Congress
Darline Graham is sworn in to her brother’s Senate seat
Darline Graham has officially filled the South Carolina Senate seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) swore Graham in just after 2:30 p.m. Tuesday on the Senate floor amid applause from colleagues and staff. Graham was escorted on the floor by Sens. Tim Scott (S.C.) and Katie Britt (Ala.). She shook Grassley’s hand but did not make a separate speech.
Republicans’ swift move to fill the late senator’s seat maintains the party’s already slim margin in the chamber as it tries to advance priorities before August recess.
Graham — who makes history as the first woman to represent South Carolina in the Senate — is not a politician and little is known about her policy stances. She previously headed up the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, which connects people who are blind or have low vision to resources in the state.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune signaled Tuesday Graham could choose to stay on her brother’s committees after his sudden death. The late Graham served on Senate Budget, Judiciary, Appropriations and Environment and Public Works.
“We’ll figure out which of his committees she wants to stay on, and then we’ll go from there,” Thune told reporters.
Republicans close to the Graham family said despite the fact that her career has mostly unfolded outside of political offices, she has much in common with her late brother.
Scott Farmer, a longtime former campaign manager for her brother, said Graham’s work over the past several years has focused on streamlining work at the agency and protecting taxpayer dollars.
Farmer, who had a meeting with Graham Monday, said she shares her brother’s views “on most topics” and that both had a sense of loyalty and fiscal conservatism.
“She’s less of an extrovert than Senator Graham, but they’re both strongly grounded and opinionated,” Farmer added.
Kevin Bishop, who served as late senator’s communications director for over 25 years until 2024, said in an interview people will be “pleasantly surprised” at her similarities with her brother.
Bishop said she closely followed his work and had been involved in his campaigns so “this is not going to be a babe-in-the-woods kind of thing.”
Many Republicans Monday said they hadn’t yet met Graham’s sister but a handful, including Sens. Roger Marshall (Kansas) and Mike Rounds (S.D.) and South Carolina Reps. Joe Wilson and Sheri Biggs, said they knew her and believed she’s a good fit to carry out his legacy.
Wilson and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) were present on the Senate floor for Graham’s swearing in.
“She’s going to do exactly what Lindsey would have wanted her to do, and I’ve got no doubt about that,” said a person close to the Graham family, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
“She is her own person, and certainly has lived as private a life as she can, being a sister to Lindsey Graham. But … they’re cut from the same cloth.”
Graham is set to serve the remainder of her brother’s term, and an Aug. 11 primary election is underway to select a Republican candidate to run for the seat in the next Congress.
Billionaire investor Leon Black is scheduled for a Sept. 3 deposition in front of House Oversight lawmakers who want to press him under oath about his ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
A spokesperson for House Oversight Republicans said Tuesday attorneys for the co-founder of Apollo Global Management had confirmed his appearance date. Black’s legal team will also transfer at the end of next week nondisclosure agreements the investor allegedly had with women tied to Epstein, the spokesperson said, which he had previously told the committee he will not discuss.
Black has stoked high bipartisan interest in Congress’ investigation into Epstein and the government’s investigation into the late sex offender. Oversight lawmakers last month issued two subpoenas in the middle of a voluntary interview with Black after the investor refused to answer questions about the potential NDAs.
“We believe that information is vital to our investigation,” Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) had told reporters following the subpoena issuance. “We want to know, was Jeffrey Epstein involved in the NDAs? … Was he involved in awarding [of] funds to the women for the NDAs? What was the reason for the NDAs?”
Black at the June interview said he had no knowledge of Epstein’s crimes over the time frame he paid Epstein tens of millions of dollars, though he did acknowledge he was aware of Epstein’s 2008 sex crime conviction.
Unlike the voluntary interview, Black’s deposition will be videotaped and under oath.
The House passed legislation Tuesday to end the nation’s biannual practice of changing the clocks — a vote that sowed division in both parties and now faces an uphill battle in the Senate despite strong lobbying from the White House and personal engagement from President Donald Trump.
The final vote of 308-117 did not break down neatly along party lines. Twenty-two Republicans opposed it, even as the Trump administration put out a Statement of Administrative Policy encouraging its enactment.
Many Florida lawmakers extolled the legislation, with the state’s chief economic drivers — tourism, recreation, restaurants and golfing — standing to benefit from the extra hours of daylight in the evenings year-round.
“Why in the heck are we still changing our clocks?” Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) asked during floor debate on the bill. “Floridians — we are the sunshine state. We value sunshine.”
