Congress

Adam Hamawy, medical doctor Army vet with controversial past, wins nomination to succeed Watson Coleman in New Jersey

Published

4 weeks ago

June 3, 2026

Dr. Adam Hamawy, a progressive plastic surgeon whose life-saving work in the Army has been contrasted with his long ago association with a terrorist Muslim cleric, prevailed in a crowded Democratic primary field Tuesday to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, the Associated Press projects.

Hamawy was one of a dozen active candidates in the 12th Congressional District, where the liberal Watson Coleman is retiring after 12 years in office (a 13th candidate was on the ballot but dropped out of the race).

Hamawy is now the prohibitive front-runner to win the seat in November.

Hamawy, who lives in South Brunswick and runs a plastic surgery practice in Princeton, entered the race as a political unknown. His campaign quickly gained traction as progressives simmered over Israel and its war with Hamas in Gaza. Hamawy’s work volunteering at a Gaza hospital during the war earned him support. He also earned the endorsements of high-profile progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna.

“Courageous candidates like Dr. Adam Hamawy are the fighters voters want to take on corporate power and fight for working people. Dr. Hamawy won because voters saw him as a fearless fighter for the working class against a political and economic system rigged for billionaires and other powerful interests,” Stephanie Taylor of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which endorsed Hamawy, said in a statement.

Hamawy, 56, led the Democratic field in fundraising even before a new super PAC called American Priorities, founded as a pro-Palestinian counterweight to the pro-Israel AIPAC, spent $2 million on his behalf.

Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth has credited Hamawy, an Army National Guard veteran, with saving her life when her Blackhawk helicopter was shot down in Iraq in 2004. Hamawy also worked as a first responder at the World Trade Center following the 9/11 attacks.

Hamawy’s campaign planks are unabashedly progressive, including “Medicare For All” and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (which his campaign website says is “full of neo-Nazis at all ranks”) and dismantling the Department of Homeland Security.

But the heroic picture portrayed by Hamawy’s campaign and allies met a stark contrast when a publication tied to an anti-Islamic group resurfaced news reports of his 1995 testimony in defense of Omar Abdel-Rahman, the “blind sheikh” who was convicted on terrorism and seditious conspiracy charges, and whose followers conducted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Hamawy, then a medical student in his 20s, had four years earlier accompanied Abdel-Rahman on a trip from New Jersey to Michigan, where Abdel-Rahman spoke at a conference and talked of “conquering the land of the infidels.” Even after the World Trade Center bombing, Hamawy acknowledged translating a document for Abdel-Rahman for a press conference.

Hamawy said on the campaign trail that he disavowed Abdel-Rahman’s calls for violence and called the critiques against him as “guilt-by-association attacks on Muslim and Arab candidates.”

While the Abdel-Rahman controversy got significant media attention and criticism from the right, most of Hamawy’s rivals declined to touch it. Plainfield Mayor Adrian Mapp, an exception, called Hamawy a “radical extremist.”

Hamawy in November faces Republican Gregg Mele, who has run unsuccessfully for several offices in New Jersey as a Republican and libertarian.

But Hamawy’s victory in the primary is tantamount to winning the general election. There are more than twice as many registered Democrats than Republicans in the district, where Watson Colman won reelection by 25 points in 2024, when Republicans performed more strongly in New Jersey than expected.

Congress

House Ethics says it doesn’t have information to share on lawmaker sexual misconduct settlements

Published

18 minutes ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House adopted a resolution Tuesday requiring the House Ethics Committee to release information on taxpayer funds used to pay out sexual misconduct settlements with lawmakers — but the committee now says it has no information it can share.

In a statement Thursday, the committee reiterated it does not manage sexual harassment lawsuits or their settlements; taxpayers have not footed the bill for those payments since 2018.

Since that time, according to the statement, “the Committee has not been notified of any awards or settlements relating to allegations of sexual harassment, sexual abuse, or other sexual misconduct by a Member.”

Instead, the bipartisan Ethics Committee said it was up to the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights to publicly release a list of each member who has received settlements for sexual misconduct allegations, as mandated by the resolution championed by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.).

The committee, in the Thursday statement, said it “fully supports the release of information about sexual misconduct settlements and calls on OCWR to abide by [the resolution] and make publicly available information about Member sexual misconduct matters resulting in payment of taxpayer funds.”

Massie, in a text message Thursday, said “OCWR can release it.”

The OCWR did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bipartisan Ethics Committee has been under pressure in recent months to show it takes allegations of sexual misconduct against colleagues seriously. Two former House members — Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) — were forced to resign earlier this year amid serious accusations against them.

The renewed reckoning has prompted new questions about whether the House is up to the task of policing its own. The resolution earlier this week was adopted nearly unanimously, with just one member, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), voting “present.”

