Congress

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

Published

10 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

Democrats want Mullin in the hotseat in the next Congress

Published

11 hours ago

October 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

A top priority for Democrats if they get more power in Congress in November: Forcing the Trump administration’s controversial and unpopular immigration crackdown back in the headlines.

And one of the people they plan to go after hard is Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin — the former lawmaker who was brought into the role in part because he was seen as someone who could play well with Congress, unlike former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem.

A House Democratic aide said that committees plan to look at how DHS under Mullin has failed to deploy body cameras to many immigration agents, allowed dismal conditions at immigration facilities and failed to cooperate with the department’s Inspector General.

“He owns that,” the aide emphasized. They were granted anonymity to speak freely about evolving legislative preparations ahead of November.

Other Democrats plan to take him to task over the Oct. 12 ICE raid on the D.C. residence of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

Even if Democrats are only able to issue subpoenas and produce reports, that could be enough to force DHS back into the headlines — undermining a major goal of Mullin’s: Keeping unpopular immigration enforcement operations away from public attention.

That would likely worsen the political pains the White House is experiencing on immigration. Voters in both parties have soured on the president’s ambitious immigration crackdown after a series of controversies, including the deaths of several American citizens following encounters with immigration officers.

“We will investigate the administration weaponizing DHS against Americans, its out-of-control immigration policies, and its blatantly corrupt self-dealing. The American people expect nothing less, and we will deliver,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who is poised to chair the House Homeland Security Committee in the next Congress.

While Democrats want to investigate the full breadth of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, including changes to immigration courts and efforts to throttle legal immigration to the United States, multiple aides and lawmakers told Blue Light News that much of the action on Capitol Hill will center around deportations that appear to have happened without due process, aggressive practices in arrests and conditions at detentions facilities.

Democrats also plan to review how DHS has spent a historic influx of funds from a series of reconciliation bills — including controversial purchases of jets for use by Noem, warehouses intended to operate as detention facilities and other department acquisitions that may have benefitted administration allies.

As part of this push, they plan to also pull in a raft of lower-level and former officials for testimony.

At a Monday press conference in Long Beach, California, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, stressed that investigations into “abuses of ICE and DHS” will rank high among committee priorities — alongside investigations into the Trump family’s business dealings, disgraced deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and “corporate corruption.”

“What has been happening is horrific,” Garcia said. “But folks like Stephen MIller, Donald Trump and the horrific people they have in power to do this harm think they can get away with frankly these crimes and this inhumanity … you will be held accountable, you will be held investigated.”

“There is no moving forward without justice,” he added.

Other potential House committee chairs are also homing in on immigration enforcement as a top area for immediate congressional oversight after the midterms. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, as well as the House and Senate Judiciary committees also have jurisdiction over immigration operations. Aides say the incoming chairs of all of these committees are planning on working together to conduct oversight of DHS.

“This is a team sport,” said the House Democratic aide. “One of the Democratic campaign’s overwhelming themes has been accountability, and committees have an appetite to do more oversight work. So this is going to be a multicommittee effort.”

That said, the number of committees that are planning immigration investigations could result in a morass of similar probes if House Democratic leadership fails to manage committee chairs with differing priorities and personal styles. Republicans already experienced this during the Biden administration, when the chairs of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees did not clearly coordinate in their oversight of immigration policy and often held similar hearings with limited results.

Much of Democrats’ final approach will depend on the outcome of the midterm elections. While it is expected that Democrats will retake control of the House, if they also take back the Senate they could exert even more pressure on the administration by throttling the confirmation of nominees and leverage more resources for investigations.

But even just Democratic control of the House, which is seen in Washington as an all but certain outcome, would give Democratic committee chairs the ability to issue subpoenas for administration officials to testify before their committees and produce documents of import for committee investigations. The House could also always move to impeach the president and other top officials, though Democrats across the party’s ideological divides have for now ruled out a third impeachment of Trump, since it would likely fail to secure enough Republican Senate votes to result in his removal from office.

In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that “political attacks will not deter DHS from carrying out its lawful mission.”

