President Donald Trump fired two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, both of whom now say they plan to sue to get their jobs back.

The firings hit Commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, who represent the Democratic minority in the five-member commission. The White House did not immediately confirm Trump’s firing of the officials to Fox News Digital, but both Bedoya and Slaughter released public statements saying they intend to sue to return to their roles.

‘I’m a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission. The president just illegally fired me,’ Bedoya wrote on social media, arguing Trump wants the FTC to ‘be a lapdog for his golfing buddies.’

Slaughter released a similar statement saying Trump ‘illegally fired’ her, arguing the move was ‘violating the plain language of a statute and clear Supreme Court precedent.’

‘We are still commissioners. We’re suing to make that clear for everyone,’ Bedoya said in a follow-up statement.

FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, a Republican first appointed to the commission by President Biden and then made chairman by Trump, said he saw no issues with the firings on Tuesday.

‘President Donald J. Trump is the head of the executive branch and is vested with all of the executive power in our government,’ Ferguson wrote. ‘I have no doubts about his constitutional authority to remove commissioners, which is necessary to ensure democratic accountability for our government.’

‘I wish Commissioners Slaughter and Bedoya well, and I thank them for their service,’ he added.

The FTC firings are only the latest battle over the limits of Trump’s executive authority. His administration is facing numerous lawsuits from disgruntled former employees across the federal government, and several federal judges have sought to hamper his administration’s efforts.

Last week, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg verbally issued a 14-day restraining order to immediately halt the Trump administration’s Tren de Aragua deportation plan. Trump was deporting the gang members under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, and the order could have forced two planes full of TdA gang members to return to U.S. soil.

Trump’s efforts to trim the federal government with Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have also led to a litany of legal challenges.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said he needs more details about peace proposals following President Donald Trump’s call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, warning that ‘For us, the red line is the recognition of the Ukrainian temporarily occupied territories as Russian.’ 

Zelenskyy announced he plans to speak with Trump Wednesday after the president told Fox News’ ‘The Ingraham Angle’ that he spent nearly two hours on the phone Tuesday with Putin. 

‘We will discuss the details of the next steps with him,’ Zelenskyy said. ‘For us, the red line is the recognition of the Ukrainian temporarily occupied territories as Russian. We will not go for it.’ 

Zelenskyy added that attacks continue to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, despite U.S. and Russia saying Tuesday that Trump and Putin agreed to a ceasefire against those targets. Russia launched a series of drone strikes that struck civilian areas overnight and damaged a hospital in Ukraine. 

‘We will support any proposals that lead to a sustainable, just peace. But for this we must understand what is at stake. What are the details? And I hope to God that we know all these details, so that the partners talk to us. Because there are two sides in this war – Russia and Ukraine. Trying to negotiate without Ukraine, in my view, will not be productive,’ Zelenskyy said Tuesday. 

‘We support all steps toward ending the war. We will give support, but in order to support something we need to understand what specifically it is,’ he added. 

Trump described his call with Putin as ‘very good and productive’ on Truth Social. 

‘Many elements of a Contract for Peace were discussed, including the fact that thousands of soldiers are being killed, and both President Putin and President Zelenskyy would like to see it end,’ Trump wrote. ‘That process is now in full force and effect, and we will, hopefully, for the sake of Humanity, get the job done!’ 

The White House said in a statement following the call that ‘The leaders agreed that the movement to peace will begin with an energy and infrastructure ceasefire, as well as technical negotiations on implementation of a maritime ceasefire in the Black Sea, full ceasefire and permanent peace.  

‘These negotiations will begin immediately in the Middle East,’ it added. 

During the call, Putin also said a complete cessation of military aid to Ukraine was a key condition for ending the war, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency reported, citing the Kremlin. 

However, Trump told Fox News ‘We didn’t talk about aid, actually.’ 

‘We didn’t talk about aid at all,’ he said. ‘We talked about a lot of things, but aid was never discussed.’ 

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Concerns are mounting around former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to sign presidential pardons and other official documents across his four years in office, though the chances of successfully challenging in court the use of an autopen on presidential pardons are ‘vanishingly low,’ constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley said. 

‘Many are suggesting that the Biden pardons may now be challenged in light of the disclosures of Biden’s use of an autopen,’ Turley, a Fox News contributor, wrote on X Tuesday. ‘The chances of such challenges succeeding are vanishingly low. Presidents are allowed to use the autopen and courts will not presume a dead-hand conspiracy.’ 

‘Many of these were high-profile pardons, including for his own son, that Biden acknowledged publicly,’ he added. ‘There is also a problem with standing unless the issue comes up in a government effort to indict a recipient. That does not mean that the disclosures are not deeply troubling.’ 

