MSNBC's Alex Witt asked Cohen if he expected any other witnesses to be at the office, citing multiple reports. Cohen said he was asked to go to the DA's office as a rebuttal witness but was not aware of whether that would be before the grand jury or just a meeting. He indicated the DA's office was bringing another witness in on Monday but did not know who that individual was.

“I was asked to make myself available and to be at the DA’s office tomorrow as a rebuttal witness,” Cohen said.

When Witt asked if it was a rebuttal "to whom or what" Cohen said that had not been clarified.

“I don’t know who the person is. Obviously once I find out who the person is I'll know what the issue is because I was personally involved," he said. "Again, I don't know. It’s a little premature for me to be answering any questions on a topic that I, again, I don’t know who the person is and whether or not that person is or is not going to tell the truth.”

Anticipation is building this week over a possible indictment of Trump in connection to the hush-money payment, which Cohen admitted he made during the fall of Trump's 2016 campaign to prevent Daniels from exposing an affair she said she had with the former president. Trump has denied the affair.

Prosecutors are building a case that centers on the payment violating campaign finance laws in part due to the amount and how it was reported but it is likely to only result in a misdemeanor charge. The case had been closed before it was reopened by District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison in 2018 for arranging the payment to conceal the alleged affairs of Trump. He was also ordered to pay $1.4 million in restitution and forfeited $500,000. His prison sentence ended in 2021.

Cohen has firmly broken with Trump.

Trump' took to his Truth Social platform to claim Biden “'stuffed' the D.A.'s Office with Department of Injustice people,” including what he called a "DOJ operative" sent from Washington, D.C. Trump did not specify which individual he was referring to being an operative.

"Biden wants to pretend he has nothing to do with the Manhattan D.A.’s Assault on Democracy when, in fact, he has 'stuffed' the D.A.’s Office with Department of Injustice people, including one top DOJ operative from D.C," Trump wrote.

He also took a shot at District Attorney Alvin Bragg who he claimed "is taking his orders from D.C."

Bragg, a Democrat, is a New York City elected official who took office late last year. His office is staffed by city officials and is not at the direction of the president, who oversees federal officials.

Trump in his post also turned his attention toward his campaign to reassert his false claim that he beat Democratic presidential challengers "TWICE" despite his 2020 election loss for a second term.

A Manhattan grand jury indictment is expected in the case being investigated by Bragg's office that involves a hush-money payment to Daniels made during Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The case had previously been closed before Bragg decided he would reopen it.

An indictment of Trump has been signaled by prosecutors but the timing of that is unknown. Trump on Saturday claimed that he would be arrested in connection with the case on Tuesday but the DA's office has not confirmed such details.

A spokesman for Trump on Saturday said the former president had not had any "notification" of such action.

"President Trump is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system," the spokesman said.

The Department of Justice is also probing Trump in matters involving the potential mishandling of classified documents and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as well as efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Attorney General Merrick Garland was appointed by Biden but the White House routinely says it stays out of matters involving federal investigations.

The Hill has reached out to the White House and the District Attorney's office for comment.

Democrats are gearing up for another hard-fought Senate race in Nevada next cycle after the state narrowly decided who would control the upper chamber in the midterms. 

Last year, Democrats were able to retain Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s (D-Nev.) seat by less than a point but lost the governor’s mansion after former Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo ousted incumbent Gov. Steve Sisolak (D). 

Republicans say that the state’s shifting demographics and electorate are making the state friendlier to the GOP, particularly in the Senate, where incumbent Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) is facing reelection in 2024. 

“She’s extremely vulnerable,” said Jeremy Hughes, a GOP strategist who has worked on a number of Nevada races. “An incumbent in their first reelection always is.”  

Senate Republicans have already started to target Rosen, along with other vulnerable Democrats, ahead of 2024. The National Republican Senatorial Committee rolled out an ad campaign hitting Rosen along with five other incumbent Democrats over Social Security and Medicare.  

A poll released last month by the Nevada Independent and OH Predictive Insights showed Rosen with a 37 percent favorability rating and a 40 percent unfavorable rating. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as “lean Democratic.” 

Rosen was part of a blue wave of Democrats to win their midterm races in 2018, when the then-congresswoman ousted incumbent Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) by 5 points.  

And 2018 was a considerably good year for Democrats across the board and somewhat of an outlier in Nevada. In 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton won the state by 2.4 points, while Cortez Masto won her Senate race by the same margin.  

In recent years, Democrats have had to contend with narrower margins in the state. In 2020, President Biden defeated then-President Trump by roughly 2.4 points. Two years later, Lombardo defeated Sisolak by just over 1.5 points, while Republican Senate candidate and former Attorney General Adam Laxalt lost to Cortez Masto by less than a point.  

The narrowing margins in Nevada can be attributed to a number of factors, including its changing demographics. Latino voters make up roughly 30 percent of the state’s population, while Asians make up about 9 percent of the population and Pacific Islanders make up nearly 1 percent, according to the Census Bureau.  

“The data that we’re seeing on support levels from Latinos is that Catherine Cortez Masto tracked almost exactly on the same support levels from Latinos that President Biden tracked in 2020,” said Melissa Morales, the founder and executive director of Somos Votantes, a Democratic-leaning group aimed at engaging Latino voters.  

While Democrats won these groups in 2022, Republicans are continuing to target these demographics going into 2024. As of September last year, the Republican National Committee had opened nearly 40 community centers in Black, Latino and Asian Pacific Islander communities.  

The continued strategy from Republicans has Democrats on alert going into the next cycle.  

“They’re consistently trying to make inroads with those demographics and it’s a concerted effort year after year,” said one Nevada Democratic operative. 

On top of that, the state’s transient and growing population is adding to some Democratic anxiety over these groups.  

“They’re starting to see as those communities get bigger and more engaged in politics, you’re going to see less monolithic voting,” said David Damore, the chair of the Political Science Department at the University of Nevada–Las Vegas.  

However, Damore cautioned that Republicans have not yet necessarily made enough progress with these groups to swing them in a general election.  

“[Republicans] have done a little better job and moved the needle a little bit here, but not enough to get the margins they need,” he said. “They need to get those under 60 percent and they’re not there yet.”  

The transient nature of the state could also impact Rosen, who critics say lacks a political brand. However, this could be due in part to the newcomers in the state who are unfamiliar with Nevada politics.  

“It is a state where candidates have to consistently introduce themselves to their own constituents,” the Democratic Nevada operative said. “That’s part of the challenge of running in Nevada.”  

Republicans are also eager to tie Rosen to President Biden, pointing to his low approval ratings. The same Nevada Independent/OH Predictive Insights poll showed Biden with a 40 percent approval rating and a 55 percent disapproval rating.  

Biden visited Las Vegas on Tuesday, attending a Democratic National Committee fundraiser and announcing a plan to lower prescription drug prices at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  

The Nevada Democratic operative said kitchen table issues, like lowering prescription drug prices, would play into Rosen’s messaging. Additionally, the operative said Democrats, like Rosen, will likely go on the offense on abortion access.  

“The threat of a nationwide abortion ban is going to be very real if Republicans sweep in 2024,” the operative said, referring to the scenario of the GOP winning the House, Senate and White House.  

Of course, there is also the effect that former President Trump could have in the race if he wins the GOP nomination next year. The Nevada Independent/OH Predictive Insights poll showed the former president with 42 percent support.  

“If it were Trump to be our nominee, then once again, it’s going to be a vote to spite Trump. Kind of like the first go around, it wasn’t that Joe Biden was this wonderful politician that everyone was excited about. It was in spite of Trump,” said Amy Tarkanian, former chair of the Nevada GOP.  

But the Republican bench to challenge Rosen is still in its formative stages. Various Nevada Republicans have been floated to take on the incumbent Democrat, including Army veteran and former Senate candidate Sam Brown, who lost to Laxalt in 2022. Former congressional candidate April Becker, who lost her challenge against Democratic Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), has also been floated. Republicans have also pointed to state Sen. Minority Leader Heidi Seevers Gansert (R), along with retired boxer and lawyer Joey Gilbert, who lost in the state’s GOP gubernatorial primary last year. 

However, the issue many of these candidates have, with the exception of Gansert, is that they have recently lost statewide. 

“If we’re going to be looking at some of these other possible candidates who didn’t succeed this last election and they’re going to attempt to run for U.S. Senate, I don’t see how that’s going to be a winning strategy for us,” Tarkanian said.  

The Nevada Independent/OH Predictive Insights survey showed Rosen polling better than many of the floated GOP challengers, including Brown, who came in with a 25 percent favorability rating, and Becker, who has a 26 percent favorability rating.  

Most Republicans and Democrats acknowledge that it’s too early to make any specific calls on the race over a year out and without a firm field of GOP candidates.  

“These conversations are already happening,” Morales said. “But I think the strategy in Nevada has always been not to take anything for granted.”  

But while the idea of so-called debt prioritization is gaining legs among some Republicans in both chambers, it’s getting a lukewarm reception from others and has some experts scratching their heads.

A bill recently passed out of the GOP-led House Ways and Means Committee would require the Treasury Department to prioritize payments for principal and interest on debt held by the public, as well as benefits for Social Security and Medicare, among a few other obligations, if the debt limit is breached. 

Some House Republicans are urging swift passage in the House for the bill, known as the Default Prevention Act, as the party draws red lines around working with Democrats to raise the ceiling without steep cuts or significant fiscal reforms.

“Our house is burning down. I think we're waiting too long to call the fire department,” Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who serves on the House’s chief tax-writing committee, told The Hill last week.

He said the House should “absolutely” move quickly on the measure.

A group of Republican senators also revived a legislative effort earlier this year outlining obligations for the Treasury to prioritize the national debt in a similar scenario, though the bill faces tougher odds getting past the Democratic-led Senate. But that doesn't mean all Republicans are thrilled about the prospect. 

Pressed about the concept on Thursday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she understood the “need to have things in your back pocket to understand that, if in the event we had to, we were in this situation, how would you proceed in a manner that, perhaps, least disruptive.”

“But again, I don't think we should be planning for defeat, or planning for default,” she added. “Let's plan for success. Let's address this, while there's still time on the clock.”

While Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said he hadn’t seen the House bill, he told The Hill on Thursday that he didn’t “see the advantage” of a debt prioritization plan. 

“I need to just study it some, but we're gonna raise the debt limit or we're not,” he said, “and can prioritize your debt in a way that delays the decision, but sooner or later, you have to make it.”

Backers of the House bill argue the idea could remove the threat of a national default — an outcome experts say would be catastrophic for the country — by seeking to require the government to stay on top of principal and interest payments, while also prioritizing payments on entitlements, defense and veterans programs. 

But Democrats and some experts have panned the approach as dangerous, saying such a move would put at risk other important programs not mentioned in the text.

“We are saying here China, which has about 1 trillion of America's debt, will be paid first,” Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.), top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, said during a markup hearing on the bill last week. 

Neal is referring to the multitiered system for payment outlined in the bill. The first tier outlined refers to payments on principal and interest on debt held by the public, in addition to trusts funds for Social Security and Medicare. The second tier applies to obligations for the Department of Defense and “benefits under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.” 

Programs that fit outside the classification would fall into subsequent tiers, including pay for members of Congress, the president and the vice president, which is ranked in the last two tiers.

“That means that the nursing homes will go under in your respective congressional districts, while this legislation pays China first. That issue is not in dispute,” Neal said during the hearing, while taking issue with where programs like Medicaid would fall on the list. 

The pitch for debt prioritization has also been met with pushback from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who cast the effort to senators on Thursday as “an exceptionally risky, untested, and radical departure from normal payment practices of agencies across the federal government.”

“Prioritization is effectively a default by just another name,” she argued. She also doubted the plan’s feasibility, noting the government makes millions of payments daily and the agencies’ systems “are built to pay all of our bills on time and not to pick and choose which ones to pay.”

The secretary’s assessment has drawn mixed opinions from experts. Some say the agency could have the capacity to make applicable changes to its systems, if need be. But there is agreement among experts that such a path could pose dangerous risks. 

“Instead of defaulting on the bondholders you're defaulting on SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] recipients,” George Hall, economics professor at Brandeis University, said Friday. “The government has lots and lots of contracts out there, lots of employees and things like that. Pick any department.”

Bill Gale, a senior economic studies fellow at Brookings Institution, also argued the bill “can't prevent” a default, saying.

“If the government promises you money, and doesn't pay it, in economic terms, it's a default, whether you're a bond holder, or a Social Security beneficiary, or a Medicaid beneficiary or TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families] beneficiary,” he added. 

It’s expected to be a far different presidential election cycle than in 2020, when during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden campaigned largely from the comforts of his Delaware basement.

Even some allies wonder if Biden, who will turn 81 this year, can handle the rigors of the campaign, on top of his daily duties as president. Democrats are aware, more than ever, that his rivals will be watching for every verbal gaffe, messaging misfire and physical stumble to highlight his weaknesses and his age. 

“It’s really going to put the president to the test,” said one Democratic strategist who has worked on recent presidential campaigns. “Campaign travel is brutal for all of us, but he has to travel from place to place and be at the top of his game at every stop because he’ll be scrutinized more than any other recent candidate."

Republicans, the strategist added, “are already making age and mental acuity part of their argument.” The operative pointed to recent coverage on conservative outlets of Biden tripping on the stairs of Air Force One or when he fell off his bike last year because his foot got caught in the pedal.

“They’re going to be looking for anything to show he’s not up for the job and because he’ll be on the road a lot, there will inevitably be some moments,” the strategist said.

Or as another strategist put it: “The more he’s out there, the more likely he is to make a gaffe.” 

2024's campaign is not 2020's

Before the pandemic began, some in Bidenworld wondered if they should winnow down events at the end of the day, when their candidate was prone to make more blunders. 

In 2020, as Americans largely worked from home and social-distanced because of the pandemic, Biden built a small television studio in his Wilmington basement where he could deliver speeches and speak directly to voters without leaving his house, particularly during the tail end of the primary and start of the general election cycles. His pre-vaccination message was consistent: I’m staying home and following science.

And while then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans ridiculed Biden for “hiding” at home while they continued to travel, it was a strategy that paid off for him in the end.

Allies acknowledge there will be a higher bar for Biden this cycle.

Basil Smikle, the director of the Public Policy Program at Hunter College, who has served as a strategist and the executive director of the the New York State Democratic Party, said there will be more scrutiny not only of Biden’s interaction with voters but the “evaluations of his vigor as a campaigner.” 

“He benefits from being able to control his environment now as president more so than he did in 2020,” Smikle said. “But even through that lens, the critiques may be more significant.” 

Biden: 'Watch me'

Biden has sought to quiet the criticism ahead of his expected campaign launch in April or May. He made a surprise overnight trip to Ukraine last month, traveling to the embattled nation on a 10-hour train ride. And he continues to crisscross the country to showcase his policies, as he did this week when he traveled to California.  

“...How many 30-year-olds could travel to Poland, get on the train, go nine more hours, go to Ukraine, meet with President Zelensky?” first lady Jill Biden said in an interview with CNN earlier this month. “So, look at the man. Look what he’s doing. Look what he continues to do each and every day.” 

Since taking office, those in Bidenworld say the president has become immune to the endless headlines about his age and mental capacities. “His view has always been, ‘Yeah, and?’” one ally said. “He knows better than most what a busy campaign is like, and he wouldn’t run again if he knew he wasn’t up for it.”  

When reporters have asked him what he says to pundits and other observers who doubt an octogenarian can run for reelection, he has often replied, “Watch me.”

A Yahoo News/YouGov poll out earlier this month showed that 68 percent of voters surveyed said Biden is “too old for another term.” The poll also indicated that 48 percent of Democrats agreed that age is a problem for Biden.

But Democratic strategist Christy Setzer said campaigns have to adapt to the candidate they have, “whether that means doing long-form interviews over quick hits or fewer events or whatever.

“Biden is going to win in 2024 based on accomplishments and vibes and an understanding that he’s not looking to burn the country down,” Setzer said. “Not events stamina.” 

Joe Tacopina made the rounds on TV this week, enthusiastically defending the former president in the court of public opinion as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appears to be wrapping up his presentation to a grand jury reviewing a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Trump himself on Saturday said his arrest could come Tuesday, lashing out at New York authorities.

“Protest, take our nation back!” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, calling on supporters to protest his potential arrest. 

Tacopina’s style has drawn comparison to that of his client, dismissing the probe as one that should prompt “a healthy dose of disgust from the bar, the legal community, prosecutors, defense lawyers alike.”

He’s defended Trump for falsely saying he was unaware of the payment — “Of course it’s not the truth,” he said on MSNBC this week — and claimed that the exchange in no way violated campaign finance laws, the very charge former Trump fixer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to. 

Tacopina’s flashy entrance comes amid a flurry of activity in the probe.

The grand jury this week heard from Cohen, while Daniels met with prosecutors in what she said was part of her “continuing fight for truth and justice.”

Trump has denied having a relationship with Daniels, but a potential case would largely center on the former president’s role in directing the payment and whether doing so just days before the 2016 election violated campaign finance laws. Trump’s company labeled Cohen’s reimbursement of the payment as a legal expense and did not disclose them in campaign finance reports.

Tacopina, a former Brooklyn prosecutor, has made national television appearances that stretch back decades as he racked up a client list including celebrities such as Michael Jackson, A-Rod, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky and Don Imus.

"The guy is just made for television," Phil Griffin, MSNBC’s former president, told Westport Magazine in 2002. "He's got the looks, he's got the voice, that all plays into it, but it's really his authority and his honesty that are so refreshing. There are guests who fill the time with banter, and there's Joe, who's like, ‘You're wrong!'"

Tacopina did not respond to questions from The Hill.

He has also represented Trump allies in the past, including Bernard Kerik, a former New York police commissioner who also aided Rudy Giuliani’s team in investigating purported voter fraud in the 2020 election. Tacopina served as Kerik’s attorney in a case where he ultimately pleaded guilty to tax fraud and other charges in 2007, later being pardoned by Trump.

But Kerik’s relationship with Tacopina soured. The former police commissioner tapped Tim Parlatore, now an attorney representing Trump in matters before special counsel Jack Smith, to launch a suit alleging malpractice after Tacopina spoke to federal authorities about the case. The suit, however, was later dismissed.

Beyond the hush-money probe, Tacopina has also represented the former president in a civil sexual battery lawsuit from author E. Jean Carroll, whose claims Trump also denies.

Tacopina told CNN in 2018 that he briefly consulted with Daniels on the hush-money agreement, a detail that could become an issue if prosecutors file charges against Trump. Tacopina largely declined to discuss the matter at the time, saying “there is an attorney-client privilege that attaches even to a consultation.”

Although he has represented many celebrities and politicians, he is now adding Trump ahead of what could be the first criminal indictment of a former U.S. president.

