Politics

By John Kruzel

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Monday to hear a bid by the Archdiocese of Denver and other Catholic entities to be exempted from a Colorado preschool funding program’s nondiscrimination requirement in the latest clash between religious rights and LGBT protections at the nation’s top judicial body.

The justices took up an appeal of a lower court’s decision that found that Colorado’s program did not violate the religious rights of the Catholic plaintiffs under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

The program provides state funds for preschools. The Catholic plaintiffs objected to the state’s requirement that schools receiving funding under the program give all children “equal opportunity” to enroll in preschool regardless of certain characteristics, including the sexual orientation or gender identity of students or their family members.

The Archdiocese of Denver oversees 34 Catholic preschools.

The Supreme Court is expected to hear the case in its next term, which begins in October. President Donald Trump’s administration backed the request by the Catholic plaintiffs for the justices to hear the case.

The Catholic plaintiffs claimed that Colorado’s program pushes families toward preschools that “share the government’s views on these issues,” thereby penalizing religious schools and families who disagree.

Referring to the Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling legalizing gay marriage nationwide, the lawyers for the plaintiffs told the justices in a filing that the court had promised “that religious groups would be protected when they dissent from secular orthodoxies about marriage and sexuality.”

The lawyers for the plaintiffs cited the First Amendment provision protecting freedom of religious exercise.

“The Free Exercise Clause simply cannot do that important

work – which this court has described as ‘at the heart of our pluralistic society’ – if it can be so easily evaded,” they wrote.

Colorado has argued that its equal-opportunity requirements do not intrude on the Free Exercise Clause because they are neutral and apply generally to participating groups.

The parties disagree over whether the state’s preschool program creates a carveout for certain secular purposes, such as to prioritize children from low-income families or those with disabilities, while refusing exemptions for religious reasons. 

A Colorado-based federal judge in 2024 sided with Colorado officials’ defense of the program. The Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling last year, prompting the current appeal to the Supreme Court.

(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)

source

By Ann Saphir

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – Kevin Warsh, U.S. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, will tell lawmakers at his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he is “committed to ensuring that the conduct of monetary policy remains strictly independent,” according to prepared remarks released on Monday.

“I am equally committed to working with the Administration and Congress on non-monetary matters that are part of the Fed’s remit,” the 56-year-old financier and former Fed governor will tell members of the Senate Banking Committee.

Fed independence is “at its peak in the operational conduct of monetary policy,” Warsh said in his prepared remarks. “That degree of independence does not extend to the full range of its congressionally mandated functions,” he said, adding that U.S. central bank policymakers are not entitled to the same “special deference” in their stewardship of public monies, bank regulation and supervision, “or in areas affecting international finance, among other matters.”

Warsh, who has been nominated to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell as head of the central bank, also pledged to push through change at the monetary policy agency, saying the tendency of large and complex institutions to stick with the status quo is “harmful” when the world is changing fast.

“In a time that will rank among the most consequential in our nation’s history, I believe a reform-oriented Federal Reserve can make a real difference to the American people,” he said in the prepared remarks.

Warsh, who was a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011, used much of his speech to reprise critiques he has made of the central bank in the decade and a half since resigning. The Fed, he said, must “stay in its lane” rather than stray into fiscal and social policies, phrasing that in the past he has used to take the central bank to task for doing research into the economic implications of climate change and targeting “inclusive” full employment. The Fed in the last few years has largely abandoned any focus on climate change.

Warsh also said he views Fed independence as being under siege because the central bank has failed to ensure its congressionally assigned mandate of price stability.

“Low inflation is the Fed’s plot armor, its vital protection against slings and arrows,” Warsh said. “So, when inflation surges – as it has done in recent years – grievous harm is done to our citizens … (who) may also lose faith in our system of economic governance, raising doubts whether monetary policy independence is all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Inflation is a choice, and the Fed must take responsibility for it,” said Warsh, who has repeatedly lambasted U.S. central bank policymakers for blaming the post-pandemic burst of inflation on supply shocks.

