Politics

Former FBI and CIA head prods Senate to reject Patel, Gabbard

Published

1 year ago

December 27, 2024

A former head of the FBI and CIA is raising objections over whether Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump’s picks to be directors of the FBI and national intelligence, respectively, are qualified to serve in the Cabinet. In a letter to senators on Thursday…
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Politics

RFK Jr. urged Iowa Libertarian to drop out of battleground House race, challenger claims

Published

2 minutes ago

June 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A Libertarian challenger in a top Iowa battleground says Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the district’s current representative, GOP Rep. Zach Nunn, privately pressured him to drop out.

Marco Battaglia, who hopes to run for the state’s 3rd Congressional District, has faced multiple challenges from Republicans over his eligibility and was even struck from the ballot on Monday — though he plans to appeal the state election panel’s decision.

Battaglia said Nunn visited his home on June 7 to convince him to exit the race. Then, a day later, came a call from Washington — and Kennedy, allegedly, was on the other line.

Battaglia said Kennedy told him that it would be a direct blow to Kennedy, personally, if Republicans lost the seat.

“If this seat flips, it’ll make my life hell,” Kennedy said, according to Battaglia’s recollection. It’s not clear what Kennedy was referring to, but the HHS secretary could face impeachment should Democrats retake control of the House.

Battaglia shared screenshots of his call log with Blue Light News that show an incoming call from a phone number Kennedy has previously used. The call arrived at 12:44 p.m. central and lasted nearly 12 minutes. Blue Light News also reviewed screenshots of text messages Battaglia later sent to the number associated with Kennedy, which did not garner responses.

Kennedy’s office did not respond to a request for comment. In recent weeks, the secretary has stepped up his involvement in battleground races, visiting Wisconsin Rep. Derrick Van Orden’s 3rd District and Democratic Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur’s 9th District. He will appear with GOP Rep. Tom Barrett in Michigan’s 7th District on Tuesday.

Nunn’s campaign did not dispute that he visited Battaglia’s home, but adviser Annie Kuhle said in a statement that the purpose was to inform Battaglia of challenges to his signatures and invite him to cooperate with the investigation.

Kuhle said there is “strong evidence” Battaglia’s signatures were gathered “by dark-money outside groups with ties to the Democrat Party.” Nunn’s meeting with Battaglia was first reported by the Des Moines Register.

Battaglia was removed from the ballot Monday after the Iowa State Objection Panel — which adjudicates challenges to candidate eligibility — determined he was ineligible because he did not use his legal name: Mark Thomas Andersen.

Battaglia told Blue Light News he plans to appeal the decision, as his party did in 2024 when all Libertarians were removed from the ballot for not following state law in their nominating process. When that appeal failed, Battaglia and other Libertarian candidates launched write-in campaigns.

“Iowa Republicans know they can’t win on ideas, so they are resorting to their favorite tactic: suppressing voter choice,” Evan McMahon, chair of the national Libertarian Party, said in a statement. “When a third party gathers a record number of signatures and earns its place on the ballot, the answer is to debate them, not to bully them, bribe them, or sue them off the ballot.”

The 3rd District is one of Democrats’ top targets this cycle, a seat Nunn won by fewer than four points in 2024 even as Trump won the state by 13 points. State Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, the Democratic nominee, is a member of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” program.

Republicans have already spent nearly $4.5 million to defend the seat, according to the political advertising tracker AdImpact. Republicans warn Battaglia’s presence on the ballot — drawing conservative votes away from Nunn — could tip a close race.

The Republican National Committee did not respond to a request for comment.

Battaglia says Nunn, during his June 7 visit to his home, offered him a deal and referenced the HHS secretary: “We’ll fly you out to D.C. and you can be my wing man,” Nunn allegedly said, per Battaglia’s recollection. “We’ll make you the poster boy for election integrity, and we’ll hang out with Robert Kennedy Jr.”