After Manhattan prosecutors invited Trump to testify before the grand jury hearing evidence in the probe, usually a signal that charges are likely, Tacopina reportedly huddled last weekend at Mar-a-Lago with other Trump aides to discuss their next steps.

By Monday morning, Tacopina began taking to the airwaves to vociferously defend his client, making appearances on ABC, Fox News and MSNBC.

It began with an interview on “Good Morning America,” where he described Trump as a victim of extortion and rejected the notion that the hush money could be caught up in campaign finance violations.

“I don’t know since when we’ve decided to start prosecuting extortion victims,” Tacopina told host George Stephanopoulos. “He’s vehemently denied this affair, but he had to pay money because there was going to be an allegation that was going to be publicly embarrassing to him — regardless of the campaign.”

But Andrew Weissmann, a former prosecutor who served as one of the lead attorneys on the Mueller investigation, said the claim is itself problematic. 

“That is an admission he paid $ (which he had been denying) and the $ was not for legal fees (the cover story). Because the NY criminal case reportedly focuses on the crime of making false business records -- his ‘defense’ is an confession,” Weissmann wrote on Twitter.

Things got heated the following day, when Tacopina sat down with MSNBC host Ari Melber, who played a 2018 clip of Trump indicating he had no knowledge of the Daniels payment, calling that a lie.

Tacopina acknowledged it wasn’t true, but pushed back, saying Trump couldn’t violate the terms of the confidential settlement.

He grabbed a paper in Melber’s hand that seemed to contain notes about the statement, saying, “Put the paper down. Put the paper down, let me answer. We don’t need that.”

During prime time on Wednesday, Tacopina joined Fox’s Sean Hannity for a more friendly interview. Tacopina said the legal system had become “completely weaponized.”

Tacopina’s rounds — both in affect and in substance — prompted other criticism as well, with late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel joking that Tacopina “seems to have been born in the ashtray of Rudy Giuliani’s Lincoln Continental.”

Cohen, who spent a little over a year in prison as well as another year and a half in home confinement due to his connection with the Daniels payoff, also made comparisons to Giuliani, saying Tacopina was following in “Rudy ‘Colludy’s’ steps.”

“To be honest, I was embarrassed for him. I was actually embarrassed for our profession,” Cohen said during an appearance on MSNBC.

He added that journalists challenged Tacopina’s arguments in real time, making it difficult for the attorney.

“You're not playing to a party of one when you're sitting across the desk from Ari Melber. And he wasn't going to just accept whatever answer that Joe Tacopina decided to put out there. He was going to challenge him. And sadly, it's not the first time. George Stephanopoulos did the exact same thing and schooled him. He's making Trump look even worse, if that's possible.”

Jones was ordered last fall to pay more than $1.4 billion in damages to the families of eight victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting, which left 20 young children and six adults dead. He was also ordered to pay another $50 million to the parents of a Sandy Hook victim in a separate Texas case.

The Infowars host was hit with multiple defamation lawsuits after he repeatedly suggested that the school shooting in Newton, Conn., was a “false flag” operation staged by the U.S. government. The families of the victims, who he accused of being actors, were threatened and harassed by his followers.

He filed for both personal and business bankruptcy within the last year as the damages piled up — a move that the Sandy Hook families have claimed is an effort to shield his assets from creditors.

His company Free Speech Systems, which filed for bankruptcy last July, was reportedly transferring tens of thousands of dollars to PQPR, a company owned by Jones and his parents, according to the Times.

Jones has also transferred a $3 million property to his wife and continues to transfer other real estate assets to family members, including an adult son, and has struck up business partnerships with several new companies created by his friends, the Times reported.

The Infowars host’s financial affairs largely remain unclear, with his lawyers claiming in a recent court filing that he doesn’t remember where he holds bank accounts, how many trusts he has set up or where his 2022 W-2 form is located, per the Times.

Lt. DeWayne Smith, who spent 25 years on the Memphis police force, was facing disciplinary charges for neglect of duty, unauthorized public statements and compliance with regulations, when he submitted his retirement on March 1, Memphis’ Action News 5 reported. His disciplinary hearing was scheduled for March 2.

During the Jan. 7 arrest that ultimately led to Nichols’ death, Smith failed to get the 29-year-old medical care or remove his handcuffs, despite hearing him say, “I can’t breathe,” according to NBC News.

Nichols was brutally beaten by several Memphis police officers during the early January traffic stop and died three days later from his injuries. Despite noticing Nichols’ injuries, Smith failed to obtain reports from the other officers about their use of force.

Smith also told Nichols’ family that he had been driving under the influence, even though no evidence supported such a conclusion, and he failed to wear his body camera during the arrest in violation of the department’s policy, NBC News reported.

“It is extremely disturbing that [the Memphis Police Department] accepted the retirement of this senior officer!” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who is representing Nichols’ family, said in a tweet.

“Memphis police and officials should do everything in their power to hold Lt. Smith accountable and not let his cowardice in resigning sidestep the consequences of his actions!” he added.

Seven officers were fired over Nichols’ death, including five who were charged with second-degree murder. Three members of the Memphis Fire Department were also terminated over their failure to provide Nichols with medical care.

Trump said in a post to Truth Social that he expects to be arrested on Tuesday in connection with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s probe into a hush-money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign.

“The idea of indicting a former president of the United States is deeply troubling to me, as it is to tens of millions of Americans,” Pence told reporters in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday. “And particularly happening in what appears to be a politically charged environment in New York where the attorney general and other elected officials literally campaigned on a pledge to prosecute the former president.”

“No one is above the law,” he added. “I’m confident President Trump can take care of himself.”

He joined a slew of other Republicans who slammed the potential indictment as “politically motivated” and an “abuse of power.”

“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) tweeted on Saturday.

However, amid Trump’s call for his supporters to protest and “take back our nation” in response to the possible indictment, Pence noted that “violence will not be tolerated.”

“We respect the right of Americans to let their voice be heard and to express the frustration over what appears to be a politically motivated prosecution of the former president,” he said. “But we want to send a very clear message that violence will not be tolerated and anyone that would engage in violence would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Michael Cohen, Trump's former personal attorney and longtime fixer, compared the former president’s call for protests on Saturday to the “battle cry” he put out before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“It would have been smart for Donald to write ‘peaceful protest,’ but he doesn’t want a peaceful protest,” Cohen told MSNBC. “He wants he wants another violent clash on his behalf.”

Cohen, who testified before the New York grand jury earlier this week, made the $130,000 payment to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to quash her story of an alleged affair with Trump. He pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations in connection with the payment.

“It’s eerily similar to the battle cry that he put out just prior to the Jan. 6 insurrection, you know, especially including the call, you know, for protest,” Cohen said in an interview with MSNBC. “And I agree … it would have been smart for Donald to write 'peaceful protest,' but he doesn’t want a peaceful protest."

Trump said in a post on Truth Social earlier in the day that he expects to be arrested next week as part of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s investigation into a hush-money payment made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 campaign.

The former president claimed that “illegal leaks” indicate that “the far & away leading Republican candidate & former president of the United States of America, will be arrested on Tuesday of next week” and called for his supporters to protest and “take our nation back.”

Cohen, who testified before the New York grand jury earlier this week, made a $130,000 payment to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election to buy her silence about an alleged affair with Trump. 

The former president’s longtime fixer pleaded guilty in 2018 to violating campaign finance laws in connection with the hush-money payment.

Cohen told MSNBC on Saturday that Trump or his team was likely contacted by the district attorney’s office, rather than gaining the information via “leaks” as the former president suggested in his post.

“Knowing Donald the way that I do, I don’t see a reason that Donald would have put out the statement unless he has, or his team, has been contacted by the district attorney’s office and advised accordingly,” Cohen said.

“This is exactly him reacting to information that he has and not leaks, as he would like to say, by the district attorney’s office,” he added. “There is no leaks coming out of the DA’s office, that I can tell you for sure. This is all coming out of Trump camp.”

He also suggested that Trump’s calls for a protest likely stem from the belief that it could give his 2024 campaign a boost.

“These fools that are representing him, this clown show of lawyers, what they believe is that this will propel him into the White House by having another violent insurrection,” Cohen said.

“But more importantly for Donald, it’s all about the great grift," he continued. "He will look to profit from this action by soliciting contributions in order to protect him, your favorite president from the racist Alvin Bragg and all of the, you know, left wingers.”

Forty-nine Democrats — 33 in the House and 16 in the Senate — plus Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, joined Republicans in 2018 to pass the deregulation bill.

Nineteen of them are still in the House, all of whom will have to face voters next year, and 12 are in the Senate, five of whom are up for reelection in 2024. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who was in the House as a Democrat in 2018 and voted for the deregulation bill, is also up for reelection next year.

Proponents of the legislation, which former President Trump signed into law, saw it as a way to provide relief to small and midsize banks that were struggling with rigorous regulations put in place under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which was enacted after the 2008 financial crisis.

But a number of Democrats are now blaming that rollback for the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank — which were exempted from the regulations in 2018 — putting the measure’s Democratic supporters on the defensive as the banking blame game heats up on Capitol Hill.

Asked if she regretted her vote for the bill, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), a member of Democratic leadership who is retiring next year, told The Hill, “Not at all.”

“It was very important to me to make sure that our small banks, community banks and credit unions, who did not cause the financial crisis in 2008, were given some flexibility,” she said.

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.)  also said he does not regret his vote for the rollback, calling the Dodd-Frank regulations “impossible” for small, medium-sized and regional banks.

“You had a set of rules that literally applied to the largest few institutions in the country and also to our small and medium-size and regional banks. It was impossible, and they were all actually merging and selling to the larger banks and you had no community banks left in this country,” he said during an interview with CNN on Tuesday.

The 2018 bill — formally known as the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act — exempted some banks from stricter Federal Reserve oversight and stress tests mandated under the Dodd-Frank Act by raising the asset threshold for those regulations from $50 billion to $250 billion.

Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank both fell within that range.

“Let’s be clear. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a statement.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who voted against the 2018 bill and is now leading an effort to undo the legislation, said Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank “would have been subject to stronger liquidity and capital requirements to withstand financial shocks” if Congress and the Federal Reserve had not rolled back stricter oversight.

“They would have been required to conduct regular stress tests to expose their vulnerabilities and shore up their businesses,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “But because those requirements were repealed, when an old-fashioned bank run hit S.V.B‌., the‌ bank couldn’t withstand the pressure — and Signature’s collapse was close behind.

Silicon Valley Bank, a California-based institution that mainly catered to startups, was taken over by federal regulators last Friday after a massive run on the bank amid liquidity issues. Days later, state regulations seized Signature Bank, a New York-based establishment that largely did business with real estate companies and law firms, following another rush by customers to withdraw deposits.

The Signature Valley Bank collapse is now the second-largest bank failure in American history, and the Signature Bank break down is the third-largest.

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who stood by his vote for the 2018 deregulation bill, told The Hill that the Old Dominion lost a chunk of its banks between 2010 and 2018 because small banks, faced with having to hire compliance departments, decided to sell to larger institutions, which led to branches closing and employees being laid off.

“My community banks, as you get a few years into implementation, kind of laid this issue down. They said, hey look, a law that was designed to stop too big to fail is also accelerating too small to succeed,” Kaine, who is up for reelection in 2024, said.

“Community banks, when the [2018] banking bill was put together, they're like, we strongly support this. They were strongly supportive and they still are, and they've done well in Virginia in the last few years,” he added.

Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) also said he does not regret his 2018 vote in support of the deregulation bill, and cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the cause of the collapses.

“I don’t know all the facts,” Peters said. “Right now we got an investigation going on; the feds are gonna look at exactly what happened. I don’t think we should jump to any conclusions, so we actually investigate and look at the facts.”

The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are both investigating Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, and the Federal Reserve has launched its own probe. The central bank said a review of the probe, which is being led by Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr, will be released publicly on May 1.

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), who voted for the 2018 bill, said it is “premature” to connect the five-year-old bill to last week’s collapse.

“I think it's premature to say we know that this action by regulators under the previous administration — or this action legislatively under the previous administration — made the difference,” he told The Hill. “We don't know that.”

The senator cited other factors that may have led to the bank’s crumbling, including management failure, a failure to plan for inflation risk and regulatory oversight failure.

Warren and Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.), however, are drawing a direct line between the faltering banks and the 2018 bill. The progressive pair, along with dozens of other Democrats, introduced a bill on Tuesday that would repeal the 2018 Dodd-Frank rollback by restoring the regulation threshold to $50 billion.

The legislation comes after Biden this week called on Congress and banking regulators “to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely that this kind of bank failure will happen again and to protect American jobs and small businesses.”

Stabenow said she has concerns with the threshold under the Warren-Porter bill.

“My reason to support the bill originally was because I felt the $50 billion threshold was too low. And so she moves it all the way back down to that. And so that's the question of mine,” she said.

“And I think we need to look at, you know, what really happened here? I mean, there's total incompetence of this bank, certainly. And the question is what would make a difference? That's what I'm interested in,” she added, later saying “I think it’s just looking at, you know, what can we do to address this situation without going back to hurting small banks.”

Coons said it was “premature” to consider “specific solutions” when the cause of the bank failure remains unknown, and Kaine said he first wants to review Barr’s analysis before making a decision on Warren’s bill.

But if Barr says the repeal of the rollback would be a good thing to do, Kaine said he would “be favorably inclined.”

One proponent of Warren’s bill could be Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.), who supported the 2018 rollback. Asked about his vote, the congressman told The Hill in a statement that, in light of the bank closures, it is time to move standards back in the direction of Dodd-Frank.

“In light of recent events, I believe it’s time to review and update those changes to bring the requirements closer in line to our original Dodd-Frank standards, which I was proud to vote to establish,” he told The Hill. “This will help strengthen our financial system to keep it resilient and reliable as economic tides ebb and flow.”

Bragg's probe into the $130,000 payment made ahead of the 2016 Presidential Election has increasingly been viewed as a viable legal challenge for Trump, especially as both Daniels and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testified before the grand jury in the case. Bragg's investigation has worked to determine if the payment violated campaign finance rules.

On Saturday, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: "THE FAR & AWAY LEADING REPUBLICAN CANDIDATE & FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, WILL BE ARRESTED ON TUESDAY OF NEXT WEEK.”

The former president claimed he learned this from "illegal leaks" from Bragg's office. As Associated Press reports, Trump lawyer Susan Necheles said Trump's comments on Saturday were "based on the media reports," though no further information was given.

It's important to note that as of Saturday afternoon, no announcement has been made by the DA's office and there's no indication charges have yet been filed against the former president. Nevertheless, it's believed a decision will come soon.

All of this may be confusing, so it helps to reiterate: as of now, Trump has not been formally charged for a crime. The former president has also not been indicted.

If you're wondering what exactly "indictment" means, the U.S. Department of Justice explains that an indictment is formal notice that someone receives, notifying them it's believed they committed a crime. The indictment lists what charges they're facing.

So what would it take for an indictment to happen?

The way it works for felony charges in the U.S. is that a grand jury will examine all potential evidence to determine if a crime was committed. If the jury, generally made up of 16-23 people, decides there's enough evidence that a crime occurred, an indictment will come.

Despite Trump's claim that he will be arrested Tuesday, it's unlikely the former president would be arrested, since Trump officials themselves told Associated Press they would “ follow the normal procedures" if an indictment does come down. An arrest would only happen in the event an indicted person doesn't surrender, according to AP.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office declined requests for comment from several outlets, including MSNBC and AP.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said he would direct relevant committees to investigate if any federal funding is being used to “subvert our democracy by interfering in elections with politically motivated prosecutions.” 

“Here we go again — an outrageous abuse of power by a radical DA who lets violent criminals walk as he pursues political vengeance against President Trump,” he tweeted, referring to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. 

Condemnations of the potential charges from McCarthy and other Republicans came after Trump posted on Truth Social early on Saturday that “illegal leaks” indicate he will be arrested on Tuesday. 

Bragg appears to be close to deciding on whether to file charges against Trump after having invited the former president to testify before the grand jury he has convened this past week. Trump’s attorney has said Trump would not accept the invitation. 

The district attorney’s office has been investigating a payment that former Trump attorney Michael Cohen made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election for her to remain silent about an affair she had with Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to a campaign finance violation stemming from the payment and other charges and served a prison sentence. 

Cohen has said he paid Daniels at Trump’s direction. Trump has acknowledged that he reimbursed Cohen for the payment but said it was unrelated to his campaign finances. 

Top Trump allies have joined McCarthy in denouncing the probe as politically motivated and siding with the former president, who has insisted he has not done anything wrong. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) tweeted that Trump will “win even bigger” than he already was already going to if Bragg indicts him and “did nothing wrong.” She said any Republicans who support the former president's “persecution” will face consequences. 

“And those Republicans that stand by and cheer for his persecution or do nothing to stop it will be exposed to the people and will be remembered, scorned, and punished by the base,” Greene said. 

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) said he has been asked multiple times if Trump being indicted would cause him to take away his endorsement of Trump in the 2024 presidential election. Trump endorsed Vance while he was running in the GOP primary for an open Senate seat in Ohio. 

“The answer is: hell no. A politically motivated prosecution makes the argument for Trump stronger. We simply don't have a real country if justice depends on politics,” Vance said. 

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, said in a statement that the “Radical Left” will have Trump arrested because they know they cannot defeat him in an election. She said this is “unAmerican” and reaching a “dangerous new low of Third World countries.” 

“What these corrupt Leftist prosecutors like Alvin Bragg and their Socialist allies fail to understand is that America First Patriots have never been so energized to exercise their constitutional rights to peacefully organize and VOTE at the ballot box to save our great republic,” she said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said at Vision 24, a conservative conference in South Carolina, on Saturday that Bragg has "done more" to help Trump get reelected than anyone else in the country.

"They're making stuff up that they never used against anybody because they hate Trump," Graham said.

He said the case is moving forward because "they're afraid of Trump."

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, a conservative entrepreneur, said Trump being indicted would be a “national disaster.” 

“If a Republican prosecutor in 2004 had used a campaign finance technicality to arrest then-candidate John Kerry while [President George W.] Bush & [Vice President Dick] Cheney were in power, liberals would have cried foul - and rightly so,” Ramaswamy said. 

He said indicting Trump will undermine trust in the country’s electoral system and Bragg should reconsider charges against him. He argued that the case would not have led to criminal prosecution for anyone else and would only have been a misdemeanor at most instead of a felony. 

“Our entire country is skating on thin ice right now & we cannot afford to politicize the justice system or else we will reach our breaking point,” he said. 

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) also argued that the case is not strong, saying it is based on a “strained, convoluted legal theory.”

— Updated at 1:52 p.m.

