Presidential Transition (US)

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      Trump Names David Sacks to Oversee Crypto and A.I.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump has named one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent conservative investors, donors and media personalities to help oversee American tech policy.David Sacks, a venture capitalist and an early executive at PayPal who launched a hit podcast, will be the “White House A.I. and Crypto Czar,” the president-elect announced in a social media post on Thursday. Mr. Sacks is a close friend of Elon Musk, and Mr. Sacks has been among the people over the last year or so encouraging Mr. Musk to delve deeper into Republican politics.The position will be new, and further cements the expectation that the Trump White House intends to take a lighter hand with the regulation of technology and in particular cryptocurrencies, which have surged in value since Mr. Trump won the election and in which Mr. Trump personally has a business interest. Mr. Sacks, who leads a venture capital firm called Craft Ventures, has in general called for a more permissive policy on both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.Mr. Sacks won a battle within the Trump transition effort. Some people were pitching Mr. Trump’s team on separate positions where different people would oversee artificial intelligence and crypto, according to a person close to the process. But Mr. Sacks was chosen to oversee them all together in a joint appointment.“David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday evening. “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in both areas.”It is not clear if his role will be full time; Mr. Sacks has previously told friends that he did not want a formal role because it would require him to leave his position overseeing his venture capital fund, The New York Times has previously reported. Mr. Sacks announced a new start-up funding round led by his firm just this week.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      House Blocks Release of Matt Gaetz Ethics Report as Republicans Close Ranks

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      The House on Thursday night blocked the release of a damaging Ethics Committee report about former Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, as Republicans voted to bury it, an expected move that makes it less likely the materials will ever be made public.Republicans closed ranks to turn back two nearly identical Democratic-written resolutions that would have forced the release of the report on the ethics panel’s yearslong investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use by the former congressman.They did so by moving to refer both measures back to the committee, which has so far refused to make public its conclusions.The vote on the first resolution was 206 to 198, almost entirely along party lines, with nearly all Republicans voting to block the report’s release and Democrats voting to make it public. The vote on the second measure, which included language about preserving the records but also demanded their release, was 204 to 198, also almost all along party lines.Just one Republican, Representative Tom McClintock of California, sided with the Democrats.Democrats have continued to press for the release of the ethics report, even though Mr. Gaetz has resigned from Congress and removed himself as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice for attorney general, at least in part because the ethics report was complicating his confirmation process.Speaker Mike Johnson has said that because Mr. Gaetz is no longer a sitting member of Congress, the release of the report would set a bad precedent in the House and has urged the Republican-led committee not to release its findings.Democrats have argued that burying the report is concealing credible allegations of sexual misconduct.“No workplace would allow that information to be swept under the rug simply because someone resigned from office,” Representative Sean Casten, the Illinois Democrat who has spearheaded the move to release the report, told ABC News.Mr. Gaetz has denied all of the allegations.Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, called the question of releasing the report “moot” since Mr. Gaetz has resigned.Tom Brenner for The New York Times“The member being referenced in the resolution has actually resigned from the House of Representatives; therefore, the question is moot,” Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House majority leader, said on the floor Thursday night, moving to refer the resolution back to the committee.Since 2021, the House Ethics Committee has been investigating allegations about Mr. Gaetz. That year, it opened an inquiry into sexual misconduct allegations as well as claims that Mr. Gaetz misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, accepted impermissible gifts under House rules, and shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, among other transgressions.The secretive, bipartisan committee met earlier on Thursday for close to three hours to discuss the report, but all of its members were mum as they left the meeting.After the session, the committee issued a terse statement saying that it “met today to discuss the matter of Representative Matt Gaetz. The committee is continuing to discuss the matter. There will be no further statements other than in accordance with committee and House rules.” More

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      Trump Picks Frank Bisignano to Lead Social Security Administration

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      President-elect Trump announced on Wednesday night that he had chosen Frank Bisignano, the chairman of the payment processing behemoth Fiserv, to be the commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a sizable federal agency with more than 1,200 field offices and almost 60,000 employees.“Frank is a business leader, with a tremendous track record of transforming large corporations,” the president-elect said in a post on social media. “He will be responsible to deliver on the Agency’s commitment to the American People.”Mr. Bisignano vaulted into one of the most coveted positions in the New York finance world in his late 20s as a senior vice president of what was then known as Shearson Lehman Brothers, the investment bank whose collapse in 2008 helped set off a global recession. After nearly five years at the bank in the late 1980s, he moved to other major Wall Street banks, first to Morgan Stanley, then to Citigroup and then JPMorgan Chase & Company.Mr. Bisignano was listed as the second-highest-paid chief executive in the country in 2017, one of the few to have been compensated more than $100 million that year and to have received more than 2,000 times the average employee’s salary at his firm, First Data Corporation, which later merged with Fiserv.Mr. Bisignano has a long history of political giving, mainly to Republicans. Federal campaign finance reports show that his wife, Tracy Bisignano, donated nearly $1 million to Mr. Trump’s campaign in October. But in November 2023, he had thrown $15,000 behind the presidential campaign of Chris Christie, a Republican former governor of New Jersey who ran on an anti-Trump bid but later dropped out of the race.Earlier on Wednesday, Mr. Trump uploaded an elaborate biography of Mr. Bisignano to social media and congratulated him and his family without mentioning the post to which Mr. Bisignano was being named. The president-elect made a clarification an hour later, ending the speculation on what Mr. Bisignano’s next job would be. More

