House passes resolution to halt military action in Iran in rebuke of Trump

Israel and Lebanon agreed to renew their fragile ceasefire and create a number of “pilot” security zones inside Lebanon from which Hezbollah militants would be banned.

In a joint statement released after a fourth round of U.S.-mediated talks at the State Department, the two sides said the ceasefire “is contingent on a complete cessation of Hezbollah fire and the evacuation of all Hezbollah operatives” from areas south of the Litani River. It was not immediately clear how the security zones would be established but the agreement calls for the Lebanese army to take full control of those areas.

“These steps will enable progress towards a comprehensive peace and security agreement,” the statement said. “All countries reaffirmed that the future of the relationship between Israel and Lebanon must be decided by the two sovereign governments. They rejected any attempt, by any state or non-state actor, to hold Lebanon’s future hostage.”

The latter is a reference to Iran, which supports Hezbollah and has insisted that Israeli attacks on Lebanon be halted as part of a tentative agreement with the U.S. to end the conflict with Iran. Hezbollah is not part of the Israel-Lebanon talks.

The president’s top military adviser, Gen. Dan Caine, visited the capital of Venezuela on Wednesday, his office said in a press release.

“Gen. Caine participated in bilateral discussions with senior interim government leaders and U.S. Embassy leadership and staff, and visited the Embassy’s Marine Security Augmentation Unit,” the statement said. It also noted that this was Caine’s first official visit to the country.

The visit comes less than two weeks after the head of U.S. military operations in Latin America, Marine Gen. Francis Donovan, also visited Caracas as part of a rapid response exercise involving Marines and military aircraft.

Venezuela’s acting President, Delcy Rodríguez, is currently on an official state trip in India.

The House approved a war powers resolution that would halt the U.S. military action against Iran, defying the president as a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to end the three-month-long war that has reordered politics at home and abroad.

House Speaker Mike Johnson had tried to prevent an outcome that would show the mounting opposition to the war, abruptly shutting down floor action two weeks ago when the war powers resolution was on the verge of approval. But displeasure has only grown as the conflict drags on and as Trump struggles to negotiate a quick resolution.

The roll call Wednesday was 215-208, and cheers erupted in the House chamber.

“This reckless and costly war of choice needs to end today,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York said earlier in the week.

The secretary of state faced a litany of questions over nearly a dozen hours of hearings combined about the Trump administration’s tentacles around the war and bipartisan concern over the status of the Iran war and negotiations.

It was the first time Rubio had to face lawmakers since the U.S. first issued strikes on Iran and he spent large portions of his testimony defending the rationale and execution of the military operation.

Democrats and Republicans, on both sides of Capitol Hill, peppered Rubio about the Trump administration’s decision to extend its pause on sanctions on Russian oil shipments to ease shortages from the Iran war.

“President Trump was right to impose those sanctions last fall, but the waivers provide Moscow with badly needed revenue, and, I think, make little difference to American consumers in the price of gas,” GOP Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas said during a hearing.

Rubio defended the decision, saying these are short-term waivers and “will not be permanent.”

In April, the Treasury Department extended the so-called general license for Russian oil that had been loaded by March 11. The extensions have underscored how the fallout from the Iran war has boosted Moscow’s ability to profit from its energy exports, which had been restrained since the invasion of Ukraine.

The president directed a reporter to read Trump’s own past words on communism back to him, then scoffed at efforts in New York and other large, blue cities to expand social services.

“I’d be the greatest in the world. Nobody would be as good as me. I’d give away everything. I could be the greatest,” Trump said, commenting on what he’d be like if he were to undertake similar social giveaways.

“I would sell them: You’re going to get free rent. You’re going to get free houses. You’re going to get free food. You’re going to get free everything,” he said. “But, eventually, that ends and it leads to death, destruction and squalor 100% of the time.”

Trump also said of New York’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, “I would be better than him” at expanding free services, but “I had to sell free enterprise.”

“Free enterprise is tougher to sell,” Trump said.

In his first public comments since his Justice Department said a controversial $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund would not go forward, the president equivocated.

“I’d have to ask the lawyers,” Trump said when asked directly whether the settlement fund was dead or merely on hold. “I don’t know.”

He spent much of his response to reporters defending the fund, which he called a “beautiful thing.”

His comments came just after Senate Republicans voted to advance an immigration funding bill, which they did only after testimony from acting Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed the fund was dead.