Autopen signatures are ones that are automatically produced by a machine, as opposed to an authentic, handwritten signature. 

President Donald Trump has been sounding the alarm on Biden’s prevalent use of an autopen for official presidential documents, most notably for official presidential pardons before he left office in January. On Monday morning, Trump posted on Truth Social that Biden’s pardons for individuals connected to the Jan. 6 select committee investigation another are ‘void.’

‘The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,’ Trump wrote. 

‘In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level,’ he added. 

At the heart of the issue over the use of an autopen, which have been frequently used by presidential administrations across the decades, is concern over Biden’s mental acuity when he served in the White House. Trump said Sunday that though he uses the autopen for documents such as letters, he does not use an autopen for legally binding documents. 

Trump’s declaration that Biden’s pardons are now ‘void’ sparked a wave of legal questions to swirl — with many legal experts reporting that this is uncharted legal territory. 

‘This dog will not hunt,’ Turley added on X. ‘It may be worthy of investigation by Congress, but the pardons are unlikely to be seriously questioned by the courts.’ 

Michael O’Neill, the vice president of legal affairs at Landmark Legal Foundation — a conservative legal advocacy group that works to defend the Constitution — told Fox News Digital that, to his knowledge, ‘there hasn’t been a case where the limits of this power have been challenged.’

‘Biden’s pardons at the end of his term certainly test whether there are any limits to the presidential pardon power,’ O’Neill said. ‘Can a president issue blanket pardons encompassing any crime an individual may be accused of over ten years? This is a legitimate question that has yet to be addressed by the courts because no president has abused this authority until Biden. Another question is whether the pardons are valid if executed without the president’s knowledge — i.e. via autopen.’ 

‘If an individual who has received a pardon is indicted, they would, most likely, assert pardon as an affirmative defense,’ he added. ‘Lower courts would, most likely, uphold the dismissal, leaving it to SCOTUS to define the contours of the pardon power. How SCOTUS decides such a case is unknown.’ 

The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project first sounded the alarm on Biden’s use of an autopen earlier in March, reporting that an autopen signature was used on the vast majority of official documents researchers reviewed, except for the signature on Biden’s official announcement that he was dropping out of the presidential race in 2024. 

Heritage’s Project Oversight posted a memo on its ongoing investigation into the matter Monday, reporting that researchers are wading through copious amounts of ‘public documents discharging non-delegable Presidential powers containing former President Joseph R. Biden’s signature.’ 

The memo determined that ‘individuals in the Biden Administration other than the President appear to have used a device called an autopen to affix the President’s signature onto some of the most controversial clemency warrants of his Presidency.’

The Project Oversight memo offered a legal explanation that ‘if President Biden’s non-delegable official actions were not his own, then they are invalid.’

‘Start with the Constitution,’ the memo reported. ‘Multiple Constitutional provisions, like the pardon power, vest those powers solely in the President. In those cases, the President affixing his signature is his execution of the acts as President.’ 

‘The Founding Fathers contemplated these issues when writing the Constitution. For example, Article I, Section 7, Clause 2 of the Constitution lays out the role of the President to sign or veto legislation. Early debates at the Constitutional Convention concerning this provision made it clear that regardless of the structure of the Executive Branch, the President would maintain a necessary affirmative approbation of legislation presented to him. The act of the President affixing his signature manually to a bill is his consent and is the very act that causes a bill to become law; it is in no way ministerial. Until he signs, there is no law,’ the legal explanation continued. 

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2005 under former President George W. Bush’s administration determined that the president is permitted to use an autopen to sign bills into law.

‘You have asked whether, having decided to approve a bill, the President may sign it, within the meaning of Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, by directing a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to it, for example by autopen,’ the opinion stated. ‘This memorandum confirms and elaborates upon our earlier advice that the President may sign a bill in this manner.’ 

The Project Oversight memo, however, hit back that the opinion is ‘wrong.’

‘This opinion is wrong. But even that erroneous opinion was clear that ‘(w)e emphasize that we are not suggesting that the President may delegate the decision to approve and sign a bill, only that, having made this decision, he may direct a subordinate to affix the President’s signature to the bill,’’ the memo said. 

Concerns over Biden’s mental acuity when he was in the White House have been under the microscope as legal questions fly over the use of the autopen and Trump’s declaration his pardons were voided. 

Biden kicked off 2024 in the driver’s seat of the Democratic Party as he keyed up a re-election effort in what was shaping up to be a rematch against Trump. In February 2024, however, Biden’s 81 years of age and mental acuity fell under public scrutiny after years of conservatives questioning the commander in chief’s mental fitness. 

