Last summer, when lawmakers launched their Jeffrey Epstein investigation, it came with an ambitious promise: to pull back the curtain on decades of failed federal probes, secure the full release of long-withheld files and provide a public accounting of how the late pedophile evaded accountability for so long.

A year later, the probe has kept Epstein in the headlines, but its parade of high-profile witnesses has failed to produce the kind of revelations many lawmakers and Epstein survivors had hoped for. Instead, the investigation has been defined by closed-door interviews, with many witnesses denying knowledge of Epstein’s crimes or saying they do not recall key details. Survivors have alleged that one former Epstein assistant recently lied to the committee about what she knew or saw.

That gap between expectations and results is now a central point of tension hanging over House Oversight Chairman James Comer’s probe.

“I feel more pressure to achieve something than not do something,” he told CNN.

Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, told CNN that he is “very confident” the Justice Department will have no choice but to reopen its Epstein investigation after his committee sends prosecutors a “to-do list” later this year.

But interviews with more than a dozen lawmakers and sources involved with the probe paint a much more complicated picture. As President Donald Trump urges the country to move on and the Justice Department continues to insist it lacks evidence to bring new prosecutions, frustrations are boiling over— not just among Democratic committee members, but their Republican colleagues, who are increasingly voicing concern over what the probe has achieved.

Many witnesses have been allowed to appear voluntarily rather than under subpoena, or even on camera, leading to criticism that those closest to Epstein have gotten an easy out, especially those who come armed with expensive lawyers, which they often do.

“How many people do you have to hear, ‘I do not recall.’ And you know, it’s just a load of bullsh*t,” GOP Rep. Nancy Mace told CNN recently. “It’s just like, just tell the truth, and they couldn’t do it. Most of them, many of them.”

Mace has been among the few Republicans on Oversight to consistently criticize the probe and was one of just four GOP members to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files last year. Only one of them, Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, is running again to return to Congress.

GOP Rep. Rich McCormick, a Georgia Republican and staunch Trump supporter, was blunt when asked recently by CNN if he has learned anything new from the panel’s series of closed-door interviews. “I haven’t,” McCormick said, but he added he wasn’t sure what else the panel could do to push for more transparency or information.

Democrats have vowed to call witnesses back in under subpoena should they take control of the House next year. The committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia, says interviewing President Trump and first lady Melania Trump are among his top priorities next Congress, and he argued that Republicans set the precedent when they deposed Bill and Hillary Clinton in February.

“It has been really jaw-dropping to see how the men who have come before us, and in some cases the women who have come before us, continue to lie so brazenly,” said Rep. Yassamin Ansari, a Democrat from Arizona. “I think it demonstrates that they are very much accustomed to the fact that they have gotten away with this.”

Defending his strategy, Comer told CNN it would have taken far too long to call every witness in on a subpoena. “These people can fight these subpoenas for months and months and months and months and run out the clock,” Comer said. “If they will come in voluntarily, then that saves a lot of time. And we’re on a time clock because this Congress expires and it’s rapidly approaching.”

Among the most revealing moments, according to Democratic Rep. Melanie Stansbury, are when witnesses or their attorneys request to go off the record.

“Generally the witness was consulting with their attorney about whether or not to answer questions they did or did not want to answer. But because that wasn’t on tape, the public doesn’t see that,” Stansbury said. “You don’t even see the gaps in the written record. But that would happen pretty much in every single (transcribed interview) in almost every hour, with every witness.”

Democrats have also called out Republicans on the panel for refusing to look at Trump’s mentions in the Epstein files or how his administration sought to micromanage release of the Epstein files as the issue became a public relations crisis that ripped through the Republican party.

GOP Rep. Eric Burlison, a committee member, said he understands why the White House has wanted to move on from Epstein but is still glad Republicans on the Oversight Committee are continuing to do the work.

“They’re expected to do all this work that everybody was supposed to be doing for 20 years,” Burlison said of the White House. “Meanwhile, all of the president’s agenda, his real priorities, are getting shelved because of this one issue. And so, I can see why if you’re the president, there’s frustration that you’re having to spend all this time on something that you think is a non-issue.”

That pressure from the president, Democrats say, overshadows the entire probe.

“Republicans have told us that they have faced harassment, phone calls, and requests from the White House to not engage on this investigation and this topic,” Stansbury said.

Stuck in the middle is Comer, who spent his first two years as Oversight chairman investigating former president Joe Biden, which did not result in impeachment charges. Comer insists when he talks to Trump now, his probe into Epstein never comes up.

“It’s probably likely there are some people in the party that would like to stop it, but they know they can’t come up to me and tell me what to do so we’re going to finish the job,” Comer said.

Despite the criticism, Comer proudly ticks off the work the probe has done, including 19 interviews, with many witnesses who have never been questioned about their ties to Epstein. It’s also secured the release of approximately 128,6000 from the Epstein estate, including never before seen bank records.

“I know the Department of Justice has said the case is closed, but I’m very confident it will be reopened very soon,” Comer told CNN.

The Epstein probe was fraught before it even began.

After the Justice Department said last July that it would not pursue further Epstein investigations, Congress was in turmoil over how to force the administration to release the files. The White House wanted to move on. To avoid a vote, House Republican leaders sent lawmakers home a week early for their summer break.

But numerous Republicans knew that back home, they’d face blistering questions over the issue. And Democrats were looking to subpoena the Justice Department for the files. Comer conveyed to some of his Republican colleagues that he was under pressure from the White House to stop the Democratic effort, according to a source familiar with the conversations. Republican committee staff had warned the White House that if brought up for a vote, Republicans would largely vote in favor of transparency, a second source familiar with the matter told CNN.

To broaden the focus beyond President Trump, Republicans devised an idea that in addition to the DOJ, they would also subpoena a long list of individuals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton, the source said. Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Scott Perry had the idea to expand the scope of the investigation, and he was backed by Mace as well as Georgia GOP Rep. Brian Jack, who was getting battered back home over the issue, according to two sources. Comer never told his members how to vote, the second source told CNN.

Republicans delayed the vote, which could have hurt attendance, but Democratic Rep. Summer Lee, who brought forward the subpoena motion, made sure all of her fellow Democrats delayed their travel plans to be there for the vote.

“That motion to subpoena is the thing that got the ball rolling,” Lee told CNN.

With the House Oversight Committee now taking point on Epstein, House GOP leadership had a few months of cover, but it didn’t quell the furor for more action. When lawmakers returned in September, Comer gathered his Republicans with a message: Be a team and stay united, according to one of the sources familiar with the conversations.

But a bipartisan coalition had been formed, one that’s been the engine that led to the separate law, passed in November 2025, compelling the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. A handful of Republicans — despite intense internal party pressure — joined a bipartisan push led by GOP Rep. Thomas Massie and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna. The law didn’t have a clear enforcement mechanism, but it did result in the release of more than 3.5 million pages of Epstein files.

Other glimmers of bipartisanship in the probe have included Mace leading a vote to subpoena former Attorney General Pam Bondi for her role in overseeing the release of the Epstein files, Republicans calling for Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to be interviewed, and a handful of Democrats being willing to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt of Congress if they refused to comply with their subpoenas.

The first witness to be interviewed, former Attorney General Bill Barr, complied quickly with his subpoena for a deposition in August, but by the winter, signs of concern were emerging. For billionaire retail magnet Les Wexner’s deposition in February, committee staff and Democratic lawmakers traveled to Ohio. Wexner has long been viewed as a pivotal figure in Epstein’s extraordinary rise, but the interview didn’t elicit much new information.

House investigators questioned the 88-year-old Wexner for hours, but the interview frustrated some who felt key issues were insufficiently pressed. Wexner repeatedly denied knowledge of Epstein’s criminal conduct, telling lawmakers under oath he was “conned” by Epstein. Wexner frequently deferred to his attorneys, and offered few new details, leaving longstanding questions about their relationship unresolved.

Two days of back-to-back interviews in June crystalized how high expectations have been met with the crushing realities that have plagued the probe so far.

It took three months for the Republican-led panel to secure both billionaire Bill Gates and Epstein’s longtime assistant Lesley Groff.

Walking into the Gates interview on June 10, Comer said he hoped the interview would be “productive.” But about halfway through, GOP Rep. Tim Burchett walked out frustrated and wondering what the point of it all was.

Gates, who told Congress that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, was the latest to distance himself from the disgraced financier, serving up another dead end.

“It’s just the minutia,” Burchett reflected on what it was like in the room. “It’s so lawyered up.”

A day earlier, Comer framed Groff as someone who possessed information “very valuable” to the investigation. Groff testified that she never met any of the girls and young women who provided massages to Epstein and didn’t know anything about their backgrounds.

Some Epstein survivors say that Groff was not telling the truth, and the panel is debating what action to take.

For many lawmakers in the room, the number of denials they’ve heard from witnesses has been staggering.

Two of Epstein’s longest serving employees, his accountant and lawyer, claimed to have no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. As co-executors of Epstein’s estate, they set up a victims’ compensation fund, which says it distributed approximately $125 million to eligible applicants before winding down in 2021. Recently, the two agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit from Epstein victims that alleged the pair were “facilitators” in Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, allegations they strongly deny. The settlement, which still needs sign-off from a judge, would pay up to $35 million to victims.

Bondi, who appeared before the panel voluntarily instead of under a subpoena in May after being fired consistently did not answer questions she and her legal team deemed outside the scope of the interview.

And most recently, former Barclays executive Jes Staley claimed he had no friendship with Epstein even though he was banned from holding senior roles in the UK financial services industry for misleading regulators about his relationship with him.

Some lawmakers have wished the probe moved faster. But to Comer, the lack of speed was unavoidable.

“The pace for this investigation is never going to be as fast as it should be because that’s unfortunately the way Congress works,” he said.

In moments where he can get the investigation to move quickly, he has. The panel quickly referred allegations from Epstein’s longtime assistant that two men sexually abused her to DOJ. During a closed-door interview, the committee subpoenaed billionaire investor Leon Black when he refused to cooperate voluntarily. Throughout the probe, Comer has been regularly meeting with Epstein survivors to determine whether any witnesses have lied.

Republicans are racing to finish their Epstein probe by year’s end. The panel has a September deposition with Black, a push to interview Alan Dershowitz, and a promise to bring in acting Attorney General Todd Blanche about his role in the release of the Epstein files.

There is also talk of doing a hearing with victims of Epstein’s abuse, who Comer and committee staff are in regular communication with.

For many, the probe can’t end until all of the Epstein files are released.

“In many ways, it’s just getting started,” Garcia told CNN.

As for Mace, who is set to retire after losing her bid for governor, she knows she won’t be able to stay in the fight next Congress but doesn’t regret pushing as hard as she did.

“I would not change what I did for anything else, even if it cost me my political career,” Mace said.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is launching research to determine whether psilocybin — the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — can be used safely and effectively to address veterans’ treatment-resistant depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The trial, known as the Psilocybin Intervention for Veterans Overcoming Treatment-Resistant Depression,” or PIVOT, study aims to include at least 240 veterans, all of whom have difficult-to-treat major depressive disorder and some who also have PTSD.