“Congressional oversight should not be used as a vehicle to obstruct the department’s ability to secure the border, remove dangerous criminal aliens, disrupt transnational criminal organizations, and defend the homeland,” DHS added.

House Democrats also plan to focus on Noem’s tenure. Garcia confirmed in an interview on MS Now last week that his committee will be scrutinizing her tenure, even though she and former DHS adviser Corey Lewandowski have both left the department.

But many Democratic lawmakers are incensed about actions taken under Mullin’s tenure, including the raid on Omar’s residence.

“We are going to drag Markwayne Mullin into the Judiciary committee and give him the full Jack Smith treatment as a result of these raids,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), a member of the House Judiciary Committee, said in an interview earlier this month on MSNow, referring to the former special counsel who led federal prosecutions against Trump.

Her comments indicate that some Democratic lawmakers want to make a spectacle out of Mullin. Republicans regularly dragged Smith to testify before congressional committees as they sought to tar investigations into the president’s alleged criminal conduct.

Democrats are also eager to use their subpoena and investigative powers to compel testimony from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who wields considerable influence over the administration’s immigration policy, and border czar Tom Homan, who is accused of taking a cash bribe from a major government contractor.

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement that “Democrats have no agenda to improve the lives of Americans — their only agenda is to continue to demonize ICE law enforcement and continue their decade long witch hunt against President Trump and his administration.”

Homan has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.

Oversight work is a hallmark of divided government, especially since the party in control of Congress is often unlikely to secure presidential support for major pieces of messaging legislation. But parties have at times squandered those opportunities.

Committees are trying to put resources in place ahead of the elections to speed up this work, since investigations inherently take time as staff interview witnesses and pursue relevant documents and records. As the midterm elections approach, Democrats poised to lead committees with relevant jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security have begun staffing up in anticipation of a change in control of Congress.

New Hampshire Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan, is poised to take the gavel of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee should her party prevail in November. Hassan, who already began probing contracting decisions at DHS from her more limited perch as the top Democratic senator on the Joint Economic Commission, is hiring staff and preparing to continue her oversight work atop the Senate Homeland Security panel in the next Congress.

For now, House Democrats — mainly Garcia and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is poised to take over the Judiciary Committee — are vowing they will coordinate their efforts and work together.

“We view this as a responsibility that belongs to every committee and every member of congress … this is just an overwhelming mountain of corruption and authoritarianism that we face,” Raskin said.

Congress

John Barrasso to campaign with Ken Paxton

Published

11 hours ago

October 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso will campaign with Ken Paxton next week in Texas as Republicans work overtime to try to hold onto the endangered seat.

Barrasso said in an interview that he plans to join a bus tour with Paxton, who is locked in a tossup battle with Democrat James Talarico despite Donald Trump carrying Texas by roughly 14 percentage points two years ago.

The No. 2 leader, Barrasso is the most senior Senate Republican to hit the trail in Texas in the general election. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has held fundraisers with Paxton but has not publicly campaigned with him.

Barrasso also plans to campaign with former Rep. Mike Rogers in Michigan and Rep. Andy Barr in Kentucky. He was also in South Carolina this week with Trump and said he had made stops in Iowa, Ohio and Kansas — all home to battleground Senate races.

Republicans are navigating steep headwinds as they try to fend off Democratic momentum and voter dissatisfaction to keep their majority. But Barrasso said he was “very optimistic” that the party would keep control of the Senate.

“There’s a lot of energy at every event I’ve gone to, and of course there are eight, 10 races now, a number for sure, that are within the margin of error,” Barrasso said. “So there’s a lot at stake in the next week and a half, and nothing’s going to be left on the field.”

He said races for Democratic-held seats in Michigan, Minnesota and New Hampshire are still within the GOP’s grasp. But Republicans are also on defense in states like Kansas, Iowa and Texas where Trump won easily in 2024.

Republicans have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Texas to boost Paxton, even as some in the party lament some of the campaign decisions he’s made.