Scrutiny over Biden’s mental fitness rose to a fever pitch in June 2024 after the president’s first and only presidential debate against Trump. Biden missed his marks repeatedly in the debate, tripping over his responses and appearing to lose his train of thought as he squared off against Trump. 

The disastrous debate performance led to an outpouring from both conservatives and traditional Democrat allies calling on the president to bow out of the race in favor of a younger generation. 

Biden dropped out of the race in July, with former Vice President Kamala Harris taking up the mantle in his place, though concerns over his health have continued months later as Trump speculates that Biden was unaware of signing the pardons specifically. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was peppered with questions about the autopen during Monday’s White House press briefing, saying Trump’s Truth Social was raising the question whether Biden was aware of the pardons when he signed them. 

‘Was his illegal signature used without his consent or knowledge? And that’s not just the president or me raising those questions,’ Leavitt said on Monday. ‘According to the New York Post, there are Biden officials from the previous White House who raised those questions and wondered if the president was even consulted about his legally binding signature being signed onto documents.’

‘And so I think it’s a question that everybody in this room should be looking into, because certainly that would propose, perhaps criminal or illegal behavior if staff members were signing the president of the United States’ autograph without his consent,’ Leavitt continued. 

Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., also recounted earlier in January to the media that Biden reportedly didn’t remember signing an executive order freezing new liquid natural gas exports in 2024, which has increased scrutiny surrounding Biden’s mental acuity. 

‘I didn’t do that,’ the former president said in 2024, Johnson recounted during an interview with the Free Press’ Bari Weiss in January. 

‘Sir, you paused it, I know. I have the export terminals in my state,’ Johnson said he told the president at the time. ‘I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning, this is doing massive damage to our economy, national security.’ 

‘I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing because I thought, ‘We are in serious trouble — who is running the country?’’ Johnson said of the 2024 meeting.

‘Like, I don’t know who put the paper in front of him, but he didn’t know,’ he added.

Turley said Johnson’s comments on Biden suggest the ‘use of dead-hand power,’ but that legally pursing a challenge will nonetheless likely be a non-starter. 

‘The account of Speaker Johnson on how Biden seemed unaware of signing a major piece of legislation does suggest the use of a dead-hand power by staffers,’ Turley wrote. ‘In the end, this is the most difficult type of allegation to pursue since the key parties will be unified in claiming full knowledge and approval by the president.’ 

Fox Digital reached out to Biden’s office for comment on his use of the autopen and Trump’s comments he was unaware of the pardons he signed, but did not immediately receive a reply. 

Fox News Digital’s Diana Stancy contributed to this report. 

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Environmental Protection Agency from terminating $14 billion in grants awarded to three climate groups by the Biden administration.

U.S. District Judge Tonya Chutkan ruled that the federal government’s ‘vague and unsubstantiated assertions of fraud are insufficient.’ The order prevents the EPA from ending the grant program, which totaled $20 billion. The judge also blocked Citibank, which holds the money on behalf of EPA, from transferring it to the government or anyone else.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin claimed the grant recipients engaged in mismanagement, fraud and self-dealing in announcing that he froze and moved to terminate the grants, but the judge said Zeldin’s allegations were inadequate.

‘At this juncture, EPA Defendants have not sufficiently explained why unilaterally terminating Plaintiffs’ grant awards was a rational precursor to reviewing’ the green bank program, Chutkan wrote.

The grant recipients sued the EPA, Zeldin and Citibank, arguing that they had illegally denied the groups access to $14 billion awarded last year through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, commonly referred to as a ‘green bank.’ The program, which consisted of two initiatives worth $14 billion and $6 billion, respectively, was approved by Congress under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to support clean energy and climate-friendly projects.

Three groups — Climate United, the Coalition for Green Capital and Power Forward Communities — said the frozen grants prevented them from funding new projects and might force them to lay off staff. The groups said the allegations of mishandling funds were meritless.

The groups also asked Chutkan to order Citibank to unfreeze the account, but the judge declined. The order only preserves the status quo as the case moves forward.

Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion, the Coalition for Green Capital won $5 billion and Power Forward Communities — a group linked to Democrat Stacey Abrams — was awarded $2 billion.

Beth Bafford. CEO of Climate United, said the judge’s ruling was ‘a step in the right direction.’

‘In the coming weeks, we will continue working towards a long-term solution that will allow us to invest in projects that deliver energy savings, create jobs, and boost American manufacturing in communities across the country,’ Bafford said.