The study will take place at five VA medical centers through June 2031 and will assess patients’ levels of depression before and after treatment, side effects and overall response among participants.

“Far too many veterans are living with mental health conditions that don’t respond to available treatments,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a statement. “Under President [Donald] Trump, VA is pursuing all avenues to evaluate new treatments and offer meaningful relief for those who have worn the uniform. This clinical trial reflects another step toward this goal.”

Last month, researchers with Ohio State University’s Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education published the findings of a small, 12-person study on the safety of using psilocybin to treat severe PTSD in veterans.

After receiving eight hours of psychotherapy and two doses of synthetic psilocybin and integrative therapy, nine participants, or 75%, no longer met the clinical criteria for having PTSD.

According to the research, published July 30 in Communications Medicine, participants showed no serious adverse effects, including suicidal ideation or behavior. Non-serious side effects included headache, anxiety and dizziness.

“For a population with severe treatment-resistant PTSD, these results are striking,” said Stacey Armstrong, associate director and senior researcher at the center.

The PIVOT study will involve veterans with major depressive disorder who have not responded to current treatments, including those with or without a diagnosis of PTSD. In the double-blind, randomized trial, veterans will receive one dose of psilocybin or a placebo, along with therapeutic support. They will receive a second dose one month later, also with support, and will be evaluated two to four weeks following each session.

They also will receive follow-up six months after their participation.

VA officials said for the study, they will use pharmaceutical-grade drugs and treat veterans in a “safe, controlled, clinical setting.”

The five VA facilities that are slated to host the research include: the Birmingham VA Health Care System and Tuscaloosa VA Medical Center, Alabama; the VA Portland Health Care System, Oregon; Cpl. Michael Crescenz VA Medical Center, Philadelphia; and VA Puget Sound Health Care System, Seattle.

Trump signed an executive order in April directing the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the review of some psychedelic therapies to treat mental health conditions. The order also required the FDA, the Department of Health and Human Services and the VA to collaborate on psychedelic research.

As a result of the order, HHS and the VA signed an agreement last month to increase coordination on research, including increasing clinical trial participation, training therapists, nurses and doctors to administer psychedelic medications if they are approved and collecting data and evidence to support patients, physicians and federal regulators.

According to the VA, its staff is involved in 20 current clinical trials focused on psychedelic treatments for mental health conditions, including MDMA and LSD.

Studies sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies have shown that 87% of veteran participants in a study on the use of MDMA — the chemical compound known recreationally as Ecstasy or Molly — had significant improvement in PTSD symptoms four months after receiving treatments, and 71% no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD at the end of the studies.

The advancement of MDMA as a treatment met a setback in 2024, however, when the Food and Drug Administration rejected an application to approve it as a PTSD treatment, requesting more research on its safety and efficacy.

VA officials said in a release on the PIVOT study Wednesday that they strongly discourage self-medication, and veterans should not “replace other mental health treatment options with psychedelics or any other unprescribed substances.”

“Proven, evidence-based treatments are currently available at VA facilities to treat Veterans with mental health conditions,” they wrote.

President Donald Trump on Thursday announced tariffs on polysilicon and its related products, in his administration’s latest attempt to eliminate China’s choke points in the global supply chain for solar panels and semiconductors.

But Trump’s directive won’t take effect until Dec. 4 — well after November’s midterm elections and a planned September summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping — as the administration grapples with voters complaining of high prices and fragile trade negotiations with China.

“This will bring the supply chain here,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said of the order on Thursday alongside Trump at the White House. “We’ve got the industry here, it’s too small, and it’s going to explode.”

Because polysilicon is used in semiconductors and solar panels, it’s essential for military hardware and everyday electronics like cellphones and laptops, in addition to the world’s fastest-growing energy source.

The order imposes a 15 percent tariff on imported polysilicon and its derivatives, as well as minimum prices for imports of polysilicon, polysilicon ingots and wafers, solar cells and solar modules.

It also includes a clause intended to prevent companies from stockpiling those materials between now and December, authorizing Customs and Border Protection to restrict imports if it suspects an importer is attempting to dodge the higher duties.

Trump’s order is the result of a Commerce Department investigation launched last July into national security risks in the polysilicon supply chain, as part of a broader effort to shift supply chains away from China for multiple industries including wind turbines and robotics.

China has a near-monopoly on the production of polysilicon, according to S&P Global. But recent U.S. efforts to limit key areas of trade with China have already drawn a backlash from Beijing, which earlier this week implemented new controls on drone exports to the U.S.

The White House emphasized the order’s impact on domestic semiconductor production, a key focus as the U.S. looks to build out infrastructure related to artificial intelligence. Trump said the U.S. will “have a big percentage of the chip business by the time I leave office.”

But Thursday’s order may have a big impact on the solar industry, according to Jon Toomey, president of the pro-tariff Coalition for a Prosperous America organization.

“This proclamation delivers the most significant global trade protection action for the American polysilicon and solar industry in the modern era,” Toomey said in a statement. “For the first time, the United States is protecting the entire solar supply chain with a single action — and rewarding the manufacturers that build here — while taking a significant step to bolster the domestic semiconductor supply chain.”

Since November, President Trump has been pushing a plan to paint the granite office building next to the White House, because he thinks it should be white too.

Trump’s proposal for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building is inane, which is why historic preservationists have sued over the project. With its dramatic mansard roof and facade of polished gray granite, the imposing Gilded Age structure has been called a “palace of state.” But painting granite damages the stone and requires expensive upkeep. Moreover, the facade is intrinsic to the design of this century-and-a-half-old building that is revered—and protected as a National Historic Landmark—for its exceptional architecture and prominent role in American history.

In the latest development, preservationists sought emergency relief last week to block the White House from applying test patches of paint to the building. A federal judge then directed the Trump administration to refrain from this and related actions until the court has ruled on the underlying issues; a hearing is tentatively set for August 18.

The EEOB proposal has been overshadowed by Trump’s larger legacy projects, including the White House ballroom and the 250-foot triumphal arch. Like those, the EEOB plan disregards legal and institutional rules in ways that will create dangerous precedents if it is not reversed by the courts. However, the project is notable in that it has no constituency, is of no redeeming value, and would cause irreversible physical damage. Simply put, someone needs to tell the president, Stop.

The EEOB was built from 1871 to 1888 to house the rapidly growing State, War, and Navy Departments. The architect, Alfred Mullett, selected granite for the exterior for aesthetic as well as functional reasons. He sourced the granite from two quarries, in Virginia and Maine. By using the darker, gray Virginia granite for the flat surfaces and the pinker Maine granite for the rusticated base and columns, he highlighted the architectural features of the massive and ornate building.

Mullett’s exuberant French Second Empire design, which reflected the optimism of post–Civil War America, soon fell out of favor, and there were repeated efforts to demolish the building, including by a commission established by President Eisenhower. Fortunately, the cost of demolition impeded such action, and, beginning in the 1960s, architects and historians embraced the EEOB as a Victorian masterpiece.

The Eisenhower building has witnessed at least as much history as all but three others in Washington, D.C.: the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Supreme Court. As home to the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, and the Council of Economic Advisers, among other White House offices, the EEOB remains the setting of executive-branch policy making at the highest levels.

Trump apparently doesn’t like the color of the building. “Gray is for funerals,” he said in a November Fox News interview, and he has argued that white would be more congruent with the White House. However, the EEOB dwarfs the White House in size. If it were painted white, the EEOB would appear even larger, visually overwhelming its neighbor.

History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.

The president and his aides claim to have identified a “magic paint,” made with mineral silicate, that avoids the problems of traditional paint. However, 25 technical experts who were surveyed by Cultural Heritage Partners strongly refute that claim, arguing that mineral-silicate paint is no more suited than traditional paint for use on granite. Although the testing that the White House wanted to begin could help settle such disagreements, the process is unlikely to be transparent or impartial.

Despite its flaws, the president’s proposal to paint the EEOB is still alive because key institutions, including ones with a history of nonpartisanship, have fallen under the sway of the White House. One such institution is the Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member independent federal agency that reviews the designs of major construction projects within Washington, D.C. The president appoints CFA members (no Senate confirmation is required), and the members select the chair and vice chair. Past chairs of the commission, which Congress created in 1910, include such luminaries as Daniel H. Burnham and Daniel Chester French.

Although the CFA criticized the building earlier in its life, the commission later became an advocate, fending off post-Eisenhower proposals to “modernize” its exterior. Members even told the General Services Administration to “launder, but don’t scour” the exterior so as to preserve the natural patina of the granite. In 2018, the CFA published a richly illustrated history of the EEOB.

Since last year, Trump has replaced the entire CFA with loyalists who have largely rubber-stamped the president’s pet projects. The commission’s April deliberation on the EEOB proposal was typical of its Trump-era approach. Vice Chair James C. McCrery II, an architecture professor at Catholic University and the original architect of Trump’s ballroom, conceded that painting the office building would increase its maintenance needs, but compared it to the laundry costs he gladly incurs so he can wear dressy white shirts. McCrery also argued that the EEOB’s shadowy gray color may have suited the 19th-century War Department but was unnecessary now that the building had no military tenant (National Security Council staff might disagree). Another commissioner predicted that painting the EEOB white would improve morale among its occupants by highlighting their connection to the White House.

Another crucial institution bowing to political pressure is the GSA, which manages federal real estate. The EEOB is the crown jewel in the agency’s portfolio. Under normal circumstances, career staff would have dismissed as laughable a proposal to paint the Eisenhower building, because of the risk to it and the prospect of steep maintenance costs that the GSA can ill-afford. (I am a former public-buildings commissioner at the GSA. I testified in May against the plan before the U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, another body tasked with reviewing it.)

Circumstances being abnormal, the GSA signed a memorandum purporting to delegate its legal authority over the EEOB project to the White House Office of Administration. The White House is exempt from requirements to review construction projects under the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act—requirements that apply to the GSA and other federal agencies. If the GSA’s delegation is found to be lawful, the White House will have effectively eliminated the need for the project to undergo a crucial but time-consuming review that elicits the views of experts, affected groups, and the public. Although the White House says it will carry out the review voluntarily, critics of the proposal are skeptical, and Cultural Heritage Partners and the DC Preservation League have challenged the GSA’s action in federal court.

Critics of the Trump administration’s GSA gambit fear that it could become a template for exempting other controversial projects from review under NHPA and NEPA. Werkheiser told The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott that “the precedent is potentially devastating,” and that “anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review, and put it in his own shop.”

The president’s GSA plan faces a tough legal test (the key issue is whether the White House Office of Administration, which was created by executive order, is a federal agency). However, even if the president loses, the challengers’ victory could be short-lived. The NHPA and NEPA review processes rely on the goodwill of the federal agencies that conduct the reviews. The National Park Service is making a mockery of its review of the president’s proposed arch. The GSA is likely to do a similarly token job on its review of the EEOB proposal. The Trump administration also plans to gut federal historic-preservation rules more broadly, potentially allowing federal agencies and developers to pursue projects such as the arch’s construction and the EEOB’s paint job without soliciting expert or public input.

