Politics

NEW YORK (AP) — This is not the run up to the midterm elections that Republicans wanted.

A year and a half after winning the White House by promising to lower costs and end wars, Donald Trump is a wartime president overseeing surging energy costs and an escalating overseas conflict that many in his own party do not like.

He offered little clarity to a nation eager for answers this week during a prime-time address from the White House, his first since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran more than a month ago, simultaneously suggesting that the war was ending and expanding.

“Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives shortly, very shortly,” Trump said. “We’re going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks.”

Trump’s comments come roughly six months before voters across the nation begin to cast ballots in elections that will decide control of Congress and key governorships for Trump’s final two years in office. For now, Republicans, who control all branches of government in Washington, are bracing for a painful political backlash.

“You’re looking at an ugly November,” warned veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse. “At a point in time when we need every break possible to hold the House and Senate, our edge is being chipped away.”

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically the political landscape has shifted.

At this time last year, many Republican leaders believed there was a path to preserve their narrow House majority and easily hold the Senate. Now they privately concede that the House is all but lost and Democrats have a realistic shot at taking the Senate.

Republicans are also struggling to coalesce around a clear midterm message on Iran.

The Republican National Committee has largely avoided the war in talking points issued to surrogates over the last month. The leaders of the party’s campaign committees responsible for the House and Senate declined interview requests. Many vulnerable Republican candidates sidestep the issue, unwilling to defend or challenge Trump publicly.

The president remains deeply popular with Republican voters, and he has vocal supporters like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

“That was the best speech I could’ve hoped for,” he wrote on social media after Trump’s address on Wednesday evening. Graham said Trump “gave the American people a clear and coherent pathway forward.”

Trump made little effort to sell the conflict to Americans before the initial attack. Five weeks later, at least 13 U.S. service members have been killed and hundreds more injured. Thousands more troops have converged on the region, and the Pentagon requested $200 billion in new funding.

The Strait of Hormuz, a key passage for a fifth of the world’s oil, remains closed. The average price for a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. was $4.08 on Thursday, according to AAA, almost a full dollar higher than on President Joe Biden’s last day in office.

On Wednesday, Trump insisted that gas prices would fall quickly once the war concluded but offered no solution for reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, he invited skeptical U.S. allies to do it themselves.

He insisted that the war would be worth it.

“This is a true investment in your grandchildren and your grandchildren’s future,” Trump said. “When it’s all over, the United States will be safer, stronger, more prosperous and greater than it has ever been before.”

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who was once among Trump’s most vocal allies in Congress, lashed out against his Iran policy.

“I wanted so much for President Trump to put America First. That’s what I believed he would do. All I heard from his speech tonight was WAR WAR WAR,” she wrote on social media. “Nothing to lower the cost of living for Americans.”

About 6 in 10 U.S. adults say the U.S. military action in Iran has “gone too far,” according to AP-NORC polling from March. Roughly a third approve of how he’s handling Iran overall.

The possibility of sending U.S. forces into Iran also appears politically unpalatable.

About 6 in 10 adults are “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to deploying U.S. troops on the ground to fight Iran. That includes about half of Republicans. Only about 1 in 10 favor deploying troops.

At the same time, Trump’s approval ratings have remained consistently weak. About 4 in 10 Americans approve of how he’s handling the presidency, roughly in line with how it’s been throughout his second term.

Republican strategist Ari Fleischer, a senior aide in former President George W. Bush’s administration, acknowledged that Trump has not received the polling bump in this war that Bush got after invading Iraq.

Bush, of course, worked to build public backing for the Iraq War before going in. Immediately after the 2003 invasion, Bush’s popularity soared, as did the stock market.

Public sentiment and the economy soured only after the conflict stretched on. It ultimately spanned more than eight years, spawning a generation of anti-war Republicans — and sowing the seeds of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.

“My hope is that the Trump experience is the exact opposite of the Bush experience,” Fleischer said.

He said Trump must win the war decisively and quickly to avoid a further backlash, saying there could be a “very significant political upside if things end well, oil comes down and markets rally.”

Fleischer added that Trump’s actions will matter much more than his words.

“Ultimately, he is not going to get judged on his persuasion or his explanations or his assertions, he’s going to get judged on results,” he said.

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Associated Press writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed to this report.