Zeldin said Tuesday on X that the grants were awarded ‘in a manner that deliberately reduced the ability of EPA to conduct proper oversight,’ adding that he ‘will not rest until these hard-earned taxpayer dollars are returned to the U.S. Treasury.’

Zeldin has described the grants as a ‘gold bar’ scheme involved in conflicts of interest and potential fraud.

‘Twenty billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution, in a deliberate effort to limit government oversight — doling out your money through just eight pass-through, politically connected, unqualified and in some cases brand-new NGOs,’ Zeldin previously said in a video posted on X.

Climate United contended that the termination was unlawful, arguing the federal government had identified no evidence of waste, fraud or abuse.

Iran is trying to bolster its ‘battered deterrence’ after a general vowed to respond ‘decisively and destructively’ to any threats in the wake of U.S. strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, an expert told Fox News Digital.

Gen. Hossein Salami, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said, ‘We warn our enemies that Iran will respond decisively and destructively if they carry out their threats’ following U.S. military action over the weekend against the Tehran-backed terrorist group, according to Reuters. Salami also denied that Iran is involved with Houthi attacks on U.S. Navy ships and commercial vessels in the Red Sea, the Associated Press reported. 

‘Tehran’s bluster is aimed at bolstering its battered deterrence and getting President Trump to disconnect the dots between Iran and its proxies at a time when the regime is at its weakest,’ Behnam Ben Taleblu, director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Iran program, told Fox News Digital on Tuesday. 

‘Tellingly, as a measure of the regime’s weakness, Tehran is also trying to downplay its ties with the Houthis despite having built them up with state-level military capabilities for over a decade,’ he added. 

Trump said Monday that ‘every shot fired by the Houthis will be looked upon, from this point forward, as being a shot fired from the weapons and leadership of IRAN, and IRAN will be held responsible, and suffer the consequences, and those consequences will be dire!’ 

‘Let nobody be fooled! The hundreds of attacks being made by Houthi, the sinister mobsters and thugs based in Yemen, who are hated by the Yemeni people, all emanate from, and are created by, IRAN,’ Trump wrote on Truth Social. ‘Any further attack or retaliation by the ‘Houthis’ will be met with great force, and there is no guarantee that that force will stop there.  

‘Iran has played ‘the innocent victim’ of rogue terrorists from which they’ve lost control, but they haven’t lost control,’ he continued. ‘They’re dictating every move, giving them the weapons, supplying them with money and highly sophisticated Military equipment, and even, so-called, ‘Intelligence.” 

U.S. Central Command said Saturday it had ‘initiated a series of operations consisting of precision strikes against Iran-backed Houthi targets across Yemen to defend American interests, deter enemies, and restore freedom of navigation.’   

Trump wrote on Truth Social Saturday that he ‘ordered the United States Military to launch decisive and powerful Military action against the Houthi terrorists in Yemen.’

‘It has been over a year since a U.S.-flagged commercial ship safely sailed through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, or the Gulf of Aden,’ Trump continued. ‘The last American Warship to go through the Red Sea, four months ago, was attacked by the Houthis over a dozen times.’  

Fox News’ Taylor Penley, Andrea Margolis and Lucas Y. Tomlinson contributed to this report. 

With President Donald Trump now in the White House, analysts say Israel is operating with fewer constraints than before, impacting its military approach and the war’s potential outcome.

‘It is all about Trump,’ a former senior Israeli official told Fox News Digital, ‘Netanyahu can continue this war for another year. If Trump tells him in two weeks, enough, now you have to go for a deal, he would.’ The same source also suggested that a new strategy is now being implemented: Dividing Gaza into controlled corridors, with food and civilian movement under Israeli military oversight, aiming to pressure Hamas.

John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute, told Fox News Digital, ‘The Trump administration, even before it was elected, was very clear: release all the hostages, including American citizens, or I will provide Israel everything it needs to legally, lawfully, and within all international laws prosecute its war against Hamas, with fewer constraints than the Biden administration put on it.’

‘The big variable at the higher level is the status of civilian evacuations,’ Spencer explained. ‘The United States is now more open to encouraging nations to allow Gazans to temporarily evacuate combat zones, which signals a shift in approach under the Trump administration.’

The collapse of the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has reignited military operations in Gaza. Israel cited Hamas’ refusal to release hostages as the reason for resuming attacks, while Hamas claimed that Israel failed to uphold its commitments under the ceasefire agreement. 

Jonathan Conricus, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, highlighted Egypt’s role in the evolving situation: ‘I think that this time around, Egypt will be forced by the U.S. to open up the gate and allow Palestinians to flee the battlefield. That is the right thing to do. It’s the humane thing to do. It is the legal thing to do, and that is what Egypt must do,’ he said. He criticized Egyptian authorities for restricting Palestinian movement, arguing that their policies have contributed to civilian suffering.