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      Trump Picks Kelly Loeffler, a Top Donor, to Head Small Business Administration

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump chose Kelly Loeffler, a top donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign and a former Georgia senator, to head the Small Business Administration.“Kelly will bring her experience in business and Washington to reduce red tape, and unleash opportunity for our Small Businesses to grow, innovate, and thrive,” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday. “She will focus on ensuring that SBA is accountable to Taxpayers by cracking down on waste, fraud, and regulatory overreach.”Ms. Loeffler has little experience in public service. She was appointed to fill a vacated Senate seat in Georgia by Gov. Brian Kemp, serving from early 2020 until she was defeated in a special election by the Rev. Raphael Warnock in January 2021. In the final days of her Senate career, Ms. Loeffler played a prominent role in Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.Ms. Loeffler underwent a significant political transformation during the first Trump administration. She had been seen as a moderate, business-oriented Republican when she was appointed to the Senate — a move viewed by many as an effort to make the Georgia Republican Party more widely appealing.But Ms. Loeffler made a hard-right turn in office, portraying herself as a fervent supporter of and rubber stamp for Mr. Trump as she prepared to defend her seat in the 2020 race. Mr. Warnock ultimately won by two percentage points in a runoff election.If confirmed by the Senate, Ms. Loeffler would lead an agency that is responsible for delivering billions in loans and disaster assistance to small businesses across the country. The S.B.A. played a major role during the Covid-19 pandemic, when it distributed hundreds of billions of dollars to help businesses stay open and continue paying their employees.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Picks Warren Stephens, Billionaire Investment Banker, for U.K. Ambassador

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      Warren Stephens, an investment banker and billionaire who donated to President-elect Donald J. Trump’s rivals before eventually supporting him in the 2024 race, was tapped as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Britain on Monday.The selection of Mr. Stephens for the ambassadorship, a plum posting that often goes to one of the largest donors to presidential campaigns, was in part a nod to the American Opportunity Alliance, a big-money network of Republican donors in which Mr. Stephens plays a leadership role. Mr. Trump and the alliance had a tense relationship at times over the course of his campaign.In 2016, Mr. Stephens, the chief executive of Stephens, Inc., an investment bank based in Little Rock, Ark., gave $2 million to a group dedicated to stop Mr. Trump from winning the Republican presidential nomination. During the most recent election cycle, he backed other Republican presidential candidates, including Asa Hutchinson, Chris Christie, Mike Pence and Nikki Haley.Beginning in April, after it became evident that Mr. Trump would be the Republican nominee, Mr. Stephens donated over $3 million to support his campaign, according to federal campaign finance reports. He also donated $3.5 million to Mr. Trump’s super PACs in 2019 and 2020 during his re-election campaign.During his first term, Mr. Trump named another financial backer of his campaign, Woody Johnson, as ambassador to Britain.In a statement posted on social media, Mr. Trump praised his new pick for “selflessly giving back to his community as a philanthropist.”“Warren has always dreamed of serving the United States full time,” the president-elect said. “I am thrilled that he will now have that opportunity as the top Diplomat, representing the U.S.A. to one of America’s most cherished and beloved Allies.”Theodore Schleifer More

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      Kash Patel Would Bring Bravado and Baggage to F.B.I. Role

