Pinned
Jeffrey GettlemanMaya Tekeli and Maggie Haberman
JD Vance will lead a high-powered U.S. visit to Greenland.
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The Trump administration seems like it just doubled down on Greenland.
Vice President JD Vance announced on Tuesday that he was headed to the island later this week, taking over a controversial visit that officials in Greenland have made very clear they don’t want at all.
Originally, the Trump administration said that Usha Vance, the second lady, and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, would make the trip to Greenland, a semiautonomous territory of Denmark that President Trump wants for the United States.
Officials from Denmark and Greenland immediately branded the move “aggressive” and part of the president’s plan to get the island, as he recently put it, “one way or the other.”
The White House then issued a statement on Tuesday afternoon changing up the visit. The new itinerary is for Mr. and Ms. Vance to visit Pituffik Space Base, an American military installation high above the Arctic Circle, “to receive a briefing on Arctic security issues and meet with U.S. service members.”
In a post on X, Mr. Vance said he would “just check out what’s going on with the security there of Greenland.”
Anti-Trump sentiment has been rising steadily on the island, and activists were already preparing to protest the arrival of the American delegation, starting at the international airport in the capital, Nuuk. But now it seems that the Vances might not even set foot in Nuuk.
The United States has a longstanding defense agreement with Denmark to station troops in Greenland, and American officials can visit the base at will. Foreign-policy analysts said on Tuesday night that they expected the Vances to travel directly to the space base, which is nearly 1,000 miles north of Nuuk, and avoid the cauldron that is brewing in the capital.
Greenland officials have emphasized that they never invited the Americans in the first place but they have little control over who visits the American base.
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Initially, the plan was for Ms. Vance and one of her sons to watch a dog sled race, a cherished Greenland tradition, in Sisimiut, one of Greenland’s bigger towns. But the organizers of the race made a pointed statement on Sunday that while the race was open to the public, they had not asked the Vances to attend.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Vance denied that, saying she had received “multiple invitations for her attendance to the Greenland national dog sled race.” Still, the White House announced on Tuesday that she would no longer be going to the race.
U.S. administration officials had originally planned for Mr. Waltz to visit the space base, which is an important piece of the United States’ missile defense. But with Mr. Waltz now embroiled in a controversy over his use of a mobile messaging application to discuss sensitive war plans, his participation seems up in the air.
As the news broke on Tuesday night that Mr. Vance would be arriving, Greenland’s government wasn’t pleased. Politicians there are embroiled in delicate talks over who will form the island’s next administration. Earlier this month, the island held parliamentary elections, but the outcome was mixed, with no party winning a clear majority.
“We’ve asked for peace and quiet and no international visits while negotiations are ongoing, and that should be respected,” said Pipaluk Lynge-Rasmussen, a leading member of the departing ruling party.
Some political analysts in Denmark said that the decision to send Mr. Vance was an “escalation.”
“They choose to double down on it — massively escalate, in fact — this provocative show of force by sending JD Vance,” said Lars Trier Mogensen, a political commentator in Copenhagen. “That is many times more significant than either Mike Waltz or Usha Vance.”
“In Denmark, people are starting to see this as a kind of hybrid warfare,” he added, pointing to comparisons with Crimea, the region annexed by Russia in 2014, where lines between diplomacy and provocation were deliberately blurred.
But others saw the decision to visit the American base and ditch the dog sled race as perhaps less provocative.
“If the visit to Nuuk has been canceled, the Trump administration may be stepping back by avoiding imposing itself on civilian Greenland,” said Ulrik Pram Gad, a researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “Focusing solely on the military base brings the conversation back to security.”
Minho Kim
Reporting from Washington
A federal judge has blocked Trump’s push to shut down Radio Free Europe.
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A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked President Trump’s push to close down Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a federally funded news organization that was born out of the American efforts to counter Soviet propaganda during the Cold War.
The judge, Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued a temporary restraining order, saying that the Trump administration cannot unilaterally shut down RFE/RL, even if the president has ordered the closure.
Judge Lamberth said the administration cannot overrule Congress, which gave the news outlet a statutory mandate to promote the freedom of opinion and expression, with “one sentence of reasoning offering virtually no explanation.”
Judge Lamberth was referring to a March 15 letter to RFE/RL from the Trump administration that said the broadcaster was no longer needed as the government’s priorities had shifted. The letter did not elaborate, other than citing Mr. Trump’s directives to shut down federal agencies.
The temporary restraining order will allow RFE/RL to stay open at least until March 28. After that, Judge Lamberth would decide whether to issue a preliminary injunction that would allow the news outlet to continue operating until the court reaches a final verdict.
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were founded in the 1950s as a U.S. intelligence operation covertly funded through the Central Intelligence Agency. The broadcaster sought to foment anti-communist dissent behind the Iron Curtain.
Since the early 1970s, it has been funded by Congress and has had editorial independence. Today RFE/RL reports in nearly 30 different languages, reaching 47 million people every week in 23 countries, including Afghanistan, Russia and Hungary.