‘For the first time, Israel will be able to use all available weapons to decisively defeat Hamas,’ Conricus, a former IDF spokesman, told Fox News Digital.

In a video statement on Tuesday, Netanyahu thanked President Trump for his unwavering support of Israel, ‘Our alliance with the United States has never been stronger,’ he said.

On the battlefield, Israel has expanded its targets beyond Hamas’ military infrastructure to its governmental network.

‘The recent strikes, as Israel states, include quite a lot of the governmental side of a terror organization,’ Assaf Orion, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute and INSS, told Fox News Digital. However, he said, questions remain about what will follow if Hamas’ governance structure is dismantled.

The hostage situation remains a central issue. While the Israeli government argues that military action is necessary to pressure Hamas into releasing captives, concerns about hostage safety have sparked protests within Israel. Conricus told Fox News Digital, ‘The risk to hostages has increased. Hamas may execute some in retaliation for Israel’s renewed offensive, but the way I see it, Israel had no choice but to resume military operations after two weeks in which Hamas didn’t release any hostages. Honestly, I’m surprised we’ve waited this long to act.’

Orion acknowledged the complexity of balancing military objectives with hostage negotiations: ‘There is a clear tension between releasing the hostages, which involves a deal, and eradicating Hamas, which involves fighting. If the hostages are killed, that’s irreversible. An enduring defeat to Hamas, we all understand, is a generational task,’ he told Fox News Digital.

Whether Hamas can be fully defeated remains an open question. Spencer believes it to be possible, saying, ‘Hamas is weaker than ever, with its ability to hold territory and conduct organized military operations severely diminished. However, Israel must commit to holding the ground it clears, or Hamas could regroup and return.’

The outcome of Israel’s renewed campaign will depend not just on military strategy but also on Trump’s political approach. As the former Israeli official noted, if Trump decides to push for negotiations, Netanyahu is likely to follow suit. Until then, Israel appears set to continue its most extensive military operation yet.

The U.S. State Department has ended funding for tracking thousands of Ukrainian children abducted by Russia, and a U.S. database with information on the victims may have been deleted, according to a letter U.S. lawmakers plan to send to Trump administration officials on Wednesday.

A group of Democratic U.S. lawmakers penned the letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, urging the administration to restore the program that helps track the abducted Ukrainian children.

The administration has ended a government-funded initiative led by Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab that tracked the mass deportation of children from Ukraine, meaning researchers have lost access to a significant amount of information — including satellite imagery — on roughly 30,000 children kidnapped from Ukraine.

‘We have reason to believe that the data from the repository has been permanently deleted. If true, this would have devastating consequences,’ the letter, led by Ohio Rep. Greg Landsman, said.

News of the letter came on Tuesday, the same day U.S. President Donald Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who stopped short of agreeing to a 30-day truce in Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

A person familiar with the tracking program said the canceled State Department contract led to the deletion of $26 million in war crimes evidence.

‘They took $26 million of U.S. taxpayers money used for war crimes data and threw it into the woodchipper, including the dossiers on all the children,’ the person told Reuters.

‘If you wanted to protect President Putin from prosecution, you nuke that thing. And they did it. It’s the final court-admissible version with all the metadata,’ the person added.

The letter to administration officials also calls for sanctions to punish officials in Russia and its ally Belarus who are involved in abducting children.

‘These egregious, openly acknowledged violations of the rights of children afforded under international law demand consequences,’ the letter said.

Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab also no longer has access to the satellite imagery needed to track the abducted children, according to the lawmakers.

‘Our government is providing an essential service – one that does not require the transfer of weapons or cash to Ukraine – in pursuit of the noble goal of rescuing these children. We must, immediately, resume the work to help Ukraine bring these children home,’ the letter said.

Ukraine has described the abductions of tens of thousands of its children taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territory without parental consent as a war crime that meets the U.N. treaty definition of genocide.

Russia has claimed it has been evacuating people voluntarily to protect vulnerable children from being caught in the crossfire.

In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued warrants for the arrest of Lvova-Belova and Putin in connection with the abduction of Ukrainian children, a move Russia denounced as ‘outrageous and unacceptable.’

Eurojust, Europe’s agency for criminal cooperation, said on Tuesday it learned the U.S. government was ending its support for the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which was collecting evidence to prosecute Putin and others. The U.S. special prosecutor at Eurojust, Jessica Kim, would leave as part of the move.

Reuters contributed to this report.