Congress

Trump seems to wave the white flag on his US attorneys gambit

Published

7 months ago

December 13, 2025

For months, President Donald Trump has used unconventional tactics to install loyalists as top federal prosecutors across the country, and battled challenges to their authority. Now, he appears to be conceding defeat.

The Trump administration has signaled in recent days that it may refocus its efforts on trying to eliminate a Senate procedural tool used to block U.S. attorney nominees, rather than continuing to challenge the disqualifications in court. The move comes after New Jersey U.S. Attorney Alina Habba resigned from her post following a court ruling upholding her disqualification along with a handful of other U.S. attorneys who have been stripped of their positions by federal judges.

On Friday, Delaware U.S. Attorney Julianne Murray also left her post, citing the Habba ruling.

The administration’s tactics with U.S. attorneys — bypassing the Senate or sidestepping federal judges to keep unvetted prosecutors in place — are a crucial component of Trump’s effort to deploy the Justice Department against his perceived enemies. He has relied on loyalist U.S. attorneys to pursue what critics call baldly political investigations and prosecutions, including those against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey.

On Thursday, Trump called the so-called “blue slip” process, in which home-state senators can veto judicial or U.S. attorney nominees, a “scam.” It’s his latest attack after Trump has spent months pressuring Senate Republicans to review the practice.

“‘Blue Slips’ are making it impossible to get great Republican Judges and U.S. Attorneys approved to serve in any state where there is even a single Democrat Senator,” Trump wrote in a social media post. “So unfair to Republicans, and not Constitutional.” He directed Senate Majority Leader John Thune “to get something done, ideally the termination of Blue Slips.”

Thune quickly rejected that call, and Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley has indicated no interest in scrapping the practice. Grassley also blamed the administration for failing to advance more U.S. attorney nominees, saying he has been “hamstrung waiting for background investigations and other paperwork from the administration.”

Asked for comment, a White House spokesperson referred to Trump’s public statements.

Earlier in the week, Trump appeared to acknowledge that the court rulings disqualifying his U.S. attorneys will ultimately force them out of their offices, even though many have remained there following the rulings.

Trump-installed federal prosecutors in the Los Angeles area, Nevada and in the Eastern District of Virginia, for example, have continued working in those offices despite being deemed disqualified. Trump, however, seemed to predict that may not continue.

“We have about seven U.S. attorneys who are not going to be able to keep their jobs much longer because of the blue slip,” Trump told reporters Monday.

Next stop: SCOTUS?

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said the administration appears now to have only two options: continue to try to install temporary U.S. attorneys, only to repeatedly have those choices disqualified by courts, or attempt the traditional process of Senate confirmation.

Tobias said he suspects the administration doesn’t want the U.S. attorney gambit to reach the Supreme Court. “I think the last thing they want is to have the Supreme Court say no, right? Because then the game is over.”

That way, he said, “they can continue to do what they’ve been doing, and that is avoiding advice and consent, which is in the Constitution, which they’ve done in more than half the districts, and continue to play games with the system.”

But other legal experts said it wasn’t clear how the Supreme Court might rule. Nina Mendelson, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and an expert on acting officials, said she could envision the court leaning either way.

“If [the administration] does appeal, the Supreme Court may, on the one hand, be interested in preserving the Senate’s constitutional function of advice and consent and thus narrowly interpret the President’s authority to appoint acting US Attorneys,” she wrote in an email. “On the other hand, the Supreme Court has, in a series of cases, expressed its concern for presidential control and flexibility, which might prompt it to more generously interpret the President’s power.”

Though the administration can appeal the rulings disqualifying the prosecutors, it hasn’t in two key instances. In the Habba case, the Justice Department has said publicly that it will pursue an appeal, but asked the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals for an extension to decide how it will proceed. New Jersey’s Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, have urged the White House to work with them to select Habba’s replacement.

In the case involving Lindsey Halligan in the Eastern District of Virginia, Attorney General Pam Bondi said in late November that it would pursue an “immediate”appeal — but it hasn’t.

Instead, it kept Halligan in place and attempted, but twice failed, to re-indict James. On Thursday, in a sign the White House may be adopting a more traditional approach to installing U.S. attorneys, the administration began seeking Senate confirmation for Halligan by submitting her questionnaire to the Judiciary Committee.

A spokesperson for the committee, however, noted that Halligan doesn’t have blue slips from Virginia’s senators, and “nominees without blue slips don’t have the votes to advance out of committee or get confirmed on the Senate floor.”

The administration is appealing disqualification rulings in the Los Angeles area and Nevada. In the Northern District of New York, a federal judge appears poised to disqualifyJohn Sarcone III, the Trump-aligned U.S. attorney whose office is pursuing a separate investigation of James.

Despite Trump’s griping about having his choices blocked, he is on pace to match the Biden administration for the number of U.S. attorneys confirmed during its first year. To date, Trump has seen 13 U.S. attorneys confirmed by the Senate, up from just two in September, and 18 more are expected to be confirmed next week, bringing the total to 31.

“ATTN WH; SEND MORE NOMS,” Grassley wrote on social media on Thursday.

Legal experts said the uptick in Senate-confirmed top federal prosecutors is a welcome development, even if they aren’t in some of the highest-impact districts.

“That’s promising for the system,” Tobias said.

