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    JD Vance’s attempt to blame Democrats

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    Four days after JD Vance reportedly asked top Trump administration officials to come up with a new communications strategy for dealing with the scandal around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he appears to have put his foot in it, sparking a new round of online outrage even as he tried to defuse the furor.In an interview with Fox News broadcast on Sunday, the vice-president tried to deflect criticism of the administration’s refusal to release the Epstein files by blaming Democrats. He accused Joe Biden of doing “absolutely nothing” about the scandal when he was in the White House.“And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years,” he said. Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse multiple minor girls and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison during the Biden administration.If Vance’s attempt to switch public blame onto Democrats was the big idea to emerge from his strategy meeting with attorney general Pam Bondi and FBI director Kash Patel, which according to CNN he convened at the White House last week, then their labours appear to have backfired. (Vance denied to Fox that they had discussed Epstein at all, though he did acknowledge the meeting took place.)Within minutes of the Fox News interview being broadcast, social media began to hum with renewed cries of “release the files!”Clips of Vanc smearing Democrats quickly began to circulate on X. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with leftwing politicians and leftwing billionaires … Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein island all the time. Who knows what they did,” he said. Vance also repeated Trump’s previously debunked claim that Bill Clinton had visited Epstein’s private island dozens of times. Clinton has acknowledged using Epstein’s jet, but denied ever visiting his island.“Fine. Release all the files,” was the riposte from Bill Kristol, the prominent conservative Never Trumper who urged the documents to be made public with “no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates”.Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s former head speechwriter, replied: “Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not. What are you afraid of, JD Vance?”Favreau added that Trump’s name “is in the Epstein files”. That was an apparent reference to a report in the Wall Street Journal last month that a justice department review of the documents conducted under Bondi had found that the president’s name did appear “multiple times”.Other social media users used the Fox News interview as an excuse to re-run video of Trump in the hosting Epstein and Maxwell at Mar-a-Lago.Epstein died in August 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, while the financier and socialite was awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail; the death was ruled a suicide.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe White House has been caught in a bind over the Epstein affair which spawned conspiracy theories among many of Trump’s supporters, which now senior figures in the administration had actively encouraged during the 2024 campaign.In July the justice department announced that there was no Epstein client list and that no more files would be made public, a decision that clashed with earlier statements from top Trump officials, including Bondi’s statement in February that a client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review”. The decision triggered an immediate and ongoing uproar that crossed the partisan political divide.Among the most viral clips in the aftermath of that reversal was video of Vance himself telling the podcaster Theo Von, two weeks before the election: “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list, that is an important thing.”In his Fox News interview Vance also warned that “you’re going to see a lot of people get indicted” after Trump accused Obama of “treason” and called for his predecessor to be prosecuted.The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has passed documents to the justice department that she claims show that the Obama administration maliciously tried to hurt Trump by linking Russian interference in the 2016 election to him.Obama has dismissed Trump’s call for his prosecution as weak and ridiculous. More

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      Court overrides Trump officials’ rollback and blocks fishing in Pacific Islands monument

