Trump refuses to answer ‘stupid question’ from Fox News about Russia helping Iran target Americans
At the end of his White House roundtable on college sports on Friday, Donald Trump said he would take one or two questions and called on a favorite Fox News correspondent, Peter Doocy.
Doocy asked the president about reporting from the Washington Post and Fox News, that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to help it target US assets in retaliatory strikes.
“Thank you, president Trump,” Doocy said. “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now-”
Trump cut him off to joke that possible Russian assistance to Iran in the war launched by the US and Israel, is “an easy problem compared to what we’re doing here”, referring to the discussion of how college sports might be changed.
After pausing for laughter from the assembled supporters in the room, Trump scolded the Fox News correspondent for daring to mention the war.
“But can I be honest? It’s just- I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.”
The Associated Press reported on Friday that Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, met with Trump last year to talk about ending the Ukraine war he started, has provided Iran with information that could help it “strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region,” according to two officials familiar with US intelligence on the matter.
A few minutes later, Trump pointed at Doocy again and said, “Peter, I’ll give you one more chance, because that was a bad question you asked before.” When Doocy asked if he could bring up something other than college sports, Trump said no.
When Doocy then asked why he was doing an event on sports “right now, because there is a lot of other stuff going on in the world,” Trump did briefly address the war in Iran, but not the reporter’s question about Russia’s role.
“In, uh, Iran, we’re doing very well. Somebody said, ‘How would you score it from 0 to 10?’ I said, ‘I give it a 12 to a 15’, the president said.
Trump has largely avoided questions from reporters since he launched the war on Iran in concert with Israel on Saturday from his Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago. The next day, when he returned to the White House from Florida, Trump ignored reporters’ shouted questions about Iran as he paused in the paved-over Rose Garden to admire newly installed statues of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Donald Trump ignored questions about his war on Iran on Sunday, as he inspected a newly installed statue of Thomas Jefferson in the White House Rose Garden. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters
As reporters shouted, “Mr President what is your main objective?” and “Who do you want to lead Iran?” Trump simply pointed at the bronze likenesses and said, “Unbelievable statues, you’ll see, come and look at them”.
The reporters, however, were kept at a distance and could only shout requests for the president to come over to “talk to us about Iran”.
Instead, Trump turned and walked away, not breaking stride as one reporter shouted, “Mr President, what’s your message to the families of the service members who were killed?”
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Updated at 00.58 GMT
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Trump says he is going to Dover air force base on Saturday to pay respects to war dead
In a social media post sent from Air Force One on the way to Florida, Donald Trump announced that he will be going to Dover air force base on Saturday, with his wife Melania and members of his cabinet “to pay our Highest Respect to our Great Warriors, who are returning home for the last time.”
The president has expressed little regret for the deaths of six US service members this week in the war with Iran he launched last Saturday from his beach club. On Wednesday, he told a Time magazine reporter, “some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die.”
“The lives of courageous American heroes may be lost, and we may have casualties. That often happens in war,” Trump said when he announced the start of the US-Israeli attack on Iran last Saturday.
In a video statement released by the White House on Sunday, Trump sent his “immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen,” before adding, “and, sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is. Likely be more.”
What the Pentagon calls the “dignified transfer” of remains at the air force base, scheduled for Saturday, is a ritual in honor of US troops killed during their military service.
The six members of the US Army Reserve, who worked in logistics, died on Sunday when a drone strike hit a command center in Port Shuaiba, Kuwait.
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Darrell Issa, a Republican congressman from California, has decided not to run for reelection after his congressional district was re-drawn to favor Democrats, the Los Angeles Times reports.
Issa, who has represented different parts of the San Diego area in Congress for more than two decades, made his fortune as a car-alarm magnate, developing a popular system in the 1980s that featured his voice, warning anyone who approached to “stand back.”
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Updated at 01.17 GMT
Trump refuses to answer ‘stupid question’ from Fox News about Russia helping Iran target Americans
At the end of his White House roundtable on college sports on Friday, Donald Trump said he would take one or two questions and called on a favorite Fox News correspondent, Peter Doocy.
Doocy asked the president about reporting from the Washington Post and Fox News, that Russia is providing intelligence to Iran to help it target US assets in retaliatory strikes.
