THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel vowed before God, Fox Nation, and Donald Trump that he would punish the “deep state” for its manifold transgressions, especially the (actually nonexistent) conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.“I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this,” he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. We’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”That was five months ago. Patel has not yet delivered on his promise. But in interviews with more than 40 current and former administration officials, FBI employees, and members of Congress and their staffers, as well as others close to the White House, I’ve learned that it is not for lack of trying.The people I spoke with described Patel as desperate to help the Justice Department indict putative malefactors and stimulate headlines to please the president. Nearly all of the people I spoke with would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if their name appeared in the story. Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and me in response to my reporting earlier this year that he has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.In recent months, Patel has been briefed on the FBI’s “election integrity” investigations in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond. Officials told me their understanding is that many of the election-related investigation requests came directly from the White House, many times with the instruction that “this is a big deal for the president” or “this is a push from 47.” But all of that attention hasn’t yielded results. In meetings, Patel has expressed frustration that there have been no new findings, and instructed staff to “look harder” or “look again,” according to three people familiar with the conversations.The FBI’s preoccupation with the 2020 election represents a dramatic break with its past. Though the bureau—one of the world’s most famous and most powerful law-enforcement agencies—has experienced more than its share of controversies and episodes of overreach, it has also been dedicated to criminal investigation based in evidence, science, and reality. The commitment of personnel, resources, and time to investigate a conspiracy theory that was… [TheTopNews] Read More.

As Democrats have grown more hopeful that they might win control of the U.S. Senate, congressional investigators have gathered regularly in a conference room in the office of Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who is on track to lead the body’s key oversight committee if they do. The team in recent months has assembled a list of people in President Trump’s orbit and administration whose actions are worthy of a probe, and they have brainstormed possible witnesses, drafted information requests, and gamed out how the administration might respond. Across the Hill, Representative Robert Garcia of California, a Democrat who could soon chair the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been preparing even longer. He told me he keeps a “running list of the most corrupt things that the Trump family has done” on a whiteboard in his home in Long Beach where senior staffers this week wrapped up several days of strategy meetings. “There’s a lot of ideas and possible investigations on there,” he said.With the midterms just weeks away, an army of committee staffers has been quietly preparing to launch numerous investigations in the new year. When the 120th congressional session begins in January, Trump and his administration could suddenly find themselves under the type of scrutiny they have thus far avoided. But there are significant risks and limits to Democrats’ congressional powers—and divisions could quickly emerge over the number and intensity of investigations, especially if their majority is a thin one.During Trump’s first term, Democrats heavily invested in trying to impeach the president on two occasions, animating their base but taking them away from work on issues of broader interest to more Americans. But the biggest hurdle is likely the president himself: Trump is widely expected to be more dismissive of congressional oversight than any president in history, ignoring requests, resisting subpoenas in ways that give Democrats little recourse, or issuing broad pardons to insulate those close to him. If Democrats attempted to hold someone in criminal contempt of Congress, the matter would be referred to a Department of Justice that Trump has controlled completely.All of these considerations leave Democrats certain that they are going to scrutinize Trump like never before, but deeply uncertain about how it will go. “I don’t think I’d call it retribution. I’d call it a reckoning,” Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon told me. “I don’t look at it like, We’re… [TheTopNews] Read More.

Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss the most pressing issue of the 2026 campaign: transgender athletes. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before. Two years ago, a series of ads about Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries proved to be some of Trump’s most persuasive. (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) In November, such ads could mean the difference between Republicans retaining and losing the Senate. “They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”[Read: The Republicans are bolting from Trump]But it’s not clear that Democrats have figured out how to thwart the Republicans’ transgender gambit without betraying their own coalition.The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals.… [TheTopNews] Read More.

President Trump is deeply unpopular, and his party is on track to lose badly in the midterm elections. But at least one thing is going well on his watch: The nation’s homicide rate has dropped to its lowest level since at least 1900, and the number of violent crimes is falling across the country at the fastest pace ever recorded. Trump and senior administration officials, including the domestic-policy adviser Stephen Miller, are celebrating these trends as the effect of their immigration crackdown at the southern border and on U.S. streets.“Before I took office, we had the worst and most dangerous border on Earth,” Trump asserted to the United Nations General Assembly last week. Now, he said, no one is allowed into the United States unless they’re invited. “As a result, last year we achieved the largest drop in violent crime ever recorded.” The president had been even more explicit at an August rally in South Carolina. “If you wanna get the migrant criminals out of your communities, you have to vote Republican,” he said.ICE arrested about 50,000 immigrants a month this summer, the highest level ever, and deportations are on track for a record year. But Trump’s claim about ICE’s role in the falling crime rate is not backed up by his own administration’s data. Several of the cities and states that have seen the sharpest drops in the homicide rate, according to FBI and census data, are also the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the administration deplores as incubators of violent crime. (The Department of Justice defines sanctuary jurisdictions as places with “policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.” Those jurisdictions have adopted policies that limit cooperation between their police departments and ICE.)Three of the five jurisdictions that recorded the largest change in the violent-crime rate, according to FBI and census data, were labeled sanctuaries: Connecticut, Illinois, and the District of Columbia. And of the 11 states where the homicide rate is falling fastest, six are considered sanctuary jurisdictions by the DOJ: Vermont, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Washington State and New York. Another—Massachusetts—has a sanctuary policy in its largest city.Similarly, the states with the highest numbers of ICE arrests do not have the largest decreases in violent crime, either in terms of raw numbers or as a percentage change compared with last year. Georgia has been consistently among the top 10 states for monthly ICE arrests, according to… [TheTopNews] Read More.

The White House’s South Lawn was prepared just so: A full honor guard, complete with American and Chinese flags, stood at attention. The new White House helipad, made of four-inch-thick black-and-white California granite, seemed to gleam. President Trump appeared pleased—but something was missing. Where were the TV cameras?For a president who needs media attention like he needs oxygen, this was an unacceptable development ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s welcome ceremony last week. Trump whirled around to his aides and demanded they fix it, and a staffer raced to the briefing room to ask ABC News whether it would film the arrival, two people familiar with the exchange told me on the condition of anonymity, given the private nature of the conversations. But the answer was no: The networks were boycotting participation in the TV-pool rotation in solidarity with CNN, which Trump had banned from the White House, along with two other media outlets, days before. No major U.S. television network recorded Trump’s over-the-top greeting for Xi, and the news channels refused to display images taken by the White House or any other outlet, American or Chinese. Trump did not get to show off his extravaganza. And he had only himself to blame.At the risk of understatement, Trump has never been one to think all that many moves ahead. But his impulsive decision to ban media outlets spawned unintended consequences that derailed his own plans. Again. That’s been a real theme for much of this year: Many of Trump’s actions—quite a few impetuous and ill-considered—have only hurt him and his fellow Republicans ahead of November’s midterm elections. He was elected two years ago to drive down prices, but his tariffs have done the opposite, and a recent reignited trade war with Canada has hurt Republican candidates whose state shares a border with our neighbor to the north. His war of choice in Iran continues to sputter along, leaving gas prices elevated as Trump threatens annihilation one day and offers negotiation the next. He insists on championing AI while the public has swiftly turned on it. And he’s obsessed with vanity projects—including, yes, that helipaid that cost at least $5 million—even as polls suggest that many Americans feel that he is out of touch with the Everyman he once claimed to represent.The numbers are bad: Trump’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent in a new Wall Street Journal poll this week,… [TheTopNews] Read More.