Law firm targeted by Trump agrees to provide $40m in pro bono work, says president – as it happened

We have come to the end of another long day of chronicling the Trump restoration, but will return on Friday to keep at it. Here are some of the day’s developments:

• Donald Trump has signed an executive order to greatly reduce the size of the federal Department of Education.

• Elon Musk, who is definitely not the co-president, is reportedly visiting the Pentagon on Friday to get a briefing on the US military’s plans for fighting a war with China.

• Trump said that he is rescinding an executive order targeting a Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40m in free legal services in support of his administration’s aims.

• A federal judge blocked Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” from accessing social security records and ordered them to delete any previously obtained information.

• Judge James Boasberg, a former law school housemate of Brett Kavanaugh, said the Trump administration “evaded” his order in the case of Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador.

• Trump administration lawyers have embraced the view that the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump invoked to deport suspected members of a Venezuelan gang, permits immigration agents to enter homes without a warrant.

• The justice department has brought charges against three unnamed individuals for using or planning to use molotov cocktails to attack Tesla automobiles and dealerships.

• Immigration agents arrested Badar Khan Suri, an Indian national with a valid visa doing research at Georgetown University, and are trying to deport him for alleged support of Hamas. A judge later temporarily barred DHS from deporting him.

• Tim Walz, who Kamala Harris picked as her running mate, sees an ominous future for the country under Trump, but also opportunities for Democrats to regain their popular support.

• Trump pushed the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, something presidents typically do not do. Yesterday, the central bank held rates steady while forecasting weaker economic growth.

The New York Times reports that Elon Musk is going to the Pentagon on Friday for a briefing on the US military’s plans for how it might fight a war with China.

The unnamed officials did not say why Musk needs to know about such plans, but the Times notes that they are not usually widely shared, even within the government.

Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military’s most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country was to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.

The top-secret briefing for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.

A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to the Times that Musk will be meeting the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, at the US military’s headquarters, but said he is “just visiting”.

The briefing reinforces Musk’s clear conflicts of interest, as a government contractor with paid billions of dollars in contracts from the Pentagon and US spy agencies who is also heavily invested in China.

As Vox has explained, China is very important to Musk’s Tesla business.

The symbiotic relationship between Tesla and China almost can’t be overstated. In 2019, the company opened its Shanghai “gigafactory” with hundreds of millions of dollars in loans from Chinese banks. It was the company’s first factory outside the US, as well as the first wholly foreign-owned car company in China, where automakers typically enter into joint ventures with Chinese companies.

It is now Tesla’s largest factory, producing half of the company’s cars globally last year. Musk has praised workers at his Chinese factory for “burning the 3 am oil…whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.” The remark came at a time when the factory was literally having workers sleep in the factory due to Covid restrictions.

According to federal prosecutors who indicted Trump for illegally taking classified documents and showing them to people after his first term, Trump himself has been somewhat cavalier about the US’s war plans. The indictment described an incident in which Trump showed the ghostwriter of his former chief of staff’s memoir a copy of the Pentagon’s plan for war with Iran during a meeting near the swimming pool of his golf club in New Jersey.

Donald Trump announced on Thursday that a Democratic-leaning law firm he targeted for retribution in an executive order last week, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, has agreed to provide $40m in free legal services to support his administration’s goals.

In return, Trump said he has agreed to rescind the executive order.

Trump’s social media post announcing the agreement lays out the terms of the agreement and then includes two statements, one from the White House and a second from Paul, Weiss’s chairperson, Brad Karp, who met privately with Trump.

The pro-bono work is described in general terms as including, “assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects”.

The terms of the agreement are anodyne, as in the statement from Karp, who is quoted as saying: “We are gratified that the President has agreed to withdraw the Executive Order concerning Paul, Weiss. We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration.”

It is not clear if Karp was aware of the claim, made by the White House, that during his meeting with Trump, “Mr Karp acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz.”

Pomerantz is a former federal prosecutor who left retirement in 2021 to work for Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance on an investigation of then former president Trump’s finances.

According to Trump’s executive order, Pomerantz went to work for the Manhattan DA “solely to manufacture a prosecution against me and … according to his co-workers, unethically led witnesses in ways designed to implicate me”.

In Trump’s telling, “after being unable to convince even Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg that a fraud case was feasible, Pomerantz engaged in a media campaign to gin up support for this unwarranted prosecution.”

Pomerantz told a very different story, both in his leaked 2022 resignation letter, and in his 2023 book, People vs. Donald Trump.

In the letter, addressed to Alvin Bragg, who had taken over as Manhattan DA from Vance, Pomerantz wrote:

As you know from our recent conversations and presentations, I believe that Donald Trump is guilty of numerous felony violations of the Penal Law in connection with the preparation and use of his annual Statements of Financial Condition. His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people. The team that has been investigating Mr. Trump harbors no doubt about whether he committed crimes — he did.