“We’ve been hitting them pretty hard,” Trump said when asked by reporters on Wednesday if the ceasefire remains in place amid back-and-forth attacks by the two sides. He added, “It’s a different part of the world. You know, I’d say in that part of the world, a ceasefire is when you’re shooting in a more moderate manner.”

Trump also insisted that ongoing negotiations to extend the temporary ceasefire and open new nuclear talks with Tehran continue to progress.

He suggested that it’s possible an agreement could be reached “over the weekend.” Trump, however, has been predicting for weeks that the two sides are on the cusp of reaching a deal.

The president on Wednesday signed an order that was described as an attempt to make it easier to fire or discipline federal workers.

Introducing the order at an Oval Office event, White House staff secretary Will Scharf said existing personnel rules make it difficult to discipline or promote workers in policymaking roles. He said the goal is to make the federal workforce more accountable.

James Sherk of the Domestic Policy Council added that it has been “almost impossible” to fire federal employees even in cases of serious misconduct.

“What this does is basically treat those employees like private sector workers that are being hired on the basis of merit and competence,” Sherk said. “But if they’re messing up, then they can be removed quickly.”

After hastily bringing reporters to the Oval Office, the president signed an executive action that will empower customs officials to more carefully track what importers bring across the U.S.-Mexico border.

His order is meant to improve the tracking of goods imported into the U.S. for tariff purposes. Federal authorities said it would also allow them to improve holding importing firms accountable, who have long used shell companies to avoid taxes.

Asked why it’s important to increase normalization between Israel and Arab countries, Rubio laid out the benefits that it would provide both sides, but provided a sober outlook on the unlikelihood, given the ongoing hostilities in the region.

“We do want to expand the Abraham Accords obviously, but it’s difficult to do at this moment,” Rubio told senators Wednesday afternoon. “But we’re laying the groundwork for it. It’ll be a top priority of this administration.”

His testimony strayed from Trump’s recent comments, including last week, when the president said that signing on to the Abraham Accords “should be mandatory” as part of a U.S.-Iran deal being negotiated right now.

The accords were a series of diplomatic and commercial agreements forged with U.S. influence between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco in 2020, during Trump’s first term.

Shortly before 4 p.m. Wednesday, reporters were suddenly summoned to the Oval Office.

The reason was ostensibly to watch the president sign executive orders. But Trump kicked off the event by talking up the reflecting pool outside the Lincoln Memorial, which he announced earlier would get its final coat of protection today.

“It’ll last for 50 to 100 years before you have to do anything, very strong, powerful substance that we used,” Trump told reporters. At one point, he held up a poster that said: “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.”

After that opener, Trump moved to the topic at hand: a customs-related executive order.

Since Trump urged Republicans to redraw U.S. House districts last year, officials in eight states have enacted new districts that could help Republicans win up to 16 additional seats in the November elections.

Democrats suffered setbacks in their counterattacks. But they could gain up to six additional seats from new districts in two states.

The aggressive mid-decade redistricting carries high stakes, because Democrats need to gain just a few seats in the midterms to win control of the House. It remains to be seen whether the redistricting will help Republicans hold on to their slim majority.

The U.S. military is reducing the number of forces it would contribute to NATO during an emergency, a change that’s been expected from the Trump administration as it pushes European allies to shoulder more of the continent’s defense burden.

U.S. European Command on Wednesday publicly announced changes to the NATO Force Model, a contingency plan for European defense in the event of serious security concerns, such as increased Russian aggression. The announcement lacks specifics, but said allies could step up with planes and ships as the U.S. reserves more of its own forces to thwart potential threats in other parts of the world.

U.S. and British officials said the change was already announced in classified meetings to NATO allies in recent weeks.

As the secretary of state entered his fourth and last congressional hearing, a young demonstrator who said she was 18 years old yelled that the foreign policy actions of the Trump administration were being taken “against the will of the American people” before being removed from the Senate hearing room.

She yelled, “Free Palestine,” as the door was closing.

It was the first interruption of the day but part of a series of protests against Rubio and the administration in the past two days, specifically against U.S. support for Israel and the impacts of that on war-torn Gaza.

The independent U.N. human rights investigators urged the Trump administration in a statement Wednesday to immediately halt all threats against Cuba’s sovereignty and revoke sanctions “adopted contrary to international law.”

The experts said efforts to change Cuba’s “constitutional order” through threats and coercion “echo colonial-era practices.”

