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Trump’s fiercest GOP critic became his most influential voice on war and peace

July 14, 2026 5:45am EDT / Fox News

Graham had just returned from his 10th trip to Ukraine and was days from advancing a Russia sanctions bill when he died

By Morgan Phillips Fox News

President Donald Trump pays tribute to late Sen. Lindsey Graham, ranking his defense of Brett Kavanaugh as one of the top 10 moments in congressional history.

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In 2015, Sen. Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a “jackass” and warned Republicans that nominating him would be a disaster. Trump responded by reading Graham’s personal cellphone number aloud during a campaign rally, encouraging supporters to call the South Carolina senator.

Few political rivalries seemed less likely to evolve into one of Washington’s most consequential foreign policy partnerships.

Trump rose to power promising to end America’s “endless wars” and challenging decades of Republican foreign policy orthodoxy. Graham, by contrast, remained throughout his three decades in public service an unabashed advocate of projecting American power abroad.

FROM ‘DISGRACE’ TO ‘FAMILY’: TRUMP’S REMARKABLE JOURNEY WITH LINDSEY GRAHAM

Yet over the next decade, Graham became one of the few lawmakers with regular access to President Trump on questions of national security, emerging as one of the Republican Party’s most influential voices on Iran, Ukraine, Israel and NATO.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, speaks with reporters aboard Air Force One with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on the way back to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 4, 2026.(Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)

He had built his Senate career around foreign policy. While many lawmakers spent weekends back home, Graham was often overseas meeting presidents, visiting war zones and trying to broker agreements between allies and the White House.

By the end of his career, his office had become an unofficial waypoint for foreign leaders trying to understand — or influence — the Trump administration.

In interviews following the senator’s sudden death Saturday, Trump described Graham as “like a member of the family” and said he was among the final people to speak with the South Carolina Republican after he returned from Ukraine just hours before his death.

As Trump reshaped Republican foreign policy around an “America First” agenda, Graham became one of the few congressional voices with regular access to the president on questions of war and peace. He frequently pressed Trump to maintain a muscular U.S. role abroad — even as the president questioned long-standing alliances and warned against prolonged military interventions.

Donald Trump and Lindsey Graham pose for a picture on a golf course June 28, 2025.(Sen. Lindsey Graham via X)

Rather than becoming another Republican hawk sidelined by Trump’s ascent, Graham cultivated one of the closest working relationships with the president, giving him unusual influence as the administration navigated conflicts from Ukraine and Iran to Israel and NATO.

Whether Graham simply reinforced Trump’s instincts — or helped shape them — may become one of the defining questions of his foreign policy legacy.

GRAHAM REPORTEDLY REFUSED MEDICAL HELP BEFORE SCHEDULED TV APPEARANCE

“He would call me all the time,” Trump told Fox News Monday. “I’d say, ‘Stop calling me, Lindsey.’ It was amazing. He just never stopped. He was a worker — a total workaholic politician.”

Colleagues said Graham lived and breathed the work of the Senate, particularly serving as an informal envoy between the U.S. and allies around the world.

In the hours before his death, Graham told a confidant he wasn’t feeling well but joked he couldn’t die now because he still had work to do. He was preparing to push a long-stalled bipartisan Russia sanctions bill through the Senate, remained focused on advancing Saudi-Israel normalization and believed the Trump administration had not yet finished confronting Iran.

He had just completed his 10th trip to Ukraine, and maintained tight relationships not only with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy but also with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Gulf leaders and others around the world.

Graham believed that influence came from showing up, according to Jack Keane, a retired Army four-star general, the chairman of the Institute for the Study of War and Fox News Senior Strategic Analyst.

“He wasn’t interested in writing op-ed pieces or making speeches, he wanted firsthand contact with leaders of the world.” Keane, who counted Graham as a friend, told Fox News Digital. “He was interested in getting the results.”

Graham, upon being beaten by Trump in the 2016 primary, conceded that the then-real estate mogul understood the American public better than he did .

“He understood the American people better than we did, and shame on us for not doing it as effectively as him,” Graham said at the time, according to Keane.

So Graham went to work making himself useful for the president.

“Graham knew the world better than almost anyone in Washington, and he likely knew many foreign leaders better than President Trump’s own appointees,” Keane said. “He made a conscious decision to help the president by offering advice and counsel, which grew into both a personal and professional relationship.”

Graham’s worldview was shaped alongside late Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., with whom he traveled extensively overseas. The trio —known as the “Three Amigos” — championed an interventionist Republican foreign policy rooted in American military leadership, support for democratic allies and confronting authoritarian adversaries.

Graham publicly disagreed with Trump over Iran negotiations — preferring strikes and regime change — and repeatedly pushed for a tougher line against Russia in the war on Ukraine.

Those convictions at times put him closer to traditional Republican foreign policy than to Trump’s “America First” instincts, even as he worked to remain one of the president’s closest advisors.

Trump’s approach to foreign policy often shifted between military confrontation and diplomatic restraint. Graham’s rarely did.

Sen. Lindsey Graham is pictured in Kyiv on June 10, one day before his passing.(Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)

Whenever Trump appeared to move toward a negotiated settlement with Iran, Graham followed a familiar playbook: remind the White House that Congress ultimately would have to review any lasting agreement.