Warsh’s confirmation hearing before the Senate panel is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Ann Saphir, Doina Chiacu and Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Michelle Nichols, Chizu Nomiyama and Paul Simao)

source

By Katie Paul

NEW YORK, April 19 (Reuters) – Michigan officials on Sunday pushed back on a U.S. Department of Justice demand for Detroit-area ballots and other materials related to the 2024 election, accusing the Trump administration of trying to cast doubt on the integrity of U.S. elections.

The Justice Department last week sent a letter demanding ballots, ballot receipts and ballot envelopes to the clerk in Wayne County, home to the heavily Democratic-leaning city of Detroit, according to Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel.

Nessel’s office released the DOJ’s letter, authored by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, along with a reply vowing to fight the request.

“This request is as absurd as it is baseless,” Nessel said in a joint statement with Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson.

“If this administration wants to bring this circus to our state, my office is prepared to protect the people’s right to vote.”

Nessel, Whitmer and Benson are Democrats. President Donald Trump, a Republican, has long pushed the false claim that his 2020 election defeat to Democratic President Joe Biden was the result of widespread voter fraud. Dhillon’s letter focuses on 2024’s elections, arguing they too need scrutiny.

The DOJ confirmed the letter’s authenticity in response to a Reuters request but did not provide further comment. 

The 2020 election remains a prominent concern for many Trump administration officials. In an interview with Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” program, FBI Director Kash Patel pledged that arrests over alleged 2020 election issues are “coming soon.”

On the same TV show, Dhillon touted the administration’s efforts to get states to provide access to voter registration lists, saying the department has sued 29 states and the District of Columbia over their refusal of access to voter rolls.

DOJ staffers so far have reviewed 60 million voter records and found they included the names of 350,000 dead persons, said Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s civil rights division. She did not provide any evidence that votes were cast for those names.  

In addition, about 25,000 people who lacked proof of citizenship were referred to the Department of Homeland Security “to dig into that further and see the extent to which people voted,” she said.   

The Justice Department has suffered multiple legal setbacks in its pursuit of election-related records, with judges ruling against requests in Rhode Island, California, Massachusetts, Michigan and Oregon.

A federal judge on Friday rejected the Justice Department’s bid to force Rhode Island to turn over non-public data on nearly 750,000 registered voters so the Trump administration could probe “election integrity” in the Democratic-led state.

(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York; Editing by Sergio Non and Lincoln Feast.)

source

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – After more than a decade criticizing the U.S. central bank, former Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh faces a mark-to-market moment in a Senate hearing on Tuesday when lawmakers will likely press the Fed chief nominee to flesh out his monetary policy and economic ideas and calls for fundamental change.

The hearing before the Senate Banking Committee is the next step in the 56-year-old financier’s still-controversial path to the Fed chief’s corner office in the central bank’s headquarters in Washington. Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s last day in the top job is ostensibly May 15, but key Republicans have committed to blocking Warsh’s confirmation until the Trump administration drops a criminal probe of Powell and the central bank that they consider frivolous and a threat to its independence.

It’s a critical moment beyond the nuts and bolts of monetary policy, as the Fed faces the most intense challenges to its standing since the years immediately following World War Two.

President Donald Trump has waged an aggressive campaign to gain more influence over the central bank, demanding that it push through big interest rate cuts and castigating policymakers when they failed to deliver. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also has been critical of the Fed amid discussion about overhauling its operations or striking a new “accord” between the central bank and the Treasury, agencies with distinct roles whose intermingling could raise concerns about efforts to monetize the country’s mounting debt.

“Does Warsh voice unconditional support for Fed independence and distance himself from the administration’s call for steep rate cuts?” Deutsche Bank chief U.S. economist Matthew Luzzetti and his colleagues wrote last week in a preview of the hearing. “Warsh will have to earn market trust and credibility around his commitment to achieving the inflation target; bona fides that always need to be earned by an incoming chair. The requirement could be more acute in the current context.”

There’s plenty for lawmakers to work with.

Inflation is stuck above the Fed’s 2% target; oil prices have skyrocketed thanks to the Iran war, though they receded last week; Trump thinks the central bank’s policy rate should be cut to 1%; artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies, two of Warsh’s interests as an investor, could reshape the economy.

Warsh’s tight-money, inflation-hawk reputation has morphed into a belief that lower interest rates are appropriate because of tech-driven productivity. The same thing has happened to a long-held conviction the Fed should shrink its $6.71 trillion balance sheet, a position he developed after serving as a governor when the central bank’s bond holdings initially exploded.