They said Trump’s declaration of a “Donroe Doctrine” in March, asserting U.S. predominance in the Western hemisphere, has raised “significant alarm.” And they said his statements about the “honor of taking Cuba” reflect “a deeply concerning strategy of coercion” against the country.

The experts on democracy, the negative impact of sanctions and counterterrorism, also pointed to the longstanding U.S. embargo and recent fuel blockade of Cuba.

They called the recent U.S. indictment of former Cuban president Raúl Castro “a misuse of domestic judicial proceedings” and “an instrument of coercive foreign policy,” and the announced the arrival of the USS Nimitz to the southern Caribbean another element of “unlawful coercion.”

The secretary of state has finished nearly four hours of testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he received praise from Republicans and sparred with Democrats over the Iran war, President Donald Trump’s relationship with NATO and U.S. aid to Africa.

The hearing before lawmakers on Capitol Hill was the third of four in two days for the former Republican senator from Florida. The purpose of each hearing has been to discuss the State Department’s budget. But they’ve often veered into discussions about the Trump administration’s dealings with countries around the world.

Republicans and Democrats have raised concerns about the reported details of a deal between Tehran and Washington. And on Wednesday, Rep. Andy Barr, a Republican from Kentucky, questioned whether the deal was similar to the one former President Barack Obama made in 2015.

Rubio went on to outline the various issues being discussed and how they differ from the previous nuclear deal, which Trump withdrew from in 2018.

“Ultimately, any deal we do will be a good deal, or there won’t be a deal, and it’ll be better than JCPOA,” Rubio said, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

That agreement, which included Germany, France and Britain, had lifted most U.S. and international economic sanctions against Iran for restrictions on its nuclear program, making it impossible to produce a bomb and establishing rigorous inspections.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration has no intention of abandoning NATO but won’t back down on demanding significant reforms.

Rubio told lawmakers on Wednesday that the president plans to attend the annual NATO leaders’ summit in Turkey next month, at which he will make the U.S. case for changes and again call for allies to increase their defense spending. The summit is to be held in Ankara on July 7-8.

“The president himself will be attending the next NATO, a meeting of heads of state where all of these points will be made clear. We’re still in NATO, but NATO needs significant changes, and the president has made that clear,” Rubio said.

Trump has been particularly irked by some NATO countries, mainly Spain, denying the use of airbases for the war against Iran.

After weeks of discussions, the Senate has officially dropped a $1 billion proposal for White House security and Trump’s ballroom project.

The Senate is set to begin voting on legislation to fund immigration enforcement agencies on Wednesday afternoon, and the bill’s final text, released just hours before the vote, does not include the security funding.

Republicans had already indicated they would drop the security proposal after backlash from within their own caucus and criticism from Democrats.

Rubio made the “for now” statement when Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware asked Rubio about Trump’s calls for the U.S. to own the semiautonomous territory of Denmark to better defend the U.S.

Rubio said talks about the use of Greenland for collective defense are “in a good place,” though he declined to publicly discuss the details.

McBride had asked Rubio if he shares Trump’s belief that the U.S. needs to own land within NATO to defend it.

“The president’s view is that it’s a lot easier to defend it when you have control and complete control of it,” Rubio said. “We are obviously having conversations with both Denmark and Greenland. They are ongoing on a monthly basis now. I think we’ll have pretty good news.”

Colombian lawyer Abelardo de la Espriella, who pulled ahead in the first round of Colombia’s presidential race, on Wednesday thanked Trump for endorsing his campaign, saying he predicts stronger bilateral ties if the conservative defeats progressive Iván Cepeda in the presidential runoff.

Writing on the Truth Social platform the previous day, Trump offered his “complete and total endorsement” for de la Espriella, calling him an “intelligent, strong, and tough leader” who will take on a “radical leftist Marxist” in the June 21 runoff election.

“With my head held high and my heart throbbing with patriotic gratitude, I receive your words and your steadfast support,” de la Espriella, known as “El Tigre” or “The Tiger,” wrote on the social platform X. “Thank you, Mr. President!”

During the Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Thom Tillis asked Bessent about his past reported conflicts with Bill Pulte, the current head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Trump picked Pulte for director of national intelligence.

“Did you actually tell Bill Pulte you were going to punch him in the face?” the North Carolina Republican asked Bessent.

“I actually said I was gonna kick his ass,” Bessent said. “That was last summer, the summer of ’25.”

Tillis has stated he doesn’t support Pulte for the intelligence role.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says Venezuela’s transition to democracy is progressing but needs more time to consolidate and advance the reforms it has made since the U.S. ouster of former President Nicolas Maduro in early January.

