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  • Supreme Court rearranges its seating chart as Jackson takes the bench | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court rearranges its seating chart as Jackson takes the bench | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Tradition is a long-held value at the US Supreme Court, where the nine justices’ adherence to a myriad of historic rules makes the inner workings of America’s highest court reliably consistent even as its decisions sometimes send shock waves through the country.

    Some of those treasured rules will soon be on display as the court’s newest member, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, takes her seat on the bench for oral arguments. Although Jackson was administered her official oaths last spring, her investiture ceremony sealed her position on the bench days before the court’s new term begins on Monday, October 3.

    The addition of Jackson will cause the court to invoke one of its closely held traditions: the rearrangement of where the justices are seated on the bench when a new justice joins its ranks.

    In the courtroom, justices are seated by seniority, with the chief justice in the middle. “The senior associate justice sits to his right, the second senior to his left, and so on, alternating right and left by seniority,” according to the court.

    This means that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas will occupy the same seat this term that they did last term. But the remaining justices will be shuffled around, with Jackson seated to Roberts’ left on the end, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court in late 2020, seated on the opposite end, and the other five justices taking new seats depending on when they joined the court.

    On Friday, Jackson also participated in other court traditions, including sitting in the historic John Marshall Bench Chair at the beginning of the ceremony, as is customary for all new justices.

    President Joe Biden attended the Friday morning ceremony. It is customary before the event for the president to chat privately with the justices in a conference room and to sign the court’s oversized guest book.

    After the ceremony, Jackson took the traditional walk down the 36 marble steps at the front of the columned building accompanied by the chief justice.

    Although the justices will take new seats this term, much of the public won’t ever see them in those positions because photography is not allowed in the courtroom. But Roberts has announced that after more than two years of pandemic-related restrictions, members of the public will be allowed back into the courtroom, though he has yet to lay out details.

    Before October, the justices will likely discuss whether the court will continue to allow a live audio feed of oral arguments, a practice that began during the pandemic that enables the public to follow along in real time.

    Continuing that practice could allow court watchers across the country to get an understanding of Jackson’s style on the bench as she participates in oral arguments during her first term.

    In the new term, the justices will consider issues including voting rights, immigration, affirmative action, environmental regulations and religious liberty — areas where the solid conservative majority can easily control the outcomes.

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  • Ginni Thomas tells January 6 committee she didn’t discuss election activities with Justice Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

    Ginni Thomas tells January 6 committee she didn’t discuss election activities with Justice Clarence Thomas | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, stressed that her election activities were separate from her husband’s role on the high court during her Thursday meeting with the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

    Thomas addressed her dynamic with her husband through a prepared statement at the onset of the four and a half hour meeting with the panel, two sources familiar told CNN.

    “Regarding the 2020 election, I did not speak with him at all about the details of my volunteer campaign activities,” Thomas said under oath in her opening statement obtained by CNN. “And I did not speak with him at all about the details of my post-election activities, which were minimal, in any event. I am certain I never spoke with him about any of the legal challenges to the 2020 election, as I was not involved with those challenges in any way.”

    Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, who chairs the January 6 committee, told CNN that Thomas answered “some questions” in her interview with the panel and reiterated her belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

    “Yes,” the chairman said when asked if Thomas said she still believes the election was stolen. “She said that.”

    Thompson would not divulge what the committee asked about, including whether she addressed her text messages with then-President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. In her prepared remarks, Thomas asserted that her husband was “completely unaware” of her texts with Meadows until the media reported on them.

    When asked if Thomas tried to clear up her previous statements, as her lawyer said, Thompson told CNN, “We didn’t accuse her of anything.”

    Thompson said that overall, “at this point we are glad she came in.” And asked whether the panel will incorporate the interview into its next, currently unscheduled hearing, he said, “If there’s something of merit.”

    When entering her voluntary interview on Thursday morning, Thomas declined to tell CNN why she felt the need to speak to the committee and instead said, “Thank you for being here.”

    She declined to say whether she spoke with her husband about her beliefs that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. “Thank you for your question, I look forward to answering members,” she told CNN.

    Thomas’ prepared remarks, however, stressed, “that my husband has never spoken with me about pending cases at the Court. It’s an iron clad rule in our home.”

    “Additionally, [Justice Thomas] is uninterested in politics. And I generally do not discuss with him my day-to-day work in politics, the topics I am working on, who I am calling, emailing, texting, or meeting,” she added.

    Thomas’ attorney, Mark Paoletta, confirmed the voluntary interview last week.

    “She was happy to cooperate with the Committee to clear up the misconceptions about her activities surrounding the 2020 elections,” Paoletta said in a statement after Thursday’s interview. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas had significant concerns about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. And, as she told the Committee, her minimal and mainstream activity focused on ensuring that reports of fraud and irregularities were investigated.”

    Members of the panel have long said they are interested in speaking with Thomas, particularly after CNN first reported text messages she exchanged with Meadows prior to January 6 about overturning the election.

    But in the months after those messages emerged, there had been little indication that compelling her to testify was a top priority for the panel despite subsequent evidence that Thomas also encouraged state lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate electoral win.

    Thomas attended the rally that preceded the attack on the US Capitol, as she said in an interview with the Washington Free Beacon, where she stressed that her and her husband’s professional lives are kept separate. She also said that she had left the gathering before the protesters turned violent.

    She has also been publicly critical of the House January 6 investigation, calling on House GOP leaders to boot from their conference the two Republicans serving on the select committee.

    Thompson also told CNN that the panel had yet to reschedule its next hearing, after postponing it on Wednesday because of Hurricane Ian. The Mississippi Democrat said he doubts the hearing will take place next week.

    This story and headline have been updated with additional developments Thursday.

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  • Joe Biden’s latest gaffe plays right into Republicans’ hands | CNN Politics

    Joe Biden’s latest gaffe plays right into Republicans’ hands | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden once called himself a “gaffe machine” – and his latest slip-up is a whopper.

    Speaking at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health on Wednesday, Biden tried to acknowledge the presence of Rep. Jackie Walorski – despite the fact that the Indiana Republican had died in a car accident in early August.

    “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie? I think she wasn’t going to be here – to help make this a reality,” Biden said.

    The White House sought to play off the odd moment as nothing more than Walorski being “top of mind” for Biden.

    “There will be a bill signing in her honor this coming Friday, so, of course, she was on his mind,” said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. “She was top of mind for the President.”

    Which, sure. Everyone make mistakes.

    But that’s a pretty big mistake to make. And unfortunately for Biden, it plays into a caricature that Republicans – led by former President Donald Trump – have long been painting of him.

    “This guy doesn’t have a clue. He doesn’t know where the hell he is,” Trump said of Biden during the 2020 campaign. “This guy doesn’t know he’s alive.”

    At another point, Trump said: “Biden is shot. I’m telling you he’s shot. There’s something going on.”

    Biden’s overall health didn’t play much of a role in the 2020 election, however. Forty-one percent of voters in the 2020 election exit poll said that only Biden had the mental and physical health to serve as president. The same number – 41% – said that only Trump had the mental and physical stamina to do the job. Another 8% said neither did.

    In 2021, amid the bungled US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty suggested that the handling of the situation “created doubt not only in my mind, in the mind of many, many Americans, but also doubt in the minds of our allies” regarding Biden’s ability to do the job.

    Earlier this year, Kansas GOP Sen. Roger Marshall, a physician, suggested that Biden should submit to yearly cognitive testing. “I think we’re all concerned for President Biden’s mental health,” Marshall said at the time. He added that he felt he had seen a “deterioration” in Biden’s mental health over the past year.

    Here’s what we know for facts: Biden is 79 years old. He is the oldest person ever to be elected to a first term as president and, if he runs for a second term, will be the oldest person to do that too. His most recent physical was last November. At that time, the White House doctor said that Biden “remains fit for duty, and fully executes all of his responsibilities without any exemptions or accommodations.”

    What we also know is that Biden’s age is an issue for voters well beyond the hardcore Republican base.

    In a New York Times/Siena College poll conducted over the summer, Biden’s age was a leading factor among Democratic voters who said they preferred the party nominate someone else for president in 2024.

    As The New York Times noted in a July story on Biden’s age, citing more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers:

    “[T]hey acknowledged Mr. Biden looks older than just a few years ago, a political liability that cannot be solved by traditional White House stratagems like staff shake-ups or new communications plans. His energy level, while impressive for a man of his age, is not what it was, and some aides quietly watch out for him. He often shuffles when he walks, and aides worry he will trip on a wire. He stumbles over words during public events, and they hold their breath to see if he makes it to the end without a gaffe.”

    On Wednesday, Biden didn’t make it to the end without a gaffe.

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  • White House seeks to tackle food insecurity at first hunger conference since 1969 | CNN Politics

    White House seeks to tackle food insecurity at first hunger conference since 1969 | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Groceries cost 13.5% more than they did a year ago. Nearly 25 million adults live in households where there isn’t always enough to eat. Some 40% of food banks saw increased demand this summer.

    At a time when the affordability of food is in the spotlight, the Biden administration is hosting a White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health on Wednesday with the goal of combating food insecurity and diet-related diseases.

    Overall, food insecurity has declined since former President Richard Nixon convened the first and only White House conference on food, nutrition and health in 1969, which led to nationwide expansions of the food stamp and school meals programs and the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, among other changes. General economic growth and the reduction in poverty have also contributed to the improvements in food security in recent decades.

    However, the Covid-19 pandemic and soaring inflation have increased the attention paid to food insecurity in the US over the past two years. The Biden administration released a 44-page playbook on Tuesday aimed at the “bold goal” of ending hunger by 2030 and increasing healthy eating and physical activity to reduce diet-related diseases.

    Among the key proposals: expand free school meals to 9 million more children by 2032; allow more people to qualify for food stamps; broaden the Summer Expanded Benefit Transfer program to more kids; increase funding for nutrition programs for senior citizens; and improve transportation to and from grocery stores and farmer’s markets, among other initiatives. Many of the efforts would need approval from Congress.

    President Joe Biden announced at the conference more than $8 billion in private and public sector commitments as part of the administration’s call to action.

    “In America, no child, no child should go to bed hungry,” Biden told those gathered at the conference Wednesday. “No parent should die of disease that can be prevented.”

    More than 100 organizations have made commitments, including hospitals and health care associations, tech companies, philanthropies and the food industry.

    At least $2.5 billion will be invested in start-up companies that are focused on solutions to hunger and food insecurity, according to the White House. More than $4 billion will be dedicated toward philanthropic efforts to improve access to nutritious food, promote healthy choices and increase physical activity.

    The President also urged Congress to make permanent the enhancement to the child tax credit, which was only in effect last year. Parents used the additional monthly funds to buy food and basic necessities, which Biden said helped cut child poverty in half and reduced food insecurity for families by 26%.

    Congress has poured billions into special pandemic assistance programs aimed at enabling struggling Americans to have enough food to feed themselves and their families – even as millions of jobs were lost in 2020.

    “That’s why it’s so consequential that at the onset of the Covid-19 recession, the combination of fiscal support to households – whether it is from the economic impact payments, unemployment insurance, refundable tax credits, enhanced SNAP benefits or pandemic EBT – all combined to prevent an increase in food insecurity over the past two years,” said Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

    The pandemic aid, particularly a temporary enhancement to the child tax credit, helped keep kids fed last year, Bauer and anti-hunger advocates maintain.

    Food insecurity among children fell in 2021, reversing a spike during the first year of the pandemic, according to a recent US Department of Agriculture report. Some 6.2% of households with children were unable at times to provide adequate, nutritious food for their kids last year, compared with 7.6% in 2020, the report found. Last year’s rate was not significantly different than the 2019 share.

    And the prevalence of food insecurity in the families who have kids dropped to 12.5% last year, the lowest since at least 1998, the earliest year that comparable records exist.

    But elderly Americans living alone and childless households both experienced an increase in food insecurity last year, the report found.

    Overall, the share of households contending with food insecurity remained statistically the same in 2021 as the year before.

    This lack of improvement in general food insecurity despite the surge in federal spending on food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, is a red flag for Angela Rachidi, senior fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.

    “When the solution is always ‘let’s just spend more on SNAP or spend more on school lunch or WIC,’ I think that that’s not always the best use of federal dollars,” she said.

    Rachidi would like to see more of an emphasis on nutrition and healthy eating, which are among the pillars of the White House conference.

    “Many more people in the US die from diet-related disease than die from hunger,” she said, noting the health problems caused by obesity, diabetes and other conditions.

    The pandemic aid that helped keep Americans afloat has largely been exhausted, and Congress has shown little appetite to dole out more assistance – even as high inflation is squeezing many families.

    The share of people who say they live in households where there was either sometimes or often not enough to eat in the last seven days has climbed to 11.5%, according to the most recent US Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey conducted in late July and early August.

    That’s up from the 10.2% recorded by the survey in late December and early January, just after the final monthly child tax credit payment was distributed. The share had been even lower in the late summer and early fall of 2021, when the monthly installments were being sent.

    Meanwhile, shopping in the supermarket is taking a bigger bite out of people’s wallets. Egg prices have skyrocketed nearly 40% over the past year, while flour is 23% costlier. Milk and bread are up 17% and 16% respectively, while chicken is nearly 17% more expensive.

    Starting next month, it will be a little easier for those in the food stamp program to afford groceries because the annual inflation adjustment will kick in. Beneficiaries will see an increase in benefits of 12%, or an average of $26 per person, per month. This comes on top of last year’s revision to the Thrifty Food Plan, upon which benefits are based, which raised the average monthly payment by $36 per person.

    Still, the upward march in prices has driven more people to food pantries, which are also struggling to stock the shelves amid higher prices.

    Some 40% of food banks reported seeing an increase in the number of people served in July compared with June, according to a survey conducted by Feeding America, which has more than 60,000 food pantries, meal programs and partner agencies in its network. The average increase was about 10% more people. Another 40% said demand remained about level.

    Many food pantries don’t have the resources to meet this increased demand, said Claire Babineaux-Fontenot, Feeding America’s CEO, noting that she’s seen sites with nearly empty shelves but long lines out the door.

    The network provided 1.4 billion fewer meals in the fiscal year ending June 30 than the year before.

    The USDA announced earlier this month that it will provide nearly $1.5 billion in additional funding for emergency food assistance, which will help alleviate the supply shortages at food banks and pantries.

    However, Feeding America feels more should be done. It recently surveyed nearly 36,000 people for their recommendations to end hunger. Many felt that food stamp benefits should be increased and eligibility should be expanded. Nearly half felt their communities need more food pantries, grocery stores and fresh food.

    The recent infusion of federal funds will help pantries distribute more food, though it doesn’t completely close the gap. And it will take time for the supplies to arrive, Babineaux-Fontenot said.

    “Today, people are going to be looking for ways to feed themselves and their family, and there will be scarce resources for them to do that,” she said.

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  • After negotiating a peace deal, Jimmy Carter taught this Bible class | CNN Politics

    After negotiating a peace deal, Jimmy Carter taught this Bible class | CNN Politics

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    A version of this story appears in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.