In late 2021, then-District Attorney Cyrus Vance directed a thorough review of the facts and law relating to Mr. Trump’s financial statements. Mr. Vance had been intimately involved in our investigation, attending grand jury presentations, sitting in on certain witness interviews, and receiving regular reports about the progress of the investigation. He concluded that the facts warranted prosecution, and he directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr. Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible.

This work was underway when you took office as District Attorney. You have devoted significant time and energy to understanding the evidence we have accumulated with respect to the Trump financial statements, as well as the applicable law. You have reached the decision not to go forward with the grand jury presentation and not to seek criminal charges at the present time. The investigation has been suspended indefinitely. Of course, that is your decision to make. I do not question your authority to make it, and I accept that you have made it sincerely. However, a decision made in good faith may nevertheless be wrong. I believe that your decision not to prosecute Donald Trump now, and on the existing record, is misguided and completely contrary to the public interest. I therefore cannot continue in my current position.

After Bragg decided to indict Trump on different charges, Pomerantz made the case in an interview with 60 Minutes in 2023 that Trump should also have faced criminal charges for financial fraud.

A US district judge has barred the Trump’s administration from deporting an Indian academic who teaches at Georgetown University after the Department of Homeland Security accused him of having ties to Hamas and detained him.

On Thursday, US district judge Patricia Giles in Alexandria, Virginia, ordered federal officials not to deport Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at the university, “unless and until the Court issues a contrary order”.

Giles’s order comes after Suri, whose wife is of Palestinian heritage, filed an emergency court request to prevent deportation.

Read more from my colleague Victoria Bekiempis:

As our colleagues Tom Phillips and Clavel Rangel report, US immigration officials appear to be relying on tattoos as evidence that several of the 238 Venezuelans deported from the United States to El Salvador last week, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. But lawyers for some of the men, and their family members, say that their tattoos are unrelated to any gang.

One of the deportees is an asylum-seeker named Jerce Reyes Barrios, 36, a former professional soccer player and a fan of Real Madrid, the Spanish giants whose name attests to their loyalty to the Spanish king, and whose club logo includes a crown.

Reyes’s tattoos include one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios” (God). In a sworn declaration filed in federal court on Wednesday, his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said the Department of Homeland Security had alleged this tattoo was proof of gang membership. “In reality, he chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” Tobin wrote.

Tobin rejected the idea that her client was a gang member and said he had fled Venezuela in early 2024 after being detained at an anti-government demonstration by security forces. Reyes was subsequently “taken to a clandestine building where he was tortured” with electric shocks and suffocation.

As Dropsite News reported, his uncle, Jair Barrios, wrote on Facebook on Tuesday that the family was “surprised to see him in the videos being released on social media of those deported to El Salvador” and contacted his lawyer in California. The post includes old photographs of Reyes playing in goal, and holding a trophy, and an image that appears to show him in one the highly produced videos of the deportees in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador posted on social media by the Trump administration.

Reyes’s uncle also said that his nephew had made an appointment to present himself at the US border in September and was immediately detained and placed under investigation for “suspicious tattoos” possibly indicating gang membership. The family said that Reyes, who has no criminal record, mostly has tattoos expressing his love of soccer and his family.

According to Tobin’s affidavit, which is an exhibit being reviewed by Judge James Boasberg, who is trying to determine if the Trump administration defied his order to not deport the men, Reyes is supposed to have a hearing on his asylum claim on 17 April.

Before being transferred to Texas and flown to El Salvador last week, he was in federal custody at the Otay Mesa detention center since he presented himself at the border in September.

A federal judge blocked Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) from accessing social security records containing personally identifiable information on Thursday, and ordered them to “disgorge and delete” any previously obtained information that was not anonymized.

Judge Ellen Hollander granted a temporary restraining order that prevents Social Security Administration (SSA) workers from allowing Doge to have access to such records and called the activities of Musk’s team a “fishing expedition”.

Musk’s raid on the social security database has so far produced no concrete evidence of fraud, but has provided the basis for a series of wildly false claims based on misunderstandings of the data that the billionaire, and the president he works for, have used to mislead the American people.

The White House has published the full text of the executive order signed by the president at the White House ceremony this afternoon, and it seems to far exceed the scope described beforehand by his press secretary.

Rather than just reduce the size the department, the order directs the education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education”.

The order makes no mention of the department, which can only be eliminated by an act of Congress, continuing to ensure that federal civil rights laws will be enforced, or that protections for disabled students are maintained.

Instead, the text directs the secretary to ensure that schools receiving federal funds “terminate illegal discrimination obscured under the label ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’”, which the president and his supporters seem to see as a form of anti-white racism. The order also bans funding for any schools that support transgender students, referring to such support as “programs promoting gender ideology”.

The Financial Times reports that Britain, France, Germany and the Nordic nations are in talks to develop a plan to defend the continent without the United States if Donald Trump withdraws from Nato.

According to the FT:

Europe’s biggest military powers are drawing up plans to take on greater responsibilities for the continent’s defence from the US, including a pitch to the Trump administration for a managed transfer over the next five to 10 years.