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ATLANTA (AP) — The Georgia General Assembly ended its annual session early Friday without a plan for new equipment to overhaul the state’s voting system by a July deadline, plunging into doubt the future of elections in the political battleground.

The lawmakers’ failure to offer a solution after months of debate raises uncertainty about how Georgians will vote in November and leaves confusion that could end in the courts or a special legislative session.

“They’ve abdicated their responsibility,” Democratic state Rep. Saira Draper said of inaction by Republicans who control the legislature.

Currently, voters make their choices on Dominion Voting machines, which then print ballots with a QR code that scanners read to tally votes. Those machines have been repeatedly targeted by President Donald Trump following his 2020 election loss, and Trump’s Georgia supporters responded by enacting a law in 2024 that bans using barcodes to count votes.

But state law still requires counties to use the machines. No money has been allocated to reprogram them, and lawmakers failed to agree on a replacement.

“We’ll have an unresolvable statutory conflict come July 1,” said House Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Victor Anderson, a Cornelia Republican who backed a proposal to keep using the machines in 2026 that Senate Republicans declined to consider.

House Republicans and Democrats backed Anderson’s plan, which would have required that Georgia choose a voting process that didn’t use QR codes by 2028. Election officials preferred that solution.

“The Senate has shown that they’re not responsible actors,” Draper said. She added that Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Trump-endorsed Republican running for governor, seemed more interested in keeping Trump’s backing than “doing right by Georgia voters.”

A spokesperson for Jones didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment early Friday.

Joseph Kirk, Bartow County election supervisor and president of the Georgia Association of Voter Registration and Election Officials, said he’ll look to the secretary of state for guidance and assumes a judge will rule to instruct election officials how to proceed.

“This is uncharted territory,” he said.

Robert Sinners, a spokesperson for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who is also running for governor, said officials are “ready to follow the law and follow the Constitution.”

Republican House Speaker Jon Burns told reporters that his chamber was seeking to minimize changes this year.

“You can’t change horses in the middle of the stream,” Burns said.

Burns said he would meet with Gov. Brian Kemp and “take his temperature” on the possibility of a special session. A spokesperson for Kemp didn’t answer questions about what the outgoing Republican governor would do.

Anderson said without action, the state could be required to use hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots in November.

Election officials say switching to a new system within just a few months, as advocated by some Republicans, would be nearly impossible.

“They made no way for this to happen except putting a deadline on it,” Cherokee County elections director Anne Dover said of the switch away from barcodes. Dover said one problem under some plans is that a very large number of ballots would have to be printed.

Lawmakers seemed more concerned about scoring political points than making practical plans, Paulding County Election Supervisor Deidre Holden said.

“If anyone is resilient and can get the job done, it’s all of us election officials, but the legislators need to work with us, and they need to understand what we do before they go making laws that are basically unachievable for us,” Holden said.

Supporters of hand-marked paper ballots say voters are more likely to trust in an accurate count if they can see what gets read by the scanner.

Right-wing election activists lobbied lawmakers for an immediate switch to hand-marked paper ballots, but the House turned away from a Senate proposal to do so.

Anderson said he wasn’t sure if a special session could escape those political crosswinds, but said Georgia lawmakers must fix the problem.

“This is a legislative problem,” Anderson said. “It’s a legislative solution that has to happen.”

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ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Governors in Florida and Mississippi signed into law measures that require officials to verify the citizenship of voters, just as similar legislation being pushed by President Donald Trump has stalled in Congress.

The law signed Wednesday by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was immediately challenged in court by civil rights organizations that said it will make it harder for Floridians to vote.

The citizenship provision of the law goes into effect Jan. 1. It requires voters to provide a birth certificate, passport or naturalization certificate as proof of citizenship if their eligibility to vote is challenged by government officials through cross-referencing voter registration applications with motor vehicle records.

“Many eligible voters do not have these documents and cannot obtain them for a variety of reasons — including because they were born without a birth certificate in the segregated South, because their documents were destroyed in a hurricane, or because they cannot afford the hundreds of dollars it costs to replace them,” the civil rights groups said in a lawsuit filed in federal court in South Florida.

The voting legislation being pushed aggressively by Trump in Congress would mandate that people provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections, such as a U.S. passport, citizen naturalization certificate or a combination of a birth certificate and government-issued photo identification. It passed the House but was stalled in the Senate before lawmakers took a spring recess.