    CNN
     — 

    If you know anything about Jimmy Carter, this may be it: He never lost touch with his home in Plains, Georgia, and he never gravitated away from teaching his Baptist faith.

    Until just recently, the former US president and Nobel Peace Prize winner could be found teaching Sunday school in Georgia.

    What might be even more remarkable is that he maintained that grounding even when he was leading the free world, frequently popping up 16th Street to teach a couples’ Bible class in the balcony of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington, DC. Carter intertwined a first-person, real-time account of world events with his thoughts on the scripture.

    A week after celebrating the historic high point of his presidency – the 1978 Camp David Accords, which created a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt – Carter was telling his students, members of the First Baptist Church, about praying with then-prime minister of Israel Menachem Begin and then-president of Egypt Anwar Sadat.

    “I think some of the most unpleasant moments of my life occurred during the last two weeks,” he told the class. “And of course, also some of the most pleasant.”

    The photos of the three world leaders during their two-week negotiations at Camp David and signing of the agreement at the White House have followed Carter into the history books. Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and Begin died in 1992, but the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is still in effect.

    Carter tells Bible class about Camp David Accords

    In today’s tightly controlled media environment, when the fences around the White House keep getting higher and the barricades farther away, it’s incredible to think that any parishioner could stand in the balcony of a church and interact with the US president.

    He attended the church regularly, and his daughter Amy was baptized there – things I learned after hearing from Christi Harlan, a former reporter who has been a member since the ’90s. She showed me the plaque on the second-row pew where Carter would sit with his family, in view of a stained-glass window of George Washington Carver, the agricultural scientist who, like Carter, was a peanut farmer.

    Harlan also gave me CD copies of taped recordings of the couples Bible class that Carter sometimes led when he was president and which have been sitting in the church’s archive ever since.

    This being a Bible class and the subject being peace in the Middle East, Carter talked about the importance of faith to the negotiations that brought a lasting truce between Israel and Egypt.

    “I was meeting with two leaders who are deeply devout and religious men who spent a great portion of their time at Camp David in prayer,” said Carter, adding that they all agreed they “worship the same God.”

    Sadat, Carter said, accepted that he and Begin were both descended from Abraham and were therefore brothers of a sort.

    “That was one of the things that I believe gave us kind of a clear, unshakable purpose, because we all believe that God wanted us to work toward peace,” Carter said. “It was one of the few things on which we agreed, at first.”

    Carter claps as Sadat hugs Begin on September 17, 1978, after signing the peace agreement in the East Room of the White House.

    While the fly-on-the-wall reports from Camp David are fascinating, these were primarily Bible classes. You get the sense that teaching was a sort of escape for Carter, who goes deep into the scripture. The week after the Camp David Accords, he focused on St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians, when the apostle was imprisoned and facing death but still eager to advance the gospel.

    In other Bible class lessons, there are often moments where the weight of Carter’s words were influenced by his day job – such as when he brought along Georgi Vins, a Baptist pastor from the Soviet Union who had recently been exiled from Siberia.

    Despite the gesture, Carter insisted the class should not be about world affairs.

    “I would particularly want you this morning not to think about the time of Ahab, not to think about even the Soviet Union – but to think about the United States, the Washington, DC, community, and preferably, my life and your life and our actions in the eyes of God,” Carter told the class.

    Carter brings exiled Soviet pastor to Bible class

    His discussion about the murder of Naboth ultimately turned into a dissection of man’s law versus God’s law.

    Citing the Vietnam War, Carter told the students that the US government, which he led at the time, must be accountable:

    “American citizens have not only a right but a duty to constantly inquire into the righteousness of our nation’s actions. And that is not treason. And that is not in violation of God’s law.”

    Carter discusses man’s law vs. God’s law

    Most recent presidents have complained about the cloistered life in the White House and sought refuge in a private space.

    Donald Trump invited world leaders to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Florida. George W. Bush went down to his remote ranch in Crawford, Texas, to clear brush.

    Carter, on the other hand, joined the First Baptist Church.

    When he prayed in those years, he tried to distance himself from the presidency, Carter told Terry Gross on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in 1996, noting that he intentionally joined a church outside the White House and went there almost as a physical separation of church and state.

    “I worshipped as I would if I had not have been in public life at all,” Carter said.

    But praying as president is different, he added – more frequent and “maybe on average, more heartfelt than any other time in my life, because I felt that the decisions I made were affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people.”

    The Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer told me that the distance presidents feel from the people they lead can be difficult.

    “The challenge is that they become further and further removed from the people who elected them – seeing the country through the prism of advisors, reporters, and colleagues,” he said in an email.

    But Carter’s insistence on staying grounded in a community was a key part of his appeal at a time when Americans’ faith in their government was shaken.

    “Carter – in the aftermath of Watergate – was determined to lower the barriers between himself and the electorate,” Zelizer said.

    In the “Fresh Air” interview, Carter talked more directly about his prayers as president. He wanted to keep the nation at peace and help spread peace to other nations, and end the Iran hostage crisis that lasted for more than a year – things that did eventually happen.

    “I never prayed for popularity. I never prayed to be reelected, things of that kind,” he said.

    “I think God always answers our prayers,” he told Gross. “Quite often God’s answer is no. We don’t get what we ask for.”

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  • Senate Judiciary chair says ‘everything is on the table’ in response to Clarence Thomas revelations | CNN Politics

    Senate Judiciary chair says ‘everything is on the table’ in response to Clarence Thomas revelations | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin said Sunday that “everything is on the table” as the panel scrutinizes new ethics concerns around Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

    “The bottom line is this: Everything is on the table. Day after day, week after week, more and more disclosures about Justice Thomas – we cannot ignore them,” the Illinois Democrat told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

    “The thing we’re going to do first, obviously, is to gather the evidence, the information that we need to draw our conclusions. I’m not ruling out anything,” he added.

    ProPublica reported recently that, for years, Thomas has accepted lavish trips and gifts from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow, which have gone mostly unreported on the justice’s financial disclosures. Crow also purchased several real estate properties, including the home where Thomas’ mother lives, from the Thomas family and paid boarding school tuition for Thomas’ grandnephew, according to ProPublica.

    The extent to which these transactions and hospitality should have been reported by Thomas has been the subject of debate among judicial ethics experts, who have noted that a recently closed loophole for certain “personal hospitality” may have covered some of the luxury trips.

    Thomas has said he followed the advice of others in deciding what required disclosure and, in a statement last month, noted that that Crow did not have business before the court.

    But Durbin said Sunday the recent revelations “just embarrasses me” as he called on Chief Justice John Roberts to impose a code of conduct on the court. Roberts previously declined Durbin’s request to voluntarily testify in a hearing on Supreme Court ethics.

    “I must respectfully decline your invitation,” Roberts wrote in a letter to Durbin, which was released by a spokesperson for the high court. “Testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee by the Chief Justice of the United States is exceedingly rare as one might expect in light of separation of powers concerns and the importance of preserving judicial independence.”

    The debate over Supreme Court ethics was the subject of a Senate Judiciary hearing last week that featured testimony from a law professor, legal advocates and two former judges. Some Republican lawmakers said they want to see more transparency around the court, though they railed against the Democratic push for Congress to impose a code of conduct on the justices.

    Durbin maintained Sunday that “this is the Roberts court, and history is going to judge him by the decision he makes on this.”

    “He has the power to make the difference.”

    Durbin made clear Sunday that he hasn’t reached “any conclusion” on pursuing subpoenas in relation to

    Supreme Court ethics issues, but he acknowledged that the absence of Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein of California would pose a challenge to the committee “if we go down that path.”

    “Right now, with her absence, it’s a 10-to-10 Committee, and the majority is not there, and a proxy vote doesn’t count in this circumstance,” Durbin said.

    Feinstein, 89, has been away from the Senate since March as she recovers at home in California from shingles. Her absence has prevented the committee from advancing certain judicial nominees of President Joe Biden and several House Democrats have called on her to resign as a result.

    In a statement last week, Feinstein pushed back on those claims, saying that the Senate continues to “swiftly” confirm “highly qualified individuals to the federal judiciary.” She indicated in the statement that she still plans to return but did not say when that would happen.

    “She’s gone through an awful lot. She lost her husband last year, and she’s had some real medical issues that are problematic for her at her age at this point,” Durbin said. “I hope she returns, and I hope it’s this week. We need her. It is a challenge in the Senate Judiciary Committee to do our business.”

    The situation, he added, is “complicated.”

    “I hope she does what’s best for her and her family and the state of California and makes a decision soon as to whether she’s coming back,” Durbin said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Inside the Treasury Department team monitoring early economic warning signs as default threat looms | CNN Politics

    Inside the Treasury Department team monitoring early economic warning signs as default threat looms | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Nearly five months before the US was projected to hit the debt ceiling, a small team inside the Treasury Department began alerting top officials to early effects already being felt in the US financial system.

    The cost of insuring US debt, as measured by the price of credit-default swaps, was rising – a sign that investors were beginning to view US bonds and other securities as increasingly risky.

    That early warning – and subsequent ones over the last month as the swaps pricing has surged – came out of the Treasury Department’s Markets Room and its eponymous team of nine financial analysts who are responsible for monitoring and analyzing global financial markets to inform the policy work of top Treasury Department and White House officials.

    As the US rapidly approaches a potential default date in early June, top US officials are increasingly relying on the Markets Room to monitor for signs of disruption in the financial markets.

    “In the same way that a doctor wants to understand the vital signs of a patient as they’re thinking about how to treat them, at Treasury keeping abreast of understanding the various ways in which the economy is healthy or unhealthy. And part of that is understanding the market,” Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo told CNN in an interview.

    “So, we’re spending a lot of time with them better understanding what the costs are today, in order to make sure that we’re in a position to share that information with Congress, in order to prevent us from getting into a position where for the first time in our history, we’re unable to pay all of our obligations on time.”

    That work begins each day before dawn, when staffers take turns waking up around 3:30 a.m. ET to compile data about overnight market developments and begin making calls to contacts working in European and Asian markets.

    At around 7 a.m. ET, those data and insights land in the inboxes of top policymakers at the White House and Treasury Department.

    At 9 a.m. ET, before the US markets open, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her senior leadership team huddle virtually with the Markets Room and other key Treasury Department aides for a briefing on the state of the financial markets and issues to watch for that day.

    “Almost every American is influenced by what’s happening around the globe and global markets either through your 401(k), or your attempt to borrow money for your small business or for your home. So, this team of individuals, every morning, provides us a briefing and an update on what’s happening around the world,” Adeyemo said.

    In recent weeks, that daily briefing has heavily focused on reverberations of the debt limit standoff, from updates on auctions of Treasury bills to market reactions and commentary from market analysts and economists.

    Much of the rest of the day is spent monitoring developments in the financial markets and fielding inquiries from top policymakers at Treasury and the White House for analysis on those developments.

    And at the end of the day, the Markets Room also helps policymakers digest the biggest developments in the financial markets with another widely read one-page memo delivered after the US markets close and before the Asian markets open.

    Beyond the Treasury Department, a White House spokesperson said the unit’s twice-daily memos are “a valuable asset” for officials at the National Economic Council and Council of Economic Advisers.

    “Those offices also rely on the Markets Room’s real-time updates – either in memos or meetings – when more regular monitoring is warranted,” the spokesperson said.

    Officials say the Markets Room is focused on monitoring the global economy’s recovery from the pandemic-induced recession, lingering inflation and the trajectory of the global economy.

    Albert Lee, the Markets Room director, described the unit as an early warning system on the global financial system for top US policymakers.

    In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the team was among the first to sound alarm bells inside the federal government about early shocks in pockets of the financial system and predicting rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

    The team also played a critical role during the banking crisis earlier this year, tracking the sharp selloff of stock and outflows of deposit at Silicon Valley Bank that ultimately triggered the bank’s collapse.

    As the Treasury Department acted to address the second-largest bank failure in US history and prevent any spillover effects in the banking sector, top Treasury Department officials leaned on the Markets Room team to track the feedback of their policy actions.

    “It was critically important for us to understand how markets were interpreting the actions that we took that made clear to the American people that your deposits were safe,” Adeyemo said. “We were monitoring signs of distress in the banking sector.”

    With one week until the government can potentially no longer pay its bills, the US stock market is only just beginning to show signs of concern about a potential default and Treasury officials say the team is focused on tracking further reactions from the stock market as well as the Treasury securities market.

    The stock market’s reaction has, up until now, been relatively muted – especially as compared to the 17% drop the S&P 500 suffered amid the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. But Treasury officials say volatility in the securities market is already affecting the federal government, raising the cost to borrow.

    Yields on short-term Treasury securities have surged and recent auctions for securities are leaving a heftier price tag for the federal government, which Adeyemo said recently incurred $80 million in additional costs for a recent auction of Treasury bills.

    “So, the cost of borrowing has already gotten more expensive when it comes to us borrowing in the short term for the US government,” Adeyemo said. “So as the debt limit manufactured crisis goes on, and costs go up for the government, it also means that costs will go up for the American people as well.”

    Adeyemo declined to disclose what contingencies are being prepared should the US default. But when the US faced a similar standoff on the debt in 2011, Federal Reserve officials and Treasury Department officials quietly prepared a plan to prioritize payments on US debt and delay paying other government bills and obligations, like Social Security and payments to veterans, according to transcripts of a central bank meeting released in 2017.

    “The most important thing for the American people, for our country, for our credibility, not only with our creditors, but with the American people is to pay all of our bills on time. That’s what our system is built to do,” Adeyemo said. “I’ve spent a good part of a decade working here at the Treasury Department. What I can tell you is that there’s no plan that would allow us to meet all of our commitments other than Congress, raising the debt limit.”

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  • Trump shakes up legal team in wake of classified documents indictment | CNN Politics

    Trump shakes up legal team in wake of classified documents indictment | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Former President Donald Trump’s legal team is undergoing a significant shakeup in the wake of his indictment in the special counsel’s classified documents probe.

    In a sudden move, Trump announced Friday morning that he was removing two of his top attorneys, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, from the case and said Todd Blanche, a defense lawyer he hired in April after being indicted in Manhattan, would take the lead. Soon after, Trusty and Rowley issued a joint statement in which they said they were resigning from the legal team entirely.

    Trump is considering adding Miami-based attorney Benedict Kuehne to his legal team, a source familiar with the matter told CNN. He has not been formally added to the team yet but could join soon given Trump’s expected court appearance on Tuesday. CNN has reached out to Kuehne for comment.

    Lindsay Halligan, who is barred in the state where Trump was indicted, also remains on the team.

    In their statement, Trusty and Rowley said they were confident Trump will be “vindicated in his battle against the Biden Administration’s partisan weaponization of the American justice system” and said now was a “logical” time for them to step aside with the case having been filed in Miami.

    They added that they do not plan to make media appearances or to reveal conversations they’ve had with Trump. Trusty appeared on CNN just hours after Trump announced that he had been indicted to defend his client but also left open the door to potential changes in the legal team.

    Asked which members of the team would accompany Trump to court Tuesday, Trusty said, “We’ll see. It’ll make some excitement to see who shows up to the table on Tuesday, I guess.”

