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In a curious twist during his confirmation process, Kash Patel failed to disclose significant personal financial information until after the Senate hearing in January on his nomination to become FBI director. Consequently, one peculiar item listed on his financial disclosure form received no attention during that hearing: Patel’s work as a consultant for the embassy of Qatar. On this document, Patel did not specify what he did for Qatar or how much he was paid.

Even now—nearly three months after he took the helm of the nation’s top law enforcement agency—the details of Patel’s Qatari connection remain a mystery.

Patel is just one of several top Trump administration aides who have had financial ties to this Arab monarchy.

• Susan Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, worked for a lobbying firm that represented Qatar.
• Attorney General Pam Bondi lobbied for the Qataris.
• Mike Huckabee, now US Ambassador to Israel, was paid $50,000 to visit Qatar in 2018.
• Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, also has pocketed money from Qatar.
• In 2023, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought the Park Lane Hotel from Witkoff’s company in a $623 million deal.
• The Trump Organization itself recently struck a deal to develop a luxury golf resort in Qatar. And now Qatar is considering handing as a gift to Trump a jumbo airliner worth about $400 million for Trump to use as Air Force One. The plan reportedly is for the 747 to be transferred to Trump’s presidential library foundation after he leaves office, where it could come under his personal control.

The US solicitor general argued that lower courts overstepped their authority, saying this power should be curtailed.

Meanwhile, the New Jersey solicitor general - arguing on behalf of a group of states - said siding with Trump would create a patchwork system of citizenship.

This would create "chaos on the ground", argued the lawyer, Jeremy Feigenbaum.

It is not clear when the court will issue its decision. If it agrees with Trump, then he could continue his wide-ranging use of executive orders to make good on campaign promises without having to wait for congressional approval - with limited checks by the courts.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania ruled on Tuesday that the United States can use the Alien Enemies Act to fast-track the deportation of accused Venezuelan gang members, in what appears to be the first court ruling that backs the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 1798 law.

Haines, appointed by Trump during his first term, ruled that the administration must give potential deportees at least 21 days' notice and the opportunity to challenge their removals, to avoid the possibility that people who are not gang members "may be errantly removed from this country."

Judge Stephanie Haines, of the U.S. District for the Western District of Pennsylvania, ruled that President Donald Trump has authority to declare the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization and deport its members under the Alien Enemies Act, but she criticized the administration's practice of deporting people sometimes "within a matter of hours."

Sean Duffy, the Trump administration’s transportation secretary, has made a startling admission that he switched flights for his wife this week to help her avoid flying out of beleaguered Newark Liberty, one of the busiest airports in the New York area.

Duffy’s disclosure on Monday runs counter to his repeated assurances to the American public that it is safe to fly from Newark, despite a spate of dramatic outages affecting the airport’s radar systems. On Sunday, the transportation secretary went on NBC News’s Meet the Press and insisted Newark was safe.

“It is,” he protested. “I fly out of Newark all the time, my family flies out of Newark.”

Hours later, speaking to the conservative radio host David Webb on SiriusXM, he told a different story. “My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow, I switched her flight to LaGuardia,” he said in comments first reported by Gizmodo.

• The FBI Director

Before becoming FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight separate times on a podcast hosted by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters, who promotes Holocaust denial. Peters posted a photo of himself holding Hitler's Mein Kampf with the message "visionary leadership." In recent days, he attacked the founder of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy, with antisemitic vitriol.

• The White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security

Paul Ingrassia, currently serving as the White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, has ties to multiple figures widely known for promoting antisemitism.

• The communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget

Before joining the Trump administration as the communications director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, Rachel Cauley served on the board of the Patriot Freedom Project. The nonprofit group was founded in direct response to the arrest of Hale-Cusanelli on Jan. 6 charges.

• An official at the Department of Justice

Trump appointed conservative activist Ed Martin to multiple Department of Justice roles, after his nomination for U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, failed. Martin's ties to Hale-Cusanelli played a key role in the collapse of his nomination to that role.

For too long, healthcare has been dictated by insurance companies and hospital corporations. Healthcare decisions need to be made by physicians and advanced practice clinicians (APC), not by administration looking at what a patient is costing them. We are striking to have a voice in our working conditions to ensure we can provide the best care for our patients.

She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant.

“Those are my marching orders,” Salazar told staffers. “While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.”

Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare.

Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.)

A judge in the US state of Wisconsin has been charged for allegedly helping a Mexican man evade immigration officials through a back door during an arrest attempt.

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in April. Now a federal grand jury has approved the two charges against her, which could see the judge face a prison term.

It marks a further escalation of Donald Trump's sweeping crackdown on immigration, and has provoked an outcry from Democrats, who accuse the Trump administration of attacking the judicial system.

The OMB (Office of Management and Budget in the Executive Office of the President) memo gives agencies until May 19 to start collecting building occupancy data. That data includes a summary of daily occupancy totals for each day of the week and the average occupancy of each building based on a two-week average. OMB expects full implementation by July 4.

The OMB memo rescinds a 2024 Biden administration memo that also set targets for reducing underutilized office space.

“Even in corporate headquarters or law firms, it’s unusual to find more than 70% utilization on a given day, because people are sick, on travel or visiting a project site,” the former official said.

Republican lawmakers repeatedly pressed the Biden administration for federal building occupancy data as agencies gradually relaxed pandemic-era remote work and telework policies. But the former GSA real estate official said occupancy data is a constantly moving target.

“On a given day, some people may have just been hired, some people may have quit. There are contractors who occupy government space. They don’t typically get counted in your head count, so you’re not exactly sure how many of those people there are,” the official said. “This metric is difficult.”

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it is cutting an additional $450 million in grants to Harvard University through eight federal agencies, on top of the $2.2 billion already frozen last week.

In a statement, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said it “briefly slowed aircraft in and out of the airport while we ensured redundancies were working as designed.

“Operations have returned to normal.’’

That came after Duffy announced plans to reduce the number of flights arriving and departing from Newark for the “next several weeks” and would meet with the airport’s major carriers to discuss the issues. Flight reductions, he said, would target the hours when international flights arrive.

Duffy said he wanted to raise the mandatory retirement age for air traffic controllers from 56 to 61, to help offset a shortage of about 3,000 air traffic controllers. After the first Newark failure, on 28 April, the union representing air traffic controllers said several members were placed on trauma leave.

“While we cannot quickly replace them due to this highly specialized profession, we continue to train controllers who will eventually be assigned to this busy airspace,” the FAA said earlier in May.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announces he is placing a hold on all DOJ nominees after AG Pam Bondi signed off on President Trump accepting a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar's royal family. Schumer also calls on Bondi to testify.