Trump ‘got the last laugh,’ Hegseth says of US killing Iranian assassination plotter
US President Donald, left, and Pete Hegseth, US secretary of defense, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026. (Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — The leader of an Iranian unit behind an attempted 2024 plot to assassinate President Donald Trump has been killed, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday as he gave an update on the administration’s war against Tehran.
“Yesterday, the leader of the unit who attempted to assassinate President Trump has been hunted down and killed,” Hegseth said. “Iran tried to kill President Trump, and President Trump got the last laugh.”
The secretary did not name the individual, and later said the killing was not the objective of the operation.
“We’ve known for a long time that Iran had intentions on trying to kill President Trump and or other U.S. officials,” Hegseth said.
“While that was not the focus of the effort by any stretch of the imagination, in fact, never raised by the president or anybody else, I ensured, and others ensured, that those who were responsible for that were eventually part of the target list,” he added.
In the summer of 2024, when Trump was campaigning for president, U.S. intelligence indicated there was an Iranian threat to assassinate Trump, prompting the Secret Service to increase his security protection.
In November 2024, the Department of Justice charged an Iranian man who prosecutors said was tasked with surveilling and killing Trump to avenge the 2020 death of Qassem Soleimani, the top commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Soleimani was killed in a January 2020 U.S. drone strike in Baghdad directed by Trump.
Iran has denied that it had plotted to kill Trump.
President Trump, in a phone call with ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl, mentioned the assassination plot when discussing the U.S. and Israeli strike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
“I got him before he got me,” Trump told ABC’s Karl on Sunday night. “They tried twice. Well, I got him first.”
Hegseth on Wednesday also announced that the U.S. submarine had sunk an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean named the “Soleimani,” the first time a U.S. submarine had sunk a ship since World War II.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, accompanied by U.S. President Donald Trump (R), and his son X Musk, speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office at the White House on February 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — One year after Elon Musk began an unprecedented attempt to eliminate swaths of the federal government, newly released deposition videos are providing a never-before-seen look at two of the people responsible for the largest mass termination of federal grants in the National Endowment for the Humanities’ history.
According to the depositions and other materials released as part of a civil lawsuit related to the funding cuts, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on ChatGPT to identify more than $100 million in grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) that were later cancelled.
When President Donald Trump returned to office last January, he empowered Musk to slash federal spending as a lead adviser in the newly created DOGE. Within days, all agencies were directed to put DEI staff on leave and related programs were shuttered.
In lengthy depositions, two DOGE employees — Justin Fox and Nate Cavanaugh — defended the effort to cut “useless agencies” as part of DOGE’s attempt to reduce the federal deficit.
“You don’t regret that people might have lost important income … to support their lives?” an attorney asked Cavanaugh about the grant cancellations.
“No. I think it was more important to reduce the federal deficit from $2 trillion to close to zero,” Cavanaugh said.
“Did you reduce the federal deficit?” the attorney asked.
“No, we didn’t,” Cavanaugh said.
With backgrounds in tech and finance, neither man worked in government prior to joining DOGE last year. Cavanaugh said they originally determined which grants could be cut based on if they included certain words — like “DEI, DEIA, Equity, Inclusion, BIPAC, LGBTQ” — though the final decision about cuts was up to the head of individual agencies.
“Do you think it’s inappropriate in any way that someone in their 20s with no experience with grants for the federal government was making personal judgment calls about what grants to cancel?” an attorney asked.
“Um, no. I don’t think it’s inappropriate,” Cavanaugh said, arguing that he did not need formal education or experience to make informed judgments.
“So presumably you read some of these books that would have informed you on how to cancel a grant based on DEI,” the attorney asked.
“Um, I did not read a book, um, on how to discern whether a grant includes DEI or not. I read the actual description of the actual grant,” Cavanaugh said.
Fox said they instead turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to help sift through the thousands of grants awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
According to court filings, the men prompted ChatGPT by asking, “From the perspective of someone looking to identify DEI grants, does this involve DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters.· Begin with ‘Yes.’ o. ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation.· Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response.”
Fox was repeatedly pressed by attorneys to explain certain funding decisions, such as defunding a language center — described as a “wasteful, noncritical spend” — or projects related to Black history and civil rights.
“Why is a documentary about Holocaust survivors DEI?” an attorney asked.
“It’s a gender-based story that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group,” Fox said.
According to the depositions and legal documents, the men did not provide a clear definition for DEI or take additional steps to ensure the decisions were not discriminatory — arguing it was not necessary because AI software was not the final decision-maker.
“Did you do anything to ensure that ChatGPT’s perception of DEI as applied here wouldn’t discriminate on the basis of sex?” an attorney asked, prompting another objection.
“It didn’t matter,” Fox said.
DOGE’s efforts in multiple federal agencies and departments last year faced opposition and lawsuits, with critics raising concerns about the group’s effectiveness and its access to sensitive data.
Both Fox and Cavanaugh defended the funding decisions, arguing the cuts were necessary to reduce the deficit, though they never achieved their goals.
“Did you ever find it problematic that you were, alongside Nate, short-listing for termination projects that had hits on words like Black, homosexual, LGBTQ+?” an attorney asked, prompting an objection and follow up question.