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      A federal judge in Hawaii has ruled that commercial fishing is illegal in the Pacific Islands Heritage marine national monument, a federally protected area in the central Pacific Ocean.The decision from judge Micah WJ Smith overturns an April letter released by the National Marine Fisheries Service’s (NMFS) – also known as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Fisheries – that allowed fishing in parts of the monument that Barack Obama had protected during his presidency. The letter came about a week after Donald Trump’s presidential proclamation to reverse fishing regulations across the national monument, a world heritage site that includes archeological treasures, marine mammals, seabirds and coral reefs.Regulations banning commercial fishing in the area remain in effect, according to Friday’s ruling. The court said “no commercial fishing operators may reasonably rely on” the April letter, meaning fishing in waters 50 to 200 nautical miles around Johnston Atoll, Jarvis Island, and Wake Island must halt immediately.“The Fisheries Service cannot ignore our perspectives as the native people who belong to the islands and to the ocean that surrounds us,” said Solomon Pili Kaho’ohalahala, founding member of the non-profit group Kāpaʻa, the Conservation Council for Hawaii and the Center for Biological Diversity. “The law guarantees a process where we can advocate for protecting the generations of our children’s children who are yet to be born.”The environmental conservation group Earthjustice, representing the non-profits in Hawaii, filed its lawsuit in May and argued NMFS violated federal law by bypassing the formal process for changing fishing rules, which requires public notice and comment.“The court forcefully rejected the Trump administration’s outrageous claim that it can dismantle vital protections for the monument’s unique and vulnerable species and ecosystems without involving the public,” Earthjustice attorney David Henkin said.Then president George W Bush created the marine monument in 2009. It consists of about 500,000 sq miles (1.3m sq km) in the remote central Pacific Ocean south-west of Hawaii. Obama expanded it in 2014.As part of his push to make the US the “world’s dominant seafood leader”, Trump called the regulations “so horrible and so stupid” – and claimed they force US fishers “to go and travel four to seven days to go and fish in an area that’s not as good”.The Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is about 370,000 sq nautical miles (1,270,000 sq km), or nearly twice the size of the state of Texas. It is managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Noaa and the defense department. The monument is home to one of the largest collections of deep ocean coral reef, seabird, and shorebird protected areas on the planet. It provides refuge for species threatened by the climate crisis and other stressors caused by humans.Kingman Reef, considered one of the most pristine coral reefs in US waters, is also part of the monument. Unesco reports it has the highest proportion of apex predators of any studied coral reef worldwide.Its waters are home to several shark species, including grey reef, oceanic whitetip, hammerhead and silky sharks, all of which play an important role in maintaining ecological balance.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlong with the ecological value, the islands and ocean areas in and adjacent to the monument hold great value to Indigenous Pacific Islanders and researchers. The lawsuit says allowing commercial fishing in the monument expansion would harm the “cultural, spiritual, religious, subsistence, educational, recreational, and aesthetic interests” of a group of Native Hawaiian plaintiffs who are connected genealogically to the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific.“This is a huge win for the Pacific’s irreplaceable marine life and for the rule of law,” Maxx Phillips, staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said about Friday’s ruling. “These sacred and irreplaceable ecosystems are home to endangered species, deep-sea corals, and rich cultural heritage.”Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      Trump orders homeless he passed en route to golf course to leave Washington DC