Nunn’s campaign denies the representative said any such thing. “No offer, inducement, or thing of value was ever proposed or provided in exchange for withdrawing the nomination petitions,” said Kuhle, the Nunn campaign strategist, in a statement.

A spokesperson for Nunn’s campaign, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said they “kept stakeholders, including the White House, informed of our concerns,” but they “did not ask them to take any action on our behalf, and were not aware of any actions taken until Marco informed us of the call [with Kennedy].”

Battaglia is a longtime Kennedy supporter who backed him when he launched a Democratic bid for president in 2023. Battaglia said he met Kennedy during a campaign stop in Des Moines in August 2023, when the then-Democrat spoke at a coffee shop. Battaglia said he presented Kennedy with a gift: A VHS tape of “The Second Gun,” a documentary exploring an alternate theory of Kennedy’s father’s assassination.

“He seemed to respond to it warmly,” Battaglia said. “It was a nice gift.”

Politics

Summer ICE

Published

1 hour ago

June 15, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A hectic summer of events brings the threat of ICE agents surging into New York City.

WINTRY MIX: The Knicks ticker-tape parade. World Cup festivities. Pride Month. America 250. The Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce wedding.

It’s all happening this summer in New York City — and those events and more may coincide with a surge in federal immigration enforcement at the direction of President Donald Trump’s administration.

The convergence of events as an ICE crackdown looms has not gone unnoticed by Gov. Kathy Hochul, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and immigrant-rights advocates who are already bracing for a hectic summer in the city.

Hochul last week warned that a surge would “create chaos” especially as the World Cup was getting underway. The mayor told reporters earlier today that the city — and especially the NYPD — is prepared to handle the uncertainty.

“We are the biggest city in the country,” Mamdani said at a press conference in Queens. “We are used to big events, and we are incredibly excited for this one.”

Yet the potential operation — teased repeatedly by Trump border czar Tom Homan — adds a different dimension to the center-of-the-world festivities and celebratory atmosphere that’s pervasive in New York at the moment.

“We’ve just had a lot of practice with being in the streets — thankfully celebrating,” said state Sen. Pat Fahy, a Democrat. “It’s New York. People are not going to tolerate any type of surge here.”

Homan has insisted the federal government’s New York campaign will be much different than the Minneapolis crackdown six months ago, which ultimately led to civil unrest and the deaths of two U.S. citizens.

He told SiriusXM’s Chris Cuomo last week that federal immigration agents would take a refined, precision-based approach.

“Every day we leave the office and we know exactly who we’re looking for, more likely where we will find them, because we have a targeted operation,” Homan said. “We have a folder on each target. It’s not gonna be driving around looking for people that we have no idea who we’re looking for. It’s gonna be a well-planned, targeted operation.”

Trump’s aggressive deportation campaign led Hochul and the Democratic-led Legislature this year to approve a package of measures meant to protect undocumented immigrants.

Law enforcement officers are banned from wearing masks, federal immigration authorities cannot execute civil deportation warrants in so-called sensitive locations like houses of worship, and the state moved to end cooperative agreements between local police and ICE.

“We’re much better prepared as a result of that legislation,” Fahy said. “We’ve sent a very clear and strong message that ICE is not welcome.”

It’s those very same laws, though, that stoked Homan’s plans to focus on New York. He’s warned that, without cooperation with local law enforcement, ICE will need to take a much more expansive approach to deportations.

It’s all led immigration advocates to ready communities for an unpredictable summer.

“New Yorkers are going to stand up for their neighbors,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “You’re going to see local communities organizing more, potentially protests, people standing up for New York and New Yorkers. This is an attack on all 19 million New Yorkers.” — Nick Reisman with Gelila Negesse

FROM CITY HALL

Mayor Zohran Mamdani continues to discuss disbanding the SRG but has offered no timeline.

POLICING PARTY CITY: Days after being sworn in as mayor, Mamdani declared that his promise to abolish the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group wasn’t up for debate.