FREQUENT CRITIC

As Trump mulled naming a successor for Powell over the past year, Warsh lobbed sharp criticisms at the Fed, calling for “regime change,” saying his role would be “knocking some heads,” and labeling Powell’s leadership “broken,” but without detailing how he would change things.

His nomination caps years of op-eds, academic lectures, and television interviews, many through his position as the Shepard Family Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Economics at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a center of Fed criticism among analysts who regard the recent era of policymaking as recklessly experimental. Warsh, who earned a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford before graduating from Harvard Law School, has spoken of being influenced by key Hoover figures including monetarist scholar Milton Friedman and economist John Taylor.

Both championed constrained forms of central banking, Friedman’s rooted in growth of the money supply, Taylor’s in an eponymous “Taylor Rule” relating recommended interest rates to the Fed’s dual inflation and employment goals. Warsh has lauded rule-based policymaking as “aspirational” while stopping short of committing to use it, raising questions that both critics and advocates of such an approach will be keen to understand.

Warsh’s recent views about interest rates, and how Trump has influenced them, are also likely to be a focus of the upcoming hearing, which will be chaired by Senator Tim Scott, who, along with other Republican lawmakers, has been complimentary of Warsh’s nomination despite the divide over the conditions for proceeding with it.

WARSH’S WORLD

The nominee’s ideas about interest rates echo arguments former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan made during the 1990s about the impact of productivity on inflation, while also putting Warsh in sync with Trump’s call for lower rates. Trump said he would only nominate someone he was confident would lower borrowing costs.

The Fed’s massive balance sheet also is a delicate issue. Expanded dramatically to fight the 2007-2009 financial crisis, large holdings of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities are now a staple tool for controlling interest rates for the Fed to achieve its 2% inflation and maximum employment goals.

A Fed governor during that crisis two decades ago, Warsh opposed the balance sheet’s seemingly open-ended growth alongside other conservative economists who felt it distorted financial markets. He chose to exit the central bank in 2011 rather than publicly break with then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke through dissenting votes during policy debates still focused on lifting the economy out of its post-crisis sluggish growth.

The hearing on Tuesday could replay that era. Warsh joined the Fed in 2006, appointed by President George W. Bush, and was a key Bernanke adviser as a subprime housing crisis exploded into a full-blown financial meltdown that triggered not just Fed bond purchases but massive government bailouts for Wall Street.

A lawyer like Powell, with family ties to a Republican hierarchy that came to include Trump, Warsh has been lauded as much for his Wall Street smarts and people skills as his academic background. He helped guide those controversial financial sector rescues and then returned to Wall Street to work as an adviser to billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, a position that helped Warsh amass a personal fortune in excess of $100 million, according to financial disclosures filed before this week’s hearing.

“In the lead-up to the crisis, Mr. Warsh failed to meaningfully identify or address the risks associated with subprime mortgages and derivatives,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Senate Banking Committee’s top Democrat, wrote in an April 15 letter to Powell demanding documents detailing Warsh’s role at the Fed during the crisis.

“Since 2008, it has been well-documented that Mr. Warsh, in his role as (a) Fed Governor, failed to take seriously the risks posed by the subprime mortgage market and played a central role in helping to arrange numerous multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded capital infusions to financial institutions involved in the crisis,” Warren wrote.

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Paul Simao)

source

By Nolan D. McCaskill

WASHINGTON, April 18 (Reuters) – Republicans and Democrats vehemently disagree over whether Virginia should adopt a new congressional map for the November midterms, but they’re leaning on the same person to sway voters to their side: former U.S. President Barack Obama.

Ahead of Virginia’s statewide special election on Tuesday, Obama has become an omnipresent voice of an expensive, high-stakes campaign that could be critical in determining which party controls the House of Representatives after November’s elections.

The former president – once an opponent of gerrymandering – has endorsed efforts by Virginia’s Democratic Party to allow the state’s legislature to create new congressional districts that could give Democrats four additional seats in Congress, offsetting similar Republican efforts undertaken at President Donald Trump’s behest in Texas and several other states. 

