Politics

By Jonathan Landay and Erin Banco

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – Tulsi Gabbard said on Friday she was resigning from her job as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, saying her husband had been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and she was leaving her role to help him.

Gabbard advised Trump of her intention to step down during an Oval Office meeting on Friday, Fox News Digital reported earlier. The resignation is effective June 30, it said.

In her resignation letter posted on X, Gabbard told Trump she was “deeply grateful for the trust you placed in me and for the opportunity to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the last year and a half.”

She cited her husband Abraham Williams’ recent diagnosis of bone cancer.

“I cannot in good conscience ask him to face this fight alone while I continue in this demanding and time-consuming post,” she said.

Trump said on his Truth Social platform that Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Aaron Lukas would become acting director. Lukas is a former CIA officer and analyst who served on the National Security Council during Trump’s first term.

Trump said Gabbard had done “a great job” but with her husband’s cancer diagnosis, “she, rightfully, wants to be with him, bringing him back to good health as they currently fight a tough battle together.”

A source familiar with the matter said that Gabbard had been forced out by the White House. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, but Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson, said on X that Gabbard was departing in light of her husband’s diagnosis.

Trump has hinted in the past at differences with Gabbard on their approach to Iran, saying in March that she was “softer” than him on curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

In April, several ​sources told Reuters that Gabbard could lose her role in a broader cabinet shakeup.

A senior White House official said then that Trump had expressed displeasure with Gabbard in recent months. Another source with direct knowledge of the matter said the president had asked allies for their thoughts on potential replacements for his intelligence chief.

CONTROVERSIAL TENURE AS DNI

Gabbard had no deep intelligence experience when Trump tapped the former Democratic member of Congress to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, an agency created to oversee the 18 U.S. intelligence agencies after the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks on the U.S.

A member of the Hawaii National Guard, she served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005, became an officer, transferred to the U.S. Army Reserve and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Her departure from Congress saw her adopt conservative viewpoints, endorse Trump for president in 2024 and join the Republican Party.

She faced bipartisan criticism for comments seen as echoing Russia’s statements blaming NATO for its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and for meeting former Syrian President Bashar Assad during a 2017 trip to Damascus during a brutal civil war in which he received Russian and Iranian backing.

Once she took office, Democrats accused Gabbard of using her post to advance Trump’s drive to retaliate against his perceived enemies and back his efforts to prove debunked claims that fraud foiled his re-election in 2020.

Signs of tension with the White House appeared when Trump in June suggested she was wrong in assessing there was no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon.

She has been absent from deliberations between Trump and his top national security advisers on major foreign policy issues, including the U.S. military operation that deposed former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Iran war and Cuba.

“She was pushed out by the White House,” the source familiar with Gabbard’s departure told Reuters. “The White House has been unhappy with her for quite some time.”

The person said among other reasons for the displeasure with Gabbard were the activities of her taskforce known as the Director’s Initiatives Group. The group has worked to declassify documents related to the death of former President John F. Kennedy, investigate the security of election machines and probe the origins of COVID-19.

Another source of friction, the person said, was Gabbard’s revocation last August of the security clearances of 37 current and former U.S. officials that exposed the name of an intelligence officer serving undercover overseas.

Gabbard led several initiatives she cast as rooting out politicization from the intelligence community and approved the stripping of security clearances from former intelligence officials, including former CIA Director John Brennan.

Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading Gabbard critic, told reporters after a Friday event in Manassas, Virginia, that Gabbard’s job itself had become too politicized.

“This position now more than ever needs to be an independent, experienced intelligence professional,” Warner said.

The next leader should understand the “director of national intelligence should be focusing on foreign intelligence and not involving himself or herself in domestic election incidents,” he said.

(Reporting by Ismail Shakil, Doina Chiacu, Erin Blanco, David Brunnstrom, Jonathan Landay, and David Shepardson; Editing by Caitlin Webber, Don Durfee, Deepa Babington and Cynthia Osterman)

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By Jarrett Renshaw

May 22 (Reuters) – Donald Trump campaigned on Friday in New York’s Hudson Valley to support a vulnerable House Republican facing reelection in November, a rare test of the U.S. president’s standing with suburban voters concerned about rising costs.

Trump’s visit alongside Representative Mike Lawler came as political strategists eye congressional districts in suburbs, which are expected to be closely contested between Democrats and Republicans during the elections.

“He’s a terrific guy and you’re lucky to have him,” Trump said in a speech interrupted multiple times by protesters.