After Trump announced a memorandum of understanding with Iran in June, Graham quickly argued that any lasting deal would require congressional scrutiny and even suggested Vice President JD Vance would ultimately have to defend it on Capitol Hill.

By the time of his death, Graham had fashioned exactly the role he wanted in Washington: trusted interlocutor between the White House, Congress and foreign leaders.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., described Graham as having a “kid-like exuberance about his job and the responsibilities he was given.”

“Even in his sixties he would get off a plane in a foreign land with a twinkle in his eye and look at me as if to say, can you believe we are actually here and doing this?” she wrote on X.

Very rarely in life do you get to be exactly where you want to be, when you want to be there, with who you want to be with, doing precisely what you want to do — that was every moment for Lindsey,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller wrote on X.

“Lindsey was a senator’s senator. The job was everything to him. Truly did he believe in the splendor of the office and the noble lineage behind it, of which he was the worthy heir.”

Graham rarely seemed interested in winning an argument if it meant losing the president. He spent more than a year revising his long-stalled Russia sanctions legislation and negotiating with the White House as Trump pursued his own diplomatic outreach to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Only days before his death did Graham announce that he had reached an agreement with the administration to move the bill forward.

While Trump frequently questioned the value of NATO and demanded allies shoulder more of the burden, Graham viewed America’s alliances as one of its greatest strategic advantages. He generally agreed that European nations needed to spend more on defense, but argued the alliance itself remained indispensable to deterring Russia and projecting American power.

Graham’s support for Israel was equally central to his worldview. He regarded Israel as America’s closest partner in the Middle East and spent years working to strengthen ties between Israel and Arab states, viewing Saudi-Israeli normalization as a historic opportunity to reshape the region while further isolating Iran.

Graham spent a decade proving that in Washington, proximity to power could matter as much as formal authority. Without Graham in Washington, Ukraine now fears it may have lost an indispensable advocate in Washington.

“Huge and absolutely unexpected loss,” said Oleksandr Merezhko, a lawmaker with Zelenskyy’s party, told the AP. “He was truly indispensable. I even don’t know who might be as important for us now in Trump’s entourage.”

“He was the closest link between Ukraine, our president and Trump,” he added. “Our position in Trump’s entourage might be weaker.”

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It’s unclear who will be able to usher Graham’s signature Russia sanctions bill through the Senate and onto the president’s desk with the same access to both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

For now, the president will navigate wars in Ukraine and the Middle East without the friend who was never shy about telling him to hit harder.

Facing funding losses, states call out big businesses with employees on Medicaid

July 14, 2026 / 5:00 AM EDT / KFF Health News

As the Trump administration’s January deadline looms for states to enforce a new Medicaid work requirement, some state lawmakers are turning the tables by pushing to publicly name the largest companies that have employees enrolled in the government program covering low-income and disabled people.

California lawmakers seek to revive an expired law that would require the state to identify companies that employ 100 or more people and have employees enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program. Nevada has had a similar law in place since 2017, though a proposal for one in Oregon stalled when its legislative session ended in March.

The California bill author, Democratic state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas, said she is deeply troubled by what is going to happen when work requirements kick in. According to the state, nearly 5 million out of more than 14 million residents on Medi-Cal will be subject to the requirement.

“We think this is a bill that’s about fairness,” Smallwood-Cuevas said. “It’s a basic principle that taxpayers deserve transparency about which large employers are shifting their healthcare costs onto the public.”

California state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas wants the state to identify companies that employ 100 or more people and have employees enrolled in Medi-Cal. Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Large employers that regularly top Nevada’s list, such as Walmart and Amazon, have said that the state included part-time and seasonal workers in their counts and that their full-time hourly employees make too much to qualify for Medicaid.

Walmart spokesperson Katrina Proffitt said that the company offers affordable medical coverage to most employees, including eligible part-time workers, and that most of its plans include no-cost virtual care options.

“Healthcare affordability and access to quality care remain real barriers for many Americans, and Walmart continues to be committed to being part of the solution,” Proffitt said.

The push to name and shame companies reflects dueling narratives about the biggest abusers of the joint state-federal Medicaid program, which reached nearly $932 billion in government spending in 2024. The Trump administration, led by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz, has called out blue states for not doing enough to fight insurer fraud and abuse. State Democratic leaders, meanwhile, are pushing back by calling attention to big employers that don’t offer affordable health benefits, which leaves taxpayers subsidizing healthcare costs for the low-wage workforce.

Some states have considered financial penalties. Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a bill in June to fine businesses that have at least 50 Medicaid-enrolled employees. Companies with 50 to 249 workers on Medicaid will pay $325 a year per person, and those with at least 500 will pay $725.

Bills that would have penalized companies with workers enrolled in Medicaid failed in Washington state and Colorado this year.

In Sacramento, California, Democrats want to figure out a way to make large businesses pay for their employees’ health coverage. State lawmakers struck a deal with Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is contemplating a presidential bid as he wraps up his final year in the governor’s office, to explore tax options. Any tax hike would be up to the new governor.

States face losing billions of dollars under HR 1, the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, notably through a provision that requires nondisabled Medicaid enrollees ages 19 to 64 in most states to prove they are working, volunteering, or going to school at least 80 hours a month to keep their coverage.

