Zelenskyy remains defiant after blowup with Trump and Vance

The White House announced it will host a crypto summit on March 7, and invite crypto founders, CEOs and investors.

Trump courted the crypto community during his 2024 campaign, promising to make the U.S. “the crypto capital of the world” and vowing to undo Biden-era restrictions. He eventually counted them as his largest donor group.

The president previously created his own digital currency, issuing $TRUMP and $MELANIA themed currencies. Last month, he ordered his administration to explore the creation of a “national digital asset stockpile.”

The White House today touted next week's event as “the first ever White House Crypto Summit.”

Some employees at the Department of Education, Office of Personnel Management and Federal Bureau of Prisons received a second DOGE email Friday telling them to send five bullet points of what they accomplished this week by Monday at 11:59 p.m., a source familiar with the correspondence told NBC News.

The email appears to make the action a weekly requirement, noting: “Going forward, please complete the above task each week by Mondays at 11:59pmET.”

The email, viewed by NBC News, asks workers to not send any classified information or data, adding that if an employee’s activities are all sensitive or classified, they should respond by writing, “All of my activities are sensitive.”

Caitlin Ballard spent nearly two decades working as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service before being hired as a federal management analyst in 2023. She was terminated on Feb. 14, with only four months remaining in her two-year probationary period. Her termination letter cited performance-related issues, which she said added a sting to an already painful moment.

“It’s gut-wrenching because I wouldn’t have been kept around for so long if I had poor performance. They wouldn’t have created a position for me. I received numerous awards and also received a promotion...

It’s absolutely devastating. It’s devastating to my family. I have two young boys. I stuck with my contracting position for 17 years and wanted for many of those years to get into the federal government. Because as a contractor you’re just a supporting role, I wanted to get in to help make a difference. …

My father was in the military. He was a federal government employee of 40 years. He just retired. I have looked up to him and I have looked up to everything that he did. That’s what I wanted.”

Read more profiles of federal workers who have been fired by the Trump administration here.

Rubio told CNN in an interview tonight that frustrations over Zelenskyy’s behavior are not new, pointing to reporting by NBC News that former President Joe Biden lost his temper during a June 2022 phone call with the Ukrainian leader.

“These frustrations are not unique to President Trump. There was those frustrations in the previous administration, if NBC News right," he said.

During the interview, Rubio asserted that Zelenskyy should apologize for "wasting our time" and "turning this thing into the fiasco for him that it became.”

“There was no need for him to go in there and become antagonistic,” Rubio said.

Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah, is among a small group of Republican lawmakers that did not dole praise on Trump and Vance today following their sparring match with Zelenskyy.

Curtis, who's shown a willingness to buck what the president wants, instead called for "diplomacy and statesmanship."

On Feb. 14, Frank Zhu, 31, was less than two months into his job as a financial analyst at the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Chicago. He was on the phone with a co-worker when he saw an email that told him he was fired.

In one of his first in-depth interviews since joining the U.S. government, Elon Musk pushed a variety of claims about waste and fraud but offered little new information or insight into the work of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

In a wide-ranging, three-hour discussion with podcaster Joe Rogan published today, Musk revisited well-trodden grievances about news outlets and billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. He also touched on whether he thinks private aerospace contractors have secret propulsion technology (“I don’t think they’re hiding it from me.”), his respect for Trump’s Cabinet (“This is a revolutionary Cabinet and maybe the most revolutionary Cabinet since the first revolution.”), and a recent fringe theory that the gold in Fort Knox had been stolen.

Read the full story here.

Zelenskyy offered a less-than-certain assessment when asked during an interview this evening whether a tense confrontation with Trump and Vance at the White House this afternoon was coordinated.

"I don't know," Zelenskyy said during a Fox News interview with Bret Baier, before adding when pressed on the matter: “I think, no. I think, I think it was just a really tough situation because we’ve been very open, very direct.”