And Warren, who rose to prominence as a consumer protection advocate and has long made headlines for hammering banks, is seizing the opportunity.

Over the past week, the Massachusetts progressive and one-time presidential candidate has launched a wide-ranging offensive.

She unveiled legislation to repeal a 2018 deregulation law signed by former President Trump that raised the threshold for banks subject to federal scrutiny from $50 billion to $250 billion.

She has been a constant presence on cable news, with more appearances set for this weekend’s Sunday show circuit, penned an op-ed in The New York Times and has pressed former SVB CEO Greg Becker on his lobbying for the 2018 rollback of regulations.

To a number of Senate Democrats, she is an invaluable voice on the subject.

“Very important,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.), a backer of Warren’s new banking proposal, told The Hill. “She's got not only a great commitment to consumers and families, more broadly she's got a lot of expertise and is a great messenger and advocate on these issues.”

But Warren’s ongoing criticism is poised to cause a headache for President Biden and other Senate Democrats, especially those who voted for the 2018 rollback and are up for reelection in 2024.

In total, 12 sitting senators who caucus with the Democrats voted for the bill — including Sen. Kirsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who voted for it in the House — which raised the asset threshold to $250 billion so SVB and dozens of other banks were exempted from the strict federal oversight.     

Warren’s legislation, the Secure Viable Banking Act, was introduced in the House by progressive Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.). Despite the warm welcome from some corners of the party, it hasn’t been embraced by Democratic leadership. 

When asked if he supports Warren’s blueprint, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) told reporters that “strong legislation” is needed, but that any bill must be bipartisan. 

Still, leadership is keenly aware of Warren amid this period of banking tumult. After The Hill noted that Warren has been vocal on the subject this week, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (Mich.), the No. 3-ranked Senate Democrat quipped, “Has she really?”

“She's always a respected voice, certainly,” Stabenow, who voted for the 2018 bill, said. “[The question is] what exactly are we trying to solve? ... I am so grateful that we have President Biden and his team in place. They acted very swiftly and I think in an incredibly competent job to be able to move quickly to calm the waters.”

Biden on Monday blamed the Trump administration for the rollbacks of Dodd-Frank and called on Congress and regulators “to strengthen the rules for banks to make it less likely that this kind of bank failure will happen again.”

Press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Thursday said the White House has seen “bipartisan support on a piece of legislation, the [Warren]-Porter bill.” No Republicans had signed onto the bill as of Friday.

Jean-Pierre wouldn’t say if the SVB failure could have been avoided if the Dodd-Frank regulations weren’t rolled back but said the White House will speak on its stance on the $250,000 deposit insurance limit — which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) waived for SVB depositors — “in the next few days.”

The White House is looking at the Warren bill, as well as other regulatory changes, an administration official told The Hill, but wouldn’t say if Biden supports the Massachusetts Democrat’s legislation.  

Dozens of Senate and House Democrats have since co-sponsored Warren’s bill, but it will be a non-starter in the GOP-controlled House or face a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

“We appreciate their leadership in putting ideas on the table,” the official said. “The Obama-Biden Administration put in place tough requirements after the 2008 financial crisis to make sure that sort of crisis would not happen again. Unfortunately, the last Administration rolled back some of them. As the President said, Congress and regulators must strengthen rules for larger banks so this doesn’t happen again.”

When Warren ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 before dropping out and endorsing Biden, the difference between her views and the president’s on issues like regulating banks were on display. Biden, who honed in on messaging that he is a centrist and believes in capitalism, was joined on the debate stages by Warren, who has a long history of fighting back against the practices of banks that she adamantly argues are predatory.

Throughout the Biden administration, Warren has been at odds in particular with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, an official appointed under Trump but in whom Biden has stressed he has full confidence. She opposed Powell’s nomination in 2018, warning at the time that he would weaken financial regulations, and since then has been his fiercest critic in the Senate and has berated him during various hearings.

Warren called on Powell this week to recuse himself from the internal review of the SVB failure, arguing that his actions “directly contributed” to the situation because the Fed chair has signaled that he would support easing bank regulations. 

Powell reportedly pushed to not include a phrase mentioning regulatory failures in a press release on Sunday night that was put out jointly by the Fed, Treasury Department and the FDIC, arguing he wanted to focus instead on the actions being taken. Warren tweeted that the Fed chairman's "attempt to muzzle" government officials was "completely inappropriate." 

"Congress needs to step in to fix these mistakes before things get even worse," she added.

Meanwhile, Warren cited Biden specifically calling on Congress to act after the SVB failure for her decision to introduce her legislation.

“President Biden called on Congress to strengthen the rules for banks, and I’m proposing legislation to do just that by repealing the core of Trump’s bank law,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.

Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Saturday that “illegal leaks” indicate that “the far & away leading Republican candidate & former president of the United States of America, will be arrested on Tuesday of next week.” 

“Protest, take our nation back!” Trump continued, calling on supporters to protest his potential arrest. 

The post comes as multiple recent signs appear to point to the grand jury Bragg organized being close to possibly filing charges against Trump.

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testified before the grand jury earlier this week, and Daniels met with Manhattan prosecutors. With Cohen’s testimony, almost every major figure involved in the investigation has appeared before the grand jury.

Another sign came when Trump was invited to testify before the grand jury this week, often an indication that a decision on any charges is coming imminently. Trump's attorney said this week that he was declining the offer.

Bragg’s investigation stems from a $130,000 payment that Cohen admitted to making to Daniels in the leadup to the 2016 election for her to remain silent about an affair she had with Trump.

Cohen pleaded guilty to a handful of charges in 2018, including one for a campaign finance violation related to the payment. He was sentenced to a few years in prison but was released early at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed to serve the remainder of his sentence under house arrest.

Cohen has said he paid Daniels at Trump’s direction and Trump reimbursed him for the payment. Trump has acknowledged reimbursing Cohen for the payment but denied it came from his campaign funding.

The Trump Organization declared the reimbursement to Cohen to be a legal expense.

If charges are filed against Trump, this would be the first time in U.S. history a former president is criminally indicted.

Trump’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, told The New York Daily News that Trump would not refuse to surrender himself if he is charged in the case.

A Trump spokesperson said in a statement that the former president has not been formally notified about charges being filed Tuesday. They said Trump only knows Bragg decided to "take his Witch-Hunt to the next level" through "illegal leaks" from the Justice Department and the Manhattan district attorney's office to media outlets.

"President Trump is rightfully highlighting his innocence and the weaponization of our injustice system," they said.

The spokesperson said Trump will be in Texas next weekend for a rally.

Trump has slammed Bragg’s investigation as politically motivated, and Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said last week that Trump is “totally innocent.” Cheung said the investigation will “backfire massively” for Democrats and the country.

New York law enforcement officials have been preparing security ahead of a potential indictment against Trump. Officials told The Associated Press that they are planning security and the logistics of a former president making a court appearance.

CNN reported that senior staff members from Bragg's office, the New York Police Department (NYPD) and New York State Court Officers have had meetings about security needs following any possible charges being filed. The court officers are responsible for securing state court facilities, including the New York Supreme Court building in Manhattan.

Officials with knowledge of the discussions told CNN that they are preparing for potential demonstrations from Trump supporters and counterprotests from Trump opponents and the possibility of the two groups confronting each other.

The NYPD and FBI have also given attention to the possibility of threats increasing against Bragg and his staff members, according to the outlet.

The concerns come after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection after Trump called for them to protest the certification of President Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election.

— Updated at 10:40 a.m.

Over the past decade in particular, HBCUs have made a concerted effort to address the community’s concerns, from establishing LGBTQ centers on campus to changing admissions policies to allow transgender students to enroll. But now some fear the new legislation, which many seen as discriminatory, could have a chilling effect on that progress.

Leslie Hall, director of the Human Rights Campaign’s HBCU program, told The Hill the laws could have an “enormous impact” on the institutions.  

“When you put an LGBTQ inclusive curriculum or you want to start a LGBTQ center on campus but you have to worry about a legislature saying that there's no value in this so this is unnecessary or we'll strike out your budget appropriation for this year, it's very scary,” Hall said. 

“It puts HBCUs in a very, very precarious situation because they’re already underfunded in many cases, and they just really can’t afford that type of treatment.”

According to HRC, more than 340 anti-LGBTQ laws have been introduced in state legislatures, with 150 specifically restricting the rights of transgender people. These laws range in limiting health care for transgender people to bathroom bans to prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion programs on campuses. Many of these laws have been passed in states home to HBCUs, most of which are in the South.

In 2021, there were 99 HBCUs in 19 states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Fifty were public institutions and 49 were private nonprofit. 

Established in the 19th century, HBCUs originally provided Black Americans with educational opportunities denied to them by white institutions. Today, 19 HBCUs have land-grant status under the 1890 Morrill Act. 

Those HBCUs, as well as public HBCUs, receive some state funding, though not in equal amounts as predominantly white state schools. Still, with the spread of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, non-compliance with these laws means these colleges and universities could lose their state funding, and many don’t have the coffers to make up the difference.

But HBCUs are thought of as a space of acceptance and Black excellence, said Florida State Sen. Shevrin Jones, a graduate of Florida A&M University.

“These campuses are teaching students not just based off them being Black, but it’s teaching them how to operate and thrive in this society, this place we call America, in a place where we weren't welcome,” Jones said. But the spread of anti-LGBT laws, Jones added, is causing professors and administrators “to walk on eggshells.”

“It’s also causing HBCUs to have to go back to the drawing board to try to figure out who we are,” Jones said. “And that's dangerous, because I think HBCUs are pivotal to our community, they’re pivotal to our society, they're pivotal to this country.”

That doesn’t mean HBCUs were always a safe space for LGBTQ students. 

In 2002, a student at Atlanta’s Morehouse College viciously beat another student with a baseball bat. The attacker’s defense was that he felt the student, who is gay, looked at him “in an inappropriate way.” Violent incidents against LGBTQ students at HBCUs continued over the years, with another student at a different campus later being sodomized in the shower. Eventually, HRC stepped in and the HBCU program was created.

“We're not just this silent group that doesn't experience any harm just because we're all at an HBCU and we're all Black,” said Quenessa “Q” Long, a third-year law student at Howard University in Washington D.C. and president of Howard’s OUTlaw LGBTQ organization. “We do experience a lot of displacement and a lot of it has to do with the fact that people aren't acknowledging the things that we're going through.” 

Hall said HBCUs have historically been slower to adopt LGBTQ-friendly policies, in part due the complex history between the LGBTQ community and the Black community, but also because many HBCUs were formed in basements of churches, and the religious beliefs of those congregations became embedded into the campus community. 

But lately, Hall said, HBCUs have been doing “really great work.”

In 2012, Maryland’s Bowie State University became the first HBCU to establish an LGBTQ center. In 2018, Spelman College, a historically all-women school, began accepting transgender women. One year later, Morehouse began reckoning with its past and announced the historically all-male school would begin accepting transgender male students.

And at Howard, Long and Frank Cunningham, OUTlaw’s vice president, have begun to host campus-wide events, like the group’s recent Pride Week, to encourage and build community awareness and acceptance.

All these things, Hall said, have been proven to make a campus more inclusive, respectful and safe for everyone. 

Still, Long said, Howard – and other HBCUs – can do more.

“Where it will be a shortfall of Howard is if they don’t come out and say, ‘Yes, we care about historically the fight for, like, Black people but we also care about these other civil rights … we care about Black queer people and these identities that stand alone,” Long said.

But in some states, these actions could have legal backlash. 

In Florida, the state legislature is debating a bill that would ban programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion in colleges and universities across the state, as well as majors in women’s studies or gender studies. 

Hall expressed concerns that the spread of anti-LGBTQ legislation, and what some call anti-Black legislation, could lead to a mass exodus of Black and LGBTQ folks from Southern states.

So far, these laws haven’t impacted HBCU attendance just yet — in fact, the very opposite seems to be happening.

HBCU enrollment has been increasing over the last few years, with the National Center for Education Statistics reporting last year that the percentage of Black students enrolled at HBCUs increased from 8 percent in 2014 to 9 percent in 2020.

“I think in protest, a lot of young people want to make sure that our history is preserved, and preserving that history is attending HBCUs,” Jones said. 

But Cunningham, of Howard, thinks it goes even deeper.

“We as a Black community have to begin to see the fact that we can't simply just focus on the racial issues,” he said. “We have to focus on the fact that Black people are actually a part of many different communities and also different groups. And so we have to be for the complete liberation of all Black people.”

That’s why Cunningham wants to see HBCU alumni networks pick up funding where state governments are passing legislation targeting identities. 

“This is the time that the alumni have to step in to really fund and protect these schools from the risk of getting their funding taken away,” Cunningham said. “We ourselves have to figure out a way to ensure that our HBCUs are actually protected and are not weakened by demands from racist, homophobic and hate-driven governments.” 

HRC’s Hall said he’ll be interested to see if the rate of enrollment at HBCUs keeps increasing but acknowledges it’s too soon to tell. Still, he had advice for students during this time. 

“Students need to appeal directly to the state legislatures. They need to start running for office in many of these legislative districts,” he said. He also encouraged students to use social media campaigns to inform others of the impact these laws could have on them. 

“Students have an opportunity to really show some leadership on this issue because they can't get fired, state legislatures can't withhold pay from them,” Hall said. “This is an opportunity for them to really use their voices because we're approaching a very dangerous time.”

Kari Lake, who ran for Arizona governor in November and lost to Gov. Katie Hobbs (D), is weighing a bid for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s (I-Ariz.) seat, while Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) is considering a run against Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) after costing the GOP the governor’s mansion last year. 

The list goes on: Republican Joe Kent is gunning for a rematch against Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Wash.) after he was narrowly defeated in 2022; J.R. Majewski, who’s House campaign imploded last year after it was revealed that he misrepresented his military service, has floated another challenge to Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio); and Bo Hines has already filed paperwork to run again for a North Carolina House seat he lost in November.

The growing list of Trump loyalists weighing congressional runs has Republicans now warning against writing them off as possible GOP nominees once again.

“There are people out there that just won’t go away,” one Republican strategist familiar with Senate campaigns said. “All the folks out there that want to say, ‘Oh, they’re nobodies, they don’t matter’ — they need a reality check. Kari Lake doesn’t speak for the whole party, but she’s loud; she knows how to get attention. And, at least to an extent, it holds the rest of the party back.”

Lake, Mastriano and other candidates are among a cohort of Trump-aligned Republicans who have questioned or espoused baseless claims about the 2020 election. While they prevailed in their respective primaries, their candidacies ultimately cost the party key races in the general election in swing states like Arizona and Pennsylvania in a midterm year that was assumed to favor Republicans. 

Concerns over the Republican Party’s candidate quality was brought to the fore ahead of the November midterms by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who cited that as reason for his bearish stance on the GOP’s chances of retaking the upper chamber. But it came too late after many of the party’s primaries had already wrapped up. 

Those same concerns remain as the GOP now stares down the possibility of many of those same candidates running again. Some Republicans warn it would be a mistake for them to mount new campaigns.

“Some of these people are just a glutton for punishment,” said Arizona-based GOP strategist Barrett Marson. 

“The only thing worse about being a loser is being a two-time loser. And people like Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano did not resonate with a broad swath of voters, and there's nothing in the months since the election where they have changed or recognized their shortcoming and altered their strategy or message,” he continued. 

In Pennsylvania, Republican strategist Vince Galko noted that GOP members in the state have also expressed anxiety about a possible Mastriano Senate bid.

There’s “certainly a lot of hand-wringing going on amongst party leaders and donors and the political establishment with the thought of Doug Mastriano running for U.S. Senate” because he starts off “with solid name I.D. and a very strong base and if he should be on the same ticket as former President Trump, that would possibly give him a leg up as well,” he said.

“I think I, like many Republicans — you have to get to the point where you want to win, right?” Galko added.

The split-screen between Trump-aligned candidates and more establishment Republicans has not only become apparent at a national level but also on a state and local level. Last month, Kristina Karamo, another Trump-aligned candidate who has questioned the 2020 election results and lost her secretary of state race in Michigan last cycle, was elected the Michigan GOP chair last month.

Over in Colorado, former state Rep. Dave Williams — an election denier who tried to get the anti-Biden phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” as part of his name on the ballot and lost his GOP House primary against Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) – was elected Colorado GOP chair earlier this month. 

While Republicans believe that national groups can opt to work around state parties in key races, some acknowledge having pro-Trump populists as state party chairs can offer unnecessary headaches for viable candidates.

“The fact that the chairmen of some of these parties can get on TV and say crazy things and then force candidates to respond to those crazy things, well, that's detrimental,” said a GOP consultant based in the West who requested anonymity to speak candidly. 

Heading into 2024, both Senate and House GOP campaign arms have signaled that they’re handling their Republican primaries differently, with the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) already notably wading into the Indiana GOP Senate primary while the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) is signaling it’ll stay out of the primaries. 

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has also agreed to stay out of safe Republican districts that have an open-seat primary after reaching a deal with the conservative Club for Growth amid McCarthy’s bid to become Speaker earlier this year.

“Chairman Daines has been clear he’s willing to do whatever it takes to nominate candidates who can win both a primary and a general election,” said NRSC communications director Mike Berg.

Some Republicans say they’d like the House campaign arm to get involved in some of the House primaries.

“Of course they will be on offense in a lot of districts around the nation in addition to trying to retain incumbents, but I do think that they should … consider getting involved in some primaries, maybe not all of them,” said Dick Wadhams, a former Colorado GOP chairman. “But there are some that do make a big difference obviously.”

Wadhams worried that a repeat of pro-Trump candidates who lost their midterm races last year could “potentially deny Republican majorities from being elected in both the House and the Senate.”

But other Republicans believe some of those concerns can be addressed at a candidate-recruitment level. 

“There's no use losing sleep over this. We just got to put our head down and focus on recruiting diverse and exciting candidates who can outrun the top of the ticket and unite the party,” said one Republican House strategist, using Reps. Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.) and John James (R-Mich.) as examples. 

Overall, many Republicans are signaling that the party and its candidates need to offer a forward-looking vision to voters and not focus on past elections. 

“Elections are always about the future,” said Dallas Woodhouse, a longtime Republican operative and executive director of the conservative South Carolina Policy Council. “And I think the people that put forward a forward-looking, optimistic vision for the future are going to be in a lot better shape. Voters are craving that, I think, without question.”

Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s attorney, said in a letter to U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Friday on behalf of all parties involved to request that the two trials stemming from separate comments Trump has made that Carroll said were defamatory be consolidated into one. 

Carroll’s attorney and the judge have no relation to each other. 

The attorney said in the letter that the parties agreed the consolidated trial should start on April 25 and cover liability and damages for both cases. 

