Trump, Donald J

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      Justice Dept. to Use False Claims Act to Pursue Institutions Over DEI Efforts

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      The department’s use of the law is all but certain to be met with legal challenges.The Trump administration plans to leverage a law intended to punish corrupt recipients of federal funding to pressure institutions like Harvard to abandon their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, Justice Department officials announced late Monday.President Trump’s political appointees at the department cited antisemitism on campuses as justification for using the law, the False Claims Act, to target universities and other institutions that Mr. Trump views as bastions of opposition to his agenda and a ripe populist target to rile up his right-wing base.“Institutions that take federal money only to allow antisemitism and promote divisive D.E.I. policies are putting their access to federal funds at risk,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “This Department of Justice will not tolerate these violations of civil rights — inaction is not an option.”The department’s use of the law is all but certain to be met with legal challenges. Last week, the Justice Department notified Harvard, which receives billions in government grants, of an investigation into whether its admissions process had been used to defraud the government by failing to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that effectively ended affirmative action.The department will seek fines and damages in most instances where violations are found. But it will consider criminal prosecutions in extreme circumstances, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche warned in a memo to staff.The initiative will be a joint project of the department’s anti-fraud unit and its Civil Rights Division, which has been sharply downsized and redirected from its historical mission of addressing race-based discrimination to pursue Mr. Trump’s culture war agenda.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 Suggests Biden’s Cancer Diagnosis Was Hidden From Public

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      Mr. Biden’s office said he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 prostate cancer that had spread to his bones.President Trump said Monday that he was surprised that Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s cancer diagnosis was not made public a “long time ago,” seeming to suggest without evidence that the former president’s cancer was not newly discovered and had been covered up.“There are things going on that the public wasn’t informed, and I think somebody is going to have to speak to his doctor,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.On Sunday, Mr. Biden’s office said he had been diagnosed on Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Mr. Biden had spent May 9 at a Philadelphia hospital after a doctor discovered a small nodule on his prostate, his spokesman said last week. Mr. Biden, 82, had reported urinary symptoms before the nodule was found.The cancer is Stage 4, with a Gleason score of 9, according to the former president’s office. A Gleason score is a measure of cancer aggressiveness, ranging from 6 to 10.“To get to Stage 9, that’s a long time,” Mr. Trump said Monday, apparently mixing up the Gleason score with the cancer stage.“You have to say, why did it take so long?” Mr. Trump said, adding, “It can take years to get to this level of danger. So it’s a — look, it’s a very, very sad situation, and I feel very badly about it, and I think people should try and find out what happened.”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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      In Reversal, Trump Officials Will Allow Huge Offshore N.Y. Wind Farm to Proceed

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      The Trump administration had issued a highly unusual stop-work order on the Empire Wind project last month, leading to intense pushback from officials in New York.The Trump administration on Monday allowed construction to restart on a huge wind farm off the coast of Long Island, a month after federal officials had issued a highly unusual stop-work order that had pushed the $5 billion project to the brink of collapse.In a statement, Gov. Kathy Hochul, Democrat of New York, said she had spent weeks pressing President Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to lift the government’s hold on the wind farm.The project, known as Empire Wind, is being built by the Norwegian energy giant Equinor and when finished is expected to deliver enough electricity to power 500,000 New York homes.“After countless conversations with Equinor and White House officials, bringing labor and business to the table to emphasize the importance of this project, I’m pleased that President Trump and Secretary Burgum have agreed to lift the stop work order and allow this project to move forward,” Ms. Hochul said on Monday evening.When the Trump administration halted work on Empire Wind last month, it stunned observers and sent shock waves through the wind industry.Equinor had obtained all necessary permits for the project after a four-year federal environmental review, and the company had already begun laying foundations for the project’s turbines on the ocean floor. Another 1,500 workers had begun constructing a marine terminal in Brooklyn.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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      Emil Bove, Top Justice Dept. Official, Is Considered for Circuit Court Nomination

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      Emil Bove III has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the appeals court covering Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, people familiar with the matter said.President Trump is considering nominating Emil Bove III, a top Justice Department official responsible for enacting his immigration agenda and ordering the purge of career prosecutors, to be a federal appeals judge, according to people familiar with the matter.Mr. Bove, 44, is a former criminal defense lawyer for Mr. Trump and a longtime federal prosecutor in New York. He was the Justice Department official at the center of the Trump administration’s request earlier this year to dismiss a corruption case against the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.One of the department’s most formidable and feared political appointees in the second Trump administration, he has emerged as a top contender to fill a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which covers Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, those people said.There are two vacancies on the court — one based in New Jersey and one in Delaware. It is not clear which seat Mr. Bove is under consideration for. He has a property in Pennsylvania, and some conservatives have called for moving the Delaware-based seat to Pennsylvania.The people familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive internal matter that has not yet been publicly announced. They cautioned that the timing remains unclear, and the intentions could still shift.If Mr. Bove is nominated for the post, Democrats are all but certain to use his Senate confirmation process to scrutinize his role in some of the Justice Department’s most contentious actions since Mr. Trump took office.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 Republicans Will Vote Again on President Trump’s Legislative Agenda

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      A group of fiscal hard-liners on the Budget Committee blocked the bill Friday morning. The group will try again to pass the president’s megabill out of committee Sunday night.The House Budget Committee will meet late Sunday night to try once again to advance President Trump’s domestic policy bill toward a floor vote after a handful of fiscally conservative Republicans blocked the measure on Friday over concerns about the ballooning national deficit.The remarkable revolt among hard-right lawmakers has threatened to upend Republicans’ goal of approving the legislation before the Memorial Day recess. G.O.P. leaders have been searching for a way to pacify the holdouts.Five Republican representatives — Chip Roy of Texas, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma, Andrew Clyde of Georgia, and Lloyd Smucker of Pennsylvania — joined Democrats to block the legislation on Friday. The vote was 16 to 21 on a motion to advance the bill.“This bill falls profoundly short,” Mr. Roy said.Mr. Smucker, who changed his “yes” vote to a “no” at the last minute, said he did so for procedural reasons. Because he voted against the bill, he will be able to ask to call the legislation back up for consideration.But it was unclear what changes Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team could come up with to win enough votes.Without the support of Republican hard-liners, the bill cannot advance. Any changes to win their backing could alienate the more moderate Republicans whose votes will also be needed to pass the measure on the House floor.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 Is Destroying a Core American Value. The World Will Notice.