Speaking at Rockland Community College, Trump centered some of his remarks on last year’s expansion of a federal deduction for state and local taxes, known as SALT, a key issue for suburban voters in New York. The state imposes a relatively high income tax on residents.

Trump credited Lawler with his advocacy for the deduction. “I call him Mr. Salt,” said Trump.

Otherwise, Trump’s speech ping-ponged from one topic to another, including the economy, Iran, transgender athletes, voter ID, crime, electric cars, migrants and cognitive tests. “I’m the smartest guy you’ll ever meet,” he said.

“You gotta go vote,” Trump said during his 90-minute speech. “Otherwise it’s a rigged election.”

Voters’ approval of Trump’s performance in office has fallen since the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran began in February. Rising gasoline prices and broader inflation concerns are intensifying the political stakes in the House of Representatives, where Republicans are defending a narrow margin of control.

Trump is also facing unusual pushback from some Republicans over his push to finance a White House ballroom project and a separate effort to establish a political compensation fund tied to a legal settlement involving the IRS over the release of his tax returns.

Riya Vashi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, blasted Trump’s visit, saying it reflects poor judgment by Lawler.

“Nothing says ‘I don’t care about my district’ quite like Mike Lawler bringing Donald Trump to NY-17 to tout a disastrous economy that’s crushing working families,” Vashi said.

Lawler, one of few Republicans representing a district won by Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, has embraced Trump more openly than some other swing-district Republicans.

New York’s 17th Congressional District, which stretches across parts of the lower Hudson Valley, is expected to be among the nation’s most competitive House races and could play a pivotal role in determining control of Congress. 

Trump has demonstrated his continued political strength within the Republican Party in recent weeks, with several candidates he endorsed successfully defeating incumbents who had fallen out of favor with him, reinforcing his influence over primary contests and party alignment heading into the 2026 cycle.

(Reporting By Jarrett Renshaw and Steve Holland; Editing by Trevor Hunnicutt, Alistair Bell and Nick Zieminski)

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PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — David Brock Smith won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in Oregon on Friday, in the last significant race to be called following the state’s May 19 primary election.

Brock Smith, a state senator, emerged from a field of seven candidates to challenge the incumbent, Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, in November.

“This campaign is about putting Oregon first. Fighting for affordable living, safer communities, good-paying jobs, responsible government, and protecting the values that make our beloved state strong,” he said in a statement. “This election is bigger than politics. It’s about restoring hope, opportunity, and accountability for every Oregonian.”

Merkley, who was first elected in 2008, is viewed as having a generally safe seat since Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican U.S. senator since 2002. His campaign did not immediately respond Friday evening to a request for comment on Brock Smith’s win.

Friday’s result comes after other high-profile contests were called on election night, including a gas tax referendum and the Republican primary for governor that set up a November rematch for the state’s top job.

Voters overwhelmingly rejected the ballot measure that asked them whether to raise the state gas tax by 6 cents to 46 cents a gallon. The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed the contested gas tax increase and a series of fees last year to help fix roads and plug a gap in the state’s transportation budget. Republicans then launched a referendum campaign to refer it to the ballot and give voters the final say.

Republicans hailed the rejection of the gas tax increase after it was trounced by voters. Democrats have remained mostly silent and didn’t organize efforts to campaign for it as the Iran war caused prices at the pump to skyrocket. Some party members said in the run-up to the primary that they expected voters to defeat it.

In the governor’s race, Republican state Sen. Christine Drazan advanced from a field of 14 candidates to win her primary. She beat opponents who included a fellow GOP legislator who helped lead the gas tax referendum campaign and a former NBA player.

Her victory set up a rematch with Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek, who won her party’s primary as she seeks reelection. Drazan lost to Kotek in 2022 by over 3 percentage points in a three-way race that included an independent candidate.

Elected that year to her first term as governor after years in the Legislature, including as Oregon’s longest-serving House speaker, Kotek has sparred with the Trump administration, which sought unsuccessfully to deploy the National Guard to Portland last fall for the stated purpose of protecting federal property and personnel following protests at the city’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

Kotek also pledged to tackle homelessness, mental health and education. Despite approving funding and programs aimed at addressing those issues, the state has continued to see rising homelessness and flagging student test scores that have failed to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Drazan will likely try to capitalize on those issues while facing an uphill battle: Oregon hasn’t elected a Republican governor in over 40 years.

Meanwhile, in Oregon’s lone competitive U.S. House district, Democratic incumbent Rep. Janelle Bynum won her primary. Patti Adair, a county commissioner, won the GOP primary there and will work to win back the seat for Republicans. The GOP flipped it in 2022 for the first time in decades before Bynum reclaimed it for Democrats.