“We need to disband the SRG,” he said on Jan. 28 after the unit had been involved in arresting anti-ICE protesters. “I’m currently in conversations with the police commissioner about the ways in which we do so that are operational.”

Six months later, the SRG remains intact — and Mamdani is singing a very different tune.

When asked today if it was appropriate for the police department to deploy the SRG in response to the chaos following the Knicks’ NBA Finals victory, the mayor had this to say: “The NYPD handled themselves appropriately in delivering safety across the five boroughs.”

Mamdani told reporters he remains committed to the idea of “decoupling” the SRG’s protest responsibilities from its counterterrorism duties and that he continues to talk with his NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, about how “to disband SRG to ensure that we have responses to each.” He did not give a timeline for how soon that could happen or elaborate on the nature of the holdup, though.

Mamdani’s thumbs up for the SRG’s response to Saturday’s Midtown mayhem speaks to the awkward terrain he’s navigating as his more politically moderate police commissioner continues to reject his push for breaking up the unit.

Tisch, in fact, has continued to publicly and privately praise the SRG as a critical tool in the NYPD toolbox. On Sunday, she gave members of the unit a salute in a department-wide email thanking officers for their work the night before, when frenzied Knicks fans set fire to or destroyed several school buses in Midtown, smashed NYPD vehicles with bats and even fired shots in Times Square, wounding a 17-year-old.

“You managed to meet the challenges that came with one of the most closely watched periods this city has seen in years,” Tisch wrote in the email obtained by Playbook that included a shoutout to those engaged in “SRG disorder-control response.”

While pushing for breaking up the SRG as a mayoral candidate last year, Mamdani noted the unit’s members face disproportionately high rates of misconduct claims, especially as it relates to violating protesters’ First Amendment rights.

In dragging his feet on the SRG issue, Mamdani has put himself at odds with his own political base.

The local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America issued a rare public rebuke of the mayor Friday for not making good on his campaign pledge to eliminate the SRG.

The DSA’s statement also knocked Mamdani for not fulfilling a separate campaign pledge to abolish the NYPD’s gang database (which critics say is a “drag net” for young Black and Latino New Yorkers, but which Tisch touts as a necessity). On top of that, the DSA — Mamdani’s “political home” — also took aim at him for supporting an increase to the NYPD’s uniformed headcount this year despite having promised as a candidate to keep it flat. — Gelila Negesse and Chris Sommerfeldt

From the Capitol

State Sen. Zellnor Myrie’s 2021 gun-control measure remains in effect after the Supreme Court declines review.

GUN BILL SURVIVES: The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to a New York law aimed at opening up gun companies to civil liability suits.

Federal law has made the firearms industry generally immune to lawsuits since 2005. But state Sen. Zellnor Myrie proposed a workaround in 2021, authoring a statute to expand New York’s ability to sue manufacturers and dealers whose “reckless” actions endanger public safety.

The law that passed was quickly challenged by the gun industry. A series of lower courts have upheld the law in recent years, and the Supreme Court has now decided it won’t consider an appeal.

“For New Yorkers and residents of the ten other states that have adopted similar laws — covering close to 117 million Americans — this serves as affirmation for victims, survivors, and communities across the nation that live with the realities of gun violence on a daily basis,” Myrie said in a statement. “We are not helpless. Gun violence is not inevitable.” — Bill Mahoney

IN OTHER NEWS

— ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: Progressives Champions PAC, which has spent nearly $400,000 in attack ads against NY-17 Democratic candidate Cait Conley, is reportedly funded by Republican groups. (Popular Information)

— MAKE IT MAKE CENTS: Mamdani’s administration will no longer delay billions of dollars in repayments to contracted nonprofits. (NBC New York)

— INSURANCE SCRAMBLE: Federal cuts will leave 450,000 New Yorkers enrolled in the state’s Essential Plan without healthcare coverage beginning next month. (New York Focus)

Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.