Senate votes to advance Hegseth as Trump’s defense secretary
The Senate has voted 51 to 49 to advance Pete Hegseth’s nomination to become secretary of defense, despite grave objections from Democrats over his behavior and qualifications to lead the US military.
All but two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted to advance his nomination, clearing his way for a vote on his confirmation later this week.
The former combat veteran and Fox News host faces allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement.
Although he has denied the allegation of sexual assault, Hegseth paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of rape in 2017. A new claim emerged this week in an affidavit from Hegseth’s former sister-in-law who claimed he was abusive to his second wife to the pont that she feared for her safety. Hegseth has denied the allegation.
Key events
Republican lawmakers reportedly sent sexually explicit texts to Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump aide who testified to the Jan. 6 committee.
The Washington Post reports that it has seen correspondence from last June in which an aide to House speaker Mike Johnson warned Republican colleagues not to subpoena former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson due to fears that doing so could reveal “sexually explicit texts that lawmakers sent her”.
The warning came after Representative Barry Loudermilk, a George Republican, had publicly floated the idea of forcing Hutchinson to testify before a panel working to undermine the Jan. 6 select committee ‘s findings.
According to the Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany, who spoke to an unnamed “person familiar with the effort” to block the subpoena and reviewed correspondence related to that effort, “a Johnson aide told Loudermilk’s staff that multiple colleagues had raised concerns with the speaker’s office about the potential for public disclosure of ‘sexual texts from members who were trying to engage in sexual favors’ with Hutchinson.
It was Hutchinson who made public the allegation that Trump had attacked his own Secret Service agents after his speech on 6 January 2021, when they refused his order to drive him to the Capitol before the riot.
Trump, and the agents, subsequently denied that allegation, but it has apparently haunted the president, who brought it up, entirely unprompted, during remarks to supporters in the Capitol this week following his inauguration.
Carter Sherman
The US House on Thursday passed an anti-abortion bill that claims to protect babies “born alive” after attempted abortions – a bill, abortion rights advocates say, that misrepresents and stigmatizes excruciating medical situations.
The bill, the Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, requires medical providers to “preserve the life and health” of any children born after attempted abortions or face criminal penalties. Republicans, who have pursued this kind of federal legislation for years, have framed the law as a common-sense defense against infanticide.
However, abortion rights supporters fear the bill would also apply in situations where, due to pregnancy or fetal complications, women give birth to infants with no chance of survival. In those scenarios, women may prefer that their children are offered palliative care.
The vast majority of US abortions take place before fetal viability, which tends to occur at around 24 weeks of pregnancy. Infanticide is also already illegal.
The passage of the bill marks the first anti-abortion legislative victory of the second Trump administration, but the bill is unlikely to become law anytime soon. Earlier this week, the US Senate blocked a similar bill from advancing.
Hegseth reportedly told senator he paid $50,000 to woman who accused him of sexual assault
The Associated Press reports that Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, told Senator Elizabeth Warren in writing that he paid $50,000 to the woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017.
The answers, which were seen by the AP, were provided to Warren in response to additional questions she had for Hegseth as part of the vetting process.
Hegseth’s attorney, Timothy Parlatore, declined to comment to the news agency on the dollar figure Thursday. Hegseth has insisted that the encounter was consensual and denied any wrongdoing. During his confirmation hearing last week Hegseth said that he was “falsely accused” and was completely cleared.
At his conformation hearing last week, Warren grilled Hegseth over his “degrading statements about women in combat roles” in a contentious exchange.
As Donald Trump signed an executive order to support cryptocurrency industry on Thursday, his daughter Ivanka warned investors that “a fake crypto coin called ‘Ivanka Trump’ or ‘$IVANKA’ is being promoted without my consent or approval”.
The president was flanked by David Sacks, a venture capitalist who is the new “White House AI & Crypto Czar”, as he signed the order to create a working group on digital assets, “tasked with developing a Federal regulatory framework governing digital assets, including stablecoins, and evaluating the creation of a strategic national digital assets stockpile”.
As our colleague Callum Jones reported, in the past week, “the president and his wife, Melania, each announced their own respective crypto coins ahead of his inauguration. Both were valued at billions of dollars as Trump took the oath of office on Monday.”
Trump also signed a second order on artificial intelligence, “to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance in order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security”.
On Wednesday, two of Trump’s supporters in the field of AI, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, bickered in public over the seriousness of an AI infrastructure initiative the president had unveiled on Tuesday.
As the Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper wrote in September, Sacks, like Musk, was born in apartheid-era South Africa, before moving to the US aged five, to grow up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee.
Trumps claims 800,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine
In remarks to reporters at the White House after signing a new batch of executive orders, Donald Trump claimed that Russia has lost a far higher number of soldiers fighting in Ukraine than experts and researchers estimate.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine is “ready to negotiate a deal; he’s ready to stop” the war, Trump said, because he has “lost a lot of soldiers”.
“Russia lost more soldiers,” Trump said, “They lost 800,000.” Trump has cited that death toll, without giving any idea of his source, at least three times since taking office this week.
The independent Russian news site Mediazona, working with the BBC’s Russian news service and a team of volunteers, reported in November that they had had identified the names of 80,973 Russian military personnel killed in the Russia-Ukraine war since February 2022.
Earlier this week, Trump told reporters that “almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed; about 700,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed”.