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      In a social media post on Sunday, Donald Trump demands homeless residents of Washington DC leave the country’s capital or face eviction, and again promised to use federal officers to jail criminals, even though violent crime in the city was at a 30-year low when he took office in January.“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Sunday morning, shortly after being driven from the White House to his golf club in Virginia. “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”View image in fullscreenThe post was illustrated with four photographs, all apparently taken from the president’s motorcade along the route from the White House to his golf course. Two of the images showed a total of 10 tents pitched on the grass along a highway on-ramp just over a mile from the White House. The third image showed a single person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. The fourth image showed the line of vehicles that whisk Trump to his golf course passing a small amount of roadside litter on the E Street Expressway, near the Kennedy Center.Trump’s post promoted a previously announced news conference on Monday, which he has promised, “will, essentially, stop violent crime” in the capital district, without explaining how. In a subsequent post, he said that the news conference at 10am Monday, “will not only involve ending the Crime, Murder, and Death in our Nation’s Capital, but will also be about Cleanliness”.The Free DC movement, which advocates for self-determination, immediately scheduled a protest on Monday to coincide with Trump’s news conference.Despite Trump’s claims, there is no epidemic of homelessness or violent crime in the capital.According to the Community Partnership, which works to prevent homelessness in Washington DC, on any given night there are about 800 unsheltered persons sleeping outdoors in the city of about 700,000 people. A further 3,275 people use emergency shelters in Washington, and 1,065 people are in transitional housing facilities.Trump’s repeated claims that it might be necessary to federalize law enforcement in the city to make it safe also ignores data collected by the Metropolitan police department, released in January by the federal government, which showed that violent crime in Washington DC in 2024 was down 35% from 2023 and was at the lowest level in over 30 years.“We are not experiencing a crime spike,” Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, told MSNBC on Sunday. “We have spent over the last two years driving down violent crime in this city, driving it down to a 30-year low.” She added that Washington DC police statistics show that violent crime is down a further 26% so far this year.“Federal law enforcement is always on the street in DC, and we always work cooperatively with them” Bowser said, adding the the Washington DC national guard, which Trump has threatened to deploy, is under the control of the president.Earlier this week, Trump ordered a surge of federal officers from a variety of agencies to increase patrols in Washington DC, pointing to the assault on a young federal worker who came to Washington to work with Elon Musk as evidence that the city’s police force was failing to combat violent crime. Washington DC police, however, had stopped the assault Trump focused attention on, and arrested two 15-year-old suspects at the scene.Asked by Reuters, the White House declined to explain what legal authority Trump would use to evict people from Washington. The president controls only federal land and buildings in the city.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe US Congress has control of the city’s budget but the DC Home Rule Act, signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, gives Washington DC residents the right to elect the mayor, council members, and neighborhood commissioners to run day-to-day affairs in the district.Trump told reporters on Wednesday that White House lawyers were “already studying” the possibility of legislation to overturn the law granting the Washington DC self-rule and imposing direct federal control of the capital.“Even if crime in D.C. weren’t at a historic low point, President Trump’s comments would be misguided and offensive to the more than 700,000 people who live permanently in the nation’s capital,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents DC as a nonvoting delegate in congress said in a statement. “D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and brown, are worthy and capable of governing themselves without interference from federal officials who are unaccountable to D.C.”“The only permanent remedy that will protect D.C.’s ability to govern itself is enactment of my D.C. statehood bill into law,” the 88-year-old congresswoman added.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Texas redistricting fight with Democrats ‘could last years’, threatens Greg Abbott

