A Justice Department prosecutor abruptly retired this week after being warned she could be fired for defending herself as a judge weighs a criminal probe tied to President Donald Trump's Chicago immigration crackdown.

Sheri Mecklenburg, the former lead prosecutor in the "Broadview Six" protest case, disclosed the warning Thursday in a motion asking U.S. District Judge April Perry to let her argue on her own behalf.

Perry will hear arguments Oct. 1 on whether to name an independent special counsel to investigate U.S. Attorney Andrew Boutros and others over the case, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

"[W]hen notified (through counsel) that she intended to file a motion to intervene, the U.S. Attorney's Office advised that, as a Department of Justice employee, Ms. Mecklenburg was not permitted to file anything on her behalf and could be disciplined or terminated if she did so," her attorneys wrote.

"Ms. Mecklenburg then notified the U.S. Attorney's Office that she was retiring, effective on September 24, in part so that she can address these issues on her own behalf," the motion continued. Her retirement took effect the same day she filed, according to court records.

The former defendants are seeking a hearing on sanctions and "the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate her conduct and possibly to prosecute her," along with others, for criminal contempt, the motion says. That charge punishes people who disobey or obstruct a court.

"[T]here is no question that she is among those against whom Former Defendants seek sanctions and those they would like to see investigated for criminal contempt," her attorneys wrote.

The case grew out of a Sept. 26, 2025, protest outside an immigration facility in suburban Broadview during the crackdown, known as Operation Midway Blitz. Prosecutors charged six protesters, most of them active in local Democratic politics, with conspiring to impede a federal agent, the Sun-Times reported.

Three weeks before the protest, on Sept. 6, Trump threatened Chicago in a Truth Social image styled after the film "Apocalypse Now," declaring the city was "about to find out why it's called the Department of WAR," CBS Chicago reported.

In early October, amid clashes between protesters and federal agents in Broadview, Trump ordered 400 Texas National Guard members to Illinois, Oregon and other locations, Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) said, according to CBS Chicago.

"Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!" Trump wrote on Truth Social on Oct. 8.

The next day, the grand jury refused to indict the protesters, returning a rare "no bill," Capitol News Illinois reported.

When Mecklenburg returned to the same grand jury on Oct. 16, she told jurors she "did not do my job" the week before and had not explained the law "well enough," the outlet reported, citing transcripts Perry released in June.

"I heard this case like last week and I thought it was a crock of s— then and I still think it is," one grand juror told her, according to the transcripts.

Mecklenburg dismissed the juror, telling them to "have a good evening," according to the report. Prosecutors won an indictment from the same panel on their third try, on Oct. 23. The former defendants have since asked for any evidence that White House officials pressured Boutros' office to secure the indictment.

"To the extent that Ms. Mecklenburg made mistakes, as the Court suggested, she owns them," her attorneys wrote.

The motion concedes she should not have vouched for the case, meaning she put her personal credibility behind the charges, during the first grand jury session. It also concedes she should not have spoken with two grand jurors outside the grand jury room.

But the motion disputes that she improperly excused jurors, saying she followed Justice Department guidance and that a second juror "excused him/herself."

The Justice Department is opposing the former defendants' motions and argues that Mecklenburg did not commit misconduct, a position she shares, according to her motion.

On May 21, after Perry rebuked prosecutors over apparent misconduct before the grand jury, Boutros appeared in her courtroom, dropped the remaining charges and took responsibility for the alleged misconduct, Capitol News Illinois reported.

Mecklenburg had left Chicago in February for a Justice Department assignment in Washington, withdrew from the case and received no notice of later hearings, the motion says.

"In fact, Ms. Mecklenburg only learned of the Court's May 21, 2026 hearing and the events that transpired that evening, when she received a call from a reporter," her attorneys wrote.

The motion argues that "no other party to this case, including the United States, can fully represent" her interests.

"Ms. Mecklenburg only re-presented the case on October 16 after receiving the instruction to do so from the U.S. Attorney," her attorneys wrote, adding that the government's brief did not explain it.

"The United States also omitted the fact that … the U.S. Attorney directed Ms. Mecklenburg to order an expedited copy of the October 9 grand jury session," the motion says.

A Truth Social post by President Donald Trump taking aim at the media was quickly and angrily fact-checked by CNN White House correspondent Kristen Holmes.

On Thursday, Trump shot off an irate post about how CNN and MS NOW didn't cover his White House welcome ceremony for Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

"CNN and MSDNC's Ratings have dropped considerably," Trump wrote, using his name for MS NOW, a jab at the network's progressive lean. "The primary reason is NO CREDIBILITY! They only write badly about a man who won the Election IN A GIANT LANDSLIDE."

He continued, "CNN and MSDNC, to show you how fake they are, today refused to cover one of the Biggest and Most Beautiful Events to take place in many years, the arrival at the White House of the Highly Respected President of China, Xi Jinping...the event was magnificent — Actually made for Television."

Holmes reacted to the post minutes after it came out.

"He is clearly very angry that there has been no coverage of his meeting," Holmes said, but she noted that claims in the post are "fundamentally not true." CNN would have covered the event, Holmes stressed, but its reporters were still not allowed into the White House when it took place.

A judge temporarily blocked Trump's media ban earlier in the day and ordered the White House to restore access to CNN, MS NOW and Politico. However, the Trump administration initially tried to continue restricting their access, and the event with Xi took place before the White House finally relented. It seemed like no one told Trump about the series of events, Holmes said.

"Either somebody in President Trump's administration or the press office is lying to President Trump, or he does not have a fundamental understanding of what is happening today, or he himself is not telling the truth in this post," Holmes said, nearly yelling out of frustration. "And I do want to be very clear to the president of the United States that we would have covered this event had you not banned CNN and MS NOW and Politico."

A little-known State Department agency called the Office of Remigration is paying hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars to authoritarian governments around the world in exchange for accepting deportees who have no connection to those countries whatsoever, wrote Greg Sargent for The New Republic on Thursday.

The agency, operating under White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller's direction with roughly 15 staffers buried inside the State Department bureaucracy, was initially exposed by a Washington Post investigation.

"It’s really sleazy, ghoulish stuff," wrote Sargent. "The administration has authorized or pledged over $400 million for such agreements with more than 30 countries, mostly in Africa and Latin America. As the Post reports, the deals place many migrants in countries to which they have no previous connections, and are structured to skirt 'human rights safeguards' that typically are built into U.S. foreign assistance payments abroad."

Perhaps most striking is what the office is doing to an agency built for the opposite purpose. The Office of Remigration sits inside the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, historically responsible for resettling people fleeing danger into the United States. Career staffers who once carried out that mission are now leaking details of their dismay at being ordered to do the reverse essentially.

The word "remigration" itself carries loaded history — a term with roots in European far-right movements that use it as coded language for expelling nonwhite populations en masse. According to The Post, senior State Department officials objected internally to naming the office this, warning the term evokes ethnic cleansing, but were overruled from above and told the name would stay.

Democrats are already eyeing ways to fight back if they retake either chamber of Congress next year. Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL), a senior Appropriations Committee member, argues Congress should use its funding power to shut the practice down entirely.

"Removing individuals to countries where they have no ties is unconscionable," Frankel said.

President Donald Trump's decision to ban CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House is being blamed on the rising influence of two of his most polarizing aides, executive assistant Natalie Harp and housing finance chief Bill Pulte, according to a Daily Mail report.

Both in their mid-30s, Harp and Pulte have become the aides most often at Trump's side just before his most inflammatory moves, and White House insiders told the Mail they fear the president is especially prone to impulsive decisions when the two devotees are in his ear.

"The White House is no man's land right now," one insider told the outlet. "Karoline Leavitt would have never let this happen."

The concern points to a shrinking inner circle. Press Secretary Leavitt left at the end of August to spend more time with her young children, and insiders say she often talked Trump out of rash moves against the press. Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was in Florida for medical appointments when the ban was announced Friday, and was not involved in the decision. New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has described Trump's circle narrowing to a handful of constant companions, saying that over the summer at his Bedminster resort "it was like Natalie Harp and Walt Nauta and Bill Pulte showing up at the golf course over and over again."

Harp's role in the ban is well documented. Just before Trump posted the crackdown, she showed him a slate of critical coverage, including a Politico graph that reportedly infuriated him, according to CNN and the Wall Street Journal. Known as the "human printer" for the portable printer she carries to feed Trump favorable clips, Harp is the aide who often publishes his social media posts after he dictates them, and she has ruffled feathers by acting on his directives without checking with the chief of staff or communications office.

Pulte, nicknamed "Little Trump," has earned rare access, flying on Air Force One at least four times since August and pitching the president policy ideas on weekends, sometimes with a poster board. One source in the Mail report was blunt: "I haven't determined if he is a fool or if he is nefarious."

The White House rejected the characterization. "Every member of this team is valued," spokeswoman Danielle Alvarez said. "Director Pulte, Ms. Harp, and the rest of the team are doing a phenomenal job." Neither Harp nor Pulte responded to requests for comment.

The ban has since triggered lawsuits from the three outlets and an overnight court order temporarily lifting it. But the deeper worry among Trump's own staff, the insiders say, is that with Leavitt gone and Wiles often away, the people closest to the president when he picks a fight are the ones least inclined to stop him.

President Donald Trump sparked outrage by joking about the "autopen" on a portrait to get a laugh out of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

On Thursday, the White House X account posted a video of Trump giving Xi a tour of the Presidential Walk of Fame, a West Colonnade display of gold-framed portraits of past presidents that Trump installed last September. Former President Joe Biden's portrait is notably swapped out with an autopen, reflecting Trump and his allies' claim that Biden's aides used the signature device on pardons and orders because he was mentally unfit. Biden denies the claim.

"Trump, Trump," the president said, pointing at the portraits on both sides of the autopen. "This is the autopen...It's Biden," Trump then explained to Xi with a pat on the arm.

While people following Trump and Xi on the tour laughed at the joke, online reactions were harsher. Many were outraged that Trump would take a dig at a previous president for the sake of getting a laugh out of a foreign leader.