“Thank you, president Trump,” Doocy said. “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran target and attack Americans now-”
Trump cut him off to joke that possible Russian assistance to Iran in the war launched by the US and Israel, is “an easy problem compared to what we’re doing here”, referring to the discussion of how college sports might be changed.
After pausing for laughter from the assembled supporters in the room, Trump scolded the Fox News correspondent for daring to mention the war.
“But can I be honest? It’s just- I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been very nice to me. What a stupid question that is to be asking at this time. We’re talking about something else.”
The Associated Press reported on Friday that Russia, whose president, Vladimir Putin, met with Trump last year to talk about ending the Ukraine war he started, has provided Iran with information that could help it “strike American warships, aircraft and other assets in the region,” according to two officials familiar with US intelligence on the matter.
A few minutes later, Trump pointed at Doocy again and said, “Peter, I’ll give you one more chance, because that was a bad question you asked before.” When Doocy asked if he could bring up something other than college sports, Trump said no.
When Doocy then asked why he was doing an event on sports “right now, because there is a lot of other stuff going on in the world,” Trump did briefly address the war in Iran, but not the reporter’s question about Russia’s role.
“In, uh, Iran, we’re doing very well. Somebody said, ‘How would you score it from 0 to 10?’ I said, ‘I give it a 12 to a 15’, the president said.
Trump has largely avoided questions from reporters since he launched the war on Iran in concert with Israel on Saturday from his Florida beach club, Mar-a-Lago. The next day, when he returned to the White House from Florida, Trump ignored reporters’ shouted questions about Iran as he paused in the paved-over Rose Garden to admire newly installed statues of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
Donald Trump ignored questions about his war on Iran on Sunday, as he inspected a newly installed statue of Thomas Jefferson in the White House Rose Garden. Photograph: Nathan Howard/Reuters
As reporters shouted, “Mr President what is your main objective?” and “Who do you want to lead Iran?” Trump simply pointed at the bronze likenesses and said, “Unbelievable statues, you’ll see, come and look at them”.
The reporters, however, were kept at a distance and could only shout requests for the president to come over to “talk to us about Iran”.
Instead, Trump turned and walked away, not breaking stride as one reporter shouted, “Mr President, what’s your message to the families of the service members who were killed?”
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Updated at 00.58 GMT
US justice department searching for evidence Cuba’s leaders broke US law – report
The US attorney in Miami, Jason Reding Quiñones, is leading a working group dedicated to finding evidence that Cuba’s leaders have violated some US law in order to give Donald Trump an excuse to send in the military to seize them, MSNOW reports.
“Law enforcement sources said they fear this approach marks a dramatic break from the Justice Department’s standards for prosecuting crimes, which have long required that federal investigators have some evidence or intelligence to suspect a specific crime has occurred before opening an investigation,” the outlet reports.
“But sources say that in this case, the working group’s stated mission appears to have instead picked a target in service of the White House’s goal of regime change, and is now in search of potential crimes it can charge.”
A justice department spokesman, Chad Gilmartin, did not deny the existence of the working group in a statement to the broadcaster, which cast the effort as routine. “Federal prosecutors from across the country work every day to pursue justice, which includes efforts to combat transnational crime,” said Gilmartin, a former aide to Trump’s first-term White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany.
When McEnany hired Gilmartin in 2020, she was accused of nepotism, since he is a cousin of her husband, the former big league pitcher Sean Gilmartin.
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Updated at 23.31 GMT
Vinay Prasad, FDA’s vaccine chief, to step down, again
Dr Vinay Prasad, who leads the US Food and Drug Administration’s vaccines and biologics unit, is leaving the Trump administration for a second time, a spokesperson for the agency told Reuters on Friday.
The FDA commissioner, Dr Marty Makary, confirmed the departure of Prasad, a vaccine critic, to the Wall Street Journal. “He’s really been successful and gotten a lot done in one year,” Makary said.
Prasad, an oncologist, took several controversial regulatory decisions as the head of the division responsible for approving vaccines and biotechnology products.
Last month, the FDA unexpectedly refused to consider Moderna’s application for a flu shot based on messenger RNA (mRNA) technology in a decision that experts said would have a chilling effect on vaccine development.