Under the Florida law, credit cards, student IDs and retirement community identifications can no longer be used as IDs when voting, and the citizenship status of a driver must be reflected on driver’s licenses starting in July 2027.

DeSantis said the law improves the security and transparency of Florida’s election system.

“In Florida, we will always stand up for election integrity,” the Republican governor said.

The new Mississippi law signed Wednesday requires local officials registering people to vote to run additional citizenship checks if applicants don’t have or can’t provide driver’s license numbers on their voter application. The law, which takes effect July 1, also requires the secretary of state to run annual checks of the voter rolls against an online database from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to flag any potential noncitizens who could be asked to provide proof of their eligibility.

“This is another win for election integrity in Mississippi (and America),” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican, said in a social media post. “We will continue to do everything in our power to make it infinitely harder – with a goal to make it impossible – to cheat in our elections!”

The Southern Poverty Law Center has said that the law could disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Mississippians who don’t have a passport, lack a birth certificate or whose last names don’t match their birth certificates because of name changes due to marriage.

Four Republican-led states – Florida, Mississippi, South Dakota and Utah – have enacted laws this year to strengthen proof-of-citizenship requirements for voters. In Michigan, supporters of voter citizenship documentation have submitted 750,000 petition signatures in a bid to get a constitutional amendment on the November ballot.

The Republican-led Kansas Legislature also has passed legislation, though it still must go before the Democratic governor. Gov. Laura Kelly has until next week to decide whether she’ll sign the bill and hasn’t said publicly what she will do, though she has regularly vetoed past GOP-election bills. Supporters would need a two-thirds majority to override a veto — and thanks to Republican dissenters, the bill appeared to be a few votes short of that in the House.

Any efforts in Kansas to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote are shadowed by one of the state’s biggest political fiascos in recent memory — a requirement imposed in 2013 that people registering to vote in the state for the first time provide documentation of their U.S. citizenship.

That law ended up blocking the voter registrations of more than 31,000 U.S. citizens who were otherwise eligible to vote, or 12% of everyone seeking to register in Kansas for the first time. Federal courts ultimately declared the law an unconstitutional burden on voting rights, and it hasn’t been enforced since 2018.

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Associated Press writers David A. Lieb in Jefferson City, Missouri, and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report.

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Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social.

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WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) – Two Democratic U.S. senators on Thursday called on Wall Street’s top regulator and a Defense Department watchdog to prevent and investigate possible insider trading by government officials following a spate of market activity seemingly timed to President Donald Trump’s announcements.

Reuters and others have reported that major moves over the last year in equity, commodities and prediction markets are consistent with the possibility that traders had advance knowledge of Trump’s announcements concerning the war with Iran, tariffs and the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, among other examples.

The White House has denied any wrongdoing.

“Recent reports of equity trading that occurred shortly before significant government policy announcements suggest that federal officials are disclosing material non-public information for financial gain,” Senators Mark Warner of Virginia and Adam Schiff of California wrote to the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Defense Department’s Inspector General.

“These actions undermine public interest and market integrity, and demand oversight by each of your respective authorities, as well as by Congress.”

Warner is the top Democrat on the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence.

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment while the Defense Department Inspector General’s office did not immediately respond. 

(Reporting by Douglas Gillison in Washington; editing by David Gaffen)

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Before picking Todd Blanche to help lead and now run the Justice Department, President Donald Trump was his client.

Blanche, whom Trump elevated Thursday from deputy attorney general to acting U.S. attorney general, rose to prominence representing the president in criminal cases that consumed the four years between his first and second terms.

Blanche, a former federal prosecutor and law firm partner, led Trump’s criminal defense team, representing the Republican in matters including his New York hush money case, which ended in his conviction on 34 felony counts, and a pair of federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith, both of which have been abandoned.

In a social media post, Trump called Blanche “a very talented and respected Legal Mind.”

As deputy attorney general, Blanche was the Justice Department’s second-in-command.

Working under Attorney General Pam Bondi, he managed the department’s day-to-day operations and became one of its most vocal defenders and visible public faces. He oversaw the release of government files on Jeffrey Epstein and appeared frequently on TV news programs.

