President Donald Trump late Saturday called on Netflix to fire board member Susan Rice or “pay the consequences,” after she said Democrats would push for corporate accountability if they regain power in the November midterm elections.

In a Truth Social post on Saturday, Trump described Rice, who served as President Joe Biden’s domestic policy chief and held top foreign policy posts under President Barack Obama, as “purely a political hack” with “no talent or skills.”

“HER POWER IS GONE, AND WILL NEVER BE BACK,” Trump wrote.

Rice argued during a podcast last week that “it is not going to end well” for corporations, news organizations, and law firms that “bent the knee” to Trump, and that their deference is unpopular.

“There is likely to be a swing in the other direction, and they are going to be caught with more than their pants down,” Rice told Preet Bharara, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. “They’re going to be held accountable by those who come in opposition to Trump and win at the ballot box.”

She added, “If these corporations think that Democrats, when they come back in power, are going to play by the old rules, and say, ‘Never mind, we will forgive you for all the people you fired and all the policies and principles you violated, all the laws you skirted,’ I think they got another thing coming.”

Rice served on Netflix’s board from 2018 to 2021, and rejoined in 2023 after leaving the Biden administration.

A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment on Trump’s remarks, and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump included a screenshot of an earlier post from far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who said Rice’s remarks were “anti-American” and urged the president to “kill the Netflix-Warner Bros. merger now.” Loomer also tagged Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr in her post.

The comments come after Trump told NBC News earlier this month that the Department of Justice will “handle” the deal and that he’ll stay out of their review, after previously saying he’d be involved in the process. The DOJ is currently reviewing Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

Netflix has proposed acquiring WBD in a $72 billion deal that would not include the company’s cable networks, including CNN.

Paramount Skydance, in response, launched a hostile takeover bid for all of WBD, promising its shareholders $30 per share in an all-cash deal.

The DOJ is investigating whether Netflix’s proposed deal could hurt competition, and it’s also asked how the company’s previous acquisitions have affected competition for creative talent, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month.

As part of its review, the agency is also examining whether the streaming giant uses anticompetitive tactics in negotiations with independent content creators for acquiring programming, Bloomberg reported, citing documents.

Steve Sunshine, Netflix’s outside counsel and the head of the global antitrust group at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, told CNBC in a statement that the law firm hasn’t been given any notice that the DOJ is conducting a monopolization investigation.

Netflix’s Chief Legal Officer, David Hyman, said in a statement that the company operates in an “extremely competitive market.”

“Any claim that it is a monopolist, or seeking to monopolize, is unfounded,” Hyman said. “We neither hold monopoly power nor engage in exclusionary conduct and we’ll gladly cooperate, as we always do, with regulators on any concerns they may have.”

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos said last month that he’s confident the company will be able to secure regulatory approval “because this deal is pro-consumer … pro-innovation, pro-worker.”

Tesla Europe announced plans to add xAI’s Grok, an AI chatbot, to its vehicle infotainment systems in the U.K. and eight other markets across Europe.

It remains to be seen if the addition of this technology will revitalize Europeans’ interest in buying Teslas.

Elon Musk’s automaker saw electric vehicle sales in Europe decline by 27%, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, or ACEA. The decline for Tesla came as Europeans’ continued strong adoption of battery electric vehicles. BEVs, the only kind that Tesla makes, represented 17.4% of the market across Europe in 2025 according to the ACEA. China’s BYD gained market share across the continent with innovative, and more affordable, EV models.

Tesla’s lack of affordable new models last year, and an ongoing consumer backlash in response to Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, and endorsements of anti-immigrant extremists including Tommy Robinson in the U.K. and Germany’s AfD party weighed on the appeal of the Tesla brand last year, according to Brand Finance.

Tesla is not the only automaker integrating chatbot features into its infotainment systems. For example, Volvo has announced plans to add a Google Gemini-based conversational AI assistant to its EX60 electric vehicles.

During a fourth-quarter earnings update, Tesla revealed that it had invested $2 billion into Musk’s xAI.

After that, Musk’s aerospace and defense juggernaut, SpaceX, acquired xAI in an all-stock transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion.

Before those deals, xAI had merged with social network X (formerly Twitter), and its Grok product had become the subject of myriad regulatory probes in Asia, Australia and throughout Europe including by regulators in Ireland, the U.K., France and the European Commission.

As CNBC previously reported, Grok enabled users to easily create and share deepfake explicit images based on photos or clips of real people without their consent, including deepfake images depicting child sexual abuse.

