Senate Republicans are venting their frustration over Attorney General Pam Bondi's management of thousands of records related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and, more recently, mistakes made by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in handling a controversial indictment against former FBI Director James Comey.
Several Republican senators say that controversies at the Justice Department under Bondi's leadership have become a growing "distraction," although GOP lawmakers acknowledge that Bondi has a tough job responding to the mercurial demands of President Trump.
Their biggest gripe is with Bondi's conflicting statements on the Epstein files, which they believe triggered the backlash from Trump's MAGA base that put pressure on Congress to pass a law this past week requiring the Justice Department to release all unclassified files related to Epstein, who died in prison in 2019. |
|
|
BY SUDIKSHA KOCHI AND EMILY BROOKS |
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced on Friday that she is resigning from Congress, saying she refused to be a "battered wife" following her public fallout with President Trump in which he un-endorsed her and called her a "traitor."
The decision comes one week after Trump pulled his support from the Georgia Republican as her fissures with the president reached a boiling point over the Epstein files.
"I have too much self respect and dignity, love my family way too much, and do not want my sweet district to have to endure a hurtful and hateful primary against me by the President we all fought for, only to fight and win my election while Republicans will likely lose the midterms," she said in a lengthy statement. "And in turn, be expected to defend the President against impeachment after he hatefully dumped tens of millions of dollars against me and tried to destroy me." |
|
|
The oddest of political couples had a startlingly positive meeting Friday afternoon when President Trump came face-to-face with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani (D) in the Oval Office.
The vehement attacks that each man has lobbed against the other in the recent past — including Trump inaccurately calling Mamdani a "communist" in the social media post that announced their meeting — were nowhere to be seen. |
|
|
House Republicans are throwing cold water on the idea of making discharge petitions harder to execute — and threatening to launch even more of the rarely used gambits to circumvent leadership.
The heightened interest in the rarely used tool comes after Democrats teamed up with a small group of Republicans to force a vote on a bill requiring the Justice Department to release files related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Though only four Republicans signed the petition, the legislation passed the House 427-1, was unanimously approved by the Senate and was signed by President Trump this week. |
|
|
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily reinstated Texas's congressional map that adds up to five GOP pickup opportunities until the high court rules on the state's emergency appeal.
Alito's order, known as an administrative stay, does not reflect the underlying merits of the map's constitutionality. But it temporarily allows Texas Republicans to keep using their GOP-friendly map as the candidate filing period remains underway. |
|
|
For former national security adviser John Bolton, a trial is a long way off.
At a hearing in his criminal case Friday, a federal judge made no attempt to set a trial date on the allegations of mishandled classified material, forced instead to grapple with a pretrial schedule that will likely stretch into next fall thanks to the confidential information in play.
It stands in stark contrast with the other criminal cases against President Trump's foes, which have moved at lightning speed. |
|
|
Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, panned President Trump's proposal to end the Russia-Ukraine war as rewarding Russian President Vladimir Putin and as detrimental to U.S. interests.
The 28-point plan, which was quietly hammered out between Washington and Moscow, to end the conflict in eastern Europe contains several nonstarters for Ukraine, including placing the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea under "de facto" Russian control and recognized by the U.S. |
|
|
Attorney General Pam Bondi has filed an expedited motion seeking the release of the grand jury transcripts in the Jeffrey Epstein case amid an aggressive push by lawmakers to release all files related to the late convicted sex offender.
Bondi filed the motion in the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida, leveraging the enactment of the Epstein Files Transparency Act earlier this week as reason to unseal the confidential materials. |
|
|
A federal judge has blocked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from handing over the home address information of taxpayers who may be undocumented to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued a 94-page ruling Friday in a lawsuit brought by the Center for Taxpayer Rights against the IRS that called the tax collection agency's information sharing with ICE "unlawful." She ordered that the IRS halt any further "unlawful" data transfers. |
|
|
OPINION | If President Trump really wanted to release the Epstein files, he could have done so at any time since taking office, without waiting for Congress to pass legislation, as both the House and Senate did Nov. 18 with only a single House member dissenting.
Instead, Trump spent months disgracefully trying to prevent public disclosure of the files, which contain a massive amount of evidence of Jeffrey Epstein's horrific sex crimes against more than 1,000 teenage girls and young women. |
OPINION | When HBO inevitably makes the definitive mini-series about the Trump presidency, the events of this past week will doubtless be one of the season finales. Watching the bill to release the Epstein files go from a stalled discharge petition with 217 signatures to passing both houses of Congress by a combined vote of 527-1 has got to be one of the most dramatic events in recent American political history.
Or maybe it will be on Comedy Central, because watching President Trump sprint to get in front of the Epstein parade only to be run over by it is high comedy. |
| |
The environmental rollbacks came one after the next this week, potentially affecting everything from the survival of rare whales to the health of the Hudson River.
On Monday, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed to strip federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands and streams, narrowing the reach of the Clean Water Act.
On Wednesday, federal wildlife agencies announced changes to the Endangered Species Act that could make it harder to rescue endangered species from the brink of extinction. |
The Trump administration has pressured Brazil like it has few others.
The U.S. slapped 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian exports earlier this year to push authorities to drop charges against Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing former president and ally of President Trump. Brazil didn't even run a trade surplus with the U.S., the usual rationale behind the levies.
But the Latin American country didn't budge. Not only did Brazil's Supreme Court proceed to sentence Bolsonaro to 27 years in jail, but the run-in with Trump also put leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a stronger position to win next year's elections. |
European leaders were set to meet in South Africa on Saturday to hash out alternatives to a U.S. plan to halt Russia's war in Ukraine seen as favoring Moscow, nearly four years after it invaded its neighbor.
The 28-point blueprint to end the Kremlin's aggression sparked alarm in Kyiv and European capitals, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying Friday that his country could face a stark choice between standing up for its sovereign rights and preserving the American support it needs. |
BY LIZ GOODWIN AND YASMEEN ABUTALEB |
Earlier this year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez received an unlikely request: A former colleague who once excoriated her brand of left-wing politics wanted her assistance. The New York Democrat was happy to help. She sent out a fall fundraising email calling centrist candidate Abigail Spanberger "a brawler for the working class" — putting her stamp of approval on a former congresswoman who once fumed after a disappointing 2020 election season that she didn't want Democrats to "use the word 'socialist' or 'socialism' ever again." |
|
|
400 N Capitol Street NW Suite 650, Washington, DC 20001 |
© 1998 - 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. | All Rights Reserved. |
|
|
|
If you believe this has been sent to you in error, please safely unsubscribe.
No comments:
Post a Comment