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NEW YORK (AP) — One day after the Democratic National Committee released its botched autopsy report on the 2024 election, party leaders continued limping toward the midterm elections — even as other prominent Democrats demanded major changes at the very top of the organization.

Ken Martin, the committee’s chair, faced new calls to resign from elected officials and Democratic operatives, who say he mismanaged a report originally intended to be a comprehensive examination of the party’s failures and a potential road map for its future. Martin kept the document under wraps for months, stoking speculation about its contents, only to release it this week and insist it was too flawed to be useful anyway.

“There doesn’t seem to be a plan to turn things around and the clock is ticking. November is literally around the corner,” Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Texas, told Semafor. “I believe it’s time for him to move on.”

“He should resign,” Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said to Axios.

And in a radio interview, Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., said he agreed with a caller saying Martin should be replaced.

But Martin maintains support from many state party leaders, who have benefited from a steady stream of funding from national headquarters since he took over. In a conversation with DNC staff on Thursday, Martin apologized for his handling of the autopsy and said he was determined to continue leading the organization.

“This was a major mistake. I own it, and now it’s time for us to move forward at the DNC, and I hope that you’ll move forward with me,” Martin said, according to a person with knowledge of the call who was not authorized to disclose a private conversation.

Martin, a little-known Minnesota operative before emerging last year as the head of the national party’s formal political machine, has already faced criticism for dismal fundraising and inability to inspire confidence among his party’s unruly membership.

However, there was no sign that a serious alternative was emerging. The Associated Press contacted a half dozen Democratic presidential prospects to gauge their support for Martin and all of them declined to weigh in.

The intraparty feud represented an extraordinary distraction for a Democratic Party showing signs of momentum in its fight to break President Donald Trump’s grip on power in Washington. Democrats hope to regain majorities in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate in the November midterms, and Republicans could be vulnerable because of Trump’s low approval ratings, dissatisfaction over the war in Iran and lingering economic frustration.

Martin’s allies across the country lashed out at Democrats who were fueling the election-year drama, dismissing them as unhappy consultants and supporters of Martin’s previous rivals for DNC leadership.

Kansas Democratic Party Chair Jeanna RePass described calls for the first-term chair to step down as “ridiculous and dangerous.”

“It is dangerous for Democrats to be playing politics with our leadership when these elections are five and a half months away,” she said. “The American people are counting on us.”

Janet Kleeb of Nebraska, who leads her state party and the DNC’s association of state committees, said the fighting “is nuts.”

“I haven’t had a single chair come to me saying I think Ken needs to resign,” she said. “Ken was elected by the DNC members to do a four-year term, and he has not violated any of our rules or bylaws where there would be a two-thirds vote, right? Because that’s what it would take to remove the chair.”

Kleeb added, “These reports are such distraction.”

The long-awaited postelection autopsy said Kamala Harris “wrote off rural America” during the 2024 presidential campaign and failed to attack Trump with sufficient “negative firepower,” among other key findings.

Martin shared the 192-page report only after facing intense internal pressure from Democratic operatives. He originally promised to release the autopsy even before taking over the committee last year, only to keep it under wraps because he worried it would interfere with Democrats’ focus on the November midterms.

“I didn’t want to create a distraction,” Martin wrote on Substack. “Ironically, in doing so, I ended up creating an even bigger distraction. And for that, I sincerely apologize.”

Although the autopsy criticizes Democrats’ focus on “identity politics,” it sidesteps some of the most controversial elements of the 2024 campaign. The report does not address former President Joe Biden’s decision to seek reelection, the rushed selection of Harris to replace him after he dropped out or the party’s acrimonious divide over the war in Gaza.

___

Kinnard reported from Columbia, South Carolina.

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Republicans are rushing to redraw congressional districts to their advantage ahead of the midterm elections following a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that weakened minority protections under the federal Voting Rights Act.

In a matter of just weeks, new U.S. House districts already have been enacted in Tennessee and Alabama and have cleared at least one legislative chamber in Louisiana and South Carolina. But hurdles remain in courthouses and capitols before the new maps can be used in the November elections.

Voting districts typically are redrawn after a census at the start of a decade. But President Donald Trump has urged Republican-led states to redistrict now to try to hold on to the GOP’s narrow House majority in the face of political headwinds. A president’s party typically loses congressional seats in the midterms, and Trump’s approval ratings are in the negative.

Republicans stand to gain seats from the aggressive redistricting. Since Trump first urged Texas to redraw its voting districts last year, Republicans think they could win as many as 15 additional seats from new House districts in seven states. Democrats have countered only partially, hoping to pick up six seats from new districts in two states.