Last summer, Grok generated and spread antisemitic hate speech across social network X and praised Adolf Hitler, drawing earlier regulatory probes by the European Commission.

A Tesla owner in Canada raised the alarm about Grok’s lack of safeguards after it was added to her vehicle. As CBC reported, her son used Grok to generate entertaining comments about soccer athletes, and Grok eventually asked the minor to send nudes.

Tesla and xAI have not said whether they can limit minors’ access to Grok in Tesla vehicles, or moderate outputs of the chatbot to be appropriate for minors by default.

Besides criticism of Grok’s lax safety guardrails, driver distractibility remains a point of concern.

Mike Nelson, who is a partner at Nelson Law and an automotive safety researcher, said his own Tesla Model Y features Grok in the U.S., and he has enjoyed using it. However, the addition of chatbot technology to vehicles’ infotainment systems, he said, introduces a new “distraction layer” for drivers.

“Research shows that even in hands-free mode, you are more distracted when you are talking on the phone and driving,” Nelson said. “Adding Grok introduces more stimuli.”

A professor of machine learning and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Rayid Ghani, told CNBC that researchers and regulators, and insurance companies especially, should hasten to conduct “practical evaluations” of chatbots.

With a lack of benchmarking and standards across the industry, he said, “we do not yet understand the information needs of drivers, how well Grok or other chatbots fulfill those needs compared to other options and whether chatbots may change driving behavior and exactly how.”

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The two guard members remained in critical condition on Thursday after they were shot in an ambush Wednesday near the White House. The suspect is Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, an Afghan national who was subdued and taken into custody shortly after.

Federal authorities have launched a sprawling, nationwide terrorism investigation into what Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for DC, called a “brazen and targeted” attack. Police scoured the scene of the shooting, while authorities searched homes in Washington state and California. 

Trump, Vice President JD Vance and others in the administration quickly blamed the Biden administration for letting Lakanwal into the US and seized on the case to push for deeper immigration curbs, including halting reviews of Afghan immigration proceedings and ordering a review of those already in the US. That raises the prospect that settlement rights for Afghan allies of US forces may be curtailed.

“We must now re-examine every single alien who has entered our country from Afghanistan under Biden, and we must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country,” Trump said in a recorded video address published by the White House Wednesday.

On Thursday, Joseph Edlow, the head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, said in a social media post that his agency, under Trump’s orders, is conducting “a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern.” He didn’t name specific countries.

Even before Wednesday’s shooting, the Trump administration had moved to slash legal migration to the US. Trump’s second term has seen the administration severely lower its refugee cap, end temporary protected status for migrants from numerous countries, impose a $100,000 application fee for H-1B visas heavily used by tech companies and universities to bring over high-skilled workers and revoke thousands of visas. It also plans to review the cases of all refugees resettled under the Biden administration, according to an internal Nov. 21 memo seen by Bloomberg News.

Read More: Trump to Review Refugees Admitted Under Biden in New Crackdown

The calls for further steps came swiftly after Wednesday’s shooting, even as the investigation is in its early stages. Authorities are treating it as a terror case but haven’t publicly described his specific motive. On Thursday morning, they said that interviews and search warrants were still being carried out.

Lakanwal lived in Washington state with his wife and, authorities believe, five children. They say he drove to Washington, DC — a cross-country trip of nearly 3,000 miles — with the intent of carrying out the attack. He then drew a revolver and fired at two national Guard Members from West Virginia, blocks from the White House. The two victims are Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24; both remained in critical condition Thursday. 

Lakanwal was evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021 around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal. AfghanEvac, a nonprofit group dedicated to supporting resettlement of US allies in Afghanistan, said he served in an elite Afghan counterterrorism unit operated by the CIA with direct U.S. intelligence and military support to support their fight against the Taliban.

Lakanwal arrived in the US in September of that year “due to his prior work with the U.S. government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement. 

Lakanwal arrived under humanitarian parole and was granted asylum earlier this year by the Trump administration, according to AfghanEvac.

But the administration’s response raises the prospect that it will seek to block or even revoke status of Afghan nationals who helped US forces fight the Taliban.

The US immediately suspended processing of immigration requests related to Afghan nationals and is reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration, according to Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary of homeland security.

Trump called for reviewing every person who came to the US from Afghanistan under the Biden administration, while Vance said they will “redouble our efforts to deport people with no right to be in our country.”

And several top aides said that Lakanwal’s work with the CIA and other American agencies should not have meant that he was afforded residency or status in the US.