"As an American, I find this so embarrassing," former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul reacted. "He calls it the people's house, but he does not treat it as the people's house. Whatever your policy disagreements were with President Biden, 81 million Americans voted for him. To treat him with such disrespect is appalling. To force a foreign guest to participate in your ridicule of Biden is even worse."

"I hate this," lamented Philip Klein, the editor of National Review Online, a conservative opinion outlet. "Xi is a commie b— who runs a key US adversary. Biden, warts and all, was a U.S. president."

"He's a grotesque human being," blasted former GOP congressman Joe Walsh. "Taking a despicable cheap shot at an American president to make a communist dictator laugh."

"How embarrassing for us," bemoaned Gregg Nunziata, a former GOP Senate Judiciary Committee counsel.

As an American, I find this so embarrassing.

He calls it the people's house, but he does not treat it as the people's house.

Whatever your policy disagreements were with President Biden, 81 million Americans voted for him.

To treat him with such disrespect is appalling. To… https://t.co/PTwtEpYn6M
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) September 24, 2026

Republicans are facing growing pressure over high prices before the midterms — and some of their own senators are fuming that Congress is spending valuable time on college sports.

Even some supporters of the legislation are unhappy with that choice ahead of the crucial midterms, The Washington Sun reported Thursday.

“If you think moms and dads, when they lie down to sleep at night, are worried about whether the football coaches are happy, you need to back off the crank,” Sen. John Kennedy (R- LA) told reporters this week.

Kennedy said lawmakers should be working on the cost of living instead.

“We haven’t,” he said. “We haven’t done anything since the One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) voiced a similar concern, writing in a social media post that the Senate is focused on issues voters “don’t even care about.”

“We’re just not doing what we should be doing to deal with issues you care about,” Curtis posted on X.

The Protect College Sports Act has more than 70 senators and would set nationwide rules for college athlete compensation, transfers and eligibility, according to The Sun. But the time spent on it has reportedly left lawmakers frustrated.

“Voter concerns about high prices have rattled Republicans in key battleground races across the country, with some calling on Trump to end the war in Iran and take actions to lower the record cost of diesel, which is hitting farmers hard across the Midwest,” the publication said Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said lawmakers could take up a bill aimed at protecting consumers from rising costs tied to data centers next week.

But, as The Sun put it, “even that wasn’t a sure thing.”

Conservative CNN pundit SE Cupp sounded off on President Donald Trump when talking about his media ban and predicted it will ultimately backfire.

On Thursday, SE Cupp was part of a panel discussing the ban of CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House grounds. The discussion came after the White House initially turned away reporters from the three outlets despite a judge's order to restore their access. Cupp said that the media should always keep fighting because the public is on its side.

"We will win this fight not because we're morally superior or better, but because the American people demand a free press," Cupp said. "They demand it, and they're not idiots. They realize, well, if he does it against these guys, what will they do against my guys when the next guy is in office?"

Cupp stressed the American people are "not stupid" and argued that they're not applauding Trump's media ban. She framed it as a move that will backfire against him.

"This read as weakness," she said. "Wherever they're coming from politically, they see this as weak."

Cupp also argued that the move doesn't have a "return on investment" for Trump.

CNN contributor and TV host Cari Champion raised the question of "what he'll do next now that this ruling is seemingly against him. Do we see him say, 'Let me walk away'?" Champion continued, "Does he decide, 'I still want to pick up. This is being defiant...I still want to fight this fight.'?"

Cupp responded by pointing out that Trump "keeps losing" the fight. "He's sued a bunch of media outlets. He has lost most of those defamation suits."

She noted that on top of losing in court over his media ban, a judge also tossed a Trump lawsuit against veteran Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer this week.

However, "some media agencies decided to capitulate and settle" in the past, Cupp warned. "That was a bad look and bad for journalists and democracy."

Nevada GOP congressional candidate David Flippo got another humiliation on Thursday as the outgoing Republican currently holding his seat, Mark Amodei, doubled down on his refusal to endorse him.

Speaking to The Washington Post's Dan Merica, Amodei said he will "absolutely not" give Flippo his support.

“The guy is a fraud ... I’m not having my last action walking out the door to hug a guy who I think is a fraud,” said Amodei.

Nevada's 2nd District covers all of the northern areas of the state, including Reno, Carson City, and the Lake Tahoe area. Republicans have won the district in every single election since it was first established in 1982.

Flippo, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, emerged out of a bitterly divided primary that featured over a dozen candidates, though he swiftly earned the endorsement of President Donald Trump and Gov. Joe Lombardo even as Amodei has pointedly kept his distance.

This week, his campaign was rocked by reporting that he has repeatedly falsely claimed he earned a different type of Bronze Star than he actually did, a claim military experts say is tantamount to stolen valor. His campaign has apologized for the controversy.

The news comes as Republicans are already sweating over holding the usually safely red seat, amid a national environment where the public is furious at the party over the Iran war and the spiraling cost of gas.

Former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-PA) offered a blunt warning to Republicans on MS NOW Thursday: Many of you who have never had to run in a competitive seat will suddenly find your seat up for grabs in November.

This came amid a discussion of right-wing talk radio host Steve Deace, who is currently panicking over data he is seeing behind the scenes in Iowa as Democrats reportedly put seats that voted for President Donald Trump by double digits in play.

"I've been saying for months that if you're an R+10, R+12 district, you're going to be in the fight of your life," said Dent, who himself retired from Congress in anticipation of the 2018 blue wave. "That's real trouble ... a lot of these members who are in those seats are R+15, R+10. They've never had to run a general election before."

Now, he said, "they're going to find out the hard way. They're in a real fight for their lives. And many of them don't know how to position themselves for a general election."

Republicans in safe districts, he added, have never needed to reach out to Democrats or independents for their votes. "People like Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, for example. They've always had to do that. I had to do that. I was in a district that Obama won and that John Kerry won. So I always had to appeal to those folks." By contrast, he said, Republicans who have never had to do that are going to be "shocked" when they have to this fall.

As an example from 2018, Dent cited former Oklahoma Rep. Steve Russell. "He lost. Nobody saw that coming. But one of those cases where the wave was really big. And this guy was not really concerned about a general election. He lost."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

A man is dead in western Kansas.

Erlin Y. Lagos-Gonzales, a Honduran citizen living in Garden City, has been charged with voluntary manslaughter in the Aug. 31 death of Adonis Edgardo Aguilar-Juarez at a livestock facility in Kearny County. A federal immigration judge had issued Lagos-Gonzales a final order of removal in July 2025. He remains presumed innocent unless the state proves the charge.

Those facts are serious enough on their own. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach immediately gave them a broader political meaning.

“This killing never should have happened,” he said, before arguing that law-enforcement agencies should collaborate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to locate and remove people with final removal orders.

The policy connection was not inferred by critics. Kobach himself made it. One charged homicide became the evidentiary vehicle for a general claim about immigration enforcement.

That is where the hypocrisy begins. When a native-born American commits a murder, we generally understand the concept of individuality perfectly well. We ask about motive, rage, domestic conflict, ideology, drugs, mental illness, opportunity or the peculiar facts of that person’s life. Citizenship is rarely offered as the explanation. We do not normally treat a citizen’s violence as evidence that citizens, or white Americans, or white men, are collectively dangerous.

But when the accused is an undocumented immigrant, the individual’s immigration status can suddenly become the headline, the explanation and the policy prescription all at once.

The aggregate evidence does not justify that asymmetry. A peer-reviewed study using unusually detailed Texas arrest data found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens across violent, property and drug offenses.

A later National Institute of Justice-funded report cautioned policymakers against linking crime increases to unauthorized immigrant populations without robust evidence and found no significant association between estimated unauthorized immigrant population size and arrest rates after accounting for known correlates of crime and robustness checks.

One horrific case does not erase those denominators.

Chapter seven of my book makes the double standard concrete by naming native-born white offenders whose crimes are seared into American memory: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Dennis Rader, Adam Lanza, Dylann Roof, James Holmes, Scott Peterson, Chris Watts, Timothy McVeigh, Patrick Crusius, Robert Bowers and Stephen Paddock. Beyond that numbered list: Dylan Klebold, Eric Harris, James Alex Fields Jr. and John T. Earnest.

Their crimes were monstrous. Yet their whiteness and citizenship did not routinely become a generalized policy category called “white male crime.” The individual remained the individual. That privilege of individuality is exactly what disappears when the defendant is an immigrant or another racialized outsider.

Another reality makes the criminal-immigrant stereotype especially simplistic. Undocumented people often have powerful reasons to fear contact with law enforcement.

Research on Latino communities has found that greater fear of deportation is associated with a lower likelihood of reporting crimes and lower confidence in police and courts. Other scholarship about migrants with irregular status likewise documents fear that contact with police can expose them to immigration consequences.

This does not mean undocumented people never commit crimes. It means the common picture of undocumented immigrants casually embracing conduct likely to attract police attention ignores a basic feature of undocumented life: Official attention can carry consequences that most citizens never have to contemplate.

That fear also creates a public safety complication that slogans erase. If immigrants are afraid that reporting a crime, appearing as a witness or cooperating with police may expose them or someone in their family to immigration enforcement, crimes can go unreported and investigations can become harder. The research is not perfectly uniform, and undocumented communities are not monolithic. But the existence of this documented fear is relevant to any serious claim that more entanglement between local policing and immigration enforcement automatically makes communities safer.

This is where the cognitive science matters. Human beings are not spreadsheets. We process vivid stories more easily than denominators. We form in-groups and out-groups. We give familiar people more benefit of the doubt, and we are more likely to treat a frightening act by an outsider as information about the outsider’s group.

System-justification research adds another layer: When people perceive the social order as threatened, they become more inclined to defend familiar hierarchies and explanations. My book calls the related process “meh relegation”: inconvenient information gets pushed into the cognitive background because the emotionally satisfying story feels more real.

That mechanism is politically universal.