His position shows how far Democrats have shifted on the issue in the wake of unprecedented Republican-led mid-decade efforts to redraw state congressional maps to help their party maintain control of Congress. But Republicans are hoping Virginia’s voters are more swayed by what Obama has said in the past.

Television and radio ads sponsored by two Republican groups use 2017 footage of Obama that blames gerrymandering for political polarization that’s made it “harder and harder to find common ground.” They urge Virginians to vote no.

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia said the Obama-centric messaging from Republicans shows their desperation.

“They wouldn’t be lying about Obama’s position if they weren’t desperate and worried,” Kaine said.

Recent surveys of likely voters show the yes campaign narrowly leading. More than 1 million people have voted early, according to the Virginia Department of Elections. 

Should the amendment pass, the new congressional districts would remain in place until after the 2030 census.

ALL OBAMA, ALL THE TIME

Obama has appeared in mailers, radio spots and TV ads for both sides of the issue, potentially confusing voters with mixed messaging led by groups with anodyne names.

But Obama endorsed the referendum, appearing in a TV ad where he says: “Republicans want to steal enough seats in Congress to rig the next election and wield unchecked power for two more years, but you can stop them by voting yes by April 21.” 

Meanwhile, Virginians for Fair Maps, a Republican-led committee that has raised nearly $20 million, and Justice for Democracy PAC, a group funded by nearly $9 million from the conservative nonprofit Per Aspera Policy Incorporated, have led the opposition with Obama ads.

Both groups’ ads resurface Obama’s April 2017 comments made at the University of Chicago. 

“Our president, Barack Obama, knows that partisan gerrymandering is wrong for our democracy. Listen to his words,” a woman says in a Justice for Democracy radio ad.

Republican Representative Jen Kiggans of Virginia said the strategy to leverage Democrats’ past comments is one the Democratic Party would use if the tables were turned. 

“When you put those words in the public sphere, as a politician, they still exist,” she said. “They don’t go away just because you’ve changed your viewpoint.”

REDISTRICTING WARS

Currently, six Democrats and five Republicans compose Virginia’s congressional delegation. A new map would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in a Democratic-leaning state at the federal level.

The additional four seats in Virginia would be enough to hand Democrats control of the House for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s administration, following a flurry of moves by other states.

The redistricting wars started last year in Texas, when – at Trump’s direction – Republicans drew new maps designed to give their party as many as five additional congressional seats. California responded with a similar referendum that could garner Democrats a similar number of seats in that state. 

Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina also changed their maps to further favor Republicans, with Florida poised to take up a new map as soon as next week.

“If this does not pass, Republicans could gerrymander in all the red states and hang on to the majority and continue to rubber-stamp President Trump,” said Virginia Democratic Representative Suhas Subramanyam.

REPUBLICANS CRITICIZE DEMOCRATS’ EFFORTS

Virginia Republicans have criticized the map as an unfair redraw that would deprive half the state of fair representation and harm constituents’ access to services that help them resolve issues with federal agencies. Democrats have made similar arguments in states that have been redistricted to favor Republicans.

Republican Representative Ben Cline of Virginia did not address Republicans’ use of Obama in advertising but said Democrats’ nationalization of the statewide election would hurt their cause. 

“Enlisting national Democrats to try and push this egregious political hackery through next Tuesday is going to backfire,” Cline said. “Republicans and independents and moderate Democrats are voting no, and we’re going to defeat it on Tuesday.”

An Obama spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment, but Obama has emphasized his position through Democratic advertising.

“We can’t afford two more years of unchecked power and zero accountability in Washington,” Obama says in a Virginians for Fair Elections radio ad. “Help us chart a better path forward, Virginia.”

(Reporting by Nolan D. McCaskill; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan. Editing by Michael Learmonth and David Gaffen)

source

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (AP) — The only thing standing between President Donald Trump and his revenge on Indiana state senators are people like Julie Wise.

She’s 48 years old, works at a hospital, describes herself as a conservative and voted for Trump in the last election. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to vote out her Republican state senator just because he defied the president’s demand to redraw Indiana’s congressional map.

“I’m not going to say that ‘because this is what the president wants, this is how I’m going to vote,’” Wise said from her front step on a sunny, springtime afternoon.