Ratcliffe said “this individual — and so many others — should have never been allowed to come here” while Attorney General Pam Bondi called Lakanwal a “monster who should not have been in our country” during a Fox News interview Thursday. FBI Director Kash Patel said at the Thursday press conference that “you miss all the signs when you do absolutely zero vetting” and Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington, DC, said “this is what happens in this country when people are allowed in who are not properly vetted.”

But while the Trump administration said it was a failure of vetting, the Afghan settlement rights group said there is vetting and that Lakanwal was a bad apple. 

“Afghan immigrants and wartime allies who resettle in the United States undergo some of the most extensive security vetting of any population entering the country,” AfghanEvac President Shawn VanDiver said in a written statement. 

The group supports “fully supports the perpetrator facing full accountability” and “rejects any attempt to leverage this tragedy as a political ploy to isolate or harm Afghans who have resettled in the United States,” VanDiver added.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, said the anger over the crime must be directed at the perpetrator and not every Afghan national in the US or seeking to move to the US. “Using this horrific attack as an excuse to smear and punish every Afghan, every refugee, or every immigrant rips at something very basic in our Constitution and many faiths: the idea that guilt is personal, not inherited or collective,” the group said in a written statement.

Aside from immigration reform, the political fallout from the attack could widen. Bondi also signaled that the administration may scrutinize Democrats who had criticized the deployments.

Speaking on Fox News on Thursday morning, Bondi criticized Democratic lawmakers, without naming any, and media figures who have criticized Trump’s use of the National Guard. 

“They should be praising our men and women in law enforcement. And we are looking at everything they have said, and why they said it, and if they encouraged acts of violence,” she said, without elaborating.

The administration is already seeking to court-martial Senator Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, after a video in which Democratic lawmakers told US service members that they can refuse unlawful orders. Trump has called the video “seditious” and reposted calls for the lawmakers to be killed.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser, meanwhile, condemned the shooting and pledged that the suspect will be prosecuted, but also hinted at her unease with the deployment. “These young people should be at home in West Virginia with their families,” she said. She didn’t elaborate.

Pirro, separately, declined to discuss the issue. “I don’t even want to talk about whether they should have been there” she said. “We ought to kiss the ground and thank god that the president said it’s time to bring in more law enforcement.”

US officials have opened an investigation into Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led two federal criminal cases against President Donald Trump, US media reported Saturday.

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The ongoing investigations of the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) into funds obtained from the President’s Fund have revealed names of 22 former Ministers and MPs as beneficiaries between 2008 and 2024. 

Sri Lanka Police said that accordingly, the CID will obtain an order from Fort Magistrate’s Court to obtain cheque details of these transactions.

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In an interview with Bitcoin commentator Natalie Brunell, Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) reaffirmed her commitment to establishing a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR), disclosing that the Treasury Department is probing its legal authority to purchase and custody BTC on behalf of the federal government. The senator believes such a move could significantly reduce the national debt over the long term.

Senator Lummis Pushes Bitcoin Reserve

Lummis pointed to roughly 200,000 BTC in the US Marshals Service’s asset forfeiture program as a possible starting point: “Working with Treasury, and the Treasury Secretary, we’re trying to find out which assets among those could become the basis of the first year’s investment in a strategic Bitcoin reserve.”

Further clarifying her stance, the senator noted she is determining whether a new law is required or if the administration already has the authority: “What I’m trying to figure out right now is whether it needs to be done legislatively or whether the Treasury Secretary has the authority to do it right now.”

Lummis proposes converting the seized BTC into an official “base investment,” which she says would be the foundation of a larger BTC reserve. If successful, this would mark the first time the US government deliberately and openly accumulated Bitcoin as a strategic asset.

One of Lummis’ main arguments for a SBR is its capacity to trim the federal debt, which she deems “irresponsibly high.” Under her Bitcoin Act, the US could also revalue its gold certificates—currently listed at a decades-old official price of $42 per ounce, far below market value—and deploy the difference toward purchasing BTC in a budget neutral way:

“My legislation would provide that we could take our gold certificates… bring them up to current fair market value for gold and then use that to buy Bitcoin, thereby creating a 1 million Bitcoin reserve over five years.”

She contends that holding this million BTC over a 20-year horizon could “cut the current national debt in half.” Citing extensive modeling—some from advocates like Michael Saylor—she believes the price appreciation of BTC has the potential to deliver significant gains to taxpayers.

New Episode Out Now!

U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis is leading the Bitcoin Revolution in Washington.