Congress

Senate Ethics dismisses allegations against Ruben Gallego

Published

7 minutes ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed allegations of misconduct levied against Sen. Ruben Gallego, who stood accused by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of “campaign finance violations and inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”

The charges came following the resignation of the Arizona Democrat’s longtime friend, Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who was forced to step down amid accusations of serious sexual misconduct. Luna, a Florida Republican, sought to implicate Gallego by claiming in an interview on CBS that a woman would come forward about an “incident that occurred between the two of them at the same time and the event was sexual in nature allegedly.”

But in a letter to Gallego sent Monday — which he shared in a public news release — the notoriously inactive Ethics Committee cited Gallego’s “prompt contact with the Committee following media reports of the allegations and appreciated your full cooperation with the Committee throughout the investigation.”

Gallego has maintained he was unaware of the allegations against Swalwell and said in a statement he was a victim of “right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.”

He continued, “I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families.”

Luna, in a post on X, defended her referral to the Senate Ethics Committee.

“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” Luna wrote on social media. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s state. She represents Florida.

Congress

Rubio, Witkoff to brief Congress on Iran

Published

4 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Top deputies of President Donald Trump will brief Congress on the Iran peace talks in a Monday conference call — the first time administration officials have addressed a broad group of lawmakers since Trump signed a “memorandum of understanding” with Tehran earlier this month.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, will lead the briefing for all House and Senate members at 4 p.m., according to seven people granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting.

Republicans and Democrats have called for more transparency about the 14-point agreement inked on June 18, which initiated a cease-fire between the two countries. Since then, the U.S. and Iran have continued to engage in hostilities.

Congress

Capitol agenda: Red, white and GOP hard-liner blues

Published

6 hours ago

June 29, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Republicans finally cleared a runway this week to finish some of their top legislative priorities before the July 4 recess.

That is, unless a small band of hard-liners trip up those plans at takeoff.

Speaker Mike Johnson is hoping to move quickly to pass fiscal 2027 appropriations legislation, the annual defense policy bill and a kids online safety bill that has been years in the making. The movement comes after President Donald Trump instructed GOP hard-liners to stop holding up a procedural vote amid a protest from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and others that the Senate hadn’t passed Trump’s election security bill.

But Luna and other hard-liners are still threatening to tank the procedural vote that could delay the defense policy bill and other measures until they get concessions on the SAVE America Act, amid other demands.

Johnson, for example, had also promised hard-liners a vote before July 4 on a sweeping GOP immigration bill introduced in the prior Congress as H.R. 2, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Johnson for his part has said the House will “pass the SAVE America Act again” by folding parts of it into a third party-line reconciliation bill. But the slimmed-down version he’d need to pursue in order to meet strict Senate rules for the budget process is already being panned by hard-liners as insufficient.

That reconciliation bill is also already delayed. House Republicans aren’t on track to meet their goal of advancing its framework before the July 4 recess as members on the Budget panel balked over how to pay for the legislation in a closed-door meeting last week.

“Time is of the essence, given how many legislative days we have,” House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie, who is sponsoring the kids online safety legislation, said in an interview last week. “If we lose a week, that would be important.”

Meanwhile, Democratic leadership is grappling with their own heated internal divisions this week. Members are split over supporting the adoption of an amendment to a fiscal 2027 spending bill from Rep. Thomas Massie that would end Israel aid and cut the overall foreign military aid program by $3.3 billion.

Appropriations ranking member Rosa DeLauro did not instruct her colleagues on how to vote during a rare Sunday evening caucus call, two sources granted anonymity to discuss the private meeting tell Mia and Riley. Leaders did, however, criticize the amendment as poorly written.

One other item this week that could split members of each party: House lawmakers are also slated to vote on a rewritten war powers resolution from Rep. Rashida Tlaib to reign in Trump administration military actions in Lebanon. Leadership worked with Tlaib to come up with new language last month that is expected to garner more Dem support, but the resolution is still expected to fail without GOP votes.

What else we’re watching:

— SENATE GOP GETS ANTSY ABOUT NOMINATIONS: Some Republican senators are unsettled by Trump’s apparent lack of urgency in filling vacant posts, even as GOP control of the chamber beyond the midterms is increasingly in doubt. There are more than two dozen federal court vacancies. Labor secretary, FDA commissioner and scores of other open positions do not have nominees, and a senior White House official said Trump is in no rush to fill them. “We’re running short on time,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, a member of Senate HELP, which oversees health, labor and other issues.

—RICK SCOTT SAYS HE’S JUST TRYING TO HELP: Fresh off his controversial Trump invite to a Senate GOP lunch last week, Sen. Rick Scott told Blue Light News in an interview he’s trying to make a mark — not trying to challenge Senate Majority Leader John Thune. Scott insists that neither his invitation to the president nor a letter he circulated afterward outlining how the Senate GOP should be preparing for the midterms should be seen as a prelude to a leadership challenge. The Florida Republican said he’s perfectly happy running the conference’s conservative Steering Committee and predicted Thune would easily secure another term as leader. What has become eminently clear in recent weeks is that Scott — after a long career in business, two terms as governor and nearly eight years as senator — just isn’t a back-bench kind of guy.

Meredith Lee Hill, Riley Rogerson, Alex Gangitano, Jordain Carney and Cheyenne Haslett contributed to this report.