Here’s a look at where things stand on the most recent redistricting efforts:

Republican Gov. Henry McMaster called lawmakers into special session to consider congressional redistricting. The Republican-led House passed a plan early Wednesday that would improve the party’s chances of winning the state’s only Democratic-held seat.

Senators are to meet Saturday — for the third straight day — to consider the redistricting plan. But passage is not guaranteed.

Democrats are opposed, and some Republicans also have reservations. Some GOP senators fear that their attempt to win the district held by Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn could backfire by spreading so many Democrats into Republican-held districts that they become susceptible to being lost.

South Carolina’s primaries are set for June 9. The legislation revising the districts would set a new congressional primary for August.

The Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map, which contains two majority-Black districts held by Democrats, as an illegal racial gerrymander. The state House is expected to debate a revised map next week that would significantly reshape one of those districts while giving Republicans an improved chance to win it.

Although Republicans who dominate the state Legislature are aligned on the broad contours of the new map, the House and Senate have competing visions for how to divvy up certain localities, including which parishes will be kept whole and which will be sliced up.

A House committee tweaked a map previously passed by the Senate. If the House and Senate pass different versions, a joint committee of lawmakers could try to negotiate a compromise before the session is set to end June 1.

Republican Gov. Jeff Landry postponed Louisiana’s May 16 congressional primary until later this summer to allow time for redistricting.

A federal court heard arguments Friday on a request to block Alabama from using congressional districts that could help Republicans gain an additional seat in the midterm elections. It’s the latest twist in a long-running legal case.

Republican state lawmakers in 2023 approved a map with one majority-Black district. The court previously blocked that map and ordered a new one that resulted in Democrats winning two seats in which Black residents comprise a majority or close to it.

But the U.S. Supreme Court recently overturned that order and directed the lower court to reexamine the case in light of the Louisiana decision.

Attorneys for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU, which are representing Black voters, want a three-judge panel to prevent the state from using the 2023 map. They contend a preliminary injunction is warranted, because the Louisiana decision should not affect a separate finding that Alabama’s map was intentionally discriminatory against Black voters.

Alabama’s primary elections were May 19. But new congressional primaries are scheduled for August for the districts that are different under the 2023 map.

A state court panel heard arguments Thursday in another NAACP lawsuit seeking to invalidate Tennessee’s new congressional map, which carves up a Memphis-based, majority-Black district represented by a Democrat. The new map could give Republicans an improved chance to sweep all nine of the state’s seats.

The lawsuit contends the General Assembly included provisions in the redistricting legislation that weren’t specifically authorized or necessary under a proclamation by Republican Gov. Bill Lee that set the agenda for the special session. Among those is a provision repealing a state law that prohibits mid-decade redistricting.

If the legislature exceeded its authority, then the lawsuit asserts that the new map cannot be used.

___

Associated Press writers Jack Brook, Kim Chandler and Jeffrey Collins contributed.

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By David Shepardson

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said on Friday that more late-night talk shows will depart after he praised the end of CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Trump has repeatedly pressured the Federal Communications Commission to strip broadcast networks of their licenses, called on Walt Disney to fire ABC late night host Jimmy Kimmel and urged Comcast’s NBC to fire host Seth Meyers.

“Stephen Colbert’s firing from CBS was the ‘Beginning of the End’ for untalented, nasty, highly overpaid, not funny, and very poorly rated Late Night Television Hosts,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Others, of even less talent, to soon follow. May they all Rest in Peace!”

Colbert hosted what has been the top-rated Late Show for 11 seasons. CBS last year said it was cancelling the “Late Show,” citing financial reasons. Late-night television, an American tradition since the 1950s, has been losing viewership and advertising dollars for years.  

NBC, CBS and ABC did not immediately comment on Friday.

CBS announced in July that it was cancelling Colbert’s show just days after the company’s parent agreed to settle a lawsuit Trump filed against the company for $16 million over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris. Days after that, the FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance.

The decision to end the top-rated late-night talk show sparked an outcry, however, from Democrats and other critics who noted that Paramount was seeking approval for its merger with Skydance at the time of the cancellation. Many critics suggested it was done to curry favor with the administration and saw it as a move to silence political satire in violation of the First Amendment’s free speech protection.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez said on Wednesday that Trump has been vocal about trying to get programming he dislikes off the air.

“This administration cannot tolerate any critics, whether it’s late-night comedies, whether it’s ‘The View’,” Gomez said. “They are using every regulatory lever in their arsenal to go after content.”