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      Texas governor, Greg Abbott, has stepped up his war of words with Democratic lawmakers who have left the state to foil an aggressive redistricting plan aimed at giving his Republican party five additional seats in Congress, saying on Sunday that the fight “could literally last years”.Abbott issued his new threat on Fox News Sunday, saying that he would use his powers to call a special session of the Texas legislature to extend the battle indefinitely. The special session lasts 30 days, he said, “and as soon as this one is over, I’m going to call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one”.Whenever the absent Democrats return to Texas, Abbott said, they would be arrested for violating their oath of office. “If they want to evade that arrest, they’re going to stay outside Texas for literally years,” he remarked. “And they might as well start voting in California or Illinois, or wherever they may be.”Sunday’s TV political talk shows were dominated by the increasingly acrimonious dispute over Texas’s audacious gerrymandering plans which were instigated at the direct behest of Donald Trump.The move to flip five US House seats to the Republicans is being made as polls indicate that the US president’s party will struggle to hang on to its razor-slim majority in the chamber in next year’s midterm elections. The Republicans currently hold a margin of just three seats.The stakes could not be higher: were Trump able to hang onto his narrow control of Congress, he could cement the attacks on democratic and constitutional norms that he has begun in the first six months of his second presidency.As the crisis reaches a crunch, more than 50 Texas Democrats have left the state, heading to Democratically-controlled states, including Illinois and New York. The relocation is designed to deprive Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the new gerrymandered maps in the Texas legislature in Austin.Democratic governors went on the political shows on Sunday to launch their own barrage of words threatening counter-action. The strong language deployed was the latest indication that the leadership of the Democratic party, which has floundered in the face of Trump’s radical authoritarian-leaning tactics, is determined at this point to take a stand.New York’s Democratic governor Kathy Hochul accused Abbott on Fox News Sunday of being a “lap dog” for Trump. “Knock it off,” she told her counterpart in Texas. “Let’s get back to governing.”She added that if Texas continued with what she called “these games”, “we’re not going to sit on the sidelines – we’re New Yorkers. We fight back.”New York’s room for maneuver, however, is more limited than that of Texas. The state has an independent redistricting commission that oversees the drawing of its electoral maps which has been the subject in recent years of much court action.Hochul said that the restrictions would not hold New York back. “We amend constitutions – we did it a few years ago,” she said. “We can put it to the people. I’m not going to let our democracy be eroded away because there’s a blatant power grab in our nation’s capital.”JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois where many of the Texas Democrats are holed up in an undisclosed hotel outside Chicago, unleashed his own verbal volley on NBC’s Meet the Press. He accused Trump of being a cheater, saying: “He cheats on his wives. He cheats at golf. And now he’s trying to cheat the American people out of their votes.”Pritzker was dismissive of claims by Texas US senator John Cornyn that the FBI had been brought in to help find the missing Democrats. “Texas law does not apply in the state of Illinois, and there’s no federal law that would allow the FBI to arrest anybody that’s here visiting our state,” Pritzker said. “So, it’s a lot of grandstanding.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs the governors were thrashing it out in the TV studios, lawsuits continued to fly around Texas’s courts as both sides seek to gain the upper hand legally. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton is suing a sample group of 13 of the Democratic lawmakers claiming that the “runaways” have officially vacated their offices.Paxton is now asking the state’s supreme court to remove the 13 from their seats.Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic presidential candidate from El Paso, Texas, has also waded into the fray. On Friday, a state court in Fort Worth blocked his political action committee, Powered By People, from using its funds to support the fleeing lawmakers.O’Rourke has counter-sued, arguing that Paxton was trying to “intimidate” a potential rival in next year’s US senate race. Speaking at an event in New Orleans on Friday, he accused the Republicans of being “would-be fascists” and warned that if they got away with their plan to maintain power in Congress in 2026 “the consolidation of authoritarian control in the hands of Donald Trump will be nearly unstoppable”.Trump’s ruse to create more winnable congressional seats is being taken so seriously in Democratic circles that it has gelled even die-hard opponents of party political gerrymandering to come out in favor of counter measures. Bernie Sanders, the independent US senator from Vermont, is a fierce critic of the redrawing of electoral maps for partisan benefit.Yet he told CNN’s State of the Union that the Democratic party had no option but to fight fire with fire, saying: “Democrats have got to fight back. I think it’s pathetic, but I think that’s what they’ve got to do.”Asked whether that his position was defensible, given his years of opposing gerrymandering, Sanders said: “What we have now is terrible, and Republicans are making it worse. Well, what do you do if Republicans are doing it? You have to respond. It’s pathetic, but I think you have to respond.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: Lutnick threatens Harvard patents; former Fox commentator bound for UN