“The court concludes, in keeping with Congress’s longstanding determination, that the continued operation of RFE/RL is in the public interest,” Judge Lamberth wrote.
Judge Lamberth was appointed by President Ronald Reagan.
His ruling partly blocks the Trump administration’s push to shut down the news organization’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversaw five federally funded news networks including Voice of America.
The letter to RFE/RL was sent a day after Mr. Trump signed an executive order dismantling the media agency, as an effort to terminate nearly $7.5 million in grants. The news organization is a private nonprofit that receives most of its funding from the federal government.
“The award no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the letter said.
Judge Lamberth wrote on Tuesday that the letter did not provide sufficient explanation for why the congressionally-established news outlet needed to be shut down in such a unilateral fashion.
The officials at the Trump administration “have acted arbitrarily and capriciously,” he wrote. “The ‘explanation’ offered by U.S.A.G.M. can scarcely be characterized as an explanation.”
The letter was signed by Kari Lake, a special adviser at the agency who appears to be leading the push to gut it. Ms. Lake, who was hired in February, is a former Senate candidate and local news anchor who peddled false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
Ms. Lake was initially named in December to be the next director of Voice of America by Mr. Trump. She was hired as the media agency’s special adviser instead, as legal experts questioned whether Mr. Trump would be able to fire Voice of America’s current director.
Her appointment stoked fears that the Trump administration would meddle in the editorial decisions of federally funded news organizations. The global media agency has also opened investigations into its journalists for reporting on criticisms of Mr. Trump or making comments that were perceived as critical of him.
During his first term, Mr. Trump attacked the media outlets under the global media agency over their editorial decisions, and his appointees were accused of trying to weaken journalistic safeguards.
In 2020, Mr. Trump appointed Michael Pack, an ally of his former aide Stephen K. Bannon, to run the media agency.
Mr. Pack was accused of trying to turn Voice of America into a mouthpiece for the Trump administration, and a federal judge ruled that Mr. Pack had violated the First Amendment rights of the outlet’s journalists. A federal investigation later found that Mr. Pack had grossly mismanaged the media agency, repeatedly abusing his power by sidelining executives he felt did not sufficiently support Mr. Trump.
On Monday, Mr. Trump withdrew the nomination of L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative media critic and fierce defender of Israel, to lead the media agency. He instead named Mr. Bozell as the next U.S. ambassador to South Africa.
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Erica L. Green
Reporting from Washington
President Trump said during an interview on Newsmax that he would look into the case of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed during the Jan. 6 riots. She was among the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election that he lost.
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Erica L. Green
Reporting from Washington
The interviewer said the Justice Department was still defending the government against the wrongful death lawsuit Babbitt’s family filed, and asked Trump if it should be settled. Trump said he was “going to take a look at it,” along with the fact that the Capitol Police officer who shot her is still a federal employee.
Erica L. Green
Reporting from Washington
Trump, asked whether he believed that Russia was “dragging its feet” in getting to a ceasefire with Ukraine, gave two different answers, saying he believed that Russia wanted to see the war end, but could also be stalling. He added that he had done it over the years, when he didn’t want to sign a contract but wanted to “stay in the game.”
Erica L. Green
Reporting from Washington
During an interview with Newsmax tonight, Trump was asked whether the Signal leak raised any concerns that members of his staff were talking to the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg. Trump largely deflected by continuing his attacks on Goldberg, calling him “bad news.” He also repeated the claim that the leak was a result of actions of a staffer, which Waltz contradicted during his own interview with Fox tonight, when he took “full responsibility.”
Chris Cameron
The White House notified Congress earlier today that it was withdrawing the nomination of L. Brent Bozell III to lead the United States’ global media agency, and that he has instead been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to South Africa. Bozell, a former anti-Trump Republican who is now a firm supporter of the president, would be stepping into the diplomatic post as the relationship between South Africa and the United States is at its worst in recent memory.
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Minho Kim
A federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s push to close down Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a federally funded news organization that was born during the Cold War out of the American efforts to counter Soviet propaganda with factual reporting. The judge, Royce C. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, ruled that the Trump administration couldn’t force the news media to shut down “even if the president has ordered them to do so,” as Congress established the organization through a law it passed, the International Broadcasting Act of 1973.
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Minho Kim
The judge’s ruling partly blocks the Trump administration’s push to shut down the news organization’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversaw four other federally funded news networks including Voice of America. Last month, President Trump named Kari Lake, an unsuccessful Senate candidate and a former local news anchor who peddled false claims that the 2020 election was rigged, to serve as a special adviser at the agency, stoking fears that she would meddle in editorial decisions of its news organizations. Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order dismantling the media agency in its entirety, prompting a lawsuit from Radio Free Europe employees.
An earlier version of this post misstated the number of federally funded news outlets overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media in addition to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. It has been corrected above.
Erica L. Green
Reporting from Washington
Trump signed an order calling for proof of citizenship when voting.