The FCC is investigating whether ABC’s “The View” violated equal time rules for an interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico of Texas. CBS in February barred Colbert from airing an interview with Talarico, citing an FCC order in January.

“Donald Trump’s administration wants to silence anyone who says anything bad about Trump on TV, because all Trump does is watch TV,” Colbert said at the time.

Last month, Trump cited a joke from Kimmel as grounds for his dismissal, which Disney declined to do. A day later, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr ordered a highly unusual early license review of the company’s eight ABC television stations. Disney must file its license renewal applications by May 28.

In September 2025, ​Carr pressured broadcasters to take Kimmel off the air. ABC briefly suspended Kimmel’s show over comments he made about the assassination ​of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Carr’s ⁠efforts drew sharp criticism from across the political spectrum.

Carr denied Colbert was forced off the air by government pressure. “He’s just not as popular or as funny as he once was, if he ever was,” Carr told Reuters in March.

When Trump called for NBC’s Meyers to be fired in November, Carr reposted it on X.

(Reporting by David ShepardsonEditing by Bill Berkrot)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Tulsi Gabbard resigned as President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence on Friday, saying she needed to step away as her husband battles cancer. She is the fourth Cabinet official to depart during Trump’s second term.

In her resignation letter, which she posted on social media, Gabbard said she told Trump she would leave office on June 30. She said her husband had recently been diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and “faces major challenges in the coming weeks and months.”

“At this time, I must step away from public service to be by his side and fully support him through this battle,” she wrote in the letter, which was earlier reported by Fox News.

Trump, in his own social media post announcing her resignation, said “Tulsi has done an incredible job, and we will miss her.” He said her principal deputy, Aaron Lukas, will serve as acting director of national intelligence.

During Trump’s first term, Lukas was as an intelligence aide to the acting director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell, in 2020. A former policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, he also served as deputy senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council in the final year of Trump’s previous administration.

There had been rumblings that Gabbard would split with Trump after the president’s decision to strike Iran, which caused some division within his administration. Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced his resignation in March, saying he “cannot in good conscience” back the war.

Gabbard, a veteran and former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii, built her political name on her opposition to foreign wars. This put her in an awkward position when the U.S. joined Israel in launching attacks on Iran on Feb. 28.

During a congressional hearing in March, her measured comments were notable for their careful non-endorsement of Trump’s decision to strike Iran. She repeatedly dodged questions about whether the White House had been warned of potential fallout from the conflict, including Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

Gabbard said in written remarks to the Senate Intelligence Committee that there had been no effort by Iran to rebuild its nuclear capability after U.S. attacks last year “obliterated” its nuclear program. That statement contradicted Trump, who has repeatedly asserted that the war was necessary to head off an imminent threat from the Islamic Republic.

This created several awkward exchanges with lawmakers who asked Gabbard for her opinion on the threat posed by Iran as the nation’s top intelligence official. She repeatedly said it was Trump’s decision to strike, not hers.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said.

Gabbard’s departure follows Trump having ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in late March, in the midst of mounting criticism over her leadership of the department — including the handling of the administration’s immigration crackdown and disaster response.

The second Cabinet member to leave was Attorney General Pam Bondi, in response to growing frustration over the Justice Department’s handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. And Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer resigned in April, after being the target of various misconduct investigations.

A veteran but without any intelligence experience, Gabbard was a surprising choice to head the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies. She ran for president in 2020 on a progressive platform and her opposition to U.S. involvement in foreign military conflicts.

Citing her military experience, she argued that U.S. wars in the Middle East had destabilized the region, made the U.S. less safe and cost thousands of American lives. Gabbard later dropped out of the race and endorsed the ultimate winner, President Joe Biden.

Two years later she left the Democratic Party to become an independent, saying her old party was dominated by an “elitist cabal of warmongers” and “woke” ideologues. She subsequently campaigned for several high-profile Republicans and became a contributor to Fox News.

She later endorsed Trump, who also was a strong critic of past U.S. wars in the Middle East and campaigned on a pledge to avoid unnecessary wars and nation-building overseas.

But friction with the president started soon after he began his second term and tapped Gabbard to lead ODNI, which was set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to improve coordination between the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Shortly after taking on the job, Gabbard testified before lawmakers that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran was seeking to develop nuclear weapons. After Trump launched attacks on Iranian nuclear sites in June he said Gabbard was wrong and that he didn’t care what she said.

She appeared to be back in Trump’s good graces when she took a lead role in Trump’s effort to relitigate his 2020 election loss to Biden, whom Gabbard had endorsed. She appeared at an FBI search of election offices in Fulton County, Georgia, even though her office was created to focus on foreign espionage, not state elections.