Here’s a look at Blanche’s career and his rise to running the Justice Department:

Blanche, 51, attended Brooklyn Law School at night while working as a paralegal at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, and graduated cum laude. Originally from the Denver suburbs, he completed his undergraduate studies at American University in Washington, D.C.

Blanche served as a law clerk for federal judges Denny Chin and Joseph Bianco, both now members of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and was a federal prosecutor for eight years in the same U.S. attorney’s office where he had started as a paralegal.

He spent two years as co-chief of the office’s violent crimes unit, overseeing about two dozen prosecutors and cases involving killings, kidnappings, and other violent crimes.

Blanche left the U.S. attorney’s office in 2014, taking a job in the Manhattan office of the law firm WilmerHale. In September 2017, he moved to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, where he was a partner in the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice.

In a prelude to his work defending Trump, Blanche represented the president’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and in 2019 succeeded in getting a mortgage fraud case against him dismissed in the same New York court where Trump was convicted.

Blanche argued that the case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office that later prosecuted Trump, was too similar to one that landed Manafort in federal prison and therefore amounted to double jeopardy.

Blanche left Cadwalader in 2023, telling colleagues he was resigning to represent Trump. He joined the president’s defense team just prior to his arraignment in the hush money case.

In an email announcing his departure, he wrote: “I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently charged DA case, and after much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up.”

Despite his conviction, Trump came away from the hush money case impressed with Blanche’s tenacity, his willingness to spar with witnesses and judges, and the poise he showed in speaking in front of TV cameras.

Trump rewarded Blanche and another of his defense lawyers, Emil Bove, with prominent roles in his new administration’s Justice Department, and last summer nominated Bove to be a judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In addition to the hush money matter, Blanche represented Trump in the two cases brought by the special counsel, his 2020 election interference case in Washington and the Florida case accusing the former president of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

In both cases, Trump’s Blanche-led defense team successfully mounted a legal strategy focused heavily on delaying the cases until after the 2024 presidential election. When Trump won, Smith moved to abandon the cases, acknowledging a longstanding Justice Department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted or prosecuted while in office.

Ten days before Trump returned to office, Blanche sat alongside him at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, appearing by video together as a Manhattan judge sentenced the president-elect to no punishment in the hush-money case.

“The majority of the American people also agree that this case should not have been brought,” Blanche told the judge, citing the election results as a verdict of its own.

“The American voters got a chance to see and decide for themselves whether this was the kind of case that should’ve been brought,” Blanche said. “And they decided.”

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By Nandita Bose, Andrew Goudsward and Jana Winter

WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday after mounting frustration with her performance, especially over the release of files on late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump also felt Bondi was not moving quickly enough to prosecute critics and adversaries whom he wanted to face criminal charges, according to sources.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former personal lawyer to Trump, will lead the Justice Department temporarily, Trump said in a social media post.   

In the post, Trump praised Bondi as a “Great American Patriot and a loyal friend” who had overseen a “massive crackdown in Crime.” Trump said she will soon move to a job in the private sector, but he gave no details.

In her own social media post, Bondi said: “Leading President Trump’s historic and highly successful efforts to make America safer and more secure has been the honor of a lifetime.”

She said she would spend the next month transitioning the role to Blanche. On social media, Blanche thanked Trump and praised Bondi, promising to do “everything in our power to keep America safe.”

During her tenure as the top U.S. law enforcement official, Bondi was a combative champion of Trump’s agenda and dismantled the Justice Department’s longstanding tradition of independence from the White House in its investigations.

But it was repeated criticism over the Epstein files, including from Trump allies and some Republican lawmakers, that came to dominate her tenure. Bondi was accused of covering up or mismanaging the release of records on the DOJ’s sex-trafficking investigations into Epstein, a financier who cultivated ties to wealthy and powerful figures.

Trump informed Bondi at a White House meeting on Wednesday that he was looking to replace her as attorney general, according to a source familiar with the matter. Trump allies had encouraged the president in recent days to “rip off the Band-Aid” and fire her, according to the source and one other person familiar with the matter.

Trump told Bondi multiple times over the past several months that he was unhappy with her performance, a senior White House official told Reuters. The official said Trump has contemplated replacing her with Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, but has also discussed other candidates.