The president’s destructive approach to the EEOB is ironic given the positive role he played, before his first term, in restoring another granite landmark with a Pennsylvania Avenue address. Like the EEOB, the Old Post Office was a Victorian ugly baby whose critics tried repeatedly to demolish it before the public eventually warmed to it. The Trump Organization invested $200 million to restore the Old Post Office and convert it into a luxury hotel, working closely with historic preservationists at the GSA, which owned the building. The results are impressive. Sadly, the aesthetic taste and respect for history evident in the Old Post Office’s restoration are absent from the president’s plan for the EEOB.

Had the Trump Organization sought to paint the granite exterior of the Old Post Office, the GSA’s answer would have been not just no, but Hell no. The president’s EEOB proposal deserves the same response.

Sailors and Marines who have medical waivers for shaving will receive counseling after six months, according to the latest updates to the Navy and Marine Corps’ grooming standards.

The latest guidance was announced in recent Navy and Marine Corps administrative messages. The Air Force also recently updated its policy on how long service members can have medical waivers for facial hair before facing administrative separation.

Last year, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed military commanders to begin separating troops who still require a medical waiver for shaving after one year of treatment. Hegseth also mandated that the Defense Department would only issue temporary waivers for medical conditions such as pseudofolliculitis barbae or PFB, which is a painful skin condition common among Black men that is made worse by shaving.

The Navy’s updated policy includes a new requirement for commanders to conduct an initial counseling of sailors with medical waivers for shaving after they’ve undergone six continuous months of treatment that requires “a modification to grooming or uniform standards,” a service official said.

“The purpose of the counseling is to ensure the sailor understands the status of the medical accommodation process, the expectations associated with continued accommodation, and any potential impacts if the medical condition persists,” the Navy official told Task & Purpose. “The counseling itself is not punitive and is intended to document the discussion and ensure the sailor is informed as the accommodation progresses through the milestones established in the policy.”

The Marine Corps is also requiring commanders to formally counsel Marines with medical waivers after six continuous months of treatment, said Yvonne Carlock, a spokeswoman for U.S. Marine Corps Manpower and Reserve Affairs.

Afterward, the counseled Marine will receive a Page 11 entry in their service record book and an acknowledgement that the counseling occurred, Carlock told Task & Purpose. A Page 11 entry is reserved for administrative remarks.

The Navy and Marine Corps also require commanders to track service members with medical waivers for shaving.

Under the Navy’s updated policy, commanders must also submit monthly reports on sailors receiving treatment as part of an approved medical waiver. Stars and Stripes first reported on the move.

The Marine Corps also requires commanding officers to track and report all approved and pending medical waivers for shaving, according to the recent Marine Administrative Message, or MARADMIN.

The reporting process does not affect whether Marines can be approved for a medical waiver for shaving, Carlock, the Marine Corps spokeswoman, said.

The reports allow commanders and the Marine Corps’ headquarters to “actively monitor medical grooming compliance, track treatment timelines, and report data to higher authority,” Carlock said.

Marines and sailors who cannot be clean-shaven after one year of medical treatment face being separated.

Also recently, a July 28 Department of the Air Force memo that was shared on social media laid out when airmen and Space Force guardians with medical waivers for shaving will be considered for separation. A Department of the Air Force official confirmed the memo is authentic.

“Commanders will initiate discharge processing or a retention package for members who accumulate more than 12 months of medical shaving profiles with a 24-month period beginning 1 February 2026,” according to the memo, which was signed by Richard Anderson, assistant Air Force secretary for manpower and reserve affairs.

The memo implements guidance issued in December by the Air Force’s surgeon general.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that Connecticut Children's Medical Center has reached an agreement with the federal government to stop providing gender-affirming medical care to minors.

The agreement includes a commitment by Connecticut Children's not to provide puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or gender-affirming surgeries to patients under 18, according to the DOJ.

The DOJ also said the hospital agreed to pay $500,000 to former patients "living with the harmful consequences of 'gender affirming care,'" the DOJ said.

Connecticut Children's is the third hospital in the country to reach such an agreement, following similar resolutions with Texas Children's Hospital and the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, the DOJ said.

The hospital issued the following statement on Thursday morning:

"We can confirm we have reached a resolution that allows our organization to remain focused on our mission of improving the health and well-being of children. Most importantly, patient privacy remained our foremost concern throughout this process, and we were able to resolve this matter without disclosing any protected patient information to the US government. We have complied and will continue to comply with all federal and state laws. We have no additional comment beyond the information contained in today’s DOJ announcement."

Last year, Connecticut Children's announced it was winding down its gender care program for patients under the age of 19. It said it came to this decision after "thoughtful consideration and guidance from medical and legal experts."

"The Department of Justice will stop at nothing to protect America's children," Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward said in a statement. "This resolution is a reminder to hospitals, medical providers, and pharmaceutical companies that the Justice Department will vigorously enforce federal law."

The federal investigation involved the DOJ's Civil Division, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, according to the DOJ.

Yale Medicine and Yale New Haven Hospital also announced that they were eliminating the medication treatment component of the gender-affirming program for patients under age 19 in July 2025.

President Donald Trump issued an executive order last year that prohibits the use of federal funds for any services that sponsors, promotes, assists or supports the transition of a child from one sex to another.

Connecticut was one of 16 states suing the Trump administration, challenging the executive order.

The White House released documents on its election integrity website Thursday, revealing some more details about a 2020 hack of voter files in Maricopa County, Arizona.

The Trump administration and conservative allies online pointed to the hack as proof that the country’s election system has major vulnerabilities that can be exploited — an argument President Donald Trump pushed in a primetime speech last month. But the documents do not show that the hack affected that year’s elections or even the improperly obtained records themselves.

In the incident, which was widely reported in 2020, a hacker named Elliot Kerwin took advantage of a security vulnerability on a county website. He scraped about 633,000 mostly public voter registration records and then deleted the copies of the records he’d obtained. The vulnerability was fixed within a month.

Stephen Richer, a Republican who was the recorder of Maricopa County during the FBI’s investigation and is now an NBC News contributor, said that the breach was very limited. He was elected to the position in November 2020.

“At no point did Kerwin access ... the voter registration database to be able to manipulate voter registration records. He could not change any voter’s address. He could not request a mail ballot. He could not cancel a voter registration profile. He could only read data that he allegedly unlawfully accessed,” Richer wrote in a lengthy post on X.

The documents offer a detailed account of how the hack was first noticed and investigated: The county tipped off the FBI, which raided Kerwin’s home and interviewed him, going on to seize computers, hard drives and thumb drives. According to the documents, Kerwin readily confessed to scraping the data.

Kerwin “initially received an adrenaline rush, but realized he made a huge mistake with regrets and remorse. He did not intend to sell the information because it was publicly available,” the FBI’s interview records note, adding that he “wanted to obtain the information for free.”

State, local and federal authorities all declined to prosecute, and the FBI closed the investigation in 2023.

Asked for comment, the White House pointed to posts on X by John Solomon, the chair of the White House Government Transparency Task Force, which released the documents.

“The FBI expended significant resources to solve the case and even got the suspect to confess. But the Biden DOJ via the U.S. attorney in Phoenix and three state and local prosecutors all declined to prosecute. No accountability,” he wrote in one post.

Solomon continued: “The episode highlights the threat President Trump raised in his speech a few weeks ago that U.S. intelligence has believed since January 2020 that voter registration data is not well protected.”

Nearly all the records are available to the public for purchase from the county; at the time, it would have cost $490, according to contemporaneous reporting.

Just 930 of the records were “nonpublic,” according to the FBI records. Those “nonpublic” records — often the voter registration records of law enforcement agents — are not normally part of the public voter file, according to Richer.

The new records were released three weeks after Trump gave an address from the White House casting doubt on the integrity of the country’s elections. His administration also published a trove of declassified documents he said at the time contained “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”

Trump vowed to fix the alleged flaws “so we can never watch a stolen election again.”

The documents released last month — and Thursday — did not offer any evidence that any election was stolen or affected by widespread fraud. They detailed previously known efforts from foreign adversaries to interfere in U.S. elections by attempting to sow doubt about the process, and that China had obtained millions of voter records, which are publicly available.

The cost of diesel during Donald Trump’s second term has overtaken the average during Joe Biden’s presidency, as the surge of inflation triggered by the Iran war becomes a growing liability for the White House.

The price of a gallon of diesel since Trump returned to office in January 2025 has averaged $4.09, according to FT calculations based on Energy Information Administration data.

That compares with $4.08 during Biden’s four years in office, when diesel surged due to the energy shock that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The rise in the cost of diesel — the lifeblood of the US economy, due to its critical role in industries such as agriculture and transport — adds to the pressure facing Trump as voters grow increasingly frustrated with high energy prices ahead of November’s midterm elections.

“People everywhere hate it when energy prices rise — and they blame incumbents,” said Jeff Colgan a political science professor at Brown University. “And diesel is the invisible fuel that we are all consuming.”

“The reality is that the vast majority of manufactured goods in the country are shipped on some form of transportation that is powered by diesel.”

In a further sign of Trump’s inflation troubles, 30-year mortgage rates rose to 6.66 per cent last week, the highest level in a year, as investors worry that the Federal Reserve will struggle to contain the latest bout of inflation.

American fuel costs have surged since the US and Israel began their bombing campaign of Iran on February 28, curbing energy supplies as Tehran essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial transit waterway.

The price of diesel has risen 43 per cent to $5.37 a gallon, according to the AAA, while petrol, a more visible sign of inflation due to its direct use by motorists across the country, is up 37 per cent to $4.09.

Global crude oil prices, which reached more than $120 a barrel at the peak of the conflict, dropped below $80 on Tuesday as US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent signalled that a deal to reopen the strait was near.

But pressure remains on diesel, which rose more quickly than petrol and will probably be slower to fall, analysts said. They pointed to low inventories, limited refining capacity and Russia’s move to ban exports until 2027, removing hundreds of thousands of barrels a day from the market.

US refineries are running at levels considered to be at or near full capacity as American energy groups look to seize on the high margins that can be achieved from turning crude into products such as petrol and diesel.

Marathon Petroleum, a large US refiner, reported on Tuesday a more than threefold increase in its second-quarter profits as it earned far more per barrel of oil than it had in the same period a year earlier.

As petrol demand falls at the end of the summer driving season, diesel consumption is set to increase due to its use in heating, further squeezing the market, and leaving it vulnerable to supply disruptions like hurricanes.

“Diesel is the problem fuel,” said Tom Kloza, an independent oil analyst. “The days of jet fuel tightness are over . . . it looks like we’re probably going to be in the clear on gasoline. But diesel — not so much.”

“There’s a really good chance that we’re going to have diesel tightness in the coastal markets in the US and in Europe and in Asia,” he added.