In response to questions from lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Rubio stressed that it had only been five months since Maduro had been deposed and that conditions for free and fair elections – including the creation of independent media and political parties – are still works in progress. Rubio did say that Venezuela’s oil revenue had increased significantly under U.S. supervision since January.

“It’s not where it needs to be, but it is a long ways from where it was five months ago and poses not nearly the threat it once posed to America’s national security. We’re not satisfied with where it is, but we’ve come a long way,” Rubio said.

Speaker Mike Johnson said he spent three hours at the White House with the president, Vance and Rubio, as Trump is working on “that final piece” to reopen commerce.

“I am, all of us, are calling on our allied nations and friends — the Arab states in the region, and NATO partners and everyone else,” the Republican told reporters at the Capitol about the Monday meeting. “The entire world has an interest in the Strait of Hormuz being reopened for commerce. That’s what he’s working on.”

Johnson also defended the president for suggesting the war’s unpopularity and the resulting high gas prices ahead of the U.S. midterm elections aren’t impacting his decision-making. The speaker said Trump, who fielded phone calls from reporters during the lengthy meeting, is “laser focused” on domestic issues.

In a video posted to his TikTok account, the president offered a history lesson on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, noting that it was built to be a temporary structure for the 1889 World’s Fair.

“They said, you know we sort of like it, let’s leave it up a little bit longer,” he said. “And then they said, let’s leave it up longer and longer and longer. Well, they never took it down.”

Trump drew a parallel with the UFC octagon being built on the White House’s South Lawn for a June 14 bout celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

“You know, we’re building something in front of the White House that’s quite attractive to a lot of people,” Trump said in a video posted on Tuesday. “It’s going to have the big UFC fight on June 14. And I’m looking at it, and maybe we’ll never ever take it down.”

He was asked what Treasury is doing to address sanctions evasion as the Trump administration pressures Iran into accepting a deal to end the war.

“We have seized a substantial amount of crypto assets,” Bessent told lawmakers. “We have sanctioned ships, and in fact, the Navy has seized some of these ships, and we are tracking mostly the IRGC funds, and we are freezing those for the day that they can be given back to the Iranian people.”

Detailing progress on the wall the Trump administration is building separating the U.S. and Mexico, Mullin said the first layer — referred to as the “primary wall” — will be finished by “this time next year.”

On some stretches of the border, Customs and Border Protection is building a secondary wall so that people trying to cross the border would have to go through two layers. That “secondary wall” will be finished by the summer of 2028, he said.

Homeland Security received $46 billion last summer from Congress to finish the wall along the border from San Diego to the Gulf of Mexico. Most of that will be protected by a physical wall, but CBP says 535 miles (860 kilometers) of remote, rugged border terrain will solely rely on detection technology.

CBS News fired Pelley a day after he reportedly said Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss was “murdering the show” and accused Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison of casting aside the show’s reputation “apparently to curry a moment of favor with the Trump administration.”

Pelley criticized management Monday during a fiery staff meeting with Nick Bilton, the program’s new executive producer installed by Weiss last week, according to a detailed report on the Status website. In a termination notice obtained Tuesday night by The Associated Press, Bilton, a technology journalist and filmmaker with no traditional broadcast news experience, accused Pelley of carrying out an “ambush” in a “performative display of hostility.”

Pelley said in a statement that “60 Minutes” has lost its DNA and that the new management had asked him to “inject falsehoods and bias” into his work.

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About 60 names were on the ballot to succeed Democrat Gavin Newsom as governor. Under California’s primary system, all candidates appear on a single ballot and the top two finishers advance to the November general election, regardless of party.

Republican Steve Hilton campaigned with Trump’s endorsement, and in the final days of the campaign, Democratic attention focused on Xavier Becerra, a former congressman and state attorney general who was health secretary under President Joe Biden, and Tom Steyer, a billionaire known for his climate activism.

The three have been leading in early returns after polls closed. If Becerra were to advance to one of the two slots on the fall ballot, he presents a natural choice for voters more comfortable with a traditional candidate. Steyer and Hilton have both presented themselves as advocating significant changes.

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Democratic Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada pushed Rubio to explain Iran’s military capabilities. Trump and others claim American forces have decimated the Islamic Republic’s military, and yet ships are still being attacked in the Strait of Hormuz, she said.

“So is the war still on or is the war off?” Titus asked.

