The journalist Anna Merlan brought the story up to date in a deeply reported 2019 book, “Republic of Lies,” in which she argued that in recent decades, conspiracy theories entered into mainstream politics. Unlike earlier eras when conspiracy theorists were mostly powerless outsiders, they are now central — and increasingly normalized — figures in American political and cultural life.

Donald Trump is the main character in this story, having come to power and returned to power after aggressively promoting birtherism, election fraud and many other conspiracies. He has also brought into the mainstream people like Alex Jones and Kash Patel, who have trafficked in even more extreme theories and insinuations. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, spread the lie that Hillary Clinton was connected to child sex rings.

The challenge for Trump is that, having long fanned the flames of anti-statism and anti-elitism, he now sits in the White House, running the state and its elites. His administration has released thousands of files about the murders of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

There were no smoking guns revealing any major conspiracy, but no one in the administration can quite bring themselves to admit that. It would suggest that prior administrations and elites had not in fact been lying to the American people. But to do that is to lose credibility with their base.

Trump is an artful politician who knows how to handle his base. But this time it is proving tough even for him — perhaps because he clearly had some kind of relationship with Epstein. He has tried to deflect attention by raising other conspiracy theories — chiefly, that Obama tried to organize a coup against him.

He brought up old allegations about Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But they all have the feeling of desperation about them.

As Charlie Warzel notes in The Atlantic, on July 20, when the questions about Epstein were mounting, Trump posted on Truth Social 33 times. He demanded that the Washington Commanders football team change its name back to the Redskins and shared an AI-generated video of Obama being handcuffed by the FBI in front of a smiling Trump in the Oval Office.

Patel, the FBI director, recently claimed on Joe Rogan’s podcast that he has found a secret vault in the FBI, full of dark secrets no one had ever seen. Forget about Epstein, they seem to be saying; it turns out there are hundreds more conspiracy theories to dangle in front of the MAGA faithful.

Trump’s ferocious response to the Epstein affair will likely only deepen the public’s distrust toward institutions and politicians, create more online radicalization, and further hollow out our polarized political ecosystem. But he is playing with fires that may for the first time, if not consume him, then burn him badly.

President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the “Winning the AI Race” summit hosted by All‑In Podcast and Hill & Valley Forum at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on July 23 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

As they seek to quell a revolt in their base over the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Donald Trump and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard have offered MAGA voters some tantalizing alternate programming: The prospect of charging Barack Obama with orchestrating a treasonous plot to undermine Trump’s first presidency.

The biggest problem with that is the sheer lack of evidence of any wrongdoing by Obama and other former officials. But even if the Trump administration produced a smoking gun, they’d have to contend with the issue of immunity for former presidents.

Backing up a second, the idea Gabbard has promoted is that Obama pushed for manufactured intelligence about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election to undercut Trump before he took office. The whole thing rests on a series of conflations and misleading claims.

And the biggest findings in that intelligence have been affirmed over and over again, including by Republicans and including by Trump’s now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a major 2020 Senate report. If people who said this stuff engaged in a coup, wasn’t Rubio also complicit?

But again, even if we set all that aside, there’s the problem that Obama might well be immune from any such prosecution — thanks in no small part to Trump himself.

Trump and Co. spent much of 2024 arguing that presidents should be immune from virtually any criminal charges. And they succeeded in large enough part at the Supreme Court that it seems unlikely their allegations — even if merited — could result in criminal prosecution for Obama.

Despite Trump’s and Gabbard’s suggestions that Obama could be charged, Trump’s own lawyers argued that such threats of prosecution were unthinkable because they would so hamstring a president.

“Without presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, there can be no presidency as we know it,” D. John Sauer, then Trump’s personal lawyer and now his solicitor general, told the Supreme Court.

Sauer even left open the idea that a president could order his political opponents to be assassinated and not face charges, because that act would be an official act of the president.

The Supreme Court didn’t go quite that far, but it did give the presidency a broad new grant of immunity.

So would that immunity apply to Obama?

The Supreme Court said actions taken under a president’s core executive powers are immune. Beyond that, a president has the presumption of immunity for any actions that are “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility” — that is, actions that are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.”

That’s just the presumption, not actual immunity. But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in the opinion set a high bar for when immunity wouldn’t apply. He said that, at a minimum, the president’s “outer perimeter” official acts must be immune unless the government proving its case “would pose no ‘dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.’”