Prasad was first appointed director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in May last year. He briefly stepped down in July, under apparent pressure from Laura Loomer, a far-right, racist podcaster with unusual influence over Donald Trump.
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Trump welcomes Iran war supporter Condoleezza Rice to the White House
Donald Trump, who said in a 2016 Republican primary debate that George W Bush’s administration had “lied” about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the 2003 war he called “a big fat mistake”, just welcomed Condoleezza Rice, a prominent member of that administration, to the White House for a roundtable on college sports.
Trump singled out Rice during his introductory remarks at the start of an ongoing White House roundtable on “Saving College Sports”.
“We have some great people,” Trump said. “Condoleezza, thank you very much. I see you over there. Great to have you. Great to be with you.”
At the White House on Friday, Condoleezza Rice, a former national security adviser and secretary of state, sat beside Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, at a roundtable discussion on college sports chaired by Donald Trump. Photograph: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
That warm welcome for Rice, who was Bush’s national security adviser, came 10 years after a February 2016 debate in which Trump had been asked about his comment in 2008 that it “would have been a wonderful thing”, for the Democrats to have impeached George W Bush because “he got us in to a war with lies”.
“Obviously it was a mistake,” Trump said then, as he stood next to his main rival at the time, Jeb Bush. “So George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Rice was front and center in making the case for the US invasion of Iraq at the time, most notably when she told CNN that doubts about whether or not Saddam Hussein even had a nuclear weapons program (spoiler alert: he did not) did not undermine the case for war. “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons,” Rice said. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
This week, however, as Trump launched his own regime change war on Iraq’s neighbor, Iran, Rice has been a forceful proponent of Trump’s war.
“To say that this regime was not a threat … it’s ahistorical,” Rice told Fox News on Wednesday, citing Iran’s nuclear program. “They have been a threat for a long time.”
Like Trump, Rice also claimed that Iran’s role in arming proxy militias in Iraq that attacked US troops there with roadside bombs, justified the current US-Israeli bombing campaign.
“Iran has been at war with us for at least 47 years,” Rice said. “If you ask people about Iraq, what was the source of many of our casualties in Iraq, you’ll get estimates as high as 75 or 80% of them were due to Iranian-made roadside bombs.”
In remarks on Thursday, Trump had claimed that Iran was responsible for “95%” of the casualties in Iraq during the US occupation he had denounced a decade ago.
In the closing days of his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Trump focused on the fact that Liz Cheney, the daughter of Bush’s vice-president, supported his rival Kamala Harris.
“Kamala’s campaigning with warmongers like Liz Cheney… whose father virtually destroyed the Middle East,” Trump told a rally crowd. “Every time I was with her in the White House,” he claimed, Cheney urged him to start wars. “‘We should attack this nation, that nation, nations that people never heard of,” Trump said. The clincher of his argument was his claim that Cheney had even said to him: ‘“We ought to to go attack Iran’”.
At the very end of the event, Rice was seen on a livestream speaking with Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, before leaving with them.
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Updated at 02.24 GMT
My colleague, Lucy Campbell, is covering the latest out of the Middle East, and she just noted that Iran’s president Masoud Pezeshkian has spoken on the phone with Russian president Vladimir Putin, according to Iran’s government news service.
This comes as reports allege that Russia is providing Iran with targeting information to strike US forces in the region. Earlier, asked whether Russia’s involvement in the Iran conflict affects efforts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine, Karoline Leavitt said the White House still believes peace is “an achievable objective”, but declined to confirm whether Moscow has supplied information to Tehran.
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Updated at 22.12 GMT
Oversight Democrats say White House ‘cover-up is ongoing’ after justice department releases more files
Following the release of additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, including FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who made uncorroborated allegations against Epstein and Donald Trump, Democrats on the House oversight committee said that the “White House cover-up is ongoing”.
“Millions of pages still remain concealed from the public and our committee,” spokesperson Sara Guerrero said in a statement. “We will get answers when Pam Bondi appears before our committee under oath.”
This comes after oversight lawmakers passed a motion to subpoena the attorney general to testify before the committee.