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President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday that will require proof of U.S. citizenship on election forms, in an aggressive push to catch and combat voter fraud, which is exceedingly rare but constantly cited by Mr. Trump as a reason he lost the 2020 election.
The order calls for the Election Assistance Commission to require people to show government-issued proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, and directs state or local officials to record and verify the information. It also seeks to require states to count ballots by Election Day.
Administration officials, who cast the order as one of the most far-reaching in American history related to elections, cited cracking down on immigrants illegally on voter rolls as one of the order’s main goals, amplifying Mr. Trump’s longstanding grievances about election integrity. He has falsely claimed that illegal votes contributed to his losing the 2020 election and the popular vote in 2016.
Like many of Mr. Trump’s orders, this one is likely to face legal challenges for executive overreach.
Rick Hasen, a political science professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, said that Mr. Trump had no authority to dictate how states ran their elections, such as requiring them to count their ballots by Election Day.
Mr. Hasen added that Mr. Trump’s exertion of power over the commission — which was created by legislation passed in Congress — would need to be tested in court, since what he is ordering them to do is “either contrary to law or at best disputed.”
“This executive order is important for what it tries to do on requiring voters to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, but it is even more important for what it means for Presidential power,” Mr. Hasen wrote in an email. “Trump is trying to assert power over an independent, bipartisan agency that Congress created to deal fairly and evenhandedly with assisting states in administering elections.”
The order claimed that current rules that prohibited states from allowing noncitizens to register to vote were not “adequately enforced,” and suggested that elections were also compromised by states that counted ballots received after Election Day.
This is standard practice in states that require that mail ballots are only postmarked by Election Day. But even in the weeks after his decisive victory in November, Mr. Trump continued to complain that ballots were still being counted.
The order threatens to withdraw federal funding in states that do not comply.
“Free, fair and honest elections unmarred by fraud, errors or suspicion are fundamental to maintaining our constitutional Republic,” the order stated. “The right of American citizens to have their votes properly counted and tabulated, without illegal dilution, is vital to determining the rightful winner of an election.”
At the signing, Mr. Trump — who still falsely claims he won the 2020 election — noted that some may not understand why he was complaining since he won “in a landslide” last year.
“There are other steps that we will be taking as the next in the coming weeks, and we think we’ll be able to end up getting fair elections,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday at the signing. “This country is so sick because of the election, the fake elections and the bad elections, and we’re going to straighten it out one way or the other.”
Erica L. Green
Reporting from Washington
Waltz’s admission contradicts what President Trump has said in his defense of Waltz. Trump claimed that “It was one of Michael’s people on the phone. A staffer had his number on there.” Waltz confirmed the account provided by Goldberg, saying during the interview “Look, a staffer wasn’t responsible. I take full responsibility.”
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Chris Cameron
Michael Waltz, President Trump’s national security adviser, said in an appearance on Fox News that “I take full responsibility” for the sharing of military plans on the messaging app Signal, adding that he had “built the group” and added the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg to it.
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Chris Cameron
Waltz suggested in his remarks that Goldberg’s number was saved under another person’s contact information in his phone, and that was how Goldberg was mistakenly added to the group chat saying that “I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number.”
Luke Broadwater and Kenneth P. Vogel
Luke Broadwater reported from New York, and Kenneth P. Vogel from Washington.
Trump pardons a former business partner of Hunter Biden who testified about the Bidens.
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President Trump signed a full and unconditional pardon on Tuesday for Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter Biden whose congressional testimony two years ago helped fuel House Republicans’ investigation into the Biden family.
Mr. Archer had been convicted in a fraud case, and was sentenced in 2022 to a year and a day in prison.
The pardon erases the conviction and also tens of millions of dollars in forfeitures and restitution that Mr. Archer had been ordered to pay. Mr. Archer was pardoned before he served any of his prison sentence.
Mr. Archer earned fans on the right — including in Mr. Trump’s circle — after he testified in a congressional investigation in 2023 into Hunter Biden’s business dealings. He accused the Bidens of abusing “soft power” through business deals in which then-President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son Hunter made millions of dollars. Supporters of Mr. Archer had argued that he was treated more harshly by prosecutors after he started cooperating with investigations into the Bidens.
Before signing the pardon, Mr. Trump on Tuesday said that Mr. Archer “was treated very unfairly” and “was a victim of a crime, as far as I’m concerned, so we’re going to undo that.”
The pardon is the latest example of Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of his clemency power to reward allies or highlight his own grievances about what he sees as the political weaponization of the justice system.
Mr. Archer, who had a background in international finance and Democratic fund-raising, partnered with Hunter Biden in 2009, helping arrange introductions to foreign business interests. In 2014, they joined the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company that some in the State Department viewed as corrupt, at a time when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was serving as vice president and overseeing the administration’s Ukraine portfolio. The overlap would become a focus for Republicans.