Precisely what all this means has been the subject of plenty of debate. It wasn’t clear what it meant for Trump’s Jan. 6-related prosecutions, which were the impetus for the ruling. Prosecutors and judges scrambled to reckon with what evidence and charges remained valid, but the cases never reached trial after Trump was elected.

“Assuming this nonsense is true, if Obama were acting in his official capacity in merely communicating with his intelligence folks about Russian interference, clear immunity,” Harvard University law professor Richard Lazarus said. “But if the allegation is that Obama was stepping outside that role and acting in his personal capacity to help Clinton’s campaign, then not so clear.”

Still, it would be easier for Obama to argue that the actions in question were part of his official duties than it was for Trump to assert his efforts to overturn election results were presidential acts. Elections are largely conducted by the states and the president doesn’t have a defined role.

White House Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard talks to reporters in the Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House on July 23 in Washington, DC.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

In Obama’s case, the basis of Trump’s and Gabbard’s allegations is that he was participating in manufacturing intelligence reports. But would asking for intelligence not be part of his core (and theoretically immune) powers? And even if it’s somehow not, wouldn’t it be in the “outer perimeter” of his official duties, where the bar for getting past immunity is higher?

“Communicating with intelligence officials would seem to fall into the scope of official duties,” UCLA law professor Rick Hasen said.

Hasen also noted that any theoretical charges would have to overcome a major problem stemming from the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States: They couldn’t use official acts as evidence to prove the crime.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked repeatedly about this Wednesday at a briefing, and she punted multiple times on whether immunity applied to Obama.

“I’ll leave that to the Department of Justice,” Leavitt eventually said.

All of this might seem academic. It still seems a distant possibility that Trump and his Justice Department would ever press forward with trying to prosecute Obama. Trump makes these claims a lot and they tend to fall away. Judging by how his media allies are covering the Obama allegations much more than the saga over the Jeffrey Epstein files, it would seem this served as a temporary distraction.

But it’s also just so discordant. Trump and his lawyers argued that presidents had to be fully immune because it was absolutely essential to the executive job. Then he turns around and, just more than a year later, suggests those standards shouldn’t be applied to his predecessor for actions that appear much more official than Trump’s own.

By the logic of Trump’s lawyers, Obama in 2016 could have done much more than just massage intelligence reports; he could have put out a hit on Trump, and still possibly have been immune.

It’s almost like Trump’s view was always: Immunity for me, not for thee.

 

 

The United States and the European Union avoided the worst-case scenario: a damaging, all-out trade war between allies that threatened to raise prices on a large number of goods and slow two of the world’s largest economies. The framework delivered a sense of relief for both sides – but few are cheering the arrangement itself.

The agreement, which sets a 15% tariff on most European goods entering the United States, is higher than the 10% tariff Trump put in place on April 2 and significantly higher than the average of around 1.2% from before Trump’s presidency. But it’s significantly less than the enormous numbers Trump had been threatening if an agreement wasn’t reached.

A deal with the United States felt like an impossibility in late May. Frustrated by a lack of progress in negotiations with the 27-member European Union, Trump on May 24 told the world he was done talking to some of America’s strongest allies.

“Our discussions with them are going nowhere!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

“I’m not looking for a deal,” he said later that day in the Oval Office. “We’ve set the deal — it’s at 50%.”

The statement — and the shockingly high tariff threat — stunned European trade negotiators and rallied Europe’s leaders into action. They quickly agreed to kick talks into high gear.

Trump, who has taken a particular liking to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, was swayed after she called him to say the EU would commit to moving “swiftly and decisively.” Trump soon backed off his threat and said negotiations would continue.

But a deal between the United States and the European Union, one of America’s top trading partners, had remained elusive for months. The two sides squabbled over America’s insistence on high tariffs for steel and aluminum, looming tariffs on pharmaceuticals and the tariff floor for virtually all goods that the Trump administration appears set to raise to 15%.

Negotiators were unable to come up with a resolution before the initial July 9 deadline — one of the reasons the Trump administration postponed the effective day for its “reciprocal” tariffs to August 1. With just days to go before the extended deadline, while Trump was visiting Scotland, he met with van der Leyen and finalized a framework for an agreement — one that was thin on details, heavy on caveats, but was nevertheless a hard-sought relief for both sides.

Avoiding the worst

With the agreement in place, two of the world’s largest economies avoided a potential economically crippling trade war. The United States held a 50% tariff threat over Europe’s head, and Europe threatened America with strategic retaliatory tariffs that threatened to damage key US industries.

Both sides appeared to embrace the fact that a deal was in place more than they celebrated it.

“We made it,” Trump said while announcing the deal with von der Leyen. “It’s going to work out really well.”

“I think we hit exactly the point we wanted to find,” von der Leyen said. “Rebalance but enable trade on both sides. Which means good jobs on both sides of the Atlantic, means prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic and that was important for us.”

Markets cheered, somewhat: Dow futures rose 150 points, or 0.3%, poised to open near record territory. S&P 500 futures gained 0.3% and Nasdaq futures were 0.4% higher.

The United States and Europe “seem to have avoided a self-destructive trade war for now in the biggest and deepest commercial and investment relationship the global economy knows,” said Jörn Fleck, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

Nevertheless, the details remain murky. Europe will increase its investment in the United States by $600 billion and commit to buying $750 billion worth of US energy products. It eliminates tariffs on a variety of items, including aircraft and plane parts, semiconductors, generic drugs and some chemicals and agricultural products.

Maury Obstfeld, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, note many of those investments were already in place. And the agreement appears to do little to eliminate the EU’s non-tariff barriers, such as value-added and digital taxes that the Trump administration had railed against.

“There are many things that puzzle me about this agreement,” Obstfeld said.

Industries in the zero-tariff arrangement cheered.

“The zero-for-zero tariff regime will grow jobs, strengthen our economic security and provide a framework for U.S. leadership in manufacturing and safety,” Airlines for America said in a statement.

But the 15% baseline tariff applies to most goods, so the EU member states – and American importers — will have to come to terms with the fact that higher tariffs will raise prices for European goods in America.

“You’re going to pay more for your European imports. That’s what this means,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “This doesn’t enhance trade, this just sets a tax on European goods in the United States.”

The agreement also deals another blow to Detroit automakers, which objected to a similar deal the Trump administration reached with Japan. The 15% auto tariff on EU cars imported to the United States undercuts the 25% tariff American automakers pay if their cars are built in Mexico.

Although von der Leyen said pharmaceuticals were included in the early framework, she acknowledged that Trump may ultimately place higher tariffs on drugs imported to the United States, undercutting the agreement.

Still, in the eyes of the hard-working negotiators — and for the sake of the global economy — a deal is better than no deal.

“We avoid a tit-for-tat retaliation between Washington and Brussels that would’ve spilled over into the far more important services sector,” Brusuelas said.

Now comes the hard part: figuring out the details.

President Donald Trump over the weekend called for the prosecution of music superstar Beyoncé – based on something that did not actually happen.

Trump claimed in a social media post that Beyoncé broke the law by supposedly getting paid $11 million for her endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris during an October 2024 event in Houston. But there is simply no basis for Trump’s claim that Beyoncé received an $11 million payment related to the Harris campaign, let alone for the endorsement in particular.

Federal campaign spending records show a $165,000 payment from the Harris campaign to Beyoncé’s production company, which the campaign listed as a “campaign event production” expense. A Harris campaign spokesperson told Deadline last year that they didn’t pay celebrity endorsers, but were required by law to cover the costs connected to their appearances.

Regardless of the merits of this particular $165,000 expenditure, it’s far from an $11 million one. Nobody has ever produced any evidence for the claim of an eight-figure endorsement payment to Beyoncé since the claim that it was “$10 million” began spreading last year among Trump supporters on social media. Fact-check websites FactCheck.org and PolitiFact looked into the “$10 million” claim during the campaign and did not find any basis for it.

The White House did not immediately respond to a CNN request late Saturday for any evidence of Trump’s $11 million figure. When Trump previously invoked the baseless figure, during an interview in February, he described his source in the vaguest of terms: “Somebody just showed me something. They gave her $11 million.”

A Harris spokesperson referred CNN on Saturday to a November social media post by Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles, who called the claim of a $10 million payment a “lie” and noted it was taken down by Instagram as “False Information.”

“When In Fact: Beyonce did not receive a penny for speaking at a Presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harrris’s (sic) Rally in Houston,” Knowles wrote.

A spokesperson for Beyoncé told PolitiFact in November that the claim about a $10 million payment is “beyond ridiculous.”

Singer Beyonce and Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris embrace as they attend a campaign rally of Harris, in Houston, Texas, U.S., October 25, 2024.

Marco Bello/Reuters

 

What Trump wrote Sunday

Trump revived the false claim in a social media post published after midnight early Sunday morning in Scotland, where he is visiting. He wrote that he is looking at “the fact” that Democrats “admit to paying, probably illegally, Eleven Million Dollars to singer Beyoncé for an ENDORSEMENT.”

Democratic officials actually reject the claim of an $11 million payment. The White House did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for any evidence of a Democratic admission of such a payment.

Trump went on to criticize other payments from the Harris campaign to organizations connected to prominent endorsers. He asserted without evidence that these payments were inaccurately described in spending records. And he wrongly asserted that it is “TOTALLY ILLEGAL” to pay for political endorsements, though no federal law forbids endorsement payments.

Trump concluded: “Kamala, and all of those that received Endorsement money, BROKE THE LAW. They should all be prosecuted! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Trump has repeatedly called for the prosecution of political opponents. His Saturday post about Harris and celebrity endorsements was an escalation from a post in May, when he said he would call for a “major investigation” on the subject but did not explicitly mention prosecutions.

A Supreme Court decision last month limiting the use of nationwide injunctions appeared to pave the way for President Donald Trump to begin enforcing his plan to end birthright citizenship on Sunday — until lower courts stalled the effort.

The president could have begun enforcement if lower courts had significantly modified a series of injunctions ahead of a 30-day deadline given by the justices. But that hasn’t happened. In fact, lower court judges have gone in a different direction, preventing Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship from taking effect now — and possibly ever — through three new adverse rulings. And more lower court decisions against the administration may be coming.

A federal judge in New Hampshire earlier this month blocked Trump’s order nationwide via a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Such lawsuits are one of the ways the Supreme Court suggested challengers could try to jam up enforcement of the policy for those who would be impacted by it.

The Justice Department has not appealed that ruling from US District Judge Joseph LaPlante, who was appointed to the bench by former President George W. Bush.

The administration was further stymied last week, after a federal appeals court decided that a nationwide injunction issued by a judge in Seattle earlier this year against Trump’s order did not represent a judicial overreach that needed to be curbed in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The Supreme Court ordered lower courts that issued or kept intact such broad injunctions to reconsider those rulings to see whether they comply with the justices’ decision that such injunctions may not be needed to provide litigants with the “complete relief” they’re seeking.

“We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a universal injunction in order to give the states complete relief,” the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 2-1 decision in a case brought by several Democratic-led states against Trump’s order.

The administration has not yet appealed that ruling. The 9th Circuit’s decision may soon bring the birthright issue back before the Supreme Court, since the appeals court had also reviewed the merits of the executive order and found that it was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s June 27 decision did not address the legality of the policy, only the use of nationwide injunctions.

Yet another blow came on Friday, when US District Judge Leo Sorokin decided that his earlier nationwide injunction against the birthright policy could not be narrowed in a way that would “feasibly and adequately protect” against the harms that more than a dozen Democratic state attorneys general, the District of Columbia and several cities said would befall them if the policy could be enforced, even partially.

In that ruling, Sorokin, an appointee of former President Barack Obama who sits on the federal bench in Boston, repeated his conclusion that Trump’s order “is unconstitutional and contrary to a federal statute.”

President Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 27, following a Supreme Court ruling that limits the application of birthright citizenship.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

It’s not clear whether, absent those three rulings this month, the policy could have taken effect this weekend. In court, attorneys for the administration have avoided providing specifics when speaking about what would happen once the 30-day pause from the Supreme Court is lifted.

“It’s an unusual situation, what the Supreme Court did,” DOJ attorney Eric Hamilton said earlier this month to Sorokin.

It’s possible Trump may never be able to fully implement his order. Every lower court in the US to scrutinize the policy has found it unconstitutional.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday issued another major blow to President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, ruling that it’s unconstitutional and upholding a nationwide block against the controversial policy.

The 2-1 ruling from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals is significant because the Supreme Court late last month ordered lower courts to take a second look at a set of nationwide injunctions issued earlier this year that halted Trump’s implementation of his Day One order to ensure they weren’t broader than necessary.

The San Francisco-based appeals court decided that one such injunction issued by a federal judge in Seattle in a case brought by a group of Democratic-led states did not represent a judicial overreach that needed to be reined in.

“The district court below concluded that a universal preliminary injunction is necessary to provide the states with complete relief. We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a universal injunction in order to give the states complete relief,” appeals court Judge Ronald Gould wrote for the majority.

“The states would suffer the same irreparable harms under a geographically-limited injunction as they would without an injunction,” Gould, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, added, explaining that a narrower injunction would require the states that challenged the law to overhaul their eligibility verification systems for various social services programs.

Wednesday’s decision also represents the first time an appeals court has fully concluded that Trump’s order is unconstitutional. The Trump administration has the option of asking the full 9^th Circuit to review the case, but it could also appeal the matter straight to the Supreme Court.

“The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,” Gould wrote in the ruling, which was joined by appeals court judge Michael Hawkins, also a Clinton appointee.

He went on to say that Trump’s order contradicts the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution, an 1898 Supreme Court case known as United States v. Wong Kim Ark and decades of Executive Branch practice.

Trump’s order is already blocked on a nationwide basis after a federal judge in New Hampshire barred enforcement of it against any babies who would be impacted by the policy in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Such lawsuits are one of the ways the Supreme Court said plaintiffs can still try to broadly block Trump’s order.

Appeals court Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, partially dissented from the court’s ruling on Wednesday. He said he didn’t think the states who challenged Trump’s order had the legal right — known as “standing” — to bring the lawsuit in the first place. As a result, he said, he thought it was “premature to address the merits of the citizenship question or the scope of the injunction.”

US District Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee in Seattle, was the first federal judge to block Trump’s order. When he first issued an emergency order preventing enforcement of it in late January, he said it was “blatantly unconstitutional.”

House Republicans gave the final stamp of approval early Friday morning to a package of $9 billion in spending cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting, handing a win to President Donald Trump.

Congress passed the package — which is part of Trump’s cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency efforts — under an obscure presidential budget law used to circumvent the Senate filibuster. The measure will now head to the president to be signed into law.

Trump is the first president in roughly 30 years to successfully use the maneuver, in a show of deference to the White House from the legislative branch – which is specifically given the power of the purse in the US Constitution.

President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

Nathan Howard/Reuters

Roughly $8 billion will be taken from congressionally approved foreign aid programs as part of the White House’s efforts to dismantle the US Agency for International Development. Another $1.1 billion comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund NPR and PBS.

The final tally was 216-213, with GOP Reps. Mike Turner and Brian Fitzpatrick the only Republicans to vote against the package.

The spending cuts package, which codifies some of DOGE’s cuts into law, was a key priority for Trump and conservatives who have long railed against ballooning federal spending.

Ahead of final passage, however, the package ran into problems in the narrowly divided House, as some of the same members demanded a separate and unrelated promise from GOP leadership calling for more transparency on the Jeffrey Epstein files.

The issue of more transparency over the Epstein case has percolated for days on Capitol Hill, placing an awkward wedge between Trump and some of his most steadfast supporters in the House GOP.Speaker Mike Johnson and his leadership team spent hours on Thursday afternoon with members of the House Rules Committee negotiating over the path forward.

Ultimately, the committee voted Thursday night to advance the DOGE cuts package as well as a non-binding resolution that calls for the release of additional Jeffrey Epstein files following calls from a number of Republicans for more transparency surrounding the case. There is nothing that would compel this to the floor, however.

After the House passed the DOGE cuts package, Trump, Johnson and congressional Republicans were quick to tout the move. On Truth Social, Trump said, “THIS IS BIG!!!”

The speaker said he was “delighted” to move the DOGE cuts package to the president’s desk.

“We’re going to downsize the scope of government. Government is too large. It does too many things, and it does almost nothing well. We believe in a limited government that’s accountable and efficient and effective for the people, and we’re going to continue to demonstrate that through our actions here on the floor,” he said.

But Johnson would not commit to bringing the non-binding Epstein resolution to the floor.

“We will see how all of this develops. We’re in line with the White House, there’s no daylight between us,” he said.

The spending cuts package is $400 million less than the initial package the House passed after Senators rejected a plan to cut PEPFAR, a global program to combat AIDS. But conservatives still voted for the package when it came up for its second vote in the House arguing it contained significant spending cuts in other areas of global health.

“It’s disappointing that we’re, you know, $37 trillion in debt. This, to me, was low hanging fruit. We saw how DOGE exposed a lot of this misuse of funds. It’s disappointing that the Senate took it out,” Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri said. “It’s better than nothing. So I think that at least we’re able to make some spending reductions.”

Passage of the bill, however, now raises questions about how and whether Democrats and Republicans will be able to work together to keep the government funded past the September 30 deadline. Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer argued the process has cast doubt on whether Democrats can work in good faith with Republican lawmakers who could agree to a spending deal now and pull future funding later.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks with reporters at the US Capitol on Thursday.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Schumer said that he does not “have much faith” in Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s insistence that Senate Republicans will approach government funding in a bipartisan way, after White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought said earlier on Thursday that the appropriations process should be “less bipartisan.”

“Every time they have tried to resist Trump and Vought, they have folded – as recently as last night. I don’t have much faith in that,” Schumer told CNN.

GOP appropriators argue that the rescissions package shouldn’t have any impact on those future spending talks and if it does, that is Democrats’ own choice.

“It’s up to them,” House Appropriations Chairman Tom Cole said.

President Donald Trump is not done re-litigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. And neither are his allies on Capitol Hill.

GOP Rep. Barry Loudermilk announced this week he will be leading a select subcommittee to once again investigate the incident, re-scrutinizing the work of the previous, Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee that made the case that Trump’s actions fueled violence that day.

And he told CNN it all comes at Trump’s request.

In early June, Loudermilk said, the president summoned him to the White House to understand why Republicans had not stood up a new investigation. It had been six months since the pair had spoken directly about the issue, and negotiations on Capitol Hill had been stalled for months as many in the party sought to move on.

“I got called in by the president,” Loudermilk told CNN. “We sat and talked for a while. And he was asking, ‘what is the stall?’ Because he had expected it to be done early in the year too. We talked about it, he engaged with the speaker’s office.”

Before Trump took office, he told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he wanted House Republicans to prioritize re-litigating the previous investigation into January 6, two sources familiar with the conversations told CNN. Behind the scenes, Johnson wrestled for weeks with how to implement Trump’s request while balancing moderate and vulnerable members of the GOP’s historically narrow majority who wanted the party to look ahead and focus on its agenda.

Some of the delay though was bureaucratic. Republicans could not figure out which committee would helm the investigation since it would no longer be under the House Committee on Administration and lawmakers didn’t have consensus on the direction they would take.

Johnson at one point wanted Republicans to stop investigating the former January 6 committee, including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, and narrow the GOP panel’s, according to three sources familiar with the negotiations. But Loudermilk wanted a broader mandate and to have his own subpoena power.

After Trump’s direct involvement, Loudermilk ultimately got everything he wanted, even an agreement with other committee chairs that he can look outside his current jurisdiction if needed, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

“He was part of the equation in making it happen,” the source told CNN of Trump.

Loudermilk told CNN, “The White House was clear they wanted us to continue doing what we were doing.”

CNN has reached out to the White House for comment.

This December 2024 photo shows Rep. Barry Loudermilk.

Nathan Posner/Anadolu/Getty Images

The announcement that Loudermilk would be getting his own select subcommittee with subpoena power came just as several House Republicans joined Democrats in a high-stakes vote demanding the release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. That vote drew considerably more attention – and some critics viewed Loudermilk’s move as harmful distraction.

“Loudermilk’s investigation in the Select Committee is now into its third year and they have found absolutely nothing,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat who chaired the Democrat-led Jan. 6 committee. “Continuing it is not only pathetic, it sets our democracy back. Republicans will do literally anything to protect Trump and distract from releasing the Epstein files.”

“It seems House Republicans are so desperate to talk about anything other than their Jeffrey Epstein coverup that they’re breaking out all the tired old hits,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat who served on the committee led by Thompson, said in a statement.

In the last Congress, Loudermilk zeroed in on the former Jan. 6 committee and its work product – an effort that resulted in a report recommending Cheney be prosecuted by the FBI for her role in probing the Capitol attack.

His new committee cannot officially get started until September, when lawmakers return from a five-week recess. Loudermilk will need to quickly build up a staff since much of the original staff working on the project had left given the months of delay.

This time, Loudermilk he will have a willing partner in the White House, which might be willing to turn over DOJ or other files related to Jan. 6.

“We have a friendly administration now who has already committed to work with us, to provide us whatever we’re looking for,” Loudermilk said.