Indiana’s primary on May 5 has become an unlikely test of Trump’s grip on the Republican Party. After state senators defied White House pressure by opposing redistricting, Trump has endorsed seven primary challengers in races that rarely attract any attention from Washington.

The campaign, backed by national organizations such as Turning Point Action and pro-Trump groups that have spent more than $4.2 million on advertising, has no precedent in recent memory. Gov. Mike Braun and U.S. Sen Jim Banks, both Republicans, are also working against incumbent state senators in a display of deference to Trump.

One of their targets is Spencer Deery, a first-term state senator who knocked on Wise’s door while canvassing her West Lafayette neighborhood via electric scooter.

“This is about one thing only,” he told The Associated Press. “And that’s control.”

Deery represents the 23rd Senate District, a seven-county swath of farmland that borders Illinois to the west, runs north to West Lafayette and touches the outskirts of Terre Haute to the south.

Four years ago, Deery’s campaign spent $142,000 to win his seat in a race where fewer than 11,000 people voted. One of the primary candidates he defeated was Paula Copenhaver, a veteran Republican activist and local party chair.

Now Trump has endorsed Copenhaver, an aide to Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, and Deery is facing a nearly $1 million avalanche of spending. One television advertisement declared that “State Sen. Spencer Deary voted against President Trump’s agenda.”

“It’s about sending a message that any state that does not get in line or any lawmakers that do not get in line with the political forces in D.C. should be on the lookout,” Deery said. “That should concern you in a constitutional democracy.”

Deery has spent $167,000 so far, and he hasn’t had any help from outside groups.

Copenhaver declined to respond to telephone calls and text messages from The Associated Press after originally saying she was willing to discuss the campaign. Trump endorsed her in January by calling her a “MAGA Warrior” — a reference to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement — and “a terrific Candidate for Indiana’s 23rd State Senate District.”

He wrote on social media that Copenhaver was “running against an incompetent and ineffective RINO incumbent named Spencer Deery who, for whatever reason, betrayed his voters by voting against Redistricting in Indiana.” RINO means “Republican in name only.”

The White House leaned heavily on Indiana lawmakers last year to break with precedent and adopt a new congressional map, part of an unusual nationwide cascade of redistricting that Trump hopes will help Republicans protect their thin U.S. House majority in November’s elections. Vice President JD Vance met with Indiana politicians in Washington and Indianapolis, and Trump weighed in by conference call.

Some opponents of the proposal faced threats. Deery was targeted by a false police report intended to provoke a dangerous situation by sending a SWAT team racing to his home.

But the Republican-controlled state Senate voted against redistricting in December, a defeat for the president.

Trump tried to brush it off afterward, telling reporters in the Oval Office that “I wasn’t working on it very hard.”

As Deery moved from door to door in the neatly manicured suburb at the edge of a clover field in northwest West Lafayette, a pair of motorcyclists out on a Saturday ride stopped to encourage him.

“I wanted to thank you for having the courage to vote against the redistricting,” one of them said.

Annette and Curtis Williams politely chatted with Deery at their door. Curtis said Trump’s threat to unseat Deery is “inappropriate.” Neither he nor his wife would say how they planned to vote.

Beckie Eikenberg, a quality assurance associate at an Indiana pharmaceutical company, has seen the advertisements targeting Deery, but she does not trust them. The 47-year-old who calls herself “libertarian on the conservative side,” spoke with the state senator at the end of her cul-de-sac.

She voted for Trump but wrinkled her brow when asked if the president should have a say in Indiana’s congressional map.

“He doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on within our state. He’s not here. He doesn’t see the day to day,” she said.

The campaign to oust incumbents is also intended to dislodge Indiana Senate President Pro Tem Rodrick Bray, who helped block redistricting and has faced criticism from Trump.

Bray is not up for reelection this year, but Braun wanted primary challengers to commit to opposing him as Senate leader, according to three people familiar with the demand. The people were not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump political aides said they were monitoring the campaigns. Representatives for Banks, the U.S. senator allied with the White House, did not return messages seeking comment.

Braun, the Republican governor, said he is backing the primary challengers not because of redistricting but because he needs help to advance his agenda. For example, he was at odds with Bray over property taxes earlier in his term.