Bondi spent much of Wednesday with Trump, riding with him to the U.S. Supreme Court in the morning, attending an Easter lunch where he spoke and later watching his address to the nation on the Iran war. At the Supreme Court, Trump observed as one of Bondi’s top officials, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, was grilled by justices about the administration’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship.

POLITICAL HEADACHE

The Epstein files created political headaches for Trump and drew renewed scrutiny of his past friendship with Epstein, which he has said ended decades ago.

Bondi’s firing could lead to a shake-up in strategy at the Justice Department and potentially a renewed push to deploy the U.S. legal system against Trump’s targets.

Bondi is the second senior Trump official to be ousted recently. Trump removed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on March 5 following criticism of her management of the agency and Trump’s immigration agenda.

Bondi, a former Republican state attorney general in Florida, said she worked on restoring the Justice Department’s focus on violent crime and rebuilding trust with Trump’s supporters after federal prosecutors twice criminally charged Trump during his years out of power.

Bondi also faced criticism over the removal of dozens of career prosecutors who worked on investigations that Trump opposed, with critics accusing her of abandoning the DOJ’s traditional focus on even-handed justice.

“Pam Bondi took a sledgehammer to the Justice Department and its workforce,” said Stacey Young, a former DOJ lawyer and the head of Justice Connection, an advocacy organization formed to aid career staff who were expelled or resigned.

Bondi presided over a mass exodus of career lawyers from many crucial DOJ units and a near-total alignment between the Justice Department and Trump, whose image now adorns its Washington headquarters. 

DOJ has pursued a slew of investigations against Trump antagonists, including bringing criminal charges last year against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The cases encountered obstacles in court and were thrown out by a judge who found the Trump-nominated prosecutor who brought them, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed.

“Pam Bondi’s legacy will be the weaponization of the world’s preeminent law enforcement agency for Donald Trump’s personal benefit, but apparently even she didn’t go far enough to appease him,” Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. 

SPARRING WITH LAWMAKERS

Bondi defended the rollout of the Epstein files, saying the Trump administration had been more transparent than previous presidents and that DOJ lawyers quickly reviewed reams of material.

At a House of Representatives committee hearing in February, Bondi responded to criticism with political attacks on lawmakers. 

Bondi early last year played into fevered speculation about the Epstein files, saying a client list was on her desk for review. But after an initial release included material that was largely already public, the DOJ and FBI declared in July that the case was closed and no further disclosures were warranted.

That prompted an eruption of criticism and eventually a bipartisan law passed in November requiring the Justice Department to release nearly all its files.

The release of roughly 3 million pages still did not quell the controversy, as lawmakers criticized redactions and the disclosure of some Epstein victims’ identities.

The Republican-led House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Bondi and she was set to testify on April 14.

(Reporting by Andrew Goudsward and Nandita Bose, additional reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Jana Winter, Bhargav Acharya, Doina Chiacu, Bo Erickson and Steve Holland; Editing by Michelle Nichols and Cynthia Osterman)

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By Richard Cowan and David Morgan

WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) – Federal funding for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security remained in limbo on Thursday despite the Senate clearing the way for the House of Representatives to pass legislation that would end a nearly seven-week partial shutdown.

Meanwhile, lawmakers got some breathing room, after President Donald Trump announced that he will use his executive powers to temporarily pay all DHS workers while Congress searches for a way to pass a bill with funding through September 30, the end of this fiscal year.

This follows Trump’s action last week to temporarily pay Transportation Security Administration airport passenger screeners.

The Senate bill awaiting House action provides no additional funding for immigration law enforcement activities that already are robustly funded.

The House held a brief session without acting upon legislation that was passed by the Senate late last week. It is next scheduled to meet on Monday.

Also, House Speaker Mike Johnson was set to hold a call with his rank-and-file on Thursday to discuss next steps.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, speaking to a near-empty chamber early on Thursday, cleared the way for progress on ending the DHS funding fight by formally killing a 60-day, stopgap bill that had been passed by the House but had no chance of passing the Senate.

Senate and House Republican leaders announced on Wednesday that they had reached a deal to finally end the DHS shutdown. But it was unclear whether House Republican rank-and-file would support that agreement.

House passage of the Senate bill would send it to President Donald Trump for signing into law.

Even with Trump’s temporary payments to all DHS workers, Congress still has to figure out a way to fund DHS operations for workers at an array of agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Coast Guard.