The first defamation case comes from comments Trump made in 2019 accusing Carroll of lying about the rape allegation and criticizing her physical appearance. The second one stems from a post he made on Truth Social in October saying that the allegation is a “hoax and a lie” and a “complete scam.” 

Carroll also sued Trump for battery in the second defamation suit after New York passed the Adult Survivors Act to open a one-year window for survivors of rape and sexual assault to sue the alleged perpetrator even if the statute of limitations had expired. 

The request for a consolidated trial needs to be approved by the judge. 

If the request is granted, the parties are asking that the jury use a special form to identify any damages applicable to each claim. They would also agree to not seek a stay of the trial date. 

Carroll’s attorney said in the letter that the parties believe consolidating the cases would be in the judge’s interest, as Kaplan has acknowledged that the “same factual question is ‘central’” to both cases. 

“Because of the overlapping nature of these proceedings, a single trial will reduce costs across the board, avoid the risk of inconsistent factual rulings or jury confusion, and economize matters for the Court (as well as for both parties’ witnesses),” the letter states. 

The judge ruled last week that the jury in the defamation case could hear the “Access Hollywood” tape from 2016 in which then-candidate Trump is heard talking about making apparently unsolicited sexual advances toward women and from two other women who have accused Trump of sexual assault.

The California governor’s office said in a tweet that the state is transforming its most notorious prison to the “most innovative rehabilitation facility” in the country. San Quentin houses the country’s highest number of people on death row, but it is being “repurposed” for rehabilitating inmates, educating them and breaking “cycles of crime.” 

The office said incarcerated individuals will have access to programs that will provide them with skills and tools that they can use to be successful inside and outside of prison. 

“California is advancing a more effective judicial system that builds safer communities,” a video that the office posted states. 

The facility will be renamed from San Quentin State Prison to San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and the more than 500 inmates who are currently on death row will be moved to another local in the state prison system. 

Newsom said at a press conference on Friday that the change is designed to help incarcerated individuals reintegrate into society once they complete their sentences. He said 30,000 people come out of the state prison system every year. 

“And how are people coming back? Are they ready to reintegrate in society? They ready to be fully participatory in the life of their city and their county, our state and our nation? Or are they bitter?” Newsom said. 

“And so for us, this is about real public safety. This is about keeping communities safe. This is about getting serious about addressing the issue of crime and violence in our state,” he continued. 

Newsom said about 800 people are released from San Quentin every year, and the goal for the reimagining of the facility is to prevent them from committing another crime and returning to prison, which would make communities safer. 

The office said in its tweet that the plan will take the best practices from countries like Norway, which has among the lowest rates of repeat offenders in the world. 

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation officials toured Norwegian prisons in 2019 and noted that cells even in maximum security prisons have additional furniture like chairs and desks and potentially televisions. They also have access to a kitchen. 

Oregon and North Dakota have also been inspired by Norway’s style of prisons in developing their own. 

San Quentin is the oldest prison in California’s history, having been established in the 1850s. Some of its most notable prisoners during its history have been serial killer Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan, the man who assassinated Robert Kennedy. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The March 20 to 22 visit, also Xi’s first foreign trip since winning a third term as president, is seen by the West as a show of Beijing’s support for Moscow in its ailing war against Kyiv. 

Much speculation has been made as to the nature of the trip, with western officials warning that it may signal China is considering giving Russia military assistance for the fight. 

But China, which is trying to present itself as a neutral arbiter of the conflict, has denied such claims, even as it has refused to condemn the invasion. 

Whatever the outcome, the meeting is sure to intensify ties between the two leaders who have already met 39 times prior - including over a year ago in Beijing at the Feb. 4, 2022, opening of the Olympics Games. At that encounter, held shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine, the two declared a “no limits” partnership.  

Here are the things Putin and Xi seek to gain from their joint meeting and one curveball ahead of it: 

Putin wants the weapons 

After launching an attack on Ukraine a year ago, Putin found himself with a limited pool of friends, a size that matters when it comes to Moscow’s ability to import and resupply critical arms and munitions in the fight. 

China so far has held off on providing such lethal aid, instead choosing to support Russia through boosted trade and extra joint wargames.  

But Western officials have recently started to warn that Beijing could soon move to give Moscow military assistance – with next week’s meeting a possible ideal venue for the two to make such an announcement. 

Also setting off alarms were comments from Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang, who recently accused the U.S. of hypocrisy in warning China against supplying weapons to Russia, pointing to the Biden administration supplying weapons to Taiwan. 

“It’s something that we will watch for,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters Monday, referring to any glimmers of a weapons agreement between the two nations. “Obviously, Russia has its own interests in trying to pull other countries into this conflict if it can, but our position is the same whether or not they meet.” 

The prospect is worrisome to U.S. officials as Chinese weapons, while not seen as able to hand a decisive win to Putin, could draw out the conflict, draining American weapons, aid resources and public goodwill toward helping Ukraine in the fight.  

Xi wants to grow his reputation as a peacemaker 

Fresh off a Chinese-brokered deal for Saudi Arabia and Iran to resume diplomatic relations, announced earlier this week, Xi now turns his eye to the Ukraine-Russia war. 

Without mentioning the embattled country, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Xi's visit is partially to promote “peace,” with conversations to touch on major regional and international issues. 

Xi’s government has already released a so called “peace plan” for Ukraine, a 12-point agenda for “a political resolution of the Ukraine crisis,” that has largely gone ignored in the west.  

And in a phone call on Thursday, senior Chinese diplomat Qin Gang told his Ukrainian counterpart that Beijing hopes “all parties will remain calm, rational and restrained, and resume peace talks as soon as possible,” according to a statement from the Chinese foreign ministry. 

But the United States and NATO remain wary of China’s push to mediate as Beijing has yet to condemn Russia for the war, or even to outwardly call the conflict such, instead deferring to Russia’s insistence it is a “special military operation.” 

Further drawing western skepticism, China has repeatedly sided with Russia and blocked international action against Moscow for the war. 

Both want a new world order 

One likely outcome of the Xi-Putin meeting is a public recommitment of the two’s partnership, seen as vital for them to counter what they see as the West’s unfair meddling in their affairs. 

Xi’s visit to Russia - and the Chinese support that comes with it - means to act as a challenge to the U.S. and its allies, who have sought to squeeze Moscow’s economy with crippling sanctions. 

The relationship is symbiotic, as Russia, in turn, offers China more weight on the international stage and backing in its own aggressive maneuvers, particularly in the South China Sea.  

“As the world enters a new period of turbulence and change, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and an important power, the significance and influence of China-Russia relations go far beyond the bilateral scope,” China’s foreign ministry said in the announcement of the Xi visit.  

Ryan Hass, a senior fellow with Washington D.C.-based think tank Brookings, said securing Russia as China’s partner is “fundamental” to Xi’s vision of national rejuvenation.  

“China views the United States as the principal obstacle to its rise," Hass writes. 

“Xi likely also sees the benefit of Russia distracting America’s strategic focus away from China. Neither Beijing nor Moscow can deal with the United States and its partners on its own; they both would rather stand together to deal with external pressure than face it alone,” he added. 

Shaking things up - Xi set to meet with international fugitive 

The Xi-Putin meeting was announced hours ahead of the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for the Russian president over allegations of war crimes related to unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. 

The arrest warrant - one of the first charges against Putin for war crimes in Ukraine – means Xi is now meeting with an international fugitive come Monday. 

Typically, such a warrant brings with it an important element of public shaming - a signal to other countries to carefully consider their dealings with an individual under investigation, according to international law experts. 

“From now on, the Russian president has the official status of a suspect in committing an international crime – illegal deportation and displacement of Ukrainian children,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin wrote on Facebook. 

“This means that outside Russia, Putin should be arrested and brought to court. And world leaders will think three times before shaking his hand or sitting with him at the negotiating table. The world has received a signal that the Russian regime is criminal and its leadership and allies will be brought to justice.” 

There’s little chance Putin will be brought into custody of an international court of law, and it’s also unlikely the warrant will greatly impact the meeting or Beijing’s position toward Moscow. But the legal move could put pressure on the two countries on the world stage. 

But Republicans say it could also lay a marker for future negotiations on potential permitting reform and even the debt ceiling.

Given the designation of H.R. 1 — a symbolic marker of being a top priority for the GOP majority — the “Lower Energy Costs Act” aims to boost domestic oil and gas production, speed up the approval process for energy and infrastructure permits, and repeal several programs that were approved in Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act package of climate, tax and health care measures last year.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), lead sponsor of the bill, said in an interview the H.R. 1 designation “shows the country how important smart energy policy is.” And he took aim at Biden, who he alleged had “declared war on American energy.”

“Frankly, it's following through on our promises that we made and the commitment to America,” Scalise said. “We told the country, ‘If you give us the majority, we will go bring forward good, smart policies that focus on helping families who are struggling from the Biden agenda.’ So let's lower costs for families, both at the pump and in their household electricity bills, which both are up dramatically since Joe Biden took office.”

The bill is not likely to pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate or get support from Biden. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on Wednesday that the “partisan” and “unserious” proposal would be “dead on arrival” in the upper chamber.

Scalise brushed off Schumer’s comments.

“They said that the D.C. crime bill, too,” Scalise said, referring to the resolution disapproving of changes to the District of Columbia’s criminal code that Biden reversed course to support after its passage in the House — blindsiding House Democrats who voted against the measure. The measure ultimately passed the Senate by a wide margin.

“I think when Schumer starts hearing from people in New York who are tired of paying incredibly high prices for energy and realizes that people don't like buying our energy from countries like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela when we can make it here at home a lot cleaner and a lot less expensive, then hopefully he’ll come around,” Scalise said. “I’m an optimist.”

Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) chalked Schumer’s comments up to “stock talking points.”

“Let's keep in mind this bill was designed to pass the House,” Graves said. “Is this the opening salvo on negotiations? Yeah, I think that's fair to say.”

Permitting reform is one major subject in the bill that is the subject of ongoing bipartisan negotiations. Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.V.) efforts to pass a permitting form proposal failed last year and Schumer said Thursday that he supported ongoing talks about a permitting reform deal.

But Graves said the bill might also play into Republicans’ demands for spending cuts and other measures as a condition of raising the debt ceiling, which Congress will have to take action on later this year in order to avoid default and severe economic consequences.

“In my mind, this is part of [the] debt ceiling, because this bill turns the spigot back on for billions of dollars in revenue to the United States Treasury,” Graves said. “This bill checks so many boxes.”

Though Graves acknowledged that there are still some details to hammer out before Republicans bring the bill for a vote with a slim five-seat majority, the bill is likely to get wide support in the House GOP Conference.

“It's an appropriately placed priority for the Republican Party, and it does show a very stark contrast between the hard left and the reasonable right,” said Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), chair of the hardline House Freedom Caucus.

“But I would also say this,” Perry added. “We want all voices to be heard. And there's some things that I'd like to see included as well.”

Scalise said leaders will discuss later this month whether the bill would be considered under any kind of open rule that could allow amendments on the floor, a process Republicans clamored for during several years of the Democratic-led House and has the potential to complicate major legislative packages.

Perry, for his part, said that he hopes several of his own amendments will be considered, either in the House Rules Committee or elsewhere. 

One of those amendments, Perry said, would eliminate the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s renewable energy program, linking an offshore wind farm in New Jersey to marine life washing up dead on beaches. Federal authorities have said they have found no credible evidence linking the wind program to the phenomenon, but are monitoring the situation.

The hearing — set for March 29 — will feature testimony from Martin Gruenberg, the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) Board of Directors, and Michael Barr, the vice chair for supervision of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

“The House Financial Services Committee is committed to getting to the bottom of the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank,” Reps. Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the chairman and ranking member of the committee, said in a statement on Friday.

“This hearing will allow us to begin to understand why and how these banks failed. As Chairman and Ranking Member, we take our oversight duties seriously,” they continued. “We are working around the clock to deliver answers to the American people in order to protect depositors, promote the safety and soundness of America’s banks, and strengthen our financial system.”

The pair said they “will conduct this hearing without fear or favor to get the answers the American people deserve.”

The committee said it “will hold more hearings as appropriate.”

The announcement of the first hearing comes exactly one week after federal regulators took over Silicon Valley Bank following a run on the bank amid liquidity issues. Days later, state regulators seized control of Signature Bank in New York after depositors ran to withdraw their money.

The failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank are now the second and third-largest bank collapses in U.S. history. The Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission are investigating the failure of Silicon Valley Bank.

Additionally, Barr is leading the Federal Reserve Board's review of the supervision and regulation of Silicon Valley Bank. The review will be released publicly by May 1, the board said.

The bank failures dominated Capitol Hill this week, with lawmakers reacting to the news and pointing fingers at what caused the collapses. A number of Democrats are blaming a 2018 deregulation bill that rolled back regulations put into place under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act for small and mid-size banks. Former President Trump signed the bill into law, but a handful of Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the measure on Capitol Hill.

Some Republicans have said that federal regulators in San Francisco did not conduct strong enough oversight, while others claimed that Silicon Valley Bank was “woke,” pointing to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investments and diversity and inclusion initiatives.

On Friday, SVB Financial Group, the parent company of Silicon Valley Bank, filed for bankruptcy.

Asked on Friday if any congressional action can be taken to react to the Silicon Valley Bank situation, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters “I think you want to get all the facts but it seems as though the regulators didn’t do their job.”

“I don’t know that it needs new legislation,” he added.

McCarthy also said McHenry “has a number of hearings that he’s gonna have so you could actually get all the facts.”

Pressed on what role Congress plays in dealing with the bank situation the Speaker again pointed to the California regulators, saying it “seems as though” that they “didn’t do their job,” which is “concerning” to him.

“Questions for California regulators out there and the governor too on what they missed,” he added.

By mid-April, as businesses in South Florida and across the Gulf Coast juggle an influx of vacationers, the region's beaches will likely face another unwelcome visitor: enormous mats of rotting sargassum seaweed. 

The leading edge of several thousand mile long train of floating sargassum is already beginning to pile up on the beaches of resorts in Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, along Caribbean islands and in Key West, Fla.

But with an estimated 13 million tons of seaweed out there, those early arrivals are just "the tip of the iceberg," said marine biologist Brian LaPointe.

LaPointe runs one of the nation's leading seaweed labs, at Florida American University. He said the bloom wasn't isn’t a cause for "panic" — but added that for a bloom to be "that big, that early, just doesn't bode well."

But much about the blob, from its origins to its ultimate destination, remains under active scientific debate.

Here is a list of things we know about the threats posed by the seaweed bloom — and what we still don't.

What is washing ashore?

Clumps of seaweed that have broken loose from a far larger belt of floating sargassum that has established itself in the mid-Atlantic over the past decade.

Unlike kelp or eelgrass, which are types of seaweed fixed by their roots firmly to the seafloor, sargassum is a form of free-floating seaweed that is most highly concentrated in the Sargasso Sea.

The Sargasso Sea is the world’s only sea not bounded by any land. Instead, it is a region of the Atlantic surrounded by swirling ocean currents that have long trapped ships, ocean detritus and huge populations of sargassum.

Those swirling currents had long kept sargassum in — until about a decade ago, when the current sargassum crisis began, and cities like Miami and Fort Lauderdale began having to spend tens of millions per year on dealing with it.

What caused the seaweed crisis?

The acute cause seems to be two years of “unprecedented” wind events — in 2009 and 2010 — which blew record quantities of sargassum out of its home waters.

While clumps of sargassum had always escaped to wash up on Atlantic and Caribbean beaches, there had never been enough before to establish a stable population, said Rick Lumpkin, who runs the physical oceanography division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) observation lab in Miami.

Other factors helped the new sargassum colony to establish itself in its new home after 2011, Lumpkin said. Like any plant, sargassum benefits from heat and fertilizer. The heat came from rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change. And the fertilizer came from, well, fertilizer. 

Many scientists link the sargassum blooms to the overuse of fertilizers in the watersheds of the great rivers that pour into the Atlantic: the Mississippi, Orinoco, Congo and Amazon.

Those fertilizers — which those rivers' powerful outflow push far out to sea — are used in industrial agriculture to make up for soil depleted by tropical deforestation or season after season of growing the same crops.

But particularly in the case of agriculture in the Amazon and Orinoco, that nutrient runoff also ended up boosting the population of floating algae in the mid-Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Other factors likely contributed, Lumpkin said. Churning winds off the west coast of Africa pulling nutrient rich waters to the surface and the colossal Sahara Desert dust storms also seem to have helped played a role.

These led to huge sargassum blooms across the Atlantic in 2018 and 2019 — blooms that may even have been bigger than this year’s.

But what’s unusual this year, however, is how “how much sargassum has entered the western Caribbean,” Lumpkin said.

Where did sargassum seaweed come from?

We don’t really know. Scientists only detected the incoming sargassum belt once it had already congealed into a mass big enough to be visible from satellites.

But in the broadest sense, the sargassum beginning to wash up on Caribbean beaches came from what scientists call the Great Sargasso Belt — that new colony that established itself in 2011 outside the Sargasso Sea.

The western extremity of that belt, sheared off by currents, is now on its long collision course with the Caribbean.

Is the seaweed dangerous? 

Not directly — at least not to people. 

It can even make the ocean marginally safer, said Stephen Leatherman, an oceanographer at Florida International University specializing in beach health.

The thick drifting mats of sargassum are so thick that they block the action of riptides that could otherwise pull people out to sea, Leatherman said.

But few would want to swim among a sargassum bloom anyhow. As it decays on beaches and among mangroves, it releases noxious-smelling chemicals like hydrogen sulfide — a malodorous chemical reminiscent of rotten eggs that will deter beachgoers.

Leatherman described it as “a floating forest,” with its own unique ecosystem of hundreds of other plants and animals.

One particularly dangerous resident of that forest is the highly venomous Portuguese man-of-war.

But as the seaweed is pulled ashore, all that stuff goes along with it, creating a host of new problems. Fish, crabs and jellyfish that move among the sargassum get washed ashore and rot on the beach. 

NOAA’s Lumpkin recounted pulling a little crab out of the mat of sargasso that had washed ashore near Miami. He recalled thinking, "That guy had gone on a really long ride."

Could a sargassum colony — or the species that ride along with it — eventually establish the kind of permanent presence in the Caribbean that it has in the wider Atlantic?

“That’s a fascinating question,” Lumpkin said. “We don’t know the answer.”

Is it killing off coral?

The overwhelming danger posed by the massive seaweed blooms is ecological. As the floating plants pile atop each other, they form layered mats several feet deep and sometimes stretching for miles — so large, Leatherman said, that sea turtles sometimes get stuck underneath them and drown.

The drifting mats also can block all light from reaching underwater plants beneath, posing a deadly threat to coral reefs.