Yet federal work requirements are projected to increase the number of uninsured people nationwide by more than 5 million by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Nebraska and Montana have begun enforcing the rule.

One health policy researcher said employer Medicaid reports highlight the lack of affordable healthcare options available to low-wage workers. More than half of adults enrolled in Medicaid who don’t have dependent children already meet the 80-hour-a-month requirement or face challenges that would likely qualify them for an exemption, according to KFF.

“There’s a whole set of people who are working — they may not satisfy the work requirement provisions, they may not get the exemption that they’re qualified for, and they don’t have access to that employer-sponsored insurance either,” said Edwin Park, a research professor at the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University.

Employers push back

While employer lists haven’t succeeded in bringing down Medicaid costs, supporters say measuring the burden can be the first step and help lawmakers make the case for further action.

In Nevada, Amazon has employed more Medicaid enrollees than any other company since 2020, according to the state’s report published in January. For state fiscal year 2025, Walmart, the Clark County School District, the state government, and Tesla rounded out the top five.

Employers have argued that the reports are misleading because they have included part-time and seasonal employees. The state’s latest report includes only full-time employees, plus those who could not be confirmed as either full- or part-time employees.

That came to 4,914 Amazon employees and 3,503 Walmart workers in Nevada on Medicaid in 2025.

There are no penalties for companies on the list.

Amazon said it pays its workers more than double the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage and noted that Medicaid eligibility is based on household income and size rather than an individual’s wage. That means two employees who earn the same pay may have different eligibility depending on whether they have children or live with parents.

“Pointing fingers at Amazon over Medicaid is a red herring,” said spokesperson Alisa Carroll. “What really needs to happen is a significant and large increase in the federal minimum wage — that would be a big boost for American families.”

Nevada Medicaid spent nearly $950 million on healthcare for more than 133,000 full-time employees and more than 140,000 of their dependents. While the total amount spent dipped in fiscal year 2025, the average cost per member per year increased by nearly 17%.

Yvanna Cancela, a former Nevada lawmaker who sponsored the legislation on Medicaid work reports, said the annual reports force an important conversation “about whether or not this is the kind of economy we want and whether or not it is right or just that people who work full-time don’t make enough to have health insurance.”

A fraying safety net

Health researchers say that uninsured people delay or skip using healthcare and that their children may end up losing coverage, too.

One analysis found that more than 2 million fewer children were enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program this April than in January 2025. California is among the states with the steepest enrollment losses among children.

The loss in healthcare coverage among residents will be compounded by the loss of public food assistance benefits, Smallwood-Cuevas said. Her bill is pending in the legislature.

She compared Medi-Cal to a trampoline that has become a “very tattered kind of fishnet” overwhelmed by people falling into it. President Trump’s spending-and-tax law pulls and rips at the safety net, she said.

When people lose food assistance and health benefits, they must choose between paying for medicine and paying for rent, Smallwood-Cuevas said.

“We’re going to see more people in their cars, more people on the street, and a lot more people in the emergency room,” she said. “That is dangerous for all of California.”

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.

Fed’s Warsh heads to Congress after tentative steps away from Trump

2026-07-14T10:07:05.169Z / Reuters

WASHINGTON, July 14 (Reuters) – At Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s swearing-in ceremony in May, President Donald Trump was effusive about his pick to lead the U.S. central bank, pumping his fist and applauding alongside administration officials gathered in the White House.

“Go get ’em,” Trump ​said as Warsh took the podium for a roughly seven-minute address that was only a third as long as Trump’s remarks and blended compliments of the president with the new Fed chief’s ambitions for the central bank.

Just as former ‌Fed Chair Jerome Powell was noted for rebuilding the central bank’s relationship with Congress, Warsh’s potential to keep Trump’s trust could prove an important asset as he manages monetary policy through a difficult-to-read moment in the economy, and oversees a review process touching on key issues for the Fed and the country.

Warsh is expected to further draw out his plans for the Fed and thoughts about the economy during two days of testimony before lawmakers in Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday. The testimony could also show if his first weeks in office have eased concerns that, far from managing Trump, Warsh will either meet the president’s persistent demands for lower interest rates ​or face the same blowback from the White House that clouded Powell’s tenure and ultimately put the then-Fed chief under a since-abandoned criminal investigation.

At the outset at least, Warsh’s initial steps are seen as showing more distance from Trump than not, with his appointments ​to a set of task forces last week noted for the level of expertise and the absence of the sort of ideological or partisan figures brought in at other agencies.

“If people were concerned he would ⁠be a ‘sock puppet,’ those fears should have been gone after the first press conference” following the Fed’s decision to hold rates steady, when Warsh’s comments were seen, if anything, as tilted toward keeping them that way, said Jon Faust, a former top adviser to Powell and now an economics professor ​at Johns Hopkins University.

The task force appointments, “really cement that view,” tapping a group of well-known economists, corporate executives and central bankers likely to operate largely as Warsh says he intends — as neutral arbiters of key debates, some new and some ongoing, Faust said.

Warsh is scheduled to appear before ​the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Tuesday, his first public session as Fed chief with lawmakers from that chamber.