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Updated at 20.56 GMT
Here’s a recap of the day so far
Donald Trump told CNN in a phone interview that Cuba is “going to fall pretty soon”. This follows the president’s comment at the White House on Thursday, when he claimed that Cuba wants to “make a deal so badly”. Cuba is struggling with dwindling oil reserves after the US attacked Venezuela in January, and depleted the country’s petroleum shipments. Later that month, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country selling or supplying Cuba with oil. Now, half of the country is dealing with blackouts.
Earlier, the president said there will be no deal with Iran “except unconditional surrender”. He noted that after that, and the selection of a new leader the US “will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction, making it economically bigger, better, and stronger than ever before.” Press secretary Karoline Leavitt added that once Iran longer “poses a threat” to the US and “the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized”, then Iran will “essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender”.
The US customs agency is readying a system within 45 days to process refunds on Donald Trump’s tariffs that were struck down as illegal and importers will not have to sue for them, a customs official said in a court filing today. The declaration by Brandon Lord, a top Customs and Border Protection (CBP) official, came as government lawyers were meeting with a federal trade judge to hammer out a process for returning $166bn in tariff payments to about 330,000 importers.
The US lost 92,000 jobs in February, a major slackening in the labor market that came just before Donald Trump threw the global economy into upheaval with his conflict in Iran. Several Democratic lawmakers slammed the data as an example of Trump’s “failed economic agenda”, while White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said that the report was “something of a surprise” but the economy remains “really strong”.
The justice department released additional files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday, including FBI memos describing interviews with a woman who made uncorroborated allegations against Epstein and Donald Trump. The documents were not included in the justice department’s earlier releases of Epstein-related records, which began in December. Justice department officials have said the files were initially withheld because they were mistakenly categorized as duplicates.
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Updated at 20.41 GMT
White House praises new pick for DHS secretary following Noem ouster
Karoline Leavitt praised senator Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Republican who Donald Trump tapped to takeover the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
The press secretary called Mullin “a strong friend of the president” and a “a big supporter” of the administration’s immigration policies. “He’s exceptionally talented,” she said. “We look forward to his expeditious confirmation and I know the White House will be working with our counterparts in the Senate to make that happen as quickly as possible.”
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Leavitt also told reporters today that she had no update on the investigation into a bombing of a girls’ school in Iran that killed 175 people. On Wednesday she noted that the Pentagon was investigating the strike.
Earlier, we reported the news that military investigators believe it is likely that US forces were responsible for the attack, but have not yet reached a final conclusion, according to a report from Reuters.
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White House says that administration is ‘well on our way’ to achieving Operation Epic Fury objectives
Speaking to reporters outside the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that she didn’t want to “get ahead of the president on any timelines”, but reiterated that the administration expects the military action to last “about four to six weeks” and “we are well on our way” to achieving Operation Epic Fury’s objectives.
On US forces taking control of the airspace in Iran, she added: “We are well on our way to doing so.”
Leavitt also elaborated on the president’s earlier post to Truth Social. “When he, as commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, determines that Iran no longer poses a threat to the United States of America and the goal of Operation Epic Fury has been fully realized, then Iran will essentially be in a place of unconditional surrender,” she said.
The press secretary also noted that the president “wants to take an interest” in the choice of the country’s next leader. He has previously called the late supreme leader’s son an “unacceptable” option.
Today, Leavitt said that there are a “number of people” that US intelligence agencies and government officials are assessing, but declined to comment further.
Karoline Leavitt speaks with reporters at the White House, 6 March 2026. Photograph: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/APShare
Updated at 19.55 GMT
‘The stakes could not be higher’: UN chief urges end to ‘all unlawful attacks in Middle East’
Lucy Campbell
The UN secretary-general has called on nations to “stop the fighting and get to serious diplomatic negotiations”. “The stakes could not be higher,” António Guterres wrote in a post on X.
double quotation markAll the unlawful attacks in the Middle East and beyond are causing tremendous suffering and harm to civilians throughout the region – and pose a grave a risk to the global economy, particularly to the most vulnerable people.
The situation could spiral beyond anyone’s control.
It is time to stop the fighting and get to serious diplomatic negotiations.
The stakes could not be higher.
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