The rise of sargassum blooms has happened alongside a wider loss of stony corals in the Florida Keys, LaPointe said, although he stressed that the cause still hadn’t been proven.

And as the floating seaweed breaks down among the mangroves that ring the Gulf of Mexico, hydrogen sulfide and other byproducts suck oxygen out of the water column, creating dead zones that suffocate fish and “everything underwater that can't swim away,” LaPointe said.

To make things even worse, those rotting bodies add to the stink.

Where is the seaweed headed and when will it get there?

Likely the beaches of the Gulf Coast and islands of the Caribbean Sea, but it is hard to say much beyond that, experts told The HIll.

That belt is “not one single mass — it’s lots and lots of clumps and passages that get sheared off,” said Lumpkin of NOAA. 

Some of those clumps have gotten sheared off from the larger floating forest, and are washing ashore in Cuba, the Yucatan and South Florida — and in particular the three east-facing counties of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach. 

“But the mass of it is still heading into the Gulf, and we’re going to see a steady increase in the amount passing along,” Lumpkin said.

In its current trajectory, a long train of seaweed is following the Caribbean current west, where it is catching the loop current around the Yucatan Peninsula and threading the 90-mile strait between Cuba and Florida, after which the Gulf Stream will carry it back into the Atlantic.

But while “that’s the pathway, wind can blow it off course,” Lumpkin said — a north wind could blow it against Cuba, a south wind against the Florida Keys.

LaPointe of Florida American returned to the metaphor of a hurricane far from land: the trajectory is too uncertain to warn any specific resort or beach community in time to avoid a wave of disappointed guests.

That could change starting this July. LaPointe’s lab has gotten a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to begin work with the Florida National Marine Sanctuary to begin trying to track specific sargassum clumps with enough detail “to tell hotels what’s coming for you.”

What will places do about it?

In the past, Miami plowed algae under the beaches, but it has become such a problem now that the beach sand can no longer contain it, Leatherman said.

On some of the rockier Caribbean islands, where pocket beaches lie inside a protective bottleneck of peninsulas, the solution to sargassum is simple: stretch a boom (of the sort that might be used to stop an oil spill) across a narrow bottleneck.

And in Mexico’s Yucatan, an entrepreneur calling himself Mr. Sargasso has begun selling bricks made from clay compacted with the seaweed pulled from beaches — which he calls “sargablocks.”

But Florida’s long, flat beaches can’t be protected by booms, and the state has no brick industry.

Fort Lauderdale has disposed of sargassum for years by dragging it out to giant parking lots, laying it in sheets, letting the rain wash off the salt, and then composting it into mulch, which it gives out for free. It’s a solution that, in essence, repurposes uses the nutrients running off the denuded Amazon to nourish Florida lawns and crops.

But with the seaweed bloom arriving in such quantities so early in the season — months before Florida’s summer rains begin — composting may not be an option, Leatherman said.

That will likely give the region’s cities little choice but to drag it to the landfills at a cost of $35 million to $45 million per county.

The $30 billion transfer to First Republic by banks including JPMorgan, Citigroup and other banking juggernauts that were deemed “too big to fail” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis is spurring a flight of deposits away from smaller lenders.

It is also raising eyebrows about the relationship between Wall Street and the federal government.

The private-sector rescue came just days after a public-sector bailout of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Signature Bank by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Federal Reserve and Treasury Department.

In that deal, taxpayer money is being used to backstop a federal line of credit extended to ailing banks.

Administration officials maintain the move to save First Republic was done at the initiative of the financial sector, but multiple outlets reported that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen leaned on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon to get the deal done.

The effects of the news on the beleaguered First Republic, which had at one point lost 80 percent of its share value since Monday, were immediate.

First Republic stock rose 10 percent on news of the rescue package on Thursday but was down more than 30 percent during trading on Friday.

Here’s what you need to know about the latest bank rescue and what it means for the relationship between the government and big finance.

A call for consequences: Biden urges Congress to crack down on failed bank executives

Private banks say the bailout was their idea, but reporting indicates otherwise

Representatives for the banking industry told The Hill that the $30 billion bailout for First Republic was the banks’ idea and that the move was designed to stabilize the financial sector in the interests of the broader economy.

The economy has been under pressure from eight consecutive interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

U.S. officials have repeated this line, saying they’re supportive of the move but not responsible for it.

“This show of support by a group of large banks is most welcome, and demonstrates the resilience of the banking system,” a Thursday statement from the Treasury and other government agencies reads.

But reporting by The New York Times and other outlets indicates that the private-sector bailout was Yellen’s idea and that she suggested it to JPMorgan’s Dimon, who then corralled industry leaders to pony up the funds.

A rescue in real-time: Megabanks bail out First Republic

“Despite still feeling bruised by the fallout from JPMorgan’s rescues of Washington Mutual and Bear Stearns during the 2008 financial crisis, Dimon started calling other C.E.O.s to raise the money,” the Times reported in its Dealbook newsletter on Friday.

“Jamie Dimon and Janet Yellen were on a call Tuesday, when she floated an idea: What if the nation’s largest lenders deposited billions of dollars into First Republic Bank, the latest firm getting nudged toward the brink by a depositor panic,” Bloomberg News reported Thursday.

The rescue avoided another appeal to taxpayer funds

The private rescue takes taxpayers off the hook for yet another bank failure, just days after their money was put up to insure rich depositors from the venture capital industry at SVB.

Political blowback from a second round of public bank bailouts may have been what the Biden administration was trying to avoid in asking private bankers for their help.

“This First Republic thing, it’s disappointing,” former FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair said on the CNBC television network on Friday. “I’m glad at least they didn’t use government support, that the private banks came in to try to stabilize it, but it’s not clear it’s working. The problem is with this that fear becomes the major issue.”

“This is a classic Jimmy Stewart problem,” she added, referring to the famous pop culture example of a bank run in the classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life."

Nobody likes bailouts? ‘Unfortunate and wrong’: Angry taxpayers respond to latest bank bailouts

Bair said that people need to understand that deposits in a bank aren’t simply locked up safe, but are reinvested in ventures that carry varying degrees of risk.

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman called the rescue of First Republic “bad policy” in a tweet on Thursday and insinuated that assurances about taxpayer money were being made behind the scenes.

“Spreading the risk of financial contagion to achieve a false sense of confidence in [First Republic Bank] is bad policy," he wrote. "The [systemically important banks] would never have made this low return investment in deposits unless they were pressured to do so and without assurances that [First Republic Bank] deposits would be backstopped if it failed.”

Other financiers disagreed, stressing the commercial nature of the consortium’s investment.

“It’s a commercial transaction, it’s the right thing to do. Yes, it was encouraged by Treasury and the Fed, but it’s the right thing to do, and quite frankly they’re being paid for it. So it’s not a bailout,” Westwood Capital founder Dan Alpert said in an interview with The Hill.

“Borrowing deposits from other banks is hardly anything new. Broker deposits are something that’s been going on forever. Clearly there is a desire for liquidity in various institutions and for an increase in deposits, but the fact is there are excess deposits at many banks,” he added.

Smaller banks are fuming mad

Smaller and midsize banks are furious after Yellen told Congress this week that only the big banks would be backstopped by taxpayers and not the $23 trillion banking industry as a whole. 

“The nation’s community banks denounce today’s statements from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen that uninsured deposits will be protected only at systemically risky banks, which is a bailout for big banks that rewards mismanagement and risky behavior,” Rebeca Romero Rainey, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said in a statement on Thursday.

Ironically, investors are noting that the seemingly charitable move toward First Republic by JPMorgan and others can end up helping their businesses by making them appear as reliable as the federal government.

“Let’s face it. The large banks have been enormous beneficiaries of the last week," Alpert said. "I can’t tell you how many businesses I know that have run from all these little small banks, basically every bank that’s below the top five and have pulled their money and moved it over to JPMorgan or any bank in the top five.”

“This has been ridiculous," he said. "People have panicked, unnecessarily, mind you. It’s been crazy, it’s been completely lunatic.”

Taxpayers are still angry about financial sector bailouts

New polling by Ipsos released this week on attitudes toward bank bailouts shows that a large majority of Americans believe that taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook for banks that collapse

“84 percent of Americans agree – 56 percent agree strongly – that taxpayers should not have to foot the bill for irresponsible bank management, including 85 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans,” the poll found.

More background: What you need to know about this week’s banking crisis

But the polling also found that 49 percent of Americans are “in favor of government bailouts of U.S. financial institutions,” up from 37 percent in 2012.

“We live in capitalism, so we can’t have our economy tanked,” Ellen McTigue, a retired nurse practitioner from New York, told The Hill in an interview. “I just sort of feel like, where is this really going?”

Could taxpayers be called upon to backstop the entire banking system yet again?

The White House put out a statement on Friday saying that Congress should allow the FDIC to punish the executives of failed banks more severely, docking their pay and banning them from future banking work. 

But the president didn’t weigh in on whether Congress should be called upon to make the FDIC backstop the entire banking sector, and all deposits in the industry above $250,000, as it did with SVB.

Former FDIC Chairwoman Bair said Friday this should only happen if “true systemic problems with uninsured deposit runs” start to occur.

Picking up the tab: Here’s who is paying to restore Silicon Valley, Signature Bank deposits

“We did it during the Great Financial Crisis. It would be temporary," Bair said. "Obviously, you should charge banks an extra premium for providing the coverage. Look, I don’t like bailouts of any sort, so I would only do this if they’re seeing true systemic problems with uninsured deposit runs.”

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, told Politico Wednesday that the Congress should in fact insure all bank deposits on a temporary basis.

“If you don’t do this, there’s going to be a run on your smaller banks,” he said. “Everyone’s going to take their money out and run to the JPMorgan’s and these too-big-to-fail banks, and they’re going to get bigger and everybody else is going to get smaller and weaker, and it’s going to really be bad for our system.”

“There won’t be a standoff at Mar-a-Lago with Secret Service and the Manhattan DA’s office,” Joe Tacopina told The New York Daily News. 

Tacopina said Trump, whom he described as a survivor, would find a way to use any charges filed against him to help him politically in the end.

“Most people would collapse under the weight of this,” he said. “He seems to turn everything into a positive and everything into a boost for his campaign, so I’m sure this will just join that long list of things that people think no one could overcome, but he will.” 

Tacopina’s comments comes as Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg appears to be close to making a decision about whether to charge Trump in his investigation into the hush-money payment that was made to adult-film star Stormy Daniels for her to stay quiet ahead of the 2016 presidential election about an affair she says she and Trump had. 

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen, who testified before the grand jury in the probe earlier this week, pleaded guilty in 2018 to multiple charges including a campaign finance violation for a $130,000 payment he made to Daniels. Cohen, who served more than a year in prison, has said he made the payment at Trump’s direction. 

Daniels met with Manhattan prosecutors leading the investigation on Wednesday. 

Trump has admitted to reimbursing Cohen for the payment but says it was not related to his campaign funds. The Trump Organization declared the payment reimbursing Cohen to be a legal expense. 

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung blasted Bragg in a statement on Thursday, asserting that Trump is “completely innocent.” He alleged that the probe was politically motivated and would backfire “massively” on Democrats. 

Trump was invited to appear before the grand jury himself, another sign of an impending decision on whether charges will be filed, but he declined to testify.

According to Google researchers, the newly discovered hacking techniques are different from the usual cyber espionage Chinese hackers are known for.

“Instead of infiltrating systems behind the corporate firewall, they are compromising devices on the edge of the network — sometimes firewalls themselves — and targeting software built by companies such as VMware Inc. or Citrix Systems Inc,” the Journal said.

The researchers told the news outlet that the new hacking techniques “represent a new level of ingenuity and sophistication from China.”

This comes as tensions between the U.S. and China mount over a myriad of issues, including security concerns over TikTok, cyber espionage, election security, spy balloons and recent export control restrictions.

Just this week, the Biden administration threatened to ban TikTok in the U.S. if its Chinese-based parent company, ByteDance, did not sell its stake to an American company. This follows months of pressure from U.S. and state lawmakers, primarily Republicans, to ban the social media app, especially on government-issued devices.

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is scheduled to testify before a House panel next week, said selling the app wouldn’t solve any security concerns that they haven’t already addressed.

U.S. officials have also recently raised the alarm on growing Chinese threats in cyberspace. 

Earlier this month, U.S. Cyber Command Director Gen. Paul Nakasone said that China has become “a very capable force” and “a very formidable foe” in cyberspace. 

And last month, an FBI cyber official warned state officials that Chinese hackers pose a “growing threat” and that their attempt to target political parties prior to the 2022 midterm election shows there will be “significant Chinese cyber activity … in the coming year,” CNN first reported.

Biden's budget proposes increasing discretionary funding for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) by $14.8 billion over 2023, raising taxes on people making more than $400,000 a year to keep Medicaid solvent, making ObamaCare tax premiums permanent and enacting a $35 cap on monthly insulin costs across the commercial market.

Republicans leaders have already stated that a tax increase is a non-starter, and GOP lawmakers have indicated a desire to cut the Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax premiums that Biden is seeking to set in stone.

While Republicans have not yet released their own budget plan, which Biden has not hesitated to point out while promoting his proposal, they are expected to call for cuts in health care spending in some areas, such as the ACA and Medicaid. Programs including Medicare and Social Security have been deemed off the table, but lawmakers in the party insist that cuts are necessary to address the national debt.

With the House under GOP control, compromises will have to be made in order for the budget to pass in Congress. Democratic senators seemed optimistic on Thursday that they could come together with their Republican colleagues on a few issues.

Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) said he wasn't aware of any measures that Republicans had expressed an openness to considering yet, but pointed to the ACA tax credits as one where he felt bipartisanship could occur.

"There's constituents in every one of our states that benefit from these credits, and when I hear all my colleagues talk about issues that constituents are facing, every one of us is concerned about higher costs in whatever the space may be," Luján said. "As someone that survived a stroke, I can tell you how important it is to have access to care. It's life-saving."

Fellow Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions member Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) signaled a degree of confidence in several issues that he felt both sides could come together on.

"I was pleased to see good solid investments on the technology on the border that can be used to stop fentanyl from coming in and that should be a place where we can work together," Kaine said. "Some of the child care stuff, we got some good, solid [Republican] votes on that with an omni last year so there may be some possibilities there."

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said he appreciated the effort and the amount of measures that Biden had put into his budget.

"A lot of them I disagree with. On the health care front, we're going through them, so I don't have a response for it yet," said Romney.

When asked which of Biden's health care proposals he was open to considering, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he wanted to see expansions in health savings accounts (HSA), which were not included in the president's budget.

HSAs are savings accounts where pre-tax dollars can be contributed for later use to pay qualified medical expenses. Individuals can only contribute to HSAs if they have a high deductible health plan. In December, Paul introduced legislation that would allow more people to contribute to HSAs, regardless of if they have insurance or not, and also expand what expenses HSA contributions could go towards.

Three people familiar with the matter told The New York Times that the DOJ is investigating the company’s surveillance of U.S. citizens broadly, too. The Times reported that the probe seems to be related to the admission from ByteDance, which owns TikTok, in December that some of its employees inappropriately gained access to some U.S. citizens’ user data. 

Internal emails that the Times obtained showed the company conducted an internal investigation and found employees gained access to data from two journalists and people associated with them. Forbes reported following the Times’s report that two additional journalists that work for the outlet were also tracked. 

The employees were working as part of a monitoring program to try to find the source of leaks. All four employees involved in obtaining the data were fired. 

A person with knowledge of the situation told the Times for its Friday report that the DOJ’s criminal division, the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia are conducting the investigation. 

A DOJ spokesperson told the Times that they had no comment on the report.

A spokesperson for TikTok referred the Times to ByteDance for questions.

A ByteDance spokesperson told The Hill that the company "strongly" condemns the actions of the employees who obtained the data on the journalists and are no longer working for the company.

"Our internal investigation is still ongoing, and we will cooperate with any official investigations when brought to us," they said.

Forbes also confirmed the investigation before the Times report. 

The Biden administration has recently been increasing pressure on TikTok following criticism of the app over concerns about the security of its U.S. users’ data on a platform run by a Chinese company. Critics have expressed worries that the data could be obtained by the Chinese government, while TikTok has insisted that the data is not at risk. 

The administration has told ByteDance that it must sell its stake in TikTok or the app could possibly be banned in the country. The app has been banned on devices owned by the federal government and more than two dozen state governments amid the backlash. 

Legislation has also been introduced in Congress to ban the app in the country entirely. 

Trump posted a short video clip from the night of the 2016 presidential election. In it, he says: “Sorry to keep you waiting. Complicated business. Complicated.”

Trump’s most recent post before Friday was from Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters violently stormed the Capitol to try to stop the certification of President Biden’s election victory.

Meta suspended Trump from Facebook and Instagram the next day, saying his posts risked inciting further violence.

In January, the company announced it would reinstate Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, saying he would regain his ability to post to his millions of followers on each platform. The company also said it would put measures in place to “deter repeat offenses.”

“Like any other Facebook or Instagram user, Mr. Trump is subject to our Community Standards. In light of his violations, he now also faces heightened penalties for repeat offenses,” Nick Clegg, president of global affairs for Meta, said in January.

Twitter, which also suspended Trump’s account after the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, reinstated Trump last November after the company was bought by Elon Musk.

Trump’s return to Facebook gives him a powerful megaphone as he seeks to connect with supporters as part of his 2024 campaign for the White House. It could also provide a fundraising boost, as it will reconnect him with individuals who can help fuel his grassroots, small-dollar donor base.

Trump has also been posting on Truth Social, a social media platform he helped launch. On that platform, he frequently uses the rhetoric that got him suspended from platforms like Facebook in the first place, spreading claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

In a sealed ruling from U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, she found sufficient evidence that Corcoran’s legal advice was given in furtherance of a crime, one of the few determinations that can compel an attorney to discuss communications that would otherwise be covered by attorney-client privilege.

The development is a significant win for special counsel Jack Smith and could make Corcoran a key witness as prosecutors advance an investigation into more than 300 classified records discovered in Trump’s Florida home.

In a warrant to search the property, prosecutors said their removal to Mar-a-Lago could violate the Espionage Act, which prohibits removing or concealing national defense information.

Neither Corcoran or his attorney immediately responded to request for comment.

Corcoran has been representing Trump in his dealings with the Justice Department for the bulk of the time the department has sought the return of the documents.

The repeated attempts to secure them included a June subpoena for the records, with Cororan then handing over a folder with some 38 documents.

Corcoran is also reported to have been the attorney who drafted a letter certifying that all remaining records with classified markings at Mar-a-Lago had been returned, but the letter was ultimately signed by another attorney, Christina Bobb. She reportedly insisted on adding language that said all records had been returned “based upon the information that has been provided to me.”

