3 weeks ago
Trump says FBI 'may have to' get involved with helping Texas Republicans arrest Democrats
Donald Trump said the FBI “may have to” get involved with helping Texas Republicans arrest Democrats who left the state to block a plan to redraw electoral boundaries.
“The governor of Texas is demanding they come back,” Trump told reporters today. “A lot of people have demanded they come back. You can’t just sit it out. You have to go back. You have to fight it out. That’s what elections are all about.”
Senator John Cornyn of Texas sent a letter to FBI director Kash Patel, imploring him to take “any appropriate steps” to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who have fled the state.
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Trump administration cuts New York City’s anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack
The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.
US Congress created the program to help cities prevent terrorist attacks.
“It makes absolutely no sense, and no justification has been given to cut NY’s allocation given the rise in the threat environment,” a spokesperson for the New York state division of homeland security and emergency services said in a statement on Monday afternoon.
Manhattan has been the site of two attacks on high-profile corporate executives in the last year. The most recent attack came from a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle in late July, who killed four people inside an office building that houses the headquarters of the NFL and several major financial firms.
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After the Texas governor Greg Abbott filed a petition to the state’s supreme court to remove the Texas house of representatives’ minority leader, Gene Wu, the lawmaker said that denying the governor a quorum was “not an abandonment of my office; it was a fulfillment of my oath”.
“When a governor conspires with a disgraced president to ram through a racist gerrymandered map, my constitutional duty is to not be a willing participant,” Wu said in a statement. “When that governor holds disaster relief for 137 dead Texans and their families hostage, my moral duty is to sound the alarm – by any means necessary.”
“Unable to defend his corrupt agenda on its merits, Greg Abbott now desperately seeks to silence my dissent by removing a duly-elected official from office,” Wu added.
Greg Abbott files emergency petition with state supreme court to remove representative Gene Wu from office
Texas governor Greg Abbott filed an emergency petition with the state supreme court seeking to remove the state representative Gene Wu from office.
The move comes after Wu and dozens of other Democrats left Texas to block Republican efforts to redraw congressional district maps.
The lawsuit claims that Wu, who chairs the Texas House Democratic caucus, violated the state constitution by abandoning his office.
In a statement, Abbott said Wu and more than 50 other Democrats had intentionally broken quorum by refusing to return to the state, preventing the House from conducting business.
“Representative Wu and the other Texas House Democrats have shown a willful refusal to return, and their absence for an indefinite period of time deprives the House of the quorum needed to meet and conduct business on behalf of Texans,” Abbott said. “Texas House Democrats abandoned their duty to Texans, and there must be consequences.”
For more details on today’s developments, Kira Lerner, Lauren Gambino and Shrai Popat bring us all the details:
Trump administration dismisses five out of seven financial overseers in Puerto Rico
The Trump administration has dismissed five out of seven members of Puerto Rico’s federal control board, which oversees the US territory’s finances. The five fired are all Democrats.
The board confirmed in a brief statement that the five had been terminated and noted that the board would continue to fulfill its mandate and work “in the interest of the people of Puerto Rico”.
A White House official said that the board “has been run inefficiently and ineffectively by its governing members for far too long and it’s time to restore commonsense leadership”, the AP reports.
Puerto Rico is struggling to restructure more than $9bn in debt held by the state’s Electric Power Authority, with officials holding bitter mediations with creditors demanding full payment.
The representative Nydia Velázquez, a New York Democrat, criticized the dismissals though she acknowledged what she said were “serious and longstanding concerns” about actions the board has taken, including implementing austerity measures.
The Department of Health and Human Services said on Tuesday it would wind down mRNA vaccine development activities under its biomedical research unit.
The unit, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, helps companies develop medical supplies to address public health threats, and provided billions of dollars for development of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.
HHS said the wind-down includes cancellation of a contract awarded to Moderna for the late-stage development of its bird flu vaccine for humans and the right to purchase the shots, a move first reported in May.
The health agency said it is also rejecting or canceling multiple pre-award solicitations, including proposals from Pfizer, Sanofi Pasteur, CSL Seqirus , Gritstone and others.
In total, this affects 22 projects worth nearly $500m, the agency said.
HHS said the decision follows a comprehensive review of mRNA-related investments initiated during the Covid-19 public health emergency.
Barack Obama calls Texas GOP’s move a ‘power grab that undermines our democracy’
Barack Obama called the Texas GOP’s attempts to redraw the state’s congressional lines “a power grab” that threatens democracy.
“We can’t lose focus on what matters – right now, Republicans in Texas are trying to gerrymander district lines to unfairly win five seats in next year’s midterm elections. This is a power grab that undermines our democracy,” Obama said in a post on the social platform X.
With his post, he shared a virtual event hosted by All on the Line, a campaign affiliated with the Democratic Redistricting Committee.
A federal judge on Tuesday stopped the Trump administration from taking $4bn that was meant to help communities prepare for natural disasters.
The US district judge Richard G Stearns in Boston approved a request from 20 Democrat-led states to temporarily block the move while their lawsuit continues.
The states argue that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) does not have the power to shut down the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program and use its $4bn for other purposes. The program is designed to strengthen infrastructure across the country to protect against storms.
Fema announced it was ending the program, but later told the court it was still reviewing it.
