, White House national security adviser Michael Waltz, who is being blamed for adding Goldberg to the group, claimed he has never met the journalist. He’s lying, and there’s a photo to prove it.

“There’s a lot of journalists in this city who have made big names for themselves making up lies about this president,” Waltz told reporters Tuesday. “Whether it’s the Russia hoax or making up lies about Gold Star families, and this one in particular I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with, and we are looking into and reviewing how the heck he got into this room,” Waltz said, referring to Goldberg.

“Wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, if I saw him in a police lineup,” Waltz maintained again in a Fox News interview later that evening.

But Lawfare editor Anna Bower shared an image on X Wednesday of Waltz and Goldberg standing next to each other at an event at the French Embassy in 2021. “The event Waltz attended—a Q&A with a French filmmaker—was moderated by Goldberg,” Bower writes.

In The Atlantic’s original report, Goldberg wrote that he has met Waltz before, though he didn’t specify where. The messages in the chat with Waltz, which also included Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, contained sensitive details about the timing of an American airstrike and location of missile strikes against the Houthis in Yemen.

Like Waltz, the rest of the GOP has desperately tried to downplay the incident, spewing a number of lies to smear The Atlantic’s credibility. The White House claimed that no “classified information” or “war plans” were shared in the group chat, despite Hegseth revealing the exact timing of the airstrikes and U.S. aircraft used ahead of time.

It’s a colossal slipup, and Trump’s team is trying to lie its way through it.

The man whose word the Trump administration is swearing by refuses to speak.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth still refuses to give a straight answer on when exactly he declassified the plans he shared in a Signal group chat to attack Yemen.

Full text messages from the group chat, which included The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, were released Wednesday and showed sensitive government information was shared, including timing of the airstrikes on Yemen.

“Mr. Secretary, did you share strike plans before they launched? Mr. Secretary, how do you square what you said with what your messages show?” a reporter asked Hegseth Wednesday afternoon. He walked away silently.

“Did you share classified information? Did you declassify that information before you put it in the chat?” Hegseth continued to ignore the questions.

Hegseth’s refusal to answer comes just hours after Representative Johnny Gomez asked CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard if Hegseth—whom he referred to as “the main person involved in this thread”— was drunk when he sent the messages regarding Yemen in the chat.

On Monday, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg revealed that Mike Waltz had added him to a Signal chat with Hegseth, Vice President JD Vance, and multiple other defense Cabinet members. Hegseth called Goldberg a “deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist” when asked about it on Monday.

“We are prepared to execute, and if I had final go or no go vote, I believe we should,” Hegseth wrote in the chat. “This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.”

If these attack plans—which Republicans are framing as just a chill, regular conversation—were truly unclassified long ago, the defense secretary should have no issue saying that plainly.