The new Fed chief will appear before the Senate Banking Committee at 10 a.m. EDT on Wednesday. That committee, also controlled by Republicans, recommended Warsh for approval to the full Senate on a party-line vote in late April, with Democrats expressing particular concerns about his relationship with Trump and whether he would be truly independent after a selection process in which the president said he would only nominate someone he was certain would cut rates.

Warsh has shown no signs that a rate cut will happen soon.

“I agree ​that he got the president’s support by giving him dovish signals,” said Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “The counterpoint is that now that Warsh is in position, he has the luxury of taking a long, impartial view … Powell successfully showed how independent a Fed chair can ​be, how political interference can only get so far. I’m sure Warsh has one eye on who Trump’s successor might be,” with his legacy and possible reappointment both at stake.

EARLY HIRES HAVE SHOWN NO PARTICULAR LEAN TO TRUMP SPHERE

If anything, Warsh has begun talking in more conditional terms about some of the things, ‌like artificial intelligence, ⁠that before his nomination he said could lower inflation and lead to lower rates.

The monetary policy report submitted to Congress last week ahead of his testimony noted that AI investment is pushing up some prices, and other Fed policymakers have noted how it may be feeding a jump in software costs that is adding inflationary pressure from a new direction.

Warsh has also acknowledged that the timing of supply-side and productivity gains from AI is uncertain, while the impact on demand for capital, skilled construction labor, and infrastructure is occurring now.

His view contrasts with that of former Fed Governor Stephen Miran, who was appointed by Trump last year to temporarily fill a seat on the central bank’s Board of Governors. Miran, who also served as the head of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, advocated either a rate cut or a larger rate cut at each of the ​six Fed meetings he attended during his roughly eight-month tenure, and dissented ​each time.

While Warsh, unlike his colleagues, did not submit an interest rate ⁠projection at the Fed’s June 16-17 meeting and does not plan to do so, since he opposes that sort of “forward guidance,” he said at his press conference that there was only a single policy proposal on the table at his first meeting as Fed chief — with no discussion of a rate cut.

Along with the task force appointments, his other early hires have shown no particular lean to Trump’s sphere or the Make ​America Great Again movement.

Paul Winfree, one of the advisers Warsh hired on contract, wrote a chapter for the controversial Project 2025 document that included ideas such as abolishing the Fed or dropping its full employment mandate, ​though he later distanced himself from proposals ⁠he said were a synthesis of thoughts from other scholars.

Daniel Heil, a conservative policy analyst who worked with Warsh at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, was tapped as interim policy adviser.

Warsh also hired John McConnell as a speechwriter. McConnell is a “pre-Trump” Republican who was a top adviser and writer for former President George W. Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney.

From the Fed staff, Warsh enlisted veteran economists Daniel Covitz, who worked with Warsh during his time as a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, and Eric Engstrom.

Like others who started out on Trump’s good side but later lost favor, Warsh’s standing with the president ⁠could be tested in ​coming months — if inflation persists, for example, and support among Warsh’s colleagues for rate hikes becomes too great to ignore. The Trump administration could also continue trying to ​fire Democratic appointees to the Fed board, including Powell, putting Warsh in the situation of either defending the institution, as his predecessor did, or angering the president.

But for now, at least, Warsh seems to be taking Trump at his word when the president at his swearing-in told him to “be totally independent. … Don’t look at me.”

“The president says he wants ​Kevin to do what he thinks is best. I don’t know if you can say how long that will last,” said former Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester. But “so far so good,” said Mester, who described the composition of the new Fed task forces as “very promising.”

Judges are getting more comfortable calling out Trump’s and the DOJ’s cynical ploys

2026-07-14T09:00:25.448Z / CNN

President Donald Trump’s ill-fated $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund suffered yet another major blow on Monday, with a federal judge delivering a brutal review of the process that led to it.

It’s part of a growing trend of judges saying rather bluntly that Trump and his Justice Department aren’t operating in good faith — and even that they’re misusing the legal process for Trump’s personal and political benefit.

The most recent is US District Judge Kathleen Williams, a Barack Obama nominee whose 56-page opinion is routinely brutal toward Trump and his DOJ’s conduct in the case that produced the now-defunct settlement.

Williams said the settlement — which included the fund that could have given money to violent January 6 defendants and also purported to give Trump amnesty from past tax issues — resulted from a lawsuit that was essentially a pretext.

She said Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the illegal leaking of his tax returns was merely meant to “provide some legitimacy” to what the administration already wanted to do with the settlement.

“This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation because the Parties were not adverse,” Williams said.

(Indeed, the main problem with Trump’s lawsuit was that the two sides of it — the personal lawyers working for Trump and the Justice Department he runs — weren’t sufficiently adversarial, and thus nobody really seemed to be fighting against what Trump wanted.)

The judge then went even further. She referred one of the private attorneys working for Trump to the Florida Bar for possible disciplinary action. She blocked another from court appearances in the Southern District of Florida for a year. And she even ordered that her opinion be included in the reviews of preexisting professional ethics complaints against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.

Blanche is currently facing confirmation hearings after Trump officially nominated him for AG.

A judge had similarly harsh rhetoric for the administration last week.

US District Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump nominee, invalidated a grand jury subpoena that sought personal information about scores of election workers in Fulton County, Georgia. The subpoena was part of an effort to scrutinize the 2020 election results that Trump has spent years claiming, without evidence, were rigged.