Mr. Archer left the board and started severing his business connections with Hunter Biden after being charged in 2016 in connection with a scheme to defraud pension funds and an Indian tribe of tens of millions of dollars. He was initially convicted in 2018, but later that year a judge set aside the conviction and ordered a new trial, only to be reversed in 2020 by a federal appeals court ruling that reinstated the fraud conviction.
Matthew L. Schwartz, Mr. Archer’s lawyer, portrayed the presidential pardon as fixing a flawed decision by a jury.
“The American jury system is an amazing thing, but as the trial judge held in finding serious questions about Devon Archer’s innocence, sometimes juries get it wrong,” Mr. Schwartz said in a statement. “Today’s pardon corrects a serious injustice, and finally allows an innocent man to be free of the threat of misguided prosecution. Mr. Archer is deeply appreciative of the President.”
Mr. Archer’s congressional testimony was not a clean win for either Republicans or Democrats.
While he provided an unflattering portrayal of how Hunter Biden conducted business, Mr. Archer told congressional investigators he saw no wrongdoing by the elder Mr. Biden. The G.O.P.’s congressional investigation ultimately did not result in an impeachment case against the former president.
“Are you aware of any wrongdoing by Vice President Biden?” Mr. Archer’s lawyer asked him at one point during the closed-door testimony.
“No, I’m not aware of any,” Mr. Archer replied.
But Mr. Archer also said he believed Burisma stayed in business during tough times through its associations with influential figures in Washington, and the “brand” that Hunter Biden brought to the board.
Asked what he meant, Mr. Archer said, “Because people would be intimidated to mess with them.”
Mr. Archer testified that he could recall about 20 times when he and Hunter Biden were meeting with business associates, and Hunter Biden put his father on speakerphone. The conversations, Mr. Archer said, discussed only niceties — “How’s the weather? How’s the fishing?” — but the signal from Hunter Biden was clear, he said.
“There was not business content in these conversations,” Mr. Archer told the Trump-allied pundit Tucker Carlson in an interview after his testimony. “The idea of signals and influence — the prize is enough in speaking or hearing or knowing you have that proximity to power.”
At one point, Mr. Archer told Mr. Carlson, “In the rearview, it’s an abuse of soft power.”
Mr. Archer also said he believed it was false for defenders of the former president to say that he had no knowledge of his son’s business activities. “He was aware of Hunter’s business,” said Mr. Archer, who played golf with both Bidens. “He met with Hunter’s business partners.”
In addition to the congressional testimony, Mr. Archer in 2021 was interviewed by prosecutors and subpoenaed for documents as part of an investigation into Hunter Biden’s finances and foreign business.
Last year, Hunter Biden was convicted of gun crimes, and pleaded guilty to tax crimes related to millions of dollars in income from Burisma and other foreign businesses.
With less than two months left before he left office, President Biden issued a broad pardon for Hunter Biden for those convictions, and any other crimes he might have committed in the past 11 years, a period coinciding with the beginning of his work for Burisma.
The pardon, which troubled clemency experts, was cited by Mr. Archer’s supporters as additional justification for granting clemency to him.
A lawyer for Hunter Biden declined to comment.
Benjamin Mueller
The Senate confirms Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Dr. Martin A. Makary as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health, installing two critics of the medical establishment to influential posts amid a Trump administration campaign to cut spending at health agencies.
In a 56-to-44 vote, Dr. Makary was confirmed to lead an agency with broad regulatory authority over products including drugs and vaccines, putting him at the center of debates about the safety of the abortion pill and a wide range of inoculations.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation — 53 to 47, on a party-line vote — places him at the head of the world’s premier medical research agency, which lately has been battered by cuts to staffing and orders to pause or cancel vast research funding.
Dr. Makary, a pancreatic cancer surgeon and health policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, drew attention from the Trump team as a Fox News personality and commentator on Covid who in 2021 incorrectly predicted that the nation was “racing toward an extremely low level of infection.”
At a confirmation hearing this month, Dr. Makary signaled that he shared Republican concerns about expanded access to the abortion pill, which the Biden administration made available for people to obtain without an in-person medical appointment.
He also expressed support for vaccines, even as he suggested that the F.D.A. needed to review the role of vaccine experts whom the agency turns to for advice.
Lawmakers have warned that staff cuts and hiring freezes by the Trump administration could weaken F.D.A. efforts to ensure the safety of the food supply.
The N.I.H., which has a $48 billion budget and funds medical research on diseases like cancer and diabetes, has also been whipsawed by layoffs and Trump administration moves to block key parts of its grant-making process and scrap some grants outright.
Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist and professor of medicine at Stanford, largely dodged questions about those decisions at a confirmation hearing in early March.
He burst into the public spotlight in 2020, when he was among the authors of an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for protecting older and more vulnerable people from Covid while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.
He has also argued for reforms to scientific funding practices, including applying greater scrutiny to research findings that are not borne out by subsequent studies and directing money toward the most far-reaching and innovative research rather than incremental studies.