“I mean, I hope Ken Paxton wins. … But you know, Ken Paxton also has some responsibility here to be a better candidate and to raise some of his own money and to not be a drain on the system,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said in an interview Thursday. “Having said all that, I hope he’s a senator.”

Democrats are now pushing into even deeper red territory, including South Carolina and Mississippi. Barrasso, in the interview, said that he was “very confident” that Republicans would hold both states, which have seen an influx of late spending.

“You know the president has really opened up his campaign coffers, and he’s fully invested time as well as money,” Barrasso said. “Every candidate wishes there were more resources, every candidate, so there’s no surprise there, but we feel we’re fully resourced to get … the message out.”

Congress

Capitol agenda: Bennie Thompson warns about Dems’ late bet

Published

13 hours ago

October 23, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

National Democrats finally went into Mississippi this week, putting over $1 million behind Scott Colom‘s campaign to unseat Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

To the state’s most prominent Democrat, it was welcome — but too late.

“Anything is appreciated, and I don’t want to seem like people here are not appreciative. But you know, we’ve been singing this song for almost a year,” Rep. Bennie Thompson said in an interview. “Scott is a quality candidate and he could’ve benefited from early recognition from the Senate Majority PAC and others.”

Thompson’s sentiments reflect ongoing frustration among some Democrats who have been beating the drum for more national investment in Black candidates in races once seen as long shots that are now anything but.

“Mississippi people are ready for a new direction. They’re ready to fire Cindy Hyde-Smith. They want somebody that’s going to actually look out for our state, and it’s great that the country is starting to realize that,” Colom said in an interview.

The sentiments were also echoed by Florida Democrat Angie Nixon, who is on her own quest to defeat incumbent GOP Sen. Ashley Moody.

Nixon, referring more broadly to national Democratic donors, said the party needs to do more in her state, and stat.

“I can win. I’m going to win. We just need people to really lean into this moment right now,” she told Dasha Burns in the latest episode of The Conversation.

Neither the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee nor Senate Majority PAC has publicly announced a Florida television buy on her behalf, but Nixon was clear that the DSCC has been “very helpful” recently, opening up doors to connect her with donors and having her participate in fundraisers with DSCC head Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“They are now seeing that this seat is actually winnable,” Nixon said.

Colom has also been a part of DSCC fundraisers and Schumer has directed donors to him.

The Senate Majority PAC declined to comment. DSCC spokesperson Maeve Coyle said Nixon and Colom are running “inspiring and energetic campaigns” and that her group is “committed to expanding the map as much as possible” despite limited resources and a flood of Republican money.

But Thompson argued that party leaders need to move much faster in the future to invest early in strong candidates who can mobilize the large populations of Black voters in Southern states that others deem unwinnable.

“The South in general is ripe for Democrats, but it has to be a sustained investment,” he said. “Given the loyalty that the African American population gives to the Democratic Party, it is just an ideal opportunity to grow the party and ultimately get some Democrats elected.”

“But,” he added, “that engagement can’t come two weeks or less before the general election.”

What else we’re watching:

— DEMOCRATS’ LOOMING TRADE BATTLE: Cracks in Democrats’ trade policy are starting to emerge within the party, even as candidates are presenting a united front on repealing Trump’s tariffs on the campaign trail. The simmering debate over how far to reject Trump’s trade agenda cuts across geography and ideology. It’s likely to bubble into public view in the coming months as Democrats prepare to assume more power in Congress and jump into the wide-open upcoming presidential primary.

— DEMS WANT MULLIN IN HOTSEAT: A top priority for Democrats if they get more power in Congress in November: Forcing the Trump administration’s controversial and unpopular immigration crackdown back in the headlines. And one of the people they plan to go after hard is Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin — the former lawmaker who was brought into the role in part because he was seen as someone who could play well with Congress, unlike former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. A House Democratic aide said that committees plan to look at how DHS under Mullin has failed to deploy body cameras to many immigration agents, allowed dismal conditions at immigration facilities and failed to cooperate with the department’s Inspector General.

Adam Wren, Daniel Desrochers and Eric Bazail-Eimil contributed to this report.