Republican voters are not uniquely susceptible to it, and neither are Democratic voters. But political identity matters because messages from trusted in-group leaders can arrive with built-in credibility. Here, a Republican attorney general deliberately connected a homicide committed by a Honduran national to a broader immigration-enforcement argument.

We cannot establish Kobach’s private mental state or whether he consciously intended to exploit racialized fear or cognitive bias from the statement alone. But the rhetorical structure is inescapable: a vivid death, an outsider, a threat narrative and a policy demand — without the comparative crime-rate evidence that would allow citizens to evaluate the generalization.

That deserves scrutiny because Kobach is not merely a campaign surrogate or television commentator.

The Kansas Attorney General Office’s own website describes Kobach as the state’s “chief legal officer and top law enforcement official.” The office includes the Kansas Bureau of Investigation. When the state’s highest law enforcement official makes an empirical public safety claim, the evidentiary standard ought to be higher than the emotional force of a single case. The more powerful the office, the higher the ethical responsibility to distinguish a tragedy from a trend.

None of this minimizes Aguilar-Juarez’s death. If the state proves Lagos-Gonzales committed voluntary manslaughter, he should be held accountable under the law.

If federal authorities failed to execute a valid removal order, that failure can be investigated on its own terms. If Kansas wants to evaluate whether a particular form of ICE cooperation improves public safety, it can examine actual outcomes. Those are legitimate questions. What is not sound reasoning is using an alleged act as though it proves a proposition about millions of people while comparable crimes committed by native-born white Americans remain resolutely individual.

There is also an ethical question here that cannot be answered by crime statistics alone. At what point does using a person’s death as the emotionally potent substitute for aggregate evidence become more than ordinary political rhetoric?

When a public official knows or has ready access to the denominator, the comparison group and the contrary research, but presents the anecdote without them, constituents are entitled to ask whether grief is being used to do persuasive work that the evidence itself cannot do. That question is especially serious when the speaker is the state’s top law-enforcement official.

Look again at what is easiest to lose.

The best comparative evidence does not show undocumented immigrants to be more violent than native-born citizens. Undocumented people often have reasons to avoid law enforcement contact and can be reluctant to report crimes because of deportation fears. The long list of spectacular native-born white violence has never produced an equivalent presumption that one white offender represents white Americans generally. This particular Kansas case, however tragic, cannot supply a denominator it does not contain.

Do you see how powerful these impulses are? Even when you now know the evidence, can you feel how easy it is to just “meh” away the truth because the original story — foreign criminal, dangerous immigrants, more enforcement — is simpler and more emotionally satisfying?

The frightening anecdote still feels more real than the denominator. The outsider still feels more representative of his group than the insider. That is precisely the cognitive vulnerability my book describes. The first defense against it is to recognize the move when it happens.

Rory Bahadur is the author of “A Critical Race Approach to Systemic Inequity” and the James R. Ahrens Professor of Law at Washburn University School of Law but his views are his own and do not represent those of Washburn University. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.

The Trump administration said it had identified 185 noncitizens on Nevada’s voter rolls — but Nevada checked the names and says every one of them is a U.S. citizen.

“Our records indicate that they were citizens,” Nevada Deputy Attorney General said in a letter obtained by The New York Times. “You have provided nothing of substance to suggest otherwise.”

The finding cast doubt on a claim by the Department of Homeland Security, which had previously raised the possibility of nearly 16,000 noncitizens on the state’s rolls.

“Our records do not support DHS’s claims, and DHS has still not provided evidence to change that,” said Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar. “Instead, DHS officials continue their attempts to intimidate election officials into compliance and deter voters with huge claims of fraud with no evidence.”

The Times called the dispute the Trump administration’s “latest stumble” in its effort to find evidence of widespread noncitizen voting, which the publication noted is “extremely rare.”

The new development drew immediate reactions.

The Bulwark’s Sam Stein pointed to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s earlier threats of prison time to election officials, “pointing to allegations of mass voter fraud in Nevada among other places.”

“The state looked into DHS's claims. They found nothing,” he wrote on X.

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, noted DHS’s shift from nearly 16,000 suspected voters to a list of 185 that Nevada says are all citizens.

“DHS certainly isn't too concerned about disenfranchising Americans,” he posted Thursday.

DHS disputed Nevada’s account, telling the Times the state’s characterization was “false.”

"Incredible," wrote immigration lawyer Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. "All 185 were citizens. DHS got 100% wrong."

Federal investigators examining two of Jeffrey Epstein's closest advisers are looking closely at a shell company that survivors say was a site of his abuse, according to new reporting on a probe that could mark a turning point for his victims.

CNN reported Thursday that a source who was interviewed by investigators earlier this year said officials from multiple agencies, including the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, are gathering documents such as emails and checks and speaking with witnesses, among them survivors. The probe targets Epstein's longtime lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountant Richard Kahn, whose federal scrutiny the Wall Street Journal first reported this week.

Among the topics of interest, the source told CNN, is the Florida Science Foundation, one of Epstein's shell companies. The nonprofit was incorporated in November 2007, and multiple survivors have told CNN that Epstein abused them there while he was serving his jail sentence. Survivors and former associates testified to Congress this year about the same operation, describing a Palm Beach office Epstein used during work release, with sheriff's deputies paid to escort him, to continue preying on women. One former Epstein assistant told lawmakers she believed the foundation was essentially a "fake office," set up to give him somewhere to go while he was supposed to be behind bars.

Indyke and Kahn are among the most scrutinized figures from Epstein's inner circle. As co-executors of his estate, they also stand in line to potentially collect millions from his trust, an arrangement survivors have challenged as a conflict of interest. Both have repeatedly denied any knowledge of or role in Epstein's sex trafficking. Indyke told lawmakers this year he "had no knowledge whatsoever" of the crimes, and Kahn testified his relationship with Epstein was "strictly on a professional level," though a legal analyst has since suggested Indyke may have committed perjury in that testimony.

The Justice Department would not confirm the investigation, saying only that "if the evidence presents itself, we will investigate." A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment. To date, Ghislaine Maxwell remains the only person prosecuted in the U.S. in connection with Epstein's operation, which survivors' advocates have long called an unacceptable lack of accountability.

Reporters from conservative outlets were shoved by Chinese press at the White House as President Donald Trump joked that the Chinese had the friendliest press corps amid his attempt to ban some U.S. outlets.

The clashes broke out Thursday during Chinese President Xi Jinping's state visit, according to reporters who posted videos and accounts on X. Trump made the remark as the press corps covering Xi was at the White House, according to a White House print pool report.

Tensions appeared to begin earlier that morning, before Xi's arrival, when the U.S. Secret Service stepped in and cautioned Chinese reporters outside the White House as they jockeyed for the best position to cover their leader.

"NOW: WH and Chinese delegation are currently fighting on the south lawn regarding placement of official government cameras… [The Secret Service] is getting involved," Washington Examiner White House reporter Christian Datoc wrote on X Thursday morning, before Xi arrived.

"Chaos ahead of Xi Jinping's arrival at the White House as the travelling Chinese press corps push and shove their way into position. Lots of shouting and raised voices as they refuse to move for Secret Service," The Telegraph's White House correspondent Connor Stringer posted.

"A reminder that they trampled a White House staff member during Donald Trump's state visit to Beijing," Stringer added.

Scuffles later moved to the briefing room, where Chinese reporters broke decorum to get a glimpse of the two world leaders as they met in the Oval Office. Reporters from pro-Trump outlets lodged multiple complaints.

"Chinese reporters just shoved an American reporter inside the briefing room. They are being very aggressive," The Center Square's Washington bureau chief Sarah Roderick-Fitch posted later that morning.

"Chaos in the press briefing room with Chinese media and U.S. media (pool trying to get into event) now," Newsweek White House reporter Leonardo Feldman wrote minutes later.

"Absolute chaos with Chinese press in the room…" the pro-Trump network Real America's Voice posted.

"Currently: squashed against a wall by Chinese press," Daily Wire White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olohan wrote.

"A Chinese photographer just shoved one of our American reporters in the press room. Where is the outrage?" Newsmax's Bianca Gracia asked.

"A Chinese male photographer shoved an American female reporter while rushing through the briefing room door to the Oval Office bilateral [meeting]," NTD News reporter Iris Tao wrote.

"Chinese press taking over and doing photo shoots in the briefing room," Real America's Voice posted at noon. CNN reported that it saw Chinese state media filing into the briefing room and taking pictures at the podium.

Real America's Voice has been filling in as the backup TV pool, the camera crew that shares footage of the president with other networks, since ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC stopped pool coverage to protest Trump's ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico last week, CNN reported.

"THEY SAID PRESIDENTIAL VIDEO COVERAGE HAD STOPPED. RAV'S CAMERAS NEVER DID," the network wrote on X Wednesday. "We are Real America's Voice — and we're proud of it."

CNN noted that the White House eventually forced the reporters to separate.

"US and Chinese photographers were separated from the pool and brought in for two sprays [brief photo sessions] with the president, according to two of the photographers who were present," read a White House print pool report cited by CNN.

"During the second spray, Trump made a joke about how the Chinese had the friendliest press corps," the report continued.

Trump also remarked on how Chinese reporters ask Xi for permission to speak, The Associated Press reported.

"There is, of course, a reason for that. And it's that China is an authoritarian country with repressive restrictions on free speech and the press," CNN's Aaron Blake wrote in an analysis.

Blake pointed out that administration lawyers have argued in court that Trump's press ban is about national security, not politics. But Trump's comment "would seem to get at his real goal: acquiescence," he wrote.

Reporters from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were let back into the White House around noon Thursday under a court order, CNN reported.

Axios media correspondent Sara Fischer said it was a national embarrassment for President Donald Trump to joke about China having the "friendliest press corps" on the same morning his White House was turning away American journalists in defiance of a court order.