Questioned by lawmakers this month about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Bhattacharya said that he supported children’s inoculation against diseases like measles, but also that scientists should conduct more research on autism and vaccines, a position at odds with extensive evidence showing no link between the two.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, who has faced criticism for his reluctance to explicitly recommend vaccinations in the midst of a deadly measles outbreak in West Texas, oversees both the F.D.A. and the N.I.H.
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Devlin Barrett
Reporting from Washington
Trump’s old grudge gets directed at another law firm.
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President Trump initiated a fresh attack on lawyers on Tuesday, singling out a firm where a former prosecutor who investigated him once worked as the White House pursues vengeance against the profession he blames for his legal troubles.
An executive order from Mr. Trump focused on Jenner & Block, a prominent white-shoe firm that once employed Andrew Weissmann, a longtime deputy to Robert S. Mueller III, who as a special counsel investigated Mr. Trump in his first term over possible links to Russia.
The order underscored the extent to which the president, who faced four criminal indictments after he left office in 2021, now aims to exact a steep price from anyone associated with past investigations of him.
Days earlier, Mr. Trump significantly expanded his campaign of retaliation against lawyers he dislikes, issuing a far-reaching memorandum that threatened to use government power to punish any firms that, in his view, unfairly challenged his administration. Mr. Trump has declared his efforts will clean up a legal profession that has become tainted by politics and unethical behavior.
At the White House on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called Mr. Weissmann a “bad guy” and said he would also declassify additional documents from the Russia investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane, that began in 2016.
After serving in a senior role for the special counsel investigation, Mr. Weissmann spent many years as a television pundit, sharply criticizing Mr. Trump’s conduct. Mr. Weissmann, who left Jenner & Block in 2021, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The executive order signed Tuesday declares that many big law firms “take actions that threaten public safety and national security, limit constitutional freedoms, degrade the quality of American elections, or undermine bedrock American principles.”
The order also criticizes firms for doing pro bono work, or representing clients who are indigent or have limited financial resources to afford lawyers, charging that such work is often for what he called “destructive causes.”
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Jenner & Block, the president’s order decreed, “has abandoned the profession’s highest ideals” and therefore its employees should not have security clearances, federal government contracts, access to federal government buildings or be hired by the government.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the law firm described its storied history of paid and pro bono work and pointed out that a federal judge had temporarily blocked the administration from imposing penalties on at least one firm subject to Mr. Trump’s orders, Perkins Coie. “We remain focused on serving and safeguarding our clients’ interests with the dedication, integrity and expertise that has defined our firm for more than 100 years and will pursue all appropriate remedies,” the statement continued.
Mr. Trump’s accusations against the firm range from the personal to the political, claiming that Jenner & Block rehired Mr. Weissmann after he worked on the Mueller investigation, which Mr. Trump called “entirely unjustified.” The order also accuses Mr. Weissmann of misconduct.
Last week, one of the targeted firms, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, struck a deal with the administration to spare itself from a punitive order Mr. Trump had issued.
As part of that deal, the law firm agreed to provide $40 million worth of legal work in support of Mr. Trump’s efforts to fight antisemitism on college campuses, as well as other issues.
The president has embarked on his campaign against lawyers by denouncing what he calls “lawfare” or the “weaponization” of the legal system against him.
He and his allies have long claimed that Democrats asserted improper control over prosecutors’ offices to bring cases against him. Current and former law enforcement officials say those accusations are baseless, and that what the president and his senior aides are doing is stripping away the ability of institutions like the F.B.I. and Justice Department to pursue such cases again.
His ever-growing list of targets in the legal world has led to a heated debate among lawyers about how best to respond. Some have sharply criticized the president’s actions, and the decision by Paul, Weiss to cut a deal rather than fight in court, as Perkins Coie chose to do.
Vanita Gupta, who is a civil rights lawyer and a former Justice Department official, said Saturday that Mr. Trump is attacking “the very foundations of our legal system by threatening and intimidating litigants who aim to hold our government accountable to the law and the Constitution.”
The executive branch “should neither fear nor punish those who challenge it,” Ms. Gupta said, “and should not be the arbiter of what is frivolous — there are protections in place to address that. This moment calls for courage and collective action, not capitulation, among lawyers and the legal profession.”
Mr. Trump also signed an executive order declassifying some documents from the Russia investigation, while ordering that two separate categories of documents from that work remain classified.
Annie Karni
Democrats try an economic populist pitch with a new group, the New Economic Patriots.
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A number of frustrated House Democrats who said their party had a “weak and undefined brand” announced on Tuesday that they were seeking to form a new group to dig out of their crisis, informally referred to as the New Economic Patriots.
The group is the brainchild of Representative Chris Deluzio, a 40-year-old second-term congressman from a competitive district in Pennsylvania, who criticized members of his own party as wimps in a speech on the House floor on Tuesday and called for Democrats to channel a “fighting spirit of economic populism” that he argued could lead them out of the political wilderness.
“Too many in our party have lost their way and it’s time to wake the heck up,” Mr. Deluzio said, later declaring: “The era of a spineless Democratic Party must end.”