    Shortly before Friday’s statement was issued by Trusty and Rowley, Trump disclosed on Truth Social that neither would be representing him. He thanked them for their work, saying they “were up against a very dishonest, corrupt, evil, and ‘sick’ group of people,” but did not explain why they were departing.

    Trump’s legal team has seen significant turnover as the investigation into the mishandling of classified documents has unfolded. Last month, Timothy Parlatore, an attorney who played a key role in the investigation and once testified before the grand jury, left Trump’s legal team due to infighting, he told CNN’s Paula Reid.

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  • Fact check: Biden makes 5 false claims about guns, plus some about other subjects | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Biden makes 5 false claims about guns, plus some about other subjects | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden made false claims about a variety of topics, notably including gun policy, during a series of official speeches and campaign remarks over the last two weeks.

    He made at least five false claims related to guns, a subject on which he has repeatedly been inaccurate during his presidency. He also made a false claim about the extent of his support from environmental groups. And he used incorrect figures about the population of Africa, his own travel history and how much renewable energy Texas uses.

    Here is a fact check of these claims, plus a fact check on a Biden exaggeration about guns. The White House declined to comment on Tuesday.

    Beau Biden and red flag laws

    In a Friday speech at the National Safer Communities Summit in Connecticut, Biden spoke of how a gun control law he signed in 2022 has provided federal funding for states to expand the use of gun control tools like “red flag” laws, which allow the courts to temporarily seize the guns of people who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. After mentioning red flag laws, Biden invoked his late son Beau Biden, who served as attorney general of Delaware, and said: “As my son was the first to enforce when he was attorney general.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. Delaware did not have a red flag law when Beau Biden was state attorney general from 2007 to 2015. The legislation that created Delaware’s red flag program was named the Beau Biden Gun Violence Prevention Act, but it was passed in 2018, three years after Beau Biden died of brain cancer. (In 2013, Beau Biden had pushed for a similar bill, but it was rejected by the state Senate.) The president has previously said, correctly, that a Delaware red flag law was named after his son.

    Delaware was far from the first state to enact a red flag law. Connecticut passed the first such state law in the country in 1999.

    Stabilizing braces

    In the same speech, the president spoke confusingly of his administration’s effort to make it more difficult for Americans to purchase stabilizing braces, devices that are attached to the rear of pistols, most commonly AR-15-style pistols, and make it easier to fire them one-handed.

    “Put a pistol on a brace, and it…turns into a gun,” Biden said. “Makes them where you can have a higher-caliber weapon – a higher-caliber bullet – coming out of that gun. It’s essentially turning it into a short-barreled rifle, which has been a weapon of choice by a number of mass shooters.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims that a stabilizing brace turns a pistol into a gun and increases the caliber of a gun or bullet are false. A pistol is, obviously, already a gun, and “a pistol brace does not have any effect on the caliber of ammunition that a gun fires or anything about the basic functioning of the gun itself,” said Stephen Gutowski, a CNN contributor who is the founder of the gun policy and politics website The Reload.

    Biden’s assertion that the addition of a stabilizing brace can “essentially” turn a pistol into a short-barreled rifle is subjective; it’s the same argument his administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has made in support of its attempt to subject the braces to new controls. The administration’s regulatory effort is being challenged in the courts by gun rights advocates.

    Gun manufacturers and lawsuits

    Repeating a claim he made in his 2022 State of the Union address and on other occasions, Biden said at a campaign fundraiser in California on Monday: “The only industry in America you can’t sue is the – is the gun manufacturers.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false, as CNN and other fact-checkers have previously noted. Gun manufacturers are not entirely exempt from being sued, nor are they the only industry with some liability protections. Notably, there are significant liability protections for vaccine manufacturers and, at present, for people and entities involved in making, distributing or administering Covid-19 countermeasures such as vaccines, tests and treatments.

    Under the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, gun manufacturers cannot be held liable for the use of their products in crimes. However, gun manufacturers can still be held liable for (and thus sued for) a range of things, including negligence, breach of contract regarding the purchase of a gun or certain damages from defects in the design of a gun.

    In 2019, the Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit against gun manufacturer Remington Arms Co. to continue. The plaintiffs, a survivor and the families of nine other victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, wanted to hold the company – which manufactured the semi-automatic rifle that was used in the 2012 killing – partly responsible by targeting the company’s marketing practices, another area where gun manufacturers can be held liable. In 2022, those families reached a $73 million settlement with the company and its four insurers.

    There are also more recent lawsuits against gun manufacturers. For example, the parents of some of the victims and survivors of the 2022 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, have sued over the marketing practices of the company that made the gun used by the killer. Another suit, filed by the government of Buffalo, New York, in December over gun violence in the city, alleges that the actions of several gun manufacturers and distributors have endangered public health and safety. It is unclear how those lawsuits will fare in the courts.

    – Holmes Lybrand contributed to this item.

    The NRA and lawsuits

    At a campaign fundraiser in California on Tuesday, Biden said the National Rifle Association, the prominent gun rights advocacy organization, itself cannot be sued.

    “And the fact that the NRA has such overwhelming power – you know, the NRA is the only outfit in the nation that we cannot sue as an institution,” Biden said. “They got – they – before this – I became president, they passed legislation saying you can’t sue them. Imagine had that been the case with tobacco companies.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. While gun manufacturers have liability protections, no law was ever passed to forbid lawsuits against the NRA. The NRA has faced a variety of lawsuits in recent years.

    Machine guns

    At the same Tuesday fundraiser in California, Biden said that he taught the Second Amendment in law school, “And guess what? It doesn’t say that you can own any weapon you want. It says there are certain weapons that you just can’t own.” One example Biden cited was this: “You can’t own a machine gun.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is false. The Second Amendment does not explicitly say people cannot own certain weapons – and the courts have not interpreted it to forbid machine guns. In fact, with some exceptions, people in more than two-thirds of states are allowed to own and buy fully automatic machine guns as long as those guns were legally registered and possessed prior to May 19, 1986, the day President Ronald Reagan signed a major gun law. There were more than 700,000 legally registered machine guns in the US as of May 2021, according to official federal data.

    Federal law imposes significant national restrictions on machine gun purchases, and the fact that there is a limited pool of pre-May 19, 1986 machine guns means that buying these guns tends to be expensive – regularly into the tens of thousands of dollars. But for Americans in most of the country, Biden’s claim that you simply “can’t” own a machine gun, period, is not true.

    “It’s not easy to obtain a fully automatic machine gun today, I don’t want to give that impression – but it is certainly legal. And it’s always been legal,” Gutowski said in March, when Biden previously made this claim about machine guns.

    California, where Biden made this remark on Tuesday, has strict laws restricting machine guns, but there is a legal process even there to apply for a state permit to possess one.

    The ‘boyfriend loophole’

    In the Friday speech to the National Safer Communities Summit, Biden said “we fought like hell to close the so-called boyfriend loophole” that had allowed people convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence to buy and possess guns if the victim was not someone they were married to, living with or had a child with. Biden then said that now “we finally can say that those convicted of domestic violence abuse against their girlfriend or boyfriend cannot buy a firearm, period.”

    Facts First: Biden’s categorical claim that such offenders now “cannot buy a firearm, period” is an exaggeration, though Biden did sign a law in 2022 that made significant progress in closing the “boyfriend loophole.” That 2022 law added “dating” partners to the list of misdemeanor domestic violence offenders who are generally prohibited from gun purchases – but in a concession demanded by Republicans, the law says these offenders can buy a gun five years after their first conviction or completion of their sentence, whichever comes later, if they do not reoffend in the interim.

    It’s also worth noting that the law’s new restriction on dating partners applies only to people who committed the domestic violence against a someone with whom they were in or “recently” had been in a “continuing” and “serious” romantic or intimate relationship. In other words, it omits people whose offense was against partners from their past or someone they dated casually.

    Marium Durrani, vice president of policy at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said there are “definitely some gaps” in the law, “so it’s not a blanket end-all be-all,” but she said it is “really a step in the right direction.”

    Biden said at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Saturday: “Let me just say one thing very seriously. You know, I think this is the first time – and I’ve been around, as I said, a while – in history where, last week, every single environmental organization endorsed me.”

    Facts First: It’s not true that every single environmental organization had endorsed Biden. Four major environmental organizations did endorse him the week prior, the first time they had issued a joint endorsement, but other well-known environmental organizations have not yet endorsed in the presidential election.

    The four groups that endorsed Biden together in mid-June were the Sierra Club, NextGen PAC, and the campaign arms of the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council. That is not a complete list of every single environmental group in the country. For example, Environmental Defense Fund, The Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, Earthjustice and Greenpeace, in addition to some lesser-known groups, have not issued presidential endorsements to date.

    Biden’s claim of an endorsement from every environmental group comes amid frustration from some activists over his recent approvals of fossil fuel projects.

    In official speeches last Tuesday and last Wednesday and at a press conference the week prior, Biden claimed that Africa’s population would soon reach 1 billion. “You know, soon – soon, Africa will have 1 billion people,” he said last Wednesday.

    Facts First: This is false. Africa’s population exceeded 1 billion in 2009, according to United Nations figures; it is now more than 1.4 billion. Sub-Saharan Africa alone has a population of more than 1.1 billion.

    At a campaign fundraiser in Connecticut on Friday, Biden spoke about reading recent news articles about the use of renewable energy sources in Texas. He said, “I think it’s 70% of all their energy produced by solar and wind because it is significantly cheaper. Cheaper. Cheaper.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “70%” figure is not close to correct. The federal Energy Information Administration projected late last year that Texas would meet 37% of its electricity demand in 2023 with wind and solar power, up from 30% in 2022.

    Texas has indeed been a leader in renewable energy, particularly wind power, but the state is far from getting more than two-thirds of its energy from wind and solar alone. The organization that provides electricity to 90% of the state has a web page where you can see its current energy mix in real time; when we looked on Wednesday afternoon, during a heat wave, the mix included 15.8% solar, 10.2% wind and 6.6% nuclear, while 67.1% was natural gas or coal and lignite.

    In his Friday speech at the National Safer Communities Summit, Biden made a muddled claim about his past visits to Afghanistan and Iraq – saying that “you know, I spent a lot of time as president, and I spent 30-some times – visits – many more days in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim that he has visited Afghanistan and Iraq “30-some times” is false – the latest in a long-running series of exaggerations about his visits to the two countries. His presidential campaign said in 2019 that he made 21 visits to these countries, but he has since continued to put the figure in the 30s. And he has not visited either country “as president.”

    At another campaign fundraiser in California on Monday, Biden reprised a familiar claim about his travels with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who is, like him, a former vice president.

    “It wasn’t appropriate for Barack to be able to spend a lot of time getting to know him, so it was an assignment I was given. And I traveled 17,000 miles with him, usually one on one,” Biden said.

    Facts First: Biden’s “17,000 miles” claim remains false. Biden has not traveled anywhere close to 17,000 miles with Xi, though they have indeed spent lots of time together. This is one of Biden’s most common false claims as president, a figure he has repeated over and over in speeches despite numerous fact checks.

    Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted in 2021 that Biden and Xi often did not even travel parallel routes to their gatherings, let alone physically travel together. The only apparent way to get Biden’s mileage past 17,000, Kessler found, is to add the length of Biden’s flight journeys between Washington and Beijing, during which Xi was not with him.

    A White House official told CNN in early 2021 that Biden was adding up his “total travel back and forth” for meetings with Xi. But that is very different than traveling “with him” as Biden keeps saying, especially in the context of his boasts about how well he knows Xi. Biden has had more than enough time to make his language more precise.

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  • Trump legal team will look to challenge ‘every potential issue’ once indictment is unsealed | CNN Politics

    Trump legal team will look to challenge ‘every potential issue’ once indictment is unsealed | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Donald Trump’s legal team will look to challenge “every potential issue” in his indictment once the charges are unsealed, an attorney for the former president said Sunday.

    “We’re not doing anything at the arraignment because that would be showmanship and nothing more because we haven’t even seen the indictment yet. We will take the indictment, we will dissect it, the team will look at every – every – potential issue that we will be able to challenge and we will challenge it,” Joe Tacopina told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union.”

    Tacopina and other Trump lawyers have done several TV interviews in anticipation of the former President’s first appearance in court Tuesday, when he will learn the charges that the Manhattan grand jury has approved against him.

    At times, the lawyers have vowed to ask for the charges to be dismissed. But the full slate of charges still aren’t known. And crucially, a judge will ultimately determine if the law is sound enough for the case to move forward to trial.

    Former Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said in an interview with NBC News on Sunday, “We can speculate on what evidence we think they may or may not have, but even with the indictment published, we really will not know what the district attorney’s evidence is and what they would present at trial.”

    Vance’s team investigated the case but did not charge it, leaving it under the purview of his successor, Alvin Bragg.

    Trump faces more than 30 counts related to business fraud in the indictment. The investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office began when Trump was still in the White House and relates to a $130,000 payment made by his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen to adult film star Stormy Daniels in late October 2016, days before the presidential election, to silence her from going public about an alleged affair with Trump a decade earlier.

    Trump has denied the affair.

    The Trump team’s court strategy could center around challenging the case because it may rely on business record entries that prosecutors tie to hush money payments to Daniels seven years ago, beyond the statute of limitations for a criminal case.

    Tacopina suggested in TV interviews Sunday that the statute of limitations may be passed, and said the Trump businesses didn’t make false entries.

    “They’re not false entries. But assuming they were, they’re misdemeanors way beyond the statute of limitations, so they had to cobble them together to try and get a felony,” he said.

    Tacopina on Sunday also said a request to move the case to a different New York City borough isn’t on the table yet for Trump’s legal team.

    “There’s been no discussion of that whatsoever,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in another interview. “It’s way too premature to start worrying about venue changes until we really see the indictment and grapple with the legal issues.”

    CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct Cy Vance’s comments to NBC.

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  • Inside the furious week-long scramble to hunt down a massive Pentagon leak | CNN Politics

    Inside the furious week-long scramble to hunt down a massive Pentagon leak | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Jack Teixeira, wearing a green t-shirt and bright red gym shorts with his hands above his head, walked slowly backward toward the armed federal agents outside his home in North Dighton, Massachusetts, who took him into custody on charges of leaking classified documents.

    The carefully choreographed arrest of the 21-year-old Air National Guardsman stood in stark contrast to the Biden administration’s scramble one week earlier to deal with the fallout from the revelation that highly classified documents had been sitting publicly on the internet for weeks.

    Those leaked documents, which appeared to catch the Biden administration flat-footed, disclosed a blunt US intelligence assessment of the war in Ukraine, as well as details revealing US intelligence collection on allies.

    The Biden administration raced to determine the identity of the leaker who had posted pictures of folded-up documents online, to understand the full scope of what had been leaked and to soothe allies who were varying degrees of angry that their secrets had spilled out for the world to see.

    While the suspected leaker has been arrested, the administration’s damage assessment is still ongoing. It remains unclear whether the full extent of the impact of the leaks is known, as details from additional classified documents continued to be published throughout the week – even on Friday morning, the day after his arrest.