Rubio acknowledged that Iran still has small boats with machine guns as well as some drone capabilities. But he said Iran lacks the ability to attack targets with swarms of drones as it once did.

Titus noted that the U.S. military has been using expensive weapons systems to take down the drones. Rubio said “that needs to change.”

California Rep. Ted Lieu displayed several clips of what he described as Trump sleeping while Rubio spoke during Cabinet meetings, saying they reflect concerns about the president’s health. The short clips show Trump with his eyes closed on several instances during meetings from the last few months.

“I’m going to ask you to come clean with the American people and the White House as well: There’s something wrong with Donald Trump’s health or cognitive abilities,” Lieu said.

In response, Rubio said, “I don’t even know how to respond to that other than to tell you that it’s absurd and ridiculous.”

Mullin was asked about his threat to remove Customs and Border Protection officers from airports in cities that don’t typically cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Mullin said he isn’t “punishing” places dubbed sanctuary cities by the Trump administration.

But he blamed those cities for “refusing to allow local and state enforcement officers to respond when we called” and said he needs to protect his staff. “If that means I gotta pull them out of Customs and Border Protection from processing international flights, I will,” Mullin said.

Mullin did not say when he might implement his threat, which has sparked criticism from the travel industry for its potential to cause chaos just ahead of the World Cup.

In a rare example of a Republican criticizing the Trump administration’s deportation program, Rep. Carlos Gimenez urged Mullin to put more emphasis on apprehending violent criminals.

“I think you need to use your discretion a little bit more as to who is being deported, who’s being arrested, etc. Let’s go after the worst of the worst,” said Gimenez, whose South Florida district has a large heavy Cuban population.

Referring to a comment from Democratic Rep. Lou Correa, Gimenez said it’s unacceptable that ICE recently failed to take six criminal suspects into custody in Orange County, California.

Mullin said ICE only has 48 hours after defendants are booked into local jails to take them into custody, a difficult deadline if not immediately informed of arrests.

“There’s no excuse for it, but we just don’t have the resources to get there like we need to,” Mullin said.

The power of Trump’s endorsement helped end the political careers of Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. But even though Trump jumped into Iowa’s Republican primary by backing Rep. Randy Feenstra for governor, GOP voters nominated Zach Lahn instead.

Democrats nominated Rob Sand, whose rural roots are rare among Democrats. Sand also is a proven winner in a Republican-leaning state, having been elected twice as auditor.

Lahn was not well known in Iowa politics when he launched his campaign in November, but he built support among conservatives by championing a total ban on abortion, keeping liberal ideology out of public school classrooms and developing a following with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, which opposes the Trump administration’s embrace of pesticides.

Democrats stunned by how Trump has remade American politics have spent the past decade debating which type of candidate is best positioned to energize voters and win elections, not moral victories.

Iowa marked the latest stop in this sometimes agonizing conversation.

The party’s establishment supported Josh Turek, a state representative who presented a compelling personal biography that included competing for the United States in four Paralympics. State Sen. Zach Wahls had offered himself as a more disruptive figure, refusing to back Chuck Schumer of New York as the Senate Democratic leader if he were elected.

Democratic voters united behind Turek, who will face Republican Ashley Hinson in November.

Oil prices are rising Wednesday following the latest flare-up in fighting to threaten the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, and U.S. stocks are stalling near their records.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.3% from its all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 339 points, or 0.7%, as of 10:15 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% lower.

Weighing on the market was a climb of 1.1% for the price of a barrel of Brent crude to $97.07. It rose after the U.S. military said Iran fired missiles toward Kuwait and Bahrain. The United States said it then struck an Iranian military ground control station on an island in the Strait of Hormuz. Hope seems to be remaining on Wall Street that the United States and Iran will ultimately reopen the strait.

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Trump praised the possibility of Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio running as a ticket in the 2028 presidential election.

“They’re both very talented,” Trump said on the “Pod Force One” podcast. “I like them together. You know, it’d be great. I don’t know how you beat them if they’re together. That would be a great team.”

The president has previously talked up this combination. How Vance and Rubio feel about it is unclear. “They’d have to agree to it, right?” Trump said.

There is still “a long time left” before the 2028 presidential election, Trump cautioned. But he said he observes how his aides and Cabinet officials interact and called the relationship between Vance and Rubio “good.”

The Homeland Security secretary said his agency is ready to help protect security at World Cup games across the U.S., but still has “a lot of work to do” ahead of the first game June 12 in Los Angeles.