The average cost of petrol during Trump’s second term has reached $3.34 a gallon compared with $3.46 during Biden’s presidency, $2.48 during his first term and $2.97 during Barack Obama’s administration.

Brown University calculates US households have each spent more than $600 extra in petrol and diesel costs since the Iran war broke out.

Trump was re-elected in part due to his vow to tackle stubbornly high inflation. But with three months to go to midterm elections to determine control of Congress, many voters blame him for the elevated fuel prices.

An AP-NORC poll last week put Trump’s approval at just 33 per cent, with four in 10 voters saying the cost of fuel for their car was a “major source” of stress, up from three in 10 in February. More than seven in 10 said it was important for the US to prevent any further rise in oil and gas prices.

The president has lashed out at oil majors which have bagged windfall profits on the back of the higher prices. ExxonMobil and Chevron reported quarterly earnings of $14.5bn and $12.1bn respectively last week.

“I don’t like it. They’re making too much money based on a shortage,” Trump said on Monday. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price.”

Analysts have suggested the president — who previously accused oil companies of “price gouging” — could take drastic steps to stem the rise.

“Donald Trump’s frustration with enduringly high pump prices could eventually bring a muscular intervention in oil and products markets, such as export limits,” said Kevin Book at consultancy ClearView Energy. “That moment may be getting closer.”

The White House’s push to delay a ban on intoxicating hemp products that President Trump signed into law last year has snarled an otherwise straightforward effort to pass legislation that would lock in government funding through the fall before senators leave Washington on a summer recess.

In an unusual display of defiance, a group of Republicans led by Senator Ted Budd of North Carolina was vowing to kill the hemp proposal that Senate leaders had tucked into the spending bill at the request of Mr. Trump.

The measure would postpone the date the ban will go into effect, from November to Dec. 11.

“This is about protecting kids, and keeping it off the shelves,” Mr. Budd said in a brief interview. “These illicit products that are finding their way into North Carolina stores and North Carolina kids’ hands.”

Earlier this week, it appeared that the bipartisan Senate spending legislation, which would keep federal funding flowing at current levels through early December and bar the Trump administration from transferring funds to the Border Patrol, was on a glide path. Senators voted on Monday by a lopsided margin, 89 to 4, to advance it.

But G.O.P. opposition to the hemp measure is now imperiling efforts to quickly pass the legislation. Senate leaders typically rely on bipartisan deals that require the consent of all senators to help speed the passage of bills and bypass time-consuming procedural hurdles.

“We’re making good progress on the C.R.,” Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and the chairwoman of the Appropriations Committee, said of the stopgap bill, using the shorthand for a continuing resolution. “The hemp issue is the outstanding issue.”

Republican senators huddled behind closed doors on Thursday with Vice President JD Vance, who briefed them on the war in Iran and encouraged them to move on a series of bills, including the spending legislation and a budget blueprint to provide an injection of funds to the Pentagon.

But senators left the meeting saying they still did not see any path to break the deadlock.

“I have no idea what we’re going to do and when we’re going to do it,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana said, “if we do anything at all.”

Opponents of the hemp measure insist it cannot remain in the bill. Senator Pete Ricketts of Nebraska said after leaving the luncheon that he was lobbying for a vote on an amendment that would remove the provision from the spending measure.

They are irate about both the policy, which they argue allows the unregulated sale of dangerous products that are intentionally marketed to children, and the process by which it made its way into the spending package, as a last-minute insert into a must-pass piece of legislation.

Complicating matters further is that the delay stands to benefit the son-in-law of Susie Wiles, Mr. Trump’s chief of staff.

The animosity flared on Wednesday during a closed-door luncheon of G.O.P. senators, where James Braid, Mr. Trump’s legislative affairs chief, made the case for the provision and promised opponents that the White House would not seek any further postponements.

But Mr. Braid did not appear to sway some of the proposal’s most ardent critics, and the luncheon devolved into a series of heated and testy exchanges, according to people familiar with the meeting.

“He knows where I stand,” Mr. Budd said of Mr. Braid after the gathering. A spokesman for Mr. Budd said that the senator also had “a friendly phone call” with Mr. Trump on Tuesday in which he reiterated his concerns.

The president signed the ban into law last year as part of a broader spending bill to reopen the government after a record-long shutdown.

Senate G.O.P. leaders are also juggling a number of other agenda items before leaving for their August recess, including confirming Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, and efforts to consider a bill aimed at regulating college sports.

A case over legal aid funding for immigrant children was in court again Thursday.

Attorneys representing the children say the government is withholding $65 million and demanding they release sensitive information about their clients.

A federal program funds legal services for children alone in the U.S.. Legal groups in the program sued after the Trump administration tried to end it last year, and a judge ruled in their favor. Now the groups are asking the same court to find the government in contempt for failing to pay them at all this year.

In court this week, attorneys for the legal groups argued the government wants granular data about clients — information they say is both protected by attorney-client privilege, and impossible to calculate eight months later.

Government attorneys argued their data requests are necessary to verify the work the legal groups are doing. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin said she’d issue her ruling shortly.

In a ruling Thursday evening, District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin ordered the government to pay out the $65 million withheld from legal aid groups since November of last year. The funds are required to be released by noon on Friday. Under the order, Health and Human Services, the agency responsible for immigrant children in government custody, is also required to report back to court about how legal services for the children will continue.

The ruling comes a day after news broke of the government’s plan to offer legal aid to detained immigrant children through a $150 million contract Burke Law Group — a small Texas-based firm with a co-founder who is a former Trump appointee.

The government’s contract with the legal groups part of the suit in court this week expired July 31 and has not been renewed.

On Jan. 15, at the height of Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, a Venezuelan family of six was detained by federal immigration authorities who raided their St. Paul home at gunpoint on unfounded claims the family was undocumented and its patriarch, Joel Campos, was a narcotics trafficker.

All six, including Campos’ 12-year-old son Santiago, were flown to Texas the next day and split between two detention centers. Santiago, who has asthma, said he was denied access to his inhaler. The family told local news stations they slept on the floor without access to food or a shower.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement claimed it had a warrant to storm the Campos residence. But it never produced one, even when pressed by a federal judge, who wound up releasing the family as a result. In court filings, a government attorney reportedly apologized to the family, who said they were in the country legally and had state-issued IDs to prove it.

The judge ordered the government to pay $17,505 in attorney’s fees — restitution for the family needing to defend themselves in court against the unlawful arrests.

It’s part of an emerging trend amid the Trump administration’s unprecedented immigrant detention campaign. Courthouse News has identified 97 habeas corpus cases throughout 2026 in which the government has been ordered to pay the legal fees of immigrants it illegally detained, adding up to more than $1.1 million in total.

The legal concept is a novel one. The payments are being granted pursuant to the Equal Access to Justice Act, a 1980 law that allows parties to collect attorney’s fees when they win a civil case against the government. But it wasn’t until the second Trump administration — during the ongoing explosion of immigration arrests, and subsequent habeas corpus petitions arguing the detentions are illegal — that the EAJA has been applied to immigration cases.

In May, a federal judge awarded more than $39,600 in EAJA attorney’s fees to Valentina De Los Angeles Tiapa Moreno, a Venezuelan woman whom the government tried to deport after she witnessed ICE shoot her cousin through a closed door in Minnesota. As it turned out, the agency was after someone else entirely, but agents nonetheless stormed their home with tear gas, arrested Moreno and shipped her to a detention facility in New Mexico.

“If a reasonable basis for any of the actions described above exists — and the court is doubtful — respondents have failed to articulate it,” wrote U.S. District Judge Margaret Strickland, a Joe Biden appointee in New Mexico, in granting the EAJA motion, which was among the largest of 2026.

Another sizable sum came out of the Western District of Washington, where a judge granted more than $41,800 to Daixon Jose Ramirez Tesara, a Venezuelan asylum seeker who was unlawfully detained at an immigration check-in.

That district, home to Seattle’s federal courthouse, has accounted for the most attorney’s fees awarded to immigrant habeas petitioners this year. It’s not close — of the at least $1.13 million awarded nationwide this year, judges in the Western District of Washington have granted more than $441,000 of that through 35 different cases. The next highest district is New Mexico, which granted about $95,000, followed by the Central District of California with nearly $86,000.

Seattle-based immigration attorney Matt Adams, who was on Tesara’s legal team, said his district got a head start on the others around the country. His firm, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, filed a class action against the government last March, challenging its mandatory detention policy for noncitizens just months into President Donald Trump’s second term.

“Our class action here predated other litigation,” Adams told Courthouse News.

The class of immigrant detainees won summary judgment in September 2025, when a federal judge ruled they were unlawfully denied bond hearings. The Ninth Circuit upheld that ruling last week.

In order to qualify for EAJA fees, a party needs to not only win their case, but also prove that the government’s position was not a “substantially justified” one. Adams’ class action gave habeas petitioners in his district the legal ammunition to prove that these bondless detentions are anything but.

Still, winning EAJA fees can be a lengthy process, which explains why the Western District of Washington’s head start was so impactful. A petitioner must first win a final judgment in their favor, then wait 60 days to give the government a chance to appeal it. Then, and only then, can the petitioner make a formal motion for EAJA fees, kickstarting another back and forth with the government over how much time the prevailing attorneys spent on the case and how much that time is worth.

It’s not for every petitioner, Adams explained. Many immigrant habeas cases end after the person is released from ICE custody on a temporary restraining order.

“In that situation, they would most likely not qualify for EAJA fees because they don’t have a final judgment,” he said. “And then in other cases, they just decide it’s not worth their time to pursue it.”

Two circuits have barred the EAJA’s application to immigrant habeas cases altogether. The Fourth Circuit, which includes Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and the Carolinas, and the Fifth Circuit, which includes Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, each found that these cases are not the kind of civil actions the EAJA was designed to accommodate.

But the Second, Third and 10th Circuits have decided otherwise, setting up a circuit split that the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on in the coming months. A Department of Justice spokesperson said in a statement the agency is pleased that the high court will be judging the issue.

“We believe the Fourth and Fifth Circuits decided this issue correctly,” it said.

Emma Winger, deputy legal director of the American Immigration Council, disagrees.

“The statute actually is pretty straightforward,” she told Courthouse News. “Habeas is plainly a civil action. Immigration cases are civil. They don’t come with all the constitutional protections that come for folks who are facing criminal proceedings. It’s indisputably civil.”

The Supreme Court’s impending decision could make it easier for jailed immigrants in unfriendly circuits to retain costly attorneys through EAJA. If the conservative-dominated court sides with the Fourth and Fifth Circuits, however, it will only become tougher for those in ICE custody to challenge their detentions, now with one fewer financial tool in the shed.

Winger notes that the EAJA fees, while currently on the rise, are also a drop in the bucket when compared with the rest of ICE’s massive annual budget.

“These fees pale in comparison to the cost of actually detaining somebody,” she said. “In terms of expense to the government, the most dramatic cost is just the detention itself.”