Earlier this week, however, she testified to lawmakers during an annual threats hearing that last year’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites had “obliterated” their nuclear program and that there had been no subsequent effort to rebuild.

The statement seemed to complicate Trump’s repeated assertions that Iran posed an imminent threat and created several awkward exchanges with lawmakers who asked Gabbard for her opinion on Iran’s threat as the nation’s top intelligence official. She repeatedly said that it was Trump’s decision to strike, not hers.

“It is not the intelligence community’s responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” she said at one of this week’s hearings.

Gabbard vowed to eliminate what she said was the politicization of intelligence by government insiders. But she quickly used her office to support some of Trump’s most partisan of arguments — that he won the 2020 election.

She also worked to undermine the results of earlier investigations into Trump’s ties to Russia.

In her year on the job, Gabbard oversaw a sharp reduction in the intelligence workforce, as well as the creation of a new task force that she charged with considering big changes to the intelligence service.

Earlier this year an intelligence sector whistleblower filed a complaint that Gabbard was withholding intelligence for political reasons, a complaint that prompted calls from Democrats for Gabbard’s resignation.

Gabbard, 44, was born in the U.S. territory of American Samoa, raised in Hawaii and spent a year of her childhood in the Philippines. She was first elected as a 21-year-old to Hawaii’s House of Representatives but had to leave after one term when her National Guard unit deployed to Iraq.

As the first Hindu member of the House, Gabbard was sworn into office with her hand on the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu devotional work. She was also the first American Samoan elected to Congress.

During her four House terms she became known for speaking out against her party’s leadership. Her early support for Sen. Bernie Sanders ’ 2016 Democratic presidential primary run made her a popular figure in progressive politics nationally.

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May 22 (Reuters) – The Trump administration is temporarily moving immigration lawyers to the Justice Department to speed up efforts to strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, Axios reported on Friday.

Reuters could not immediately verify the report.

(Reporting by Angela Christy in BengaluruEditing by Tomasz Janowski)

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By Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Alexandra Alper

WASHINGTON, May 22 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s election-security czar last year sought to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states by asking whether the Commerce Department could declare their components national-security risks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged, the sources said, as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states, an idea publicly aired by Trump.

Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, the sources said, a frequent Trump demand some election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use.

The plan to exclude the machines, reported here first, got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it, three additional sources said. It eventually collapsed, however, because Olsen and other administration staffers working with him failed to provide evidence to justify such a move, two of the sources said.

The episode is part of a far-reaching Trump administration push to encroach on state and local governments’ authority to run elections – which is granted to them in the U.S. Constitution to prevent the executive branch from seizing power. Olsen is working with the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement agencies to chase voting-rigging claims. 

A Reuters investigation earlier this month found administration officials and investigators in at least eight states have sought confidential records, pressed for access to voting equipment and re-examined voter-fraud cases that courts and bipartisan reviews have rejected. Trump and Republican allies are also pursuing unprecedented plans to redraw election districts earlier than usual to secure advantages in the November midterm congressional elections.

Olsen, who Democratic senators are seeking to remove from his post, aimed to invalidate Dominion voting machines before the midterms, the two sources said. 

Others involved in the deliberations included Paul McNamara, a senior aide of Trump’s spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, and Brian Sikma, a special assistant to Trump who works on his Domestic Policy Council, according to one of the two sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Olsen has worked closely with Gabbard’s Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

Early last summer, McNamara asked officials in the Commerce Department to consider the potential designation of Dominion chips and software as a national security risk, the two sources said. 

At the time, McNamara headed an ODNI task force that worked with officials across the administration to investigate vulnerabilities in the nation’s voting machines. The two sources said McNamara spoke about the issue to senior officials at the U.S. Commerce Department, which is run by Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Reuters could not determine whether Lutnick was involved in or aware of those discussions.

A Commerce Department spokesperson said Lutnick never met or discussed election-integrity issues with McNamara and did not “engage in the topic at all.” The spokesperson declined to comment on whether Lutnick’s office or other officials were involved.

Olivia Coleman, a spokesperson for Gabbard’s agency, said ODNI, including McNamara, “did not brief on nor coordinate a plan with the Department of Commerce to take actions to ban Dominion voting machines.”

Olsen, McNamara and Sikma did not respond to requests for interviews. Responding to this story, Democratic U.S. Senator Alex Padilla said Olsen should be fired, calling him a threat to democracy in a post on X. 