Ray, like Williams, suggested the proceedings were something of a ruse. He said the statutes of limitations had passed for charging any election workers even if crimes were found, thus rendering the subpoena an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”

He said the relative ease with which prosecutors can obtain subpoenas from grand juries “does not give DOJ the right to use the grand jury to do whatever the DOJ wants.”

“Everyone, whether you support the president or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the grand jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose,” Ray wrote.

In late June, another Republican-appointed judge blocked subpoenas against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other Democrats.

Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, like the other judges, suggested the true motives were political — that the Justice Department was using the subpoenas to apply pressure, in this case related to the recent effort to crack down on undocumented immigrants in Minnesota.

Schiltz wrote that “the dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so.

And another federal judge said back in March, while rejecting subpoenas during an investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, that the subpoenas had been intended to “harass and pressure” Powell into doing as Trump wanted and lowering interest rates.

These aren’t the first legal setbacks the Trump administration has faced — not by a long shot. Nor are they the first times that Trump and his side have faced harsh language.

But it’s notable that there’s a growing number of judges suggesting Trump’s administration is attempting to use the courts improperly — and how directly they say it.

Trump’s second term has featured a veritable assault of legally questionable actions that, at times, seem intended to challenge the courts to stop them.

On the surface, that throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy might not seem like a bad idea. But it risks the courts as a whole coming to believe that the administration simply isn’t a good-faith operator and isn’t even trying be a good steward of the law.

Judges seem to be getting more comfortable with reaching such conclusions.

RFK Jr. faces Hatch Act complaint after intervening in congressional races

July 14, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDT / The Washington Post

A top Senate Democrat has requested an investigation into whether the health secretary broke a law that bars political appointees from trying to influence elections.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. watches as President Donald Trump speaks at the White House on Sept. 22, 2025. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

By Dan Diamond and Isaac Arnsdorf

A top Senate Democrat has requested an investigation into whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. broke a federal law intended to prevent political appointees from interfering in elections, citing Washington Post reporting.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, filed a complaint Monday with the Office of Special Counsel, a quasi-judicial independent agency that administers the Hatch Act and other civil service rules.

The Hatch Act bars federal employees from engaging in political activity in the course of their work. Several Trump appointees in the first administration were found to have broken the law.

President Donald Trump has previously derided the Hatch Act and declined to enforce the special counsel’s recommendations.

In his complaint and accompanying letter to Jamieson Greer, the acting head of the special counsel’s office, Wyden cited examples of Kennedy encouraging a pair of third-party candidates in Iowa to drop out of contested House races so Republicans could keep control of Congress.

The Post obtained audio of Kennedy’s call with one of the candidates, in which the health secretary suggested he would serve as a liaison with the White House and could help the candidate if he left the race. A second candidate has said he received a similar call from Kennedy.

Wyden, whose committee helps oversee some of the agencies led by Kennedy, said that the Cabinet secretary’s offers to the candidates were “brazenly corrupt” and violated the Hatch Act and other laws.

“The quid pro quo offer of federal employment or other personal gain that Kennedy extended to Stewart on the June 11 phone call is conduct expressly prohibited by the Hatch Act,” Wyden wrote in his letter to Greer, which was shared with The Post.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services, which Kennedy leads, did not respond Monday to questions about Kennedy’s conversations with the candidates and whether he faced any internal repercussions once the calls came to light.

Trump mocked the Hatch Act in his first term, including after the Office of Special Counsel in 2019 recommended that Kellyanne Conway, a top Trump adviser, be removed from her post for violating the law. Conway had criticized Democratic presidential candidates while she was being interviewed by media outlets in her official capacity and tweeted about the candidates from her official account, the office concluded.

Trump ignored the office’s recommendation and kept Conway in her post.

The Hatch Act, which has been law since 1939, does not apply to the president — a fact that Trump has acknowledged in the past, including when he decided to accept the Republican nomination for president in 2020 by giving a speech at the White House.

“There is no Hatch Act because it doesn’t pertain to the president,” Trump said in August 2020.

印度就船员在霍尔木兹海峡遇害向伊朗提出抗议

2026年7月14日 18:27 / 联合早报

7月13日，船只在阿联酋东海岸附近的霍尔木兹海峡航行。 （法新社）

印度外交部星期二（7月14日）说，已就一名印度海员在霍尔木兹海峡遇害事件召见伊朗副大使，并向伊朗提出强烈抗议。

印度外交部称，遇害的印度籍海员是巴希亚号（Al Bahiyah）和蒙巴萨号（Mombasa）上的46名船员之一，这其中30名海员为印度籍。这两艘油轮在通过霍尔木兹海峡时遭到袭击。

印度外交部在一份声明中说，另有10名印度海员受伤，其中两人伤势严重。

印度对此次袭击深表关切，并表示必须停止针对中东地区商船和民用基础设施的袭击。

美国总统特朗普本月重新开始对霍尔木兹海峡的伊朗船只实施封锁，并提出收取20%的费用以维持海峡安全。

德黑兰方面称，美国无权决定霍尔木兹海峡的未来走向。

台媒：台陆军赴美参与演习 被令营外服装须去识别化

2026年7月14日 18:02 / 联合早报

台湾陆军营级部队近期赴美国受训，据报在出发前接获上级命令，要求官兵在营外活动时服装必须“去识别化”，避免引起外界注目。

据台湾《联合报》报道，台军“陆威专案”旨在派遣陆军营级部队赴美受训。今年，台湾陆军关渡地区指挥部（简称关指部）联合兵种营，获派赴美参与“北方打击”（Northern Strike）演习。