    Inside the Pentagon, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was “pissed” at the leak and “deeply concerned” about its national security implications, a US official told CNN. The Defense Department has been holding daily meetings on the leak since Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was first briefed last Thursday.

    The episode represents the most egregious disclosure of classified documents in years. The leaked documents have exposed what officials say are lingering vulnerabilities in the management of government secrets, even after agencies overhauled their computer systems following the 2013 Edward Snowden leak, which revealed the scope of the National Security Agency’s intelligence gathering apparatus.

    It is unlikely, however, that those safeguards would have prevented the most recent leak, sources said. “All classified systems have multiple levels of risk controls, but a determined insider will find the weak points over time,” said a former US official.

    The Pentagon has already taken steps to clamp down on who can access sensitive classified material, while Austin has ordered a review over access to classified documents. And Congress is vowing to investigate exactly what happened and why the US intelligence community failed to discover its secrets were sitting on a public internet forum for weeks.

    In a statement acknowledging the extent of the problem that the leaks exposed, President Joe Biden said Friday that he had directed both the military and intelligence community to “take steps to further secure and limit distribution of sensitive information.”

    “This is a breakdown,” Chris Krebs, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency, told CNN. “There’s no question that there will be a lot of introspection inside the intelligence community and across the government of where were those breakdowns? How do we ensure that we tighten that system of military discipline that that was referred to earlier to ensure that these things do not happen?”

    According to charging documents unsealed on Friday, Teixeira allegedly began posting classified information on the Discord server in December 2022.

    Teixeira is believed to be the head of obscure invite-only Discord chatroom called “Thug Shaker Central,” multiple US officials told CNN, where information from the classified documents was first posted.

    One of the users on the Discord server told FBI investigators that Teixeira began posting photographs of documents that appeared to be classified in January 2023, according to the affidavit unsealed Friday after Teixeira was arraigned.

    Investigators wrote in the affidavit that at least one of the documents that described the status of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, including troop movements, was classified at the TS-SCI level, meaning it contains top-secret, sensitive compartmentalized information.

    “The Government Document is based on sensitive U.S. intelligence, gathered through classified sources and methods, and contains national defense information,” the affidavit states.

    Teixeira, an airman first class stationed at Otis Air National Guard Base, was assigned to the 102nd Intelligence Wing, which is a “24/7 operational mission” that takes in intelligence from various sources and packages it into a product for some of the most senior military leaders around the globe, a defense official said.

    His job was not to be the one packaging the intelligence for those senior commanders, but rather to work on the network on which that highly classified intelligence lived. For that purpose, the official said Teixeira would be required to have a TS/SCI clearance, in the instance that he was exposed to that level of intelligence.

    “It’s not like your regular IT guy where you call a help desk and they come fix your computer,” the official said. “They’re working on a very highly classified system, so they require that clearance.”

    CNN has reviewed 53 documents that were posted on social media sites, which include US intelligence assessments of Ukrainian and Russian forces, as well as details about other countries providing weapons to Ukraine and other intelligence matters. The Washington Post has reported on an additional tranche of documents from the server.

    The photos showed crumpled documents laid on top of magazines and surrounded by other random objects, such as zip-close bags and Gorilla Glue, suggesting they had been hastily folded up and shoved into a pocket before being removed from a secure location.

    A Discord user told investigators that Teixeira had become concerned “he may be discovered making the transcriptions of text in the workplace, so he began taking the documents to his residence and photographing them,” according to the affidavit.

    Four Discord users active in a different Discord chatroom where the documents later appeared told CNN they began circulating on Thug Shaker. Another user who was in the Thug Shaker chatroom told CNN they saw the original posts of classified documents but declined to speak further about them.

    While the documents were being shared on Discord, there’s no indication that the US intelligence community was aware they were on the internet. Discord servers are typically small, private online communities that require an invitation to join.

    On April 6, The New York Times first reported on the leaked documents and the Pentagon having launched an investigation into who may have been behind the leak.

    The investigation into finding the leaker quickly moved into the hands of the Justice Department, while the Pentagon investigation focused on a damage assessment of the leaks themselves.

    But the number of leaked documents continued to grow in the hours and days that followed the initial disclosure, revealing new intelligence assessments on everything from South Korea’s hesitance to provide the US weapons that might be sent to Ukraine to intelligence suggesting Egypt planned to supply rockets to Russia.

    US diplomats were forced to deal with the fallout. Seoul said it would hold “necessary discussions with the US” following the leak.

    The documents that were leaked appear to be part of a daily intelligence briefing deck prepared for the Pentagon’s senior leaders, including Milley, the top US military general. On any given day, the slides in that deck can be properly accessed by hundreds, if not thousands, of people across the government, officials said.

    Last Friday’s announcement of a Justice Department investigation underscored just how high a priority the leak was considered.

    By Monday, FBI agents from Washington to California to Boston were combing through evidence, conducting interviews and tracking volumes of computer data that within days pointed to Teixeira. They worked with Army CID investigators experienced in classified document probes.

    Anthony Ferrante, a former FBI agent, said that the “first few hours are critical” in a case like the Discord leaks as investigators rush to preserve digital evidence before it becomes harder to find online or vanishes altogether.

    FBI agents likely worked backward from the initial Discord posts to build a profile of the leaker, combing through his other online accounts to “put a human behind a keyboard,” Ferrante, who is now global head of cybersecurity at FTI Consulting, told CNN.

    Even though Teixeira emerged quickly as the most obvious suspect, counterintelligence agents trained in uncovering foreign spies looked through Teixeira’s background to try to find any sign that he could be working with a foreign intelligence service.

    The FBI agents’ work was made more urgent because the trove of documents had set off a media frenzy and reporters found ready interviews among members of Teixeira’s Internet social circle.

    On Monday, the FBI interviewed a user of the Discord chatroom where the classified information had been posted, according to the affidavit. That person told investigators that a user who went by “Jack” and said he was in the Air National Guard was the server’s administrator.

    A day earlier, the investigative news outlet Bellingcat posted an interview with a member of that same chatroom.

    On Wednesday, a day before Teixeira’s arrest, the FBI obtained records from Discord that included the subscriber information of the server’s administrator, which had Teixeira’s name and address, according to the affidavit.

    By day 5 of the FBI’s search, agents believed they had enough to charge Teixeira, and they began surveilling him.

    In a different scenario, without the intense public attention, agents might have watched him for weeks to see if he was meeting anyone suspicious or if he had accomplices.

    Instead, they moved to make an arrest Thursday, as news helicopters flew above.

    Teixeira was charged under the Espionage Act with unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information and unauthorized removal of classified information and defense materials. He will next appear on Wednesday in federal court in Massachusetts.

    For the Biden administration, the episode has already prompted the Pentagon to begin to limit who across the government receives its highly classified daily intelligence briefs, amid lingering questions over why a 21-year-old junior Air National Guardsman had access to such classified information – and why it wasn’t discovered more quickly.

    Austin and Milley spent time on the phone speaking with US allies and partners around the world regarding the sensitive intelligence and top-secret documents suddenly thrust into the public sphere. Those conversations were expected to continue through the end of the week, another US official said.

    Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman was tapped to lead the diplomatic response to the leaked US intelligence documents, according to a US official familiar with the matter.

    Biden was continually briefed on the state of the investigation while abroad, as well as the efforts of his top officials to engage with allies over the leaked information, officials said. Behind the scenes, that effort was a reality that loomed over a deeply personal and important foreign trip for Biden, one official acknowledged. 

    Still, the leaks didn’t arise when Biden met Wednesday with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Five Eyes intelligence sharing ally.

    Biden publicly downplayed the significance of the leak when he made his first comments on the matter. “I’m concerned that it happened, but there is nothing contemporaneous that I’m aware of that is of great consequence,” Biden told reporters Thursday.

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  • Trump lawyers rail against DOJ in letter, reveal foreign leader briefings may be among classified documents taken from White House | CNN Politics

    Trump lawyers rail against DOJ in letter, reveal foreign leader briefings may be among classified documents taken from White House | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Two of Donald Trump’s defense lawyers now believe that classified briefings of phone calls with foreign leaders were among “all manner of documents” in 15 boxes that Trump returned to the National Archives a year after he left the presidency, according to a new letter his lawyers sent to Congress.

    This organization of the materials “indicates that the White House staff simply swept all documents from the President’s desk and other areas into boxes, where they have resided ever since,” the two lawyers, Timothy Parlatore and Jim Trusty, wrote to the GOP chair of the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.

    Their characterization not only reveals new details about the documents but also comes as part of a broadside against the Justice Department’s investigation into Trump over the classified documents that lays out talking points for Republicans as they try to portray the ongoing probe as politically motivated.

    The lawyers urge Congress to tell the Justice Department to “stand down,” even as special counsel Jack Smith’s probe has shown signs of nearing its end and even though Congress doesn’t have the power to control DOJ criminal investigations.

    Parlatore and Trusty say they reviewed the 15 boxes earlier this year that are now part of the Justice Department’s investigation. They saw placeholder pages where classified documents were removed by the National Archives, according to the letter.

    “The vast majority of the placeholder inserts refer to briefings for phone calls with foreign leaders that were located near the schedule for those calls,” the lawyers wrote.

    The 15 boxes were turned over to the Archives in January 2022. The FBI seized more boxes in August 2022 during a court-authorized search that found more than 100 classified documents, including 18 at the highest “top secret” classification level. Trump’s own legal team later found more classified materials in a search other locations.

    The Justice Department has never said exactly what was in the classified material found in Trump’s possession after the presidency. Trump’s lawyers say in their letter that the Justice Department has refused to tell them whether any of the documents remain classified.

    It’s not clear why at this point in the special counsel’s investigation that the Trump legal team was given access to the boxes turned over to the National Archives to look through them.

    Wednesday’s letter was sent to House Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner, and it represents Trump’s legal team seeking a political lifeline by asking Congress tell the Justice Department to step aside because they believe the intelligence community should conduct the investigation into what happened with the classified documents.

    “DOJ should be ordered to stand down, and the intelligence community should instead conduct an appropriate investigation and provide a full report to this Committee, as well as your counterparts in the Senate,” the lawyers wrote to Turner.

    “This is indicative of the staff’s packing processes and not any criminal intent by President Trump,” the lawyers argued.

    The lawyers also pointed to classified documents since discovered at the residences and offices of President Joe Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence.

    “As demonstrated by the discovery of documents with classification markings in the homes of President Trump, President Biden, and Vice President Pence, deficient document handling and storage procedures are not limited to any individual, administration, or political party,” the lawyers wrote.

    The intelligence community said in August following the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago that it was conducting its own damage assessment of the classified documents that had been retrieved.

    Earlier this month, intelligence leaders in Congress were provided access to some of the classified documents that had been taken from the residences and offices of Trump, Biden and Pence so that Congress could do its own review.

    Trump’s legal team sent Wednesday’s letter to Turner and copied other intelligence leaders in Congress, including the Democratic-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump’s allies have for years assailed the various probes into the former president, yet even his former attorney general, William Barr, has said the classified documents investigation puts the former president in serious legal jeopardy.

    In a February interview with CNN, Parlatore signaled Trump’s legal strategy, saying that DOJ should be “benched” on matters related to classified material and it should be left up to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to conduct an administrative review of the White House’s procedure for handling such documents at the end of each presidency.

    In Wednesday’s letter, Trump’s lawyers criticized the Justice Department’s handling of the case before the search of Mar-a-Lago, arguing that federal investigators put Trump on the defensive by issuing a grand jury subpoena instead of working cooperatively with Trump.

    The letter also tried to defend a certification made by one of Trump’s attorneys last year following the subpoena. In June 2022, the lawyer, Christina Bobb, signed a certification that Trump had complied with the subpoena by turning over the classified documents in his possession.

    “Ultimately, President Trump’s legal team complied with DOJ’s demands, performing as diligent a search as they could by Mr. (Jay) Bratt’s arbitrary deadline, and submitted a certification that affirmed the same,” the lawyers wrote in Wednesday’s letter.

    “To be clear, the certification stated that a diligent search was conducted, and all responsive documents found were provided — not that the search turned up all possible materials, as many media outlets have falsely characterized the certification as saying,” they added.

    The certification that Bobb signed, however, states that “any and all responsive documents accompany this certification.” Trump did not, however, turn over all classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

    Bobb has since testified to the grand jury, and another attorney who worked on the draft response to the subpoena, Evan Corcoran, was recently forced to testify to the federal grand jury about the response and other discussions with Trump, after prosecutors believed Trump used his attorney to advance a crime.

    Wednesday’s letter also did not note that the FBI’s August 2022 search warrant came after federal investigators were told that Trump directed the movement of boxes from a basement storage room to his residence at Mar-a-Lago following receipt of the subpoena.

    This story has been updated to reflect additional lawmakers copied on the letter from Trump’s lawyers.

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  • Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

    Thousands of Afghans escaped the Taliban with the help of private veteran groups. Today, many remain in limbo, held in a compound in the UAE | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    About 2,100 Afghan refugees remain held in a sprawling compound in the United Arab Emirates more than 18 months after they were evacuated from Afghanistan largely by private groups working with the State Department.

    They are what’s left of as many as 20,000 Afghans who were hastily relocated to the camp during the chaotic weeks surrounding the US withdrawal after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Several thousand were brought there by the State Department directly from Kabul and have since been relocated to the US or Canada.

    But thousands more, including those still stuck in the UAE, were evacuated weeks later, and sometimes from hundreds of miles away from Kabul, by private groups working to get as many out of Afghanistan as possible.

    Sources familiar with the matter told CNN that the private evacuation efforts, though well-intentioned, contributed at times to an already chaotic situation – though they also say that the frenzy of the withdrawal created unclear communication and expectations.

    Consequently, thousands of Afghans evacuated by private groups were left in a legal limbo with seemingly no clear path to the US – or anywhere else. And though the effort to resettle them has picked up in recent months, refugees inside the compound known as Emirates Humanitarian City, or EHC, are restless after almost two years of waiting inside a camp they are barred from leaving.

    Without a visa, they’re not allowed inside the country.

    When they first arrived in the UAE in August 2021, Afghan evacuees were housed across dozens of buildings in the gated compound. Afghans were separated in rooms with their families across multi-level buildings divided by a common outdoor space.

    They were supposed to be there for a few days. But that’s now approaching two years for the more than 2,000 people who remain there. The State Department says it continues to process refugees out of EHC “on an ongoing basis.” One American Marine veteran closely involved said that a family or two leave each week, bound mostly for the US and Canada, as well as Australia, with some scattered across Europe.

    At that pace it could still take more than a year to empty out the entire population of evacuees who remain at the compound.

    Their plight has gained recent attention from human rights groups, who say the refugees are being held arbitrarily by the UAE and have been subject to a host of abuses, including poor medical care and being held in “prison-like” conditions.

    A report put out by Human Rights Watch in March said Afghan asylum seekers have been “locked up for over 15 months in cramped, miserable conditions with no hope of progress on their cases” and are “facing further trauma now, after spending well over a year in limbo.”