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      In the late 1980s, Joseph Nye, the Harvard political scientist who died this month, developed the concept of “soft power.” His central premise, that the United States enhances its global influence by promoting values like human rights and democracy, has guided U.S. foreign policy for decades across both Republican and Democratic administrations.Donald Trump has made clear that he fundamentally rejects this vision. As president, he has ordered a sweeping overhaul of the State Department that will cripple its capacity to promote American values abroad. At the center of this effort are drastic cuts to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor — the State Department’s core institution for advancing soft power, which I led under President Barack Obama. Unless Congress intervenes, the debasement of the bureau’s role will impair America’s ability to challenge authoritarianism, support democratic movements and provide independent analysis to inform U.S. foreign policy. The long-term result will be a United States that is weaker, less principled and increasingly sidelined as authoritarian powers like Russia and China offer their own transactional models of global engagement.The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor was created with bipartisan congressional support in 1977, a time when lawmakers sought greater influence over foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and America’s support for authoritarian regimes in countries like Chile and South Korea. President Jimmy Carter’s religious convictions and deep commitment to human rights gave the fledgling bureau early momentum. Still, its purpose was always practical: to ensure U.S. foreign aid and trade decisions were informed by credible assessments of human rights conditions around the world. That’s why every year, the bureau prepares congressionally mandated human rights reports.In its early years, it struggled to defend its existence. Foreign governments resented being called out in its annual reports and attacked its legitimacy. Many State Department traditionalists viewed its focus on human rights as an unhelpful distraction from the realpolitik topics they were much more comfortable addressing. It also drew criticisms of hypocrisy, mostly from the left, for condemning the records of other countries in the face of unresolved human rights problems here in the United States. Others accurately pointed out that even as the State Department’s human rights reports documented serious abuses, the United States continued to provide substantial aid to governments like Ferdinand E. Marcos’s Philippines, Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt and numerous military regimes across Latin America.These tensions have not disappeared. But over nearly five decades, the bureau has evolved to confront them. Governments, companies, judges and nongovernmental organizations have all come to rely on its annual country reports. It plays the lead role in preventing the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. And its policy engagement has guided the U.S. approach to international conflicts, repressive regimes and civil wars.That progress is now at risk. The Trump administration’s proposed “reforms” will hamstring my former agency’s capacity to uphold its mission in three major ways.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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      Federal Courts Buck Trump Deportation Schemes, Focusing on Due Process Rights

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      The Trump administration’s aggressive push to deport migrants has run up against resistance from the judiciary.If there has been a common theme in the federal courts’ response to the fallout from President Trump’s aggressive deportation policies, it is that the White House cannot rush headlong into expelling people by sidestepping the fundamental principle of due process.In case after case, a legal bottom line is emerging: Immigrants should at least be given the opportunity to challenge their deportations, especially as Trump officials have claimed novel and extraordinary powers to remove them.The latest and clearest expression of that view came on Friday evening, when the Supreme Court chided the Trump administration for seeking to provide only a day’s warning to a group of Venezuelan immigrants in Texas it had been trying to deport under the expansive powers of an 18th-century wartime law.“Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal,” the justices wrote, “surely does not pass muster.”While many questions remain to be answered about Mr. Trump’s deportation plans, many legal scholars have hailed courts’ support of due process. At the same time, they have also expressed concern that such support was needed in the first place.“It’s great that courts are standing up for one of the most basic principles that underlie our constitutional order — that ‘persons’ (not ‘citizens’) are entitled to due process before being deprived of life, liberty, or property,” Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote in an email. “It would be even better if the administration would simply cease violating such principles.”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 Administration Abandons Fight to Ban Powerful Gun Accessory

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      The device, called a forced-reset trigger, allows semiautomatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds. The Biden administration had sought to block them from being sold.The Trump administration has given up a legal fight to ban a device that makes semiautomatic weapons more powerful.The Justice Department said Friday that it had reached a settlement ending litigation filed by the Biden administration to block the sale of the device, called a forced-reset trigger.“This Department of Justice believes that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement. “And we are glad to end a needless cycle of litigation with a settlement that will enhance public safety.”Forced-reset triggers allow gun owners to fire their semiautomatic weapons at great speed. Aided by the device, a shooter can fire hundreds of rounds in a minute with an extended squeeze, Biden administration officials had said.The accessory is similar to a bump stock, which President Trump banned during his first term after a gunman used one to massacre dozens of concertgoers in Las Vegas. Bump stocks, like forced-reset triggers, allow semiautomatic rifles to fire at speeds approaching those of machine guns.Last year, the Supreme Court struck down the bump stock ban. But the Biden administration had sought to maintain a ban on forced-reset triggers.A federal judge in Texas struck down the forced-reset trigger ban, but the Biden administration appealed the case.The Justice Department said the new settlement included gun-safety provisions and would prevent the sale of forced-reset triggers in pistols.Still, gun safety advocates decried the settlement, saying that it would allow gun owners to transform their firearms into virtual machine guns, making life in America more dangerous.“Machine guns have no place on our streets, and this move from the Trump administration will only lead to tragedy,” John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a statement. More