“北方打击”是由美国密歇根州国民警卫队主办的大型联合军演，重点在于跨领域实战与多国协同作战。2026年的演习分为冬季与夏季两阶段进行，演训场地涵盖格雷林营地与阿尔皮纳作战中心。

报道指出，台湾陆军今年稍早曾以旅级的地区指挥部编成指挥架构，率领联合兵种营结合特战与两栖协训部队，赴美参与“西方打击”（Operation Western Strike）演习。此次由关指部副指挥官率队参与“北方打击”，据信是台军今年赴美参演的第二波行动。

为保持低调，部队在出发前收到上级明确指令，要求营外服装全面去识别化。具体规范包括：严禁穿着带有迷彩图案的便服、发型须符合规定，且必须穿着有领上衣，极力避免在营外引起不必要的瞩目。

印度就船员在霍尔木兹海峡遇害向伊朗提出抗议

2026年7月14日 18:27 / 联合早报

7月13日，船只在阿联酋东海岸附近的霍尔木兹海峡航行。 （法新社）

印度外交部星期二（7月14日）说，已就一名印度海员在霍尔木兹海峡遇害事件召见伊朗副大使，并向伊朗提出强烈抗议。

印度外交部称，遇害的印度籍海员是巴希亚号（Al Bahiyah）和蒙巴萨号（Mombasa）上的46名船员之一，这其中30名海员为印度籍。这两艘油轮在通过霍尔木兹海峡时遭到袭击。

印度外交部在一份声明中说，另有10名印度海员受伤，其中两人伤势严重。

印度对此次袭击深表关切，并表示必须停止针对中东地区商船和民用基础设施的袭击。

美国总统特朗普本月重新开始对霍尔木兹海峡的伊朗船只实施封锁，并提出收取20%的费用以维持海峡安全。

德黑兰方面称，美国无权决定霍尔木兹海峡的未来走向。

Gaining full control of Strait of Hormuz has proven exceptionally hard for U.S. Here’s why.

2026-07-14T06:42:00-0400 / https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-iran-war-strait-of-hormuz-control-difficulties/

Washington — President Trump has been trying to force Iran to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz for months, turning to everything from airstrikes and naval blockades to negotiations and threats to destroy a “whole civilization.”

But restoring oil tanker traffic in the vital Middle East shipping corridor to prewar flows likely will require a much bigger armada of U.S. warships if not tens of thousands of American troops on Iranian soil, experts say. Despite on-and-off fighting, Iran can still target vessels in the slim Persian Gulf waterway with drones and missiles that have been hidden in a country a third the size of the continental United States.

“Iran has been preparing for this type of asymmetric conflict for decades now,” said Jason H. Campbell, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former Pentagon official. “I think they’re starting to demonstrate why no other U.S. president since Reagan has elected to engage at this level of conflict with Iran, because they have that ability to completely disrupt the Strait of Hormuz.”

Mr. Trump said Monday that the U.S. is reimposing its blockade on Iran’s ports and will charge other ships for safe passage through the strait.

“We are reinstating the THE IRANIAN BLOCKADE, so named because it is only stopping Iran’s ships or customers from entering or leaving,” the president posted on Truth Social Monday morning. “All other countries will have fair and open use of the Strait.”

In the same post, the president said the U.S. would “probably run” the Strait of Hormuz and impose a 20% fee on cargo shipments.

Iran has insisted it controls the narrow waterway through which 20% of the world’s oil normally flows, while both sides have exchanged fire over the past week in a series of skirmishes that threaten a return to all-out war.

Vithun Khamsong / Getty Images

“Test of wills” playing out

It underscores the bind Mr. Trump is in as commercial shipping remains stifled in the strait, oil prices are rising again and Iran has shown no sign of capitulating. The war has been unpopular with many Americans and could factor into the upcoming midterm elections with gas prices high.

“They thought the situation was under control, and now they’re seeing renewed escalations, and the markets responding negatively to this,” said Eric Lob, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Middle East program and a professor of politics and international relations at Florida International University.

“It’s really a kind of test of wills to see how much economic pain the Iranians are willing to absorb and then how much economic pain and even political liability this could be for Trump and the Republicans heading into November,” Lob said.

Before he was a scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington, Campbell was a researcher at RAND, where he worked in coordination with the U.S. military to simulate war-game scenarios against Iran.

“The things they’re doing now are precisely the types of things that were discussed and came up in really all of these types of situational scenarios,” Campbell said.

Iran produces parts for its weapons across different facilities to reduce their risk of being attacked, Campbell said. Its military units are often allowed to operate without waiting for orders from Tehran. They don’t often mass in one place, making airstrikes less effective.

U.S. boots on the ground would almost surely be needed

“It’s very difficult to envision any scenario where you could satisfactorily secure the Strait of Hormuz absent ground forces,” Campbell said.