    In a statement to CNN, a UAE official said the refugees at EHC have “received a comprehensive range of high-quality housing, sanitation, health, clinical, counseling, education, and food services to ensure their welfare.”

    The official said the UAE “continues to do everything it can to bring this extraordinary exercise in humanitarian resettlement to a satisfactory conclusion. We understand that there are frustrations and this has taken longer than intended to complete.”

    “The UAE remains committed to this ongoing cooperation with the US and other international partners to ensure that Afghan evacuees can live in safety, security, and dignity,” the official added.

    Allegations similar to those raised by the HRW report were described in an appeal to the United Nations submitted last fall by an independent American attorney, who alleged “widespread human rights abuses,” including inadequate health and mental health care, “constant” surveillance and “restricted access” to government officials working their cases.

    In a statement to CNN, Mara Tekach, State Department coordinator for Afghan relocation efforts, said that while the department is aware of the Human Rights Watch report, the US government “is not aware of any verified allegations of human rights violations at EHC.”

    CNN has not independently verified those allegations.

    One refugee still stuck at EHC who spoke to CNN described extreme frustration over a seemingly hopeless situation. The man, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of safety concerns, said he worries about the effect the ordeal is having on his young daughter.

    “My daughter, from months ago until now, sometime when she starts talking, I can feel the pain in her voice,” he said.

    The man showed CNN what appeared to be documentation that he was recommended for a Special Immigrant Visa by a US contractor with whom he worked in Afghanistan for almost two years. It was unclear whether that documentation is sufficient for what the State Department has required. He told CNN his daughter is growing anxious to leave.

    “She says, ‘You have [taken] me somewhere that I cannot see anywhere, I cannot go outside,’” the man said. “She’s asking me every time, frequently, ‘When are we going to get out of here?’”

    During the chaotic weeks of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, thousands of American military veterans rushed to help evacuate as many Afghans as possible.

    Among them was US Marine veteran Pete Lucier, who worked with a coalition of veterans’ groups known collectively as the #AfghanEvac coalition. Lucier said he is proud of much of the work that veteran and civilian volunteers did in helping Afghans flee the Taliban, which has since reinstated many of the draconian laws it had in place before the US and allied forces invaded after 9/11.

    Afghans crowd at the tarmac of the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, to flee the Taliban which had gained control of Afghanistan

    Still, Lucier admitted there have been shortcomings, telling CNN that even well-intentioned veterans’ groups and individuals ended up “sometimes, unfortunately, making things worse for vulnerable and at-risk people.”

    Many of the individuals involved in evacuating Afghans had a “lack of familiarity with international law and the requirements of international travel,” Lucier said. “Broadly, I think EHC represents and embodies many of those challenges.”

    Dina Haynes, an international human rights lawyer and a professor at New England Law school in Boston, echoed those thoughts, saying that what has happened at EHC is “not a surprise at all to anybody who has paid attention” to the US immigration system.

    “The only people that it was a surprise to were those new people that showed up thinking that they could fly people out and land them somewhere and get the US government to help,” Haynes said.

    EHC is one of a few locations around the world where evacuated Afghans are still waiting to be processed for visas to the US or elsewhere. There are Afghans in Albania and Pakistan who were relocated there by private groups, as well as Afghans who were evacuated by the US government and are still being processed at Camp As-Sayliyah in Doha, Qatar, according to the State Department.

    Operated and funded by the UAE government, the EHC compound was first built in Abu Dhabi’s industrial Mussafah area to receive quarantine evacuees stranded in China following the outbreak of Covid-19 in 2020. After the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, thousands were evacuated to the compound as part of a wider regional humanitarian call to assist.

    That was in part due to an agreement made in August 2021 between UAE officials and Joseph Robert III, a former US Marine and son of a wealthy real estate investor with connections in the country.

    Robert’s group, the Black Feather Foundation, joined the #AfghanEvac coalition made up of roughly 200 nonprofits in November 2021. Robert told CNN that relationships with UAE officials who were close with his late father helped secure the agreement to bring Afghans to UAE, sealed by a memorandum of understanding, which, according to Robert, stated that the UAE would receive and temporarily house Afghan refugees until they were able to move on to a third country.

    The EHC compound was not specifically part of the agreement, Robert told CNN, but was chosen by the UAE because of its capacity.

    This undated photo from the Emirates News Agency, the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates, shows the Emirates Humanitarian City in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

    CNN visited the compound in August 2021, during the first days when Afghans were arriving. Afghans awaiting security and medical screenings were kept in assigned rooms until they were called for processing.

    UAE officials and US embassy personnel were present at the main center at EHC, where dozens of Afghan men and women sat awaiting information on their next destination. It was not immediately clear who was processing information from the evacuees.

    Robert said he has seen no signs of the alleged abuse taking place at EHC, which, he said, he visits every few weeks. He blames the US for not swiftly processing people out of EHC despite originally taking advantage of the extra hands that brought them there.

    “The US government was using us at every turn when it benefited them,” Robert said. “And then when it came time to do the work on the back end, to process them out, they tried to leave us high and dry.”

    Before going to Afghanistan in August 2021, Robert said he first flew to the UAE, where he had several meetings with officials about lining up commitments to take in refugees, as well as provide planes. When he finally landed at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan on August 20, 2021, things began to change immediately.

    “It became just an on-the-fly, ad hoc assistance operation,” Robert said, adding that, suddenly, “our planes were being loaded with just people from the airport that the US would have evacuated.”

    Afghan refugees arrived at EHC in three distinct groups. The first two groups were evacuated from the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul in August 2021 by both the State Department and private groups working independently. The third group of Afghans were brought to EHC over the next two months by private groups, including Robert’s Black Feather Foundation, from Mazar-i-Sharif, a city roughly 260 miles from Kabul.

    The EHC resident who spoke to CNN said he was flown out of Mazar-i-Sharif with his family after attempting to get through crowds of people at the Kabul airport during the evacuation in August 2021. Despite concerns about traveling from Kabul, especially with the possibility of running into the Taliban on the way, the resident said he thought it might his best chance “to get myself and my family out of the danger zone.”

    Afghans climb atop a plane as they wait at the Kabul airport on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan's 20-year war, as thousands of people mobbed the city's airport trying to flee the group's feared hardline brand of Islamist rule.

    Robert told CNN the manifests for those flights were submitted by other organizations either directly to him or through other members of his team. Robert said he then submitted the manifests to the UAE government, which ran them through its own security systems.

    It is almost entirely this group of people – those evacuated after August 2021 – that remains stuck at EHC, both the State Department and Robert said. In her responses to CNN, Tekach said the State Department “had limited information” about refugees who came on those separate flights. She also emphasized that that the place where people were evacuated from “is not a determining factor as to whether” they qualify for relocation and resettlement.

    Toward the end of October 2021, Robert said it was clear to him that the State Department was “not going to continue processing” any more people brought to the UAE since the evacuation had ended.

    “That’s where things with State Department started to unravel,” he said. “They processed only those that came on their aircraft, not even the ones that came on our aircraft alongside theirs during the [noncombatant evacuation]. As one State Department official told me, ‘Not our plane, not our problem.’”

    Tekach told CNN that the State Department paused processing in November 2021 “in support of US public health priorities” and began relocating individuals in March 2022.

    Still, Lucier told CNN that the US government and State Department likely were not clear enough in their communication about what private organizations could or could not do, leading to much of the confusion and at-times chaotic interference that occurred.

    Robert expressed frustration over security concerns the State Department has raised about the Afghans at EHC, saying that for the most part the evacuees are “able to provide everything they needed” in terms of paperwork and documents, including reference letters from US employers while in Afghanistan.

    While he acknowledged that there were shortcomings and mistakes made in the broader evacuation effort by private groups, Robert also said that was in part due to a “US government plan that was nonexistent.”

    All in all, Robert said volunteers were still able to evacuate “tens of thousands of individuals, despite the US government’s inability to appropriately evacuate them in the first place.”

    Joe Robert, lower left, sitting at EHC with Aziz, an interpreter, kicked off a group effort of US veterans to help evacuate Afghans to the UAE.

    Asked how many State Department officials have access to EHC and how frequently they are at the compound working to process people out, the State Deaprtment’s Tekach said US officials have access to the compound “for a number of purposes, including gathering information to work on case processing and to support the well-being of the Afghan population at the facility.”

    Robert said that over the past six months, an average of three to five State Department personnel have come to EHC twice a week. After early frictions, Robert said his relationship with US government personnel who deal with EHC is “in a much better place now.”

    Despite the delays, Robert said they’re slowly making progress in resettling the Afghans still at EHC.

    “Having 20,000 people pass through the walls of EHC, and we’re down to the last 2,000 – that’s a rather remarkable effort, although things didn’t go as smoothly as we’d planned or hoped,” he said.

    “Even though everyone wants it to be faster, things are moving at a rather steady and consistent pace, and everyone’s still actively doing everything they can to find suitable pathways for people and accommodate families, and find other opportunities if a previous one falls through. Everyone is working tremendously hard to do what is right by these people,” Robert said.

    As the US and others work to process Afghans out, Human Rights Watch is still trying to bring attention to their plight.

    “They’re still in this facility, which was never designed to hold people for this long,” said Joey Shea, the lead researcher on HRW’s recent report. “And they’ve been effectively imprisoned after an extremely traumatic experience of fleeing a Taliban takeover.”

    Shea said the clearest solution is through the US government.

    “There just needs to be more resources put by the US government to make sure that these asylum and humanitarian parole and other applications are processed quickly,” she said.

    At EHC, the current resident who spoke to CNN described how happy he was to have been evacuated from Afghanistan in 2021. Aside from marrying “the love of my life” and having children, he said that leaving Afghanistan was “the best day of my life.”

    “When the plane took off, I couldn’t fit in my own skin because of the happiness that I had,” he said emotionally. “This is a new life that I began to live with my family. I was happy and proud I could do something for my wife, my kids.”

    The recommendation letter he received from his US employer says he is “completely trustworthy, intelligent, and a faithful employee” and the “kind of person who will make a valuable contribution and service to the US, if allowed to immigrate.”

    But the longer he and his family languish at EHC, he said, the harder it is to explain his work with the US.

    “‘What will happen to us? Why are we abandoned by the US?’” he said his wife asks him. “My wife tells me that maybe it was not right that you worked for the US government.”

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  • Disney rocks DeSantis ahead of expected White House bid announcement | CNN Politics

    Disney rocks DeSantis ahead of expected White House bid announcement | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    “DeSantisland” was likely not the happiest place on Earth on Thursday.

    As Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis gears up for an expected jump into the 2024 presidential race next week, his powerful adversary, Disney, trampled his pre-launch buzz by scratching a $1 billion plan for an office campus that could have brought 2,000 jobs to the state.

    The move was the latest twist in a bitter feud between DeSantis and one of the most important corporations operating in the Sunshine State, rooted in a political collision over the Republican governor’s hardline conservative ideology that will become his pitch to GOP primary voters. And it raises the question of whether Floridians are paying a big price for his political ambitions.

    Disney’s power play showed that CEO Bob Iger wasn’t bluffing when he asked whether Florida wanted the firm to “invest more, employ more people, and pay more taxes” last week. The timing of the Thursday announcement seemed calculated to damage the governor ahead of the most important week of his political career to date, when he is expected to soft launch his White House bid and make the all-important sell to fundraising bundlers. Disney did not specifically blame DeSantis for the move, partly citing “changing business conditions.” But the message was clear.

    “When you are involved in a situation like this, it doesn’t happen very often that events like this are random or coincidental,” said Mark Johnston, a professor of marketing and ethics at the Crummer School of Business at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

    Disney’s latest swipe at DeSantis set off multiple political reverberations. It offered a huge opening for ex-President Donald Trump and other Republican primary candidates to argue DeSantis is blundering through an ill-conceived battle with the corporate giant and to accuse him of squandering jobs and business in pursuit of higher office.

    Trump’s campaign gleefully declared that DeSantis got “caught in the Mouse Trap,” after predicting weeks ago that the governor would lose his face-off with Mickey Mouse. (In that same statement, the campaign claimed the GOP front-runner, while in office, was known as the “job’s President.”)

    The fact that some of the new jobs in the Disney project were expected to be transferred from California also undercut a narrative central to the DeSantis platform that businesses and citizens are fleeing liberal areas for a dynamic state dubbed “DeSantisland” by his supporters and which he calls “the free state of Florida.”

    More fundamentally, the latest sign DeSantis was outmaneuvered by Disney threatens to highlight damaging perceptions Trump and other critics are seeking to sow about his candidacy – that despite his thumping reelection win in November, DeSantis lacks basic political skills and strategic nous. This theme has been gathering steam following a series of missteps by DeSantis – who for months was seen as a severe threat to Trump – as he prepped his campaign. His collision with Disney also calls into question whether the bullying persona that the governor adopted to appeal to the conservative base is grounded in reality.

    In other words, has DeSantis picked an enemy – that after decades of mastering societal currents and protecting its image in the courts – is tougher and better at politics than he is? If so, what might this augur for his capacity to thrive in a coming clash with a candidate who is as feral as Trump?

    In a series of moves over the last year, DeSantis created the “Mouse trap” for himself. He recently slammed Disney during a visit to South Carolina, a key primary state and declaring: “They may have run Florida for 50 years before I got on the scene, but they don’t run Florida anymore.”

    The dispute between the governor and Disney dates back to the firm’s objections to legislation that DeSantis signed last spring that restricted the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity for kindergarten through third grade, dubbed by critics as the “Don’t Say Gay bill.” The measure is part of his targeting of cultural issues and his campaign against “woke” diversity, equity and inclusion policies. The strategy is calculated to appeal to conservatives who believe America’s traditional values are under attack from a more diverse and inclusive society. But the governor’s clash with Disney – a huge firm that appeals to millions of mainstream Americans and has sought to become more inclusive in recent years – could hint at difficulties DeSantis might have in selling such policies toward more moderate voters in a general election.

    DeSantis claimed in his recently published autobiography that Disney had been pressured by “leftist activists” to take a position that alienated Floridians, including parents and children, and that had nothing to do with its core business. He justified his subsequent effort to take control of a special tax district that gave Disney wide autonomy by saying that it had ceased to act in the interests of Florida. “The Walt Disney Company had decided to bite the hand that had fed it for more than fifty years,” he wrote.

    Disney, in response to the governor’s moves, has accused DeSantis of infringing its right to free speech and has launched a lawsuit that could shadow his presidential campaign.

    In keeping with his bruising political persona, DeSantis reacted defiantly to Disney’s announcement that it would halt the office project. Jeremy T. Redfern, a spokesman for his office said, “Disney announced the possibility of a Lake Nona campus nearly two years ago. Nothing ever came of the project, and the state was unsure whether it would come to fruition.” Redfern also took a swipe at the entertainment empire: “Given the company’s financial straits, falling market cap and declining stock price, it is unsurprising that they would restructure their business operations and cancel unsuccessful ventures.”

    Whatever the economic backdrop of this dispute, it has enormous political implications, as could be seen from the swift reactions of some his potential GOP primary rivals.