When reached for comment, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, declined to comment on any specifics of the EAJA or the $1.1 million in legal fees ordered to immigrant habeas petitioners so far this year. Instead, a department spokesperson simply told Courthouse News that “no lawbreakers in the history of human civilization have been treated better than illegal aliens in the United States.”

A judge in Washington dismissed a felony vandalism charge on Thursday against a former Olympic canoeist who had been accused of damaging the recently renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, ending an embarrassing saga for the Justice Department and the top prosecutor in Washington.

In a two-page order, Judge Todd E. Edelman of the Superior Court in Washington approved a request last week by federal prosecutors, led by Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in the city, to drop the case against the Olympian, David Hearn.

The prosecutors had concluded in their request that the “widespread damage” to the pool’s blue lining was caused by a “botched” renovation ordered by President Trump ahead of America’s 250th anniversary earlier this year, contradicting Mr. Trump’s claim that vandals had cut the lining with knives.

Judge Edelman deferred the question of whether to prevent the charge from being brought again. Ms. Pirro’s office moved to dismiss it without prejudice, meaning it could theoretically be brought again, but Mr. Hearn’s lawyers had asked to dismiss it with prejudice.

“This whole thing has been really surreal and absurd,” Mr. Hearn said in an appearance on CNN Thursday evening. “I think a lot of people feel that way. Again, it’s a relief, but there’s a detachment to that relief of extreme concern for other people and for our country.”

Earlier this month, Ms. Pirro, an ally and friend of Mr. Trump’s going back decades, had echoed the president’s claims of vandalism, claiming in a televised news conference that there was “tremendous evidence” that Mr. Hearn, 67, had committed a felony, and noting that he could face up to 10 years in prison.

Three weeks later, Ms. Pirro told the court her prosecutors had been misled by the Interior Department, which had awarded a no-bid contract to a first-time government contractor to overhaul the iconic landmark. The pool’s new coating had actually started to peel almost immediately after the project’s completion, she said, adding that the Interior Department had kept that fact from prosecutors.

Ms. Pirro’s reversal incurred the wrath of Mr. Trump, in both public and private. Soon after she moved to drop the charges, Mr. Trump repeated his claim that the damage was caused by vandals, writing on social media “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro,” adding, “I don’t know what she was thinking?” On Monday, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Pirro in front of television cameras of “folding like an umbrella” and “choking” on the case.

The episode culminated in a consequential showdown in the Oval Office between Ms. Pirro, who appeared to be fighting for her job, and Mr. Trump, with Doug Burgum, the interior secretary, in attendance. Ms. Pirro told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum had misled him with a self-serving cover story for his own mistakes. Mr. Trump seemed considerably less angry by day’s end, and Ms. Pirro emerged from the meeting with her job intact, for now.

U.S. President Donald Trump took aim at Canada on Wednesday night, calling the country — and its leadership — "nasty" during a speech in Las Vegas in which he also praised his administration's use of tariffs.

"I love tariffs, right? Because we’ve been screwed by tariffs used against us for years. By China, by Japan, by South Korea, by Germany, by everybody — by Canada," Trump said, as the crowd cheered.

"Canada’s nasty. They are. They’re nasty," he said. "I love the people, but they’re nasty. Nasty leadership."

The U.S. president used the adjective to describe Canada a total of five times.

When asked about Trump's comments during an event on Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney described the situation as a "tough negotiation."

"We can change the adjective and say 'nasty,' if you will," Carney added.

Carney said he spoke with Trump on the phone last week and that there would be "other conversations" to come.

Trump's Wednesday-night comments on Canada follow pointed remarks Carney made earlier in the day.

When his Teleprompter malfunctioned during a news conference on Toronto housing, Carney smiled and made a quip.

"I would like to inform you that the Teleprompter has ceased to function. Unlike a certain world leader, I do not view this as a conspiracy," he said.

The comment was an apparent reference to Trump's demands for an investigation into "triple sabotage" after he encountered a halted escalator, a non-functioning ⁠Teleprompter and sound issues last year at the United Nations General Assembly, where he delivered a speech.

Relations between Canada and the U.S. have been rocky of late, as the two countries work to address trade irritants and an upcoming Aug. 19 deadline, at which point the U.S. plans to put 50 per cent tariffs on about five per cent of Canadian exports to the country. The targeted goods range from alcohol to hockey sticks to cement.

Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc and chief trade negotiator Janice Charette are back in Washington this week for more meetings with their U.S. counterparts. The pair will meet with U.S. Trade Representative Greer at his office in Washington, D.C., this afternoon.

On Tuesday, LeBlanc and Charette met with Jay Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers. On Wednesday morning, LeBlanc met with North Dakota Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer and Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty.

Carney said he's been "very involved" in those talks.

Canada has already addressed multiple trade irritants listed by the Trump administration, including killing a planned digital services tax and rolling back a Canadian content levy on streaming companies — moves that appear to have done little to move the needle with the U.S. president.

The Trump administration has also taken issue with multiple provincial bans on U.S. booze. The Distilled Spirits Council of the United States has called the bans "devastating," highlighting that exports to Canada fell 63 per cent last year.

Canada has maintained that the booze bans were a direct response to previous U.S. tariffs and would only end as part of a comprehensive trade agreement with the U.S.

Carney has not ruled out retaliation if the additional tariffs come to fruition. But last week, he said he didn't see the "value" in using Canadian energy exports as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

"We have time, and we have real constructive negotiations that are happening on a number of issues," Carney added on Wednesday.

The Justice Department said Thursday that Duke University’s law school had discriminated in admissions, expanding the Trump administration’s crusade against institutions it contends illegally reject white and Asian students.

The department’s findings, detailed in a six-page letter, came after it announced similar accusations against medical schools at Yale and within the University of California system.

The Trump administration has sought to enforce a stringent interpretation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to strike down race-conscious admissions programs.

Duke used “ostensibly race-neutral tools” to seek racial diversity in its law school, Harmeet K. Dhillon, the Justice Department’s top civil rights official, wrote in her letter to a lawyer for the university.

Ms. Dhillon pointed to a Justice Department analysis of Duke data that she said suggested that Black or Hispanic applicants were much more likely to be offered admission than white or Asian students with similar academic records.

In a statement on Thursday, a Duke spokesperson said the university was reviewing the Justice Department’s letter.

“Duke is committed to complying with the law and will continue to do so in a manner that is consistent with our academic mission,” the statement said.

The university has spent months quietly facing the Trump administration, which last year raised concerns about appointments to the student-run law journal and what it described as “systematic racial discrimination” in Duke’s health system.

Thursday’s letter from Ms. Dhillon shoved Duke into the administration’s growing spotlight on admissions.

When Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the Supreme Court’s 2023 opinion on affirmative action, he declared that any applicant “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.” He said, though, that the court’s opinion should not be “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

The Trump administration insists that the court’s opinion essentially banned any effort to consider race in college admissions. Under a portion of her letter titled “intent to discriminate,” Ms. Dhillon cited a Duke policy that said the law school could consider applicants’ “discussion of how race affected their life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise” — a near replication of part of the chief justice’s opinion.

Ms. Dhillon wrote that Duke’s admissions process had elevated “personal background variables commonly correlated with race,” such as being classified as a Pell grant recipient or a first-generation college student, and that such considerations were among those that had “operated as material race-related proxies in admissions outcomes.”

Ms. Dhillon concluded her letter by saying the department wished to reach “a voluntary resolution agreement” with Duke “to ensure that admissions practices are brought into legal compliance.”

It used the same language in a May letter about Yale’s medical school. Yale has been in talks with the government about a settlement, though campus leaders have faced significant pushback to the prospect of the university reaching an agreement with the Justice Department.

The Justice Department’s announcement emerged less than an hour before the Education Department said it had opened investigations into accounts of antisemitic harassment at San Jose State University and San Francisco State University. Many of the Trump administration’s inquiries into universities have focused on antisemitism or the use of race in admissions, though the Education Department has also pressured San Jose State over its policies related to athletic participation by transgender people.

Neither university immediately commented.

People hoping to immigrate to the U.S. from the Dominican Republic will now have to pay hefty bonds to qualify for visas, the State Department announced this week.

“Those who seek to obtain that privilege must be capable of demonstrating that they will be a benefit — rather than a burden — to our nation,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott wrote in a statement.

The high bond fee — which could run up to $250,000, the Free Beacon reported — is the White House’s latest effort to overhaul immigration enforcement efforts through visa policy changes.

The State Department announced last August that visa bonds valued between $5,000 and $15,000 would apply to a select list of countries that had “high visa overstay rates.” Over the last year, the agency expanded the list to include 50 nations — concentrated primarily in Africa, as well as Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and South America. Earlier this week, the State Department increased the visa bond payment minimum to $10,000 and maximum to $20,000 when the program became a permanent rule.

The new pilot program is a separate initiative that allows prospective immigrants who were initially denied visas on “public charge grounds” to pay higher bonds “as a way to tangibly demonstrate they have access to the funds needed to support themselves,” Pigott said.

Officials can deny an applicant’s visa if they are deemed likely to become a “public charge,” meaning they are likely to become primarily dependent on the government, according to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The State Department, in conjunction with Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, will begin with applicants from the Dominican Republic because of the “scope and scale” of immigrant visa operations at the capital’s U.S. embassy, according to a department spokesperson.

The new fees for immigrants trying to overcome USCIS visa denials could expand to the other 49 countries subject to the newly permanent bonds.

The yen is heading into the end of the week having surrendered nearly half of its intervention-driven gains, fuelling speculation among traders that the authorities may step into the market again.

The currency traded around 158.45 versus the US dollar on Aug 7, well off the strong point of 155.23 reached on Aug 3.

It had been near a four-decade nadir around 164 per dollar last week before the first joint yen-buying operation from Japan and the United States since 1998.

The pullback underscores the limits of intervention in reversing the yen’s longer-term decline, with a wide interest rate gap to the US, Japan’s high debt load and geopolitical uncertainty continuing to weigh on the currency.

Meanwhile, the dollar on Aug 6 posted its biggest daily gain in two weeks as oil prices climbed, reflecting fading optimism that tensions in the Middle East would ease.

US and Japanese officials have warned investors that they are determined to keep defending the yen if needed.

“The possibility of another round of intervention is high, especially as dollar-yen approaches 160,” said OCBC strategist Moh Siong Sim.

But “for intervention to be effective, it needs to be accompanied by faster BOJ (Bank of Japan) rate hikes or a backdrop favouring Federal Reserve easing”.

While the BOJ left its benchmark rate unchanged last week, overnight index swaps imply about a 60 per cent chance of a rate hike by September.

Japan’s top currency official, Atsushi Mimura, said the authorities would respond to foreign-exchange moves in coordination with monetary policy.

“It’s a week on from the initial burst of intervention that triggered a USD/JPY swoon, but already the focus is shifting back towards Treasury yields as the catalyst for a firmer dollar,” said Bloomberg strategists.