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump’s choice to run the F.B.I. has a record in and out of government that is likely to raise questions during his Senate confirmation hearings.Few people tapped for any top federal post, much less a job as vital as F.B.I. director, have come with quite so much bravado, bombast or baggage as Kash Patel.On Saturday, Mr. Patel, 44, a Long Island-born provocateur and right-wing operative, was named by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead the F.B.I., an agency he has accused of leading a “deep state” witch hunt against Mr. Trump. The announcement amounted to a de facto dismissal of the current director, Christopher A. Wray, who was appointed to the job by Mr. Trump and still has almost three years left on his 10-year term.Mr. Patel’s maximum-volume threats to exact far-reaching revenge on Mr. Trump’s behalf have endeared him to his boss and Trump allies who say the bureau needs a disrupter to weed out bias and reshape its culture.But his record as a public official and his incendiary public comments are likely to provoke intense questioning when the Senate weighs his nomination — and determines whether he should run an agency charged with protecting Americans from terrorism, street crime, cartels and political corruption, along with the threat posed by China, which Mr. Wray has described as existential.Here are some of the things Mr. Patel has said and done that could complicate his confirmation.He was accused of nearly botching a high-stakes hostage rescue.In October 2020, Mr. Patel, then a senior national intelligence official in the Trump administration, inserted himself into a secret effort by members of SEAL Team Six to rescue Philip Walton, an American who was 27 at the time and had been kidnapped by gunmen in Niger and taken to Nigeria.Mr. Patel, whose involvement broke with protocol, assured the State and Defense Departments that the Nigerian government had been told of the operation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Says He Will Nominate Kash Patel to Run F.B.I.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump turned to a firebrand loyalist to become director of the bureau, which he sees as part of a ‘deep state’ conspiracy against him.President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Saturday that he wants to replace Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, with Kash Patel, a hard-line critic of the bureau who has called for shutting down the agency’s Washington headquarters, firing its leadership and bringing the nation’s law enforcement agencies “to heel.”Mr. Trump’s planned nomination of Mr. Patel has echoes of his failed attempt to place another partisan firebrand, Matt Gaetz, atop the Justice Department as attorney general. It could run into hurdles in the Senate, which will be called on to confirm him, and is sure to send shock waves through the F.B.I., which Mr. Trump and his allies have come to view as part of a “deep state” conspiracy against him.Mr. Patel has been closely aligned with Mr. Trump’s belief that much of the nation’s law enforcement and national security establishment needs to be purged of bias and held accountable for what they see as unjustified investigations and prosecutions of Mr. Trump and his allies.Mr. Patel “played a pivotal role in uncovering the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, standing as an advocate for truth, accountability and the Constitution,” Mr. Trump said in announcing his choice in a social media post.He called Mr. Patel “a brilliant lawyer, investigator and ‘America First’ fighter who has spent his career exposing corruption, defending Justice, and protecting the American people.”Mr. Patel, a favorite of Mr. Trump’s political base, has worked as a federal prosecutor and a public defender, but has little of the law enforcement and management experience typical of F.B.I. directors.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Names Charles Kushner as Pick for Ambassador to France

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      The announcement elevated Mr. Kushner, the father of President Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law and the recipient of a presidential pardon at the end of Mr. Trump’s first term.President-elect Donald J. Trump announced on Saturday that he would name Charles Kushner, the wealthy real estate executive and father of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to serve as ambassador to France, handing one of his earliest and most high-profile ambassador appointments to a close family associate.The announcement was the latest step in a long-running exchange of political support between the two men. Mr. Kushner received a pardon from Mr. Trump in the final days of his first term for a variety of violations and then emerged as a major donor to Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign.“I am pleased to nominate Charles Kushner, of New Jersey, to serve as the U.S. Ambassador to France,” Mr. Trump wrote in a social media post announcing his choice. “He is a tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests.”Mr. Kushner, 70, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 16 counts of tax evasion, a single count of retaliating against a federal witness and one of lying to the Federal Election Commission in a case that became a lasting source of embarrassment for the family. As part of the plea, Mr. Kushner admitted to hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, a witness in a federal campaign finance investigation, and sending a videotape of the encounter to his sister.Mr. Trump granted Mr. Kushner clemency as part of a wave of 26 pardons he issued with roughly a month left in his first term, along with other close associates including Paul Manafort, his 2016 campaign chairman, and Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime ally and informal adviser.In addition to securing a pardon for himself, Mr. Kushner was instrumental in helping others seeking clemency elevate their cases, relying on his son as a bridge to help get applications in front of Mr. Trump.The case against Mr. Kushner was prosecuted by Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who was then a U.S. attorney. Mr. Christie has since become a vocal critic of Mr. Trump’s and continued to describe Mr. Kushner’s transgressions as severe.Mr. Kushner served two years in prison before his release in 2006.While widely seen as one of the most prized ambassador positions, the role Mr. Kushner will be nominated for could be complicated by the at times standoffish position Mr. Trump took toward President Emmanuel Macron of France during his first term.As president, Mr. Trump also expressed support for Mr. Macron’s far-right challenger in the 2017 French presidential election, Marine Le Pen, whose hard-line stance against immigration Mr. Trump praised.Mr. Macron, who has been a staunch supporter of both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Ukraine, will serve until mid-2027. Mr. Trump has repeatedly questioned the value of Western support for Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion, and has also publicly sparred with Mr. Macron over other contentious policy disagreements, including trade issues and the U.S. withdrawal from a nuclear deal with Iran. More