Braun is putting $500,000 from his political action committee into state Senate races.

“Whether you supported this or that, my goal is to get enterprising senators and representatives,” Braun said Monday. “So when it comes to what you do to either support or not support certain legislators, for me, it’s going to mostly be based on, ‘Are you willing to help me take Indiana into places that all states would want to be?’”

One of Braun’s predecessors is working against him in the primary. Former Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican who stepped away from politics after leaving office in 2015, has been quietly working to protect incumbents targeted by Trump.

Daniels recorded a video and helped raise money for Deery, who was chief of staff to the former governor when he became president of Purdue University.

Deery said his vote against redistricting was not about defying Trump or the president’s allies.

“I don’t work for them,” Deery said. “I work for my voters, my constituents.”

_____

Associated Press videojournalist Obed Lamy in Indianapolis contributed to this report.

source

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A federal judge has sentenced a former Wisconsin man to 20 months in prison for funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into domestic political campaigns after moving to another country and renouncing his U.S. citizenship.

Court records show U.S. District Judge James Peterson sentenced Roger Hoffman on Wednesday. He also ordered Hoffman to pay a $150,000 fine. Hoffman’s attorney, Mark Maciolek, didn’t immediately return a message Friday seeking comment.

Hoffman, a 70-year-old self-employed investor originally from Madison, became a citizen of the Caribbean nation Saint Kitts and Nevis in January 2009, according to a grand jury indictment handed down in 2021. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in July of that year.

But he still moved more than $400,000 to state and federal elections in the U.S. over more than a decade, using an assistant identified in court documents only as M.W. as a conduit to circumvent laws prohibiting foreign nationals from making donations in U.S. elections.

He pleaded guilty in September to a single count of making illegal donations in a deal with prosecutors, agreeing that they would be able to prove he made about $345,000 in illegal federal campaign contributions between 2010 and 2020, according to court records.

Court documents state that Hoffman made donations to federal and Wisconsin candidates and political parties, with most of the dollars directed toward the federal side, but does not list specific recipients. It’s not clear which candidates or political parties received money from him.

A message left at the U.S. attorney’s office in Madison seeking those details was not immediately returned.

The office said in a news release Friday that Peterson admonished Hoffman during the sentencing hearing for demonstrating “a resolute pattern of dishonesty.”

source

PHOENIX (AP) — Arizona is expected to have at least two competitive U.S. House races in November while Democrats will be defending their seats for governor, attorney general and secretary of state.

Yet so far, it’s been the office running elections in the state’s most populous county that has commanded much of the spotlight.

Republican Justin Heap is an election skeptic who will be overseeing his first statewide election in Maricopa County. He has been engaged in a bitter legal feud with the county board of supervisors over election procedures, has put in place a controversial system for checking signatures on mail ballots and has run voter records through a federal system to check for noncitizens despite questions about its accuracy. Heap also has made overtures to the Trump administration in its quest for voter and election records.

His actions have drawn heated comments from members of that board, which splits election oversight with Heap’s office, and rebukes from the attorney general and secretary of state. A ruling this week in the legal case will give Heap more authority over election operations.

The turmoil has created an air of uncertainty about how the midterm elections will go in a county that has been a regular target of election conspiracy theorists and is pivotal for deciding statewide races in one of the nation’s most important political battlegrounds.

State Sen. Lauren Kuby, a Democrat who sits on a legislative elections committee and represents part of Phoenix, said the discord between the recorder and county board is sowing confusion and distrust.

“We’re one of the biggest counties in the country, and we have all of our election administrators fighting right now,” she said. “So I imagine if you’re a voter, you’re pretty confused and worried.”

The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, which Heap runs, did not provide a response to questions despite multiple requests for comment. Heap did issue a statement in response to the court ruling, saying it “restores both the authority and the resources necessary for my office to do its job.”

Heap took office after defeating the incumbent in the 2024 Republican primary. He quickly began challenging the board of supervisors, which is majority Republican.

He sued them in June 2025 with the backing of America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Stephen Miller, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House. The lawsuit accused the board of negotiating an agreement with Heap’s predecessor to transfer money, information technology staff and certain election functions away from his office, including management of ballot drop boxes, processing of early arriving ballots and placement of sites used for early voting.