The remark came during Chinese leader Xi Jinping's state visit Thursday, as Chinese photographers documented the day. According to a White House pool report, Trump "made a joke about how the Chinese had the friendliest press corps," and the Associated Press reported he also noted that Chinese reporters ask Xi for permission to speak. China is an authoritarian state that jails journalists and enforces media loyalty to the government.

Fischer refused to let the claim go unchallenged, telling a panel: "This is such an embarrassing moment for the United States," she railed on CNN, noting that the country was hosting one of its biggest global adversaries while failing to live up to the values it purports to stand for.

"We're supposed to be meeting with one of our biggest global adversaries, a communist country, and representing democracy on the global stage. And democracy stands for freedom of the press, freedom of speech," Fischer said. "And the fact that we have reporters who are not being allowed in the White House... a president who is sort of acknowledging the fact that another world leader, in his view, gets the opportunity to have less of a free press. It is everything that we don't stand for here in America."

Just after midnight Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge ordered the administration to restore White House access for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, which Trump had banned last week over what he called their "FAKE NEWS." U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly found the outlets' press passes were revoked without "constitutionally adequate due process."

Hours after that order, the White House was reportedly still turning reporters away, with CNN's Betsy Klein denied entry at least four times before she was finally let in around noon. Some journalists had their passes confiscated. Full access was restored around lunchtime, and the news organizations had to return to court for an emergency hearing because the administration was, as one CNN correspondent put it, essentially defying the judge's order.

Fischer praised the White House press corps for staying "professional" through the episode, calling their coverage a reminder "not just to the people here in the US, but everywhere around the world" that the country still believes in press freedom regardless of the administration's conduct.

Trump-endorsed Nevada congressional candidate David Flippo has been caught misrepresenting his own military record, repeatedly telling supporters he earned a Bronze Star with a valor citation during more than 20 years in the Air Force, when in fact his actual 2004 award carried no such distinction.

The controversity was initially reported in The Washington Post on Thursday.

A standard Bronze Star recognizes solid overall service. The valor version, denoted by an added "V" device, is reserved for troops who displayed genuine bravery while actively engaged with the enemy, a much higher and far less common bar to clear. Experts who study military honors say blurring the line between the two isn't a harmless exaggeration, but functionally equivalent to fabricating an honor altogether.

The false claim wasn't a one-time slip either. It first surfaced in a campaign announcement video years ago, then resurfaced again this year in fundraising appeals sent out during his current run. Flippo's campaign has acknowledged the error and apologized, attributing it to a staffing mistake rather than intentional deception.

Flippo just emerged from a crowded 13-candidate primary to become the GOP nominee in Nevada's 2nd Congressional District, a seat the party has comfortably held ever since it was first established in 1983. Rep. Mark Amodei, the current officeholder Flippo is seeking to replace, has pointedly declined to endorse him, leaving questions about how enthusiastically the broader party will rally behind a nominee already facing credibility questions in what should otherwise be an easy hold.

The controversy adds Flippo to a growing list of politicians accused of embellishing military service, including Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), who was found to have overstated his Bronze Star count, and Ohio GOP congressional candidate J.R. Majewski, whose campaign was sunk after it emerged he lied about being deployed into combat in Afghanistan.

The California Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco broke state law when he seized roughly 650,000 ballots from last year's special redistricting election, ordering him to hand them back immediately.

Bianco, a Republican with ties to the Oath Keepers paramilitary, used search warrants last fall to seize about 1,000 boxes from the county's vote on Proposition 50, the redistricting referendum, after conservative activists pushed unfounded claims that Riverside tallied tens of thousands more ballots than were actually cast. County officials later traced the confusion to informal handwritten tracking sheets, finding the real discrepancy between official records and the final tally was minuscule, just over a hundred ballots.

Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero, writing for the court, found Bianco's seizure directly violated the state's election code, which shields voted ballots from ever leaving election officials' custody, regardless of any ongoing law enforcement inquiry. She ordered him to immediately hand the ballots back to the county's registrar.

"The Elections Code contemplates that voted ballots remain in the continuous custody and control of elections officials from the moment the voter deposits them until the moment they are destroyed," Guerrero wrote.

In a companion case brought by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, the justices also unanimously rejected Bianco's argument that the state's top law enforcement official has no power to issue binding orders to county sheriffs. During oral arguments in August, justices repeatedly pushed on how far Bianco's legal theory could stretch, including whether it would let sheriffs seize mail ballots before Election Day even arrived, with one justice calling the implications "bizarre." When asked whether the attorney general could stop a sheriff who openly admitted targeting a political rival out of "payback," Bianco's own attorney conceded no.

The court didn't stop at the substance of the ruling. In a footnote, the justices called out Bianco's legal team for citing inaccurate material apparently generated by an AI tool in an earlier filing, and took the additional step of flagging the conduct to California's attorney licensing body for possible ethics review.

The rulings deal a significant blow to efforts by local officials to use unsubstantiated fraud claims as justification for seizing election materials outside standard procedures, reinforcing California's authority to step in whenever a local official tries to take unilateral control over ballots.

Bianco ran for governor earlier this year, but failed to place in the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election.

A new investigation says Tim Tebow's celebrity has helped draw believers into a wealth seminar that left some of them thousands of dollars in debt.

The former NFL quarterback is the recurring keynote at Life Surge, a company that stages roughly 30 one-day events a year mixing worship music, Christian celebrity speakers, and promises of financial transformation, according to Mother Jones. Tickets run as little as $20, but the real money is in what comes next: multi-day "SurgeU" investing courses that cost from roughly $10,000 to $40,000.

The seminars center on what Life Surge calls "kingdom impact," the idea that the more wealth you build, the more good you can do for God. But hundreds of attendees have aired complaints to the Federal Trade Commission, the Better Business Bureau, and online, describing a high-pressure sales pitch wrapped in scripture.

"I am so devastated that Christians like Tim Tebow made me trust in something that has taken so much money from me," one attendee wrote in an FTC complaint. "This is evil, especially because I'm disabled on a limited income."

One Indiana couple bought a $20,000 course package, then borrowed roughly $40,000 more on interest-free credit cards to have money to invest, only to make nothing in the market and watch the promotional rates balloon to around 29%, according to the report. Another woman said she took a line of credit against her home to fund a $13,000 real estate course and is still paying it off. Attendees said counselors pressed them to sign up on the spot, denying them time to go home and pray on the decision.

Life Surge has denied any wrongdoing, with spokesman Richard Lorenzen saying the company "does not train its representatives to pressure customers into borrowing or taking on debt they cannot afford." He said that enrollment is voluntary and financing comes through third parties. The events also flash on-screen disclaimers warning that customers "could potentially lose money," though Mother Jones reported they appeared too briefly and too small to read easily.

The report traces part of Life Surge's DNA to Online Trading Academy, an investment-education company where several top Life Surge executives once worked. The FTC sued that company for deceiving customers with inflated earnings claims, and it agreed to a settlement that forgave consumer debt and imposed a $362 million judgment, most of it suspended. None of the Life Surge executives were named in that complaint.

A speakers' bureau estimates the biggest names can command up to $100,000 per appearance, and with Tebow on track to headline 20 events this year, Mother Jones estimated his Life Surge earnings at $2 to $4 million. He did not respond to the outlet's request for comment. Life Surge said it does not ask its headline speakers to promote the paid classes. In a 2023 recording obtained by the outlet, Tebow egged the crowd on.

"So I know that many of you today have probably signed up for classes, have probably signed up to take the next step," he said. "I want to encourage you to finish that, to follow through on that commitment, to finish strong."

President Donald Trump left political observers scratching their heads Thursday after declaring that Chinese President Xi Jinping is “an expert on stone” who “loves good granite.”

“We had a great meeting, and he has great interest in granite,” Trump told reporters after showing Xi the new White House helipad. “He likes granite. He's an expert on stone. And he loves good granite.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul turned to social media for help understanding Trump’s unexpected revelation.

“To the China experts out there, is it well known that Xi ‘loves good granite?’” McFaul wrote. “That was news to me.”

“Lord help us,” Andy Ostroy, a political commentator and writer, posted on X.

Foreign policy reporter Laura Rozen relayed an observation from a White House foreign press pool reporter, who said Trump had shown Xi the helipad and ballroom construction before he addressed the Chinese president’s apparent love of granite.

“Xi just stood without changing his expression,” the reporter observed. “He [said] nothing.”

“Granite—definitely a top issue for Americans,” one critic on X wrote, while the political commentary account Spiro's Ghost referred to the president as "Dementia J. Trump."

Journalist Robert Lesetich was equally as blunt: “Xi loves granite! The idiocy of this buffoon we elected king knows no bounds.”

WASHINGTON — The Republican candidate to be Alabama’s next governor admitted Thursday he actively avoids reading anything — because only his opinion matters to him.

"No, I read very little," Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) told Raw Story. "I want my own opinion, not somebody else's."

The former Auburn football coach is leading polls in his gubernatorial contest in ruby-red Alabama, but former U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) is hoping to ride the nation’s anti-Donald Trump sentiment into the governor’s mansion in November.

In today’s Senate, Tuberville’s far from alone in avoiding the latest headlines. Unlike the president's tweet-saturated first term, these days most Republicans in Congress seem to avoid the news altogether.

But Tuberville is taking it to a new level.

"What do you make of this report that Vice President Vance was the person behind the leak in one of the Politico stories that got them banned from the White House?" Raw Story pressed the MAGA Republican while riding an elevator in the Capitol.

"Did they ban Politico, too?" Tuberville asked Raw Story. "Who knows? I mean, hey, I've learned up here about 10 percent of it is fact. The other [90 percent] is not even close to reality. You know that. Everybody tries to get out there and make a name."

"There's no way Vance would do that," Tuberville said. "You gotta have faith in your people that lead, you know, on both sides."

"And he'd lose faith with Trump if he was leaking?" Raw Story pressed.

"Well, whoever's going to run for president is going to be picked by him," Tuberville said of Trump's role in picking his successor.

With Vance and Secretary of State Rubio's names at the top of the speculative 2028 presidential pack, Tuberville says both need to woo Trump.