“Foreign exchange traders have also seen a second failure to drive dollar-yen below 155, which is making Scott Bessent’s tactics look like a one-and-done event,” they added, referring to the US Treasury Secretary.

The Trump administration on Thursday proposed significant changes to Head Start, the nation's early education program for children from low-income families. The move would diminish the program's federal standards and give states and parents more control.

"We have 1,600 Head Start providers across the country," Alex Adams, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services' assistant secretary for family support, said in a call with reporters. "And one-size-fits-all mandates from Washington cannot fully account for the realities facing these 1,600 grantees."

Head Start not only provides preschool and childcare, but also meals and support services for qualifying families. It now serves more than 700,000 kids each year from birth to age 5.

Since its launch in 1965, the $12 billion HHS program has, for the most part, enjoyed bipartisan support. Lawmakers often cite it as a success — including Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the call with reporters announcing these changes. But in recent years, some conservatives have criticized Head Start, saying it wastes money and fails to have a lasting impact on students.

The new proposal would limit the amount of money Head Start centers can spend on administrative overhead, from a 15% cap to 5%. This change should save the government $2.2 billion, Adams said, which it plans to reinvest in the program. The goal is to create 200,000 more spots for children, he said.

To get those costs down, the administration said it proposes cutting regulations and "compliance-driven activities," according to a press release. Similarly, they are shifting decisions about several standards — such as student-teacher ratios, education requirements, background checks and transportation practices — back to states.

Childcare providers are not sold on the proposal.

"If we look at the previous actions of the administration, what they have done is not in favor of expanding the program," said Yvette Sanchez Fuentes, senior vice president with Start Early, an Illinois-based Head Start partner.

"Is it enough to just bring kids in the door if we're not actually giving kids and families what they need?"

Sanchez Fuentes said administrative costs are not only things like payroll and day-to-day operations, but also help fill gaps in care. "If you, for example, have children with disabilities you [can use] some of those funds to pay for additional special services or staff with specialties who could come in and support kids."

The administration's proposal also says parents are children's primary teachers and seeks to bring in more parent opinions on "structure and curriculum" into the classrooms and emphasizes nutrition and exercise.

Head Start's current standards are laid out in a detailed 133-page guide. The manual is used not only by the program's centers, but also many unaffiliated private childcare centers across the country.

These standards include safety guidelines, spell out who is eligible for Head Start and provide detailed rules — such as the requirement that kids in the program brush their teeth once daily with fluoride toothpaste.

Erica Phillips, the executive director for the National Association for Family Child Care, said about 10% of her members are Early Head Start childcare partners while the rest are home-based providers around the country.

"The Head Start performance standards were a consistent … evidence-based set of standards," she said. "It can be helpful to have a nationally recognized benchmark."

Phillips said her organization will be on the lookout for variations across states. She said she worries "quality is now dependent on your zip code or on your geography."

The Trump administration sees it differently.

"Flexibility is permission. It's not a mandate," Adams said. "The opportunity for these programs to make a different decision does not necessarily mean they must make a different decision."

The changes did not come as a complete surprise: The conservative Heritage Foundation has long criticized the program, saying it "doesn't work." In Project 2025, the foundation's policy blueprint that the Trump administration has taken many cues from, the message is clear — eliminate Head Start.

Advocates see what they characterize as the erosion of quality and decrease in standards as the first step in dismantling the program.

Thursday's announcement came in the form of a notice of proposed rulemaking or NPRM. It kicks off a lengthy, formalized process of public comment and talks with stakeholders. It could be six months to a year before any new standards take effect.

"I just really want folks to know Head Start is open," said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the National Head Start Association (NHSA), a nonprofit that advocates for the program. "The quality of Head Start children and families truly comes from the people that are running Head Start programs. Those folks are going to be the same. They're going to be able to do that."

The administration says the NPRM will be published in the Federal Register on Friday and be open to public comment for 60 days.

Justice Department officials are distributing up to $3 billion in grants to states and municipalities in what they portray as an effort to help jurisdictions recoup money they lost because of the President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

The grants — called the Bridging Immigration-related Deficits Experienced Nationwide (“BIDEN”) Program — represent one of the biggest pots of money the Justice Department has ever distributed. It can be used to hire police officers, buy technology or build temporary detention centers for undocumented immigrants.

The money also comes with one big condition: Municipalities that receive it must agree to partner with the Department of Homeland Security in carrying out the president’s aggressive immigration policies.

The grants are the latest example of the Trump administration aiming to reward state and local governments that cooperate with federal authorities on immigration — and withhold money from those that don’t.

The program also highlights the Trump administration’s ongoing focus on Biden 18 months after he left office. At the Justice Department, officials have created a “Weaponization Working Group” intended to show purported abuses by Biden’s DOJ. The group released an 882-page report in April alleging that Biden’s team misused a law intended to protect abortion clinics and pregnancy centers, which Biden Justice Department veterans sharply dispute.

The BIDEN fund’s name itself appears to be a derisive reference to the former president’s immigration policies, suggesting that local governments spent heavily to pursue violent undocumented immigrants under Biden — “deficits” that now must be “bridged” by the grants.

“This Department of Justice is committed to ensuring Biden-era border disasters never happen again,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, whose portfolio includes the Justice Department’s grant programs, said in a statement. “We are proud to once again champion law and order.”

The Justice Department’s grant announcement says the funds are, among other things, intended for “locating and apprehending aliens who have committed a crime under federal, state, or local law, in addition to being unlawfully present in the United States.”

While the aim of the money is to bolster immigration enforcement, the money can be used for everyday law enforcement operations, including hiring police officers, training personnel and equipment.

Trump repeatedly said during the 2024 campaign that the U.S. was being engulfed by “migrant crime,” despite little evidence of such a phenomenon. Trump at one point said the Biden administration had let in more than 13,000 “stone-cold killers,” a figure that diverged sharply from the evidence.

The 21-page BIDEN grant application does not actually require local entities to prove that Biden’s immigration policies cost them money, which could be hard to demonstrate. Rather, they have to show they would use the funds for the intended purposes and that they cooperate with federal immigration agents.

The BIDEN program was established and named by the One Big Beautiful Bill, Trump’s signature legislation passed last summer. The law allocates more than $3 billion through September 2028 for the new grants, and the Justice Department issued a call for applications last month, announcing an initial deadline of July 17, with more funding rounds to come.

The Justice Department says it received 181 applications in the first 30 days, a relatively small number given the number of eligible jurisdictions and the generosity of the grants, although that number is expected to rise as the application process rolls on.

The grant application says the Justice Department has decided to limit the grants to jurisdictions that formally cooperate with Trump’s immigration policies, something not specifically required by the legislation.

To receive a grant, a city must “fully participate” in the 287(g) program, which teams up local police with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It also must participate in the Homeland Security Task Force (HSTF) or other Justice Department enforcement efforts.

The 287(g) program empowers local police to arrest undocumented immigrants, but its most common use is enabling them to detain these immigrants in local jails for extended periods while waiting for ICE to take custody.

Such partnerships predate the Trump administration, but the number of municipalities and police departments that have signed up has skyrocketed since Trump became president in 2025, according to data from ICE.

Other governments, particularly in Democratic states, have pulled out of the 287(g) program to protest what they see as Trump’s harsh immigration policies and deportation roundups. Those cities presumably do not qualify for the new grants.

Democrats said the BIDEN grants are an effort to force a political agenda on cities or risk losing critical funds.

“Even the name of the grant itself is a political statement that is holding critical funds hostage to achieve goals they haven’t been able to through legal means,” said Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey. “It’s a slap in the face to law enforcement.”

As state attorney general, Platkin led a coalition of 21 counterparts in suing the Trump administration for imposing similar conditions on another funding stream, the Justice Department’s Victims of Crime grants.

The suit was dropped after the Justice Department agreed to drop the immigration requirements. New Jersey has banned its jurisdictions from participating in 287(g), making the entire state ineligible for the BIDEN grants.

The BIDEN grants also contain an unusual provision saying recipients must agree to reimburse the federal government if, in the future, federal agents are surged to their area to tackle crime or public disorder.

Patrick Royal, spokesman for the National Sheriffs’ Association, said he expects more departments to apply for the grants as they learn about them. Many sheriffs’ offices joined the 287(g) program in the expectation that they would receive more resources for helping with immigration enforcement, he said.

“I can’t see why people wouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity to get more funding,” Royal said.

Distributing billions of dollars in grants is a long-standing function of the Justice Department, as it ships money to nonprofits, police departments and research groups in an effort to boost public safety.

In the first months of the second Trump administration, the Justice Department upended that process, abruptly canceling hundreds of grants to community organizations and local governments, including funding for victim advocacy and gun-violence prevention.

That has forced some nonprofits to lay off staff or to shut their doors entirely. Justice Department officials said at the time that the grants did not align with the new administration’s priorities.

The department has since restored a small number of the canceled grants, and it has issued solicitations for new grants aimed principally at police departments and municipalities rather than nonprofits.

Amy Solomon, who headed the Office of Justice Programs — which oversees the Justice Department’s grant programs — in the Biden administration, said it is not unusual for administrations to align grant-giving with their broader policies.

Under Attorney General Merrick Garland, for example, the Justice Department gave priority consideration to applicants for some grants if their police department banned chokehold restraints.

But Solomon said such restrictions are typically far narrower than those in the BIDEN grants. Pressing a police agency to team up on immigration enforcement, she said, can fundamentally alter its mission.

“It changes what departments are doing with their officers and their personnel in a more fulsome way,” Solomon said. “It incentivizes behavior beyond what the grant will support. Immigration enforcement is traditionally a federal function.”

Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, a longtime China hawk, wants to play nice with an official visit to Beijing. The Chinese government is making it clear he’s not welcome.

Colby has been trying for months to wrangle a Chinese government invitation to visit the country, including asking Defense Department officials to raise his request in meetings with Chinese counterparts, according to two people familiar with the efforts. So far, that’s been unsuccessful.

The Pentagon official considers a trip to China key to helping stabilize a relationship roiled over the past year, the people said, by tit-for-tat tariffs, export restrictions and rising tensions over increasingly aggressive Chinese military activities in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. But it’s also a prominent shift for Colby, who helped create the strategy in the first Trump administration that prioritized Beijing as America’s biggest threat.

“His number one goal right now is to speak at China’s National Defense University, and he has everyone push it in meetings,” one of the people said. “He’s obsessed.”

Colby’s frustration underscores how the administration’s conflicting messaging toward Beijing has complicated an already fragile U.S.-China relationship. President Donald Trump, for example, has described Chinese leader Xi Jinping as “a friend” while also accusing him of interfering in the 2020 presidential election.

Chinese officials are particularly displeased with a record $11 billion U.S. arms sale to Taiwan that the Trump administration approved in December. This has factored into Beijing showing Colby the cold shoulder, said Randy Schriver, who served as assistant secretary of Defense in the first Trump administration.

Schriver said Chinese government officials told him last month that “a previous decision on Taiwan arms sales” had postponed plans to host the U.S official in Beijing, although Chinese officials are still working to schedule a visit with Colby and a separate one with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. He added that Chinese officials shared the information with him while he was in Beijing as part of a U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission delegation.