Her bold plans for America through Bitcoin & digital asset policy promise to reshape the financial system—reduce U.S. debt, protect Bitcoin self-custody, and reinforce dollar… pic.twitter.com/G1Rvl1ORDb

— Natalie Brunell (@natbrunell) April 1, 2025

The senator lauded President Trump’s recent executive orders that aim to make the United States “the digital asset capital of the world” by fostering a favorable environment for BTC mining, regulatory clarity, and a strategic reserve. According to Lummis, those moves stand in stark contrast to prior administrations, where “people neither knew nor wanted to talk about digital assets.”

However, Lummis also underscored the need for bipartisan collaboration, suggesting that while Bitcoin has now garnered interest in Republican circles, it should not become a strictly partisan endeavor: “We want to keep that momentum… We worked extremely hard to keep it bipartisan, so I can’t flip my brain and start to think of it as a partisan issue.”

At press time, BTC traded at $84,202.

Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com

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Multiple federal health agencies have stopped releasing some key health information — including updates on some outbreak investigations — amid a department-wide communications “pause” ordered by the Trump administration, though many other “mission critical” updates are still being released, CBS News has learned.

The Department of Health and Human Services “has issued a pause on mass communications and public appearances that are not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health,” Stefanie Spear, the HHS principal deputy chief of staff, told CBS News in an email. “This is a short pause to allow the new team to set up a process for review and prioritization.”

The Food and Drug Administration, a federal agency of the HHS, usually releases updates on probes of outbreaks linked to contaminated food every Wednesday, but the agency did not release them this week. As of the FDA’s last update on Jan. 15, authorities were investigating multiple outbreaks of E. coli and Listeria.

Publication of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s authoritative scientific publication, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, has also been delayed, health officials said. Articles have been published virtually every Thursday for decades, detailing agency guidance, updates on disease outbreak investigations and studies of health threats. But no issue was published this past Thursday. 

Weekly CDC updates on rates of flu and COVID-19 vaccinations have also been disrupted, the agency’s website shows. Local health departments and nonprofits rely on these figures to track uptake of the shots, targeting outreach to communities seeing lagging immunization rates. 

A Jan. 21 memo obtained by CBS News from acting Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Dorthy Fink ordered health agencies to, “consistent with precedent,” stop all new policies, communications and speaking engagements without clearing them with officials from the new administration until Feb. 1. 

Politico first reported the directive on Tuesday. 

Spear said there are “exceptions” for “mission critical” announcements, which will be made “on a case-by-case basis.”

The CDC on Thursday still released its weekly tally of certain infectious diseases reported to the agency from health departments, which include tracking of germs like whooping cough that have seen a record wave in recent months. 

Updated data on trends in emergency room visits from respiratory diseases were also updated Friday. Local officials and healthcare systems use the data to track influenza and COVID-19 every winter during surges. 

At least some of the CDC’s work with outsiders is still ongoing. A spokesperson for Alabama’s health department said Thursday that the CDC was still involved in an ongoing investigation of unusual side effects linked to an antibiotic injection used in the state. 

Public health labs have also so far not been hindered by the pause, a lab official outside the federal government said, despite a handful of webinars and calls that were canceled.

An update to the CDC’s travel notice about Tanzania was also published Thursday, after the World Health Organization announced an outbreak of Marburg virus disease had been confirmed in the country. 

The FDA is still releasing notices about recalls. A safety communication was also posted by the FDA this week, warning of an allergic reaction linked to a multiple sclerosis medication.

Multiple current and former health officials said a slowdown in communications has happened during every recent transition, as incoming officials sought to get a handle around the firehose of information and guidance coming from across the federal health bureaucracy.

But some also said the length and scope of the communications slowdown was unusual, resulting in confusion among staff as health agencies sought to stop or claw back communications, meetings and events to comply with the directive.

At the National Institutes of Health, meetings set up to review grant applications were abruptly canceled and agency experts at outside events and conferences were either unexpectedly recalled or participated without making any comments, one researcher said.

A meeting organized by the Presidential Advisory Council for Combating Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria scheduled for next week was also canceled, according to an email obtained by CBS News. Health officials from several countries were scheduled to discuss strategies to respond to superbugs at the meeting.

Another monthly meeting scheduled by the CDC for Jan. 27 with testing laboratories was also canceled. The CDC relies on the monthly calls to answer questions about guidance and ongoing outbreaks from labs, like about the recent change in testing procedures in response to this past year’s unprecedented bird flu outbreak.

The end of the communications “pause” will coincide with the conclusion of Senate hearings next week for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President Trump’s controversial nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. 

It’s not clear whether Kennedy, a former Democrat who has been widely criticized for his anti-vaccine statements and activism, will have the support to be confirmed in the closely divided Senate.