"Well, you can't have both of them run,” Tuberville gamed out. “You can't waste that much money."

While he won’t be found thumbing through tabloids, Tuberville says he’s heard chatter in Washington about some of the other Republicans who are eyeing a White House run in 2028.

“I saw that Rand [Paul] is thinking about running,” Tuberville said. “Rand Paul — who else? Cruz will run. I was with [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis Saturday at a football game in Tuscaloosa. He said he hasn't made his mind up yet.”

Besides presidential gossip, Tuberville seems to have tuned out the talk of the town on Capitol Hill.

"What do you make of Sen. [John] Curtis' (R-UT) move to try to get [Donald] Trump Jr. in to testify about the Russian wedding donations?" Raw Story asked.

"I didn't see that," Tuberville said.

"Oh, yeah? He's calling your party out. Some people aren't happy," Raw Story replied. "Do you have questions about Trump Jr. taking Russian oligarch money?"

"I don't get into all that," Tuberville said. “I mean, no reason to talk about anything you don't know anything about.”

Diplomats from dozens of countries walked out of the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approached the podium, emptying rows of the chamber in protest before he could say a word.

Cheers and chants in support of Palestine broke out Thursday afternoon as dozens of diplomats stormed out. The protest led to a gaveling and a call for "order in the hall!"

Netanyahu answered the exodus from the stage with a firm retort.

"If there are any other moral cowards who have not left this hall, please do so now," he said to a visibly thinned-out room.

The walkout comes amid protests against Israel's brutality in Gaza, where the war has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, and against Netanyahu personally. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him last year over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity tied to the siege of Gaza, a warrant he rejects.

Netanyahu arrived in New York at odds with the city's leaders. He spent the run-up to the trip attacking Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who previously warned he would seek to enforce the ICC warrant if Netanyahu set foot in the city. In a video before the speech, Netanyahu declared, "Shame on you, Mr. Mamdani!" and accused him of "supporting the Hamas terrorist monsters" and inciting violence against Jewish New Yorkers.

That claim landed flat even on Fox News, where correspondent Trey Yingst flatly rebutted it, noting that Netanyahu's video said Mamdani "strongly supported Hamas, which... isn't true."

The mass exit was not the first of the week's UN drama. A day earlier, President Donald Trump used his own General Assembly address to threaten to "annihilate" Iran, remarks one New York Times reporter characterized as a threat to commit a war crime.

Mortgage rates have reached their highest level during either of President Donald Trump’s terms, adding to the strain on Americans already struggling with high prices.

The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage rose to 7.03% this week, up from 6.95% last week, according to CNN, which cited figures released by Freddie Mac.

The network called the development a “grim milestone” as rates have now climbed for five straight weeks, leaving buyers facing larger monthly payments.

“A move from 6 to 7 is a big change,” Columbia University finance professor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh said in a The New York Times report on Thursday, “and it will further dampen an already weak housing market.”

The Times tied the reversal to the war with Iran. Mortgage rates briefly fell to 6% in February but began rising after U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28. Energy prices, the outlet added, have risen due to disrupted oil shipments and have only increased inflation concerns.

The jump also comes as Trump calls for lower interest rates. He said last week that U.S. rates “should be 1% or less,” CNN reported.

“There’s a psychological aspect,” Eric Orenstein, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, told the Times. “At what point do consumers just accept that rates are not going back to 3 percent?”

An Ohio sheriff who has built his career on tough immigration enforcement says President Donald Trump's administration got its second-term crackdown wrong from the start.

"Now, has [immigration enforcement] been kind of messed up when they first started this under [Trump's] 2nd term? Sure they have," Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones told WCPO-TV. "Did they go about it in the wrong way? Sure they did."

Jones, who calls Trump a "real leader" in his book, “They Call Me Jonesy: Let’s Get Real About Saving America," said the administration has since replaced some personnel and moved to what he called a "softer approach," which he praised as good.

The sheriff also raised doubts about the scale of Trump's mass deportation promises.

"You can't deport 20, 25 million people," Jones said, citing his own estimate of the number of people living in the country illegally. "I don't even think [Trump's] deported maybe over a million."

Jones has worked with federal immigration authorities under several administrations and has expanded his office's cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump. His office has a 287(g) agreement with ICE, which lets trained local officers carry out some immigration enforcement duties under federal supervision.

He told WCPO that roughly 450 people in the Butler County Jail were being held on immigration matters, and that about 6,000 people had been deported from the jail over the previous 18 to 19 months.

In January, several Ohio lawmakers asked state corrections officials to address what they called overcrowding, poor food, inadequate heating and other problems there, citing an earlier state inspection. Jones disputes the complaints and says the jail is clean and the food is nutritious.

Jones argued that immigration was a major reason Trump won in 2024, pointing to a figure showing 78 percent of Americans want action on immigration. WCPO noted that the figure comes from a February 2024 Pew Research Center survey.

It found 78 percent of Americans saw the number of migrants at the southern border as a "crisis" or "major problem," not that they supported Trump's policies. The same survey found 56 percent said expanding legal immigration would help.

Jones said he supports expanding legal immigration while cracking down on illegal immigration.

"The whole system's broke," he said, suggesting that six Republican and six Democratic leaders be locked in a room "and don't let them leave until they reach a compromise on immigration."

President Donald Trump’s own words about the war with Iran are being used against him in a new lawsuit seeking a court ruling that the months-long conflict is unconstitutional.

The new lawsuit filed by the National Iranian American Council in federal court argued that Trump launched and is continuing his war without authorization from Congress. The group asked a federal judge to declare that the president is violating the Constitution’s provision giving Congress the power to declare war.

“The bombing and other acts of war, such as a blockade, continue with no end in sight,” the group says in its lawsuit.

The complaint points specifically to Trump’s April 7 post on his Truth Social platform: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

It also cites a more direct comment about congressional approval. Trump said he avoided calling the conflict “a war because you’re supposed to get approval,” according to the court filing. “So I’ll use the word ‘military operation.’”

The group says its members have relatives in Iran who have been injured by the months-long war.

“They are all in imminent danger of harm to their persons and properties proximately caused by the unconstitutional war waged by defendant President Donald J. Trump,” the Sept. 24 lawsuit says, which names Trump as the sole defendant.

The group is seeking a declaration that Trump “is unconstitutionally waging an indefinite war of aggression against the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

“Absent a declaration from this Court that defendant’s continuing presidential war of aggression violates the Constitution, the war will continue indefinitely and will cause imminent threats to the lives, limbs, health, property, and bare necessities of all Iranians, including those whose families are members of plaintiff NIAC Action,” the group said.

President Donald Trump is casting Americans who oppose AI and data centers as agents of China, and a new Justice Department warning has raised alarm that the administration could try to prosecute them, according to a new report.

Trump has spent recent weeks recasting opposition to AI as a foreign plot.

"There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China," he posted on Sept. 14, adding: "Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE!"

In another post, he called AI skeptics "Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause," and he has warned he could go after "BAD" actors using "our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System."

Those alarms escalated when the Justice Department issued an unusual public warning on Sept. 16, reminding "both citizens and noncitizens" that anyone acting "as an agent of any foreign power to carry out any public activity, including (but not limited to) public demonstrations designed to further the propaganda or other goals of the foreign power," must register with the government or face civil and criminal penalties, "up to and including a maximum of five years in prison."

The warning named no one and didn't mention AI, data centers, or any specific protest. It also stated the department "recognizes and protects the First Amendment rights of those who seek to express their opinions publicly."

Writing in his newsletter, journalist Ken Klippenstein tied it to Trump's posts and argued the real targets are actually ordinary Americans, "normal people who have no idea they are part of the government's latest national security mirage."

And Congress pushed the same theory, he noted.

In June, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate "foreign influence efforts" behind opposition to data centers, alleging a network "led by the Chinese Communist Party."

The threats come after a Gallup survey this year found 71% of Americans oppose a data center in their area, including 63% of Republicans, a rare cross-party consensus.

And the marquee "China is paying protesters" claim has already collapsed. MAGA "Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary, who pushed it about opponents of his own planned Utah data center, later conceded he had "no evidence," and two groups he named sued him and Fox for defamation.

"When people who distrust the government’s handling of AI are told their distrust is traitorous foreign propaganda punishable by jail time, it’s hard to imagine them trusting the government more," Klippenstein concluded, warning the gambit could backgire on the Trup administration. "It’s easy to imagine them trusting it less, and wondering what the government is so eager to keep them from asking. That’s the downside of playing national security card, and it’s one that Washington never seems to think about."

President Donald Trump's pick to run the Food and Drug Administration left Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) briefly speechless by declining to say whether an intrauterine device causes an abortion.

Heidi Overton, a physician and White House domestic policy adviser, appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday for her confirmation hearing.

Murray pressed Overton on birth control in the final seconds of her time to question the nominee.

"Last year, the Trump administration falsely labeled birth control as abortion. Do you agree that, say, an IUD is an abortifacient?" Murray asked.

"Senator, if I have the privilege of being confirmed, first off, I commit to working with you on the food safety pillars that are critically important," Overton replied.

"I appreciate that. But I wanted to know if you agree that IUD is an abortifacient," Murray pressed.

"Senator, thank you for the question. If I'm confirmed as FDA commissioner, I'll be fully briefed in all their prior decisions and make determinations according to the standards of safety and efficacy," Overton answered.

"I don't think you answered the question," Murray said after a long pause, during which she flashed a confused look at the committee's chairman, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA).

"Look, I think it is outrageous and should be deeply alarming to all Americans right now that the prospect of an FDA commissioner who doesn't know that birth control is not an abortion is deeply concerning to me," Murray continued.

Murray's claim traced to September 2025, when the U.S. Agency for International Development told The New York Times why the administration planned to destroy about $10 million in birth control meant for women overseas.

"President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world. The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid," the agency said.

The supplies included IUDs, birth control pills, and hormonal implants, journalist Jessica Valenti reported in her Substack newsletter.