The discussions are an attempt to avoid the chaos of a unilateral US withdrawal from Nato, a fear sparked by President Donald Trump’s repeated threats to weaken or walk away from the transatlantic alliance that has protected Europe for almost eight decades.

Trump’s former national security advisor, John Bolton, told Germany’s Deutsche Welle this month that the president has a “simple-minded” understanding of Nato, and came “within an inch” of withdrawing from the alliance in 2018.

Like everyone else, Democratic lawmakers were prepared for the president’s long-trailed order to destroy the federal Department of Education, and they immediately denounced it.

Representative Yvette D Clarke, of Brooklyn, wrote on Bluesky:

No matter what excuse the president gives, we know the real reason he’s tearing apart the Department of Education is to steal money from public schools and funnel it into private ones that don’t care about teaching your kids – only indoctrinating them into the cult of Trump.

Representative Frank Pallone, of New Jersey, wrote on X:

Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education means mass teacher layoffs, overcrowded classrooms, and less support for students. It’ll price millions out of college and increase local property taxes. Trump’s billionaire Education Secretary doesn’t care about public education, but the American people do. This must be reversed.

Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, said in a statement:

Trump’s attempt to close the Department of Education has nothing to do with helping our kids learn better or empowering teachers. It’s about making it easier to sell our public schools off to the highest bidder. The billionaire class is rooting for the destruction of public education because they see your local elementary school as their next target to run for profit. Our kids will pay the price.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, a former teacher, said in a Bluesky video that everyone involved in education had to “fight back”.

Donald Trump has signed an executive order to greatly reduce the size of the federal department of education.

In remarks beforehand to a White House event filled with schoolchildren and Republican governors, attorneys general and lawmakers, Trump claimed, falsely, that there was widespread, bipartisan support for “eliminating the federal Department of Education once and for all”.

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His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters earlier on Thursday that the executive order would not eliminate but greatly reduce “the scale and the size of this department”. Closing the department, which was created by Congress in 1979, would require a law passed by the House and Senate.

Nevertheless, Trump welcomed the Republican governors of Texas, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, Idaho, Louisiana, Nebraska, and a co-founder of the far-right group Mom’s for Liberty, before declaring that his administration “will take all lawful steps to shut down … the department”.

Trump insisted that removing the federal role in education would “return” responsibility to the states, but questions remain over who will take over certain critical functions, like enforcing civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination against ethnic and racial minorities, and making sure that federal laws ensuring access to disabled students are followed.

In a recent appearance on Fox, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, mentioned the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act by its acronym, Idea, before admitting that she did not know what it stood for.

James Boasberg, the federal judge handling a complaint that the Trump administration sent Venezuelan asylum seekers to a prison in El Salvador who were wrongly accused of being members of a street gang, said in a new order that “the Government again evaded its obligations” to comply with his demand for information on why the planes did not return to the United States as he had ordered.

Boasberg gave the administration until 10am on Friday to “submit a sworn declaration” as to whether or not the government intends to invoke a state-secrets privilege or give detailed evidence that the migrants were not deported in defiance of his original order.

The judge called the government’s submission of a lower-level immigration officer’s vague statement that state secrets might be invoked ahead of a Thursday deadline he’d set “woefully insufficient”.

Donald Trump will soon sign his executive order laying out a plan to dismantle the Department of Education in a ceremony at the White House.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier today said the order will result in a “much smaller” department, which will nonetheless continue handling student loans and some crucial programs. But it is unclear how effective Trump’s order will be. The education department was created by an act of Congress and abolishing it requires their consent.

Here’s more about what we expect Trump to do:

The Trump administration faced a deadline of 12pm ET today to provide a federal judge with information he requested to determine whether three planes of suspected Venezuelan gang members were deported in defiance of his order, or claim a national security exception to not reveal the details.

Noon has come and gone, and the docket in the case shows no new filing from the government. But Fox News, citing sources familiar with the situation, reports that justice department attorneys made some kind of submission in person today to James Boasberg, the federal judge handling the case. It remains unclear if it arrived by his deadline.

Here’s more about the case of the Venezuelans, in which the Trump administration is asserting it can deport migrants without due process if they are covered by the Alien Enemies Act:

The non-partisan Campaign Legal Center said the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick violated ethics rules when he encouraged Americans to buy Tesla stock in an interview yesterday.

“Secretary Lutnick’s actions violate the ethics rules that were enacted to hold public officials accountable to the American people. His statement is part of a pattern of behavior showing that Trump’s indifference to ethics is trickling down to his most senior officials,” said Kedric Payne, the center’s vice-president and senior director for ethics.

“The American people deserve a government that prioritizes public good. Most people will conclude that promoting a stock is not tied to any public good and ethics laws agree. The office of government ethics and commerce ethics officials should hold Lutnick accountable and reassure the public that their officials will face consequences if they use their public office to enrich themselves or their allies.”

Lutnick’s plea has not had much effect, at least not yet. Tesla’s share price is down about 0.9% in today’s trading, and more than 38% this year so far: