Democrats respond to FBI agreement to locate Texas lawmakers: ‘We will not be intimidated’
Democrats have responded to the news earlier that the FBI has agreed to assist local law enforcement to track down Democratic lawmakers who left the state to break quorum in protest of the state’s GOP-drawn congressional map.
It comes after Republican Senator John Cornyn’s statement earlier, praising FBI director Kash Patel for his support.
Hakeem Jeffries lambasted the move in a post on X.
“The Trump administration continues to weaponize law enforcement to target political adversaries,” the House minority leader wrote. “We will not be intimidated.”
Meanwhile, Illinois governor JB Pritzker underscored on a podcast on Wednesday that Texas lawmakers hadn’t broken any laws. He also said that any arrests by FBI agents would be “unwelcome” in his state.
“They’re grandstanding, there’s literally no federal law applicable to this situation,” he added.
Key events
White House signals increase in federal law enforcement in DC – report
The Trump administration plans to increase the federal law enforcement presence in Washington DC, as early as Friday morning, CBS News reports.
The move follows the alleged assault of former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer Edward Coristine over the weekend.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, President Trump said that he may place DC under federal control if the city doesn’t “get its act together, and quickly.”
Officers will come from the DC National Guard, FBI, US Marshals, ICE, US Secret Service and other components of the Department of Homeland Security, according to an official who spoke with the news outlet.
A White House official told CBS News that the increased federal law enforcement presence on DC streets would begin at midnight Thursday and would focus on tourist areas and other known hotspots.
Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and several lawmakers on Thursday called for a congressional hearing to “prioritize the individuals who survived the horrific abuse associated with Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and their associates”.
In a letter to chair James Comer of the House committee on oversight and government reform, representatives Ro Khanna, Raja Krishnamoorthi, Robert Garcia and others said that survivors must be given the opportunity to share their stories in order to support their healing and to ensure a transparent investigation.
“If the Committee is to conduct credible oversight, it must hear directly from survivors, or their representatives, who volunteer to advance our investigation on their own terms,” reads the letter. “Some survivors have expressed a clear willingness and desire to come before Congress, and the Committee cannot meet their strength and bravery with inaction.”
Texas Republicans ask court to make Illinois police arrest Democrats who broke quorum
The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton and state house speaker Dustin Burrows have filed a lawsuit in Illinois to enforce arrest warrants against Democratic lawmakers who left Texas to block Republicans from enacting a gerrymandered congressional map that would likely add five more Republican seats before next year’s midterm elections.
The civil petition was filed in an Adams county, Illinois, circuit court, and more than 30 Texas Democratic members are named in the suit. Other Democrats are staying in New York and Massachusetts.
“We are pursuing every legal remedy at our disposal to hold these rogue legislators accountable,” said Paxton. “Texas deserves representatives who do their jobs instead of running away at the behest of their billionaire handlers.”
State representative John Bucy III from Austin condemned the move, and said that Paxton and Burrows were using “the justice system to hunt down their political opponents and silence the voices of millions of Texans and Americans across the country”.
“It’s now more clear than ever that Republicans are scared,” he added. “They’re scared of the voters. They’re scared of being held accountable.”
During an interview with Fox News, Benjamin Netanyahu said the New York Times “should be sued” after the newspaper amended an article about starvation in Gaza to include that a child featured in the story, Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, had a pre-existing medical condition that affects his appearance, in addition to having severe malnutrition.
The Times responded to the prime minister of Israel via a statement on X, asserting that “attempts to threaten independent media providing vital information and accountability to the public are unfortunately an increasingly common playbook”.
“Journalists continue to report from Gaza for The Times, bravely, sensitively, and at personal risk, so that readers can see firsthand the consequences of the war,” the statement reads.
Obtaining food in Gaza has become an increasingly difficult and deadly endeavor. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, many of them by Israeli forces, while heading toward aid sites. More than 20,000 children were admitted for treatment for acute malnutrition between April and mid-July, with more than 3,000 severely malnourished, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification.
The Guardian made a separate comment when we first published the picture on the homepage and the front of the print edition.