A Maricopa County Superior Court judge ended up largely siding with Heap in the case. The board’s chair, Kate Brophy McGee, said the board will consider an appeal.

Before the ruling, supervisors had called Heap’s lawsuit frivolous and “full of falsehoods” as part a power struggle that at times has boiled over. A budget meeting in January devolved into heated accusations, with Supervisor Thomas Galvin, a Republican, saying Heap “continues to lie over and over again.” In a statement issued afterward, Heap dismissed the incident as a “juvenile temper tantrum.”

The board proposed a settlement earlier this year but did not receive a counteroffer from Heap.

Once in the job, Heap changed the process for checking voters’ signatures on their mail ballot envelopes.

The new procedure involves workers of both political parties reviewing signatures and more workers conducting additional reviews of signatures deemed to be questionable, Heap told the board during a meeting last fall.

But some elected officials and observers say they are concerned the new policy could lead to otherwise eligible ballots being rejected. Galvin said the rejection rate in the November 2025 local election was “huge” relative to past elections.

He has said he worries the new signature verification process is a “looming disaster” and expressed concern that many people “who legally and validly voted last November saw their ballots be rejected for arbitrary reasons.”

Heap says the new policy is faster and more secure. “In the end, the signatures either match or they don’t,” he told the board.

Heap has promoted his office’s use of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE system to identify people on the voter rolls who may not be citizens.

The office said that through the system, it found “137 registered voters who are not U.S. citizens” and that 60 of those “voted in prior elections.” The Maricopa County attorney’s office has said it received 207 names from the recorder’s office to review for voting eligibility.

Voting by people who are not U.S. citizens is rare, and the SAVE system has been criticized by some election officials and experts who say it frequently identifies eligible voters as noncitizens. Arizona’s secretary of state, Democrat Adrian Fontes, said in an interview that the program is unreliable.

“The SAVE system is notoriously inaccurate,” he said. “You can’t depend on that to take somebody off the voter rolls or to start the removal proceeding.”

The recorder’s office announced its use of the SAVE system the same day Heap attended a news conference outside Phoenix, where then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was promoting a congressional bill that would require documented proof of citizenship to register and vote.

Fontes said his office has not received any additional information from the recorder about the alleged noncitizen voters and that the timing of the announcement makes it seem like “more of a headline grab than anything without more information.”

Heap’s presence at Noem’s February news conference was not the only instance when the recorder has appeared close with the Trump administration.

Correspondence obtained from the recorder’s office through a public records request shows a willingness to defer to the U.S. Department of Justice. This year the department seized ballots and other records related to the 2020 election from Georgia’s Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.

Meanwhile, the FBI subpoenaed similar Maricopa County records from the state Senate president.

Harmeet Dhillon, who oversees the department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote to Fontes, Heap and county officials in September seeking preservation of county election records. Heap replied the next day, stressing in his letter that his office is “committed to full cooperation with the Department of Justice as it conducts its investigation,” before adding: “We share your goal of safeguarding election integrity.”

As it has done in other states, the department sued Arizona months later for failing to comply with its request for detailed voter information.

The state’s attorney general, Democrat Kris Mayes, told a local media outlet that Heap is “trying to undermine Arizonans’ trust in our election system” and warned him not to provide voter lists to the federal government.

With the state’s July primary approaching, some observers are concerned that Heap’s feuding with the board and other actions could undermine public confidence in elections.

“The voters need to have a sense that this county is well-run, that the recorder and the board of supervisors have the best interest of every voter,” said Pinny Sheoran, state advocacy chair with the League of Women Voters of Arizona. “And that is frayed with this discord.”

source

SAN FRANCISCO, April 18 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of Justice will add an attorney who once worked for President Donald Trump to the investigation into former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan, CNN reported on Saturday.

Citing sources familiar with the matter, the network reported that Joseph diGenova, who has worked with Trump’s legal team on a variety of matters, will join the Justice Department in the Southern District of Florida to work on the Brennan probe. Brennan, a cable news analyst and longtime critic of Trump, has condemned reported investigations into him as politically biased and a misuse of the legal system.

The Justice Department and diGenova’s law firm did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. An attorney for Brennan has previously said there is no legal ​basis for an investigation.