“I feel very comfortable where we’re at, and we feel like we have a zero-fail mission. But it’s going to be complicated,” Mullin told the House Committee on Homeland Security on Wednesday.

Millions of fans will be coming to the U.S., for the equivalent of “78 Super Bowls in 38 days,” he said, and “we have some very complicated countries that are going to be playing each other that have a tremendous amount of dislike against each other.”

He credited state and local officials at host sites for their cooperation with federal agencies, and said “I hope when FIFA is over, we can show that we can work together and continue to keep our cities and our streets safe.”

The secretary of state says he hopes the latest round of high-level political talks between Israel and Lebanon will result in a joint statement on ending hostilities.

In testimony before lawmakers that started Wednesday shortly after the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to the U.S. began meeting at the State Department for a second day of negotiations, Rubio said the aim of the talks is to “produce a joint statement and an action plan on a track for security in that country, independent from Hezbollah, independent from nefarious influence.”

The conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which is not participating in the talks, has become a major sticking point in efforts to end the war in Iran. Wednesday’s discussion is the fourth between the two countries and follows a meeting focused on security issues that was held at the Pentagon on Friday.

On the second day of back-to-back Capitol Hill hearings, Rubio was pressed by a senior Democrat on whether he warned Trump about the scope of Iran’s response if the U.S. were to strike.

“Did you warn President Trump, before the Iran war began, that this conflict would drive up cost on gas, food, travel and the president? Yes or no?” asked Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“The president and the full administration was aware that there would be consequences to action,” Rubio responded. “But the consequences of Iran having a nuclear weapon were worse.”

Rubio’s comments come despite reporting that Trump and U.S. officials underestimated Iran’s retaliation to an attack, including its closure of the Strait of Hormuz and strikes on Gulf countries. The president himself has previously said no one thought Tehran would close the critical waterway.

Wyden questioned Bessent on whether the Trump administration would drop the IRS plan to confer audit immunity on Trump, as part of a settlement agreement to end the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.

Wyden referred to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Tuesday testimony to lawmakers that the Trump administration is scrapping plans for a $1.8 billion fund that would have compensated allies of the Republican president.

Wyden asked Bessent: “Does the IRS audit immunity given to Trump, his family, and his businesses still stand?”

“There’s continuing litigation and I’m unable to comment on ongoing litigation,” Bessent said.

Setting the tone for a hearing scheduled to examine Treasury’s budget, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said in his opening remarks that lawmakers would question U.S. Scott Bessent on the IRS plan to drop any probes of Trump, his family or the Trump organization over whether they have paid their fair share of taxes.

The administration has dropped plans to create a $1.8 billion fund to compensate the Republican president’s allies, but is sticking with a deal meant to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service. The U.S. is “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting Trump, his sons and the Trump organization’s current tax examinations, according to a one-page Justice Department document.

“Secretary Bessent owes the committee an explanation of what the Treasury knows about the dirty settlement, that’s because his department was involved from beginning to end,” Wyden said.

A prolonged disruption of energy supplies from the Middle East due to the Iran war would deal a severe blow to the global economy, sending some countries into recession and spreading inflation and higher unemployment, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report Wednesday.

Hardest hit would be Asian economies that depend on crude oil, fuel and natural gas from the Persian Gulf, and poorer countries where people spend more of their incomes on fuel and food, the OECD said. The report analyzes two scenarios:

• Prolonged disruption: Global growth slows from 3.4% last year to 2.1% this year and 1.8% in 2027, potentially pushing some economies into or close to recession.
• Time-limited disruption, in which energy production and Gulf shipments start to return to pre-war levels in the middle of this year: Growth would slow to 2.8% this year and rebound to 3.1% next year.

Markwayne Mullin is in Congress again, this time in the House, after fielding fierce questions from skeptical Democratic senators over his short tenure leading Homeland Security.

As Mullin walked into the hearing room Wednesday, protesters in the hallway could be heard yelling that he’s an “embarrassment.”

Democrats slammed Mullin on Tuesday over his department’s immigration policies and accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement of mistreating detainees at a facility in New Jersey.

Mullin pushed back, saying that officers were following laws set forth by Congress and defended treatment of migrants at Delaney Hall.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has begun his second day of testimony on Capitol Hill, facing questions from lawmakers for the first time this week since the Iran war was launched in late February.

The focus of the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing is the State Department budget. But it’s likely to veer into issues concerning the Iran war, arms sales to Taiwan and an Ebola outbreak in Africa.