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      The Trump administrations has threatened Harvard’s lucrative portfolio of patents amid its long-running dispute with the university, accusing it of breaching legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research.In a letter, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick demanded that Harvard provide within four weeks a list of all patents stemming from federally funded research grants, including how the patents are used and whether any licensing requires “substantial US manufacturing”. Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Many civil rights experts, faculty and White House critics believe the Trump administration’s targeting of schools for supposedly failing to address antisemitism on campus is a pretext to assert federal control and threaten academic freedom and free speech.Trump administration threatens Harvard federal funding and patentsIn his letter to Harvard, Lutnick also said the commerce department had begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.As of 1 July 2024, Harvard held more than 5,800 patents, and had more than 900 technology licenses with over 650 industry partners, according to the Harvard Office of Technology Development.Read the full storyTammy Bruce nominated for US deputy ambassador to UNDonald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating former Fox News commentator Tammy Bruce as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations.Bruce has been serving as the chief spokesperson for the state department since Trump took office this year. Trump said Bruce, who had no prior foreign policy experience before becoming spokesperson in January, “will represent our country brilliantly at the United Nations”.Read the full storyIRS commissioner reportedly removed over immigration policy disputeThe removal of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) commissioner Billy Long after just two months came after the federal tax collection agency said it could not release some information on taxpayers suspected of being in the US illegally, it was reported on Saturday.The Washington Post reported the Department of Homeland Security had sent the IRS a list of 40,000 names that it suspected of being in the country illegally. DHS asked the tax service to crosscheck confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses.The IRS reportedly responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3% of the names on the DHS list, but declined requests for further information, citing taxpayer privacy rights.Read the full story‘We are at war – bring it on’: Democrats ready to fight dirty to stop TrumpKen Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, speaking in Chicago this week, said: “This is a new Democratic party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight, and we are going to fight fire with fire.”It was a brutally honest acknowledgement of what a decade of Donald Trump’s politics has wrought. Out go the courtly and courteous playing-by-the-rules Democrats convinced that Maga is a passing phase, a fever that will break. In come a new generation of pugnacious Democrats prepared to take off the gloves and fight dirty.The trigger for this scorched-earth approach is Trump’s push to find more Republican seats in the House of Representatives ahead of next year’s crucial midterm elections through gerrymandering, a process of manipulating electoral maps to benefit one party over another.Read the full storyHow did we get all this gerrymandering? A brief history Extreme GOP gerrymanders have remade American politics over the last 15 years. They have locked Republicans into office in state legislatures nationwide, even in purple states when Democratic candidates win more votes. They have delivered a reliable and enduring edge to the GOP in the race for Congress.How did we get here? How did gerrymandered lines, rather than voters, gain the power to determine winners and losers?Read the full storyPete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn’t be allowed to voteThe US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.Hegseth reposted a nearly seven-minute report CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist. In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.Doug Pagitt, a pastor and the executive director of the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good, said the ideas in the video were views that “small fringes of Christians keep” and said it was “very disturbing” that Hegseth would amplify them.Read the full storyUnder-fire FDA figure returns just days after leaving Vinay Prasad is returning to his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy and blood product regulation at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a little more than a week after he left the agency.Two days before Prasad stepped down last month, Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist, had released misleadingly edited audio to suggest Prasad had admitted sticking pins in a Trump voodoo doll, when the full audio made it clear that he was talking about the kind of thing an imagined liberal Trump-hater would do.Prasad is an oncologist who was a fierce critic of US Covid-19 vaccines and mask mandates.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A Georgia man who opened fire on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta on Friday, killing a police officer, had blamed a Covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal, a law enforcement official said.

      Documents filed recently in the New Orleans Roman Catholic archdiocese’s five-year bankruptcy case provide more clarity on how claims will be doled out to survivors of clergy abuse if a proposed settlement is approved.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 8 August 2025. More

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      Trump administration threatens to strip Harvard University of lucrative patents

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      The latest phase of the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard University is a comprehensive review of the university’s federally funded research programs, and the threat to strip the school’s lucrative portfolio of patents.In a letter to the Harvard president, Alan Garber, posted online on Friday, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, accused Harvard of breaching its legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research programs and patents.Lutnick also said the commerce department has begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses.“The Department places immense value on the groundbreaking scientific and technological advancements that emerge from the Government’s partnerships with institutions like Harvard,” Lutnick wrote.He said that carried a “critical responsibility” for Harvard to ensure that its intellectual property derived from federal funding is used to maximize benefits to the American people.Harvard did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Friday’s letter ratchets up White House pressure on Harvard, which it has accused of civil rights violations for failing to take steps dictated by the administration in response to accusations that student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza were antisemitic.Harvard sued in April after the administration began stripping or freezing billions of dollars of federal research money.In his letter, Lutnick demanded that Harvard provide within four weeks a list of all patents stemming from federally funded research grants, including how the patents are used and whether any licensing requires “substantial US manufacturing”.As of 1 July 2024, Harvard held more than 5,800 patents, and had more than 900 technology licenses with over 650 industry partners, according to the Harvard Office of Technology Development.Other universities faced with federal research funding losses have signed settlement agreements with the government, including Columbia University, which agreed to pay more than $220m, and Brown University, which agreed to pay $50m.Harvard’s president reportedly told faculty that a New York Times report that the university was open to spending up to $500m to settle with the government was inaccurate and had been leaked to reporters by White House officials.The bipartisan Bayh-Dole Act was sponsored by senators Birch Bayh of Indiana and Bob Dole of Kansas and signed into law by Jimmy Carter near the end of his term.Carter said at the time it was important that industrial innovation promote US economic health, and the legislation “goes far toward strengthening the effectiveness of the patent incentive in stimulating innovation in the United States”.Many civil rights experts, faculty and White House critics believe the Trump administration’s targeting of schools for supposedly failing to address antisemitism is a pretext to assert federal control and threaten academic freedom and free speech. More