WORRIES ABOUT MORE ELECTION CHAOS

Democrats and election-integrity experts worry that, with Republicans expected to suffer losses in the midterms, the administration aims to suppress voting and pave the way to challenge losses with more baseless claims of election fraud.

More than 98% of U.S. election jurisdictions already produce a paper record for every vote, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission said last year. Those votes are mostly cast on machines that print a paper record, or hand-marked but counted by electronic readers. Election-security experts broadly support the current combination of technology and paper ballots, which provides a voter-verified trail for post-election audits.

Proponents of hand-marked, hand-counted ballots argue they eliminate hacking concerns. But they pose different risks, said Alex Halderman, a University of Michigan computer-science professor, including counting mistakes and ballot-box stuffing.

“Changing to hand counting would be chaotic,” he said, “and it might facilitate cheating.”

White House spokesman Davis Ingle characterized the reporting for this story as selectively leaked and called it misinformation.

SCOURING VOTING MACHINES FOR TRACES OF ‘FOREIGN ADVERSARIES’

U.S. supply chain rules give the commerce secretary powers to restrict transactions with technology companies from nations designated “foreign adversaries,” including China, Russia, and, specifically, the government of Venezuela’s former President Nicolas Maduro, who the U.S. military unseated from power in January.

A main focus of Olsen’s efforts to find evidence of foreign hacking is the debunked theory that Dominion machines were infected with code controlled by Venezuelans to steal the 2020 election from Trump, the two sources said.

Repeated investigations and lawsuits since 2020 have produced no evidence Dominion machines were hacked. In 2023, Fox News paid Dominion $787 million in a defamation case over false election-rigging claims.

In 2024, at least 27 states used Dominion machines, similar to the number in 2020. Denver-based Dominion was purchased last October by Liberty Vote USA of Colorado. Liberty did not respond to a request for comment. 

Yet Trump continues to repeat the allegations, most recently on May 12 when he reposted a six-year-old clip of a host on the far-right One America News network making the false claim that Dominion machines deleted millions of votes. 

In May, 2025, Olsen helped lead a federal mission that seized Dominion machines that Puerto Rico used in its 2024 gubernatorial election. An analysis of the machines by cyber contractor Mojave Research Inc. produced later that summer found some known-about vulnerabilities, but no Venezuelan-origin code or evidence of hacking. 

Around the time McNamara’s conversation took place with Commerce Department officials, Olsen’s team took apart some of the Puerto Rico machines, believing that they would find components manufactured by countries designated as foreign adversaries, the two sources said.

The team found one chip packaged in China by U.S. company Intel. Such chips are not generally considered a threat to U.S. national security. Other chips were packaged in Japan, South Korea and Malaysia, the two sources said. Olsen’s report on the teardown, they said, described the chips as ‘East Asian,’ which they believe was intended to obscure the failure to find any security risks.

A September White House meeting convened to discuss the machines included cyber experts at the National Security Council, two of the sources said. The group, which included Olsen’s team, discussed whether Dominion’s equipment contained traces of Venezuelan code, one of the sources said.

Following the meeting, a Commerce Department political appointee asked the department’s office that assesses foreign national-security risks to tech supply chains to consider options to address any risks posed by voting machines, according to the three additional sources. 

The office considered the matter but took no action, two of the sources said.

(Reporting by Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay and Alexandra Alper in Washington; Additional reporting by Phil Stewart; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Don Durfee)

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PHOENIX (AP) — As Sandra Ramirez watched footage of immigration officers cracking down on migrants over the past year, she knew her 2024 vote for Donald Trump was a mistake.

“There are a lot of people who are being harassed for the color of their skin, and that’s not right,” said Ramirez, who broke from her Democrat-voting family to cast a ballot for Trump.

“I’ll never go Republican again,” she said.

Trump made inroads with Latino voters like Ramirez during the 2024 elections, earning support that helped propel him to a second term in the White House.

As Republicans gear up for midterms this fall and look ahead to presidential elections in 2028, all eyes are on whether they can hold on to that key support or whether the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown and an economy beset by high prices may drive Latino voters away.

In a sign of looming danger, recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows support for Trump falling fast among that electorate.

Latino voters have historically been largely aligned with the Democratic Party but during the 2024 election, they shifted significantly toward Trump. A majority still supported Democrat Kamala Harris for president, but Trump made big gains: 43% of Latino voters nationally voted for him, compared with 35% in the 2020 presidential election, a change attributed in part to their concerns about the economy.

Trump returned to office pledging to crack down on immigration, a promise that prompted arrest sweeps, often against Latino migrants, in homes, workplaces and schools, among others. According to an AP-NORC poll, more than half of Latino adults report knowing someone impacted by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.

