Trump, Donald J

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      Pam Bondi Is Trump’s New Choice as Attorney General. Here’s What to Know About Her.

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump quickly swept aside Thursday’s bad headlines about Matt Gaetz by speedily substituting Pam Bondi, a fellow Florida Republican with a starkly different profile — but a similar reputation for fealty — to be his attorney general.Ms. Bondi, 59, is a lobbyist and Trump loyalist who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019. She has charted a more conventional and less clamorous course than Mr. Gaetz, with little of the ugly personal or political baggage that led some Republicans to oppose Mr. Gaetz’s nomination.She was a local prosecutor.Ms. Bondi, the daughter of the mayor of a small Tampa-area municipality, began working as an assistant state attorney in Hillsborough County in the 1990s. During 18 years as a prosecutor, she tried cases “ranging from domestic violence to capital murder,” according to the bio page at her lobbying firm.She supervised a handful of high-profile cases, most notably one involving the former New York Mets pitcher Dwight Gooden, who served a one-year prison sentence for violating probation in a drug case in 2006.She was elected Florida’s first female attorney general in 2010.Ms. Bondi — a Democrat until 2000 — emerged from a crowded Republican primary to win the attorney general’s race after garnering the support of Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and failed 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee, and by touting her tough stance on crime during appearances on Fox News.During her eight-year tenure, she tried unsuccessfully to overturn and weaken the Affordable Care Act, opposed expanding legal protections for the L.G.B.T.Q. community and cultivated a national reputation by supporting anti-human-trafficking efforts.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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      Bondi Worked as Lobbyist in Recent Years, With Clients Including Amazon, G.M., Uber and Qatar

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick to be attorney general, Pam Bondi, is a lobbyist for a powerhouse Republican firm, for which she represented major corporations and foreign governments with interests before the U.S. government.Ms. Bondi joined the lobbying firm of the Republican fund-raiser Brian Ballard after finishing her second term as Florida attorney general in January 2019.Among the clients for which she was registered to lobby were major companies, including Amazon, General Motors and Uber, as well as the Qatari government and various financial firms.Those registrations are no longer active, but Ms. Bondi is currently registered as a lobbyist for law enforcement-related clients, including an association representing some of the country’s largest sheriff’s offices and another group representing sheriffs in Florida, as well as the Florida sheriffs’ self-insurance program.A person familiar with the firm confirmed that Ms. Bondi was still affiliated with it and those clients as of Thursday.The firm’s website indicates that she is the chairwoman of its corporate regulatory compliance practice, focusing on helping Fortune 500 companies implement policies to fight human trafficking, opioid abuse and data breaches.Another veteran of Mr. Ballard’s firm, Susie Wiles, was tapped by Mr. Trump to be the White House chief of staff. Ms. Wiles will be the first woman to hold that job. Mr. Ballard helped to bring in more than $50 million for committees supporting Mr. Trump’s campaign. More

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      Marjorie Taylor Greene to Lead ‘DOGE’ Panel and Work With Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy

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      When she arrived in Congress in 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, was quickly stripped of her two committee assignments by Democrats and shunned by her colleagues on Capitol Hill.Almost three years later, Ms. Greene is poised to hold a gavel for the first time, a sign of the ascendancy of the MAGA wing of the G.O.P. in Congress, where President-elect Donald J. Trump’s most loyal allies will occupy prominent posts next year.Representative James Comer of Kentucky, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, is planning to create a new subcommittee to partner with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to “eliminate government waste.” The committee, which has yet to be created, will work with the new Department of Government Efficiency, known as “DOGE,” and leading Republicans have agreed to allow Ms. Greene to serve as its chairwoman.Republicans said the committee would be charged with investigating waste and corruption within the federal government.Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene during a House Homeland Security Committee meeting on Capitol Hill, in Washington, in January.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesEven though she is not yet the chairwoman of a committee that does not yet exist, Ms. Greene’s new position appeared to be a done deal, with top Republicans confirming it would be hers to lead when the new Congress convenes in January.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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      China’s Hacking Reached Deep Into U.S. Telecoms

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      The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said hackers listened to phone calls and read texts by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks that connect systems.China’s recent breach of the innermost workings of the U.S. telecommunications system reached far deeper than the Biden administration has described, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday, with hackers able to listen in on telephone conversations and read text messages.“The barn door is still wide open, or mostly open,” the Democratic chairman, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a former telecommunications executive, said in an interview on Thursday.Mr. Warner said he had been stunned by the scope and depth of the breach, which was engineered over the past year by a group linked to Chinese intelligence that has been named Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, whose cybersecurity team discovered the hack in the summer. Government officials have been struggling to understand what China obtained and how it might have been able to monitor conversations held by a number of well-connected Americans, including President-elect Donald J. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.At first, the F.B.I. and other investigators believed that China’s hackers used stolen passwords to focus mostly on the system that taps telephone conversations and texts under court orders. It is administered by a number of the nation’s telecommunications firms, including the three largest — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. But in recent days, investigators have discovered how deeply China’s hackers had moved throughout the country by exploiting aging equipment and seams in the networks connecting disparate systems.U.S. officials said that since the hack was exposed, the Chinese intruders had seemingly disappeared, suspending their intrusion so their full activity could not be discovered. But Mr. Warner said it would be wrong to conclude that the Chinese had been ousted from the nation’s telecommunications system, or that investigators even understood how deeply they were embedded.“We’ve not found everywhere they are,” Mr. Warner said.The committee has received briefings from the government on the hack, and Mr. Warner has had conversations with telecommunications executives.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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      West Bank Settlement Supporters Have Big Hopes for Trump’s Presidency