Two problems remain at the heart of this spending fight, which has been raging almost since the start of Trump’s second term that began on January 20, 2025.

Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, want to ensure that large amounts of federal dollars will be available through the end of Trump’s presidency to execute his aggressive migrant deportation program.

That requires significant funding for immigration law enforcement agencies at DHS, including money for additional detention facilities for the migrants Trump wants to have under arrest while awaiting deportation or possible release.

Senate Leader Thune told reporters Republicans will try to accomplish this through a rarely-used and complicated procedure that would circumvent any Democratic opposition.

It is unclear whether this foray will be allowed under Senate rules for multi-year funding of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Democrats have demanded new constraints on ICE and CBP agents carrying out Trump’s aggressive migrant deportation program.

Republicans who control Congress and the White House have refused to allow any of those constraints to be written into law.

Those included requirements that immigration agents shed masks that conceal their identities, wear body cameras and obtain judicial warrants to enter private homes. Democrats also want to end agents’ practice of lurking at churches, hospitals and schools in an effort to find migrants and their children.

Democrats mounted this initiative after two U.S. citizens were shot dead in Minneapolis by federal immigration agents earlier this year and protests over the Trump administration’s deportation policy escalated in cities throughout the United States.

Aides to Johnson were not immediately available for comment on next steps the House will take to break the DHS funding logjam.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan and David Morgan; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Chizu Nomiyama)

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April 2 (Reuters) – The U.S. Department of the Interior will offer employees new opportunities to leave the agency as part of a plan to improve efficiency, it said in a statement on Thursday.

Interior will offer a deferred resignation program and voluntary early retirement, it said, without giving details on the number of employees or parts of the agency that would be targeted.

Agency officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move is aligned with President Donald Trump’s broader effort to shrink the size of the federal government.

As part of the plan, the agency will move more National Park Service positions to visitor-facing roles and modernize processes including permitting, it said.

“By modernizing our operations we’re strengthening our ability to carry out Interior’s mission and deliver world-class service for the American people,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in the statement.

The Interior Department manages about a fifth of the land in the United States. It is responsible for energy and mineral development on public lands and waters, tribal relations and preservation of the nation’s cultural heritage.

(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Chris Reese)

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DENVER (AP) — A Colorado appeals court ruled Thursday that a former county clerk convicted in a scheme that sought to prove fraud in the 2020 presidential election should be resentenced because a judge wrongly punished her for statements protected as free speech.

Tina Peters is serving a nine-year prison term after being convicted of state crimes for sneaking in an outside computer expert to make a copy of her county’s election computer system during a software update in 2021. A photo and video of confidential voting system passwords were later posted on social media and a conservative website.

Calls for Peters’ release have become a cause celebre in the election conspiracy movement. President Donald Trump has sought unsuccessfully to pardon Peters and pressured Colorado to set her free.

Judges on the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld her conviction in a 74-page ruling that rejected a range of issues raised by Peters, including the notion that Trump has authority to pardon her state crimes. But they said a lower court judge should not have considered Peters’ continued promotion of election fraud conspiracies when he sentenced her in 2024.

One of Tina Peters’ lawyers, John Case, said the court’s ruling affirmed the importance of free speech.

“Tina Peters was punished for words that she used to criticize our insecure and illegal voting system,” he said. “The decision affirms that people are free to speak what they believe in Colorado as well as the rest of the United States of America.”

Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who has been considering granting clemency to Peters, praised the court’s decision for rejecting Trump’s pardon but upholding her free speech rights.

“This case has been very challenging and a true test of our resolve as a state to have a fair judicial system, not just for people we agree with but a fair system for Coloradans that we vehemently disagree with,” Polis said in statement.

Peters was the former clerk in Mesa County, in the far western part of Colorado, and convicted by jurors in the Republican stronghold that has supported Trump.

She was unapologetic when she was sentenced by Judge Matthew Barrett and insisted that she tried to unearth what she believed was fraud for the greater good. He ripped into her, calling her a “charlatan” who had used her position to “peddle snake oil.”

The appeals court found that Barrett violated her rights to free speech by punishing Peters for persistently alleging fraud in the 2020 election. They noted that because Peters is no longer serving as an election clerk, she can no longer engage in the conduct that led to her conviction.