"By definition, contraceptives prevent pregnancy – not end a pregnancy. IUDs and other forms of birth control do not cause abortion, and any suggestion otherwise is misinformation," the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists told CNN last year.

If confirmed, Overton would lead the FDA as it reviews the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone, The New York Times reported ahead of the hearing.

The newspaper said Overton would be the first commissioner to have openly opposed the drug, which she has called "dangerous to women."

"This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist's weekly newsletter here."

Last year was a tough time for anyone who studies climate change for a living. The United States, once respected around the world for its sprawling investments in science, suddenly reversed course. Shortly after President Donald Trump began his second term in office, his administration set to work slashing funds for America’s scientific institutions, scrapping billions of dollars in research grants and firing thousands of federal employees at agencies ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

People were “in shock,” said Aparna Shrivastava, who was a senior climate official in the Biden administration. In private chats, she found herself in conversation with dozens of experts who had recently lost their jobs or funding, but who wanted to continue studying the rapidly warming planet or trying to prevent its worst effects. But the sudden cuts left many with few options.

All of them were trying to figure out, “What could we possibly do to address this?” Shrivastava said. Eventually, the conversations started happening in person. At a workshop convened by the Aspen Global Change Institute in Colorado last July, a group of more than 30 climate experts landed on a possible solution — one that would help fund new jobs for laid-off colleagues across the country. Today that idea is a full-fledged initiative, backed by tens of millions of dollars, with Shrivastava at the helm. They call themselves the Climate Reserve, and they’re just now taking their operation public.

Climate Reserve functions through a network of experts with a mission to identify the most critical climate work left in limbo and find a place where it can continue, even without federal support. Sometimes that means placing a climate researcher with an organization focused on the environment or climate; other times that means finding a new home for projects that the government cut from its budget, Shrivastava said.

So far, Climate Reserve has funded more than two dozen new positions for climate experts. These people, known as their fellows, are now working across the U.S. at nonprofits such as the Environmental Protection Network and institutions like the University of Minnesota. The group has also resuscitated a number of federal projects, such as EJScreen, an online map that shows which American communities experience the worst pollution. There’s international work happening too, such as a project mapping sea level rise on islands in Panama, and another measuring greenhouse gas emissions in five African countries.

And there’s more that the group isn’t willing to share publicly. The hope is that a measure of secrecy will keep some of its fellows and projects out of the crosshairs of the Trump administration — which has been notably punitive with some of its funding cuts. After all, many of those working within the network still rely on federal funding in some capacity, or plan to apply for federal funding in the future.

Now that Climate Reserve is making progress, its leaders are willing to take the risk of being more open about their efforts to attract more funding for fellows. So many people are still out of work, Shrivastava said. Even the Lyft driver in Washington, D.C., who drove her to the airport to meet potential funders this spring happened to be a laid-off climate and energy expert.

The name “Climate Reserve” is meant to evoke a nature reserve as well as the Army Reserve — “the emergency group that you can call up to bring people together,” said Brittany Janis, executive director at the nonprofit Open Environmental Data Project, who was involved in the group’s discussions from the start. Her organization recently partnered with Climate Reserve to hire a former senior advisor for environmental justice programs in the Biden administration to keep the now-independent EJScreen tool up to date.

Funding these positions is meant to provide a kind of “parachute” that can help former federal workers, along with all their specialized knowledge and the relationships they’ve built, land in a safe place, Janis said. “How can we be really thoughtful about parachuting people to the right places so we aren’t losing all that institutional knowledge and that really critical basis for climate action in the U.S.?”

Unlike a traditional hiring or grant-funding system, the group wants to emphasize collaboration rather than competition, according to Ben Poulter, who leads an emissions-monitoring program at Spark, a climate solutions nonprofit that is in the process of hiring two Climate Reserve fellows. “We realized early on that the changes that were happening could fragment the community even further as resources became scarcer,” he said. “The whole point of Climate Reserve is that we’re all in the same boat and we need to work together.”

This philosophy — dubbed “movement generosity” by several of the group’s founders — means focusing on the broader goals of the climate movement and trying to share resources and expertise across organizations to achieve them. For instance, a single expert funded by Climate Reserve could split their time between two organizations, allowing them to coordinate on similar projects and reduce redundancy.

Poulter, who previously coordinated greenhouse gas monitoring efforts between federal agencies, now leads a program tracking how ecosystems that are especially sensitive to warming, like wetlands, will release more planet-warming emissions as temperatures rise — a feedback loop that is often overlooked by climate models. One of the fellows working at Spark will coordinate these measurements across five African countries, while another will translate that science into policy recommendations for those countries, Poulter said.

There’s also a lot of vitally important but “unsexy” data-crunching projects being saved by Climate Reserve, said Sonia Wang, who leads the Center for Climate and Environmental Data at the Data Foundation, a nonprofit think tank. It’s an important, and often invisible, part of understanding the realities of climate change. For example, two groups using satellites to detect methane emissions might end up with different estimates if they aren’t using the same wind speed models.

Sorting out these discrepancies is “not the flashiest thing, but when you look under the hood, this is really what’s necessary,” Wang said. Her organization has taken on four Climate Reserve-funded experts to help with these kinds of projects that make it easier for decision-makers and scientists to trust climate data, she said.

By the end of this month, Climate Reserve will have placed 50 climate experts in new roles, and it plans to triple its funding by the end of next year, Shrivastava said. And if federal support for climate research eventually returns, its organizers hope the network they are building can make the entire field more collaborative and resilient to political shifts in the future. “We are not at all looking to replace the government. We’re just stepping up to try and meet some of the needs here,” Shrivastava said.

Climate change may be politicized in the United States, but its impacts “affect us all,” said John Balbus, a Climate Reserve fellow who spent 15 years in the federal government. Most recently, he was a senior official in the Department of Health and Human Services coordinating projects to address the health effects of climate change, such as seasonal forecasts for extreme heat and wildfire smoke. He is now continuing that work at the Federation of American Scientists and as an independent consultant.

The climate and health experts that Balbus once worked with would “do anything in their human power” to continue living a life of public service, even without a government job, he said. And the need for this kind of work, he added, isn’t going away. “The need is only going to get stronger every year.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/labor/trump-science-funding-network-climate-reserve/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to reporting on climate change.

In November 2021, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History opened an exhibit called “The Electric Dr. Franklin,” describing “Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering contributions to electrical science.” The exhibit explained that, prior to becoming an abolitionist, he had enslaved people in his household. “Benjamin Franklin’s remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery,” it declared.

The exhibit speculated that Franklin may have used enslaved people in his electrical research. “Franklin wrote about experiments in which he took shocks and used family and friends in these ways, although he seldom identified who in particular assisted him,” stated the exhibit, which closed in 2025 but can still be found online. “Indentured servants and enslaved people in his household could also have been used, although we may never know for certain.”

It was an eye-catching conjecture: one of the most revered of the Founding Fathers subjecting people held against their will to possibly painful shocks. And it was one of many details singled out for criticism in a blistering 162-page White House report released in July that argued that the museum had fallen victim to an “ideological capture” that “moved the Museum’s mission away from straightforward historical education and scholarship toward an extreme political activism that seeks to transform our country.”

For decades, the Smithsonian Institution, which draws some 15 million visitors every year to its assemblage of 21 museums — bounty that has no real global peer — has managed to stay mostly above the political fray. There have been occasional exceptions, such as the uproar over the National Air and Space Museum’s planned 1995 exhibit of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By and large, though, the institution maintained bipartisan support as the guardian of America’s history, ingenuity and natural heritage, even as political polarization spread and culture wars raged.

But that institutional exceptionalism is now imperiled as never before. In March 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the Smithsonian had succumbed to “divisive, race-centered ideology.” This July 4, timed to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, came the White House report. Later in July, two House committees held back-to-back hearings on the report, where Republican members took turns lambasting the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, and forcing her to answer questions about exhibit items such as a “chrome and rubber crotch harness” designed for sadomasochistic sex. That week, Trump signed an executive order instructing the Department of the Interior to erect signs outside the museum “warning visitors about the ideological capture” on display there. The signs have yet to go up, but in late August, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sent a letter to the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents declaring that other federal agencies “cannot in good conscience continue to support the Smithsonian under current leadership.”

The Smithsonian is independent of the executive branch, governed by a 17-member board led by the chief justice of the Supreme Court and with six members of Congress, three from each party, serving with nine private citizens and the vice president. But it depends on the federal government for 62% of its funding, receiving more than $1 billion per year, and warnings of deep budget cuts have grown ever louder. Finally, on Sept. 8, Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch, the first African American person to lead the institution, announced he was stepping down at age 73, saying “it has been stressful.”

Seen from one vantage, the battle over the Smithsonian is but another example of Trump attempting with characteristic bombast to put his stamp on Washington institutions, alongside shuttering the Kennedy Center, replacing the East Wing of the White House with a huge ballroom and planning a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery.

But unlike some conflicts initiated by Trump, this one has been festering for years, independent of him, with complaints lodged by board members before he returned to office. The American history museum, the main focus of the administration’s ire, has wrestled for years with how, or even whether, it should present a unifying national narrative, an ambivalence that left it susceptible to the administration’s broadside. Meanwhile, the Smithsonian underwent a political awakening during the 2020 upheaval over the COVID-19 pandemic and murder of George Floyd that echoed responses in academia and other progressive realms.

This left it exposed to a new administration that viewed itself as a corrective against perceived woke excesses. “I said over and over again that there’s going to be a day of reckoning,” recalled Garret Graves, a Republican former congressman from Louisiana who served on the Smithsonian board in 2023 and 2024, in an interview. “You can either participate in it, help guide the Smithsonian back to something that makes more sense, or you can have an abrupt shift. I didn’t realize my words would ring as true as quickly as they did.”

Now, in the year that was supposed to be a crowning celebration of the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Smithsonian is instead in Trump’s crosshairs. And the question of how the country’s premier history museum should tell the nation’s story is suddenly up for grabs.

