Congress
How Senate Republicans finally said ‘no’ to Ingrassia
Senate Republicans spent months quietly raising the alarm with the White House about Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel before he withdrew from consideration this week.
Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which was vetting President Donald Trump’s pick, were initially on edge this summer about his comments on social media and perceived lack of qualifications, according to interviews with GOP members of the panel.
Even close Trump allies, including Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, said they dug into his background and were uneasy with what they found. Ingrassia professed to have little memory of inflammatory social media posts and writings when he sat for a meeting with bipartisan committee staff in July, according to three Democratic aides who were present and granted anonymity to discuss the conversation.
Senators reached a breaking point this week after Blue Light News reported on texts that showed Ingrassia making racist and antisemitic remarks to fellow Republicans, as he was set to testify before the Senate Homeland committee on Thursday. Ingrassia announced Tuesday evening that he was withdrawing, citing a lack of GOP votes for his confirmation.
“It’s been ongoing for a while,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview Wednesday. “The members on the committee who have met with him and some of the stuff they had come up with during the vetting process, I think, created some — he had challenges.”
The derailment of Ingrassia’s nomination shows that even some of Trump’s most loyal defenders have limits when it comes to rubber-stamping his administration personnel. In the case of Ingrassia, Republican senators succeeded in blocking the nominee through limited public statements and months of privately putting the White House on notice.
The GOP pushback accelerated in July when he was first scheduled to testify before Senate Homeland Security — a hearing that was ultimately delayed.
In a July 21 meeting with Senate staffers, Ingrassia was asked about a December 2023 social media post where he said “exceptional white men are not only the builders of Western civilization but are the ones most capable of appreciating the fruits of our heritage,” according to the three aides in the room. Ingrassia responded by pointing to Leonardo da Vinci as an example of a great artist but then trailed off, the aides said.
“His most typical response was that he’s posted so many things he couldn’t recall,” said one of the aides.
Just before he was set to testify on July 24, his appearance was postponed.
Ingrassia and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Sen. Rand Paul, the chair of Senate Homeland Security, declined to comment.
As Senate staff continued to vet Ingrassia, Republican offices backchanneled with the White House about the nominee’s dimming chances of confirmation.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican on Senate Homeland Security, said in an interview this week his office privately signaled to the White House “at a staff level” that he would not support Ingrassia’s confirmation.
Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican on the panel, said in an interview he had “rolling conversations” with the White House about “what do I think about the nomination.” Hawley said that from the beginning his concerns were focused on a perceived lack of qualifications to lead the office, which investigates federal employee whistleblower complaints and discrimination claims. Ingrassia, a conservative lawyer and activist, would have been two decades younger and less experienced than recent leaders at the Office of Special Counsel.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Scott, whose home state of Florida has a large Jewish population, said in an interview this week that digging from Hill staff had turned up a litany of remarks that troubled him.
“We just reviewed things he had said in the past,” Scott said. “It was just a lot of antisemitic tropes.”
Scrutiny of the nomination ramped up earlier this month, after Blue Light News reported that Ingrassia, who has been serving as White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, was investigated for harassment involving a lower-ranking colleague. The colleague filed a complaint against him before retracting it. Ingrassia’s attorney denied the allegations.
On Monday, Blue Light News reported on a text chain that showed Ingrassia making a number of offensive remarks, including that he had a “Nazi streak” and that the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday “should be ended and tossed into the seventh circle of hell where it belongs.” A lawyer for Ingrassia did not confirm the authenticity of the texts and said they “could be manipulated or are being provided with material context omitted.”
Hours before Ingrassia withdrew from consideration Tuesday, Paul in a POLITICO interview vented about Trump’s handling of the nomination and said Republicans should “man up” and bring their concerns about Ingrassia to the president.
“I’m waiting to see a little courage,” Paul said.
But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), another member of the Homeland Security panel, denied that lawmakers had been reluctant to voice their concerns.
“Several of us … had direct conversations with the White House for a couple of months, actually,” he said.
Sen. Darline Graham sought to take up her brother’s mantle Tuesday, going after former special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining the late-Sen. Lindsey Graham’s phone data.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the South Carolina Republican told Smith as he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that the anguish the prosecutor caused her brother “makes me sick.”
Lindsey Graham, until his unexpected death in July, was among the most vocal in his outrage over revelations that Smith secretly collected electronic data from GOP lawmakers as part of the Biden-era investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The late senator was also unapologetic in his support for a provision tucked into a government funding package, which was later repealed, allowing senators to sue the federal government for $500,000 or more if they discover their electronic records were seized without notification — language specifically designed to compensate Smith’s targets.
But Smith replied that Lindsey Graham was not a target of his investigation and was not suspected of wrongdoing — in fact, he considered Darline Graham’s brother “a patriotic public servant” who likely would have been a “witness” in his case against Trump for attempted election subversion.
“Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making,” Smith told Darline Graham. “He found them to be false.”
The federal government’s internal watchdog told Congress Tuesday that it has concluded President Donald Trump acted unlawfully in unilaterally canceling $810 million in federal funding.
In a letter to congressional leaders obtained by Blue Light News, the Government Accountability Office’s top lawyer panned Trump’s declaration Friday that he is nixing money Congress appropriated through a controversial budget maneuver called a “pocket rescission.”
“The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse,” GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez wrote,
adding that “Congress did not cede this important power” by enacting the 1970s impoundment law intended to stop presidents from withholding money Congress approves.
“Any withholding of appropriated funds beyond their date of expiration, regardless of size, subverts both the constitutional process for enacting federal law and Congress’s constitutional power of the purse,” Perez added. “The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind.”
It is unclear what practical effect, if any, the letter will have on the interbranch funding fight. Outside groups sued the administration last year over a prior pocket rescission, but the Supreme Court issued a preliminary ruling that they did not have standing to challenge the matter. The Trump administration has argued that only the head of the GAO is able to sue under the 52-year-old law governing rescissions.
Sen. Eric Schmitt thought he caught Jack Smith in a lie. Instead, he outed him as a fan of former Iowa Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark.
In a quest to frame former special counsel Jack Smith as a liar during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday, Schmitt asked him if he was in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024, for an NBA basketball game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks — amid mounting drama around the Atlanta-based criminal investigation into Donald Trump led by prosecutor Fani Willis.
Smith clarified that he didn’t go to that game. But he did go to a different one on the same day: He was in College Park, Md. to see the Maryland Terrapins women’s basketball team play the Iowa Hawkeyes, led by phenom Caitlin Clark, who dropped 38 points that night in a win over the Terps.
It appeared that Schmitt misinterpreted a text message reference to the “hawks” among Smith’s deputies, who discussed reserving a seat for Smith in the front row.
“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair,” the Missouri Republican asked, intimating that he was about to get Smith to perjure himself.
Schmitt also tried to connect the NBA game Smith did not attend in Atlanta to Feb. 2, 2024 — the date Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was also investigating Trump, acknowledged a personal relationship with another prosecutor on her team.
“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that,” Smith said, as he initially struggled to recall the time frame.
After reviewing the messages more closely, Smith said he recalled going to the Iowa-Maryland game and being flanked in the crowd by U.S. marshals. His testimony prompted Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) to lash out at her colleague’s erroneous attack, saying Schmitt owed Smith an apology.
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