The Trump campaign dismissed the move as interference with the right to an attorney and attacked Howell, an Obama appointee whose decision comes as she is stepping down as chief judge.  

“Whenever prosecutors target the attorneys, that’s usually a good indication their underlying case is very weak. If they had a real case, they wouldn’t need to play corrupt games with the Constitution. Every American has the right to consult with counsel and have candid discussions — this promotes adherence to the law. We will fight the Department of Justice on this front and all others that jeopardize fundamental American rights and values,” a Trump spokesperson said in a statement.

“Interfering with Americans’ right to an attorney is a serious and weighty matter. For a judge to do so in violation of due process, without allowing for any real hearing, and within a few hours of her expiration date - as chief judge supervising the grand jury - is unAmerican and unacceptable.” 

The remarkable decision from Howell, however, indicates prosecutors were able to supply sufficient evidence that Corcoran’s behavior meets the threshold for the crime-fraud exception, opening the door to a second interview.

Corcoran has already appeared before the grand jury in the case, but declined to answer numerous questions, citing attorney-client privilege. 

It’s not the first time a judge has found one of Trump’s attorneys may have violated the law in the course of giving legal advice.

A California-based federal judge determined in March last year that John Eastman and Trump more likely than not committed crimes in their effort to keep the former president in power.

Eastman crafted memos for the Trump campaign arguing that then-Vice President Pence could buck his duty to certify the election results.

He is now facing disciplinary action from the California State Bar that could result in the loss of his law license.

Updated at 4:37 p.m.

The report, based on White House records that the committee requested from the National Archives last June, identified 117 undisclosed foreign gifts received by the former president, former first lady Melania Trump, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, and Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump.

Trump’s youngest son Barron Trump and the Kushner children were also listed as recipients of some of the undisclosed gifts. 

The president and his family are not allowed to personally keep gifts worth more than $415 from foreign governments and instead must accept them on behalf of the United States. The gifts, which must be publicly disclosed, are then turned over to the National Archives.

After Trump left office, the State Department reported that it was “missing items of a significant value”, finding that a “lack of accurate recordkeeping and appropriate physical security controls contributed to the loss of the gifts.” A later report also said that the president’s office had failed to provide a foreign gift listing for 2020.

Friday’s report from the Oversight Committee noted that the undisclosed gifts create concerns about “potential undue influence,” highlighting that the Trump family failed to report $45,000 worth of gifts from Saudi Arabia, $47,000 worth of gifts from India and $3,400 worth of gifts from China.

The previously undisclosed gifts included, among other things, a “larger-than-life sized painting” of Trump from the president of El Salvador and a $3,755 gold golf driver from the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

White House email correspondence suggested officials may have provided inaccurate advice on reporting requirements, according to the report.

The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to examine new regulations made by government agencies and overturn them with a majority vote. 

The effort to use the CRA to stop Biden’s plan is led by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), ranking member for the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joni Ernst (R-Iowa.).

“It’s a shame for working families across the country that Republican lawmakers continue to fight tooth and nail to deny critical relief to millions of their own constituents impacted by the pandemic. President Biden, Vice President Harris, and [Education] Secretary [Miguel] Cardona recognize how essential this relief is for tens of millions of working families, and they will continue fighting to deliver much-needed support to borrowers trying to get back on their feet after the economic crisis caused by the pandemic," a White House spokesperson said in response to their resolution. 

The senators introduced the resolution following a report from the Government Accountability Office that declared Biden’s student loan relief and payment pause are rules subject to the CRA.

In response to the GAO's decision, the White House said the student debt relief plan "is based on the Department of Education’s decades-old authority granted by Congress and is a result of the same procedures used by multiple administrations over the last two decades to protect borrowers from the effects of national emergencies." 

"This longtime statutory authority has never been subject to the Congressional Review Act. GAO’s decision is at odds with clear longstanding practice, and the Department remains fully confident that its debt relief plan complies with the law," the spokesperson added.

If a Senate majority supported the resolution, Biden’s student loan forgiveness would be overturned and a federal agency would not be able to propose another plan similar to it unless it was put into law. 

“Where is the relief for the man who skipped college but is paying off his work truck, or the woman who paid off her loans and is now struggling to afford her mortgage? This resolution prevents these Americans, whose debts look different from the favored group the Biden administration has selected, from picking up the bill for his irresponsible and unfair policy,” Cassidy said. 

It is unlikely the resolution would get enough support in the Democratic-led Senate, although some Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) have previously been critical of Biden’s program, which eliminates up to $20,000 in student debt per borrower and is estimated to cost $400 billion. 

The loan forgiveness is already hanging in the balance at the Supreme Court, where a majority-conservative court seemed highly skeptical of the legality of the plan during oral arguments last month.

—Updated at 4:54 p.m.

The arrest warrant is thought to mark one of the first charges against Putin for war crimes in Ukraine, part of a global effort to hold the Russian president and the Russian Federation accountable for atrocities beginning with the full-scale February 2022 invasion.

An arrest warrant was also issued for Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, commissioner for children’s rights in the Office of the President of the Russian Federation, who the ICC alleges “bears individual criminal responsibility” for the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory to Russia.

“It is forbidden by international law for occupying powers to transfer civilians from the territory they live in to other territories. Children enjoy special protection under the Geneva Convention,” ICC President Judge Piotr Hofmański said in a video statement on Friday.

The arrest warrant marks a stunning global rebuke against Putin, even as the chance of bringing the Russian leader into custody of an international court of law is remote at best. 

“The ICC is doing its part of work. As a court of law, the judges issued arrest warrants that execution depends on international cooperation,” Hofmański said.

The warrants and the authority of the ICC were rejected by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova. 

“Russia does not cooperate with this body, and possible 'recipes' for arrest coming from the International Court of Justice will be legally null and void for us,” according to a statement posted in Russian on the Foreign Ministry’s Telegram channel. 

The ICC maintains it can bring charges against Russian officials because Ukraine has accepted its jurisdiction to investigate crimes that are committed on Ukrainian territory by Russia.

The ICC president underscored the extraordinary nature of the publication of the arrest warrants, though the contents are being kept secret to protect victims and witnesses and to safeguard the investigation.

The international body said that because the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia is ongoing, it felt compelled to publicize the warrants so that it “may contribute to the prevention of the further commission of crimes.” 

“This is an important moment in the process of justice before the ICC,” Hofmański continued. “The judges have reviewed the information and evidence submitted by the prosecutor and determined that there are credible allegations against these persons for the alleged crimes.” 

The publication of the arrest warrants — a rare move by the ICC — comes ahead of a high-stakes and high-profile meeting between Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping set to take place between March 20 and 22.

International law experts say there is an important element of public shaming in publishing an arrest warrant that signals to other countries to carefully consider their dealings with a person who is under investigation on the world stage. 

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin called the ICC’s arrest warrant “a historic step” but the beginning “of a long road to justice.”

“From now on, the Russian president has the official status of a suspect in committing an international crime - illegal deportation and displacement of Ukrainian children,” Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin wrote on Facebook.

“This means that outside Russia, Putin should be arrested and brought to court. And world leaders will think three times before shaking his hand or sitting with him at the negotiating table. The world has received a signal that the Russian regime is criminal and its leadership and allies will be brought to justice.”

The ICC statement said that the court's Pre Trial Chamber II, which has the authority to issue an arrest warrant, considered evidence brought by the ICC Prosecutor General on Feb. 22.

This followed the publication on Feb 14. of a report by the Conflict Observatory, which is supported by the U.S. State Department, detailing a vast network of Russian-run sites used in the transfer and deportation of Ukrainian citizens to Russian territory, including thousands of Ukrainian children.

Kostin said his office estimates that more than 16,000 children have been deported from the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories of from Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv and Kherson regions, but warned the real number is much higher.

Ukraine has managed to bring 308 children back from Russia, Kostin said.

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General said his office cooperated with the ICC Prosecutor General on their investigation to provide 40 volumes, more than 1,000 pages, of materials and supporting evidence of deportations.

“No doubt, this is a planned policy of the Russian Federation aimed at destroying Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a nation. By kidnapping our children, Russia is literally stealing our future.”

While Ukrainian officials, with the help of the U.S. and international partners, are investigating and prosecuting crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukrainian courts, Kyiv is also focused on holding Russia accountable on the international stage, in particular for the crime of genocide and other crimes against humanity, including the violent targeting of civilians, using rape as a tool of war, imprisonment, torture and executions.

In addition to the work with the ICC, the Ukrainian government is rallying international partners to establish a Special Tribunal to hold Russia accountable for the crime of aggression, but the pathway and support for such a court not yet established.

Kostin, in his Facebook post, called to bring all Ukrainian children back from Russia and pursue justice.

“We need to bring them all back. And condemn in Ukrainian and international courts everyone involved in the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. As well as other war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the most serious international crime - aggression.”

Updated at 2:02 p.m.

Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands) criticized Jordan’s management of the subcommittee in an interview with The Washington Post’s The Early 202 newsletter published on Friday.

“I always saw [Jordan] as an aggressive, very bullish member of Congress, and I don’t have any problems with that,” Plaskett said. “That is his personal style. That’s who he is. I've always felt that as a lawyer trained in a courtroom, I can have an argument with you and still be respectful.”

“But the manner in which Jim Jordan has conducted himself in the hearings thus far is a cavalier manner in which he dismisses other members of Congress’s arguments,” she continued. “I do not agree with members mocking loudly each other, laughing at each other, making degrading comments during the hearing.”

Plaskett also pointed to Jordan's approach to the witnesses that Republicans have described as whistleblowers.

“Because he has also done things such as presenting information about what he calls whistleblowers — who do not fit the term of whistleblowers — to reporters lets me know that he’s not an honest broker,” she added. “I'm going to always have to be prepared for the worst, unfortunately.”

House Judiciary Democrats claimed in a report earlier this month that the three witnesses that Republicans have identified as whistleblowers did not "present actual evidence of any wrongdoing" by the FBI. The group acknowledged the unusual nature of their report, noting that it was not a step they would take “in the ordinary course of business.” 

Plaskett also accused Jordan of declining to engage with her on particular issues where she thought they might be able to find some common ground, such as reports of an FBI special agent who colluded with Russia or of the IRS disproportionately auditing working-class people.

“I sent a follow-up letter saying, ‘Look, these are areas I'm interested in. There may be one or two of those that I think that we can work on together, or others that we could work on together that you might suggest,’” Plasket told The Early 202. “No response to that, either.”

Jordan spokesman Russell Dye said in a statement to the newsletter that Republicans “have engaged with Democrats and Delegate Plaskett, followed committee rules and invited Democrats to every transcribed interview and hearing with ample notice.”

“Sadly, Democrats have abandoned all trust by leaking transcripts and subpoenas, slandering and attacking journalists testifying about government abuse, and defaming brave whistleblowers who have come forward to tell their stories about DOJ and FBI abuses," Dye added.

The restrictions had been imposed in response to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, which took place after Trump repeatedly made false claims about voter fraud related to his loss in the presidential election.

“We carefully evaluated the continued risk of real-world violence, balancing that with the importance of preserving the opportunity for voters to hear equally from major national candidates in the run up to an election,” Leslie Miller, vice president of YouTube Public Policy, said in a statement.

"This channel will continue to be subject to our policies, just like any other channel on YouTube."

Unlike other platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, which removed Trump’s accounts after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, citing concerns about incitement of violence, YouTube left the channel up but restricted it from uploading new content. 

The lifted restriction follows actions that other platforms have taken to restore Trump’s accounts. 

Twitter, under new owner Elon Musk, restored the former president’s account in November. 

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, restored his accounts in February. 

Despite regaining access to Facebook and Twitter, Trump has yet to post from his since restored accounts. 

The ruling prevents the state from enforcing its “trigger law” for the time being. However, the lower court’s injunction on the abortion ban is temporary, put in place to maintain the status quo while the case is decided on the merits.

The state Supreme Court noted in Thursday’s opinion that the North Dakota constitution gives its citizens the “right to enjoy and defend life and a right to pursue and obtain safety,” which it found includes that “a pregnant woman has a fundamental right to obtain an abortion to preserve her life or her health.”

The state’s abortion ban, passed by the state legislature in 2007 and “triggered” by the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, makes it a felony to provide an abortion. It includes exceptions for sexual assault, incest and preventing the death of the mother.

The North Dakota Supreme Court found that the law unnecessarily restricts a woman’s access to an abortion to preserve her life or health, suggesting that the Red River Women's Clinic has a substantial likelihood of succeeding on the merits of its case and weighing in favor of the injunction.

“[The abortion ban] criminalizes abortions performed even if the abortion is to preserve the life or health of the woman,” the opinion said. “The statute requires a physician who performs a life-preserving abortion to face prosecution of a class C felony, and if prosecuted prove by a preponderance of the evidence the abortion was necessary to save the life of the woman.”

North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley, who brought the case, slammed the decision for finding “there is now also an un-defined ‘heath’ exception to abortion regulation.”

“Our Supreme Court did this without explicit support from our state Constitution, and without support from legislative enactments in our history of abortion regulation,” Wrigley said in a statement. “In so doing, North Dakota’s Supreme Court appears to have taken on the role of a legislative body, a role our constitution does not afford them.”

However, Wrigley added that the state legislature is working to rewrite North Dakota’s abortion laws and “will now have the opportunity to enact the will of North Dakotans, aware of the latest North Dakota Supreme Court pronouncement.”

Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Trump-related cases, has reportedly subpoenaed restaurant servers and a housekeeper from Mar-a-Lago, as well as a staff member who was seen on security footage helping move boxes from a storage room.

Several of the former president’s attorneys and aides have also been subpoenaed to testify before the federal grand jury in the probe, CNN reported.

The network reported on Thursday that communications aide Margo Martin appeared before the grand jury in the case in Washington, D.C.

Some 300 classified documents have been recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence since he left office. About 100 of these documents were found during an FBI search of the property last August, which was conducted amid concerns that the former president had not fully complied with an earlier subpoena to turn over all remaining classified materials.

The March 20-22 visit, Xi’s first trip to Russia in nearly four years, comes amid Moscow’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine and Beijing’s efforts to present itself as a neutral arbiter of the conflict.

The two leaders are set to discuss "pressing issues related to the future of relations of comprehensive partnership and strategic interaction between Russia and China,” the Kremlin said on Friday, per the Russian state-run news agency TASS.

Putin announced last month during a visit with China’s top diplomat Wang Yi that Xi planned to visit Moscow but had not provided a specific time frame.

China recently presented a 12-point peace plan for "a political resolution of the Ukraine crisis," which was followed by calls for a cease-fire and negotiations alongside Belarus. However, the U.S. has eyed Beijing’s peace efforts with skepticism, accusing China of “strongly considering” providing Russia with lethal aid for its war effort. 

Democrats for months have been on offense on Social Security, accusing Republicans repeatedly and publicly of wanting to make cuts to the entitlement program. But now some in the GOP are hitting back and trying to put the onus back on Biden to address the insolvency threat facing the program.

The dynamic was on full display in a pair of hearings this week that saw Republicans criticize White House officials and key in on the absence of a plan to shore up Social Security in the 2024 budget proposal the president released last week.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) was among other Republicans to broach the issue in a charged line of questioning against Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during a Finance Committee hearing Thursday.

“Of the $4.5 trillion in taxes he has proposed, not a dime is going to shore up Social Security,” Cassidy said, before asking moments later “why doesn’t the president care” about threats to the program’s funding. 

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated last month the program’s fund risks running a shortfall in 2032. 

Yellen responded that Biden “cares very deeply,” before Cassidy interjected to ask for the president’s plan to extend solvency for Social Security. 

Yellen said that Biden “stands ready” to work with Congress on the matter, but Cassidy called the statement a “lie.”

“Because when a bipartisan group of senators has repeatedly requested to meet with him about Social, so that somebody who is a current beneficiary will not see her benefits cut by 24 percent, we have not heard anything on our request,” he said. 

“And we’ve made multiple requests to meet with the president,” Cassidy added.

The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment. 

Cassidy has been leading bipartisan talks with Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) to explore potential fixes to shore up funding for the program.

The issue was also subject of a heated exchange during a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee on Wednesday, when Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) pressed White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Shalanda Young about Biden’s plans for the program and his accusations against Republicans.

“I know of no Republican or Democrat in the House or the Senate who is proposing cutting Social Security benefits, and it’s dishonest to keep saying it,” he told Young. “It’s offensive and dishonest and not realistic.”

“This president believes the biggest threat to Social Security are those who want to cut it,” Young said moments later. “His budget says no.”

Romney called the response “offensive in the extreme,” while doubling down on his argument that “no one” on the Republican side "is proposing cutting Social Security benefits for our Social Security recipients.”

The exchanges are some of the latest shows of frustration among Republicans, as the party has sought to quell concerns they are looking to cut Social Security, despite an onslaught of attacks from the other side. 

“We’ll never get those programs reformed and saved without presidential leadership,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) told The Hill this week, saying Biden is “not doing anything.”

Democrats have pushed back on the criticisms, arguing the president’s resume speaks for itself on the matter.

“One way of looking at it is through the budget, but I think the president's got a long record of outlining steps he would take to strengthen Social Security,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) told The Hill on Wednesday.

“Unfortunately, the debate around here has been Republicans wanting to make changes or privatize or private accounts, there's so many different ideas,” he argued. “So, he spent a lot of time pushing back against that, but I think our side has been in the, in the lane of trying to strengthen it.”

The president’s budget request included investments aimed at improving services for recipients. And while he didn't propose a plan for solvency for Social Security, the request offered a path to plan to shore up Medicare, as some estimates project the program’s Hospital Insurance trust fund will reach insolvency in roughly five years. The budget calls for a higher tax rate on earned and unearned income above $400,000, which the White House says will protect the fund for at least 25 years.

The pitch was instantly met with immediate support from Democrats, though Republicans came out against the proposed tax hike. Others say they were also taken aback by the inclusion of a plan for Medicare, and not Social Security, though it's not the first time that plans for solvency for either program have been absent from the president’s budget requests.

Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) on Wednesday called the move by Biden surprising, while arguing changes to Social Security are probably “easier” to tackle than reforms to Medicare, though “harder to do politically.”

Rubio said otherwise on Wednesday, instead arguing that “no one wants to touch” the program, as changes to entitlement programs have long been seen as a tough lift on Capitol Hill.

“In fairness, Republican presidents really haven't either because it's a third rail politically. But the math is what it is on those programs,” he said, adding: “Eventually, we're gonna have to confront it.”

Democrats began to ramp up attacks on Republicans over Social Security months ago, after some GOP members floated linking potential entitlement reforms to a deal to avoid a federal default late last year. 

The Republican Study Committee, the biggest conservative caucus in the House, has also received attention for proposals to tighten the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare, an idea many Democrats see as a nonstarter.