Doing so would require tens of thousand of troops, Campbell said, not only to take out Iran’s hidden munitions but to secure hundreds of miles of coastline and large swaths of inland territory. The U.S. troops would likely face insurgent attacks.

Standing up that kind of force would take a few months and include “very high costs,” Campbell said.

Mr. Trump insisted Monday evening that “the strait is open. It will be open,” and that the U.S. has made significant progress degrading Iran’s capabilities in just a few months. Iran vowed to fight back against any U.S. interference in the strait.

U.S. Navy could be stretched thin

Another way to facilitate commercial traffic safely through the strait would be the continuation – and escalation – of U.S. warships guiding civilian vessels, experts say. But it comes with its own challenges and costs.

The U.S. conducted an escort operation in the 1980s when Iran had targeted shipping as part of its war with neighboring Iraq. The U.S., which supported Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with intelligence, weaponry and other aid, escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers – which were reflagged as American.

Such an effort today would require a substantial number of U.S. warships at a time when the fleet is smaller than it was in the 1980s, said Michael Eisenstadt, a former U.S. military analyst.

“You’d still need a very large chunk of the U.S. fleet being dedicated to this on an open-ended basis,” said Eisenstadt, who now directs the Military and Security Studies Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

He said it is a much more complicated environment today as Iran has amassed advanced capabilities, including its ability to launch drone and missile strikes.

“If we were to do what we need to do in order to make this work, which might involve putting people ashore in order to clear anti-cruise missile and drone launch sites, the losses of U.S. service members can go up, and if you’re going to do an escort operation also, the losses can potentially go up,” Eisenstadt added.

Commercial vessels have been avoiding traditional routes through the strait out of fear of Iranian mines. Iran has demanded that ships use a route near its coastline and that it can potentially charge fees under an interim deal to end the war. Ships have been increasingly navigating a southern route along the coast of Oman under a U.S. overwatch operation that guided them using drones and aircraft.

Capt. Tim Hawkins, U.S. Central Command spokesman, said mine clearance operations are ongoing for some traditional routes through the strait but that “alternative pathways have been open.”

The southern route hasn’t stopped Iranian attacks on ships, leading the U.S. military to strike Iranian air defense systems, radar sites, missile and drone equipment, and small boats.

Mere threats could suffice for Tehran

But Iran’s threats alone can be enough to halt commerce in the strait, said Noam Raydan, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy focused on energy and maritime risks in the Middle East.

“They don’t need to launch drones and missiles – they can just use the marine radio channel to make some threats,” Raydan said. “And this in itself is enough to scare off a lot of seafarers.”

Clayton Seigle, a nonresident scholar in energy security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the Trump administration hasn’t followed through on promises it made early on in the war to militarily assist shipments that became a liability of the conflict.

“Those naval escorts, U.S. warships, larger commitments like boots on the ground never came because I think that the rhetoric got a little ahead of our risk tolerance,” Seigle said. “And when push came to shove, the United States was not ready to deploy its Navy, to deploy its other military forces in the capacity that would be needed to even have a shot at neutralizing those threats.”

Todd Blanche has to win over skeptical Republicans. Democrats are laying lots of traps

2026-07-14T08:00:25.555Z / https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/14/politics/todd-blanche-senate-judiciary-committee-hearing

More than three years ago, President Donald Trump turned to New York defense attorney Todd Blanche to step into a legal firestorm that threatened multiple criminal convictions and could cost Trump’s business hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now, Blanche is slated to formally undertake the permanent role as the face of the president’s campaign of retribution against those who he believes tried to improperly target him for nearly a decade.

His confirmation as the attorney general by the Senate isn’t assured. Sen. Lindsey Graham’s sudden death left the Judiciary Committee Republicans with just one vote to lose, a razor thin margin of error that has given the few Republicans with hesitations an ability to negotiate with the department on matters most important to them.

Blanche has been prepping for Wednesday’s high-stakes Judiciary Committee hearing for more than a week, betting on his track record of cracking down on gang activity, fraud and drug trafficking, as well as enforcing the administration’s hardline immigration approach as the ticket through the confirmation process, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

He has participated in at least one practice run of the hearing, one of the sources said, and has also focused on ways to fight back against allegations that he is operating based solely on the whims of the president and not in the interest of the United States, a separate source said.

IRS lawsuit was Trump’s attempt to ‘manipulate the judicial process’, judge says
2:28 • Source: CNN

IRS lawsuit was Trump’s attempt to ‘manipulate the judicial process’, judge says
2:28

That criticism is not confined to Democrats. Some conservatives say they’re still deciding whether to back Blanche after he signed a nearly $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund, an effort critics warned would bankroll allies of the president, including some who stormed the Capitol.

Blanche later walked away from the plan, telling lawmakers last month that “we are not moving forward with the fund, period.” Administration sources told CNN that they believe his statement put that issue to rest.

A federal judge in Florida on Monday castigated the initial lawsuit that led to the fund and a tax audit immunity provision for Trump and his family as an effort to “manipulate the judicial process.”

The acting attorney general has also drawn fire for a string of contentious moves since his predecessor, Pam Bondi, was fired in April, including indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center; rollbacks of gun control measures; and waves of subpoenas issued to journalists seeking the identities of sources.