Rep. Gus Bilirakis, another Florida Republican, added: “This is not about politics. This is about practicality. It is about recognizing that our laws should keep pace with the people we represent.”
Other members, however, were critical of the effort. Agriculture state lawmakers are especially wary of delaying daylight for farmers, while others fear the extra hours of darkness in the morning would pose risks to mental health, public safety and sleep habits.
“I’m not for it,” Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said in an interview, “because I think having kids go to school when it’s dark doesn’t make sense, and that’s the major reason.”
Democrats devoted significant time during closed-door meetings Monday and Tuesday to debate the pros and cons of adopting permanent daylight saving time as the top Democrat on House Energy and Commerce, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, tried hard to sell it.
Pallone’s committee adopted the Sunshine Protection Act as a bipartisan amendment to be included in a measure reauthorizing surface transportation programs. On Tuesday, he called it something on which “many Americans actually agree.” He claimed that only 12 percent of Americans want to keep the clock-changing practice as is, adding that it’s associated with an increase in heart attacks and strokes.
In the end, 95 Democrats voted against the bill on the floor Tuesday.
Lawmakers have been debating this topic for years, but the effort has picked up speed in recent months thanks to Trump’s involvement. GOP leaders decided to move the bill as a standalone proposition at this time in hopes it would entice Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) to end her revolt over unrelated issues on the House floor.
“I’m glad President Trump is making this a priority,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the bill’s champion in the Senate, said in a statement. “We have the momentum, now it’s time to lock the clock.”
But the bill’s prospects across the Capitol are dim. A GOP aide granted anonymity to speak freely noted that Senate Majority Leader John Thune is unlikely to override Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a member of leadership who has long been opposed to making daylight saving time permanent. Thune, too, in 2025 opposed a version of the House bill when it was marked up by the Senate Commerce Committee.
Spokespeople for Thune and Cotton did not immediately return requests for comment Tuesday.
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso told reporters Tuesday that the topic is complicated and divisions exist throughout the country.
“We’ll see,” he said. “You know, we had passed something like that once before, and then the House hit the snooze alarm on it, and we’ll see what happens when it gets here.”
Jordain Carney and Timothy Cama contributed to this report.
Former special counsel Jack Smith obtained text messages that 44 members of Congress sent to senior White House officials during the final weeks of President Donald Trump’s first term, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley revealed Tuesday.
The latest exchanges were part of a trove of materials that the National Archives turned over to Smith’s team following a subpoena for White House records stretching from Oct. 2020 to Jan. 2021. Smith’s top deputies received the materials in August 2023, just weeks after securing a grand jury indictment against Trump — and, according to internal emails Grassley released Tuesday, indicated they were quickly preparing to share them with Trump’s legal team as part of the pre-trial “discovery” process.”
Grassley’s release of these materials is part of a broader effort by the Iowa Republican and other Trump allies to portray Smith as a reckless or overaggressive prosecutor in his pursuit of criminal cases against Trump during the Biden administration, which many GOP lawmakers believe were politically motivated.
Grassley was already on the warpath for Smith after learning that investigators obtained his call records as part of Smith’s investigation into Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Jack Smith has answering to do, and I intend to have him before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the coming months to hold him accountable,” said Grassley.
A spokesman for Smith did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Smith testified to the House Judiciary Committee both privately and publicly earlier this year.
The newly disclosed records show that a wide range of lawmakers were communicating with the White House in the final months of Trump’s first term — from Grassley himself along with 19 other senators, to top House Republicans like then-GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Several exchanges with Democrats, including Sen. Cory Booker and then-Rep. Karen Bass, were also among the subpoenaed materials.
Grassley is also seeking to cast the revelation that members’ text messages were divulged to investigators as a potential breach of Congress’ constitutional “speech or debate” protection that prevents the Executive Branch from prying into lawmakers’ legislative business.
Unlike executive privilege, which protects a president’s communication from disclosure in many cases, speech-or-debate privilege is explicitly mentioned in the constitution — part of the founders’ effort to prevent the Executive Branch from using its prosecutorial power to bend legislators to its will.
Notably, Smith’s investigators laboredfor more than a year to obtain text messages and emails sent by Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) after the FBI seized his phone in August 2022. Perry sued, contending that his phone contained thousands of messages protected by the speech or debate clause, and slowed Smith’s team for more than a year while they litigated the contours of the privilege.
Eventually prosecutors won access to about 1,600 of Perry’s messages that judges deemed unrelated to Perry’s work as a legislator.
Perry is among the lawmakers whose text messages were obtained in the two-month window before Trump’s first term ended.
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