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      Trump nominates ex-Fox commentator Tammy Bruce for deputy UN ambassador

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      Donald Trump said on Saturday he was nominating Tammy Bruce, the state department spokesperson, as the next US deputy representative to the United Nations, which would make the former Fox News commentator an ambassador.The president made the announcement on Truth Social, where he praised Bruce as a “Great Patriot, Television Personality, and Bestselling Author”.She has been serving as the chief spokesperson for the state department since Trump took office this year.Trump said Bruce, who had no prior foreign policy experience before being named state department spokesperson in January, “will represent our Country brilliantly at the United Nations”.Bruce is a former radio host who was a commentator on Fox News for more than 20 years, where she also served as an occasional guest host of Trump favorite Sean Hannity’s show. She served as the president of the National Organization for Women’s Los Angeles chapter from 1990 to 1996. Before her political conversion to conservatism, she hosted a radio show where her outspoken views were broadcast widely on Los Angeles station KFI, and she was one of the few radio commentators representing the progressive movement at that time.Bruce was fired from her radio job after she vocally protested OJ Simpson’s 1995 acquittal and later became a critic of progressive feminism.She rose to national prominence thanks to her conservative TV appearances and writing. In 2002, Bruce published her book The New Thought Police, in which she claimed to “expose the dangerous rise of Left-wing McCarthyism”. She was also briefly a contributor to the Guardian’s opinion pages.Bruce, a lesbian who was given an award by the Log Cabin Republicans at a Mar-a-Lago gala in 2022, has been outspoken in her opposition to transgender rights. She has shared articles that spread misinformation about the trans community, including pieces featuring anti-trans “detransitioner” activist Chloe Cole.As a spokesperson, she has defended the Trump administration’s foreign policy decisions, ranging from its mass deportation policies to its handling of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, which Trump had promised on the campaign trail he would quickly end.If Bruce is confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, she could be in post before the man nominated to be her boss, Mike Waltz. The former national security adviser’s Senate confirmation for US ambassador to the UN has reportedly been stalled by Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who clashed with Waltz over his prior support for keeping US troops in Afghanistan. More

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      IRS commissioner’s removal reportedly over clash on undocumented immigrant data