The reports of diGenova’s appointment come days after Maria Medetis Long, a top career prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami, told attorneys connected ​to the investigation that she is no longer working on the ​case.

Reuters reported this week that the FBI planned to interview roughly a half-dozen people, ‌including former ⁠intelligence officials, over the next several weeks as part of the investigation into Brennan.

A ​DOJ official told Reuters this week that there had been frustration inside the department with the pace of the investigation. Another source familiar with the investigation said some ​witness interviews were not expected to take place until June.

Acting Attorney ​General Todd Blanche ⁠has faced pressure to prosecute Trump’s perceived political enemies after his predecessor, Pam Bondi, was ousted over Trump’s dissatisfaction with her handling of probes Trump demanded.

A former federal prosecutor, diGenova was part of Trump’s legal team during an investigation by Robert Mueller into Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. 

DiGenova later worked with pro-Trump lawyers pursuing attempts to contest the 2020 election results, making waves when he suggested that a former cybersecurity official who had served in the Trump administration should be “Taken out at dawn and shot.”

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Sergio Non and Franklin Paul)

source

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House early Friday approved a short-term renewal until April 30 of a controversial surveillance program used by U.S. spy agencies in a post-midnight vote after Republicans revolted and refused President Donald Trump’s push for a longer extension.

GOP leaders rushed lawmakers back into session late Thursday with a series of back-to-back votes that collapsed in dramatic failure, before they quickly pushed ahead the stopgap measure as they race to keep the surveillance program running past Monday’s expiration date.

First they unveiled a new plan that would have extended the program for five years, with revisions. Then they tried to salvage a shorter 18-month renewal that Trump had demanded and Speaker Mike Johnson had previously backed. Some 20 Republicans joined most Democrats in blocking its advance.

Shortly after 2 a.m. they quickly agreed to the 10-day extension, which was agreed to on a voice vote without a formal roll call. It next goes to the Senate, which is gaveling for a rare Friday session, as Congress races to keep the surveillance program running.

“We were very close tonight,” said Johnson after the late-night action.

But Democrats blasted the middle-of-the-night voting as amateur hour. “Are you kidding me? Who the hell is running this place?” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., during a fiery floor debate.

At the center of the standoff that has stretched throughout the week is Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the CIA, National Security Agency, FBI and other agencies to collect and analyze vast amounts of overseas communications without a warrant. In doing so, they can incidentally sweep up communications involving Americans who interact with foreign targets.

U.S. officials say the authority is critical to disrupting terrorist plots, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage.

Its path to passage has teetered all week in a familiar fight, as lawmakers weigh civil liberties concerns against intelligence officials’ warnings about national security risks.

Opponents of the surveillance tool point to past misuses. FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when searching intelligence related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and racial justice protests in 2020, according to a 2024 court order.

Trump and his allies had lobbied aggressively all week for a clean renewal of the program, without changes.

A group of Republicans traveled to the White House on Tuesday, and on Wednesday CIA Director John Ratcliffe spoke directly with GOP lawmakers. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said Thursday there had “been negotiations late into the night with the White House and some of our members.”

“I am asking Republicans to UNIFY, and vote together on the test vote to bring a clean Bill to the floor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this week. “We need to stick together.”

Thursday’s proceedings came to a standstill as lawmakers retreated behind closed doors and Johnson reached for an agreement to resolve the standoff.

Shortly before midnight GOP leaders announced a new proposal, a five-year extension, with revisions. The changes were designed to win over skeptics of the surveillance program who have demanded greater oversight to protect Americans’ privacy.

Among the changes are new provisions to ensure that only FBI attorneys can authorize queries on U.S. persons, and to require the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to review such cases, said Rep. Austin Scott, R-Ga., during the debate.

But the final product, a 14-page amendment, did not go far enough for some holdouts in either party.

With Johnson controlling a slim majority, he has little room for dissent. As the Republicans fell short on both efforts before the short extension, a handful of Democrats stepped in to try to help them advance the longer extensions, but most Democrats were opposed.

“We just defeated Johnson’s efforts to sneak through a 5-year FISA authorization tonight,” said Democratic Rep, Ro Khanna of California. “Now, they will have to fight in daylight.”

source