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      As Donald J. Trump nominates staunch supporters of Israel to key positions, advocacy groups are taking aim at the departing administration’s policies.The Biden administration this week imposed sanctions on more groups and individuals it accuses of having ties to Israeli settlers inciting violence in the occupied West Bank, a last-ditch show of disapproval of Israelis’ annexation of land there before U.S. policy on the issue most likely swings the other way under the next administration.When President-elect Donald J. Trump returns to the White House next year, he could easily revoke the February executive order authorizing the sanctions or, even, some pro-settlement activists hope, use the order to go after Palestinian organizations instead.Texans for Israel, a Christian Zionist group, and several other settler supporters and organizations this month renewed a challenge to President Biden’s order in federal court, arguing that it was being applied unconstitutionally, targeting Jewish settlers and violating the rights of Americans exercising freedom of religion and speech in support of them.The case highlights the growing international controversy over West Bank settlement amid the war in the Gaza Strip and the great expectations of the settler movement and its supporters of another Trump presidency.Israel seized control of the West Bank from Jordan in a war in 1967, and Israeli civilians have since settled there with both the tacit and the explicit approval of the Israeli government, living under Israeli civil law while their Palestinian neighbors are subject to Israeli military law. Expanding Israel’s hold over the West Bank is a stated goal of many ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government.The international community largely views the Israeli settlements as illegal, and Palestinians have long argued that they are a creeping annexation that turns land needed for any independent Palestinian state into an unmanageable patchwork.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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      Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Exchange Posts About Trump on X

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      The world’s two richest men are longtime business rivals, but now one of them has the ear of the next president of the United States.A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.But times have changed.“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)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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      Candidatos anteriores se vieron perjudicados por menos de lo que rodea a los elegidos de Donald Trump

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      Impuestos atrasados, consumo de marihuana y niñeras indocumentadas descalificaron a anteriores elecciones presidenciales para altos cargos. Algunos de los candidatos del presidente electo enfrentan mayores cuestionamientos.Un aspirante a la Corte Suprema se retiró tras revelarse que había fumado marihuana en su juventud. Dos candidatos a fiscal general fueron eliminados cuando salió a la luz que habían empleado a inmigrantes indocumentadas como niñeras. Un tercer candidato al gabinete —nada menos que un exlíder del Senado— fue rechazado por no pagar impuestos sobre un automóvil y un chofer que le había prestado un socio. Incluso unos tuits malintencionados bastaron para hundir a un candidato.Los problemas legales y éticos que rodean a algunas de las personas seleccionadas por el presidente electo Donald Trump para ocupar altos cargos en el gobierno, por no hablar de su historial de declaraciones públicas que levantan cejas, son mucho más profundos que el tipo de revelaciones que han acabado con candidaturas en el Senado en el pasado.Lo que antes se consideraba descalificante para un candidato presidencial parece francamente benigno en comparación con las acusaciones de conducta sexual inapropiada y consumo de drogas ilícitas por parte de su candidato a fiscal general, detalladas en un informe secreto del Congreso, una acusación de agresión sexual seguida de un acuerdo pagado por su elección para dirigir el Pentágono y una antigua adicción a la heroína reconocida por el futuro secretario de salud.No hace tanto tiempo que los candidatos a puestos de alto nivel, e incluso algunos de los menos conocidos, tenían que ser irreprochables, hasta el punto de que una cuestión fiscal relativamente menor podía hacerlos fracasar. Pero es evidente que los tiempos están cambiando en lo que respecta a los nombramientos en los albores del segundo gobierno de Trump.“Los estándares aparentemente están evolucionando”, dijo el senador John Cornyn, republicano por Texas y miembro principal del Comité Judicial. El panel consideraría la nominación del exrepresentante Matt Gaetz, republicano de Florida, para fiscal general si se presenta formalmente.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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      Newsom Heads to California Counties That Voted for Trump

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      Gov. Gavin Newsom acknowledged that residents were frustrated by economic problems and said that Democrats needed to address their concerns.On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom will make the first of three post-election visits to California counties that Donald J. Trump won in the presidential race, reaching out to working-class voters in the Central Valley who remain frustrated by economic woes.The appearance in Fresno, to unveil a new economic development system, comes as interviews and polls have shown that economic and class divisions were key to Mr. Trump’s return to power.With Democrats still mulling over their presidential and congressional losses, Mr. Newsom said in an interview on Wednesday that his party needed to learn from the recent election and to address the struggles of American workers.“A lot of people feel like they’re losing their identity or losing their future,” Mr. Newsom said. “Message received.”A leading Democrat who has been viewed as a potential 2028 presidential contender, California’s governor has long been a pointed critic of Mr. Trump. Over the past two and a half weeks, he has indicated that he expects his state and the Trump administration to repeat the pitched battle they waged during Mr. Trump’s first term, when California sued the federal government more than 120 times.The governor’s immediate response after the Nov. 5 election was to call his state’s Democrat-dominated legislature into an emergency special session that would start in December. Mr. Newsom urged Democrats to “stand firm” against expected efforts by Mr. Trump to deport immigrants, further limit reproductive rights and weaken environmental regulation.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