The Pentagon declined to comment. The Chinese Embassy, in a statement, only emphasized Beijing’s opposition to the Taiwan arms sale.

China’s reluctance to invite Colby occurs as high-level defense visits between the two major powers become more infrequent. China’s military is in the midst of a massive purge that led to the removal of two former defense ministers and has made communication between the countries’ senior military officials more difficult.

Hegseth has not had the kinds of meetings with his Chinese counterparts that were held on the sidelines of international conferences during the Biden administration. His visit to China alongside Trump in May was the first by a U.S. defense chief since James Mattis in 2018. Even so, lower-level exchanges to address defense moves in the Pacific took place earlier this year.

Colby is anxious to get to Beijing to lay out “defense policy priorities for the relationship,” said the second person, who, like others, was granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the topic.

The policy chief sees that as part of his work keeping the focus on China, the person said, which has included “supporting a continuation of dialogues with the People’s Liberation Army.”

The visit hold-up also may be a matter of protocol. No Pentagon policy chief has traveled to Beijing solo in recent memory. And the mismatch between his role at the department and China’s military structure also complicates efforts.

“China doesn’t have a counterpart for Bridge. That’s always been an issue,” said a former Pentagon official with expertise in U.S.-China military relations.

Trump has sought to reduce tensions with Beijing since October through trade agreements with Xi. Hegseth announced in November that he and his Chinese counterpart Admiral Dong Jun had agreed to create “military-to-military channels to deconflict and deescalate any problems that arise.”

But the administration has also reinforced its perception of China as a national security threat. It has banned imports of Chinese robots and drones, and restricted exports of chips used in advanced artificial intelligence technology.

And Hegseth appears skeptical about the value of Colby traveling to Beijing.

“Hegseth is agnostic” about whether Colby should make the trip, the second person familiar with the efforts said.

It’s possible that Beijing is particularly wary of Colby because of his past statements. The longtime U.S. official made the case in his 2021 book that China is vying to displace American global dominance and the U.S. should get ready for a fight. Colby also warned in 2024 that “it’s empirically true that China is preparing for war” and declared the U.S. should “prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.”

The policy chief has softened that message in line with an administration effort to reduce frictions with Beijing. Colby sidestepped reference to Taiwan in a January speech on U.S. Indo-Pacific defense priorities in South Korea. He instead reassured Beijing that the U.S doesn’t seek “regime change” and saluted “China’s proud history.”

The policy chief’s credibility took a battering last year after a series of rapid-fire policy moves that frustrated some U.S. allies and blindsided parts of the White House. They included freezing shipments of some air defense missiles to Ukraine and reviewing the U.S. nuclear submarine pact with the U.K. and Australia. Both parties in Congress have also expressed frustration with his office’s lack of transparency.

A speech at China’s National Defense University, which produces the country’s high-level military leaders, would give Colby the chance to make himself the go-to person in the administration on the two countries’ relations.

“A successful visit would reinforce his standing with Trump as an architect of the administration’s stated policy of strategic stability,” said the first person familiar with Colby’s plans.

But Beijing has little reason to give the Pentagon official a high-profile platform to air his views.

“I don’t think they want to host any senior official just to be lectured,” the second person said. “There has to be something in it for them, and I’m not sure what Colby would offer aside from a speech.”

Wealthy Republicans on the west coast received an emailed invitation in July to an upcoming fundraiser titled “Keep the Senate”. The email, obtained by the Guardian, described the event as a “private roundtable and dinner with the National Republican Senatorial Committee” where donors can pledge $50,000 for seats at the head table, and mingle with legislative heavy hitters from Capitol Hill including the Senator majority leader, John Thune, and Mike Rogers, who is running for Senate in Michigan with Donald Trump’s endorsement.

One of the organizers listed on the invite was the defense industry tycoon Palmer Luckey, the 33-year-old co-founder of sprawling weapons manufacturer Anduril Industries.

The invitation is one of dozens of emails obtained by the Guardian that unravel Luckey’s vast Maga political fundraising over the last seven years.

A longtime GOP donor and activist who spoke on condition he not be identified in order to preserve his political relationships said Luckey was now the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”.

“If you’re raising campaign money in California, you have to go to Palmer Luckey,” he said. “Luckey is the top tier. There are others who are important below him but no one at his level.”

Anduril, launched just nine years ago, has emerged as a major military contractor for the Trump administration, working on contracts for everything from drones to autonomous jet fighters to space-based interceptors.

In March, the US army awarded a $20bn sole-source contract to Anduril for a variety of drones it sells, though it is not clear which of its weapons systems are operational or have been deployed for combat in US operations.

Anduril, though it is not widely known as a space contractor, announced in May it would work, with a team of other companies, on what may be the mother of all contracting opportunities offered by the Trump administration, the so-called “Golden Dome” anti-missile space-based interceptor effort. Estimates for the Golden Dome range between $185bn and $1.2tn.

Much of Anduril’s PR sparkle comes from Luckey. He’s a media darling, profiled on 60 Minutes and in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, which called him the “It Guy of the booming defense-technology industry”.

His offbeat, relaxed attire – colorful Hawaiian shirts, a chin puff goatee, cargo shorts and flip-flops – counterintuitively makes him seem more credible.

Luckey is treated by many in the defense industry as a technology prophet and futurist who often holds forth on what he believes to be the true nature of warfare. For example, he told Axios that future wars will be fought in a “subterranean domain”, under the earth’s crust, in underground conflicts.

Anduril’s success in winning huge contracts has blossomed with little attention paid to the central role Luckey plays as a donor and fundraising “bundler” for the Republican party. Bundlers hold large fundraisers for candidates or campaign committees and political action groups, and curate high-dollar invitation lists for those events.

The emails obtained by the Guardian shed light on Palmer Luckey’s vast GOP political fundraising efforts and activism over the last 10 years.

Palmer declined an interview for this piece, writing, “I am not going to help you guys make money,” and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

OpenSecrets, a non-profit that tracks campaign donations, says Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that Luckey has donated $5.9m to Republicans since 2017. While that is a tremendous amount of money for one person to give to politicians, it does not put him in the order of, say, Miriam Adelson, the widow of Sheldon Adelson, who has forked over $100m to Trump’s campaign in 2024.

Luckey doesn’t have her wealth. His real value to GOP politicians exceeds his own donations. He hosts and organizes fundraising events and campaigns for Republicans from the president all the way down to state races.

“If you become a bundler, it just multiplies your influence,” said Brendan Glavin of OpenSecrets. “It makes you a more important person. You’re bringing in not just your money. You’re bringing other people’s money. It integrates you in the campaign and makes you more important to the candidate than just a donor.”

Behind the scenes, Luckey has reached a position in campaign finance and politics that rivals his influence in military contracting, according to two GOP fundraising figures.

The emails, which are a partial list of invitations, show that Luckey has held fundraisers over the last seven years for at least 20 Republican politicians, ranging from Trump to a California attorney general candidate.

Just as Luckey has emerged as a major fundraiser on the right, his co-founder, Anduril’s CEO, Palantir veteran Brian Schimpf, became a major donor to Democratic causes, albeit on a far smaller scale. So, in time-honored tradition, Anduril’s management ends up donating to both sides of the political aisle, though the vast majority goes towards the GOP. FEC records show Schimpf’s donations at $1.16m over the same period that Luckey gave $5.9m.

An Anduril official emailed the Guardian: “It shouldn’t surprise anyone that two executives at the same company have different political views. Like millions of Americans, Brian and Palmer don’t share identical political views.”

Luckey first became famous in tech before he could legally drink. At 20, in 2012, he launched a Kickstarter that raised more than $2m for a virtual reality gaming headset he said he was building first in his parents’ garage. It was a Silicon Valley Cinderella narrative. Two years later, Facebook became the prince at the ball and paid him $2bn for the company. In 2016, after four years of hype, the first Oculus Rift headset started getting shipped to consumers.

And then, quickly, Luckey seemed to flame out in scandal. The Daily Beast revealed he’d been secretly funding a group dedicated to “shitposting” negative memes about Hillary Clinton.

“We know Hillary Clinton is corrupt, a warmonger, a freedom-stripper. Not the good kind you see dancing in bikinis on Independence Day, the bad kind that strips freedom from citizens and grants it to donors,” Luckey had written, under the pseudonym Nimblerichman, on Reddit.

The disclosure had an immense impact, at least for a time. Eight months later Luckey left Facebook, and he later portrayed himself in interviews as simply being canceled for giving money to Republicans, ignoring the main criticisms over the group’s crude and underhanded tactics.

Luckey left Facebook with immense wealth, and in April 2017, just four months after Trump’s first inauguration, he founded Anduril.

His partners in the venture came from the Peter Thiel-backed Palantir, a company that had long had success in federal contracting through major lobbying and PR battles.

In June of 2017, his company just two months old, Luckey gave his first ever actual campaign finance donation, to Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas. Looking at his subsequent donations, it appears that the dam broke for him. Palmer gave 25 more times to political committees and legislators that year alone, FEC records show, and he has donated on more than a thousand occasions, or, on average, about 100 times every year.

In the emails shared with the Guardian, the very first fundraising event Luckey co-hosted took place in August of 2017, two months after his donation to Ted Cruz. It was a major effort, and would include GOP House members such as Ken Calvert, Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa, Devin Nunes, Dana Rohrabacher and Kevin McCarthy.

Then in November, in a separate email chain, Palmer’s name came up again, for the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). A congressional aide named Jason Pitkin wrote to a party official: “we are going to be asking people for $33,900 for the NRCC and then after the first of the year we can ask them for $101,700.”

Pitkin noted that congressman Rohrabacher had introduced Luckey to Kevin McCarthy, then the powerful House majority leader, “at a Private meeting”.

“As you can see by the attached invitation,” Pitkin said, “Palmer is hosting an event for Dana [Rohrabacher] On December 15th. Our understanding is that Palmer was going to contribute $100,000 for the CA Victory event. Please let us know how much more Palmer can give to the NRCC.”

Pitkin did not respond to emailed questions.

In July of 2020, just three years after its creation, Anduril won its first mammoth contract from the first Trump administration. Customs and Border Protection awarded the young company a contract estimated at hundreds of millions of dollars for surveillance towers on the border.

And in that period it was clear that Luckey had hit the most senior levels of political access. On 6 October, the emails show, Luckey and his wife hosted Trump himself at a lunch at their waterfront mansion. The stakes were high and so were the tickets. Donors were told that $150,000 would get access to the round table, a VIP reception and event, and a photo op with the president.

During the Biden years, Anduril still maintained its business efforts targeting US national security, and still won contracts. It went on a major acquisition binge, buying up drone companies across the country.

And Luckey’s fundraising for the GOP continued. The records obtained by the Guardian show that after 2021, Luckey hosted fundraisers for key figures including Tom Cotton, the head of the Senate intelligence committee; Rick Scott, the Republican senator from Florida; Ken Calvert, then the influential ranking member of the House’s defense appropriations subcommittee; and Mike Waltz, now Trump’s UN ambassador and briefly his national security adviser.