The National Museum of History and Technology opened on the National Mall in 1964. Its mission, said former assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Remington Kellogg that year, was to “awaken” a “clear understanding of the inspiring story of the United States — its origins, struggles, development, traditions, strength.” As the name reflected, the museum contained duelling missions from the start, showcasing American technological advances and telling a more general historical story.

In 1980, it was renamed the National Museum of American History, but the tension lingered. “It started out as a technology museum, and even now it has a lot of equipment, and to move from that to American history, that’s a huge change,” said Ivan Selin, a former chair of the museum’s board. “Unless you’re going to throw everything out and start over again, you’re going to have a very incoherent thing. Unless you have a clear strategy, you’re going to have some apples and oranges.”

Two decades after the name change, the lack of a unified approach had become an issue. In 1999, David Brooks wrote a scathing critique in the Weekly Standard, lamenting that the museum had so little on display about the nation’s defining moments (the Constitutional Convention, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Great Depression, etc.) and prominent figures who shaped them (Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., etc.). “It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history,” he wrote. “This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender.”

In 2001, in response to such critiques, the Smithsonian convened a blue-ribbon commission of historians and others led by Richard Darman, a former top aide in Republican White Houses. In 2002, the commission released its report, declaring that the museum “requires what its own leadership has described as a ‘transformation.’ It lacks aesthetic appeal, organizational coherence, and the perception of substantive balance.” The report recommended, among other things, a chronological introductory exhibit that contains “central theme lines for the examination and interpretation of American history” and that “should celebrate America’s remarkable strengths and achievements while also treating fairly and responsibly the ways in which America may have failed to meet the high standards it has proclaimed for itself.”

This would prove easier said than done. For one thing, the museum’s physical structure itself has never been coherent — “an awkward attempt to marry the classical and the modern, the building is legitimately neither,” wrote New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable at its opening. “It’s a challenging space,” Brent Glass, who became director shortly after the blue-ribbon report in 2002, told ProPublica.

Above all, though, the commission’s recommendations faced resistance among the museum’s curators to the sort of great-man-of-history approach that Brooks and others were hankering for. There had been a trend in museum science away from this, and away from straight chronology. “There was this whole museum movement to get away from a march through time, to a more episodic or specific sort of story,” John Gray, who succeeded Glass in 2012, told ProPublica. “It wasn’t done to get away from the story; it was finding a way to get people interested.”

In addition, the museum’s curators tended to be specialized in material culture — collecting and studying the museum’s several million objects and artifacts — rather than in conceptual storytelling. To make up for this, Gray’s team tried to enlist several leading academic historians to instill more of an overarching narrative structure. But they declined, saying they were concerned that such an approach could seem triumphalist and provide fodder for an America-first agenda. “We tried to organize [the museum] around ideas and ideals, ideals that were aspirational,” Gray said. “And we failed many times.”

The museum’s eventual solution was to divide the national story into subject areas, each represented by a standing exhibit: “American Enterprise” on business and innovation, “American Democracy” on politics,” “Many Voices, One Nation” on immigration, “The American Presidency,” “The Price of Freedom” on the nation’s wars, “Entertainment Nation” on culture, “America on the Move” on transportation.

Developing these required extensive debate, said the former directors. Some donors supporting the enterprise exhibit were upset that it devoted so much space to the role of slavery in American business. In crafting “The Price of Freedom,” the museum consulted with veterans’ groups to try to avoid a backlash like the one that arose on the Enola Gay. This effort succeeded, Glass said, despite the exhibit’s candor about the darker elements of the nation’s military history. “People can handle complexity,” he said. “They don’t feel bad about the country when told the whole story, and they’re grateful that they have access to the information.”

Scattered throughout the museum are countless highlights: the desk on which Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence; the top hat Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre on the last night of his life; the actual lunch counter from the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, Civil Rights sit-in; and, in a recent addition, a gunboat sunk during the Revolutionary War that is being restored on-site. But the overall effect can be disjointed and disorienting. And, with the museum’s dim lighting, dated technology and underutilized areas, it can feel at times as if one is wandering in a past-its-prime shopping mall or in the forgotten corner of an airport terminal.

It’s a stark contrast to the National Museum of African American History & Culture, which opened in 2016 under the direction of Bunch and, notably, has a clear chronological design. Of course, said Selin, the former American history museum board chair, the African American museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004, have the advantage of a more focused subject, leaving it even less clear what remains for the American history museum, where attendance has declined in recent years. “You can find nowhere in any Smithsonian document a theory of what should be in the American history museum or the more particular museums or how many of these particular museums there should be,” Selin said. “There’s no charter whatsoever that says how they fit together.”

In March 2020, the Smithsonian shuttered its museums for the pandemic. A few months after that, Washington and other cities erupted in protests over Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Bunch, who became secretary of the Smithsonian in 2019, and other top officials embarked on a push to rethink the institution’s priorities, as reflected in the minutes of the Board of Regents meetings, which were now being held online. Bunch “briefed the Regents on his efforts to navigate the dual pandemics caused by the Coronavirus and issues surrounding race, racism, and racial identity,” the minutes of the June 2020 meeting stated. He announced the launch of “Smithsonian Cares,” a digital resource that would “provide tools and guidance to empower and inspire conversations about diversity, equity, access and inclusion.”

That October, the board discussed “the potential creation of a Chief Diversity Officer position, a review of organizational processes and policies that may have inadvertently created barriers to inclusivity, integrating and standardizing DEAI training across the organization, strengthening supervisory DEAI skillsets, increasing senior leadership’s focus on inclusivity, and identifying funding and resourcing strategies to implement DEAI efforts across the Institution’s functions and operations.” In February 2021, Bunch told the board that the Smithsonian’s five strategic priorities would include positioning it as a “trusted source for critical conversations and helping the nation grapple with important issues like race and identity.”

As the meeting minutes show, the institution’s elevation of identity was being encouraged by the newly installed Biden administration. In October 2021, the Smithsonian’s Office of Government Relations reported that the Smithsonian had “brought objects from the National Museum of American History to the White House for a temporary display recognizing Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Pride Month.” Three months later, the office stated that it “continues to work closely” with the White House on “diversity, accessibility, access and inclusion efforts.” The Smithsonian noted plans for exhibits at the White House to mark “Black History Month in February, Women’s History Month in March, Asian-American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in May, LGBTQ in June and Hispanic History Heritage Month in September.”

The post-2020 shift extended to the various museums, which started to reopen to visitors in spring 2021. To cite just one example, the National Portrait Gallery revised the signage for a portrait of Henry Laurens, South Carolina’s delegate to the Continental Congress, to reflect that he had made his wealth through chattel slavery. “When Floyd was killed, everyone acknowledged that now is the time to ask: What are the stories that we’re telling and were we being honest and fair in recounting those stories? We all looked at it through this lens,” Kim Sajet, who became the director of the Portrait Gallery in 2013, told ProPublica. “Everyone felt energized by that. We can’t change the past, but we need to acknowledge what happened in order not to repeat it in the future.”

But the new direction caused misgivings for some conservative supporters of the institution, such as Graves, who joined the regents as one of the three Republican congressional appointees in 2023. Graves told ProPublica that he had high regard for Bunch — “his accomplishment with the African American museum was remarkable” — but that he became worried that the Smithsonian was operating within a bubble. Its staff were living in a metro area that had voted overwhelmingly against Trump (and museum employees are generally among the most left-leaning of any profession), yet they were charged with presenting exhibits to visitors from all over the country and the world, a disconnect that the institution seemed insufficiently aware of.

Many board meetings would kick off with tours of a certain museum, and Graves and a fellow Republican appointee, Adrian Smith of Nebraska, would often be taken aback by what they saw. “Seventy-five percent of the time Adrian and I would be walking around and say, ‘Are you kidding me?’” Graves said. “It wasn’t interpreting science or history. It seemed to have an agenda, and that’s not what a museum should be.” What was missing, he said, was a sense of the nation’s achievements. “This country is a remarkable experiment,” he said. “We’ve had some grave sins, but my gosh, America is a net victory for the world. It’s unbelievable what happened here in 250 years and it’s worth celebrating.”

Graves retired from Congress at the end of 2024. In his farewell address to the regents that October, he warned against allowing the Smithsonian to become seen as affiliated with one party or ideological bent. “I felt like they were causing sustainability problems for the institution,” he said. “Politicizing the Smithsonian is an awful, awful idea, because then you only receive funds when there’s a Democratic majority. This is America’s museum and there should not be anything partisan about it.”

One week later, Trump won the election to return to the White House.

In his first term, Trump largely ignored the Smithsonian. In 2017, Bunch gave him a tour of the new African American museum, which Bunch recounted later in his memoir: “The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade. As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”

It took little time for Trump to make clear that, as on other fronts in his second term, things would be different this time around. First came the March 2025 executive order, which directed Vice President J.D. Vance to rid the Smithsonian of “improper ideology.” Two months later, Trump said that he was firing Sajet at the Portrait Gallery, calling her “a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position.” The Smithsonian noted that Trump did not have the authority to remove Sajet, but she left anyway, hoping to spare the institution.

In August 2025, the White House issued a 120-day ultimatum to replace “divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate and constructive descriptions,” but with little follow-up, and for nearly a year, it looked as if the storm may in fact have passed. Then came the White House report on the American history museum, with such an exhaustive litany against Hartig, its director since 2018, and Bunch that it made plain the authors had been scouring their public statements and the museum. (Through a spokesperson, Bunch declined to be interviewed. Museum representatives did not respond to requests to speak to Hartig.)

In addition to citing the Franklin exhibit, the report noted that an exhibit called “Girlhood (It’s Complicated)” had included “the pages of a 6-year-old girl’s diary where she expresses fear about ‘getting boobs’ and wishes for her nonexistent ‘penis to grow.’” Another exhibit, on gay history, had “included a two-piece chrome and rubber crotch harness designed for sadomasochism.”