With subpoena power to compel testimony and documents, which he did not have during his original investigation, Loudermilk will be less focused on the security failures at the US Capitol and more on scrutinizing the former January 6 select committee’s work. He said he will also examine law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Trump has long viewed his prosecution in connection with the events of Jan. 6 as unfair, and his adminstration has removed prosecutors from the Justice Department who worked on Jan. 6 cases.

“House Republicans are proud of our work so far in exposing the false narratives peddled by the politically motivated January 6 Select Committee during the 117th Congress, but there is clearly more work to be done,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a statement.

“I think we can move a whole lot faster at this point,” Loudermilk added.

As a new select subcommittee, Democrats will have the option to seat up to three of their own members.

White House’s novel maneuver to keep Trump ally in place as New Jersey’s top prosecutor

White House Presidential Counselor Alina Habba delivers remarks before being sworn in as the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey in the Oval Office on March 28, 2025. Habba is a former personal attorney for President Donald Trump. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s fraught effort to install political appointees in permanent roles as US attorneys across the country gained momentum this week, as Republicans work to jumpstart a stalled confirmation process in the Senate, while the White House resorted to a novel legal maneuver to keep a political ally in place as New Jersey’s top prosecutor.

Alina Habba, the Trump-appointed interim US attorney for New Jersey, resigned from her post on Thursday in an effort to keep it, after district judges for the state booted her from the job.

Habba, a former personal attorney for Trump and campaign spokesperson, said she will now be appointed as the “acting” US attorney for New Jersey. Habba’s time as interim US attorney was due to expire on Friday.

The move, according to one source familiar with the strategy, will prevent Habba’s term from expiring and nullify an effort by the state’s federal judges to name her replacement, leading to a simmering standoff between the administration and New Jerseys’ judges.

Meanwhile in the Senate, Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have offered a broad compromise to Democrats in an effort to break a blockade on the president’s slate of US attorney nominees in hopes of getting a few confirmed before the Senate leaves for its monthlong recess in August, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

A spokesperson for the Senate Judiciary Democrats declined to comment on the situation.

Administration officials were initially confident they would be able to install a slate of more than 30 US attorneys Trump nominated early in the year. But only a dozen have even moved past a preliminary committee vote and not a single nominee has received a confirmation vote on the Senate floor.

While every recent president has gotten off to a slow start moving US attorney nominees, Trump is in danger of falling even further behind, especially amid concerns over the quality of some of the more controversial nominees tapped by Trump, some of whom have never worked as prosecutors.

The clock is also running out on the interim status for many of Trump’s US attorney picks, beyond Habba. Under federal law, if the administration doesn’t fill the job and the Senate doesn’t confirm a nominee within 120 days, federal judges can select a temporary US attorney, further undermining the administration’s goal to have their own people in place.

Pressure is therefore mounting on Republicans to cut a deal with Democrats to get at least a few nominees confirmed before the Senate leaves town for a month.

“I think both sides understand that the current situation is untenable,” the source familiar with the negotiations told CNN.

Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin has since May put a blanket hold on Trump’s slate of US attorney nominees, leaving the administration without top law enforcement officials in permanent roles as it presses forward with an aggressive agenda that includes a heavy focus on immigration enforcement and violent crime.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) speaks with reporters following the Senate Democrats’ weekly policy lunch on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 11, 2025.

Nathan Howard/Reuters

Durbin has justified his blanket hold in part by arguing that then-Sen. JD Vance placed a similar hold on Democratic US attorney nominees during the Biden administration.

“Sen. Durbin continues to discuss a path forward with his Democratic and Republican colleagues,” Durbin spokesperson Josh Sorbe said in a statement to CNN.

There are now a dozen US attorney nominees ready for a floor vote, after seven were passed out of committee on Thursday. That includes former Fox News personality Jeanine Pirro, who is in line to be the top federal prosecutor in Washington, DC.

While US attorney nominees usually receive broad bipartisan support, some of Trump’s nominees have made that more difficult.

In comments on Thursday, even Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledged that some of the president’s nominees are “controversial.”

“As chairman, I try to be fair to all members of the committee, even during controversial nominations. And we have plenty of them and have had plenty of them as well,” Grassley said.

The drama has been particularly acute in New Jersey, where the Justice Department spent much of the week engaged in a bitter standoff with the state’s federal judges over who will be the state’s top prosecutor.

Dramatic move in New Jersey

With Habba facing an unlikely road to confirmation in the Senate, and her interim status set to expire Friday, federal judges on Tuesday tapped Desiree Leigh Grace, a top federal prosecutor, to take over the office.

