Trump’s top intelligence officials to appear at House hearing amid fallout from security leak – US politics live

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Homeland security secretary Noem visits the El Salvador prison where deported Venezuelans are held

Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday will visit the high-security El Salvador prison where Venezuelans who the Trump administration alleges are members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang have been held since their removal from the US.

Noem’s trip to the prison – where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside – comes as the Trump administration seeks to show it is deporting people it describes as the “worst of the worst.”

Since taking office, Noem has often been front and center in efforts to highlight the immigration crackdown, AP reported.

She took part in immigration enforcement operations, rode horses with Border Patrol agents and was the face of a television campaign warning people in the country illegally to self-deport.

Noem’s Wednesday visit is part of a three-day trip. She will also travel to Colombia and Mexico.

US intelligence officials to appear at House hearing over leaked military plan

Good morning and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.

We start with news that Donald Trump’s top intelligence officials will brief House members on Wednesday on global threats facing the US where it is likely they will be questioned again over use of a group text to discuss plans for military strikes in Yemen.

CIA director John Ratcliffe, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and FBI director Kash Patel are among those who were asked to testify before the House Intelligence Committee as part of its annual review of threats facing the US.

Tuesday’s hearing was dominated by questions about Ratcliffe and Gabbard’s participation in a group chat on Signal in which they discussed plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. The group included a journalist, The Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg.

Gabbard and Ratcliffe have said no classified information was included in the messages, but Democrats have decried the use of the messaging app, saying that any release of information about timetables, weapons or military activities could have put US service members at risk.

At Tuesday’s hearing they asked Patel, who was not a participant in the text chain, if he would investigate. It is likely House Democrats will press Patel on the same question on Wednesday.

The national security council has said it will investigate the matter, which Trump on Tuesday downplayed as a “glitch”. Goldberg said he received the Signal invitation from Mike Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, who was also in the group chat.

In other news:

• The Senate voted to confirm Marty Makary as the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health. Both men were skeptics of the Covid-19 response.

• In a letter to Trump on Tuesday, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the leader of the Democratic minority in the House, demanded that the president fire his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, for disclosing secret war plans for strikes on Yemen to a Signal group that included a journalist.

• Ignoring the uproar in Greenland over the plan for his wife, Usha Vance, to visit the territory this week without an invitation, the US vice-president, JD Vance, announced in a video message that he plans to join her. The White House did, however, scrap plans for the second lady to attend a public event.