More than a year into Trump’s second term, polling suggests a significant drop in support for the president among Latinos who voted for him in 2024, although a majority still supports him.

According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in April, support for the president fell among non-Latino voters from 95% to 79% between February of last year and April of 2026. But among Latino voters who cast their ballot for Trump, the drop-off was more dramatic: 66% approved of his job performance in April compared with 93% at the beginning of his second term.

That national drop could prove crucial in a tight election in swing counties like Maricopa, the largest battleground county in the nation, which encompasses Phoenix and its suburbs. A third of Maricopa County residents are Latino, and one in four of them is an immigrant, according to the Latino Data Hub at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Arizona, which also saw a slight increase in Latino support for Trump in 2024, has been a flashpoint in the immigration debate for years. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio conducted high-profile raids in Latino communities and, later, the state saw large influxes of migrants during the Biden administration.

On a warm afternoon in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of south Phoenix, a vendor at a street fair sold shirts imprinted with phrases like “Lowriders Sunday” while car club members polished their Chevrolets. The parking lot of the nearby Catholic church was full of parishioners attending Spanish-language Sunday Mass.

Albert Rodriguez, a Phoenix tattoo artist, said he once supported Trump. But then he saw how the administration was carrying out enforcement operations in Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles.

He said the president promised to go after immigrants who were criminals, but instead Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been “hitting the paleta man,” referring to ordinary people trying to make a living from selling frozen treats.

“Big time, I regret it,” Rodriguez said of his 2024 vote for Trump.

Phoenix resident Ronnie Martinez, an Army veteran, backs Trump’s effort to stem crossings at the southern border.

“The border is only a hop, skip and a jump to our south. And I don’t want illegal alien criminals coming from Guatemala, Venezuela, Central America,” he said.

He didn’t like some of the images he’d seen of ICE arresting people in front of their children. But he was also sympathetic to ICE officers, who he said were doing the best they could in difficult situations, and he blamed Democratic officials who weren’t cooperating with immigration enforcement. He also cited economic initiatives as a reason for his continued support for the president, including the removal of taxes on tips and overtime.

Guadalupe Alaffa, another Phoenix resident, blamed President Joe Biden’s policies for prompting Trump’s immigration crackdown.

“He left that damn border wide open,” said Alaffa.

The growing influence of Latino voters is one of several factors that have eroded the GOP’s decades-long dominance in Arizona, putting the state at the center of congressional and presidential elections. Both of Arizona’s senators are now Democrats, along with the top three state officials.

Winning back some of the Latinos who shifted to Trump will be crucial to the reelection prospects of Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Attorney General Kris Mayes, all Democrats first elected in 2022.

Democrats in Maricopa County have benefited from more than a decade of political organizing among Latinos mobilizing against hard-line immigration enforcement. The Republican-controlled Legislature in 2010 passed a state law known as SB1070, which required police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally.

Around the same time, Sheriff Arpaio was building a national profile on the right with immigration sweeps in largely Latino neighborhoods.

Some activists see the nationwide crackdown on immigrants as an extension of what Latinos in Arizona endured under Arpaio.

“We were the lab where they implemented a lot of this with Sheriff Joe and now it’s all over the United States,” said Salvador Reza, a longtime activist in Phoenix who advocates for the rights of day laborers.

For over two decades, Arpaio was repeatedly elected while his department faced accusations of racially profiling Latino drivers and conducting sweeps in Latino neighborhoods and day labor areas. Deputies often stopped residents for traffic violations and turned noncitizens over to ICE, according to rights groups.

In 2013, a federal judge ruled his office had illegally profiled and detained Latinos, and a 2011 Justice Department report found widespread discrimination. After losing reelection in 2016, Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for defying court orders. He was later pardoned by Trump.

The GOP is at risk of losing some of the Latinos that Trump won over, said former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the controversial 2010 bill. She cited economic concerns as a possible reason for the drop in support.

“With the inflation and the cost of living and the gasoline and the wars, I don’t know if they can afford to be a Trump Republican,” Brewer said.

Earl Wilcox, a longtime activist and restaurant owner in Phoenix, said between affordability issues and immigration enforcement, he believes Latino support for Trump is waning. Wilcox’s restaurant hosted Biden in 2024 when he launched an initiative meant to rally Latino support for the Democratic ticket.

“I don’t think the Republican Party will have the support it did the second time around,” Wilcox said, “and I think it started with the raids.”

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Associated Press writers Jonathan J. Cooper and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this report.

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