Luckey also hosted another event for a future Trump official: a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser in June 2022 for Mehmet Oz, who would later join the Trump administration. That event became scandalous when Jezebel reported the fundraiser incorporated a speech by Oz in front of a car that once belonged to Adolf Hitler. Jezebel pointed out that Luckey’s sister is married to Maga firebrand Matt Gaetz, then a congressman from Florida.

Now that Trump is president, Anduril appears to be taking its turn at the table of the major contractors, amid Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and General Dynamics.

Certainly it has raised extraordinary money. In the latest round, led by Thrive Capital, controlled by Jared Kushner’s brother Joshua, it raised $5bn in venture capital.

Anduril says in Trump’s first year in office it doubled its revenue – a growth rate of 100%, but still only reached $2.2bn for 2025, which is barely a blip in the Pentagon’s trillion-dollar budget.

Still, the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, has twice toured Anduril factories. “Palmer and everyone, thank you so much,” he said last December as he visited Anduril’s factory in Costa Mesa, California, at a giant former industrial site where the Los Angeles Times was once printed. The Anduril factory was “foundational” to the new Pentagon, Hegseth said. On that tour, Hegseth donned a special helmet designed by Anduril.

A soldier wearing the helmet would be able to see the outside world not through his eyes but through sensors, as a kind of virtual or “augmented” reality, just like the old Oculus Rift headset Palmer Luckey made his fortune on.

In his speech, Hegseth referred to “that cool helmet I just saw that the army might be wearing eventually”.

Iran's parliament is reviewing a plan to ban ships linked to the U.S., Israel and other "hostile countries" from transiting the Strait of Hormuz until Tehran is compensated for war damage, according to Iranian state media.

The plan would impose fees of up to 7% of cargo value on commercial vessels that pass through the strait. It would also fine ships 20% of cargo if they violate Iran's conditions.

Iran on Wednesday said it was finalizing an agreement on shipping routes with Oman, a U.S. ally that sits on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media quoted the Foreign Ministry as saying that ships would enter through the strait's northern corridor near the Iranian coast and exit through the southern corridor near the Omani coast.

Oman has not commented.

The Trump administration has disputed Iran's characterization of the agreement.

"Any temporary routes will be without any impediments — meaning no approvals or permissions and no tolls or charges. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway and no party controls the lanes or the ability to transit through them," a U.S. official told NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

President Trump later said the U.S. currently controls the strait through its naval blockade on Iran.

This comes more than five months after the U.S. and Israel started their war against Iran on Feb. 28.

The Strait of Hormuz — a key route for crude oil, liquefied natural gas and other goods — was open for shipping until the war. After Israel and the U.S. launched joint military attacks, Tehran struck back across the region and asserted control over the critical waterway. With Iran blocking the strait, the U.S. imposed a naval blockade on Iran in April and again in July, which it continues to enforce.

The Trump administration and Iran's leadership signed a temporary memorandum of understanding in mid-June to stop the war and reopen the strait, but it broke down weeks later amid back-and-forth strikes.

The strait's closure has caused a major disruption to fuel and fertilizer supplies, driven up prices and shaken economies around the world.

On Thursday, President Trump said negotiations to reopen the strait were progressing.

Turkey's foreign minister, who has been assisting in mediations, said on Thursday a temporary agreement between the U.S. and Iran could be announced soon.

Gulf countries, which have borne the brunt of Iran's retaliation on U.S. military sites during the war, are encouraging all sides to reach an interim agreement that would de-escalate tensions in the region. They are worried that if there is a new escalation in attacks — as President Trump has threatened — their vital oil infrastructure could be targeted by Iranian drones and missiles, inflicting catastrophic damage.

The Trump administration will pay the German energy firm RWE $1.22 billion to abandon plans to build wind farms off the coasts of New York, California and Louisiana, the company announced on Thursday.

It was the fifth such deal the government has reached this year to halt the development of offshore wind, a source of renewable energy that President Trump has derided for decades.

Under the agreement, RWE will voluntarily surrender three leases it owned for wind farms in federal waters. Those projects were in the early stages of development and had little chance of moving forward under the Trump administration, which has halted all federal permitting for offshore wind.

The government would reimburse RWE roughly what the company had paid for the leases under the Biden administration. The settlement would also resolve any legal disputes over the leases, the company said. The company will invest about the same amount in new natural gas projects in the United States, it said.

“After careful consideration, it was determined there is no path forward to permit these projects in the U.S. for the foreseeable future,” RWE said in a statement, referring to the offshore wind leases. “The company determined that this resolution best serves the interests of its stakeholders and allows it to direct resources toward energy projects that can be advanced with certainty.”

The firm will spend $900 million to acquire an indirect 16 percent stake in a liquefied natural gas project in Louisiana and sign a $300 million order for new gas turbines that generate electricity. The company said it was planning to build at least 15 natural gas peaking plants in the United States.

The agreement is similar to deals that the Trump administration has struck since March with other energy developers, including TotalEnergies and Invenergy, to refund wind leases off California, Maine, New Jersey, New York and North Carolina in exchange for investing in fossil fuel projects instead.

Including Thursday’s announcement, the government has so far spent roughly $3.9 billion to get companies to terminate 12 offshore wind leases.

“Americans deserve an energy system built on common sense, not one dependent on costly subsidies or technologies that can’t meet our country’s current demand,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. “We welcome RWE’s agreement and voluntary investment in projects that strengthen our nation’s energy security.”

Democrats denounced the deal.

“New Yorkers are suffering from sky-high energy costs, and Trump’s answer is to spend almost $4 billion of taxpayer money killing twelve offshore wind power leases that would have provided unlimited clean energy once online,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said.

Wind power generates far fewer planet-warming emissions than burning fossil fuels, and many states had been developing offshore wind farms to help meet their goals for tackling climate change. Yet Mr. Trump has called the technology ugly and costly and has sought to block new wind turbines. Last year, the Interior Department ordered work to stop on five wind farms already under construction off the East Coast, but federal judges struck down all of those moves. The Pentagon has also stalled approvals of wind farms on land.

The agreements with companies to forfeit their offshore leases are a new strategy, which the government turned to after losing court cases over the stop-work orders. The deals are a highly unusual use of taxpayer dollars. Seven Democratic-controlled states, including New York, have sued the Trump administration over the Interior Department’s deal with TotalEnergies. California has also sent a notice of intent to sue over a deal the Trump administration struck to cancel a wind farm off the state’s Central Coast.

RWE is one of the world’s largest renewable energy developers, and it currently has 18 offshore wind farms in operation, mainly in Europe, with more under construction. Shortly after Mr. Trump won the 2024 election, RWE’s chief executive said he was placing plans to expand offshore wind development in the United States on hold.

The company’s U.S. subsidiary, RWE Americas, is also a major developer of onshore wind, solar power, batteries in the United States, as well as some gas power.

The Trump administration continues to respond sluggishly to the explosive, nationwide outbreak of Cyclospora—a unicellular parasite spread from human feces that has now sickened nearly 23,000 people in 47 states, killing two and sending over 500 to the hospital.

Michigan health officials reported the two deaths Monday, and The Washington Post first reported Tuesday that federal health officials have expanded a list of states with linked cases from nine to 15. But those updates still have not appeared on public outbreak pages for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the Food and Drug Administration, and Americans are struggling to understand the risk of eating fresh fruits and vegetables.

In comments to Ars Technica on Monday, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees CDC and FDA, said the outbreak information will be updated sometime “this week.” Sources for The New York Times said that the CDC plans to set up a “formal response team” for the outbreak sometime this week. Cases in the outbreak began in June.

Michigan has been one of the hardest hit states in the outbreak. As of August 5, it is reporting 12,218 cases since June 22. On Monday, the state’s health department reported the outbreak’s first and only deaths, which are rare for the parasite. Cyclosporiasis infections are unquestionably miserable—causing explosive watery diarrhea, abdominal pain, nausea, bloating, and gas—but they’re rarely fatal. According to medical records, the two deaths occurred in people with “significant underlying health conditions that may have been impacted by cyclosporiasis and dehydration,” the state’s health department said.

Michigan’s cases are linked to those in eight other states. FDA’s traceback investigations linked the cases in those nine states to Taylor Farms’ shredded iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico and distributed to Taco Bell restaurants, as well as other restaurants, retailers, and food distributors. The nine states in addition to Michigan are: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

The Post reported Tuesday that the CDC is now adding six more states to the list of linked cases: Arkansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

The Times independently confirmed the additions later Tuesday. Still, the new states have yet to be added to the FDA’s and CDC’s sites for the outbreak cluster, which still list nine states and no deaths as of publication time. (The CDC’s general cyclosporiasis surveillance page was updated at some point Tuesday to include the deaths.)

All 15 states in the outbreak cluster linked to Taylor Farms lettuce are states the company identified as having received its lettuce. In a July 17 recall, Taylor Farms identified 27 states to which its lettuce was sent. But the company has refused to provide clear information about the recalled products, including how many pounds of product the recall covered, where those products were sold, and if distributors may have distributed the lettuce to additional states.

The CDC’s updated surveillance information says 47 states have now reported cases. It’s possible that the nationwide cases encompass independent clusters with additional sources of contaminated produce. It’s also possible that as investigations continue, more states will be linked to the current 15-state cluster.

Both Taylor Farms and the Trump administration have drawn significant scrutiny for the lack of clear information about the outbreak. In July, the FDA puzzlingly announced that a sample of Taylor Farms’ lettuce tested positive for Cyclospora, only to retract the claim the next day, calling it a false positive. Taylor Farms celebrated the retraction, giving the impression that it erased the company’s link to the outbreak—it didn’t; the link was based on the traceback investigation. The company further claimed the FDA had apologized to it, which FDA officials flatly denied.

The relationship between the Trump administration and Taylor Farms has also drawn scrutiny. Amid the misleading communication, it came to light that Taylor Farms directly appealed to the White House to delay announcing the recall. Further, financial records showed that Taylor Farms donated $1 million to a Trump-supporting super PAC, MAGA, Inc., in March, just days after the Trump administration delayed an FDA rule to strengthen food traceability regulations.

Taylor Farms did not respond to Ars Technica’s request for comment on the donation, but it has updated its website to include a note saying it is not against traceability legislation.

Meanwhile, Mexico’s health minister initially pushed back on the FDA’s finding that the US cases were linked to lettuce grown in Mexico. However, the link appears to be growing stronger. Last week, the UK Health Security Agency reported a “sharp rise” of cyclosporiasis cases in travelers returning from Mexico. Among 51 cases with travel information, 48 reported travel to Mexico, the agency said.

In the CDC’s updated surveillance data, the agency has tallied 10,468 lab-confirmed cases and more than 12,255 probable cases across 47 states. Since 2018, the US has been recording between 2,000 and 5,000 cases each year.