“Although the Government equivocates about whether it has, in fact, ended the BRIC program, the States’ evidence of steps taken by FEMA to implement the announced termination portend the conclusion that a determination has in fact been made and that FEMA is inching towards a fait accompli,” Stearns wrote in his ruling.
“The agency has cancelled new funding opportunities and informed stakeholders that they should no longer expect to obtain any unobligated funds,” he added.
Trump says he will 'probably not' run for a third term
Donald Trump said he will “probably not” run for a third term during an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box.
Still, Trump said, he’d “like to run”, and he has “the best poll numbers” he’s ever had.
The 22nd amendment limits a person being elected to the office of president no more than twice. Trump has previously said that there are “methods” – if not “plans” – to circumvent the constitutional limit preventing US presidents from serving three terms.
Trump’s approval rating declined six percentage points compared with last week in a Morning Consult poll. His numbers are also down four points compared with April in a University of Massachusetts poll. Both polls were released Monday.
During a Q&A session with reporters on Tuesday, Trump said that JD Vance would “probably be favored at this point” to lead the Maga movement when he finishes his second term in office.
Trump was asked whether he agreed that the “heir apparent” to Maga is Vance.
“Well, I think most likely, in all fairness, he’s the vice-president. I think Marco [Rubio] is also somebody that maybe would get together with JD in some form,” Trump said.
“It’s too early, obviously, to talk about it, but certainly he’s doing a great job, and he would be probably favored at this point,” Trump said.
Trump says FBI 'may have to' get involved with helping Texas Republicans arrest Democrats
Donald Trump said the FBI “may have to” get involved with helping Texas Republicans arrest Democrats who left the state to block a plan to redraw electoral boundaries.
“The governor of Texas is demanding they come back,” Trump told reporters today. “A lot of people have demanded they come back. You can’t just sit it out. You have to go back. You have to fight it out. That’s what elections are all about.”
Senator John Cornyn of Texas sent a letter to FBI director Kash Patel, imploring him to take “any appropriate steps” to aid Texas law enforcement in locating and arresting Democrats who have fled the state.
Donald Trump said he plans to name his pick for an open seat on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors “before the end of the week” after the surprise resignation of governor Adriana Kugler.
“We have a couple of candidates,” Trump said during a Q&A session at the signing of an executive order. “Everybody wants it,” he said, “but we’ve narrowed it to a couple of candidates.”
Whomever Trump names to Kugler’s seat will need to be confirmed by the Senate, and the term would be shortened to only a few months and require another Senate vote for a full 14-year term early next year.
He also said that the nominations for the Fed chair are “down to four people right now”.
The nomination for chair of the Fed board would require a separate nomination and Senate confirmation process. Trump has been critical of the current chair of the Fed, Jerome Powell, for not cutting interest rates, even as Fed policymakers balance evidence of both a slowing economy and a weakening job market against the fact that inflation remains well above the central bank’s 2% target and is expected to move higher.
Trump just signed an executive order to establish a taskforce before the 2028 Olympic Games.
The bill is geared toward mobilizing the federal government to “ensure the games are safe, seamless and historically successful”, according to Trump.
Trump will serve as chair of the taskforce, with JD Vance as vice-chair. State department secretary Marco Rubio, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, secretary of homeland security Kristi Noem and other members of the Trump administration will also be members of the taskforce.
“Some of the greatest brands in America have stepped up to support these Olympic Games as commercial partners, and now, with the creation of this taskforce, we’ve unlocked the opportunity to level up our planning and deliver the largest and, yes, greatest games for our nation ever,” said Casey Wasserman, the chair of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.
The games will be held in LA, the first to be hosted in the United States since the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.
Wasserman said he expects more than 150 heads of state to come to the games, and that the city will host about 11,000 Olympic and 4,500 Paralympic athletes. The athletes will participate in 800 competitions at 49 venues, according to Wasserman.
Over 2,000 writers decry Trump’s ‘un-American’ actions in open letter
Adrian Horton
More than 2,300 members of the Writers Guild of America, including Spike Lee and Adam McKay, have signed an open letter decrying the actions of Donald Trump’s administration that represent “an unprecedented, authoritarian assault” on free speech.
The letter, a combined effort from the WGA East and West branches, cites the US president’s “baseless lawsuits” against news organizations that have “published stories he does not like and leveraged them into payoffs”. It specifically references Paramount’s decision to pay Trump $16m to settle a “meritless lawsuit” about a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. The letter notes that Trump “retaliated against publications reporting factually on the White House and threatened broadcasters’ licenses”, and has repeatedly called for the cancellation of programs that criticize him.
Additionally, the letter blasts Republicans in Congress who “collaborated” with the Trump administration to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “in order to silence PBS and NPR”. And it says the FCC, led by Trump-appointed chair Brendan Carr, “openly conditioned its approval of the Skydance-Paramount merger on assurances that CBS would make ‘significant changes’ to the purported ideological viewpoint of its journalism and entertainment programming.
“These are un-American attempts to restrict the kinds of stories and jokes that may be told, to silence criticism and dissent,” the letter reads. “We don’t have a king, we have a president. And the president doesn’t get to pick what’s on television, in movie theaters, on stage, on our bookshelves, or in the news.”
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