Lauren Gambino
Texas representative Greg Casar, a Democrat, told supporters he understands the urge to not be “alarmist” about what is taking place across the country. But, he said, he worries the US press is not doing enough to make the stakes clear for Americans.
“Think about if it was another country and the corrupt president of that country wanted to change the election laws at the last minute, and he got a political ally to threaten to arrest using federal law enforcement, the entire opposition party who’s getting in the way, and even threatened to use the judicial system to expel the entire other political party from office. You would say democracy is on its last legs in that other country,” Casar, chair of the Progressive caucus, said on an organizing call Thursday night. “But that’s not some other country. That’s the United States. That’s what we’re facing right now in Texas.”
“This is what authoritarianism starts to look like,” he added. “They’re wannabe dictators, and we’ve got to keep them wannabes and not let them further consolidate their power.”
Lauren Gambino
Texas representative Lloyd Doggett opposes partisan gerrymandering on principle. But on Thursday, he was urging Californians to “raise” an effort by their governor to “fight fire with fire” and counter Republicans’ attempt to redraw Texas’s congressional map to gain five seats.
Putting his own spin on the adage “two wrongs don’t make a right”, Doggett said: “Two wrongs can save our country.”
“If we play by these separate rules, Trump will rule,” he warned on the call with other state and federal lawmakers.
Not every quorum break is successful, said Doggett, who in 1979 was part of a group of Democrats dubbed the “killer bees” who hid out in a garage for days to block legislation changing the Texas presidential primary date. Republicans dropped the bill and the walkout was successful.
“It’s much more difficult to win these days with the FBI, the federal law enforcement and the state doing so much to intimidate a much larger group of House Democrats,” he said, before appealing to people in California and other blue states to support partisan redistricting efforts that would offset Texas’s actions.
“Raise this California effort,” he said. “It is our best hope to checkmate Donald Trump for what’s going wrong in Texas, and if you’re in any state where there’s a possibility of an attack by Republicans – Missouri, Indiana, Florida, of course, and several others – we need to activate every progressive voice to oppose the Texas plague from Donald Trump spreading across the country.”
Mark Oliver
Scientists decry Trump energy chief’s plan to ‘update’ climate reports: ‘exactly what Stalin did’
The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, is facing growing criticism from scientists who say their “worst fears” were realized when Wright revealed that the Trump administration would “update” the US’s premier climate crisis reports.
Wright, a former oil and gas executive, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins earlier this week that the administration was reviewing national climate assessment reports published by past administrations.
Since 2000, there have been five national climate assessment (NCA) reports, which are produced by scientists and peer-reviewed, and they are considered the gold standard report of global heating and its effects on human health, agriculture, water supplies and air pollution.
“We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports,” said Wright, who is one of the main supporters of the administration’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda to boost fossil fuels, which are the primary cause of the climate crisis.
Wright was speaking days after his agency, the Department of Energy, produced a report claiming that concern over the climate crisis was overblown. That energy department report was slammed by scientists for being a “farce” full of misinformation.
Read the full story by Mark Oliver here:
The Environmental Protection Agency will end a $7bn Biden-era grant program that sought to expand solar energy to low-income communities, administrator Lee Zeldin said in a post on X on Thursday.
“EPA no longer has the authority to administer the program or the appropriated funds to keep this boondoggle alive,” Zeldin said in a video post.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by Donald Trump last month eliminated the program’s source of funding, Zeldin added.
Cancellation of the Solar for All program had been widely expected. Since taking office in January, Trump has rolled back federal support for solar and wind energy, calling the renewable resources expensive and unreliable.
The Trump administration offered a $50m reward on Thursday for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
“Maduro uses foreign terrorist organizations like TDA (Tren de Aragua), Sinaloa and Cartel of the Suns to bring deadly drugs and violence into our country,” attorney general Pam Bondi said in a video posted on X.
In 2020, during Trump’s first term, the government offered up to $15m for information on Maduro, and then raised that reward to up to $25m in January.
Donald Trump on Thursday said he will host the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia for an “an official peace-signing ceremony” at the White House on Friday.
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said the US will also be signing bilateral economic agreements with the two countries.