And while there has been interest among the conference’s conservative flank toward pursuing changes to the age threshold for Social Security in recent months, GOP leadership has vowed reforms to Social Security or Medicare will be off the table in debt ceiling talks.

However, that hasn’t stopped Democrats from sounding the alarm as House Republicans pushed for plans to balance the federal budget in 10 years — an ambitious goal Democrats say would be extremely difficult without steep cuts to spending across the board, including to Social Security.

But despite distrust among some Democrats, a number of senators in the party have signaled a willingness to explore bipartisan solutions to help shore up funds for Social Security and Medicare in recent weeks. 

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who’s been among the most vocal Democrats pushing for bipartisan funding fixes for the entitlement program, said on Wednesday that he wants Congress to “take care of both.”

Biden’s decision to proceed with the Willow Project will allow ConocoPhillips to produce up to 180,00 barrels a day at its peak, which a ConocoPhillips spokesperson said should be within the first few years of startup. The project is expected to produce 576 million barrels of oil over 30 years.

The president and supporters of the project say Willow will create thousands of jobs in Alaska and help keep the U.S. energy independent, an increasingly important notion for Biden ahead of an expected 2024 reelection bid likely to take place against a backdrop of elevated gas prices aggravated by the Russia-Ukraine war.   

But the project will also produce an estimated 239 million metric tons of carbon emissions over the next 30 years, which is equivalent to driving 51 million cars for a year. 

That’s why Haaland, the first Native American to lead the Interior Department, opposed the project when she was a member of Congress.

And it’s why the decision to approve Willow undercuts her standing and puts her in a tough spot going forward — especially with groups opposed to the project, who believe their lead defender within the administration was just big-footed.

“It seems clear that the White House decided to override Secretary Haaland, as well as many other career staff who believe that this project should not have been approved throughout the department,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing the federal government over the approval.  “I think the Biden White House is forcing them to take the blame and swallow a decision they did not agree with, for very political reasons.”

Haaland likely knew she could be in a tough spot with Willow as early as her confirmation hearing in 2021, when she was asked about her opposition to the project by Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a prominent supporter. 

Murkowski specifically asked Haaland if she would allow it to proceed as Interior secretary.  

“I think being a [Cabinet] secretary is far different from being a member of Congress,” Haaland said at the time.   

Murkowski was the only Republican on the Senate Energy Committee to vote for Haaland’s confirmation.   

Interior did approve the Willow Project, but that approval does not show Haaland’s name.   

Instead, the No. 2 official at Interior, Deputy Secretary Tommy Beaudreau, an Alaskan nominated for his post after Murkowski and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) signaled they would block Biden's first choice, signed the approval.   

Haaland made her first public comment on the approval Monday evening, saying in a video posted to Twitter that the decision was a “difficult and complex” one that Biden inherited from former President Trump.

The Interior Department's public announcement of the signoff also pointedly deemphasized the approval itself. Instead, it focused on the department’s decision to reduce the area on which Conoco may drill — a battle won in a war that was lost.

Interior also announced new protections from drilling for a broad swathe of the Arctic over the weekend as rumors swirled that the Willow approval was imminent, an indication the department also senses the political minefield and is seeking to limit the damage.   

Environmental groups aren’t publicly upset with Haaland and say they interpret the fact that Beaudreau signed the approval suggests their longtime ally wasn’t in favor of the decision.  

The fact that Beaudreau signed it “tells, in my mind, that Deb Haaland was not on board with this decision to some extent,” Hartl said. 

Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), who, like Murkowski, has been a longtime backer of the Willow Project, suggested Wednesday that Haaland’s involvement in negotiations had been minimal.    

“Deb Haaland was not in the loop on this at all,” Sullivan told reporters Wednesday. “She was the official in the federal government least involved. And in part, I’m sure, because she was so adamantly against it as a congresswoman. But whatever they’re saying, she had nothing to do with it.”   

An Interior spokesperson declined to comment on Sullivan’s specific remarks but sharply contested the idea that Haaland had been removed from the decision-making process.    

“The Secretary has been actively involved in Willow discussions from the beginning,” the spokesperson said. “In addition to traveling to Alaska and holding stakeholder meetings in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Utqiagvik, she has met with Alaska Native leaders on both sides of this issue multiple times in D.C. and virtually, as well as conservation and other groups, and members of Congress.” 

Either way, the decision would appear to undercut Haaland, suggesting she was overruled and raising questions about her influence in the administration.   

“[We're] very much aware of the legal battles and the complexities that may have strong-armed those who do want to take more progressive actions on the climate,” Jade Begay, director of policy and advocacy at the Native American advocacy group NDN Collective, told The Hill in an interview.   

There were influential groups pushing Biden to OK the project, including Alaska’s congressional delegation, the American-Canadian union Laborers' International Union of North America and a group of Alaska Native state leaders who recently met with Haaland. 

And with the 2024 election approaching, Biden has shown signs of tacking right, both with the Willow announcement and with his support of a bill to override changes to Washington, D.C.’s criminal code.

With the crunch resulting from the invasion of Ukraine, “we got a kick in the energy reality teeth last year,” said Frank Maisano, who represents energy clients at the law and government relations firm Bracewell LLP, “and it’s just evident that we can’t run away from fossil fuels as quickly or as much as environmentalists want us to.” 

“The Biden administration has had to moderate and unfortunately that puts them in a tough spot,” Maisano added.

Supporters of Haaland say that while the Willow approval was a major loss and a blow to morale, they still think she can be an effective ally within the administration.   

“Both things can be true: we still hold her in great regard but this Willow decision, they got it completely wrong and I think a lot of people at the agency know it,” said Athan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's Lands Protection Program.   

“It’s the White House’s choice of how they want to proceed here,” Hartl said. “Do they want to keep handcuffing Interior because they feel like Lisa Murkowski is more important than the future of our planet? That’s their decision.”   

Rachel Frazin contributed.

Updated at 9:33 a.m.

A divided Republican field is raising Democrats’ hopes of clearing the all-party primary on Oct. 14 and making it to the November general election. But Democrats acknowledge they face several challenges to maintaining the governorship.

“I don't think anyone thinks that it's going to be an easy task,” said Richard Carbo, Edwards’s former deputy chief of staff and 2019 campaign manager. “[Y]ou just have the headwinds of national politics and the Republican leaning of the state that are working against you. But … the governor showed how to defy those odds[.]”

Edwards is the only statewide elected Democrat in Louisiana. According to Morning Consult polling toward the end of last year, 51 percent approved of Edwards’s job performance (40 percent disapproved).

Recent state Secretary of Transportation and Development Shawn Wilson entered the race last week, and Edwards endorsed him the next day.

The endorsement “is an indication that the Democrats are trying to rally around one candidate in order to hopefully, for them, secure a chance in the runoff round,” said Sean Cain, associate professor of political science at Loyola University New Orleans. One other Democrat, pastor Daniel Cole, is in the race.

Several Republicans are running. The Louisiana Republican Party endorsed Jeff Landry, the state’s attorney general, in November.

In January, party chairman Louis Gurvich attributed Edwards’s 2015 and 2019 wins to Republican division in those primaries. Gurvich said the party has united behind Landry and called on U.S. Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) not to run. Graves announced last week he won’t join the race after weighing a bid.

Two days later, Louisiana Association of Business and Industry president Stephen Waguespack, a Republican, announced his resignation and entered the race. Additional candidates have until Aug. 10 to join.

Waguespack previously served as chief of staff to former Gov. Bobby Jindal (R). Waguespack left the governor’s office in 2012.

Jindal is the state’s last Republican governor. He left office in 2016 and had an approval rating below 40 percent toward the end of his tenure.

John Couvillon, a pollster based in Louisiana, told The Hill last week that if Waguespack entered, he’d “be a formidable candidate” from the “business-emphasizing wing” of the party, with the ability to fundraise and make himself known. Couvillon typically works with Republicans and said he’s not involved in any of the gubernatorial campaigns.

Waguespack said on a recent radio show that his record stands out among candidates: “I understand how the inside of the governor’s office works, I understand the thoughts and hearts and dreams of the business community. … I have a proven record of conservative values, but bringing people together at the same time and working with everyone.”

Couvillon said Landry is in the conservative wing of the party, which Couvillon characterized as putting “an emphasis more on social issues, and/or taking more of a confrontational tone against Democrats.”

Landry recently pushed for a state law restricting what books minors can take out of public libraries. Among the positions discussed on his campaign website are his opposition to abortion and to mask and vaccine mandates in schools. A “Law and Order” section says that “incompetent mayors and ‘woke’ district attorneys are playing a dangerous game of ‘catch and release.’”

Cain discussed Landry’s record as a Tea Party Caucus member in the U.S. House, where he served from 2011 to 2013, and as attorney general, saying “he’s positioned himself as economically and socially conservative,” which to some degree “fits with the state's generally more economically and socially conservative perspectives compared to perhaps the nation as a whole.” Cain also said other Republican candidates may try to “paint him as too extreme."

The challenge for Republicans, Couvillon said, will be having an enthusiastic party base without “turning off more independent voters in the runoff.” A runoff election takes place if no candidate gets a majority in October. Couvillon said he expects Wilson and one of the Republicans to be in a runoff.

Thirty-nine percent of the state’s registered voters are Democrats, 34 percent are Republicans and 27 percent have other affiliations.

Wilson is emphasizing the theme of bringing people together, saying in a campaign ad, “Louisiana needs a governor who will build bridges, not burn them” – a statement that also alludes to his experience as transportation and development secretary.

Carbo said Wilson is respected on both sides of the aisle, pointing to his years in state government under both Democratic and Republican governors. Wilson is “not going to be this partisan, abrasive flamethrower that you'll see from the candidates on the other side,” Carbo, who is close to Wilson and supports his bid but doesn’t have an official role in the campaign, told The Hill last week.

Cain said “the challenge for a Democrat is to make the case that the party and its agenda is still something that can appeal to Louisiana voters” and that Edwards’s endorsement could help Wilson there.

One area where Wilson departs from Edwards is abortion policy. Edwards, one of few anti-abortion-rights Democrats in elected office, signed a “heartbeat” bill into law in 2019. NOLA.com reported that Wilson personally opposes abortion but said, “It’s not the government’s right to tell a woman what to do with any medical procedure involving her body. They have a right to privacy for these decisions.”

Couvillon said Wilson faces the challenge of replicating Edwards’s coalition, which included both cutting into the Republican vote in rural parishes and doing very well in larger parishes, where Edwards “was able to far outperform what Democrats typically get.”

Political analysts attributed Edwards’s 2019 reelection in part to significant support from Black voters. Thirty-one percent of registered voters in the state are Black, according to recent data from the Louisiana Secretary of State office.

Wilson would be the first Black statewide elected official since Reconstruction if he won. Cain said Wilson’s prospects are complicated by “the traditional racial politics of a state in the Deep South” and that Wilson needs to appeal “across party lines, but that also means appealing across racial boundaries, which is not impossible, but a major challenge.”

Sixty-one percent of registered Democrats are Black, whereas white voters make up 94 percent of Republicans and 65 percent of those otherwise affiliated.

NOLA.com reported Wilson’s comments on this topic: “We in this state have a long sordid history with race. It is not lost on me[.] … But I’m not running to be the Black governor. I’m running to be the governor. I want to be the best governor ever.”

While the state has favored Republicans for president since 2000, its gubernatorial election results have been more mixed. In 2019, Edwards won reelection by around 3 percentage points. Former President Trump won the last two presidential elections in the state by nearly 20 percentage points.

Louisiana’s is one of three gubernatorial races in 2023.

Trump and those around him have recently sought to paint DeSantis as an opportunist and flip-flopper. It’s the common thread in a number of recent Trump attacks — on topics including Social Security, Ukraine and even COVID.

In a speech in Iowa early this week, Trump accused DeSantis of wanting to “decimate” Social Security.

After DeSantis issued a statement on Ukraine that included the assertion that the war was a “territorial dispute” with no “vital” U.S. interests at stake, Trump — who holds a position that is broadly similar — accused DeSantis of having mimicked him.

Meanwhile, on COVID, Trump has sought to narrow the perception that there was any meaningful difference in approach between the Florida governor’s actions on the pandemic and his own.

On each of these points, Trump does have legitimate material to work with.

DeSantis, while a congressman, backed nonbinding measures that would have raised the retirement age to 70 — though he now says he would not “mess” with Social Security.

When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, DeSantis was critical of then-President Obama for the supposed weakness of his response. DeSantis advocated arming Ukraine at that time.

And on COVID, DeSantis did indeed announce a lockdown of his state in the early days of the pandemic — even though he went on to become a fierce critic of many COVID-related restrictions.

DeSantis has for the most part avoided responding to Trump’s baiting — though when a Trump-backing super-PAC filed an ethics complaint against him on Wednesday, a DeSantis spokesperson called it "frivolous and politically motivated."

The Florida governor has been reluctant to say anything openly about whether he will enter the race, even though all signs suggest he will.

When it comes to Trump, DeSantis has mostly traded in subtler jabs, such as implicit references to the chaos and staff in-fighting that typically surround Trump. 

“If you look at my administration,” DeSantis said during a recent event in Iowa, “part of the reason we’re able to do so well, we’re not leaking to the media. We don’t have palace intrigue; we don’t have any drama. It’s just execution every single day. And we end up beating the left every single day.”

But some Trump allies do believe the former president’s attacks are hitting their mark — in part simply by disrupting the otherwise positive treatment of DeSantis in conservative-leaning media outlets.

“There was no negative conservative messaging on DeSantis six months ago,” one GOP strategist close to Trump World told this column. “This is the first time he has taken any incoming at all, and I think Trump is landing real shots on him.”

This source also contended that such attacks were effective even when Trump and DeSantis were broadly similar policy-wise, as is the case with the war in Ukraine. 

The former president wants it known that, even though the two men have landed on the same page, he got there first.

“That’s a very effective attack,” the Trump World source said. “Ron DeSantis is the cover band, the tribute act. Why would you want the tribute act when you can have the real thing.”

Michael Caputo, a longtime friend and adviser to Trump who is now an executive with Americano Media, noted that on Ukraine, “Trump is saying the same thing he has always said, and DeSantis has switched. Now, why has he switched, that’s not clear. I’m sure that will come out. But his position is completely different than it was a few years ago.”

Despite Caputo’s long association with Trump, however, he cautioned against suggesting that DeSantis would be fatally wounded by such charges.

Caputo noted that attacks from one candidate accusing another candidate of being a flip-flopper have been a near-permanent feature of primary campaigns.

“I have worked for politicians who have changed over time,” he said. “The question is, how short of a time and how much of a change? The Republican primary voter has a high tolerance for change, just not if it happened yesterday on a fundamental issue.”

If DeSantis enters the race, he can defend his changes of position as a response to shifting events — or note that Trump himself has hardly been a paragon of consistency. 

Years before seeking and winning the White House in 2016, for example, Trump had expressed supportiveness of abortion rights and looked favorably on universal healthcare.

For now, it’s clear that DeSantis is easily the most serious rival to Trump — despite the presence of former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley in the race and the fact that other big names could join the contest, including former Vice President Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

In a CNN/SSRS poll released earlier this week, DeSantis was within four points of Trump with Republicans nationwide.

Results like that lead some within the GOP to see the vigor of Trump’s attacks on the Florida governor as a backhanded acknowledgement of the threat he poses.

Matt Mackowiak, the chair of the Travis County, Texas, GOP, when asked about the effectiveness of Trump’s attacks said: “I think the two best ways to judge that is, first, is he forcing DeSantis to respond? To this point, he really hasn’t. And, are these hits affecting DeSantis in any of the polls? We are not seeing that.”

In the end, Mackowiak added: “What it signals most to me is that Trump’s team is concerned about DeSantis.”

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.

Activists and policy experts supportive of charter schools in general are divided over the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School application currently under consideration by the Oklahoma charter school board, with a meeting on the subject set for Tuesday.

Charter school advocates have struggled for years to convince skeptics that the privately run, publicly paid-for institutions are equivalent to government-run schools. 

“We don't think that you can have a religious charter school in place because charter schools are public schools and public schools cannot teach religion. So right now, as public schools, this is not a door that can be opened,” Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools, told The Hill this week. 

While charter schools are publicly funded and have similar rules to follow as government-run public schools, there are other regulations they forgo, such as school board elections. 

But those in favor of the Oklahoma application say charters are not directly comparable to public schools. 

“Charter schools are called public schools by every state charter school law. I don't deny that,” said Nicole Garnett, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has been advising the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City on their efforts. But, she added, "For the purposes of the Constitution, the federal Constitution, it doesn't matter what the law calls them."

"The question is, are they government actors, are they state actors, or are they acting on behalf of the government? Or are they private actors? They can be called public schools and still be private actors for purposes of the Constitution, and, in my view, that's what they are,” Garnett said. 

The Catholic Church was emboldened to submit its application after outgoing Oklahoma Attorney General John O’Connor said the charter school laws in the state were unconstitutional because they did not allow them to be run by religious organizations. 

Although the current attorney general for the state has reversed that opinion, saying it would lead to "state-funded religion," the archdiocese is moving forward with its proposal for St. Isidore despite the almost certain prospect of litigation. 

“Undoubtedly, even if it were approved in one state, it would then be involved in a long court battle. So probably the real lifting of the lid on religious charter schools wouldn't come until not only one state approved it, but it made it through court,” said Neil McCluskey, director for the Center for Educational Freedom at CATO Institute. 

Charter school laws currently exist in 45 states across the country, with sometimes vastly different standards and regulations.

“For anyone to say, with a broad brush, that all charter schools are public schools is disingenuous because each state has a different program," said Brett Farley, the executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma. "We believe in Oklahoma that charter schools are non-state actors because our framework is very loose."

Religious institutions seeking to open education facilities typically go the private school route because it allows them more freedom to follow their religious doctrine without interference from the government. But charter schools open the door to public funding.

Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, an organization that advocates for high-quality education at the local level, says the constraints on charters, such as needing approval from the government to just expand, don’t combine well with the goals of private religious institutions. 

“Independent schools and private schools and religious schools, they have their own role to play. They do their own thing and that thing, too, is important. And for me, the idea that we would substitute those things for, you know, what charter schools have in the process of starting religious charter schools is the worst of both of these worlds,” Bradford said. 

A religious charter school would also be obligated to follow anti-discrimination laws, while private religious schools are known for not accepting students that don’t follow or believe their doctrine. 

“For those types of individuals who really want to have a truly religious education in a school, you can't do that in a public setting because our public schools are open to everyone and they cannot discriminate. And that is, to me, at least, the key hurdle to doing this in our schools. We have a commitment to serving all kids,” Rees of the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools said. 