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      The removal of the Internal Revenue Service commissioner Billy Long after just two months in the post came after the federal tax collection agency said it could not release some information on taxpayers suspected of being in the US illegally, it was reported on Saturday.The IRS and the White House had clashed over using tax data to help locate suspected undocumented immigrants soon before Long was dismissed by the administration, according to the Washington Post.Long’s dismissal came less than two months after he was confirmed, making his service as Senate-confirmed IRS commissioner the briefest in the agency’s 163-year history. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent will serve as acting commissioner, making him the agency’s seventh leader this year.The outlet reported the Department of Homeland Security had sent the IRS a list of 40,000 names on Thursday that it suspects of being in the country illegally. DHS asked the tax service to crosscheck confidential taxpayer data to verify their addresses.The IRS reportedly responded that it was able to verify fewer than 3% of the names on the DHS list, and mostly names that came with an individual taxpayer identification, or ITIN number, provided by DHS.Administration officials then requested information on the taxpayers the IRS identified, which the service declined to do, citing taxpayer privacy rights.The White House has identified the IRS as a component of its crackdown on illegal immigration and hopes that the tax agency help locate as many as 7 million people in the US without authorization. In April, homeland security struck a data sharing agreement with the treasury department – which oversees the IRS.But Long appears to have resisted acting on that agreement, saying the IRS would not hand over confidential taxpayer information outside its statutory obligation to the treasury.White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson rejected the notion that the IRS was not in harmony with administration priorities.“Any absurd assertion other than everyone being aligned on the mission is simply false and totally fake news,” Johnson told the Post. “The Trump administration is working in lockstep to eliminate information silos and to prevent illegal aliens from taking advantage of benefits meant for hardworking American taxpayers,” she added.In fact, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7bn in federal, state and local taxes in 2022, including $59.4bn to the federal government, helping to fund social security and Medicare, despite being excluded from most benefits, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy thinktank.DHS told the Post that its agreement with IRS “outlines a process to ensure that sensitive taxpayer information is protected, while allowing law enforcement to effectively pursue criminal violations”.Pressure on federal agencies to conform to administration priorities has also led to pressures on the Census Bureau to conduct a mid-decade population review as well as the firing of Bureau of Labor head last week after it published a unfavorable job report.After being dismissed on Friday, Long, a former six-term Missouri congressman, said that he would be the new US ambassador to Iceland.“It is a honor to serve my friend President Trump and I am excited to take on my new role as the ambassador to Iceland,” Long said in post on X. “I am thrilled to answer his call to service and deeply committed to advancing his bold agenda. Exciting times ahead!”He followed that up with a more humorous entry that referred to former TV Superman actor Dean Cain’s decision, at 59, to join to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency.“I saw where Former Superman actor Dean Cain says he’s joining ICE so I got all fired up and thought I’d do the same. So I called @realDonaldTrump last night and told him I wanted to join ICE and I guess he thought I said Iceland? Oh well.” More

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      Vinay Prasad returns to FDA days after leaving under pressure from Laura Loomer

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      Vinay Prasad is returning to his role overseeing vaccine, gene therapy and blood product regulation at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a little more than a week after he left the agency.“At the FDA’s request, Dr Vinay Prasad is resuming leadership of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research,” Department Health and Human Services spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement to Reuters.Prasad left the agency on 30 July after just a few months as director of the center.Endpoints News, which covers the biotech industry, first reported the return of Prasad.Prasad, an oncologist who was a fierce critic of US Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates, was named the center’s director by the FDA’s commissioner, Marty Makary, in May.Criticism of Prasad’s tenure intensified around the agency’s handling of a gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) from Sarepta Therapeutics.The FDA-approved therapy played a role in the death of two teens who had advanced DMD. After a third death in a separate experimental gene therapy from the company, the FDA asked Sarepta on 18 July to stop all shipments of the approved DMD therapy, saying it had safety concerns.The FDA changed course on Sarepta on 28 July and said shipments to the main group of patients for the drug could restart.Laura Loomer, a far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist with outsized sway over Donald Trump, had called Prasad a “progressive leftist saboteur” who was undermining the agency’s work.Two days before Prasad stepped down last month, Loomer had released misleadingly edited audio to suggest that that Prasad had admitted sticking pins in a Trump voodoo doll, when the full audio made it clear that he was talking about the kind of thing an imagined liberal Trump-hater would do.Loomer reacted to the news of Prasad’s return on Saturday by renewing her attacks on him in a social media post in which she promised to produce “exposes of officials within HHS and FDA” in the weeks ahead. “There are several Senate Confirmation hearings coming up and I have multiple oppo books ready for distribution!” she wrote.Prasad was a physician who joined the agency from the University of California, San Francisco. He has had stints at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.The FDA and other health agencies have seen multiple shake-ups in recent months under the leadership of health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. More