The Trump administration fired most of the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace and sent its new leader into the Washington headquarters of the independent organization on Monday, in its latest effort targeting agencies tied to foreign assistance work.

The remaining three members of the group’s board — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Defense University President Peter Garvin — fired President and CEO George Moose on Friday, according to a document obtained by the Associated Press.

An executive order President Donald Trump signed last month targeted the organization and others for reductions.

Current USIP employees said staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency entered the building despite protests that the institute is not part of the executive branch. Police cars were outside the building Monday evening.

USIP is a congressionally funded independent nonprofit that works to advance U.S. values in conflict resolution, ending wars and promoting good governance.

Moose said “DOGE has broken into our building.” Speaking by phone from his office, he said, “What has happened here today is an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private nonprofit.”

He said the institute’s headquarters, located across the street from the State Department in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, is not a federal building.

Trump ends security for Biden’s son, daughter

President Donald Trump said Monday evening that he was ending Secret Service protection for former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and daughter Ashley.

Not only did Trump declare in a social media post that Hunter Biden — who has been a Trump target for years — would lose his protection “effective immediately,” he mentioned his whereabouts: “He is currently vacationing in, of all places, South Africa, where the Human Rights of people has been strenuously questioned.”

The post merged two of Trump’s recent fixations: He has talked constantly about his predecessor and the Biden family since returning to office. And he has talked a lot lately about what he sees as the plight of white farmers in post-apartheid South Africa.

Trump’s post Monday blending both subjects came after the New York Post (a publication he reads closely) published an opinion article Sunday about Biden’s South African vacation and his security detail.

On Monday afternoon, a reporter asked Trump about the topic as he was touring the Kennedy Center. “I just heard about it for the first time,” Trump said. He added that it was “really interesting” and that he planned to “take a look at it.”

A few hours later, he made his post.

At Kennedy Center, Trump nixes ‘Hamilton’

President Donald Trump visited the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington on Monday for the first time since he stunned the cultural and political establishment nearly five weeks ago by taking over the institution.

“We’re here to have our first board meeting,” he told reporters as he toured the center with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and a few of the people he has appointed to the center’s board, including country singer Lee Greenwood (who sings “God Bless the U.S.A.”) and Fox News personalities Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo.

He had some thoughts about programming.

“I never liked ‘Hamilton’ very much,” he said, taking a poke at a show that canceled a planned tour there next year to protest his takeover of the institution, which had long been bipartisan.

When he was a young man, Trump had dreams of one day becoming a Broadway producer. Now, he said, the Kennedy Center’s focus would be on producing “Broadway hits.”

Semisonic: Trump use of song not authorized

The Minnesota band Semisonic is pushing back at the White House for using their hit song “Closing Time” over a social media post that shows a shackled deportee.

The White House added the 1998 song in a post of a man with his wrists handcuffed to his waist as he is patted down at an airport. The video was captioned with the song’s lyrics: “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”

“We did not authorize or condone the White House’s use of our song in any way. And no, they didn’t ask. The song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely,” the power pop trio from the Twin Cities said in a statement to the Associated Press.

Asked about the post Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said “our entire government clearly is leaning into the message of this president.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection retweeted the White House’s post on X with the caption “It’s closing time. We are making America safe again.”

D.C. prosecutor forms election-inquiry unit

The top federal prosecutor for the nation’s capital, who promoted President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, has formed a “special unit” to investigate election offenses, according to an email sent to lawyers in his office on Monday.

Interim District of Columbia U.S. Attorney Ed Martin said the “Special Unit: Election Accountability” has already opened one investigation and “will continue to make sure that all the election laws of our nation are obeyed,” according to the email reviewed by The Associated Press.

Martin, who is awaiting Senate confirmation to permanently take the position, was involved in the “Stop the Steal” movement, which was animated by lies about fraud after Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden. Martin also served on the board of a nonprofit that raised money for Capitol riot defendants and their families and legally represented at least three defendants in Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot criminal cases, including a Proud Boys member who pleaded guilty to felony charges.

Martin did not provide additional details about the investigation his office has already opened.

Trump declares Biden pardons invalid

President Donald Trump wrote on social media Sunday night that he no longer considered valid the pardons his predecessor granted to people whom Trump sees as political enemies because they were signed using an autopen — a typically uncontroversial method of affixing a presidential signature.

Trump, who specifically took aim at the pardons granted to members of the bipartisan House committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, offered no evidence for his claim, and there is no power in the Constitution or case law to undo a pardon. But Trump’s assertion, which embraced a baseless right-wing conspiracy theory about former President Joe Biden, was a new escalation of his antidemocratic rhetoric.

Implicit in his post was Trump’s belief that the nation’s laws should be whatever he decrees them to be. And it was a jolting reminder that his appetite for revenge has not been sated.

“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 a post on social media Sunday night. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

Judge turns back CPB’s pursuit of alert funds

A federal judge on Monday declined to force the Trump administration to immediately reimburse dozens of public broadcasting stations for upgrades to the nation’s emergency alert system.

The nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency last Thursday, claiming the agency had unlawfully held up nearly $2 million in grant money for modernizing the alert system. The lawsuit says the delay in reimbursements is hampering the ability of federal, state and local authorities to issue real-time emergency alerts.

U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly denied a request for a court order and ruled that the CPB failed to carry its legal burden for showing how it has been irreparably harmed.

The corporation hasn’t demonstrated that the alert system will stop working if the grant funding doesn’t start flowing right away, Kelly, who was nominated by President Donald Trump during his first term, concluded as he rejected the CPB’s request for a temporary restraining order.

— News service reports