“The trial court obviously erred by imposing sentence at least partially based on Peters’ protected speech,” Judge Ted Tow wrote in Thursday’s ruling.

The court sent Peters’ case back to a lower court for a judge to issue a new sentence. That can’t happen for at least 42 days to give time for the parties to appeal.

Case said he would likely ask for Peters to be sentenced to time served and released.

But 21st Judicial District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, who prosecuted Peters, said the judge potentially could issue a sentence similar to the original one while complying with the appeals court ruling.

Trump has threatened to take “harsh measures” against Colorado unless the state releases Peters. In February, Trump said Colorado was “suffering a big price” for refusing to release her.

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat who is running for governor, has accused the Trump administration of waging a revenge campaign by choking off funds and ending federal programs over the state’s refusal to free Peters.

Weiser said in response to the ruling that the original sentence had been “fair and appropriate.”

“Whatever happens with her sentence, Tina Peters will always be a convicted felon who violated her duty as Mesa County clerk, put other lives at risk, and threatened our democracy. Nothing will remove that stain,” Weiser said in a statement.

The U.S. Justice Department inserted itself into Peters’ bid to be released while her state appeal was considered. The federal Bureau of Prisons also tried to get Peters moved to a federal prison. After both efforts failed, Trump in December announced a pardon for Peters.

However, the appeals court judges said they could find no prior example of a president pardoning someone for a state crime. And they rejected her attorneys’ claims that Peters actions had been carried out while “defending a federal interest.”

“We have found no instance where the presidential pardon power has been stretched in such a way as to invade an individual state’s sovereignty,” they said, adding that the President’s pardon has “no impact” on the state’s case against Peters.

The Associated Press left messages with the White House for comment.

Peters was convicted of three counts of attempting to influence a public servant and one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the requirements of the secretary of state.

Peters’ lawyers didn’t deny that she used the security badge of a local man she pretended to hire to allow the an associate of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell to make a copy of the Dominion Voting Systems election computer server during an annual software update in 2021.

But they said she only wanted to preserve election data and find out whether any outside actor had accessed the system while ballots were being counted. They said she didn’t want the information made public.

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Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

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WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) – While many Americans are following the U.S. Supreme Court case involving President Donald Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship, Norman Wong is doing so with a little bit of extra motivation. For him, it is about family.

The San Francisco-area resident is the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American man who was at the heart of a landmark 1898 Supreme Court decision concerning birthright citizenship. That ruling recognized that the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on U.S. soil, including to babies born to parents who are foreign nationals.

Norman Wong, 76, traveled to Washington and was outside the courthouse as the justices heard arguments on Wednesday. He told Reuters afterward that the justices should reaffirm the court’s 128-year-old precedent and rule against Trump.

“I hope America gets this thing right,” the retired carpenter said.

When Wong Kim Ark, a cook who was in his 20s at the time, returned from a trip to his parents’ homeland of China in 1895, customs officials in San Francisco declared him a non-citizen and sought to prevent him from re-entering the United States.

Though he was born in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, the officials said that because his parents were Chinese nationals, so too was he, and as such he was ineligible for entry due to an 1882 law called the Chinese Exclusion Act that restricted Chinese migration and citizenship. The Supreme Court disagreed.

In the current case, Norman Wong said, the court’s nine justices should “not reinvent our rights” and should uphold “the way birthright citizenship stood for 128 years of precedents.”

Speaking outside the Supreme Court building amid demonstrators defending birthright citizenship, he called the day of the arguments “a special day for me.”

“I see these people and I feel like I definitely don’t stand alone, that if I can help empower them, great. Because in the end, it’s going to take America as a whole to stand up and to make this country right, to keep this ship balanced.”

Trump became the first sitting president to attend Supreme Court arguments, though he left midway through. At issue was the legality of Trump’s executive order signed last year that had instructed U.S. agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident, also called a “green card” holder.

“I think he was there to apply pressure to the judges for their decision,” Norman Wong said. “The decision should be a constitutional decision, not a decision based on fear – fear of retribution, fear of the president.”

The justices through their questions signaled skepticism toward Trump’s directive.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, the Republican president wrote, “Kangaroo Court!!!”

(Reporting by Carlos Barria, Julio-César Chávez and Katharine Jackson; Additional reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)

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