“We were identifying wasteful spend in the government based on administration direction. That was the whole reason we were there, was to find savings,” Fox said, though he acknowledged the deficit was never reduced.
Their work cutting grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities was memorialized in a social media post by DOGE, which vowed that any future grants would be “merit-based and awarded to non-DEI, pro-America causes.”
According to the depositions, some of the saved funds were spent on the National Garden of American Heroes — a sculpture garden to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary.
The Open AI logo, which represents the American-based artificial intelligence (AI) research organization known for releasing the generative chatbot language model AI ChatGPT and initiating the AI spring, is being displayed at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 28, 2024. (Photo by Joan Cros/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
(WASHINGTON) — Millions of dollars tied to artificial intelligence are pouring into the 2026 midterms.
Interest groups funded in part by AI industry leaders are split on how the government should oversee AI — and that’s already having an impact on political ads, some experts told ABC News.
“It’s sort of an open question as to what regulation is going to look like,” University of Rochester professor David Primo told ABC News. “The stakes are really high because once a regulatory system gets entrenched, it’s really hard to change it.”
An AI-related political group, Innovation Council Action, tied to two of President Donald Trump’s advisors, announced on Sunday that it would spend at least $100 million, The New York Times reported.
The donations associated with the AI sector go beyond party lines. Federal Election Commission filings show that key industry players are pouring money into committees supporting both Democrats and Republicans, with certain groups criticizing candidates who have expressed support for new AI-related laws and others doing the opposite.
“Companies have always tried to shape regulations, and they’ve always tried to shape them in their favor. What we’re seeing now, though, is that the big companies are not united,” Primo said.
With AI’s presence being increasingly felt, some politicians are calling on their colleagues not to accept money from the burgeoning industry.
“Their money will end up being toxic anyway,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., posted on social media. “People are catching on.”
1 industry, different political priorities
In February, Anthropic, the developer of Claude AI, announced it would give $20 million to an organization called Public First Action, explaining that it agreed with most Americans that not enough was being done to regulate AI and that the technology comes with “considerable risks.”
Public First Action spokesperson Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez said that they have already run advertisements thanking Rep. Nikki Budzinski, D-Ill., Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Rep. Josh Gottheimer D-N.J., for their AI records.
Gottheimer introduced a bill in February that would provide tax credits for companies training workers on AI development.
It is not yet clear who else has contributed to Public First Action, which describes itself as a “pro-regulation” group.
“Public First Action doesn’t disclose its donors,” Rivera-Rodriguez told ABC News. “To date, the project has raised around $50 million. The aligned super PACs will publicly disclose their contributors in their upcoming FEC reports.”
One of Anthropic’s main competitors, ChatGPT owner OpenAI, has voiced support for nationwide “common-sense rules of the road,” but has cautioned that the U.S. should not fall behind other countries.
In an economic blueprint released last year, OpenAI compared AI’s ascent to the rise of the car, pointing out that while the motor vehicle “industry’s growth was stunted by regulation” in the United Kingdom, the U.S. “took a very different approach,” causing the American automobile sector to grow.
FEC disclosures show that OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife each contributed $12.5 million to a group called Leading the Future, which describes itself as supporting candidates who “champion policies that harness the economic benefits of AI and reject attempts to hinder American innovation.”
Committees with links to Leading the Future have already made millions worth of contributions, filings indicate.
One group spent more than $500,000 each in support of North Carolina Republican House candidate Laurie Buckhout and Texas Republican House candidate Jessica Steinmann. The same committee spent more than $700,000 supporting Texas Republican House candidate Chris Gober.
Buckhout, Steinmann and Gober each won their March primaries. All three candidates include similar statements on their websites, mentioning that China cannot overcome the U.S. in the AI race.
Millions spent in Manhattan alone
Nowhere is the role of AI more front and center than in New York’s 12th Congressional District.
Numerous Democrats are running in this Manhattan race, but Assemblyman and former Palantir employee Alex Bores, who co-sponsored New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, is the candidate who has largely had AI’s focus.
Bores’ website says that he hopes to hold large AI companies accountable and would work to create national safety and privacy requirements.
A PAC associated with Anthropic-supported Public First Action is supporting Bores, Rivera-Rodriguez confirmed. Leading the Future is not.
“Alex Bores is a hypocrite pushing policies that would undermine America’s ability to lead the world in AI innovation and job creation,” Leading the Future spokesperson Jessie Hunt told ABC News.
As of March 16, a super PAC tied to Leading the Future had already spent more than $2.2 million opposing Bores, FEC filings show.
“There’s a few Trump megadonors that made billions of dollars from AI that don’t think there should be any regulation of AI whatsoever,” Bores told ABC News following a recent forum.
With so much AI-related money flowing into races like NY-12 around the country, Primo said these funds are not being spent secretly or for bribery. Instead, the cash is being used to convince voters of who they should elect.
“This might actually be democracy functioning really well,” he said.
(WASHINGTON) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Thursday that trilateral talks between Ukraine, Russia and the United States are expected to be held in the United Arab Emirates.
“I think that it will be the first trilateral meeting in Emirates. It will be tomorrow and the day after tomorrow,” Zelenskyy said as he spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