The answer, he said, was for the party to focus on appealing to working people on economic issues, but it was not immediately clear how his plan was different from what many in the party have already been advocating. Still, Mr. Deluzio’s effort is the latest sign that Democrats, relegated to the minority in Washington and desperate to find a more coherent message after their devastating 2024 losses, are still mired in a politically fraught debate about how to move forward.
Mr. Deluzio has highlighted his status as a young lawmaker who outperformed former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election in a critical district in a key battleground state as he makes the case for why he is the right person to help lead his party out of its funk.
In an interview, Mr. Deluzio said the “progressive” and “moderate” labels did not work anymore given that his entire tattered party needed to be restructured around an economic populist message that he said had been co-opted by the right.
“I am not interested in a wimpy Democratic Party,” Mr. Deluzio said. “The party for years has put too much stock in avoiding fights, avoiding naming big corporate villains.” It is time for Democrats to turn back to their working-class roots, he said.
The new group includes a disparate group of Democrats, including Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, a former chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, and Representative Pat Ryan, a moderate New York Democrat from a swing district. The group who spoke on the House floor notably did not yet include any Democrats who won Trump districts in 2024, or any members whom the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has identified as its “frontline” members who are considered the most vulnerable.
“What people are asking for is to transform the party in a more populist direction,” said Representative Greg Casar, Democrat of Texas and the chairman of the Progressive Caucus, who is also a member of the new group. “Populist means we are for working people across the spectrum, even if they disagree with us. The way we bring in conservatives is that we’re economic populists that are willing to be on their side.”
Mr. Casar, who made his debut appearance on Fox News over the weekend in an attempt to reach out to conservative-leaning voters, argued that Democrats could not be the party representing vulnerable people until they were seen as the party for all working people.
The New Economic Patriots have been meeting every other week to hash out a new platform, and some have been circulating among their colleagues a five-page memo trying to address what they see as a crisis in the party.
“A few of us believe that we have to focus on the economy,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who is a member. “We have to focus on issues that affect people’s pocketbooks, and the Democrats haven’t done this effectively for many years.”
Mr. Khanna added: “Our message in 2024 did not recognize how much anger there was with the status quo. We did not recognize that offshoring of jobs was taking place, we did not recognize the pain people were still feeling, and our message wasn’t transformational enough.”
Mr. Deluzio said Democrats had both a messaging and policy problem to fix.
“Voters don’t think Democrats put lowering costs first, and this group does,” he said. “It’s not just putting the economy first; it’s being clear about why you’re being ripped off. We’re very clear about who those villains are.”
But Democrats for months have been talking about Elon Musk, President Trump’s billionaire ally who is leading an aggressive campaign of slashing government, as the main villain of the young administration.
On Tuesday as the group made its debut by delivering a series of speeches on the House floor, Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, made remarks that did not sound any different from dozens of others that she and other Democrats have given in recent weeks railing against Mr. Trump’s policies.
Mr. Deluzio brought with him a poster board that read, simply and unspecifically, “Anti corruption, pro American Dream.”
Some of their colleagues were skeptical of what, exactly, the group was trying to achieve. Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Democrat of Washington, has for years been making the argument that her party is not in tune with the needs of working-class voters. Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez was invited to participate in the new group’s meetings and its performance on the House floor, but she declined to speak on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with her thinking.
Mr. Deluzio said that Tuesday’s floor action was simply an “opening salvo” and that the group would put forward a clear platform to resuscitate the Democratic Party at a moment when voters are desperate for leaders to show an effective way to push back against the Trump administration.
Over the weekend, the progressive stars Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York drew tens of thousands of supporters on their “fight oligarchy” tour, focusing on the needs of working people.
Mr. Deluzio and his colleagues said theirs was the right message for Democrats, and that voters were primed for a bigger revamp of the party. (Neither Mr. Sanders nor Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is part of his group.)
“Too many Americans felt Democrats had become the party of the elites and stopped meeting people where they are,” Mr. Ryan said on the House floor. “This moment is not ideological. It’s about who fights for the people and who fights for the elites.”
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Robert Draper
Reporting from Washington
With the Signal snafu, Michael Waltz is thrust into the spotlight.
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Despite President Trump’s insistence on Tuesday morning that his national security adviser, Michael Waltz, “has learned a lesson” after inadvertently including the editor of The Atlantic in a cabinet-level chat session, speculation continues to build about Mr. Waltz’s job security.
Mr. Trump vigorously defended Mr. Waltz in front of television cameras during an event a few hours later, saying he should not have to apologize for the breach.
“That man is a very good man, right there, that you criticized,” Mr. Trump said, pointing to Mr. Waltz after a reporter asked if the president would order practices to be changed. “So he’s a very good man, and he will continue to do a good job. In addition to him, we had very good people in that meeting, and those people have done a very, very effective job.”