As the New York Times reports, Russian researchers and journalists have estimated that Russia had suffered more than 150,000 battlefield deaths, and the independent Ukrainian war correspondent Yurii Butusov reported on YouTube last month that his sources inside Ukraine’s armed forces told him that 105,000 soldiers have been “irreversibly lost”, with 70,000 killed and 35,000 missing. That’s a far higher death toll the 43,000 soldiers that President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed have been killed as of 8 December 2024, but far lower than Trump’s estimate.
The day so far
Here’s a recap of the latest developments:
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A federal judge in Seattle blocked Donald Trump’s executive order curtailing the right to automatic birthright citizenship in the US. US district judge John Coughenour issued a temporary restraining order preventing the administration from enforcing the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional”.
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The Senate voted to advance the nomination of Pete Hegseth to become the next US secretary of defense, despite some Republican opposition. Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska announced they would oppose Hegseth’s nomination, making them the first two Republican lawmakers to publicly reject one of Trump’s cabinet picks.
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The Senate voted to confirm John Ratcliffe as CIA director, giving Trump the second member of his new cabinet. The Senate voted to confirm Ratcliffe, a former Texas representative and director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, by 74-25, with 20 Democrats and one independent joining Republicans in backing the nomination.
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Trump made a combative return to the world stage in an address to the World Economic Forum in Davos, accusing oil producers of prolonging the Ukraine war by failing to cut prices and threatening tariffs on all US imports. He repeated his call for Nato countries to dramatically increase defence spending and complained about what he called an “unfair” trading relationship with China.
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The state department has frozen all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and changes to gender identity on existing passports, following a new executive order signed by Trump on his first day of office. “The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable,” according to an internal email from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, that was shared with the Guardian.
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Trump has ended security detail for three of his former administration officials so far since returning to the White House: his former secretary of state Mike Pompeo, former top aide Brian Hook and former national security adviser John Bolton.
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Trump held his first official call with a foreign leader since returning to the White House, speaking with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, on Wednesday. In its readout of the call, the Saudi state-run Saudi Press Agency said the crown prince told Trump that he wanted to invest $600bn in the US over the next four years.
Donald Trump signed a flurry of new executive orders on Thursday, including an order aiming to declassify federal records relating to the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
The order directs the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to develop a plan within 15 days to declassify the remaining John F Kennedy records and within 45 days for the other two cases, Associated Press reports.
Speaking to reporters, Trump said: “Everything will be revealed.”
Reuters reports that Trump also signed an order to create a cryptocurrency working group, and that additionally he signed pardons for 23 anti-abortion protesters.
Lauren Gambino
Donald Trump “overreached by a mile” with his attempt to dismantle the longstanding constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, said.
California along with a coalition of states and the city of San Francisco are suing the administration over an executive order issued just hours after Trump was sworn into office on Monday that would deny automatic citizenship to some children born in the United States – a move they argue is in “flagrant violation” of the US constitution.
“Just because he’s the president doesn’t mean he can change the US constitution,” Bonta, a Democrat, said in an interview this week. “In fact, it is absolutely clear – it is civics 101 – that he cannot.”
The lawsuit, led by California, New Jersey and Massachusetts and filed in the US district court for Massachusetts, argues the order would cause “irreparable harm” to the states and their residents by denying citizenship rights to the US-born children whose parents are not lawful residents.
A second multi-state lawsuit challenging the order was filed in the western district of Washington, where a federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the order from taking effect. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups representing pregnant women whose children would be affected by the order have also sued.
Senate votes to advance Hegseth as Trump’s defense secretary
The Senate has voted 51 to 49 to advance Pete Hegseth’s nomination to become secretary of defense, despite grave objections from Democrats over his behavior and qualifications to lead the US military.
All but two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, voted to advance his nomination, clearing his way for a vote on his confirmation later this week.
The former combat veteran and Fox News host faces allegations of sexual assault, excessive alcohol use and financial mismanagement.
Although he has denied the allegation of sexual assault, Hegseth paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of rape in 2017. A new claim emerged this week in an affidavit from Hegseth’s former sister-in-law who claimed he was abusive to his second wife to the pont that she feared for her safety. Hegseth has denied the allegation.
Susan Collins votes against Hegseth nomination
The Senate is currently voting on a key procedural motion to end debate on Pete Hegseth’s nomination for secretary of defense.
Susan Collins, the Republican senator of Maine, has voted against Hegseth’s nomination, joining the Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski.
In a statement, Collins said she was “concerned” that Hegseth “does not have the experience and perspective necessary to succeed in the job”.
She also expressed concern about “multiple statements” that Hegseth has made about women serving in the military, adding:
He and I had a candid conversation in December about his past statements and apparently evolving views. I am not convinced that his position on women serving in combat roles has changed.
Senate votes to confirm John Ratcliffe as CIA director
The Senate voted on Thursday to confirm John Ratcliffe as CIA director, giving Donald Trump the second member of his new cabinet.
The Senate voted to confirm Ratcliffe by 74-25, with 20 Democrats and one independent joining Republicans in backing the nomination.
Ratcliffe, a former Texas representative, previously served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term.
The Senate health committee will hold a confirmation hearing for Robert F Kennedy Jr, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, on 30 January at 10am ET.
Kennedy will also testify before the Senate finance committee on 29 January.
Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, in a statement announcing she would vote against confirming Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, pointed to his past behaviors with women.
“I remain concerned about the message that confirming Mr Hegseth sends to women currently serving and those aspiring to join,” Murkowski said.
Allegations of excessive drinking and aggressive actions toward women, which Hegseth has denied, show that his behaviors “starkly contrast” with what is expected of the US military, she said.
She noted that behavior that Hegseth has acknowledged, “including infidelity on multiple occasions”, shows a lack of judgment.