Bradford, however, said taxpayer funding could be too much for certain religious institutions to resist. 

“Lots of private schools, religious schools are underwater, right? Constantly fundraising to, you know, just to break even in an environment that is more competitive, because charter schools are free, right? And some of them are spectacular at free,” he said. 

“Even if you take the current conversation about religious charter schools off the table, the financial incentives around being a charter school are much better than being, you know, an independent school, a private school, a religious school that serves low-income kids, in particular,” he added.

Another potential incentive to get into the charter school space is because many people see charter schools as competition to privately run institutions rather than government-run public schools, even if that is not the intention. 

“Charter schools are already more or less unfair competition for private schools," McCluskey said "That's not the intent. I don't think people intended charter schools to do that. But many people see charter schools as private schools, only they don't have to pay tuition for them. And so a private school is at a huge competitive disadvantage because they don't get government money usually."

The immediate question, however, is one of legality, and Garnett said the issue strikes her as more of a “religious liberty” case. 

“I'm not a part of the charter school movement. I think it's good to be inclusive. So I assume that when people in the charter school movement say it's bad for the charter school movement, they're not making a legal determination. They're making a political one. ... But whether or not they're right about being a better path, it doesn't make it less concrete, unconstitutional to prohibit religious charter schools,” Garnett said. 

While the national debate rages on, Farley says the church has seen much more support locally for the virtual religious charter school than expected. 

“We anticipated that there would be some difference of opinion, even amongst the school choice ranks. ... I've actually been surprised at how much local support we have amongst the school choice camp, so there's actually not as much dissension as I thought there would be. No, not everyone is saying that publicly, but I talked to people privately who are cheering us on because they recognize that this is going to be a game changer,” Farley said. 

The banking executives sold $11.8 million worth of stock in the company over the last two months, with First Republic Executive Chairman James Herbert II selling $4.5 million worth of his shares since the start of 2023, per the Journal.

Combined, First Republic's chief credit officer, president of private wealth management and chief executive sold $7 million worth of company stock.

First Republic’s insider sales appear to have gone largely unnoticed, as it is now the only S&P 500 company that reports such sales to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) instead of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Signature Bank, which collapsed on Sunday, was also exempted from filing with the SEC.

First Republic Bank’s stock plummeted more than 50 percent this week, as panic ensued over the widely-reported failures of other regional banks, including Signature Bank and Silicon Valley Bank.

Amid concerns of a potential run on First Republic, some of the largest U.S. banks — including Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — agreed to help stabilize the bank’s balance sheets on Thursday with $30 billion in deposits.

Pence chose not to call on Trump to drop out if charges are filed against him while the former vice president was visiting New Hampshire, Politico reported Thursday. 

“Look, it’s a free country. Everybody can make their own decisions,” he said. 

Pence’s comments come as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg appears to be close to potentially be filing charges against Trump for hush-money payments that were made to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election. 

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels in exchange for her silence about an affair she had with Trump. Trump later reimbursed Cohen for the payment, and the Trump Organization declared it to be a legal expense. 

Cohen pleaded guilty to multiple charges, including one for campaign finance violations stemming from the payment. Trump has admitted to reimbursing Cohen for the payment but said it was not related to his campaign. 

Trump has said himself that he “won’t even think” about dropping out if he is indicted. 

Pence, who has indicated he is considering a 2024 bid that would have him face off against Trump, remained loyal to Trump throughout most of his vice presidency, but the two had a falling out after Pence refused Trump’s calls to not certify President Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. 

Pence has insisted that he did not have the authority to reject any electoral votes from being counted in his capacity as president of the Senate and only had a ceremonial role in counting the votes on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump has slammed Pence for not rejecting the ballots. 

Pence has more recently stepped up his criticism of Trump after at times moderating his attacks on the former president. He said at the annual Gridiron Dinner on Saturday that “history” would hold Trump accountable for his role in what happened during the Jan. 6 insurrection and said Trump’s words before the riot “endangered” Pence’s family and everyone at the Capitol. 

Trump argued while traveling on his personal plane to a campaign event in Iowa on Monday that Pence himself was responsible for what happened during the attack, saying that Pence’s refusal to reject the votes from the key states that clinched Biden’s victory led to the violence. 

“Had he sent them back to Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, the states, I believe, No. 1, you have had a different outcome. But I also believe you wouldn’t have had ‘Jan. 6’ as we call it,” Trump said. 

Politico reported that Pence reiterated that he did not have the power to overturn the election again while in New Hampshire. 

“I know our former president has said I had the right to overturn the election, but Donald Trump is wrong,” he said. “I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone.”

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement on Thursday that Trump is “completely innocent” and did “nothing wrong.” He said Democrats have attacked Trump since before he was first elected as president and are trying again because Trump is leading in the polls “by a large margin” against both Republicans and Democrats. 

Polling has largely shown Trump leading Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other current and potential Republican candidates for the nomination, while some have shown DeSantis with a lead or closely behind. 

Polls have also shown mixed results in a hypothetical rematch between Trump and President Biden. 

Cheung said the investigation will “backfire massively” for the Democratic Party and “end in disgrace” for the country. 

The statement comes as Bragg appears to be close to potentially filling one or multiple charges against the former president in the investigation into a hush-money payment that was made to adult film star Stormy Daniels. This would be the first time that criminal charges are filed against a former president. 

Former Trump attorney Michael Cohen testified before a grand jury investigating the payments on Monday. 

The investigation stems from payments that Cohen admitted to making to Daniels ahead of the 2016 presidential election for her to not disclose an affair that she and Trump had. 

Cohen pleaded guilty to a handful of charges in 2018 including campaign finance violations. He paid Daniels $130,000 and Trump reimbursed him for the payment. He also paid model Karen McDougal $150,000 through the publisher of the National Enquirer to stay silent about an affair she had with Trump.

Trump has acknowledged that he reimbursed Cohen for the payment but said it was unrelated to his campaign funding. Trump’s company noted the payment as a legal expense. 

Federal prosecutors have said the Trump Organization “grossed up” the reimbursement for “tax purposes” and netted more than $400,000. 

Daniels also met with Manhattan prosecutors on Wednesday. Cohen has met with investigators more than a dozen times during their probe. 

With Cohen and Daniels testifying before the grand jury, almost every major figure involved in what happened has testified. Trump was also invited to appear before the grand jury, a sign that charges could soon follow, but he appears unlikely to do so. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Williamson said in an interview on SiriusXM’s “The Briefing with Steve Scully” on Thursday that she is sorry if anyone she worked with during the 2020 presidential election felt she did not treat them with respect, but she is not being treated as a male candidate would. 

“But there are categorical lies in that article. And you know, if the worst you have on me is that I can be tough at the office, then I think I should be OK in this campaign,” she said. 

Williamson’s response came after Politico reported that 12 people who worked with Williamson said she could be emotionally and verbally abusive and showed behavior that went beyond the typical stress of a presidential campaign. 

All 12 people interviewed said they remembered instances where Williamson yelled at staffers until they cried, while three former staffers said Williamson threw phones at her staff members. Two people said hotel staff felt the need to knock on her door to check on the situation at least four separate times because of the loudness of her outbursts. 

Four staff members said Williamson once became angry enough about poor planning of a campaign trip to South Carolina that she hit a car door until her hand swelled and she needed to go to urgent care. 

Williamson said in the SiriusXM interview that the accounts given by the 12 people were “their experience,” but men would need to take an action like committing sexual misconduct to be held accountable. 

“And at the same time, Steve, come on, I feel that if a man is to be held accountable, he has to grab a woman's breast. A woman has to refuse to say, or forget to say, ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you.’ So, I'm sorry about any mistakes I made, but that's a hit piece,” she said. 

She said if she could see a recording of the instances being described, she might say “Wow, I’m really sorry” in some cases and “Yeah, somebody should have done their job” in others. 

Williamson is likely a long-shot candidate compared to President Biden, who has not formally announced he is running for reelection but is widely expected to as soon as next month. Much of the establishment support has coalesced around Biden, and a poll showed Biden leading Williamson by more than 70 points. 

Williamson, a spiritual adviser and author, ran in 2020 but needed to drop out before the first primaries as a result of lack of money. 

She said the Democratic establishment does not want her to run and believes “everybody should just stand in line.” 

“Somehow, they feel that the best way for us to fight a threat to democracy is to suppress democracy in our own house,” Williamson said. “So, like I said, hit pieces like that, whatever mistakes I've made, I'm sorry, but there's slanderous lies in that, and I've never thrown a phone at anyone. I've never hit any anyone. It's outrageous, actually. And I think a lot of people can see that.”

“It is a new day in Michigan,” Whitmer said Thursday during a signing ceremony in Lansing. “Michiganders are freer today; they are happier today and I am proud to be playing a small part of that.”

Whitmer, whose daughter, Sherry, is openly gay, said she hopes the new law will send a message to LGBTQ people and their loved ones that, “if you're looking for a place that will respect you and protect you, it's time to come to Michigan.”

The state legislature’s new Democratic majority earlier this month passed legislation to amend Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act (ELCRA) to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, expanding the landmark civil rights law that has protected Michiganders from housing, employment, education and public accommodations discrimination since the 1970s.

The law as amended will take effect in June.

Former Michigan Republican Rep. Mel Larsen, for whom the ELCRA is partially named, said during Thursday’s signing ceremony that the measure’s original intent was — and still is — to ensure that “every resident of Michigan” is protected under the law, including LGBTQ people.

Larsen sponsored the original draft of the 1976 ELCRA with former state Democratic Rep. Daisy Elliott, who died in 2015.

“We’re on this earth to move the pendulum a little bit in our lifetime,” Larsen said Thursday. “And if we do that enough, we’ve done some good.”

Republicans in the legislature this year argued that passing the proposed amendment would infringe on the freedoms of religious organizations and institutions, claims Democrats denied.

In a landmark decision in July, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that the ELCRA’s definition of sex includes sexual orientation. The ruling stemmed from a 2020 case involving two businesses that had denied services to LGBTQ clients.

“That was an incredibly important win,” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D), one of the only openly LGBTQ state attorneys general in the U.S., said Thursday. “But until now, at this very moment, never has Michigan passed any law to enshrine legal rights and protections for the LGBTQ community.”

“We're all well aware that court decisions can change depending on the composition of the jurists,” Nessel said Thursday in an apparent reference to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to scrap federal abortion protections.

“The LGBTQ community deserves to at long last see the words sexual orientation, gender identity and expression printed in black and white in our statutes,” Nessel said. “Those words matter.”

LGBTQ advocacy groups on Thursday celebrated the new law as a history-making victory for the LGBTQ community.

“This is an incredible and historic day for LGBTQ+ people, for the people of Michigan, and for all Americans across our nation,” Kelley Robinson, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said Thursday in a statement.

“The passage of the ELCRA amendment is a beacon of hope for those fighting for their rights,” Robinson said. “In states like Tennessee or Florida or Oklahoma, this is a reminder that when we come together as one we can and we will build a better future for everyone, including for LGBTQ+ people.”

Troy Stevenson, the director of state advocacy campaigns for The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organization, said the new law sends a powerful message of acceptance to LGBTQ people nationwide.

“[W]e work every day to protect the lives of LGBTQ youth, and days like today prove that in generations to come, both their legal and lived equality will no longer be fodder for political debate,” Stevenson said.

The expansion of Michigan’s ELCRA comes as more than 400 bills targeting the rights of LGBTQ people — particularly transgender youth — are under consideration in state legislatures nationwide. Three anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced this year in the Michigan House, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, but stand little chance of passing.

Along with cutting down the price of Lantus, a long-acting injection insulin, the company said it would be reducing the cost of its fast-acting insulin product Apidra by 70 percent.

Sanofi announced it would also be enacting a $35 cap on out-of-pocket costs for Lantus for patients with commercial insurance coverage as well as capping costs for uninsured patients through its various savings programs.

“Sanofi believes that no one should struggle to pay for their insulin and we are proud of our continued actions to improve access and affordability for millions of patients for many years," Sanofi's head of U.S. General Medicines Olivier Bogillot said in a statement.

"We launched our unbranded biologic for Lantus at 60 percent less than the Lantus list price in June 2022 but, despite this pioneering low-price approach, the health system was unable to take advantage of it due to its inherent structural challenges," Bogillot continued. "We are pleased to see others join our efforts to help patients as we now accelerate the transformation of the U.S. insulin market."

These price cuts will go into effect beginning on Jan. 1, 2024.

This action comes on the tails of fellow insulin manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, which announced similar moves to reduce the prices of some of their commonly used insulin products. The three manufacturers control the vast majority of the global insulin market.

Eli Lilly was the first of the companies to announce its price cuts, calling on other companies to do the same. Novo Nordisk followed soon after, announcing earlier this week that it would reduce the prices of four of its “legacy products” by 65 to 75 percent.

The Biden administration has called for $35 price caps on insulin since a cap was included in the Inflation Reduction Act for Medicare beneficiaries. The administration has pushed for this measure to be expanded to all patients since the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act.

In his budget proposal released last week, President Biden included a provision that would cap the cost of a monthly insulin prescription at $35 across the commercial market.

The White House and Democrats in Congress have lauded the decisions from the medical manufacturers, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) crediting public pressure for these deep cuts in insulin prices.

The demand, confirmed by TikTok late Wednesday, marks the latest escalation in U.S. governmental pressure on the company. It has been facing increasing criticism from both sides of the aisle that it is a potential security risk because of its ties to China. 

TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew, who is scheduled to testify before a House panel next week, said divesting wouldn't solve any security concerns and the company has doubled down on its ongoing plans to monitor and separately store U.S.-user data instead. 

“Divestment doesn’t solve the problem: a change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access,” Chew said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. 

Chew declined to comment whether ByteDance would be open to selling the app to an American company. 

What is the likelihood of a TikTok sale?

Hannah Kelley, a research assistant in the technology and national security program at the Center for a New American Security, said she doesn’t believe that ByteDance will agree to divest from TikTok.

“This has been the sticking point in CFIUS negotiations for over two years now, how to mitigate the identified U.S. national security concerns, especially regarding data flows and access, short of full divestment,” Kelley said, referring to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. 

GOP enters the fray: House Republicans advance TikTok ban along party lines

“I think Washington has decided that Project Texas, or the re-routing of U.S. user data through Oracle cloud servers, won't be enough to satisfy its security concerns, especially as the company has consistently struggled to maintain trust with the U.S. government given a steady stream of leaks and reports of data mishandling or misuse,” she added. 

However, Cyrus Walker, the founder and managing principal at cybersecurity firm Data Defenders, said a sale of the app could happen. But it would depend on whether there was a trade off that the Chinese government would be interested in. 

“What is the U.S. willing to give up in return beyond the price of the sale of the app?” Cyrus said. 

Wedbush analysts Dan Ives, Taz Koujalgi, John Katisingris and Steven Wahrhaftig wrote in a research note that they think a spin-off of TikTok from ByteDance is “very unlikely” and that a sale would be “very complex with many restrictions likely on the docket.”

Who stands to benefit from a TikTok ban?

Facebook's Meta logo on a sign at the company headquarters on Oct. 28, 2021, in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Tony Avelar, File)

If the pressure campaign does end with TikTok getting banned, the Wedbush analysts said that U.S. tech companies, including Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and Snapchat, stand to benefit. 

In recent years, American-based social media companies have launched features that mimic TikTok’s signature vertical, full-screen video feed. Snapchat launched a feature called Spotlight that lets users discover videos in the format, and Instagram did the same through Reels. 

Meta, which struggled with a dip in revenue last year for the first time after an astronomical rise over the last decade, has been shifting to focus more on recommended content and video content — a model more in line with TikTok’s discoverability functions. 

Pressure builds: Anti-TikTok pressure is bipartisan and mounting in Congress

Meta’s stock increased more than 3 percent on Thursday, amid the news of the Biden administration’s threat over TikTok. 

The analysts said a ban would also “significantly increase” tensions between the U.S. and China with a “brewing Cold Tech War playing out across the software and chip ecosystem” and investors keeping a close watch, the analysts said. 

“This is all a game of high stakes poker and clearly the Beltway is putting more pressure on ByteDance to strategically sell this key asset in a major move that could have significant ripple impacts,” the Wedbush analysts said in a report. 

Why is a TikTok ban or sale being discussed?

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) questions Attorney General Merrick Garland during a Senate Judiciary Committee oversight hearing of the Department Justice on Wednesday, March 1, 2023. (Annabelle Gordon)

Pressure has been building over how TikTok operates in the U.S. for years, spanning two administrations.

Under former President Trump, the administration issued executive orders to ban downloads of the app in the U.S., but they were withdrawn by Biden.

Instead, in June 2021 Biden ordered a CFIUS review of the app. 

As the administration seems to weigh a course of action, Congress has also put forward proposals aimed at targeting TikTok. Last year, a proposal led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) to ban TikTok on government devices was passed as part of an omnibus bill and signed into law. 

Several states have taken similar courses of action, including Texas, Maryland, New Jersey and Ohio.

Read related: Senators introduce bipartisan bill to give president power to ban TikTok, other tech

Other proposals to ban TikTok more broadly have also emerged. A bill that more singularly targets TikTok, led by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), advanced out of the committee in a party-line 24-16 vote earlier this month.

McCaul’s bill faces an unlikely path toward passage in a split Congress without Democratic support. 

A bipartisan bill introduced last week by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.), known as the RESTRICT Act, may fare better. The bipartisan bill doesn’t target TikTok explicitly, but would give the federal government more power to regulate or ultimately ban technology linked to foreign adversaries. 

In addition to China, the proposal calls for the Commerce Department to identify and mitigate risks posed by technology linked to North Korea, Iran, Russia, Cuba and Venezuela. 

The Restrict Act is also supported by the White House. 

“Aside from developments within the CFIUS process itself, I think bipartisan support for the Restrict Act, which would allow the U.S. government to restrict and even ban foreign technologies on the basis of national security, may have helped move the needle,” Kelley said. 

She added that rising tensions between the U.S. and China over recent export control restrictions and Chinese spy balloons may have influenced this decision. 

“The existential threat that China poses to the United States goes far beyond TikTok, spanning across the political, economic, and military domains,” she said. “I think all of this comes into play when considering an app so closely tied to the PRC [People's Republic of China].”

Can TikTok be ousted? TikTok bans on government devices raise questions about platform’s future

Chairman Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) at the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting to discuss worldwide threats in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, March 8, 2023. (Annabelle Gordon)

What happens if ByteDance sells TikTok

Walker said if TikTok is sold to an American company it would “at least remove the immediate threat of the Chinese government being able to get access” to American data.

He added that “if the app was sold off, it would be prudent for the new owner to conduct a top to bottom review of the app’s code to verify that no 'backdoors' exist in the app.”