Mr. Waltz said later on Tuesday that “I take full responsibility” for the sharing of military plans on the messaging app Signal, telling Laura Ingraham on Fox News that he had “built the group” and added the Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, to it.
Most of the Republican Party has leaped to Mr. Waltz’s defense, seeking to blame the news media for the uproar.
But in interviews, several close allies of the president characterized the national security adviser’s standing as precarious, more so than it already was when The New York Times reported on his uneasy status over a week ago. Those who discussed Trump administration views on Mr. Waltz did so on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. His fate, they say, rests on Mr. Trump’s caprices, with several competing factors coming into play.
On the one hand, it is Mr. Trump’s nature to defy a media firestorm rather than try to quell it by offering up a sacrificial lamb. He parted from this tendency at the beginning of his first administration when he fired his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, for not divulging his encounters with Russian officials to the F.B.I. According to one adviser from that era, Mr. Trump soon regretted that act of acquiescence.
This time around, according to several people who have spoken to Mr. Trump over the first two months of his term, he wants to avoid firing people because of the narrative of chaos that it will quickly engender. Once he starts firing people, one person familiar with his thinking said, it will be very hard to draw a line if problems arise with other aides down the line. And Mr. Trump has appeared increasingly more concerned with holding his perceived enemies at bay than anything else.
Mr. Waltz also benefits from a much closer relationship to the president than Mr. Flynn had. As a Republican congressman from 2019 until his current appointment, Mr. Waltz had been an unflagging defender of Mr. Trump throughout his political and legal travails. He spent much of last year campaigning for Mr. Trump, often traveling aboard the candidate’s private plane. He aggressively questioned the director of the Secret Service at a hearing after an assassination attempt on Mr. Trump at a rally near Butler, Pa., and became a defender of Mr. Trump against the agency.
Perhaps more significantly, Mr. Waltz frequently served as a campaign surrogate on Fox News, thereby passing the eyeball test for Mr. Trump, who prefers his senior aides be telegenic.
But Mr. Waltz has now given Mr. Trump reason to second-guess his loyalty, two people familiar with the matter suggested. The detail that Mr. Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, appeared to be in Mr. Waltz’s list of contacts to begin with — and possibly mistaken for another “JG” to be invited into the Signal group chat — has sent up alarms among the president’s allies, according to people familiar with their thinking.
In his appearance on Ms. Ingraham’s Fox News show Tuesday evening, Mr. Waltz suggested that Mr. Goldberg’s number had been saved under another person’s contact information in his phone. “I’m sure everybody out there has had a contact where it was said one person and then a different phone number,” he said.
In The American Conservative, a founding editor, Scott McConnell, wrote Tuesday, “I don’t see how National Security Adviser Mike Waltz organizing a group chat with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg goes away without Waltz’s resignation.”
In the Atlantic article, Mr. Goldberg recounted that Mr. Waltz had sent him a connection request on Signal on March 11, adding that he “didn’t find it particularly strange that he might be reaching out to me.” Asked about the Signal fiasco in a news conference with Mr. Trump Tuesday, Mr. Waltz described Mr. Goldberg as someone “I’ve never met, don’t know, never communicated with.” In an interview for this article, Mr. Goldberg said that he had met Mr. Waltz a few years ago at two events but had never interviewed him.
Ironically, it was Mr. Waltz’s familiarity with members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment, including Mr. Goldberg, that provided relief to some quarters after he was named to the second Trump administration. A former Green Beret and four-time recipient of the Bronze Star, Mr. Waltz had served in the national security apparatus for the Bush and Obama administrations before working for a defense contracting firm and then running for Congress.
“Mike’s exceptionally well-rounded,” said Peter Bergen, an author and national security analyst who wrote the foreword to one of Mr. Waltz’s books. “I saw it as an inspired choice on Trump’s part.”
Others saw Mr. Waltz as a curious selection. An avowed hawk, he staunchly defended the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in his 2014 book “Warrior Diplomat.” In a podcast interview in 2021, he warned that withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, as Mr. Trump had proposed doing, was “the best way to cause another 9/11 to happen.” Mr. Waltz instead advocated a sustained troop presence like the one that has been in Colombia — “a great model” — for over three decades. Such views have caused Mr. Waltz to be branded a “neocon” in right-wing circles.
Many of those who have heralded Mr. Waltz’s capabilities now find themselves at pains to explain his breach of security protocol. At the news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Trump reiterated that Mr. Waltz was “a very good man” and that attacks on him were “very unfair.” But some of the president’s allies have speculated that this appraisal could change if his national security adviser is increasingly viewed with ridicule.
Those who have known Mr. Trump throughout the years point to a striking constant: While he has a high tolerance for lightning rods, he has a very low one for laughingstocks.
Maggie Haberman and Chris Cameron contributed reporting.
Debra Kamin
A judge blocked the Trump administration from rescinding grants for fair housing groups.
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A judge in Massachusetts on Tuesday blocked the federal government from terminating dozens of grants to fair housing organizations across the country, a move that had left groups who fight housing discrimination scrambling to pay their bills and, in many cases, wondering if they could keep their doors open.