House Ethics Chair Michael Guest (R-Miss.) said in an interview earlier this week that while he would support Massie’s resolution, the relevant “information was already out in the public domain.”

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Congress

AOC endorses El-Sayed in Michigan Senate race

Published

3 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) endorsed Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign for Michigan’s open Senate seat on Thursday, a decision that comes as progressives look to capitalize off a series of recent high-profile primary victories in New York, Colorado and elsewhere.

Her endorsement could provide El-Sayed with a critical boost just over a month before the state’s Aug. 4 primary. The former public health official is locked in a heated contest against Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow for the right to take on Republican Mike Rogers in the general election.

It also comes as El-Sayed has risen to the top of the pack in recent public polling.

Virtually any Democratic path to flipping the Senate in this year’s midterms would see the party hold the open Michigan Senate seat, with two-term Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) retiring at the end of his term.

The race has emerged as perhaps the largest battleground over the ideological future of the party. El-Sayed, who unsuccessfully ran for governor in 2018, has collected endorsements from progressives, while Stevens has the tacit backing of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, with AIPAC also boosting her candidacy.

El-Sayed, Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with The New York Times, is her party’s best chance.

“Despite our ideological differences and whatever disagreements there are in the party, every single one of us sees this moment as existential,” she said. “And I think many people are willing to put aside differences in order to give us the best chance at winning. And I think that Abdul gives us that right now.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: The GOP confronts its lost summer

Published

4 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Congress is settling in for a do-nothing summer.

House leaders lost control of their chamber with just eight legislative days before a planned five-week summer recess. And President Donald Trump’s demands for action on a stalled elections bill — along with his series of mercurial power moves — have left Senate Republicans frustrated and morose as major legislation piles up.

Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune are confronting the reality that ticking items off their pre-midterm to-do list is looking increasingly unattainable.

Wednesday’s events only made that clearer:

— RECON 3.0: Key rank-and-file House members and chairs huddled in Johnson’s office Wednesday to plot a path forward on a long shot policy bill under the party-line reconciliation process.

Those who attended — including Rep. August Pfluger, an avowed cheerleader for the bill — acknowledged hope is fading fast. Members are mired in fights over how to pay for the package, and their goal of advancing a budget blueprint for the bill this week is dashed.

“After this recess, if it doesn’t happen in the first couple of days, then I think it’s in real trouble,” Pfluger, chair of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said in an interview.

— EMERGENCY IRAN FUNDING: Trump has asked Congress to direct billions of dollars to cover the war with Iran — but support for the emergency funding is in serious doubt.

Key Republicans left a classified briefing from senior Pentagon officials Wednesday frustrated by unanswered questions. They want to know how the requested $67 billion would be spent — and whether servicemember paychecks and munitions stockpiles might be at imminent risk.

“We need more information,” said Rep. Ken Calvert, the top House Republican responsible for shepherding the supplemental bill, which also includes farm assistance, disaster and Ebola aid.

— IMMIGRATION: As hard-liners continue to gum up the GOP agenda over the SAVE America Act, some are similarly incensed over Johnson’s failure to act on an immigration measure he promised weeks ago to take up.

Johnson held a call Wednesday with Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan and other members to try to find a path forward but didn’t make much progress, according to five people granted anonymity to discuss the details.

Some centrist Republicans don’t want to vote on it before the midterms, they said, and farm-state members are demanding GOP leaders add guestworker visa provisions — something immigration hard-liners sharply oppose.

And while only a handful of potential developments appear capable of pulling the GOP majorities out of their summer torpor, the contemporary Congress tends to act only when deadlines force it to. That has made the early part of this summer especially languid on Capitol Hill.

It didn’t help, some members noted this week, that lawmakers were sent home early rather than hash out their differences in person.

“We shouldn’t be leaving town,” Rep. Ralph Norman said. “We ought to be working, and we’re not doing it.”

What else we’re watching:

— THE GOP’S DIRTY LITTLE SAVE AMERICA SECRET: House conservatives bristled this week over the Senate’s refusal to pass the SAVE America Act, shutting down the floor in protest. But their outrage has obscured an inconvenient truth for the Republicans locking arms with the president to push for his election security bill: It can’t even pass the House — at least not the version Trump wants. Johnson acknowledged as much this week, appearing to concede he does not have the votes to move forward with a drastic crackdown on mailed ballots that Trump has repeatedly demanded be added to the legislation.

— TRUMP’S CLAYTON REVIVAL: Trump threw Senate Republicans a rare bone Wednesday — telling reporters that Jay Clayton would have a hearing for his director of national intelligence nomination in two weeks. The president’s remarks were welcome (but in several corners, surprising) news for GOP leaders, who had watched in frustration as Trump scuttled both Clayton’s nomination hearing and passage of a key surveillance tool renewal last month.

Meredith Lee Hill, Mia McCarthy, John Sakellariadis and Jordain Carney contributed to this report.