It criticized the museum for having trained staff using the “Museums as a Site for Social Action Toolkit,” a 200-plus-page roadmap on how to “truly transform the museum space,” which is linked “with white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, abuse of labor, colonization, imperialist theft of art and artifacts, destruction or absencing of alternative ways of interpreting or representing art and artifacts, structural racism and other oppressions.”

Above all, though, the report criticized the museum on grounds that echoed Brooks and the 2002 blue-ribbon commission, saying that it failed to offer visitors a unified narrative of the nation’s history. “That story should be a basic consensus view that is not ideological or politicized, but presents the facts of history — what actually happened — as accurately as possible with minimal present-day bias,” the report stated. “It should tell the whole story of a nation, including the good and the bad, so Museum visitors can understand the development that led our nation to where it is today.”

For years, the Smithsonian had avoided major conflagrations partly by engaging in what one former official called the “care and feeding” of members of Congress on the two committees with purview over it, Appropriations and House Administration. If there was a potentially controversial exhibit, the museum would bring members over for a preview tour, so they had some context for complaints they might receive. But these efforts were on hold for a while because of the pandemic closures, and the Smithsonian’s government relations office experienced heavy turnover, as one of its directors had cancer and another died suddenly.

This context, combined with the fuel provided by the White House report, helped explain the level of vitriol that Hartig faced when she appeared at the two hearings in late July. Even by the standards of today’s decorum-less Congress, the hearings were wild affairs. At the first, held by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency, Chair Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, kicked things off by playing a lengthy string of video clips of Hartig offering tribal land acknowledgements at the start of her speeches. “I’m wondering, have you ever planned on deeding any of your personal property or property of the Smithsonian to any of these tribes?” he asked Hartig.

She adopted a conciliatory tone, saying the Smithsonian “takes the concerns raised in the White House Domestic Policy Council’s report seriously” but that “it does not fairly or accurately characterize the full body of work at the museum.” She assured the committee, “I love the United States of America. I consider it the privilege of my career to help preserve its treasures and serve the American people.”

This did not assuage committee Republicans. Burchett displayed museum images including the crotch harness and the diary mention of the 6-year-old girl wishing for a penis. “Ma’am, I mean, you have pictures of bondage. You have some overtly sexual things up there,” he said. “I’m not a fan.” Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican, pressed the point: “Are images of sexual fetishes appropriate for children? Yes or no?” Rep. Brandon Gill, a Texas Republican, noted that the toolkit that the museum used for staff training had referred to “politeness” as a feature of “white supremacy culture.”

Those defending Hartig were hardly less outspoken. David Blight, a Yale historian also testifying, compared the White House’s attacks on the Smithsonian to the German Third Reich, saying “their model may indeed be Joseph Goebbels’ committee on enlightenment, which is what the Nazis called their committee that tried to control museums.” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat, opened her remarks by saying, “Welcome to the White Pride Committee.” Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Maryland Democrat, vowed to sacrifice his life for the Smithsonian. “We will not let you destroy that museum,” he said. “No matter how long it takes, how many battles are required, how much effort is needed, we will not allow that to happen unless you find a way to kill all of us and walk over our bodies to change history.”

The next day’s hearing, before the House Administration Committee, was more of the same. The bipartisan consensus around the Smithsonian appeared to lie in tatters.

On a recent Sunday, a group of visitors made their way into the centerpiece exhibit at the National Mall entry to the history museum, the giant Star-Spangled Banner that was flying over Fort McHenry in 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write what became the national anthem. For safe-keeping, the flag is displayed in very low light, giving the chamber a sacred feel, like a cathedral crypt. “Oh my god, it’s huge,” said one woman. “I am shivering,” said another. “It’s insane,” said a third.

Every day, the museum, for all its imperfections, still makes a strong impression on many visitors. But its longstanding search for identity helped make it a target for an administration looking for weak spots, and now its future and that of the entire Smithsonian hangs in the balance. Three of the nine citizen slots on the Board of Regents are vacant, and three more will be next month. Whoever the remaining members of the board — which include Vance — select to fill those slots will help determine who is chosen to replace Bunch as secretary, and the institution’s future course. Much will depend on how much Chief Justice John Roberts, at the head of the board, decides to engage.

Any large institution can benefit from reassessment, and the Smithsonian and the American history museum in particular may well be overdue, especially as yet another focus area is about to be cleaved off, for the National Museum of the American Latino, scheduled to open early next decade. What gives so many supporters pause is for that reevaluation to happen under Trump, who hasn’t shown a lot of interest in how the various museums interact, much less in the nuances and subtleties of history.

“There will be a moment,” Sajet said, “when the American people will have to stand up and decide, is this what they want?”

A federal historic preservation council led by President Donald Trump's appointees abruptly called off a review with local governments of a planned 250-foot arch in Washington, D.C.

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation said it would stop consulting with officials in the nation's capital and Virginia about how the arch could affect nearby historic sites, including Arlington National Cemetery, Robert E. Lee's former home and memorials on the National Mall, reported Politico.

The decision came after historic preservation officials in both jurisdictions refused to approve a National Park Service plan to reduce the arch's harm to historic properties. In letters sent Monday, they called the Park Service's push to finalize the plan "premature" and urged the agency to wait until the project's effects are better understood.

Preservation experts said ending consultation is rare, and it is especially unusual for the advisory council itself to step in and cut off talks, rather than the agency planning the project.

"This is the government saying, 'It's our way or the highway,'" said Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. "'We know best, and we're going to build what we want.'"

The council is an independent agency that advises presidents and Congress on historic preservation law and sometimes settles disputes over federal projects. Trump removed six members appointed by Democratic presidents before their terms ended and replaced them with his own picks.

Roger Kirchen, director of Virginia's Department of Historic Resources, said the agency was "still assessing the situation and will be engaging the ACHP on next steps." The D.C. State Historic Preservation Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The council has given the public until midnight Sept. 29 to comment on the arch, less than a week away. It will send its own comments to the Interior Department by Oct. 7. Once Interior responds, the review will be considered finished.

The arch would stand about two and a half times as tall as the nearby Lincoln Memorial. The Park Service's own assessment found that dozens of historic properties would be harmed by blocked views and altered sight lines.

The project still needs approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, which is led by Trump appointees who back the arch.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation said the mitigation plan will need to be redone entirely now that Trump has announced the arch will double as a military complex with ammunition storage and snipers.

A veterans group and others have sued to stop the project. A federal judge has ordered Interior to give 14 days' notice before any construction begins.

President Donald Trump's decision to bar CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House is hurting some of his most loyal media allies.

The major TV networks responded to the ban by suspending pool coverage of the president, putting smaller pro-Trump streaming outlets, such as Right Side Broadcasting Network and Lindell TV in a bind because their programming depends largely on carrying Trump's rallies and events live and unedited, reported Zeteo.

"For everything the second Trump administration has done to juice the conservative content creation machine, it can't work well if there's no video," political journalist Jake Lahut wrote.

CNN is one of the five networks in the White House television pool, along with ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. On Monday, Fox Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, the pool's rotating chair, told members there would be no network TV coverage of the president for the foreseeable future.

The five networks also issued a joint statement saying "no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting."

Conservative outlets were left airing the White House's own livestream of Trump unveiling his new helipad, but the audio was inaudible, and even a Newsmax anchor admitted this week that the ban was "backfiring just a little bit."

The White House has launched its own 24/7 video feed, which critics have compared to state-run media, but it had just 609 viewers when Tuesday night.

The cost of covering the president is also a factor. The New York Times' Michael Grynbaum explained on "The Daily" podcast that the pool networks split the expense of staffing the president with camera crews, audio producers and correspondents.

"If CNN suddenly was not participating in a five-network pool, that's a 20 percent spike in the financial outlay that these other networks would have to pay," Grynbaum said.

Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, a Trump confidant, said the network would not step in as a replacement pool. He also said Trump had "overreacted" and urged him to reconsider. CNN reported that other broadcasters have also turned down the White House's request to handle pool duties.

The banned networks have been allowed back into the White House – at least for now – after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily reinstate their press badges.

CNN's Betsy Klein and a photojournalist were allowed into the premises Thursday at noon after multiple attempts to enter the White House that morning, and a reporter for MS Now was also granted access, according to the network.

Onlookers bristled after former White House adviser Ivanka Trump got a better seat than Secretary of State Marco Rubio at President Donald Trump's welcome ceremony for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Ivanka Trump and her teenage daughter, Arabella Kushner, sat between Second Lady Usha Vance and Rubio at Thursday's ceremony, Wall Street Journal White House reporter Meridith McGraw wrote on X.

The White House said the event was a state arrival ceremony honoring Xi for his first visit there in more than a decade.

The same row included Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, according to video that journalist Aaron Rupar posted on X.

"[W]hy is alleged private citizen Ivanka Trump sitting by JD Vance, Rubio, and Bessent?" Rupar asked.

"Who did the seating arrangement for the Pres and Xi? Ivanka is seated better than Cabinet Secretaries Rubio and Bessent .. this is a State visit," Newsmax host Greta Van Susteren wrote on X.

Ivanka Trump and her daughter had "better seats than the Secretary of State," Vanity Fair correspondent Aidan McLaughlin wrote on X.

"WTF are Ivanka and Trump's granddaughter doing there? I swear that family is so weird. Any normal person would be mortified that you included them alongside the cabinet," AMERICAblog founder John Aravosis responded on X.

McGraw reported that the teenager has "been taking Chinese lessons for years."

Donald Trump showed Xi a video of his granddaughter singing in Mandarin and reciting classical Chinese poetry during a 2017 visit to Beijing, state-run China Daily noted.

In April 2017, China gave Ivanka Trump's brand provisional approval for three trademarks on the same day she dined with Xi at Mar-a-Lago, Quartz reported, citing The Associated Press.

The trademarks gave her brand "monopoly rights to sell Ivanka brand jewelry, bags and spa services in the world's second-largest economy," the AP reported at the time.

Donald Trump and Xi are holding talks Thursday ahead of a state dinner, CBS News reported.