He took over the fallout of the Epstein files, which has dogged the president since Bondi promised and then failed to deliver on major new evidence about the convicted sex offender’s crimes. A group of Epstein survivors have come out against Blanche’s nomination, citing his role in efforts to contain the political fallout. And Blanche last year met with Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

Inside the White House, officials have been optimistic about Blanche’s chances and have cited those same controversial actions as reasons for his confirmation, a senior administration official told CNN. Trump himself has been pleased with Blanche’s performance, telling reporters this spring that “Todd Blanche has really been doing a great job.”

“Todd learned from Pam’s mistakes,” a senior administration official told CNN days before Blanche was officially tapped to be attorney general. “And there’s more to come. A lot more to come.”

With Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee unlikely to vote for him, a single Republican no-vote in the panel could damage Blanche’s nomination.

Concerns over his chances in the Senate peaked in late May, when a disastrous closed-door meeting on the anti-weaponization fund with Senate Republicans ended with multiple lawmakers publicly lambasting the acting attorney general. Blanche announced the administration was abandoning the fund two weeks later.

Blanche’s team also developed a focused effort over the past several weeks to shore up support from Republicans. Much of that reassurance was delivered during his private meetings on Capitol Hill, where Blanche had the ability to attempt to personally assure lawmakers that he had abandoned the fund and their concerns of politicization were unfounded.

Chief among those detractors is Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who said he had reservations on Blanche’s confirmation because he has shown no signs of backing away from a provision related to the fund that limits tax investigations into Trump and his family. Cornyn later said he had a “positive” meeting with Blanche, who promised him “further briefing on the tax audit issue.”

On Monday, however, Cornyn told reporters that the fund remained a “big concern” and that he would not commit to voting for Blanche until after the hearing.

Another of the GOP committee members, Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, similarly raised concerns over who could benefit from the now-defunct fund, claiming that he would not vote for Blanche if he equivocated on condemning the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. After meeting with Blanche, Tillis said he had a “positive predisposition” towards the nominee.

Blanche has also faced general criticism about his personal relationship with Trump.

Tillis, who is retiring at the end of his term next year, said in an interview with CNN that he would oppose Blanche’s nomination if there was “even a whiff of a lack of independence” from the White House.

Democratic lawmakers are likely to seize on these concerns and hammer Blanche on his oversight of the fund, particularly over his refusal to say it is no longer being pursued in writing. They are also likely to push Blanche on his continued handling of the Epstein matter, another bipartisan flashpoint.

“Throughout his tenure at the Justice Department, Mr. Blanche has used the Department as a shield to protect the President and his MAGA allies and as a sword to attack his political opponents,” Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement.

Durbin said in a Monday post on social media that the Democratic witnesses in opposition to Blanche’s nomination would include Liz Oyer, a former US pardon lawyer who was fired by Blanche, and Dani Bensky, an Epstein survivor.

Ahead of the hearing, some Epstein survivors also appeared separately in a video urging lawmakers to reject Blanche’s nomination, criticizing the Justice Department for failing to redact victims’ information as part of the files. Blanche previously acknowledged that “mistakes were made” but argued that DOJ has moved expeditiously to correct any information unintentionally released.

If he succeeds in the committee, Blanche will have an equally thin margin in a full senate vote. Several additional Republican have scrutinized Blanche’s leadership, including Sen. Josh Hawley over the department’s failure to limit access to abortion pills by mail, as well as Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who has challenged Blanche over the handling of the Epstein files.

Blanche can only lose four Republicans – three if Sen. Mitch McConnell is still absent and therefore can’t attend the vote.

But Trump’s agenda – and Blanche’s position – won’t necessarily falter even if his confirmation fails, as federal law says that the deputy attorney general can still lead the department while the top spot remains vacant.

And Blanche has promised fealty to the president regardless of his position: “If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say: ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir,’” Blanche said in his first days as acting attorney general.

Trump admin. tells court “anti-weaponization” fund is dead
0:36 • Source: CNN

Trump admin. tells court “anti-weaponization” fund is dead
0:36

While Blanche sits before the committee, his department continues to push forward on major legal fights across the country – and to face the wrath of several federal judges.

Several journalists from the New York Times are being forced to testify to a grand jury in New York over non-descript allegations of lawbreaking after the paper reported on security concerns involving Trump’s new Qatari-donated plane being used as Air Force One.

Those subpoenas, which are the second round sent to reporters who cover national security issues, are part of an escalation by the administration against independent news outlets. A spokesperson for the department has told CNN that the reporters themselves are not the target of criminal investigations.

Even so, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced Monday that both the Defense and Justice Departments had established a joint taskforce to “identify and prosecute leakers.” Details on that task force, including its members and its purview, have not been clarified.

In Florida, prosecutors are still running a wide-ranging probe into former law enforcement and intelligence officials who scrutinized Trump during his 2016 campaign and first presidential term. Career DOJ officials have repeatedly told department leaders they don’t yet have a path to bring criminal charges in the investigation.

The department has also taken public actions to boost Trump’s false election-rigging claims. Blanche’s deputies at the department have attempted to subpoena information about 2020 election workers in Atlanta (though it was blocked in court last week) and to threaten criminal prosecution of election officials if they don’t do enough to keep non-citizens off the voter rolls.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Tierney Sneed, Holmes Lybrand and Alison Main contributed to this report.