Sixty-six housing nonprofits received a letter in late February informing them that their grants were being cut off, with around $30 million in grants being suddenly rescinded across the country. Local fair housing organizations generally have annual budgets of less than $1 million, and in many cases the grants made up the bulk of their funding.
Four of the groups — in Massachusetts, Idaho, Texas and Ohio — sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, earlier this month on behalf of a proposed class of the groups.
After a hearing on Tuesday, Judge Richard G. Stearns of the United States District Court in the District of Massachusetts granted a temporary injunction, which blocks the termination of the grants.
“The action DOGE directed is endangering everyday people while empowering wealthy landlords and others to discriminate,” said Lisa Rice, the president and chief executive of the National Fair Housing Alliance, in a statement. “We are grateful for today’s decision.”
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Zach Montague
Reporting from Washington
A federal judge in Washington denied a request by the nonprofit group Public Citizen to depose Elon Musk on an expedited timeframe in a case focused on transparency into the Department of Government Efficiency operation. The group had moved to have Musk, who is leading the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize the federal government, sit for a deposition within 20 days.
Chris Cameron
In a statement following Vance’s announcement that he would be visiting Greenland on Friday, the vice president’s office said that Vance’s wife, Usha, had cancelled a scheduled appearance at a marquee dogsled race on the island this week. The organizers of the race had previously said that Usha had not been invited, but added that the event was open to the public and that she and her son “may attend as spectators.”
Julian E. Barnes
U.S. intelligence report says Russia remains an enduring threat.
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While the Trump administration has drastically changed how it talks about the danger posed by Russia, American intelligence agencies said in an annual report on Tuesday that Russia remained an “enduring potential threat to U.S. power, presence and global interests.”
On the same day the report was released, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, described Russia as a “formidable competitor” but avoided calling Moscow an adversary.
The intelligence report — an annual assessment by federal agencies of global threats — found that Russia has the upper hand in its three-year-old full-scale invasion of Ukraine and has greater leverage now to press Kyiv and its supporters to negotiate “an end to the war that grants Moscow concessions it seeks.”
The report was not overly optimistic about the Trump administration’s efforts to push for a quick cease-fire to end the war, even though President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine understands his position is weakening as his army’s battlefield position erodes, and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia knows the damage an extended conflict would do to his economy.
Still, it said, “both leaders for now probably still see the risks of a longer war as less than those of an unsatisfying settlement.”
“For Russia, positive battlefield trends allow for some strategic patience, and for Ukraine, conceding territory or neutrality to Russia without substantial security guarantees from the West could prompt domestic backlash and future insecurity,” the report said.
The report said Mr. Putin’s hold on power was extremely strong. The possibility of an alternative leader emerging “probably is less likely now than at any point in his quarter-century rule.”
While U.S. officials frequently talk about how much American military experts have learned from the war, the intelligence report said Moscow has also learned a huge amount about American capabilities, since the United States has armed Ukraine and has provided it with battlefield intelligence.
“The war in Ukraine has afforded Moscow a wealth of lessons regarding combat against Western weapons and intelligence in a large-scale war,” the report said. “This experience probably will challenge future U.S. defense planning, including against other adversaries with whom Moscow is sharing those lessons learned.”
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Mattathias Schwartz
Mattathias Schwartz covers the federal judiciary from Philadelphia.
Court lets Trump pause new refugee admissions, but thousands must be let in.
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An appeals court ruled on Tuesday that the Trump administration must admit thousands of people granted refugee status before Jan. 20, but declined to stop President Trump from halting the admission of new refugees.
The ruling, issued by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, often a reliably liberal court, did not directly address the question of whether the government must restore billions of dollars in funding to nonprofit groups that help resettle refugees after they have reached the United States.
But the decision was framed as a victory by Melissa Keaney, an attorney for the International Refugee Assistance Project, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs. She said that “tens of thousands” of people who were overseas would be processed and admitted to the United States as refugees.
“The Ninth Circuit’s ruling insures that U.S. refugee admission remains open in part,” she said.
But it was a rare victory as well for the Trump administration and its efforts to clamp down on immigration. Appellate judges have largely upheld rulings by the district courts blocking the president’s agenda. In contrast, Tuesday’s decision reversed in part an earlier ruling by Judge Jamal N. Whitehead of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, who was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Judge Whitehead’s ruling effectively required the government to reinstate the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, which has admitted more than three million refugees to the United States since it was established by statute in 1980.
Billions of dollars in funding for nonprofit groups that assist refugees with resettlement remain in limbo. After Judge Whitehead ordered the government to restore funding to the groups, the State Department terminated their contracts. A second order by Judge Whitehead, filed on Monday, ordered the government to reinstate the terminated funding. That order has not yet been considered by the appeals court.
Tuesday’s ruling by the appeals court is preliminary, and the court could eventually choose to either uphold or reverse Mr. Trump’s executive order in full.