    Trump’s camp issued several statements, including one that crowed that “President Trump is always right,” and recirculated his previous prediction that DeSantis would be “absolutely destroyed by Disney.” The situation is a win-win for Trump: It allows him to portray DeSantis as weak and politically naive and also to take shots at an impressive economic and political record in Florida the governor is using as a bedrock of his campaign. Trump has long styled himself as a famed dealmaker, and while this persona may not be justified by his years of questionable investments and business failures, it remains a powerful one among GOP primary voters, and could help him drive home his attacks on the DeSantis business record.

    “Ron DeSantis’ failed war on Disney has done little for his limping shadow campaign and now is doing even less for Florida’s economy,” the Trump campaign said in a statement.

    Another possible GOP primary candidate, former Vice President Mike Pence, also leveraged the Disney announcement to jab DeSantis. He argued the governor should have simply taken the win in the legislature over the teaching of gender issues in schools.

    “I like Walt Disney, not woke Disney,” Pence said on Fox Business. “I just don’t believe it’s in the interests of the people of any state for a government to essentially go after a business that they disagreed with on a political issue.”

    Democrats also weighed in, foreshadowing general election attacks they could make against DeSantis should he win the Republican nomination.

    “Gov DeSantis is more interested in running for President than running the state of Florida” and is trying to “out-Trump Trump” in the GOP primary, Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on the “Situation Room.”

    “And now the people of Florida are paying the price,” he said.

    Given his political exposure on Disney and the combative political image that is central to his White House hopes, DeSantis probably has no option but to further escalate the showdown.

    “He wants Republicans to know that ‘I am not going to give in just because somebody clamored for it, because the winds changed,’” said Scott Jennings, a veteran of the George W. Bush White House and a CNN political commentator.

    So the feud with Disney is unlikely to end while DeSantis is a presidential candidate, even though it may eventually end up hurting both the well-known entertainment giant and the state that hosts Disney World – and that he calls home.

    “I think that there’s a growing sense that – how does this end in a positive way?” said Johnston, the Rollins College professor. “It’s not Disney needs to lose and the state needs to win or vice versa. It’s how do we do this so that both sides can walk away from this and we can go back to having a great relationship between Disney and the state of Florida.”

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  • George W. Bush Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    George W. Bush Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of George W. Bush, the 43rd president of the United States.

    Birth date: July 6, 1946

    Birth place: New Haven, Connecticut

    Birth name: George Walker Bush

    Father: George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States

    Mother: Barbara (Pierce) Bush

    Marriage: Laura (Welch) Bush (November 5, 1977-present)

    Children: Barbara and Jenna (November 25, 1981)

    Education: Yale University, B.A., 1968; Harvard Business School, M.B.A., 1975

    Military: Texas Air National Guard, F-102 fighter pilot, 1968-1970

    Religion: Methodist

    After John Quincy Adams, George W. Bush is the second president to be the son of a previous president.

    His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a US senator from Connecticut. His younger brother, Jeb Bush, served as the governor of Florida and ran for president in 2016.

    His interests include oil painting, golf, bicycling and baseball.

    1968-1970 – Pilot, Texas Air National Guard.

    1977-1986 – Founder/CEO of Arbusto Energy, an oil exploration firm. In 1982, the name is changed to Bush Exploration.

    1978 – Runs for an open seat in the House of Representatives and loses to his Democratic challenger, Kent Hance.

    1984 – Bush Exploration merges with Spectrum 7 Energy Corp. Bush is named CEO of the new company.

    1986 – Harken Energy Corporation purchases Spectrum 7 and Bush is appointed to Harken’s board of directors.

    1988 – Works on his father’s presidential campaign.

    1989 – Along with a group of partners, purchases the Texas Rangers baseball franchise.

    1989-1994 – Managing general partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team.

    1994-2000 – Governor of Texas.

    November 3, 1998 – Is elected to a second term as governor of Texas with 68.8% of the vote. He is the first governor in Texas history to be elected to consecutive four-year terms.

    March 7, 1999 – Announces he has formed a presidential exploratory committee.

    November 7, 2000 – The US presidential election takes place, but is too close to call.

    November 17, 2000 – The Florida Supreme Court blocks certification of the statewide ballot after an appeal is filed by lawyers for Vice President Al Gore.

    December 8, 2000 – A statewide recount is ordered by the Florida Supreme Court of thousands of questionable ballots.

    December 12, 2000 – In the case, Bush v. Gore, the US Supreme Court reverses the Florida Supreme Court’s ruling and suspends the state’s recount. The 5-4 decision paves the way for Bush to be sworn in as president, even though he lost the popular vote.

    December 13, 2000 – Gore concedes.

    January 20, 2001 – Bush is sworn in as the 43rd president of the United States.

    September 11, 2001 – During a morning visit to an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, Bush is told that two planes have flown into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack. He leaves the school and boards Air Force One as aides fear for his safety.

    September 12, 2001 – Visits the Pentagon.

    September 14, 2001 – Visits Ground Zero and gives a speech to firemen, police and other rescue workers.

    January 29, 2002 – In the State of the Union address, he refers to North Korea, Iraq and Iran as “an axis of evil.”

    March 17, 2003 – Says that Saddam Hussein has 48 hours to leave Iraq to avoid war.

    March 19, 2003 – In a televised address, says that military operations have begun in Iraq.

    May 1, 2003 – Lands on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, decorated with a “Mission Accomplished” banner, and declares major combat operations in Iraq are over.

    September 23, 2003 – Addresses the United Nations on Iraq, Afghanistan and weapons of mass destruction.

    November 27, 2003 – Bush surprises US troops in Baghdad by joining them for Thanksgiving dinner. It is the first trip to Iraq by a US president.

    December 14, 2003 – In a televised address, discusses the capture of Saddam Hussein.

    March 9, 2004 – Secures the GOP nomination for president after winning primaries in four states.

    November 2, 2004 – Wins reelection over Democratic candidate John Kerry.

    January 20, 2005 – Sworn is for a second term.

    April 8, 2005 – Bush along with Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush attend the funeral for Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square.

    March 1, 2006 – Bush and wife Laura make a surprise visit to US troops in Afghanistan. The president also meets with President Hamid Karzai.

    June 13, 2006 – Bush makes a surprise visit to Iraq, meeting with new Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and with American troops stationed in Baghdad.

    June 9, 2007 – Meets Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican.

    November 9, 2010 – Bush’s memoir, “Decision Points,” is published.

    November 14, 2010 – A special “State of the Union with Candy Crowley” airs featuring a joint interview with Bush and his brother, Jeb.

    November 16, 2010 – Attends the groundbreaking ceremony of George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum at Southern Methodist University.

    September 11, 2011 – Participates in a memorial at Ground Zero to mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks.

    May 31, 2012 – Bush’s official White House portrait is unveiled.

    April 25, 2013 – Dedication ceremony of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. All five living presidents attend.

    August 2013 – Undergoes a procedure to treat a blocked artery.

    November 11, 2014 – “41: A Portrait of My Father,” a biography written by Bush, is published.

    February 28, 2017 – A book of Bush’s paintings, “Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors” is published.

    April 20, 2021 – A book of Bush’s paintings, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants” is published.

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  • Supreme Court limits federal prisoners’ ability to bring some post-conviction challenges | CNN Politics

    Supreme Court limits federal prisoners’ ability to bring some post-conviction challenges | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the conviction of a federal prisoner who argued he should be able to challenge his 27-year sentence for firearms possession based on changes in the law since his trial.

    The court’s decision will make it harder for federal prisoners to bring certain types of post-conviction challenges.

    Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the 6-3 opinion in the case. The three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

    “Because of how Justice Thomas and the other conservative justices read the relevant statutes and the Constitution, there will now be a significant number of federal prisoners who are unable to bring potentially meritorious collateral challenges to their convictions and sentences once their direct appeal has ended,” said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law.

    Marcus Jones was convicted in 2000 of two counts as a felon in possession of a firearm and one count of making false statements to acquire a firearm. At trial, he said he knew he had previously been convicted of a felony, but he thought his record had been wiped clean. Nevertheless, the jury was not told that it had to find that Jones knew he was a convicted felon. Eventually, he was sentenced to 327 months for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon and 60 months for making false statements.

    In 2002, he went back to court and filed what is called a 2255 motion meant to challenge his original conviction, but he lost.

    Seventeen years later, in a case called Rehaif v. United States, the Supreme Court narrowed the felon in possession statute. The court held that the government has to prove the defendant knew he was still a felon at the time of his new offense in order to convict him.

    Jones appealed in federal court hoping to wipe away his felon in possession of a firearm conviction. He cited the Rehaif decision in his petition, noting that the Supreme Court had changed the rules. Lower courts ruled against him.

    In Thursday’s opinion, the court ruled against him as well, holding that under 2255 there are limited conditions in which Congress has permitted federal prisoners to bring second or successive collateral attacks on their sentences.

    “The inability of a prisoner with a statutory claim to satisfy those conditions does not mean that he can bring his claim in a habeas petition under the savings clause,” Thomas wrote in his majority opinion.

    “It means he cannot bring it at all. Congress has chosen finality over error correction in his case,” he said.

    Sotomayor and Kagan, in a jointly written dissent, argued that the majority opinion “yields disturbing results.”

    A prisoner who is “actually innocent, imprisoned for conduct that Congress did not criminalize” is forever barred from raising that claim “merely because he previously sought postconviction relief,” they wrote.

    Jackson filed her own dissent. She said that because the Rehaif case “changed the scope of a criminal statute” it should apply “retroactively to individuals (like Jones) whose conviction had become final at the time it was issued.”

    She wrote that she was also “deeply troubled by the constitutional implications of the noting-to-see here approach that the majority takes with respect to the incarceration of potential legal innocents.”

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Koch network raises more than $70 million, launches new anti-Trump ads in early voting states | CNN Politics

    Koch network raises more than $70 million, launches new anti-Trump ads in early voting states | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The influential network associated with conservative billionaire Charles Koch has collected more than $70 million for political races, the group announced Thursday, as it gears up to help shape the outcome of next year’s contests up and down the ballot and encourage Republican voters to bypass former President Donald Trump in the White House nomination fight.

    Americans for Prosperity Action has pledged to back a single contender in the GOP presidential primary for the first time in its history. It has not yet announced whom it will support, but the group could dramatically reshape the Republican field by deploying its vast resources and standing army of conservative activists on behalf of a single candidate.

    The sums raised by the group will help advance those efforts. The lion’s share of the total announced Thursday came from two organizations affiliated with Koch: $25 million from his Kansas-based industrial conglomerate Koch Industries, and another $25 million from Stand Together, a nonprofit he founded, AFP Action spokesman Bill Riggs confirmed.

    The New York Times first reported the fundraising total.

    The group is also launching new digital spots, shared first with CNN, that cast Trump as a candidate Republicans can’t risk supporting in 2024.

    “Instead of making (President Joe) Biden answer for his reckless progressive agenda, Trump makes the debate about indictments, personal grievances and the election he lost,” one 30-second spot, titled “The Choice,” says.

    The second, called “Unelectable,” describes Trump as a serial loser who caused Republicans to lose the House, Senate and the White House. “If Donald Trump is the GOP nominee, we could lose everything,” the narrator says.

    The ads will run in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, officials said.

    “President Trump continues to fight against the swampy D.C. insiders who would love nothing more than to have an establishment puppet they can control in the White House,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in an email. “No amount of dirty money from shady lobbyists and mysterious donors will ever stop the America First movement, and that’s why President Trump continues to dominate poll after poll — both nationally and statewide. We welcome this fight.”

    AFP Action on Thursday also announced its first US House endorsements of the cycle, saying it will back Republican Reps. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Young Kim of California, Zach Nunn of Iowa and John James of Michigan, along with former GOP Rep. Yvette Herrell of New Mexico.

    In addition to attempting to stir doubts about Trump among the GOP faithful, network officials have said part of their 2024 strategy is to bring more general election voters into the GOP primary process to alter the outcome of early contests.

    Americans for Prosperity already has reached out to 1.4 million potential new Republican and swing voters in nearly a dozen states, officials said.

    In a statement to CNN earlier this month, Americans for Prosperity CEO Emily Seidel said the group’s voter interactions have demonstrated to it that many Trump supporters are “receptive to arguments that he is a weak candidate, his focus on 2020 is a liability, and his lack of appeal with independent voters is a problem.”

    “That tells us that many Republicans are ready to move on, they just need to see another candidate step up and show they can lead and win,” she added.

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  • China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

    China-based hackers breached US government email accounts, Microsoft and White House say | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    China-based hackers have breached email accounts at two-dozen organizations, including some United States government agencies, in an apparent spying campaign aimed at acquiring sensitive information, according to statements from Microsoft and the White House late Tuesday.

    The full scope of the hack is being investigated, but US officials and Microsoft have been quietly scrambling in recent weeks to assess the impact of the hack, which targeted unclassified email systems, and contain the fallout.

    The federal agency where the Chinese hackers were first detected was the State Department, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. The State Department then reported the suspicious activity to Microsoft, the person said.

    The Department of Commerce, which has sanctioned Chinese telecom firms, was also breached. The hackers accessed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s email account, one source familiar with the investigation told CNN. The Washington Post first reported on the access of the secretary’s account.

    The Chinese hackers were detected targeting a small number of federal agencies and just a handful of officials’ email accounts at each agency in a hack aimed at specific officials, multiple sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.

    “Microsoft notified the (Commerce) Department of a compromise to Microsoft’s Office 365 system, and the Department took immediate action to respond,” a department spokesperson said in a statement on Wednesday.

    The spokesperson did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the targeting of Raimondo’s email account.

    The hackers targeted email accounts at the House of Representatives, but it was unclear who was targeted and if the breach attempts were successful, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

    The breaches add to what is already one of the steepest cybersecurity challenges facing the Biden administration: limiting the ability of Beijing’s formidable hacking teams to access US government and corporate secrets.

    “Last month, US government safeguards identified an intrusion in Microsoft’s cloud security, which affected unclassified systems,” National Security Council spokesperson Adam Hodge said in a statement to CNN.

    “Officials immediately contacted Microsoft to find the source and vulnerability in their cloud service,” Hodge said. “We continue to hold the procurement providers of the US Government to a high security threshold.”

    The State Department “detected anomalous activity, took immediate steps to secure our systems, and will continue to closely monitor and quickly respond to any further activity,” a department spokesperson said on Wednesday.

    US Capitol Police declined to comment, referring CNN to the FBI.

    Hodge did not identify who was behind the hack, but Microsoft executives said in a blog post that the hackers were based in China and focused on espionage.

    In response to the Microsoft and White House statements, the Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday accused Washington of conducting its own hacking operations.

    US officials have consistently labeled China as the most advanced of US adversaries in cyberspace, a domain that has repeatedly been a source of bilateral tension in recent years. The FBI has said Beijing has a larger hacking program than all other governments combined.

    China has routinely denied the allegations.

    The hacking began in mid-May, when the China-based hackers used a stolen sign-in key to burrow their way into email accounts, according to Microsoft. The tech giant has since blocked the hackers from accessing customer emails using that technique, Microsoft said late Tuesday.

    Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited China in mid-June, but it was not immediately clear if the cyber-espionage campaign was connected to that high-stakes visit.

    Some US officials credited the State Department with investing in more cyber-defense capabilities, allowing the agency to detect the suspicious activity earlier than in past advanced hacks.

    The number of US organizations, public or private, impacted by the hacking campaign is in the “single digits,” a senior US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency official told reporters on Wednesday.

    “This appears to have been a very targeted, surgical campaign,” the official said.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Justice Department asks Supreme Court to reverse ruling striking down bump stock ban | CNN Politics

    Justice Department asks Supreme Court to reverse ruling striking down bump stock ban | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    The Justice Department on Friday asked the Supreme Court to take up an appeals court ruling that struck down a Trump-era federal ban on so-called bump stocks.

    The request comes as the high court has repeatedly declined to disturb those rulings that favor the restriction on the device, including not considering a challenge to the federal ban in October. Bump stocks are attachments that essentially allow shooters to fire semiautomatic rifles continuously with one pull of the trigger.

    “Like other machineguns, rifles modified with bump stocks are exceedingly dangerous; Congress prohibited the possession of such weapons for good reason.” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the new filing with the Supreme Court. “The decision below contradicts the best interpretation of the statute, creates an acknowledged circuit conflict, and threatens significant harm to public safety.”

    The January appellate court ruling concluded that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, ATF, did not have the authority to classify the devices as machine guns, a classification that had effectively banned them. But in the new filing, the Justice Department argued that prior to the ruling, three other appeals courts had upheld the bump stock regulation.

    In 2018, the ATF classified the devices as machine guns under the National Firearms Act after then-President Donald Trump ordered a review of bump stocks – which were used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting a few months prior.

    But the appellate majority in January argued that bump stocks were not covered by the law.

    “A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machinegun’ set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority’s opinion.

    In 2010, the ATF had determined that bump stocks were merely accessories, or firearms parts – and therefore not regulated as a firearm.

    But following the Las Vegas shooting that killed over 50 people and injured hundreds, the Justice Department said that the “devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger,” similar to automatic rifles.

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  • Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

    Donald Trump Fast Facts | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    Here’s a look at the life of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

    Birth date: June 14, 1946

    Birth place: New York, New York

    Birth name: Donald John Trump

    Father: Fred Trump, real estate developer

    Mother: Mary (Macleod) Trump

    Marriages: Melania (Knauss) Trump (January 22, 2005-present); Marla (Maples) Trump (December 1993-June 1999, divorced); Ivana (Zelnicek) Trump (1977-1990, divorced)

    Children: with Melania Trump: Barron, March 20, 2006; with Marla Maples: Tiffany, October 13, 1993; with Ivana Trump: Eric, 1984; Ivanka, October 30, 1981; Donald Jr., December 31, 1977

    Education: Attended Fordham University; University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of Finance, B.S. in Economics, 1968

    As Trump evolved from real estate developer to reality television star, he turned his name into a brand. Licensed Trump products have included board games, steaks, cologne, vodka, furniture and menswear.

    He has portrayed himself in cameo appearances in movies and on television, including “Zoolander,” “Sex and the City” and “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York.”

    Trump’s slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was first used by Ronald Reagan while he was running against President Jimmy Carter.

    For details on investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 election, visit 2016 Presidential Election Investigation Fast Facts.

    1970s – After college, works with his father on apartment complexes in Queens and Brooklyn.

    1973 – Trump and his father are named in a Justice Department lawsuit alleging Trump property managers violated the Fair Housing Act by turning away potential African American tenants. The Trumps deny the company discriminates and file a $100 million countersuit, which is later dismissed. The case is settled in 1975, and the Trumps agree to provide weekly lists of vacancies to Black community organizations.

    1976 – Trump and his father partner with the Hyatt Corporation, purchasing the Commodore Hotel, an aging midtown Manhattan property. The building is revamped and opens four years later as the Grand Hyatt Hotel. The project kickstarts Trump’s career as a Manhattan developer.

    1983-1990 – He builds/purchases multiple properties in New York City, including Trump Tower and the Plaza Hotel, and also opens casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, including the Trump Taj Mahal and the Trump Plaza. Trump buys the New Jersey Generals football team, part of the United States Football League, which folds after three seasons.

    1985 – Purchases Mar-a-Lago, an oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It is renovated and opens as a private club in 1995.

    1987 – Trump’s first book, “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” is published, and becomes a bestseller. The Donald J. Trump Foundation is established in order to donate a portion of profits from book sales to charities.

    1990 – Nearly $1 billion in personal debt, Trump reaches an agreement with bankers allowing him to avoid declaring personal bankruptcy.

    1991 – The Trump Taj Mahal files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

    1992 – The Trump Plaza and the Trump Castle casinos file for bankruptcy.

    1996 – Buys out and becomes executive producer of the Miss Universe, Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants.

    October 7, 1999 – Tells CNN’s Larry King that he is going to form a presidential exploratory committee and wants to challenge Pat Buchanan for the Reform Party nomination.

    February 14, 2000 – Says that he is abandoning his bid for the presidency, blaming discord within the Reform Party.

    January 2004 – “The Apprentice,” a reality show featuring aspiring entrepreneurs competing for Trump’s approval, premieres on NBC.

    November 21, 2004 – Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts Inc. files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

    2005 – Establishes Trump University, which offers seminars in real estate investment.

    February 13, 2009 – Announces his resignation from his position as chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts. Days later, the company files for bankruptcy protection.

    March 17, 2011 – During an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Trump questions whether President Barack Obama was born in the United States.

    June 16, 2015 – Announces that he is running for president during a speech at Trump Tower. He pledges to implement policies that will boost the economy and says he will get tough on immigration. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people who have lots of problems,” Trump says. “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”

    June 28, 2015 – Says he’s giving up the TV show “The Apprentice” to run for president.

    June 29, 2015 – NBCUniversal says it is cutting its business ties to Trump and won’t air the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants because of “derogatory statements by Donald Trump regarding immigrants.”

    July 8, 2015 – In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Trump says he “can’t guarantee” all of his employees have legal status in the United States. This is in response to questions about a Washington Post report about undocumented immigrants working at the Old Post Office construction site in Washington, DC, which Trump is converting into a hotel.

    July 22, 2015 – Trump’s financial disclosure report is made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

    August 6, 2015 – During the first 2016 Republican debate, Trump is questioned about a third party candidacy, his attitude towards women and his history of donating money to Democratic politicians. He tells moderator Megyn Kelly of Fox News he feels he is being mistreated. The following day, Trump tells CNN’s Don Lemon that Kelly was singling him out for attack, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

    September 11, 2015 – Trump announces he has purchased NBC’s half of the Miss Universe Organization, which organizes the annual Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants.

    December 7, 2015 – Trump’s campaign puts out a press release calling for a “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

    May 26, 2016 – Secures enough delegates to clinch the Republican Party nomination.

    July 16, 2016 – Introduces Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate.

    July 19, 2016 – Becomes the Republican Party nominee for president.

    September 13, 2016 – During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says his office is investigating Trump’s charitable foundation “to make sure it’s complying with the laws governing charities in New York.”

    October 1, 2016 – The New York Times reports Trump declared a $916 million loss in 1995 which could have allowed him to legally skip paying federal income taxes for years. The report is based on a financial document mailed to the newspaper by an anonymous source.

    October 7, 2016 – Unaired footage from 2005 surfaces of Trump talking about trying to have sex with a married woman and being able to grope women. In footage obtained by The Washington Post, Trump is heard off-camera discussing women in vulgar terms during the taping of a segment for “Access Hollywood.” In a taped response, Trump declares, “I said it, I was wrong and I apologize.”

    October 9, 2016 – During the second presidential debate, CNN’s Cooper asks Trump about his descriptions of groping and kissing women without their consent in the “Access Hollywood” footage. Trump denies that he has ever engaged in such behavior and declares the comments were “locker room talk.” After the debate, 11 women step forward to claim that they were sexually harassed or sexually assaulted by the real estate developer. Trump says the stories aren’t true.

    November 8, 2016 – Elected president of the United States. Trump will be the first president who has never held elected office, a top government post or a military rank.

    November 18, 2016 – Trump agrees to pay $25 million to settle three lawsuits against Trump University. About 6,000 former students are covered by the settlement.

    December 24, 2016 – Trump says he will dissolve the Donald J. Trump Foundation “to avoid even the appearance of any conflict with my role as President.” A spokeswoman for the New York Attorney General’s Office says that the foundation cannot legally close until investigators conclude their probe of the charity.

    January 10, 2017 – CNN reports that intelligence officials briefed Trump on a dossier that contains allegations about his campaign’s ties to Russia and unverified claims about his personal life. The author of the dossier is a former British spy who was hired by a research firm that had been funded by both political parties to conduct opposition research on Trump.

    January 20, 2017 – Takes the oath of office from Chief Justice John Roberts during an inauguration ceremony at the Capitol.

    January 23, 2017 – Trump signs an executive action withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration and awaiting congressional approval.

    January 27, 2017 – Trump signs an executive order halting all refugee arrivals for 120 days and banning travel to the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days. Additionally, refugees from Syria are barred indefinitely from entering the United States. The order is challenged in court.

    February 13, 2017 – Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigns amid accusations he lied about his communications with Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later pleads guilty to lying to the FBI.

    May 3, 2017 – FBI Director James Comey confirms that there is an ongoing investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia during a hearing on Capitol Hill. Less than a week later, Trump fires Comey, citing a DOJ memo critical of the way he handled the investigation into Clinton’s emails.

    May 2017 – Shortly after Trump fires Comey, the FBI opens an investigation into whether Trump “had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” citing former law enforcement officials and others the paper said were familiar with the probe.

    May 17, 2017 – Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is appointed as special counsel to lead the probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including potential collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russian officials. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein makes the appointment because Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from investigations into Trump’s campaign.

    May 19, 2017 – Departs on his first foreign trip as president. The nine-day, five-country trip includes stops in Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, a NATO summit in Brussels and a G7 summit in Sicily.

    June 1, 2017 – Trump proclaims that the United States is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord but adds that he is open to renegotiating aspects of the environmental agreement, which was signed by 175 countries in 2016.

    July 7, 2017 – Meets Russian President Vladimir Putin in person for the first time, on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Hamburg, Germany.

    August 8, 2017 – In response to nuclear threats from North Korea, Trump warns that Pyongyang will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Soon after Trump’s comments, North Korea issues a statement saying it is “examining the operational plan” to strike areas around the US territory of Guam.

    August 15, 2017 – After a violent clash between neo-Nazi activists and counterprotesters leaves one dead in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump holds an impromptu press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower and declares that there were “fine people” on both sides.

    August 25, 2017 – Trump’s first pardon is granted to former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was convicted of criminal contempt for disregarding a court order in a racial-profiling case. Trump did not consult with lawyers at the Justice Department before announcing his decision.

    September 5, 2017 – The Trump administration announces that it is ending the DACA program, introduced by Obama to protect nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. Trump calls on Congress to introduce legislation that will prevent DACA recipients from being deported. Multiple lawsuits are filed opposing the policy in federal courts and judges delay the end of the program, asking the government to submit filings justifying the cancellation of DACA.

    September 19, 2017 – In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump refers to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man” and warns that the United States will “totally destroy North Korea” if forced to defend itself or its allies.

    September 24, 2017 – The Trump administration unveils a third version of the travel ban, placing restrictions on travel by certain foreigners from Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. (Chad is later removed after meeting security requirements.) One day before the revised ban is set to take effect, it is blocked nationwide by a federal judge in Hawaii. A judge in Maryland issues a similar ruling.

    December 4, 2017 – The Supreme Court rules that the revised travel ban can take effect pending appeals.

    December 6, 2017 – Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and announces plans to relocate the US Embassy there.

    January 11, 2018 – During a White House meeting on immigration reform, Trump reportedly refers to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries.”

    January 12, 2018 – The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump allegedly had an affair with a porn star named Stephanie Clifford, aka Stormy Daniels. The newspaper states that Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen, arranged a $130,000 payment for a nondisclosure agreement weeks before Election Day in 2016. Trump denies the affair occurred. In March, Clifford sues Trump seeking to be released from the NDA. In response, Trump and his legal team agree outside of court not to sue or otherwise enforce the NDA. The suit is dismissed. A California Superior Court judge orders Trump to pay $44,100 to Clifford, to reimburse her attorneys’ fees in the legal battle surrounding her nondisclosure agreement.

    March 13, 2018 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and will nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo as Tillerson’s replacement.

    March 20, 2018 – A New York Supreme Court judge rules that a defamation lawsuit against Trump can move forward, ruling against a July 2017 motion to dismiss filed by Trump’s lawyers. The lawsuit, filed by Summer Zervos, a former “Apprentice” contestant, is related to sexual assault allegations. In November 2021, attorneys for Zervos announce she is dropping the lawsuit.

    March 23, 2018 – The White House announces that it is adopting a policy, first proposed by Trump via tweet in July 2017, banning most transgender individuals from serving in the military.

    April 9, 2018 – The FBI raids Cohen’s office, home and a hotel room where he’d been staying while his house was renovated. The raid is related to a federal investigation of possible fraud and campaign finance violations.

    April 13, 2018 – Trump authorizes joint military strikes in Syria with the UK and France after reports the government used chemical weapons on civilians in Douma.

    May 7, 2018 – The Trump administration announces a “zero tolerance” policy for illegal border crossings. Sessions says that individuals who violate immigration law will be criminally prosecuted and warns that parents could be separated from children.

    May 8, 2018 – Trump announces that the United States is withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal.

    May 31, 2018 – The Trump administration announces it is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum imported from allies Canada, Mexico and the European Union.

    June 8-9, 2018 – Before leaving for the G7 summit in Quebec City, Trump tells reporters that Russia should be reinstated in the group. The annexation of Crimea in 2014 led to Russia’s suspension. After leaving the summit, Trump tweets that he will not endorse the traditional G7 communique issued at the end of the meeting. The President singles out Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for making “false statements” at a news conference.

    June 12, 2018 – Trump meets Kim in person for the first time during a summit in Singapore. They sign a four-point statement that broadly outlines the countries’ commitment to a peace process. The statement contains a pledge by North Korea to “work towards” complete denuclearization but the agreement does not detail how the international community will verify that Kim is ending his nuclear program.

    June 14, 2018 – The New York attorney general sues the Trump Foundation, alleging that the nonprofit run by Trump and his three eldest children violated state and federal charity law.

    June 26, 2018 – The Supreme Court upholds the Trump administration’s travel ban in a 5-4 ruling along party lines.

    July 16, 2018 – During a joint news conference with Putin in Helsinki, Trump declines to endorse the US government’s assessment that Russia interfered in the election, saying he doesn’t “see any reason why” Russia would be responsible. The next day, Trump clarifies his remark, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He says he accepts the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia meddled in the election but adds, “It could be other people also.”

    August 21, 2018 – Cohen pleads guilty to eight federal charges, including two campaign finance violations. In court, he says that he orchestrated payments to silence women “in coordination and at the direction of a candidate for federal office.” On the same day, Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort is convicted on eight counts of federal financial crimes. On December 12, Cohen is sentenced to three years in prison.