The Justice Department immediately said it was removing Grace, though she vowed to take over the job next week. To do so, Grace would’ve had to be sworn in by a federal judge just after midnight Friday after Habba’s interim term expired. But Habba short-circuited all that by resigning on Thursday, trading in her interim status as New Jersey’s US attorney to an “acting” role, thus (in theory) restarting the clock on how long she can serve.

“Donald J. Trump is the 47th President,” Habba posted on Twitter on Thursday. “Pam Bondi is the Attorney General. And I am now the Acting United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey.”

Habba continued: “I don’t cower to pressure. I don’t answer to politics.”

Habba and the Justice Department both declined to comment when reached by CNN. Grace did not respond to CNN’s request for additional comment.

Early optimism fades

The White House had hoped to avoid all this.

In the early days of Trump’s second term, the administration worked to compile a slate of nominees to lead some of the 93 US attorneys’ offices across the country. Top Justice Department officials, with input from the White House, selected dozens of nominees they believed could carry out the president’s agenda – specifically on immigration and violent crime.

While senior officials were initially confident they would be able to get these nominees confirmed, the process stalled earlier this year amid the disastrous attempt to force through the confirmation of Trump’s nominee to lead the DC US Attorney’s Office, Ed Martin.

Martin’s nomination was riddled with controversies. He had to repeatedly update his mandated disclosure forms to Congress and came under fire over his previous praise of a Capitol rioter who is an alleged Nazi sympathizer.

In the end, Martin’s nomination was pulled and Trump in his place nominated Pirro, who is not without controversy herself following her years as a Fox News personality.

US attorneys are the top law enforcement officials in each of the 93 judicial districts across the country. They play an important role in prosecuting federal crimes and defending the government in civil litigation. They are also key to implementing the president’s agenda at the local level.

“So much of our public focus is on the attorney general, and rightly so. However, the real engines who drive DOJ’s day to day work and case making on a district-by-district basis, are the US attorneys. Each US attorney essentially runs one of those districts, and has very broad autonomy in how that office functions,” said Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor and CNN senior legal analyst.

While nominees can serve temporarily on an interim or acting basis without getting Senate confirmation, it’s less than ideal, said Honig.

“There’s a big impact where you have a non-confirmed US attorney, especially if there’s flux and uncertainty. If you’re going from one acting to another, interim back to the other acting, it causes chaos in those offices,” Honig said. “It causes a lack of stability, a lack of a sense of mission. It undermines morale in those offices.”

Data from the Partnership for Public Service, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for an effective government workforce, shows that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were the only modern presidents able to get nominees confirmed by the six-month mark. Trump, in his first term, did not have any US attorneys confirmed after the first six months.

Max Stier, PPS’s president and CEO, notes that it is significant that in his second term Trump was quick to put up nominations, but that has not resulted in swift confirmations.

“Instead of being ahead of the curve, they are now behind the curve,” Stier said.

Stier noted though that the pace of nominations is not what is slowing the administration from filling vacancies; it’s the nature of the nominees.

“It’s not just a numbers game that we’re watching this administration, even unlike the first Trump administration, is putting forward extraordinarily partisan and unqualified candidates for these positions, and it’s not just in the District of Columbia,” Stier said.

Stier points to other examples including Habba, who has worked as Trump’s personal attorney and campaign spokesman but never as a prosecutor.

John Sarcone, Trump’s pick for US attorney in Northern New York, has also been criticized for not having any prosecutorial experience.

“I do think the extra element that’s added here of consequence is the deeply flawed nature of a consequential number of the candidates that are being put up by this administration,” Stier said.

Acting US attorneys can still carry out the president’s agenda without being confirmed by the Senate, but there are downsides.

“I think his real view is that acting officials are people that don’t have the oversight by the United States Senate and by the public through that process, and so that allows to put in place people who either shouldn’t or would exact a political cost to actually get confirmed,” Stier said.

Senators have the option to personally request a confirmation that has been otherwise blocked or delayed in a process called “blue slipping,” but a senior administration official told CNN: “Unless there is a deal struck, in blue states we are not going to get any blue slips.”

One notable example is how Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declined to offer a blue slip for Jay Clayton, who was tapped to be US attorney in the Southern District of New York even though he is the former head of the SEC. “It’s pretty crazy,” the official said.