The countries, both of which won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, have been at loggerheads since the late 1980s when Nagorno-Karabakh, an Azerbaijani region that had a mostly ethnic-Armenian population, broke away from Azerbaijan with support from Armenia.
Katie Miller, a top aide to Elon Musk who is married to the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is launching a podcast for conservative mothers.
“For years I’ve seen that there isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online,” she said in the announcement. “I wanted to create that space, where we have real, honest conversations with people across the political spectrum and across the world.”
Miller was aan aide for Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” and had served in Donald Trump’s first administration, Mike Pence’s communications director.
She said in her announcement she was “concluding” her time working full-time for Musk.
Democratic representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland is urging FBI agents to resist taking part in efforts to track down a group of Texas Democrats who left the state to stop a Republican effort to redistrict, the Huffington Post reports.
Raskin, the top Democrat on the House judiciary committee, which conducts oversight of the FBI, said the agency has no authority to locate and investigate the state legislators as Republican senator John Cornyn claimed earlier on Thursday.
“The FBI is not a national secret police force operating at the beck and call of President Trump,” Raskin told HuffPost. “It has no legal authority to track down state legislators who are breaking no federal laws just for standing up to a Republican scheme to purge Democrats from Congress and rig our elections.”
“FBI personnel should refuse to participate in this act of political harassment and persecution,” Raskin added.
Earlier today, Cornyn said the FBI had agreed to assist in returning Texas Democratic lawmakers who left the state to block Republicans’ effort to add five more GOP seats to the state legislature through a gerrymandered congressional map. That claim could not be independently confirmed.
The Texas lawmakers who left the state are currently staying at a hotel in suburban Chicago.
The US air force said it would deny all transgender service members who have served from 15 to 18 years the option to retire early and would instead separate them without retirement benefits, the AP reports.
One air force sergeant said he felt “betrayed and devastated” by the move.
The move means that transgender service members will now be faced with the choice of either taking a lump-sum separation payment offered to junior troops or be removed from the service.
An air force spokesperson told the AP that “although service members with 15 to 18 years of honorable service were permitted to apply for an exception to policy, none of the exceptions to policy were approved”.
About a dozen service members had been “prematurely notified” that they would be able to retire before that decision was reversed, according to the spokesperson who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal air force policy.
A memo issued Monday announcing the new policy said that the choice to deny retirement benefits was made “after careful consideration of the individual applications”.
Chris Stein
Earlier, we reported that two senior FBI officials involved in a number of FBI investigations related to the president had been fired. Now, senior politics reporter Chris Stein brings us more details:
The Trump administration is forcing out a senior FBI official who resisted demands made earlier this year for the names of agents who investigated the January 6 insurrection, two people familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
Brian Driscoll briefly served as acting FBI director in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s new term, and his final day at the bureau is Friday, the people told the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to discuss the move. Further ousters were possible.
The FBI declined to comment to the Guardian.
The New York Times further reported that the FBI was forcing out Walter Giardina, a special agent who worked on cases involving Trump as well as Peter Navarro, a top trade adviser to the president who was convicted of contempt of Congress.
The ousters were the latest under the FBI director, Kash Patel, and his deputy, Dan Bongino, who had repeatedly alleged that the bureau had become politicized under Joe Biden. Numerous senior officials, including top agents in charge of big-city field offices, have been pushed out of their jobs, and some agents have been subjected to polygraph exams, moves that former officials say have roiled the workforce and contributed to angst.
Here’s the full story:
Trump administration asks supreme court to intervene after ruling on immigration profiling ban
Donald Trump’s administration turned to the US supreme court in an effort to defend its aggressive immigration raids after a federal judge in Los Angeles blocked agents from profiling individuals based on race or language in pursuit of deportation targets.
The justice department asked the supreme court in an emergency filing to lift the judge’s order temporarily barring agents from stopping or detaining people without “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the country illegally, by relying solely on their race or ethnicity, or if they speak Spanish or English with an accent.
The move comes after a federal judge last month ordered the Trump administration to halt indiscriminate immigration stops and arrests in seven California counties, including Los Angeles.