    October 2, 2018 – The New York Times details numerous tax avoidance schemes allegedly carried out by Trump and his siblings. In a tweet, Trump dismisses the article as a “very old, boring and often told hit piece.”

    November 20, 2018 – Releases a statement backing Saudi Arabia in the wake of the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Virginia resident, killed in October at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. Khashoggi was a frequent critic of the Saudi regime. The Saudis initially denied any knowledge of his death, but then later said a group of rogue operators were responsible for his killing. US officials have speculated that such a mission, including the 15 men sent from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to murder him, could not have been carried out without the authorization of Saudi leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In the statement, Trump writes, “Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event, maybe he did and maybe he didn’t!”

    December 18, 2018 – The Donald J. Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve according to a document filed in Manhattan Supreme Court. The agreement allows the New York attorney general’s office to review the recipients of the charity’s assets.

    December 22, 2018 – The longest partial government shutdown in US history begins after Trump demands lawmakers allocate $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall before agreeing to sign a federal funding package.

    January 16, 2019 – After nearly two years of Trump administration officials denying that anyone involved in his campaign colluded with the Russians to help his candidacy, Trump lawyer and former New York City mayor, Rudy Giuliani, says “I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or people in the campaign. I said the President of the United States.”

    January 25, 2019 – The government shutdown ends when Trump signs a short-term spending measure, providing three weeks of stopgap funding while lawmakers work on a border security compromise. The bill does not include any wall funding.

    February 15, 2019 – Trump declares a national emergency to allocate funds to build a wall on the border with Mexico. During the announcement, the President says he expects the declaration to be challenged in court. The same day, Trump signs a border security measure negotiated by Congress, with $1.375 billion set aside for barriers, averting another government shutdown.

    February 18, 2019 – Attorneys general from 16 states file a lawsuit in federal court challenging Trump’s emergency declaration.

    March 22, 2019 – Mueller ends his investigation and delivers his report to Attorney General William Barr. A senior Justice Department official tells CNN that there will be no further indictments.

    March 24, 2019 – Barr releases a letter summarizing the principal conclusions from Mueller’s investigation. According to Barr’s four-page letter, the evidence was not sufficient to establish that members Trump’s campaign tacitly engaged in a criminal conspiracy with the Russian government to interfere with the election.

    April 18, 2019 – A redacted version of the Mueller report is released. The first part of the 448-page document details the evidence gathered by Mueller’s team on potential conspiracy crimes and explains their decisions not to charge individuals associated with the campaign. The second part of the report outlines ten episodes involving possible obstruction of justice by the President. According to the report, Mueller’s decision not to charge Trump was rooted in Justice Department guidelines prohibiting the indictment of a sitting president. Mueller writes that he would have cleared Trump if the evidence warranted exoneration.

    May 1, 2019 – The New York Times publishes a report that details how Giuliani, in his role as Trump’s personal attorney, is investigating allegations related to former Vice President Joe Biden, a potential Trump opponent in the 2020 presidential race. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company called Burisma Holdings. In 2016, the elder Biden pressured Ukraine to oust a prosecutor who had investigated Burisma for corruption. Giuliani suggests that Biden’s move was motivated by a desire to protect his son from criminal charges. Giuliani’s claims are undermined after Bloomberg reports that the Burisma investigation was “dormant” when Biden pressed the prosecutor to resign.

    June 12, 2019 – Trump says he may be willing to accept information about political rivals from a foreign government during an interview on ABC News, declaring that he’s willing to listen and wouldn’t necessarily call the FBI.

    June 16, 2019 – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu unveils a sign at the proposed site of a Golan Heights settlement to be named Trump Heights.

    June 18, 2019 – Trump holds a rally in Orlando to publicize the formal launch of his reelection campaign.

    June 28, 2019 – During a breakfast meeting at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan, Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman reportedly discuss tensions with Iran, trade and human rights.

    June 30, 2019 – Trump becomes the first sitting US president to enter North Korea. He takes 20 steps beyond the border and shakes hands with Kim.

    July 14, 2019 – Via Twitter, Trump tells Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Illhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley to “go back” to their home countries. Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley are natural-born US citizens; Omar was born in Somalia, immigrated to the United States and became a citizen.

    July 16, 2019 – The House votes, 240-187, to condemn the racist language Trump used in his tweets about Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib, Omar and Pressley.

    July 24, 2019 – Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary Committee and the House Intelligence Committee.

    July 25, 2019 – Trump speaks on the phone with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump asks Zelensky for a “favor,” encouraging him to speak with Giuliani about investigating Biden. In the days before the call, Trump blocked nearly $400 million in military and security aid to Ukraine.

    August 12, 2019 – A whistleblower files a complaint pertaining to Trump’s conduct on the Zelensky call.

    September 11, 2019 – The Trump administration lifts its hold on military aid for Ukraine.

    September 24, 2019 – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announces the beginning of an impeachment inquiry related to the whistleblower complaint.

    September 25, 2019 – The White House releases notes from the July 25 call between Trump and Zelensky. The readout contains multiple references to Giuliani and Barr. In response, the Justice Department issues a statement that says Barr didn’t know about Trump’s conversation until weeks after the call. Further, the attorney general didn’t talk to the President about having Ukraine investigate the Bidens, according to the Justice Department. On the same day as the notes are released, Trump and Zelensky meet in person for the first time on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. During a joint press conference after the meeting, both men deny that Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate Biden in exchange for aid.

    September 26, 2019 – The House releases a declassified version of the whistleblower complaint. According to the complaint, officials at the White House tried to “lock down” records of Trump’s phone conversation with Zelensky. The complaint also alleges that Barr played a role in the campaign to convince Zelensky that Biden should be investigated. Trump describes the complaint as “fake news” and “a witch hunt” on Twitter.

    September 27, 2019 – Pompeo is subpoenaed by House committees over his failure to provide documents related to Ukraine. Kurt Volker, US special envoy to Ukraine, resigns. He was named in the whistleblower complaint as one of the State Department officials who helped Giuliani connect with sources in Ukraine.

    October 3, 2019 – Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Trump says both Ukraine and China should investigate alleged corruption involving Biden and his son. CNN reports that the President had brought up Biden and his family during a June phone call with Xi Jinping. In that call, Trump discussed the political prospects of Biden as well as Elizabeth Warren. He also told Xi that he would remain quiet on the matter of Hong Kong protests. Notes documenting the conversation were placed on a highly secured server where the transcript from the Ukraine call was also stored.

    October 6, 2019 – After Trump speaks on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the White House announces that US troops will move out of northern Syria to make way for a planned Turkish military operation. The move marks a major shift in American foreign policy and effectively gives Turkey the green light to attack US-backed Kurdish forces, a partner in the fight against ISIS.

    October 9, 2019 – Turkey launches a military offensive in northern Syria.

    October 31, 2019 – Trump says via Twitter that he is changing his legal residency from New York to Florida, explaining that he feels he is treated badly by political leaders from the city and state.

    November 7, 2019 – A judge orders Trump to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit against his charity filed by the New York state attorney general. According to the suit, Trump breached his fiduciary duty by allowing his presidential campaign to direct the distribution of donations. In a statement, Trump accuses the attorney general of mischaracterizing the settlement for political purposes.

    November 13, 2019 – Public impeachment hearings begin and Trump meets Erdogan at the White House.

    November 20, 2019 – During a public hearing, US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland says he worked with Giuliani on matters related to Ukraine at the “express direction of the President of the United States” and he says “everyone was in the loop.” Sondland recounts several conversations between himself and Trump about Ukraine opening two investigations: one into Burisma and another into conspiracies about Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 US election.

    December 10, 2019 – House Democrats unveil two articles of impeachment, one for abuse of power and one for obstruction of Congress.

    December 11, 2019 – Trump signs an executive order to include discrimination against Jewish people as a violation of law in certain cases, with an eye toward fighting antisemitism on college campuses.

    December 13, 2019 – The House Judiciary Committee approves the two articles of impeachment in a party line vote.

    December 18, 2019 – The House of Representatives votes to impeach Trump, charging a president with high crimes and misdemeanors for just the third time in American history.

    January 3, 2020 – Speaking at Mar-a-Lago, Trump announces that a US airstrike in Iraq has killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force.

    January 8, 2020 – Iran fires a number of missiles at two Iraqi bases housing US troops in retaliation for the American strike that killed Soleimani. No US or Iraqi lives are reported lost, but the Pentagon later releases a statement confirming that 109 US service members had been diagnosed with mild traumatic brain injuries in the wake of the attack.

    January 24, 2020 – Makes history as the first President to attend the annual March for Life rally in Washington, DC, since it began nearly a half-century ago. Trump reiterates his support for tighter abortion restrictions.

    January 29, 2020 – Trump signs the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement into law, which replaces the North American Free Trade Agreement.

    January 31, 2020 – The Trump administration announces an expansion of the travel ban to include six new countries. Immigration restrictions will be imposed on: Nigeria, Eritrea, Tanzania, Sudan, Kyrgyzstan and Myanmar (known as Burma), with exceptions for immigrants who have helped the United States.

    February 5, 2020 – The Senate votes to acquit Trump on two articles of impeachment. Sen. Mitt Romney is the sole Republican to vote to convict on the charge of abuse of power, joining with all Senate Democrats in a 52-48 not guilty vote. On the obstruction of Congress charge, the vote falls along straight party lines, 53-47 for acquittal.

    May 29, 2020 – Trump announces that the United States will terminate its relationship with the World Health Organization.

    July 10, 2020 – Trump commutes the prison sentence of his longtime friend Roger Stone, who was convicted of crimes that included lying to Congress in part, prosecutors said, to protect the President. The announcement came just days before Stone was set to report to a federal prison in Georgia.

    October 2, 2020 – Trump announces that he has tested positive for coronavirus. Later in the day, Trump is transferred to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, and returns to the White House on October 5.

    November 7, 2020 – Days after the presidential election on November 3, CNN projects Trump loses his bid for reelection to Biden.

    November 25, 2020 – Trump announces in a tweet that he has granted Michael Flynn a “full pardon,” wiping away the guilty plea of the intelligence official for lying to the FBI.

    December 23, 2020 – Announces 26 new pardons, including for Stone, Manafort and son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles.

    January 6, 2021 – Following Trump’s rally and speech at the White House Ellipse, pro-Trump rioters storm the US Capitol as members of Congress meet to certify the Electoral College results of the 2020 presidential election. A total of five people die, including a Capitol Police officer the next day.

    January 7-8, 2021 – Instagram and Facebook place a ban on Trump’s account from posting through the remainder of his presidency and perhaps “indefinitely.” Twitter permanently bans Trump from the platform, explaining that “after close review of recent Tweets…and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

    January 13, 2021 – The House votes to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” He is the only president to be impeached twice.

    January 20, 2021 – Trump issues a total of 143 pardons and commutations that include his onetime political strategist, Steve Bannon, a former top fundraiser and two well-known rappers but not himself or his family. He then receives a military-style send-off from Joint Base Andrews on Inauguration morning, before heading home to Florida.

    February 13, 2021 – The US Senate acquits Trump in his second impeachment trial, voting that Trump is not guilty of inciting the deadly January 6 riots at the US Capitol. The vote is 43 not guilty to 57 guilty, short of the 67 guilty votes needed to convict.

    May 5, 2021 – Facebook’s Oversight Board upholds Trump’s suspension from using its platform. The decision also applies to Facebook-owned Instagram.

    June 4, 2021 – Facebook announces Trump will be suspended from its platform until at least January 7th, 2023 – two years from when he was initially suspended.

    July 1, 2021 – New York prosecutors charge the Trump Organization and Trump Payroll Corporation with 10 felony counts and Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg with 15 felony counts in connection with an alleged tax scheme stretching back to 2005. Trump himself is not charged. On December 6, 2022, both companies are found guilty on all charges.

    February 14, 2022 – Accounting firm Mazars announces it will no longer act as Trump’s accountant, citing a conflict of interest. In a letter to the Trump Organization chief legal officer, the firm informs the Trump Organization to no longer rely on financial statements ending June 2011 through June 2020.

    May 3, 2022 – The Trump Organization and the Presidential Inaugural Committee agree to pay a total of $750,000 to settle with the Washington, DC, attorney general’s office over allegations they misspent money raised for former President Donald Trump’s inauguration.

    June 9-July 21, 2022 – The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol holds eight hearings, where it hears from witnesses including top ex-Trump officials, election workers, those who took part in the attack and many others. Through live testimony, video depositions, and never-before-seen material, the committee attempts to paint the picture of the former president’s plan to stay in power and the role he played on January 6.

    August 8, 2022 – The FBI executes a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, as part of an investigation into the handling of presidential documents, including classified documents, that may have been brought there.

    August 12, 2022 – A federal judge unseals the search warrant and property receipt from the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago. The unsealed documents indicate the FBI recovered 11 sets of classified documents from its search, including some materials marked as “top secret/SCI” – one of the highest levels of classification, and identify three federal crimes that the Justice Department is looking at as part of its investigation: violations of the Espionage Act, obstruction of justice and criminal handling of government records.

    September 21, 2022 – The New York state attorney general files a lawsuit against Trump, three of his adult children and the Trump Organization, alleging they were involved in an expansive fraud lasting over a decade that the former President used to enrich himself. According to the lawsuit, the Trump Organization deceived lenders, insurers and tax authorities by inflating the value of his properties using misleading appraisals.

    October 3, 2022 – Trump files a lawsuit against CNN for defamation, seeking $475 million in punitive damages.

    November 15, 2022 – Announces that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

    November 19, 2022 – Trump’s Twitter account, which was banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, is reinstated after users respond to an online poll posted by Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk.

    December 19, 2022 – The Jan. 6 insurrection committee votes to refer Trump to the Department of Justice on at least four criminal charges. Four days later the panel releases its final report recommending Trump be barred from holding office again.

    February 9, 2023 – Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are restored following a two-year ban in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, a Meta spokesperson confirms to CNN. On March 17, 2023, YouTube restores Trump’s channel.

    March 30, 2023 – A grand jury in New York votes to indict Trump, the first time in American history that a current or former president has faced criminal charges.

    April 4, 2023 – Surrenders and is placed under arrest before pleading not guilty to 34 felony criminal charges of falsifying business records in Manhattan criminal court. Prosecutors allege that Trump sought to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election through a hush money scheme with payments made to women who claimed they had extramarital affairs with Trump. He has denied the affairs. Hours after his arraignment, Trump rails against the Manhattan district attorney and the indictment during a speech at his Florida resort at Mar-a-Lago.

    May 9, 2023 – A Manhattan federal jury finds Trump sexually abused former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in a luxury department store dressing room in the spring of 1996 and awards her $5 million for battery and defamation.

    May 15, 2023 – A report by special counsel John Durham is released. In it he concludes that the FBI should never have launched a full investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. The report does not recommend any new charges against individuals or “wholesale changes” about how the FBI handles politically charged investigations, despite strongly criticizing the agency’s behavior.

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